You’re wasting a brilliant mind.
Just wait and process that a bit… You are wasting your power. Because that’s what a human’s personal power is: your brain. It is the center of your entire existence on Earth. The source of all your waking thoughts and sleepy dreams. The place where all your ambitions, goals, and sense of purpose come from and go to die. It’s how you come to know and understand pain and pleasure, reward and loss, interesting reasons to stay alive, terrible reasons to die for, and an entire system of senses that make life worth empowering. It’s what forges your choices and readies your abilities to accomplish those decisions. Any human mind is capable of imagining and directing a radiant idea into fruition that can cause the most amazing consequential impacts on the world. Anyone. If a single bacterium can wreck havoc across a population and lead to the most devasting epidemics, which can often be avoided by humans practicing basic hygiene, what would happen if just one person decided to suddenly spin their car in between just two lanes on a freeway with thousands of cars going 80 mph? One small, seemingly insignificant, act could change entire histories forever, and that’s only us contemplating immediate and extreme examples. But what if one child decided and dedicated themselves to solving the problem of world hunger… or AIDS or Alzheimer’s disease… or freedom from poverty for every person on the planet? That’s the power of a human mind.
But you’re throwing that away. People often waste their power quite willingly. This is especially relevant when it comes to young people. It seems unremarkably obvious, doesn’t it, when I talk about how the simplest of choices could lead to major change? Everybody knows this, because every neurologically-able person experiences this since the day they were born, and they are aware of it eventually soon after. They automatically understand that their choices have an impact on their surroundings, like a child knocking over a cup and spilling their milk, or exhaling and noticing how it impacts a feather-light object in front of their faces. Young people see this the most, because they’re not yet completely stressed out by the daily and unending burdens of an adult life. Yet, while everybody knows about the power their choices have, they give up building on that anyway. Why?
Nobody (well, almost nobody) will tell you how “successful” people got their success, for a variety of reasons. The major one: majority of people in the world aren’t educated in social power dynamics the way certain sociologists are. Almost nobody at the top tells them the exhaustive list of requirements before you’re even considered a candidate worthy of a ride up there. Almost nobody in power will willingly tell them about the racial, sexual, and class nature involved in political and economic systems all around the world. Almost nobody in history will tell them how kings, queens, and emperors amassed their legendary terrorities and massive wealth by hiring poor people to kill other poor people and enslave the rest of the poor people, while those monarchs took their land and labor resources, and then made the left over poor people build them palaces. And absolutely nobody wants to tell them, or you, the work that’s required to reach the word “success” in terms of power. Because it’s not sexy.
Oscar Wilde said, “Everything in the world is about sex… except sex. Sex is about power.” Now, what exactly he meant by those words is a debate for literary enthusiasts, but it holds a certain point to be made here. Power is always about desirability. Always. It comes in different shapes and forms, of course, like social influence, coercion with force, racial supremarcy, sexual appeal, monetary operations, voting, rape, war, nuclear weapons, an uprising crowd bringing down a tyrannical government, etc. But it’s always about a desired result. For a grand scale example: America tells North Korea that they won’t nuclear bomb them if N. Korea ceases to create its own nuclear weapons. They’re depending on N. Korea’s desire of freedom from nuclear war. But N. Korea, specifically Kim Jong Un, instead retorts (this is just rhetoric, not an actual quote), “No, I desire freedom from both nuclear war and American threats,” so they escalate their nuclear weapons development program. This is power of both military force and psychological influence. Now for a smaller scale example: a wealthy man from upper management indirectly suggests to an intern that if she performs a sexual act for him, he’ll let her keep her position as she attempts to progress in her career, but, if she doesn’t, he may not keep her around. He’s playing on her desire to avoid losing her internship which she needs desperately in order to get a better paying job so she can achieve financial independence for herself and her family by forcing her to appease his desire for power through sexual coercion. These are extreme and negative examples, but this is the nature of power dynamics. It’s nourished primarily by our neural capabilities. It’s about aiming for a desired effect. And we all require it to live a life of fulfillment and not waste, but we give up most of our power because the work to achieve independent power is not desireable enough, let alone achieving collective power, which requires the additional work of working well with each other.
The young especially throw away majority of their power. It’s often lost because, (and I’m still in my 20’s, I count as young, so I get to say “we”), we often think we’ll get the chance later on to play “catch up” to make up for the time that we’ve lost. Time is incredibly important to build sustainable power. The more time you have to build, the stronger you can structure your power. But we will never get to “catch up.” You can’t catch up, because the time you’ve lost is gone. It is the most finite resource in existence, because every life is numbered by days. You do not get these days back, and you cannot catch up for the days you’ve missed, because time isn’t something you can refund. The older you get, the more things pile up for you to do. Nobody tells you about this until you’re already too old to realize that you’ve lost a lot of years waiting for the day when you feel like it’s time to catch up to the work you’ve put off. Because it’s not sexy. The amount of work that goes into building truly sustainable societal power for everyone isn’t desirable.
And this goes back to the fact that “successful” people didn’t get to their success with their own work; they either had a great team behind them helping them succeed (and those people often go on without the recognition or the power to be independent from the person they propped up) or by exploiting those they believed weren’t as deserving of the power they aimed for as they are. It’s very rare to find someone in history that managed to become as powerful as a monarch just by their own merits and hard work. I actually can’t think of anyone, because, the more I think about it, every person that comes to mind had to be held up by other people collectively giving that person the power to make huge social decisions for everyone.
If you tell Amazon’s CEO (the man’s net worth 100 billion dollars as of 2018) that he has to do the same amount of work of everybody in the company to get that 100 billion independently, he’d probably stare at you dumbfounded for a few seconds before brushing it off with a nervous laugh. Because he knows he didn’t get that much monetary power alone. It was through the collective power of thousands upon thousands of minds working to make Amazon the online retail powerhouse that it is today. Meanwhile, 10% of Amazon’s workers in Ohio are on foodstamps. It robs Amazon of it’s corporate sexiness.
So, here’s a question: What if all of Amazon’s workers decided to ditch the company and go build their own with equal shareholder value providing the same service Amazon does? What if just one person in that workforce said, “Hey, why should we get paid less to do more work collectively than the CEO does on any day while he reaps all the money from stocks?” And then the idea becomes infectious, like a virus, spreading through the company. Now all the workers are infected with this idea that everybody in the company deserves a fair share to profits according to the amount of work they put in?
Now… what if this idea spread to other companies? And then the government? And then the entire country? What if this idea spread across the world that capitalism is a pointless disease that allows certain people to attain power, not by working for it by their own merits, but by feeding off the power of others? What if people decided to stop wasting their brilliant minds and chose to create something better? What if all it took was just one person to show them a better way? What if you were that person who decided to stop wasting your power, to turn around and think of another way, or better ways, to amass your power rather than playing catch up to lost time, to show the way and build radiant teams of people with their own power, all of whom were invested in the infectious idea that equal interests is the new ideal?
Why shouldn’t it be you?
Nurudeen Publishing 