The Seven Rules of Power 1: Overcoming the Submissive Mindset
Seven Rules of Power 1: Overcoming the Submissive Mindset
Before I get into the specifics of Pfeiffer’s Seven Rules of Power, I want to remind again that not everyone should seek power.
If you are embarrassed to brag about yourself, if you feel happy by quietly contributing to the collective, if you have to be true to yourself, if you are always sincere in your dealings with people, and if you want to be liked by all …… you shouldn’t chase power.
The state you are in when chasing power is not a very comfortable one.
*The first rule of power is to overcome mental barriers, break out of your ego, leave your comfort zone and switch to a ‘power mindset’. You have to be very clear that you want power, not comfort. *
You need to overcome four mental barriers.
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First, brag, don’t be humble.
Chinese people working in the US have the impression that Americans, especially Indians, can boast more than Chinese people. You have gone to great lengths to write out the program, and the Indians went up to talk about the PPT, which we think is very unfair, but we kind of look down on those who talk about the PPT, and think that bragging is not a real skill.
But in Game of Thrones, it’s precisely the rhetoric that works.
People with talent and strong business skills tend to have the virtue of humility. You always feel that your accomplishments are not worth bragging about, and you don’t brag about them. That’s not a virtue.
There was a girl in a Stanford MBA class who had a medical degree and ran her own company, so she could be very good. When the teacher asked her to tell the class about her accomplishments, she was embarrassed and not at all confident. Pfeiffer said, “This is a disease, and it needs to be cured.
Psychology calls this “Imposter syndrome”. It is said that the incidence of this disease is as high as 2/3 of the outstanding people. you have achieved good results and reached a high position, but you always feel that your ability is not enough to deserve that position, as if you are an impostor. The trouble with this disease is that you can come across as unsure of yourself. This lack of self-confidence is sensed by others, so they too feel that you are not capable enough. This leads to a vicious cycle. You’re afraid to do a lot of things, your productivity goes down, your insecurity increases, you have all kinds of delays, and you’re proving by your actions that you’re not capable.
The truth of this is that your self-confidence is not only useful to you, but also to others. Your coworkers, and especially your subordinates, expect to see confidence in you. You think you don’t have to show it, and over time people will naturally recognize you - the reality is that others don’t have the time to scrutinize you, and not being confident is not being able to do it.
How to overcome this obstacle? First of all, look at those in high positions and think about what makes them so special. You’ll find that they’re not necessarily more qualified than you are.
Furthermore, you need training. Self-promotion and self-presentation may make you feel uncomfortable, so practice until you are comfortable. Faking confidence can put you in a virtuous cycle. When you pretend to be confident, others expect a little more from you, and you expect a little more from yourself. There’s a principle of ‘embodied cognition’ here: you engage in confident behavior, you really do become a little more confident in your thoughts. You’ll be more daring to do something, and then you’ll actually make it happen, and so you’ll reap the benefits of true self-confidence.
Pfeiffer mentioned that some foreign students in his classroom - I guess there are quite a few Chinese among them - would tell him privately that they don’t want to participate in the class discussion: I’m not a good speaker, and my English is not good enough, so can I just do my homework and take the exams, and I won’t waste everyone’s time with the class discussion? I can just do my homework and take the exams, and I won’t waste everyone’s time with the class discussion.
Think about how ridiculous this is. Did you choose this power course to do academic work? Don’t you want to train yourself to fight for power? How can you talk about power when you don’t even dare to discuss it in class?
Pfeiffer says that a key means of gaining power is to assert yourself and persuade others in a discussion. Classroom discussions are the safest, as they do not involve any real competition for interests, so why not use such a good training opportunity?
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Second, be self, not collective.
This is a deeper truth. Our general values honor quiet devotion and being a good person, and good things will naturally happen to me in the future……. The so-called “God loves a stupid child”.
Pfeiffer cites studies that say if you have to think that way, it means you’re not from a very high social class.
Upper class people don’t believe in quiet giving. They believe that they should have all the benefits, and that it’s better for you to give and the benefits go to me.
The most famous aristocratic school in Britain is Eton, which is full of children from powerful families. Some people specially examined the students of Eton to see where they were strongest. It turned out that the strongest thing about them was their shamelessness, which was God’s greatest gift to them, and was the superpower of these people. These people are very daring to claim their own interests, if you do not give them protest, they have no qualms about giving themselves all the spoils of war.
It’s a completely different set of values. There was a survey done, and there are two ways of acquiring power-
A way is to work hard, help your coworkers, contribute to the collective, then of course the collective will be more willing to give you power;
Way B is to flatter your superiors, make connections and brag about yourself.
May I ask, would you prefer way A or way B?
All respondents found both ways useful. However, people of lower social class are inclined to use Method A and refuse to use Method B. People of higher social class do not mind Method B at all. Why is this so?
It is a matter of values. People in the lower social classes generally recognize collectivist values, believing that contributing to the collective is good and grasping benefits for oneself is wrong. This is probably because the lower classes must hold together and collectivism is a class sentiment. Collectivism gets in the way of chasing power.
An interesting statistic found that students in Stanford’s MBA class took classes without much class difference in all other courses, except for Pfeiffer’s Power, which was clearly more interesting to students who came from a higher class ……
The same is true for gender and race. In Silicon Valley, white men are 42% more likely to be executives than white women, 149% more likely than Asian men, and 260% more likely than Asian women. Is this because of sexism and racism? Depends on how you interpret it. Women and Asians are reluctant to brag about themselves, would you say that’s societal or self-inflicted?
The social role expectation for women is that they are good at working together as a team and like to help others; the American perception of Asians is that they are a model minority, very smart, hard working, submissive, and unwilling to dominate others. Women and Asians are also willing to conform to such social expectations so that life is most comfortable …… But power is about to get away from you.
The researchers’ suggestion is that women and Asians have to break those social expectations if they want to achieve power. At the very least you have to be willing to dominate people: to let them do things, to dare to control them. And that requires you to overcome that mental block of collectivism and talk of equality.
What if I can’t overcome it? Is it wrong for me to advocate contributing to the collective? Then you can think of it this way: the purpose of my pursuit of power is to better help the collective! A senior person once told me about this method, which is called the “Return to the Incremental Method”: yes, I’m doing all this for the sake of my own advancement - but my advancement is also for the sake of better serving the people. Thinking like this gives you inner peace.
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Third, be strategic, not sincere.
Game of Thrones requires you to often say strategic things instead of “truthful” things, and a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. They say I want to be true to myself! But that’s stupid. What does it mean to be true to yourself? What do you mean by that? Do you want to be your 6 year old self, your 28 year old self, or your 60 year old self? “Authentic self” is an illusion.
And “real” can hurt you. There was a writer who, on a whim, conducted an experiment in which he had to be completely truthful for a few weeks, without telling any lies. He told a coworker, “If I wasn’t married, I’d like to go out with you. He told a nanny, if my wife left me, we could date. He pointed out his in-laws’ flaws to their faces. Everyone was dumbfounded by him …… The result, of course, was a mass betrayal. It’s ok to have ideas, it’s stupid to put them all out there.
Power manipulation requires you to do the right thing - like build a social network, flatter your superiors, brag about yourself - instead of being your true self. For a lot of people, this is very hard.
When a manager of a healthcare organization was promoted to general manager, the number of subordinates expanded tenfold, and she was required to address all of them. As a result, the lady came up and said she was nervous, this is the first time I’ve spoken to so many people, and I’m not confident in myself.
Can you think of a sillier opening line? She wanted to express her sincerity, thinking that sincerity would be rewarded with trust - when in fact the opposite was true. No one will trust a leader who openly says she’s not confident.
As we’ve said in previous columns, proactively exposing a weakness makes people closer to you [1]. But note that power relationships are not intimate relationships, and to capture power you should not expose your key weaknesses. Research shows that exposing weaknesses reduces leadership.
To gain power, strategic words and actions are a must because you must enlist allies and supporters. Why do people support you? You have to offer something they need in order to do so. Maybe it’s some kind of common ground, such as you’re from the same hometown or you share the same views on a certain topic; or maybe it’s some kind of immediate benefit, such as I’m willing to increase the grant for your program.
Your main concern should not be “who you are”, but “who they are”: you have to find out what they need in order to make a benefit exchange. Speak well of someone not because you like them, but because you need them as an ally.
You might say that it’s never good to lie, what if the lie is exposed? Well, then you’re being naive. Our column talked about Gladwell’s “Talking to Strangers” and how people are actually very bad at recognizing lies. Pfeiffer specifically adds that if the lie is “you’re nice to him,” he’s more likely to actively believe it’s true: everyone thinks everyone should be nice to them.
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Fourth, dominate, don’t like.
People generally want to be liked, saying I’m going to be gentle and warm. But a study has found that in all cultures, ‘competence’ and ‘gentleness’ are negatively correlated: everyone says you’re a gentle person, a good person, an old bull, which is the same as saying you’re not very competent.
Some people have also studied online review sections for books or movies, and found that even if the positive reviews are better written, people generally think those who post negative reviews are more competent.
So power plays are like relationships, you don’t want to be given the “good guy card”.
The higher up the hierarchy you go, the less you want to be “liked”. If everyone likes you, people will think you are not capable. Being liked means you have strong “agreeableness. Strong agreeableness means that you love to make peace, don’t dare to break the rules, don’t dare to stick to the principle, and people who are so agreeable are not suitable to be leaders at all.
And studies have shown that, especially for men, people with strong submissiveness will have a lower salary……. You think about it is not so, the TV series which let the warm man as the main character, everyone expects the president must be “domineering”.
Of course, it doesn’t seem right to say that you’re particularly sociopathic, selfish and aggressive. The downside of that is that you don’t contribute to the group and people don’t want to support you, but the upside is that you dare to dominate others, which is a plus - overall it’s neither good nor bad, and being out of touch doesn’t subtract from the power play.
That’s why forcing conformity and always fearing that the collective won’t accept you is a psychological barrier.
How to overcome this barrier? The researcher’s advice is to demonstrate competence first, then friendliness. If people already recognize that you are very capable, and you give a warm gesture, people will not think you are weak, but rather find it a surprise.
In Chinese, it means to show the thunderous means first, and then show the Bodhisattva’s heart. A little more straightforward is to slap first, then give a sweet date …… and then develop further is PUA. In short, it must be hard first and then soft, the order must not be wrong.
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This talk may be too blunt, a little bit of “thick black science” flavor …… But Li Zongwu wrote “thick black science” that is satirical, and we here every suggestion behind the scientific research results to support.
If you find all this awkward, it’s probably because we all have a ‘submissive mentality’. I invented the term. The submissive mentality is the antonym of the power mentality.
For 2,000 years under the Qin system, the Chinese people have not been in the habit of striving for power on their own. By default, we believe that the status of an official is a result of an examination, and that power is a gift from above. We have been taught from childhood to be humble, to be submissive, to be liked, to be sincere - we always feel that as long as we do these things, the masses will naturally support you, and the leaders will naturally promote you - not realizing that even in China, that is a fairy tale.
Have position is not equal to have power, the real power is never their own to fight over.
To get rid of the submissive mentality, you can imagine the struggle for power as playing soccer. Soccer is a confrontational sport, in the edge of the foul to do some action, or even cheat a penalty kick, are not immoral, are the necessary means to win.
You can refuse to play soccer. But you can’t say you want to play a non-confrontational kind of soccer - because there is no such thing as non-confrontational soccer in the world. It is the delusion of the submissive to become emperor by crying like the fictional Liu Bei.
Annotation
[1] Elite Day Class Season 1, How to Build Intimacy with People Quickly
Get to the point
Power Rule #1: Overcome mental barriers, break out of your ego, leave your comfort zone, and switch to a ‘power mindset’. You must be very clear about wanting power, not comfort.
There are four mental barriers you need to overcome:
First, be boastful, not humble.
Second, be egotistical, not collective.
Third, be strategic, not sincere.
Fourth, be dominant, not likeable.