High-Agency People Are Made, Not Born (Abby Falik, The Flight School)
“Schools shouldn’t prepare students to fit the world. They should prepare them to remake it.”
Abby Falik once said that in another life she might have been a forest monk, a rabbi, or a rockstar. Somehow, impossibly, that feels exactly right.
She brings the contemplative patience of a monk, the moral clarity of a rabbi, and the charisma of a rockstar to one of the defining questions of this moment: how do we cultivate the wisdom and courage to navigate a world in transition?
First through Global Citizen Year, and now through The Flight School, her “launch year” platform and movement, Abby has spent nearly two decades designing and lovingly stewarding coming-of-age experiences for young people standing at the threshold between high school and whatever comes next.
Few people I know are as rigorous, and as poetic, in articulating what those experiences must do. Not simply prepare young people to fit the world. Help them meet it with greater self-knowledge, aliveness, courage, and agency. She explores these ideas more deeply in her Substack, Taking Flight, where she writes about the intersection of learning, leadership, and what it means to be human in this moment.
Her work has resonated with me for more than a decade, but I return to it now with renewed urgency. As AI reshapes learning and work, our standardized school system is still largely organized around helping students answer questions for which the answers are already known. But the future of human flourishing, including at work, will belong to people who can ask their own questions, set direction, and marshal resources toward meaningful goals. That is where our thesis that 50% of formal high school learning should be experience-based comes from. Abby, as you’ll see, goes further. For her, learning itself is experiential—through contemplation, connection, and exploration. Not subjects to master, but ways of being.
In our conversation, she makes the case with characteristic precision:
“High-agency people aren’t born that way. They’re shaped by experiences that teach them to navigate uncertainty—leaving a secure base, trying and failing, returning to metabolize what they’ve learned. And then, beginning again.”
I recorded this cross-legged on my porch, and I think you can feel that in the conversation. It is spacious and searching. Abby has a way of helping you stay with the real question a little longer, until something wiser begins to surface. I’m excited to invite you to dive in.
-Allison
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
On AI and The Unknowable
ALLISON: What’s something you’ve changed your mind about in the last year?
ABBY: My mind’s been blown open to AI’s potential. I’m not alone in that—we’re all metabolizing exponential acceleration in real time.
What’s shifted is my sense of what we need to protect. Some things we assumed were uniquely human—empathy, creativity, resilience—clearly have artificial counterparts. But I’ve grown more precise about which capacities depend on human interiority: intuition, compassion, agency. I’m not willing to give those words – or their meaning – away.
A machine can mimic these capacities through pattern recognition. A human expresses them from somewhere felt, not computed. Those are not the same.
We’re dancing at the edge of what’s possible. Modernity has been extraordinary at codifying, calculating, optimizing. AI is the pinnacle of that drive. We’re approaching a moment where the knowable is, largely, known.
What remains are deeper questions—not of mastery, but of meaning.
One of my teachers, Nipun Mehta, offered a frame I keep returning to: “AI may turn out to be an unexpected spiritual teacher—not because it possesses wisdom, but because it closes every other door, until the only thing left is us.”
On Redesigning the Industrialized Education-To-Work System
ALLISON: What’s the belief that you hold that many or most people would disagree with?
ABBY: Redesigning education won’t require as much innovation as we think. It will require remembering.
For millennia, education prepared humans to navigate the world—through experience, relationship, and initiation. The industrial era turned schools into factories. Students became products. The goal became standardization and job placement.
That model worked when we needed people for industrial and then knowledge work. But what was once a feature—efficiency, optimization, standardized outputs—is now a bug.
And AI makes this urgent. Knowledge is ubiquitous and free. The things we optimized schools to deliver—information retention and regurgitation—machines already do better and faster.
So the question shifts: will we train better robots, or better humans?
At The Flight School, we’re restoring the conditions for freedom—not to fit the world as it is, but to remake it. Our pedagogy is anchored in three modes of learning: contemplation, connection, and exploration.
Contemplation gets us quiet enough to hear what’s been crowded out—the voice that knows what brings us alive.
Connection builds relational intelligence—learning to show up for each other through care and repair.
Exploration is a modern rite of passage—leaving home to be shaped by difference and challenge.
I’m convinced the future of school will look nothing like school. The curriculum won’t be subjects to master, but ways of learning, doing, and being.
ALLISON: The studio is exploring the provocation of what it would look like for 50% of formal learning in high school to be experience-based. The reasons for that are probably familiar to you. But one of my fears is that, in bringing experiential learning mainstream, it becomes a race to the bottom: low-quality “experiences” that amount to putting kids in a cubicle at a bank. That is not the point. For experiences to work, they need to be genuinely challenging, and they need to be paired with a safe time and place to reflect on and metabolize those lessons. That learning then shapes the next “expedition.” It is incredibly efficacious and motivating, and I think it is how high-agency, thriving people move through the world for life.
For people who are just catching up to the power of experiential learning, what would you tell them about how to design experiences that really do that work, based on your nearly two decades of doing this with young people?
ABBY: I share your fear. If experiential learning becomes a checklist—internships, shadowing, low-stakes exposure—it will fail. Experience alone isn’t enough.
What makes an experience transformative isn’t what you do—it’s how you show up, and who you’re surrounded by.
The simplest way I’ve come to understand it is this: the how is the what.
It’s easy to fixate on designing the “right” experience—placement, prestige, what a student is doing. Most programs concentrate their time and resources there. But what I’ve learned over two decades is that those variables matter far less than we think.
At The Flight School, real-world experience is the anchor. Everything else—coaching, curriculum, community—wraps around it.
We meet young people after high school, support them in designing real-world expeditions, and surround those experiences with coaching and community.
There are three essential ingredients:
Stretch — stepping beyond your comfort zone, but not so far that you shut down. We don’t grow when we’re comfortable—or panicked—but when we’re stretched.
Reflection — making space to metabolize what’s happening and turn experience into insight. Without integration, nothing sticks.
Relationship — building a secure base of people who see you, support you, and challenge you. Growth doesn’t happen alone.
When these conditions are in place, the “what” matters much less. Learning comes from the cycle: step across a threshold, reflect, connect, and step again—changed.
That’s how agency develops—not from perfectly designed experiences, but from repeated opportunities to try, fail, and return. High-agency people aren’t born that way. They’re shaped by experiences like these.
The question isn’t whether 50% or 100% of learning should be experiential. It’s whether real-world experience is the anchor everything else wraps around.
Because when it is, learning comes alive—and it compounds.
ALLISON: You’ve shared that 100% of Flight School learners report a transformational experience. In contrast, a Gallup study found that only 3% of college students have that kind of experience. What explains that difference?
ABBY: I can’t believe that Gallup stat hasn’t gotten more attention—it should stop us all in our tracks.
When I first read it, something clicked: this is less an indictment of college as an institution and more about whether students arrive prepared to engage.
If you look at what that 3% have in common, it’s not the school they attend—it’s how they show up. They’re in the driver’s seat of their own learning: guided by questions that matter, building relationships that extend beyond the classroom, and making intentional choices about how they spend their time and who they learn from.
They’re choosing a mission, not just a major.
I’ve always believed we shouldn’t send anyone to college until they know their WHY. And now, as faith in higher education continues to erode, fewer and fewer will take that path at all.
So the real question isn’t how to prepare students for college. It’s how to prepare them for life in a world changing faster than any institution can keep up.
I’ve written about the opportunity to reimagine learning around 3 A’s:
Attention — directing our most precious and endangered resource.
Awareness — understanding our place in the web of human experience.
Agency — choosing our response and our role in what comes next.
So when young people step into college—or whatever comes next—they don’t just go. They go on purpose.
That’s what makes an experience transformational—not the institution, but the way you engage with it.
ALLISON: How would you respond to a young learner who asked, “What world am I moving into? How will I matter? What will my work and life be like?” How do you handle that conversation at The Flight School?
ABBY: I’d start by saying: we don’t have clear answers to those questions—and that’s not a failure. It’s approaching this moment with clear eyes.
We’ve been handed maps designed for a world that no longer exists: stable careers, predictable paths, linear progress. Those maps (along with the credential economy) are breaking down in real time.
So the task now isn’t to find a better map. It’s to learn how to navigate with a compass.
What brings you to life? What pulls your attention? What breaks your heart enough that you can’t look away?
The education community has spent a generation talking about “hard skills,” then “soft skills,” then “durable skills.” But anything we call durable today seems likely to eventually become fragile.
What matters now are regenerative capacities—the ones that strengthen with use.
The more you pay attention, the more you see. The more you follow what brings you alive, the more energy you have. The more you exercise agency, the more possibility opens.
These are the capacities that compound.
No one can say what the job market will look like, or if there will even be jobs! So we’re betting on this: a post-knowledge economy will run on aliveness—on people who know what animates them, and how to make that contagious.
That’s how you find your way: not by having the answers, but by staying in relationship with the questions—and learning to trust yourself to move toward what feels most alive.
ALLISON: I love that word, “aliveness” — and I think it can be cultivated and taught with intentionality. So often in conversations about future human flourishing, we come back to things we’ve long known are important. They’ve just never felt urgent, and sometimes get boxed in as elitist. But you’re saying it’s actually necessary for everyone, regardless of background or ambition — to develop the self-knowledge to sustainably set and achieve goals with purpose and joy.
ABBY: I think that’s exactly right—and it’s where we’ve gotten this most wrong.
We’ve treated things like self-knowledge, relational intelligence, and aliveness as “nice to have”—or worse, as elite luxuries. In reality, they’re essential.
In a world where knowledge is abundant and change is constant, the ability to know what matters to you, to direct your attention, and to make intentional choices isn’t enrichment—it’s how you navigate your life.
What’s missing isn’t awareness. It’s urgency.
So the question isn’t whether every young person needs this. It’s whether we’re willing to design learning environments that actually cultivate it.
ALLISON: You’re making the claim that this is one of the most significant equity issues facing education today, period.
ABBY: Without a doubt.
Experiential learning has faced this pushback. But what we’re seeing is that families with resources are already moving in this direction—seeking out experiences that help their kids build agency, navigate uncertainty, and develop a sense of purpose.
The tragedy is that we often frame things as an equity issue only after the fact—once something is already unevenly distributed.
In the meantime, we’re busy optimizing for access to the “right” credentials, the “right” paths—without asking what those paths are actually preparing young people for. The risk is that we hit the target but miss the point!
The goal isn’t to train for the next job. It’s to develop humans who can adapt, create, and contribute in a world we can’t fully predict.
Access to that kind of education is wildly uneven. And that’s the inequity.
So the question is: what would it look like to design an education system around human capacity, not credentials?
Because if we got that right, we wouldn’t just have a more prepared workforce—we’d have a more alive, connected, and equitable society.
On Life After Modernity — And Grieving What We’ll Lose
ALLISON: Let’s cast some future visions. Tell us: what happens to our society if we get AI right? What happens if we don’t? What do each of those worlds look and feel like?
ABBY: If we get it wrong, we build a world that moves faster and faster—but loses the capacity to question where we’re even going.
I was struck by a recent comment from Marc Andreessen dismissing introspection as a liability—something that slows us down, roots us in the past and gets in the way of progress.
I could not disagree more.
Without introspection—the ability to examine our assumptions, question our motivations, and reflect on the systems we’re creating—we default to extraction. More speed, more scale, less regard for consequence.
In a piece I wrote on the dangers of amoral ambition, I described what happens when our capabilities outpace our wisdom—the gap between what we can do and what we should do widens.
That’s the risk we’re facing.
A world that is efficient, but not wise. Powerful, but not free.
If we get it right, AI takes us to the edge of what can be known—and then releases us from the illusion that knowing is enough.
We use it to solve what can be solved—disease, energy and material constraints—and in doing so, create the conditions for something else to come forward.
More time for love. For creativity. For connection. For care.
A society oriented not around optimization, but around flourishing.
That’s the future I’m working toward. Not because it’s guaranteed—but because it’s possible.
ALLISON: I’m curious to get your reflections on a tweet I came across earlier this week; it said, “a mood I’m really missing in the current AI discourse is grief. Yes, things might go terribly and yes, we might see glories beyond imagining, but no matter what, we will lose much of what it has meant to be human forever. I’d like to be with that grief more.”
ABBY: I think that’s exactly right.
Every meaningful transition—personally or collectively—requires letting something go.
I think of this as transition wisdom.
To move from one stage of life to another, from one era to the next, we have to metabolize what’s ending. Grief slows us down. It resists optimization. It can’t be measured or rushed.
Because grief and introspection are linked. They help us see clearly—what’s ending, what’s worth carrying forward, and what needs to be left behind.
I know in my own life, the transitions I rushed through were the ones that haunted me. The ones I took time to grieve became compost for what came next.
If we skip that step, we don’t actually transform. We just accelerate.
ALLISON: I agree, and I think it’s an impulse on which we need to act. Too often, the techno-optimist response is to skip over that grief, to gloss over what is lost. I think that response is rooted in two assumptions: One, the grief process clarifies the costs of this innovation, and people are worried that if we focus on those costs, the accompanying backlash will keep us from moving forward. Instead, the rhetorical response has been to say, “Oh, well, we won’t really lose that thing, or, it wasn’t worth having in the first place.” It’s wildly ineffective, and in fact, creates backlash. Two, I think when techno-optimists are confronted with grief, there’s an impulse to categorize that response as anti-progress, even though holding grief can coincide with excitement about new futures too.
ABBY: Yes. We can’t skip steps and expect to emerge whole.
Grief is inefficient. It slows things down. That’s why it gets dismissed—especially in a culture that equates speed with progress.
But you can’t measure grief or optimize your way through it. What it offers instead is clarity.
That clarity is power.
Because the better we understand how we actually work as humans, the more wisely (and responsibly) we can build what comes next.
One Small Signal
ALLISON: What’s one small signal in the world right now to which we should be paying more attention?
ABBY:
I’ve been sitting with something that sounds right but feels wrong: the promise that technology will save us time.
And in many ways, it already has.
It’s collapsing the distance between question and answer, idea and reality, desire and fulfillment. It promises efficiency—and delivers it. The time dividend is real.
But instead of creating space, we’re compressing it. The hours we save don’t return to us—they’re getting reinvested into more. More output, more speed, more expectation. It sounds like freedom, but feels like frenzy. As a friend recently put it: we’ve put samsara on fast-forward.
I’ve started to think the question isn’t whether technology saves us time. It’s what we do with the time it gives back.
Will we fill it? Or protect it—like our lives depend on it? Because, in a way, they do.
So here’s the signal I’m paying attention to: as we put more time into our lives, can we put more life into our time?