Is your obsession with power making you question your morals and sanity? You were probably raised on rules like honesty, fairness, humility, and authenticity. Influence teaches you that attention does not reward those traits consistently.
Shamelessness is a superpower
Guess how shameless you have to be to be successful. Now take that number and multiply it by 10. Multiply it by 10 again because that's how shameless you have to be. Shamelessness is a superpower. I had never heard that before, so of course I had to look it up. I’ll be sharing 7 Rules of power with you right now because once I learned about them I'm obsessed. The main idea is that power isn't about being nice, it's not not about being fair, and it's definitely not about waiting your turn, it's about how people act and how people see you, and in what way you use that influence in the world. Let's get into these 7 rules right away
- Rule number one is get out of your own way. Let go of self doubt and stop being modest ditch that imposter syndrome. Even if someone says you don't deserve that power believe that you do.
- Break the rules stop following what everybody else is doing. People who bend or break the rules usually get ahead. Playing it safe won't get you any real influence.
- Act like a king, to be treated like one. A powerful person has a directed focus. A weak person is always, looking around, touching their hair, touching their face, it's a sign of insecurity. A powerful person is able to look at everybody in the room directly, whereas somebody who's weak is always kind of averting their gaze. These signs of confidence and charisma where you feel you are powerful, and it emanates outward. Your eyes have that certain gaze. Cues that people give off that show that they've inwardly feel secure and powerful, and it kind of emanates outward. There's a lesson here: Act like a king, to be treated like one. If you feel like you're a king or a queen, people will believe that you are.
- Build a powerful brand be known for something make yourself seen. Make yourself remembered, because the worst thing you can make yourself just forget it.
- Network non-stop. Power comes from your relationships build smart connect find people who help you grow don't wait to be found put yourself out there hot or cold reach out follow up and repeat.
- Use your power once you have power. Use it don't just sit on ask for the intro make that call say what you want power you don't use you lose.
- Success excuses almost everything when you get results people stop questioning your method they see it as effective and it protects your power.
The reason I'm sharing these rules is because as you're probably realizing by now, learning how to be successful and influential is an inner battle between purity and effectiveness.
Here's a letter from an anonymous entrepreneur:
"My obsession with business, entrepreneurship, and marketing is making me question my morals and sanity. So much of high-performance entrepreneurship and leadership is an inner battle between purity and effectiveness."
It is a hard truth that high-performance entrepreneurs and leaders eventually realize that influence is not mainly about ideas, code, or markets. It is about incentives, attention, leverage, and human behavior under pressure.
Once you study marketing deeply, especially persuasion, narrative control, incentives, and signaling, you start seeing how much of the world runs on mechanics rather than ideals.
That moment often triggers three shocks:
- You see through the curtain. You notice how often success is driven by framing, timing, repetition, and emotional leverage, not merit alone.
- Your old moral map stops working. You were probably raised on rules like honesty, fairness, humility, and authenticity. Marketing teaches you that attention does not reward those traits consistently.
- You realize power is neutral. Power is not good or evil. It amplifies whatever holds it. That realization scares people who identify as “good” more than people who identify as “ambitious”.
This is why it feels like sanity is on the line. Your internal story of who you are is being renegotiated.
The inner tension is necessary and unavoidable
Every serious man or woman in business hits this fork:
- One path is naive virtue. Staying “pure,” refusing to learn persuasion deeply, and eventually being outcompeted by people who are less scrupulous but more effective.
- The other path is cynical domination. Treating people as units, narratives as weapons, and morality as a costume.
Neither path is stable long-term.
The battle you are feeling is the search for a third position.
The third position: integrated power
Integrated power means:
- You understand manipulation well enough to never need to lie to yourself about it.
- You choose constraints deliberately instead of pretending power does not exist.
- You accept that leadership requires steering perception, but you refuse to hollow yourself out to do it.
This is harder than either extreme.
It requires:
- Holding two truths at once without flinching.
- Saying “I could do this, but I will not” from strength, not ignorance.
- Letting go of the fantasy that purity and impact are the same thing.
Most people avoid this because it is psychologically expensive. But this is the essence of spiritual growth.
Do not rush to resolve the tension
Do not rush to resolve this inner tension, and do not anesthetize it with spiritual bypassing or saying that “everything is manipulation anyway."
Because this tension is not a problem to be solved, but a growth opportunity.
Instead, articulate your non-negotiables:
- What you will never do even if it costs growth.
- What kind of customer you refuse to build on.
- What form of success would feel like a personal failure.
If you cannot name those explicitly, the market will decide for you.
And that is where sanity actually breaks. But do not doubt your coherence, this discomfort is what growth looks like when someone refuses to become hollow.