Breaking Through the Brick Wall
Reid Hoffman's superagency and the power of human imagination
In December 1952, competitive runner John Landy ran the mile in 4 minutes, 2 seconds. When asked whether he could get his pace under 4 minutes, his response was “Frankly, I think the four-minute mile is beyond my capabilities. Two seconds may not sound like much, but to me, it’s like trying to break through a brick wall.” His assessment, reinforced by many sports commentators who believed such a feat could prove fatal, was that the human body was simply not built to run a mile in under 4 minutes.
Fifteen months later, on a blustery day in Oxford, England, a young medical student took to the cinder track on Iffley Road after working his shift at a local hospital. It was May 6, 1954.
He completed his first lap in :58, then his pace slightly slackened. As he began his fourth and final lap, he was at 3:01. But when Roger Bannister’s chest split the tape at the finish line at 3:59.4, the sound barrier of the running world was broken.
Forty-six days later, John Landy broke the 4 minute mile.
A busy medical student, Roger Bannister developed a training regimen that could be squeezed into his 30 minute lunch breaks at the hospital. Without the luxury of a flexible schedule, he made the most of whatever time he had. What he lacked in resource, he made up for in knowledge and in imagination.
Grounded in his understanding of human physiology: the cardiovascular system and the nervous system - in particular, the brain - Bannister concluded that the human heart could sustain the effort required to break the 4-minute mark. And by training the brain to absolutely know it was possible, he imagined he could override any potential panic response that could sabotage his goal.
That last ingredient - his trained imagination - unlocked the gate of possibility, not just for him, but for Landy and the 1600 runners who have accomplished the seemingly impossible since.
Unlocking the Gate
The key Bannister possessed was imagination. Combining his deep knowledge of the workings of the human body with a willingness to explore the frontiers of possibility, Bannister imagined a new way of training and performing in a human body. It was his imagination, backed by his training, that changed the world.
That key is the single most important instrument of our time.
Earlier this year, in January, tech founder and entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and AI strategist Parth Patil teamed up for a 3-part conversation on Hoffman’s podcast Possible. The focus was largely on AI enterprise integration and what it means to become truly AI-native.
The centerpiece of the conversation, however, landed via a comment by Hoffman that succinctly encapsulates not only his humanist-technologist ethos, but forms the epistemological basis for the era in which we now live: the only true limit to how we use this revolutionary technology is human imagination itself.
Hoffman, a student of philosophy and an alumnus of the progressive, humanist-focused Putney School in Vermont, is no stranger to foundational thinking. His career is a builder’s odyssey, shaping the defining technologies of our era: PayPal, LinkedIn, Greylock, each venture a proof of the same underlying thesis.
In placing the ideological center of gravity on human imagination, Hoffman wasn’t being poetic. Rather, he was identifying the actual constraint. While so much contemporary focus is on the current limitations of compute, access, or technical prowess, Hoffman asserts that human imagination is the ultimate gatekeeper to progress, and our highest leverage.
Hoffman argues that AI represents a fundamental democratization of capability. We are at a moment when technology gives millions of people simultaneous access to tools once available only to institutions. He calls this “superagency:” the amplification of what any one person can accomplish, as outlined in his 2025 book by that name (Superagency, Authors Equity, 2025).
It’s a precise thesis. But a force multiplier requires a force. Superagency requires agency. And nowhere is human agency more powerfully reflected than in our capacity for imagination. It is the nexus of creativity and achievement, the frontier that has compelled our species since we harnessed fire. Imagination is the connective tissue between our highest aspirations and the determination to materialize them. Expanding human imagination is the work of our time.
Though it will play out most fully in the technological arena, this is not a technology question. At its core, this is a human development question.
Understanding Agency
Human agency is a set of capabilities that expresses our causal connection to the world around us. We learn this as infants and toddlers: the child who builds a tower of blocks, only to knock them down and build again, is learning that actions create consequences in the material world.
Certain aspects of human agency appear universal. The idea that we are the author of our own lives, often in cooperation with the divine, shows up across cultures, developmental psychology, and human history as a prerequisite for meaningful action. Its close companion is efficacy: the belief that our actions have real consequences, intended or unintended, that what we do matters. In that sense, efficacy is a form of faith: actions taken in the absence of a known, certain outcome.
Then there is imagination itself: the capacity to visualize that which doesn’t yet exist until it finally does. Before running a sub-4-minute mile, Bannister first trained his mind: the feel of it, the pace, the physiological reality. Imagination at that level of fidelity is one of the most potent forms of human agency.
At the foundation of agency is the unknown. When we act as agents in our own lives, we are embracing the uncertainty of the outcome. As agents, we are saying yes to participating in a creative process that may or may not work out the way we planned. We are experimenting with the laws of the universe to see whether we can bend them. Superagency is a collective practice that extends the reach of human capability to a species-wide scale.
These capacities are influenced by circumstance, culture, opportunity, and the examples we have been given or denied. The stories we tell, the models we hold up, and the access we extend to others are foundational to how, or even whether, we are building toward superagency.
Hoffman believes, as do I, that this is the ground upon which we must build the world we intend.
Courage to Imagine
It’s pithy and almost too easy to simply say “imagination is the key.” It’s more complicated to act on that ideal. Constraints to imagination, in order to be transcended in service to human agency, must first be acknowledged.
Of all constraints to human imagination, fear is the most pervasive. It is encoded in our DNA: we are descendants of ancient humans whose instinct toward self-preservation, fueled by fear, kept them from eating poisonous plants or being killed by predators. Those of us who enjoy the luxury of not living daily with mortal threats to our survival will find that that instinct is still alive and well, taking different forms: fear of failure, of being wrong. Fear is an imagination killer.
False certainty is subtler and perhaps more dangerous. It masquerades as realism or as “responsible thinking.” The doctors who believed with utmost certainty that the human heart would fail under four-minute-mile conditions were reasoning from a widely accepted framework of assumptions. It turned out their assumptions were wrong. Accepted frameworks are often limits to what is possible. Adherents are frequently the last to challenge their own thinking.
Third is a scarcity of models that enlarge and evolve our understanding of what’s possible. We cannot clearly imagine what we have not seen any evidence of. Bannister’s sub-4-minute mile would likely not have been possible without Swedish runner Gundar Hägg’s 9-year world record at 4:01.4. Imagination feeds on evidence. Deny leading evidence and you constrain the imagination. This is why democratization and access matter: education, mentors, stories of others on a shared path.
For all of us, in our work lives and beyond, the implications are direct. The roles that will matter most in an AI-native world are not necessarily the most technically proficient. They are the roles that require imagination: the capacity to ask questions yet to be asked, to see configurations that don’t yet exist, to persevere through the uncertainty of building something new. AI executes brilliantly within the parameters we give it. Defining those parameters is still a distinctly human job. Expanding the parameters, even more so.
Hoffman’s superagency - a democratized expansion of human capability - is dependent on the very thing that created this technological revolution in the first place: a well-fed human imagination. It is here that the greatest potential, the most impactful opportunities for investment exist in building the world we want. This is the most consequential work of our time.
- S
Sources
Superagency, Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato, Authors Equity, January 28, 2025
“Reid Riffs with Parth Patil on Enterprise AI Integration (Part 2 of 3),” Possible podcast, January 21, 2026. possible.fm/reidriffswithparth
John Landy, quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, December 1952 and February 1954
Roger Bannister, sub-4-minute mile, May 6, 1954, Iffley Road, Oxford. World Athletics record progression
Gunder Hägg, world mile record of 4:01.4, set July 17, 1945, Malmö, Sweden. Held nine years until Bannister. World Athletics