Self-Agency Development: Unearthing Your Personal Source Code

Imagine your life is a ship on a vast, foggy ocean. Right now, you might be sitting below deck, convinced that the winds and currents—the economy, your boss, your upbringing, "the system"—are the only forces determining where you end up. You react to every wave. You brace for every storm. You've forgotten that somewhere above you, there's a wheel, a rudder, and a compass that have been waiting for you to use them.

This is what it feels like to live without personal agency: the felt sense that life is happening to you rather than through you. You're not lazy. You're not broken. You've simply drifted into a reactive state where survival replaced authorship, and somewhere along the way, you stopped believing you could chart your own course.

The path back isn't another productivity hack or morning routine. It's archaeology. A process of excavating the natural direction that was always there—buried under years of "responsible" choices, social pressure, and the slow erosion of what you once knew about yourself. This framework, which we'll call Agency Archaeology, will show you how to remember who you were before the world told you who to be, synthesize that knowledge into a clear purpose, and take visible steps to reclaim the captain's seat of your own life.

What Is Personal Agency (and Why It Matters)?

Personal agency is the felt ability to be a cause in the world rather than merely an effect of external circumstances¹. In plain terms, it's your capacity to make decisions and act on them in ways that actually shape where your life goes. It's the difference between feeling like the author of your story and feeling like a character written by someone else—or worse, a background extra in a story you don't even understand.

Agency is often confused with motivation or discipline, but they serve completely different functions. Motivation is an emotional state—intense but fleeting, often tied to short-term rewards or external validation. It's the spark that gets you started on a Monday morning after watching an inspiring video. Discipline is a regulatory tool—the "rider" trying to control the powerful "elephant" of instinct and impulse². It keeps you consistent when the motivation fades.

But agency is something else entirely. Agency is the sovereign power that decides where the rider is heading in the first place. You can have all the motivation and discipline in the world and still feel profoundly lost if you're running hard in a direction someone else chose for you. Motivation asks "How do I get moving?" Discipline asks "How do I keep moving?" Agency asks "Why am I moving in this direction at all?"

The deeper insight is that true agency isn't built through productivity systems or life hacks. It's built on self-knowledge—what we might call your "source code." This is the underlying pattern of how you naturally like to think, create, solve problems, and relate to others. It's derived from the unique combination of your DNA, your upbringing, and your visceral response to both³. Most people have lost touch with this source code entirely. They've traded it for what might be called the "uniform of life"—a sanitized set of societal roles that prioritize fitting in over standing out, safety over expression, approval over authenticity.

Why does reclaiming agency matter practically? Because the absence of it is the root cause of most modern psychological suffering. When you operate from an external locus of control—believing your destiny is governed by forces outside yourself—you become vulnerable to existential nihilism, the creeping sense that your actions don't matter. You become prone to free-floating anxiety, the chronic stress that comes from feeling unable to influence your own trajectory. You lose the capacity for long-term planning because why plan for a future you don't believe you can shape?

Living without agency turns you into a pawn on someone else's chessboard. Reclaiming it makes you a player in your own game.

Locus of Control: Do You Believe You're in Charge, or Is Life Just Happening to You?

The locus of control is a psychological spectrum that determines whether you believe you govern your own life trajectory or are merely at the whim of external forces⁴. Think of it as the story you tell yourself about who's holding the steering wheel.

Internal vs External Locus of Control

People with an internal locus of control believe their outcomes are the direct result of their decisions, effort, and skills. When something goes wrong, they look for what they could have done differently. When something goes right, they recognize their role in creating that outcome. They operate from a place of sovereign authorship, viewing themselves as causes capable of creating change.

People with an external locus of control believe their lives are controlled by fate, luck, powerful others, or systemic structures beyond their influence. When passed over for a promotion, they blame office politics or an unfair boss. When a project fails, they attribute it to bad timing or bad luck. They feel like passengers—or worse, like cargo being shipped to destinations they never chose.

Here's how this shows up in everyday life:

At work: An external-leaning person attributes their lack of advancement to a biased manager or a company that "doesn't recognize talent." An internal-leaning person asks what skills they could develop, what relationships they could build, or whether they're even in the right organization for their goals. They refuse to outsource responsibility for their career to an employer.

With money: An external-leaning person feels trapped by inflation, stagnant wages, or a "rigged economy" that makes getting ahead mathematically impossible. An internal-leaning person acknowledges these constraints but focuses on what they can control: acquiring skills that command higher pay, reducing expenses, building alternative income streams. They recognize that complaining about the weather doesn't change the forecast.

In relationships: An external-leaning person blames failed relationships on partners who "weren't ready" or circumstances that "got in the way." An internal-leaning person examines their own patterns, asks what they're attracting and why, and takes responsibility for their role in every dynamic—even the ones that hurt.

Neither perspective is entirely right. External factors genuinely do constrain us. But chronic external attribution creates learned helplessness—a state where you stop believing your actions can change anything, so you stop taking meaningful action at all.

Think of it this way: Developing an internal locus of control is like stepping into the captain's seat of that ship in the fog. You still can't control the weather. You can't calm the waves or burn off the mist. But you realize you have a rudder and a compass—your values and your specific knowledge—that allow you to choose a destination even when visibility is low.

Your Childhood Interests Are Clues to Your Natural Direction

Personal agency is not something you invent from scratch. It's something you remember. Before you learned what was "practical," before you absorbed expectations about career paths and "responsible" choices, you had what we might call impulse voices—primal, visceral signals of what you naturally loved or hated⁵.

Between the ages of three and nine, these voices are at their most unadulterated. This is before societal conditioning fully takes hold, before you learn to perform for grades, before peer pressure teaches you which interests are "cool" and which make you a target. The fascinations you had during this window—the activities that made time disappear, the questions you couldn't stop asking, the things you built or collected or studied without anyone assigning them—these represent the most authentic version of your source code.

The tragedy is that these signals get systematically buried. Teachers and parents, usually with good intentions, encourage "practical" subjects over curious ones. They worry about financial security and steer you toward stable careers rather than emotional connection to your work. Peer pressure during adolescence enforces conformity—suddenly the things you loved become embarrassing, and fitting in feels more urgent than standing out. By the time you're choosing a college major or first job, you may have lost touch entirely with what you once naturally loved.

You've traded your authentic grain for the "uniform of life"—a persona gap between who you present to the world and who you actually are. This gap is exhausting to maintain and eventually leads to the "hamster wheel" feeling: running hard on someone else's script, wondering why success feels so empty.

The process of passion discovery isn't about inventing a new identity. It's about stripping away the layers of generic "responsible" paint until the original engine underneath is revealed again. Think of it like restoring a classic car that's been repainted dozens of times to fit in with modern traffic. The goal isn't to buy new parts—it's to uncover the high-performance machine that was always there.

3 Reflection Questions to Rediscover Your Impulse Voices

Childhood (ages 3-9): "What did you love or hate before anyone told you what mattered?"

Focus on your earliest years, before external expectations contaminated your natural inclinations. What activities made time disappear? What subjects fascinated you without anyone assigning them? Did you naturally veer toward words, patterns, mechanical design, physical movement, organizing systems, or understanding how things worked? Albert Einstein was mesmerized by a compass at age four—the invisible force moving the needle captured an obsession with hidden forces that would define his entire life's work⁶. Your early fascinations, however small they seemed, point toward the specific form of intelligence your brain is wired to favor.

Teen years (ages 13-18): "What interests stuck around even when peers thought they were uncool?"

Adolescence is when social pressure to conform becomes a dominant force. The interests you maintained despite the risk of being labeled a "nerd," "weirdo," or "dork"—these reveal what you cared about deeply enough to endure social judgment. These surviving interests have already passed a significant filter: they mattered more to you than approval. High-agency individuals are often the non-conformists who survived childhood, preserving their unique curiosity even when it didn't align with the status games of their time.

Early adulthood (ages 18-25): "What kept pulling your attention even when it didn't 'fit' your job or degree?"

What rabbit holes did you fall down on Saturday afternoons while ostensibly building a "responsible" career? What side projects consumed you even though nobody was paying you? What books did you read obsessively for years without anyone assigning them? These persistent pulls—pursued purely for the love of the game—often represent your "specific knowledge": the unique combination of interests and skills that makes you irreplaceable in an age of automation and AI³.

How to Find Your "Source Code" Purpose

Your source code is the underlying pattern of how you naturally think, create, solve problems, or relate to others. It's not invented through goal-setting exercises or vision boards—it's uncovered by examining the consistent threads running through your impulse voices across different life stages. The aim is to synthesize your childhood fascinations, teen-surviving interests, and early adult rabbit holes into a recognizable throughline.

This source code represents what Naval Ravikant calls "specific knowledge"—expertise that cannot be taught in a classroom because it's baked into your personality³. It's the stuff that feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else. Because this knowledge is unique to you, it allows you to "escape competition through authenticity"—when your work emerges from your genuine source code, you're not competing on the same axis as everyone else.

Turning Patterns into a Clear Direction

To synthesize your source code, look for the pattern that connects your answers to the reflection questions. Perhaps you were fascinated by stories as a child, loved explaining complex ideas to friends as a teenager, and kept writing even when your "real job" had nothing to do with writing. The pattern might be: "I've always loved synthesizing complex information into simple systems that help underdogs win."

This kind of pattern statement is powerful because it's not a job title—it's a function you naturally perform. A pattern like "explaining complex things simply" doesn't point to just one career. It could manifest as a software engineer designing intuitive interfaces, a marketing strategist building automated systems, a writer demystifying finance, a teacher breaking down difficult concepts, or a content creator using visuals to explain mental models. The pattern stays constant; the context changes.

David Perell calls this building a "Personal Monopoly"—a unique intersection of competence, curiosity, and character that no one else can replicate because no one else has your specific combination of DNA, upbringing, and response to experience⁷. When you identify this throughline in your internal processing, you can begin to externalize your unique essence into work that compounds over time.

The power of knowing your source code is that you stop searching for the "right career" and start looking for contexts where your natural function creates value. You're no longer a job-seeker hoping someone will hire you. You're an asset looking for the right deployment.

Proof You've Already Been Building Toward This Identity

Discovering your source code isn't enough. You need evidence. In the world of personal branding, your greatest asset isn't your resume or your credentials—it's your Proof of Work⁸.

Borrowed from the technical foundation of Bitcoin, Proof of Work represents a "costly signal"—a verifiable expenditure of energy that cannot be faked. Just as Bitcoin uses computational energy to create an unforgeable history of transactions, your personal brand requires a public ledger of actual results to move from mere posture to genuine authority.

Traditional credentials—degrees, certifications, titles—are often just proxy measures. Institutions use them to sift for diligence rather than true talent. In the modern economy, these signals are losing value because they're no longer scarce. Everyone has a degree. Everyone has certifications. What's scarce is an auditable track record of kept promises—real-world evidence that you can actually do what you claim.

Build Your Proof of Work Stack

To identify your unique specific knowledge, audit your past for undeniable evidence of your natural trajectory:

Projects you finished without being forced: What have you built, created, or completed purely because you wanted to? Prototypes built at 5 AM out of pure interest. Niche blogs nobody asked you to write. Creative experiments that consumed your weekends. These represent intrinsically motivated output—you did them for the love of the game, not for a grade or a paycheck. When you're in this mode, you experience what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow"—complete absorption where time evaporates and the activity itself is the reward⁹.

Topics you've studied obsessively for years: What subjects have you researched far beyond any requirement? The books you've read repeatedly, the domains where you have thousands of hours of thinking rather than just surface-level familiarity. True expertise develops through regular engagement with immediate feedback, allowing you to re-derive principles from the ground up rather than relying on memorized facts. This is the knowledge that lets you explain something simply because you understand it deeply.

Situations where people already come to you for help: Your specific knowledge is often visible to others before you recognize it yourself. Look at the "inbox" of requests you receive: What favors do you always say yes to because they come naturally? What do people admire in you when you aren't trying to impress them? What problems do you solve effortlessly while others struggle? These patterns reveal where you already provide unique value—you just haven't monetized or systematized it yet.

Building this proof of work stack serves multiple purposes. It gives you confidence that your source code is real, not just wishful thinking. It demonstrates to others—potential collaborators, employers, customers—that you can deliver. And it creates what might be called a "binge bank": a library of evidence that convinces a curious stranger you're interesting and credible within hours of exploration.

How Agency Transforms Your Personal Relationships and Social Capital

Agency doesn't operate in isolation. It profoundly shapes your personal relationships and the social dynamics you navigate daily. When you operate from an internal locus of control with a clear sense of your source code, you show up differently in every interaction.

You become less needy for external validation because you have an internal compass. You're less reactive to criticism because you know who you are regardless of what others think. You're more capable of genuine connection because you're not constantly performing for approval or seeking external proof that you matter.

High-agency individuals build qualitatively different networks. Rather than accumulating contacts transactionally—collecting business cards, sending generic LinkedIn requests—they attract relationships through demonstrated value and authentic engagement. Your proof of work becomes a magnet: people who resonate with your source code naturally find you, creating connections based on genuine alignment rather than superficial networking.

The social dynamics shift in subtle but powerful ways. When you become crystal clear about your values and direction, you stop attracting relationships built on mutual confusion or shared victimhood. You become less tolerant of energy-draining connections—the people who only show up to complain, criticize, or compete. And you become more magnetic to people operating at similar levels of intentionality—those who are also building something, also taking ownership, also playing long-term games.

This isn't about being selective in an elitist sense. It's about the natural sorting that happens when you know who you are and what you're building. Authenticity creates its own filter. The relationships that remain—or form—tend to be more valuable because they're based on genuine resonance rather than convenience or proximity.

Think of it like building a lighthouse on solid bedrock. The higher and clearer your light—your authentic evidence, your visible body of work—the more the right opportunities and relationships will be drawn to you through the fog of a noisy world. You stop chasing; you start attracting.

From Reactive to Self-Authored: A 4-Step Agency Plan

Understanding locus of control, impulse voices, source code, and proof of work creates the conceptual foundation. Now you need a concrete path from reactive drifting to intentional authorship.

This approach is sometimes called life crafting—the deliberate practice of shaping your existence according to your own design rather than defaulting to scripts written by others¹⁰. It's not about abandoning responsibility or chasing fantasies. It's about aligning your career aspirations, daily habits, and long-term vision with the source code you've already identified. The goal is crystal clear: become the architect of your life rather than a tenant in someone else's building.

Step 1: Admit Where You're Reactive

The first step is identifying where you're currently operating with an external locus of control—the areas where you believe your destiny is governed by outside forces rather than your own choices.

Audit the core domains of your life:

Work: Are you actively building toward something you chose, or just trading time for a salary in a "permissioned" role you don't own? Are you developing skills that increase your options, or just doing what's assigned?

Relationships: Are you pursuing connections based on genuine values alignment, or acting out of mimetic desire—copying what others seem to want? Are you looking for approval rather than authentic connection?

Money: Are you making strategic choices about earning, spending, and saving—or trapped in "survival mode," spending immediately because you don't believe you can get ahead anyway?

Location: Did you choose where you live based on strategic factors—opportunity density, cost of living, culture—or did you just end up here by default?

Health: Are you actively managing your physical and mental state, or just reacting to problems when they become emergencies?

Most people discover they're more reactive than they realized. You might have chosen your city because that's where your job happened to be. Your career because it seemed practical at 22. Your daily routine because that's what everyone around you does. Naming these patterns breaks the spell of inevitability. You can't change what you won't acknowledge.

Step 2: Choose One Small Area to Reclaim Control

Don't attempt a catastrophic reset. The goal is "Minimum Viable Action"—breaking down intimidating changes into sub-actions so small they cease to be scary¹¹. This generates the emotional momentum needed to sustain progress.

Pick one domain where you feel most stuck and take one small action aligned with your impulse voices. If your source code involves creating and explaining, start a simple blog post on something you care about. If it involves building and designing, sketch a solution to a problem you've been complaining about. If it involves connecting and organizing, host a small dinner for interesting people.

The specific action matters less than two things: (1) you chose it based on your authentic interests rather than external expectations, and (2) it's small enough to actually complete. This approach acts as "stress inoculation training"—building your resilience muscle through manageable challenges before attempting larger ones.

Step 3: Align One Weekly Action with Your Source Code

Once you've taken the initial step, make it recurring. Commit to one weekly action that exercises your source code: writing every Sunday morning, designing something every Saturday afternoon, reaching out to one interesting person every Friday. Consistency matters more than scale.

This recurring action becomes the seed of your personal monopoly. Over time, weekly writing becomes a body of work. Weekly designs become a portfolio. Weekly conversations become a network. The compounding effects are dramatic—but only if you stay consistent long enough for compounding to work.

Your specific knowledge—the stuff that feels like play to you but looks like work to others—is the key here. When you're "swimming with the current" of your own nature, the weekly action doesn't feel like grinding. It feels like expressing something that was always there. Work ceases to be a chore and becomes a self-sustaining practice.

Step 4: Turn Actions into a Public Ledger of Kept Promises

The final step is making your work visible. Publish your writing somewhere people can find it. Share your designs on a platform. Document your learning in public. This isn't about self-promotion for its own sake—it's about creating an externally auditable track record of kept promises.

A personal brand is not just "content." It's your public ledger of kept promises—an unforgeable history of energy expenditure that builds deep trust over time⁸. When you consistently show up and produce work in public, you build three things simultaneously:

Trust: People learn they can count on you to deliver. Trust is the currency that precedes every meaningful transaction—job offers, partnerships, customer relationships. Showing up consistently for years earns the permission to eventually make big asks.

Reputation Capital: You become known for specific capabilities in specific domains. This flips the polarity of your career: instead of you chasing opportunities, opportunities chase you. You become findable by the people who need exactly what you offer.

Optionality: You increase your "surface area exposure to positive upside"—creating situations where lucky accidents are more likely to occur. The more visible your work, the more serendipity finds you.

How Personal Agency Creates a Meaningful Career (Without Burning Everything Down Overnight)

A common fear is that reclaiming agency requires dramatic action—quitting your job, moving to a new city, blowing up stable relationships. But the path to sovereign authorship doesn't require you to burn your life down. It requires strategic patience and incremental building.

Consider what might be called the 80/20 "Bee Colony" Strategy, borrowed from the natural world¹². Bee colonies survive by balancing exploitation and exploration. About 80% of forager bees exploit known food sources—going back to flowers that reliably produce nectar. But 20% act as scouts, exploring new territory for undiscovered opportunities. If all bees exploited, the colony would starve when current sources dried up. If all bees explored, the colony would starve from inefficiency.

Apply this to your career transition:

Exploitation (80%): Continue investing the majority of your time and energy in your current responsibilities—your job, your primary income source, your existing commitments. This maintains your immediate stability and funds your exploration.

Exploration (20%): Dedicate a portion of your time to "scout" for new opportunities aligned with your source code. Use early mornings, evenings, or weekends to build proof of work in your authentic domain. Test small, reversible experiments rather than betting everything on unvalidated ideas.

This 20% is where your personal monopoly develops. You're not abandoning your current path; you're building a parallel one that could eventually become primary. The compounding loop works like this:

Aligned actions → demonstrated proof of work → growing reputation → new opportunities → increased options → structural freedom.

Over time, the "exploration" work generates evidence. The evidence attracts opportunities. The opportunities create choices. The choices eventually enable you to shift the ratio—maybe to 70/30, then 50/50, then finally to a place where your primary income flows from work aligned with your source code.

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived Nazi concentration camps and founded logotherapy, articulated a principle that applies here: meaning is not something you find waiting for you—it's something you create through your response to circumstances¹³. Even in the most constrained situations, you retain the freedom to choose your attitude and response.

Your current job, however far from your source code, doesn't determine your future. How you spend your non-work hours does. What you build on the margins eventually reshapes the center.

Journal Prompts for Deeper Agency Archaeology

Written reflection accelerates the excavation process. These journal prompts are designed to bypass surface-level thinking and access the deeper patterns that define your source code. Set aside 20-30 minutes with pen and paper—the physical act of handwriting often produces richer insights than typing.

Prompt 1: The Effortless Excellence Question
"What do people compliment me on that I find almost embarrassingly easy? What skills or contributions do others praise that feel so natural I barely consider them achievements?"

Prompt 2: The Jealousy Decoder
"When I feel jealous of someone else's work or life, what specifically triggers that jealousy? What does this reveal about desires I haven't admitted to myself?"

Prompt 3: The Deathbed Regret Test
"If I continued on my current trajectory for the next 20 years, what would I most regret not having tried, built, or become? What's stopping me from starting now?"

Prompt 4: The Energy Audit
"Which activities from the past month left me feeling energized rather than drained? Which obligations felt like obligations, and which felt like opportunities I was grateful for?"

Prompt 5: The Permission Slip
"What would I pursue if I didn't need anyone's approval? If failure were impossible and judgment didn't exist, how would I spend my working hours?"

Prompt 6: The Childhood Compass
"What did I build, collect, organize, or study before age 10 that nobody told me to? What does this reveal about how my brain naturally engages with the world?"

Prompt 7: The Invisible Audience
"Whose voice do I hear when I hesitate to take action on something I want? Whose approval am I still seeking, and what would I do differently if I stopped?"

Return to these prompts monthly. Your answers will evolve as you gain clarity, and tracking that evolution creates its own proof of work—evidence that you're actively engaging with your own development rather than passively hoping for change.

Putting It All Together: Your Agency Archaeology Roadmap

Let's synthesize the framework into a practical sequence you can start today:

Step 1: Understand your locus of control. Use the assessment questions to identify where you currently attribute responsibility for outcomes. Notice when you default to external explanations ("the economy," "my boss," "bad timing") versus internal ones ("my skills," "my choices," "my effort"). The shift from external to internal is the foundation of everything that follows.

Step 2: Rediscover your impulse voices. Spend time with the three reflection questions covering childhood, teen years, and early adulthood. Write down specific memories. Look for the activities that made time disappear, the interests that survived social pressure, the rabbit holes you fell down without anyone pushing you. These aren't random—they're signals of your source code.

Step 3: Synthesize your source code purpose. What pattern connects your impulse voices across life stages? Try to articulate it in a single sentence: "I've always loved [doing X] in a way that [achieves Y] for [type of people/situations]." This is your source code purpose—not a job title but a function you naturally perform.

Step 4: Build a proof-of-work stack. Audit your past for evidence that your source code has already been operating. List the projects, studies, and helping situations where your pattern showed up. This evidence stack gives you confidence that your source code is real and demonstrates to others that you can deliver.

Step 5: Shift from reactive to agentic with small visible actions. Choose one domain to reclaim. Take one minimum viable action aligned with your source code. Make it weekly. Make it public. Let the compounding begin.

The hamster wheel isn't destiny. The ship isn't permanently adrift. You have a rudder, a compass, and a horizon worth sailing toward. The question is whether you'll keep sitting below deck, reacting to waves—or step into the captain's seat and start charting your own course.

The path isn't about finding external permission or waiting for circumstances to change. It's about remembering who you were before the world told you who to be—and building the evidence that makes that person undeniable.

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References

1. Bandura, A. (2006). Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(2), 164-180.
2. Haidt, J. (2006). The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Basic Books. [The "rider and elephant" metaphor for reason and emotion/instinct.]
3. Ravikant, N. (2019). Arm Yourself With Specific Knowledge. Naval. https://nav.al/specific-knowledge
4. Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1-28.
5. Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis. W.W. Norton & Company. [On identity formation and early development.]
6. Isaacson, W. (2007). Einstein: His Life and Universe. Simon & Schuster. [The compass story.]
7. Perell, D. (n.d.). Build a Personal Monopoly. David Perell Blog. https://perell.com/note/build-a-personal-monopoly/
8. Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. [The original proof of work concept applied to unforgeable records.]
9. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
10. Schippers, M. C., & Ziegler, N. (2019). Life Crafting as a Way to Find Purpose and Meaning in Life. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2778.
11. Fogg, B. J. (2019). Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. [On minimum viable actions and behavioral momentum.]
12. Seeley, T. D. (2010). Honeybee Democracy. Princeton University Press. [On the explore-exploit balance in bee colonies.]
13. Frankl, V. E. (1946/2006). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.