171A. Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic Power

Power seeking individuals often take shortcuts. Intrinsic power comes from you, Extrinsic power comes from others. What happens when everyone depends on Extrinsic Power?

In a world where being hired by a big company or having someone important mention or point at you can make you powerful overnight, it makes sense that people would chase these shortcuts to Extrinsic Power. Having money, lawyers, servants, connections, powerful parents, or a famous partner are all easy paths to Power.

But that’s the problem. The easier your life is, the less Experience Points you earn every day. Playing on Easy Mode may give the outward appearance of Power, but you ultimately end up being a Low Level Person because you’ve avoided developing Intrinsic Power on your path to Easy Power. And that Extrinsic (external) power can be taken away as fast as it was granted. Because it never came from you.

A couple papers back I explained what leadership is. The greatest leaders, the ones with the greatest Intrinsic Power (Very High Level People) often started absolutely powerless. Like my first track coach, Olympic World Record holder Tommie Smith. He grew up picking strawberries in a field. Invisible. But a fire burned in him that drove him to superhuman feats of Intrinsic Power. No one could ever take that away, though many tried.

Then you have others who were born with trust funds and were millionaires by the age of two. That money and family meant that they could project a lot of power their whole lives, without any of that Power coming from them. Because life was so easy, they ended up growing up to be Low Level People. Once they rise to positions way above their skill level, others quietly make fun of them because being given a position you have not earned causes people to laugh at you. Disrespect you. To your face, they may show respect because you still wield Power.

Life After EA and Ubisoft

I’m not going to name names, because these people still hold a lot of Extrinsic Power and more importantly, it’s just bad form. We all know someone that is in the situation I am about to describe.

As these companies grew and became more corrupt, the path up involved being a “Yes Person” and promoting the Yes People below you. Being actually talented, or worse, being critical of choices others were making, would rock the boat. Those people would be stripped of Extrinsic Power and ultimately purged from the group.

Ultimately you end up with a company led by people who just said “Yes” or expected others to say “Yes” to them, for decades. When you ask what they’ve done, they say something like “I’ve worked at EA for almost 3 decades.” But this is not an accomplishment. You said Yes for three decades and built Extrinsic Power by kissing up to those above you. The people at the top surrounded themselves with people who did the same.

Over time the upper levels of an organisation become talentless. Intrinsic Power, which may have been there in the beginning, has been purged long ago. Being stuck in an elevator alone with Steve Jobs would be a make or break event for the hapless cohabitant. Jobs would ask you what you contributed to the company, and what you would change. This would panic most employees and many lost their jobs this way. But if something intelligent and useful came out of your mouth, it might be an instant promotion.

Similarly, a story circulated years back that Elon Musk’s secretary asked for a huge raise. Not because she was so powerful, but because Musk was so powerful. She wanted more Extrinsic Power. Granted, she was a very hard worker, so she was not without Intrinsic Power. But she wasn’t asking for Intrinsic Power. Musk countered by telling her to take two weeks off, and he would assess how much he depended on her services. It turned out that he felt fine without her, and that her 12 years at the company was a pretty good run.

Now what happens when a company gets huge (like EA or Ubisoft) and the top people have been there for decades? They have so much power that they can snap their fingers and end the careers of almost anyone in the industry, even if they aren’t in that company. Life becomes pretty easy. But playing on Easy Mode means you are getting less Experience Points. For decades. You’ve gone to a lot of work to be a Low Level Person.

Having a company led by dozens of very powerful Low Level People leads to rot. The market power of the company may allow it to lurch on for some years, but ultimately almost every critical decision will be a poor one and novel ideas will be impossible. Thus these companies fail, and you see them suddenly quite active on LinkedIn as they do their song and dance looking for their next ride.

Often times they talk very nicely about people still in power, or their recently dearly departed coworkers. But what do these people actually do? Have they done anything remarkable in the last 10 years? When these companies were acquired, the new owners took a good look at the various works in progress and said “none of this is as good as what we are already making, and you cost 10 times as much.” So they got the Elon Musk treatment.

So I end up getting all these notifications on LinkedIn about them posting all of a sudden, bragging about their 25 or 30 years at EA or Ubisoft. What did they actually do? How much money did they spend? What did the company get for that money? Sure they know how to be an exec in that company, but that’s not a transferable skill. That just showed they knew how to be nice to those above them and expected those below them to be nice to them. But that doesn’t drive a company to profitability. It also wouldn’t survive an elevator ride with Jobs or Musk.

They ultimately rose to positions far above their capabilities. This was very damaging to the company. One such person this week was offered a lower position by the new owners, one more in line with his Intrinsic Power. This person declined, they felt entitled to a higher position. But Extrinsic Power is not Virtue. When it’s gone, all you have is what you earned. And if your actions helped kill one of the world’s most powerful companies, you may have negative earnings.

Job’s Vision

I love Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. I listen to it often. Jobs advanced due to Intrinsic Power. When he clashed with others who had more Extrinsic Power, he was pushed down. But then it would become clear where the talent was in the company, and he would keep rising to the top.

His advice: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”. Jobs was a great leader, who did not depend on Extrinsic Power. He grew up poor and never graduated from college. He was adopted. His mother never graduated from college, and his father didn’t finish high school. No extrinsic power, like me and Tommie Smith. But he had a Hunger for success, and was willing to take risks and fail as many times as it took to succeed. He experimented and learned. He wasn’t going to let other’s expectations stop him.

Jobs knew he would die soon. His speech was full of honesty and heart. Looking back, which he very much did in his speech, Jobs talked about trusting Fate, Karma, whatever, that when you follow your heart things will always work out. There was nothing in his story about kissing up to others to get an unearned promotion. Being fired from his own company, by someone full of Extrinsic Power, ended up being “The best thing that ever happened to him.” He didn’t see his fall as a failure. He saw it as a chance to transform himself and his Path.

“Remembering That I Will Be Dead Soon”

Only you can choose what you will do today. When you chase Extrinsic Power, if that world becomes disrupted, you will fall to the level of your Intrinsic Power. That could be such a long fall that you won’t know any options other than to walk around saying “Sir, may I have more?”

If you work on building Intrinsic Power, you may fall a lot, but you will never fall far. This empowers a life full of experimentation. Perhaps more importantly, when a company is filled with Intrinsic Power (good companies often start like this) it tends to fall up. Even if it runs out of funding before making it big, the process attracts more talent and ultimately the next attempt is more likely to succeed.

When I set out in 2005 to solve the biggest systemic problems in the gaming industry, it never occurred to me that the industry would not want these problems solved. Like my old coach Tommie Smith, I expected that I would be cheered as a hero. Perhaps unfortunately, just like with Tommie, I ended up getting blacklisted for my achievements. Unlike Tommie, I didn’t feel entitled to praise. Clearly I had to try harder.

Back in 2017 I identified that it wasn’t my technology that was the problem per se. It worked, it was proven to work. The problem was that this new tech would usher in a new paradigm. Established companies operated under the old paradigm, and were massively invested in it. That made the new tech the problem. I predicted this issue and wrote about it in my 2012 Moneyballification paper. Not coincidentally, that was the last time I made a big deal about Job’s Stanford Commencement speech, some months after his death.

The new paradigm is imminent. All metrics and indicators show the shift is in progress. I never would have imagined it would have taken 13 or 14 years for the transition, given that companies like to make money and so much money was being lost under the previous paradigm. But companies are run by people, who tend to be self interested.

As I described in Moneyballification (2012), the top people from the previous paradigm are going to scurry around and try to set up the previous failed paradigm wherever they land next. After all, they have the most “experience” even though it’s not useful experience in the next paradigm. The programs that LinkedIn uses may not understand what a paradigm is either. ChatGPT5 seems to get it, and it’s sending High Level People to me.

Meanwhile I’m seeing all these displaced old-paradigm leaders virtue signalling to each other, hoping to land together in a new home someplace with their previous unearned rank. But when new owners look under the hood, all they see is obsolete thoughts and language. You aren’t entitled to what you used to make if someone in China or Eastern Europe can do what you do better, for 15 cents on the dollar. If you are from the West, and you want to keep earning what you got paid in the companies you killed off, you have to bring something to the table that just isn’t available elsewhere to justify that premium.

Extrinsic Power (Low Level People) or Intrinsic Power (High Level People): Which do you think AI will replace faster? The idea that AI is an Extrinsic Power, and that we are spending so much money on it, is worrisome. AI is literally training us to become dependent and Lower Level.

“Leadership” that led to their company, studio, or product failing is of questionable merit. My advice to them would be to go on a long fast and loop Job’s speech. It was his parting Gift to us. Thanks to technology, he can keep talking to us. Our job is to actually Listen. Replace entitlement with Hunger, “Appropriateness” with Foolishness. The creators of the Whole Earth Catalog understood this, and so did Jobs.

Godspeed Steve, and thank you.