Authority is in their hands. Power is in yours.

Everyone and their mama in this market (and by market I basically mean LinkedIn) wants to "build their authority". I stopped using the word a while ago, because it had stopped meaning anything. Then I realised the word was the least of my problems.

I'm in the business of power, and though we tend to put authority and power into the same box, they're two very different things.

Power has no intentions of its own, but it's hella motivated.

It heads towards wherever it can make things happen, or alter the state of something, then spreads what it's done far and wide. It loves a stable place to inhabit and work from. It doesn't know the difference between good and evil, and it definitely isn't here to be ethical or moral. It's looking for a place to hang out and get down to business, whether that's shaking or heating things up. Then, once the job's done, it chills out for a while before it works on spreading the great results it's achieved.

If you can give power a reinforced and stable place to work from, in the shape of a consolidated position (what you can do, who for and how you prove it, all neatly wrapped up), then it will stay with you, allowing you to use it to achieve big things. If that position becomes wobbly, power packs its bags and heads to the next stable place it can find, whether that place is good or bad. Power doesn't just evaporate if you lose it. It goes off in search of somewhere stable.

For us simple humans, power is the capacity to act and get stuff done.

It lets you shape what happens next. It comes from a source you control, and what it gets used for is up to whoever's holding it. If that's you, you get to be the force through which that power operates, and you also get to decide how it's done.

Authority, on the other hand, is something somebody else gives you. It's permission to make a decision, or to have people pay attention when you speak, and everyone involved has to agree to grant you that authority; otherwise, nothing you say or do means a damn thang. Sometimes it comes from above you, as an official title or a position in an organisation, an industry or a government. Sometimes it comes from the people around you deciding you're the one to listen to because you obviously know what you're talking about. Either way, it's theirs to give and theirs to take back.

When authority arrives from the top down, you wait your turn.

It doesn't matter how incredible or brilliant you are; you gotta wait, and you could be waiting forever. And if somebody decides to take away your title, or your standing, or your position, they can, because they gave it to you, which means everything that authority gave you goes with it. Also, even though I started this Note by saying authority had lost its meaning in my opinion, it can still be useful (it gives your power an official workplace with a top-floor corner office and a travel allowance), but it's on loan, and it can be called in without notice.

Power works very differently.

Firstly, it's not linear like authority; it flows in every direction. You might not be recognised as an authority at all and still have more power than people way higher up the food chain, especially if you've got rare or specialist expertise, or real influence with a particular group. (Think about the person in your team or industry who knows where the bodies are buried. They don't have a fancy title, but everyone goes to them anyway.)

All this to say that with power, you don't need to wait your turn. You get to decide and act based on what you're capable of. And when you think about it that way, we've just blown the doors off of the old boys' club (or whatever modern-day equivalent there is now). No more queuing or holding on until you think it might be your turn to speak. If you've got expertise nobody around you has, especially if it's expertise with the potential to create significant change, you can amass the power you need and, so long as you're diligent and hold on to it long enough to make that thing happen, you never need to worry that somebody's going to take your title away tomorrow.

You can still lose that power. Of course you can. If you get sloppy, or let your consolidated position slip, then the power that's fuelling your objective is outta here, and it drains fast. But power is yours to lose. It's not someone else's to remove.

Hence:

Authority is in their hands. Power is in yours.

Keep it breezy, friends.

(P.S. Yep, there'll be merch available as soon as I figure out how to get the above quote onto a trucker's cap.)