Foundations of Agency was exactly what I would have wanted out of my liberal arts university experience. Intellectually and spiritually expansive. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Matt Kramer
Writer · Cohort 1
A Learning Experience by Luke Burgis
Work as Soulcraft
Becoming Fully Alive as a Human Worker
Eight modules on the nature of work, the formation of persons, and what it means to build something real in an age that rewards the frictionless and the fake.
A note from Luke
Something has gone wrong with how we think about work. We've reduced it to productivity, to output, to competitive advantage — and in doing so we've lost something that cannot be recovered by working harder or smarter.
What you will leave with
- •Language for what you actually want — not what you've been told to want
- •A Work Profile that maps your motivational pattern across your whole life
- •The Belief Paper: a written position you can actually defend under pressure
- •Clarity on which of your models are opening the world and which are closing it
- •Real agency in your work — the capacity to act, rather than merely react, in the place you spend most of your hours. This draws on the framework I've been teaching at Foundations of Agency and brings it directly to the soil of your work.
- •A small community of serious people asking the same questions
The great tradition called it soulcraft: the shaping of a person through what they do and how they do it. Work was never simply economic. It was formative. It made you into someone — or it unmade you.
From the Introduction
TheHuman Worker.
The great tradition called it soulcraft: the shaping of a person through what they do and how they do it.
Who This Course Is For
—
People at a crossroads — sensing the next chapter but not yet able to name it
—
Anyone feeling the pull toward a new way of working and needing language for why
—
Professionals who are good at their jobs but privately wonder if it’s making them into someone they want to be
—
Founders, executives, and builders who’ve optimized for output and are ready to ask what it’s all for
—
People entering or leaving a career, a company, or an identity — and who want the transition to mean something
—
Those who sense that AI is changing work in ways no productivity framework can explain
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Anyone who has achieved what they set out to achieve and found it strangely hollow
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People who want to take their own interior life seriously — and do it with intellectual rigor, not self-help platitudes
If you're not sure whether this is for you, take the Work Profile Assessment first. It'll tell you more than this page can.
“The question is not whether AI will transform work. It will. The question is what kind of person you will be when it does.”
— Luke Burgis
What You Walk Away With
Concrete. Real. Yours to Keep.
This is not a course about ideas. It's a course that produces things — written, tested, and built by you.
Your Personalized Playbook
A document of your own thinking across eight modules — generated for you alone when you finish the course. It pulls together your orientation profile, your Work Profile, your Belief Paper, and the Notebook entries you write after every module. It is not the course's thinking. It is yours.
The Notebook
Three short questions after each module. Two are written for you specifically — drawing on what you said at orientation and on every answer you've already given. The third asks what another student in the Discord community showed you about the module that you couldn't see on your own. Not a survey. The seed material that becomes your Personalized Playbook.
Your Work Profile
A personalized map of your motivational pattern — the recurring way you work when you're most alive. Not a personality type. Something rarer: an account of how you actually function.
Your Motivational Pattern
The deep analysis behind your Work Profile — what specifically drives you, what depletes you, and what conditions allow you to do your best work. Generated from your Fulfillment Stories.
The Belief Paper
A written argument for something you actually believe — something you can trace to your own formation and defend under pressure. The central assignment of this course. The hardest thing most students have ever written.
Your Family Desire Map
A structured examination of the desires, fears, and patterns you inherited — and which ones you're still living out without realizing it. Most people have never done this work.
Your Model Audit
A clear-eyed inventory of the people shaping your ambitions right now — sorted by whether they're opening your world or quietly closing it. Most people have never named them all in one place.
Your Mimetic Audit
A map of the environments — workplaces, group chats, feeds, communities — that are currently shaping what you want and how you act. Not a critique of those environments. A clear-eyed reading of which ones are forming you, and toward what.
The Mystagogical Letter
A letter to one person you want to invite into a mystery you've already entered. The capstone of the course. It asks you to become, finally, someone worth following.
Plus: The Notebook — three questions after every module (two personalized for you, one asking what another student in the Discord showed you), accumulated into your Playbook at the end. A Desire Audit, a Mimetic Audit, an Ignatian Discernment exercise, daily desire tracking, annotated readings, AI feedback on every major submission, and more.
Probe — Module 0
The chatbot is
the first lesson.
Every module begins with a probe — a provocation designed to disturb a comfortable assumption before you know what the lesson is. This one is a chatbot asking you to examine your feelings about chatbots.
Leon Kass argued that gut-level repugnance precedes argument — and sometimes outpaces it. McLuhan said the medium shapes perception before you've decided what to think. Notice what is happening in you right now.
Students at the Enhanced level and higher will have various ways to interact with Luke throughout the course.
- ✦Grounded in Luke's publicly available essays, lectures, and interviews
- ✦1M+ word curated library of the tradition the course engages — Girard and the mimetic theorists, Aristotle and the virtue tradition, Augustine, Aquinas, Pieper, MacIntyre, Weil, and the contemporary philosophers of work and desire
- ✦Cites and links to its sources so you can read the primary text yourself
- ✦Module-aware: knows where you are in the course and tailors what it surfaces
- ✦Available 24/7 — for the questions that come at 11pm, not the ones you save for live sessions
- ✦Not available to the public. Only accessible inside the course.
Probe — Module 0
A probe is not a question with a correct answer — it is a disturbance designed to make the invisible visible. What you feel as you read this may be more useful than what you think.
Ask anything about the course…
→
The Curriculum
Eight Modules
Each module is a door into a question that serious people have wrestled with for centuries — and that the present moment makes urgent again.
01
The Nature of Work
What is work, essentially? Before efficiency, before output, before economics — what does work do to the person doing it?
02
The Election
Where does your wanting come from? Most of what we pursue is learned, not chosen. This module begins the work of sorting the mimetic from the genuine.
03
The Acting Person
Your family was your first school of desire. Before any career or calling, you learned what to want — and what to fear wanting — at home.
04
The Awakened Senses
Every serious person has models. This module asks: which of yours are opening the world, and which are closing it?
05
Reading the Real
Why do we lose ourselves in what others want? This module examines the crowd's logic — and what it costs to stand apart from it.
06
Against Acedia
Can you hold a position under pressure? The Belief Paper is the central assignment of this course. This is where you find out.
07
Reverence and Generativity
What does it mean to build something that outlasts you? This module examines generativity and the reverence that serious work requires.
08
Building the Real
The final module is a synthesis and a commitment: what does it look like to build something real — in your work, your relationships, your community?
Each module includes a short video introduction, a guided exercise, an excerpt from the Reader, and a written commitment. Plan for approximately ~20 hours total — about 2 hours per module, plus time for the pre-work and final integration.
See the full curriculum →From Students & Readers
What People Say
Voices from past Foundations of Agency cohorts alongside public reflections on Luke's work and ideas. Hover any card to pause.
Luke makes a startling case that many of our goals are merely reflections of what we think others want. His thinking is a spellbinding lens on desire, ambition, and the self.
Adam Grant
Wharton professor, author of Think Again · On Luke’s work
It gave me language for something I'd been feeling my whole adult life but couldn't name — that most of what I wanted, I'd been taught to want by people I hadn't even chosen as my teachers.
A reader
on encountering Luke’s ideas · Anonymized
As a licensed counselor with decades of experience, I highly recommend accepting the invitation to grow through this intensive.
Sean Slevin
LPC, LMFT · Cohort 1
The go-to thinker on mimetic desire. Everyone with mimetic desire — in other words, everyone — should engage with Luke’s ideas.
Tyler Cowen
Economist, Mercatus Center · On Luke’s work
Foundations of Agency was exactly what I would have wanted out of my liberal arts university experience. Intellectually and spiritually expansive. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Matt Kramer
Writer · Cohort 1
Luke makes a startling case that many of our goals are merely reflections of what we think others want. His thinking is a spellbinding lens on desire, ambition, and the self.
Adam Grant
Wharton professor, author of Think Again · On Luke’s work
It gave me language for something I'd been feeling my whole adult life but couldn't name — that most of what I wanted, I'd been taught to want by people I hadn't even chosen as my teachers.
A reader
on encountering Luke’s ideas · Anonymized
As a licensed counselor with decades of experience, I highly recommend accepting the invitation to grow through this intensive.
Sean Slevin
LPC, LMFT · Cohort 1
The go-to thinker on mimetic desire. Everyone with mimetic desire — in other words, everyone — should engage with Luke’s ideas.
Tyler Cowen
Economist, Mercatus Center · On Luke’s work
Stunning, even revolutionary. Revelatory. Luke takes ideas that have shaped my own field of developmental psychology and makes them practical for anyone trying to understand why they want what they want.
Andrew N. Meltzoff
Developmental psychologist, University of Washington · On Luke’s work
I learned crucial concepts about how to practice more agency in my life, and I met interesting people from around the world. You will make new friends.
Bonnie Kavoussi
Writer · Cohort 1
I expected a course about productivity or self-improvement. What I got was something closer to a philosophical formation. I came out a different kind of worker, and a different kind of person.
A reader
on Luke’s teaching · Anonymized
Most material on identity feels like therapy or branding. This feels like neither. It feels like being treated as an adult capable of telling the truth about myself.
A reader
on the work · Anonymized
Foundations of Agency was exactly what I would have wanted out of my liberal arts university experience. Intellectually and spiritually expansive. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Matt Kramer
Writer · Cohort 1
Stunning, even revolutionary. Revelatory. Luke takes ideas that have shaped my own field of developmental psychology and makes them practical for anyone trying to understand why they want what they want.
Andrew N. Meltzoff
Developmental psychologist, University of Washington · On Luke’s work
I learned crucial concepts about how to practice more agency in my life, and I met interesting people from around the world. You will make new friends.
Bonnie Kavoussi
Writer · Cohort 1
I expected a course about productivity or self-improvement. What I got was something closer to a philosophical formation. I came out a different kind of worker, and a different kind of person.
A reader
on Luke’s teaching · Anonymized
Most material on identity feels like therapy or branding. This feels like neither. It feels like being treated as an adult capable of telling the truth about myself.
A reader
on the work · Anonymized
Foundations of Agency was exactly what I would have wanted out of my liberal arts university experience. Intellectually and spiritually expansive. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Matt Kramer
Writer · Cohort 1
Personal Instruction
Luke guides you through all eight modules.
Each module opens with a short video introduction from Luke — framing the question, naming the key ideas, and setting the challenge ahead.
Enrollment opens July 6
Join the waitlist.
Get 20% off.
Waitlist members get first access and a 20% discount when enrollment opens July 6. One email. No spam.
When Enrollment Opens
Three ways in
Same course. Different levels of access to Luke. Waitlist members can choose any tier.
Self-Guided
The full course, your pace
$299
one-time
- All 8 modules with written guides, exercises, and 10 short videos from Luke
- The Work Profile Assessment that shows what you're building toward
- The Belief Paper assignment with the full framework
- An AI thinking partner trained on Luke's work, 24/7, with real feedback on every entry
- The Discord alumni community: hundreds doing this same work
- Lifetime access — come back to Module 2 in three years if you need to
- Graduates only: earn a place in the Alumni Network, the global directory of people who actually finished
Most Popular
Enhanced
Bi-weekly office hours with Luke + the Reader
$699
one-time
- Everything in Self-Guided
- Bi-weekly Office Hours with Luke (live Q&A)
- Work as Soulcraft Reader — 300+ page curated anthology (PDF)
- Expanded reading library and bonus video lectures — additional essays, interviews, and source texts that go deeper than the core curriculum
- Cohort Annotation Tool — read core texts together with classmates; highlight any passage, leave a margin note, see what others noticed
- Private Discord channel for Enhanced students
Cohort
Small group, by application
$2,500
by application
- Everything in Enhanced (incl. Reader + expanded library)
- Luke appears in two live sessions
- Special guest speakers — voices from the worlds of philosophy, theology, business, and the arts
- 16 total group sessions over 8 weeks (small cohort)
- The Welcome Box — $500 curated gift package (books, hardcover Reader, surprises) mailed to your door · U.S. only
- Application required — Luke personally reviews every application and builds each cohort by hand
- Cohort capped at 8 people
Organizations & Teams
Enrolling five or more people?
Group rates are available for companies, leadership teams, and organizations enrolling five or more people at the same time. Contact us to discuss pricing and logistics.
Not ready to enroll?
Two ways to feel out the work.
Neither of these is the course. They’re ways of asking whether the course is for you. Take one. Take both. No funnel, no sales sequence.
About the Instructor
Luke Burgis
Author. Veteran entrepreneur. Teacher.
Luke is the author of four books, including Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (St. Martin's Press) — translated into 15 languages — and his latest, The One and the Ninety-Nine. His other books include Unrepeatable and Be Not Conformed.
Before turning to writing and teaching, he spent a decade as a serial entrepreneur — building and selling companies in the health, wellness, and technology sectors. He knows what it costs to optimize for the wrong things. That experience is the foundation of this course.
He is the founder and director of the Cluny Institute and a faculty member at The Catholic University of America, where he received the Innovation in Teaching Award. Work as Soulcraft is the course he spent years building — first for himself, then for others.
Work as Soulcraft
Becoming Fully Alive as a Human Worker
Eight modules on the nature of work, the formation of persons, and how to build something real when intelligence itself has been automated.