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Power
2 min read · 428 words
Power is the operator’s capacity to produce effects in the world — to shape situations rather than be shaped by them.
The system has multiple sources of power. Position power: the authority that comes from the role. Resource power: the leverage that money, time, or material possession provides. Skill power: the capacity to produce outputs others can’t easily produce. Relational power: the trust and reach the operator has built with others. Internal power: the operator’s regulation of their own state under conditions that would dysregulate others. Different operators have different mixes. Most have access to more power than they recognize.
The cultural narrative tends to focus on position power and resource power as the meaningful kinds, and to dismiss the others. This produces the operator who, lacking position or significant resources, concludes they have no power. The conclusion is wrong. Skill power, relational power, and internal power are real, often underestimated, and frequently more durable than the positional or resource kinds — which can be lost when the role ends or the resources are depleted.
The other distortion: the assumption that power must be visible to be real. Internal power — the operator who can hold their state under pressure, produce considered responses to provocation, sustain attention on what matters when others can’t — is usually invisible to outside observers but produces consistent advantage across all the situations the operator participates in. This power scales with development. It is the kind that compounds.
From the chair: assess your actual power across all the categories, not just the ones the culture emphasizes. What can your skills produce. What relationships do you have access to. What is your internal regulation capacity in conditions where others lose theirs. The composite is usually larger than the operator’s first estimate.
Then: use it. Power that is not used decays. The skill not deployed becomes rusty. The relationships not maintained dissolve. The internal regulation capacity not exercised in challenging conditions atrophies. Power is sustained by being used. The operator who uses what they have produces more. The operator who hoards or refuses to use it watches it diminish.
The other note: power exists to be applied to something. Power for its own sake usually corrupts the operator running it. Power directed at outputs the operator considers worth producing — work that matters to them, relationships they care about, conditions they want to improve — tends to produce both more power and a life the operator can stand behind. The orientation matters as much as the quantity.