Have you Ever Run Into Those Little Tyrants? The little guys who think they can step on everyone’s toes?
Did you realize that the only people who seem to be power-hungry are those who don’t have any. Once you attain power, it becomes a burden. This statement comes from many of those minds that rose to power, thinking that happiness would follow, and were highly disappointed.
There are some people who derive pleasure from ordering others around, but they’re just insecure people who have no real personal power: power over their own lives. People who run their own lives don’t need to run others’.
Ironically, though, as people rise in worldly power, they often lose power over their own lives, because they’ve got so many people to please and obligations to meet. When this happens, reasonable people can become Little Hitlers. Sometimes they stay like that until they find a way to again manage their own lives.
Frequently, when people lose power over their own lives, they begin to tyrannize themselves with perfectionism. Perfectionism, like workaholism, is one of those vices that masquerades as a virtue – it’s fear disguised as strength. There are people everyday who wake up and congratulate themselves on their perfectionism even when it was killing them – by contributing to their cardiovascular disease. Successful people, in particular, often swallow the myth that it’s their perfectionism that has put them on top, rather than their brains and passion. One reason they feed themselves this myth is because perfectionism is so difficult that they need to exaggerate its benefits in order to be motivated to maintain it.
The popular clinical psychology perspective on perfectionism is that it’s initiated by demanding parents. However, many disagree with this conventional, blame-the-parents explanation. Their view is that perfectionism is just another mask for the fear of not being enough. It’s for insecure people who think that only the most perfect among us will prevail.
Similar to perfectionism, and just as self-destructive, is obsession with control. People with money often think it should give them control over other people and their own lives, but it doesn’t. In fact, control is a myth. Control connotes absolute power, and in this world, there’s no such thing. You’ll see in life that there are countless people who waste their lives struggling for control, and the more they demand it, the further they fall from true power. True power comes from management, not control. Management means realizing that you can’t control everybody and everything, and dealing with the world on its own terms – giving a little, taking a little. It works.