Schoening: Hands-on making and tinkering is the primary way to cultivate agency
Max Schoening · AI era skills: Why cultivating agency matters more than job titles | Max Schoening (Notion) · May 2, 2026 · at 16:44
Max Schoening, Head of Product at Notion, shares advice on Lenny's Podcast about how individuals can develop and cultivate personal agency.
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“And the biggest through line I've found is making. I think if you tinker and if you make things, Then you are now on this treadmill of just creating And then you're like, oh, it's actually not that hard to learn how to make that chair in my office, or let me tweak it a little bit, or maybe, I don't know. It's like a home cooked meal is a form of tinkering ironically. Right. And I think the more you can do that in life, I think actually sort of making things is the innately human, like sort of tool making, creating art and so on. So just do that versus I think when a lot of people hear agency, they think of themselves as they're in this big machine. And they're like, oh, okay, I'm going to circumvent my terrible boss or manager or whatever, so that I get X, Y, and Z. It's like, you know, just start by making things. And usually when you get better at making things at some point, people pay attention and it just really awakens you to the idea that you can just change things.”
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