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How to build positive relationships with colleagues and superiors
How to navigate office politics without compromising your values
How to handle conflicts and difficult situations in the workplace
Powerful people are busier and more rushed
Power in the modern world is "gained and maintained through a focus on others."
However, the more powerful a person becomes, the busier and more rushed they become, causing them to become less kind and generous.
It could be that a scarcity of time rather than an excess of power is the real corrupting agent.
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Definitions of power, status, control, and social class
Keltner offers elegant and necessary definitions of the distinct ideas comprising the constellation of power in modern society:
- Power is your ability to make a difference in the world by influencing the states of other people.
- Status is the res...
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Thoreau’s wisdom on silence and shouting
Thoreau wrote, "There are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout." Yet, a century and a half later, we've created a culture that equates loudness with leadership and abrasiveness with authority.
Keltner adds to Thoreau's wisdom that a new wave of thinking about p...
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Power itself eventually warp
Even if power is gained by kindness, generosity, and concern for the common good, power itself will eventually warp priorities and become less kind, less generous, and less concerned with the common good, which will erode her power.
For example, poor people give a greater percentage of thei...
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Mishandling the power paradox
Keltner argues that our culture's understanding of power causes us to mishandle the power paradox.
Our understanding of power was shaped by Niccolò Machiavelli's sixteenth-century book The Prince, but it is outdated today. Today, a different kind of power governs the modern world. ...
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Power dynamics
Psychologist Dacher Keltner writes that at the heart of power is a troubling paradox:
"We rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst. We gain a capacity to make a difference in the world by enhanci...
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People are weird, In general
The point is that, don’t rely on your intelligence to make assumptions about people. If it isn’t considering the practical reality outside of you.
- People are weird: In general, people are weird. As your foundational principle, you avoid falling for the assumption your mind takes for gr...
Too Much Information, Too Little Attention
Throughout most of human history, access to knowledge was limited. Power equated to how much information you had access to. Kings built great libraries, and texts were rare and valuable things.
Today, however, what was once scarce is abundant. We’re drowning in information. There are more b...
7 Things You Need To Understand About Anxiety And Depression
No, we are not over yet. After discussing the topic with my friend’s Dad (he is a doctor), I’ve made a list of things you need to understand and avoid anxiety attacks (hard to breathe moments).
- Think of your anxiety as a biological problem, rather than thinking there is something wron...
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