People's faith makes gods, leaders, and rules. Win over people, and you win power.
I used to not understand it when people said someone was "powerful." Is it because he is stronger than everyone else? Maybe. Is it because he is richer? Maybe. But after reading and watching many powerful figures, in movies and in real life, I started to see a pattern. And the pattern that keeps repeating is this: access to resources, and skills that create value.
Access is leverage
Resources can be money, property, or access to people. All of them are leverage. They make you useful, and the more people who rely on what you hold, or want it, the more powerful you become. Your power is, quite literally, holding a piece of someone else's livelihood.
Here is the scenario I keep thinking about. You are broke. No assets, zero in your bank account. You have a normal job, but by the end of every month, even after getting paid, you have nothing left. Then you take a loan and buy a moto or a car, and give it to someone to run as a taxi. Every day, they bring you money. For the first time, you have something at the end of the month.
Someone now depends on you. When your friends ask for help, you can actually help them. People start to look up to you, and your confidence grows. Nothing about you changed except one thing: you gained access to an asset, and your status followed.
Now push the story further. Your money grows. You start getting direct access to the bank president. You buy shares in companies. You begin meeting leaders that other people can only dream of meeting. Suddenly, you are powerful. Not because you are the richest person in the room, and not because you are the strongest, but because you have access to people and resources. More people believe in you, and because of that, you can make things happen.
Skill is the second door
The second source of power is a skill that creates value. I see this all the time in Chinese dramas. A person is broke today, then learns a skill, often martial arts, traditional medicine, or even driving, and little by little, their life changes.
What I take from this is simple. You need a skill you can excel in, whatever it is, and then you need to find the people who need it.
But a skill alone is not enough. The real question is: is your skill valuable to someone? If it is, exchange it for resources, connect with other powerful people, and keep going. The more you connect to a guy who knows a guy, the more powerful you become.
Power is people
Sometimes I even think that gods become powerful because of their believers. A god with no believers is just a story. And I think this reveals the most important thing about power: power is people. You can have every resource in the world, but if no one believes in you, no one wants to know you, and no one will work with you, those resources are close to useless.
The boat and the water
Nowhere is this clearer to me than in politics. A politician has no power of his own. Take away the voters, the crowds, the officials, and the soldiers who carry out his orders, and what is left is just a man in a nice suit. Politicians become powerful because people are behind them.
There is an old Chinese saying I love: the people are the water, and the leader is the boat. Water can carry a boat a very long way. But water can also sink it. The idea goes back to the philosopher Xunzi, and rulers have been repeating it for centuries, mostly as a warning to themselves.
I think politicians understand this better than anyone. Even the cruel ones, even the twisted ones, even the ones I would never vote for, still do some things for their people. They build the road, keep the price of bread down, keep the lights on, show up at the funeral. Not always out of kindness. Often out of survival. They know the water is watching, and a leader who forgets who is carrying him does not stay a leader for long.
Which also means something for the rest of us: the people are never as powerless as they feel. Their belief is the one thing every ruler is quietly afraid of losing.
The woman who could see everything
Now think about the opposite. What happens when you hold something powerful, but the water refuses to move for you? There is a story that captures this better than anything I could say, the story of Cassandra.
Cassandra was a princess of Troy, the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba. The god Apollo fell in love with her and offered her the gift of prophecy, the ability to see the future, in exchange for her love. She accepted the gift. Then she refused to keep her side of the bargain.
Apollo couldn't take back a gift he had already given. So he did something crueler. He twisted it into a curse: Cassandra would keep seeing the future, but no one would ever believe her.
And she saw everything. She foresaw that her brother Paris would bring Helen to Troy, and that the city would one day be destroyed and burned by the Greeks. When the Greeks left a giant wooden horse outside the gates, she begged her people not to bring it inside. They ignored her. Some thought she was mad. Troy fell.
Think about that. Cassandra had one of the greatest powers imaginable, and it was worth nothing, because no one believed her. She knew the truth, and she could change nothing.
Her name is still used today. Psychologists talk about the "Cassandra complex," the experience of having accurate warnings dismissed or mocked. Analysts and whistleblowers who predict a financial crash or an environmental disaster years early, only to be ignored until it is too late, are often called Cassandras.
So what is power?
This is how I see it now. Can you make things happen? Can you get other people to act with you, and for you? Or are you helpless, even when you are right?
A powerful person is someone who can make things happen, through access or through skill. And behind both of those, always, is the water: people who believe in you, carry you, and, if you forget them, can sink you.
