Power Is Incremental In Steps We are after power. All of us, all of the time. Spinoza calls virtue nothing other than power, the capacity of a thing to persist and to act from its own nature, and once you see it that way you stop pretending that anyone is after something else. You are after power. So am I. The only question worth asking is how it is acquired. It is acquired in steps. That sentence is the whole of it, and it is also the part nobody wants to hear. You cannot leap to the finish line. You cannot arrive at the end having done none of the middle. Some of the ground you can cover on your own, with no help from anyone, and people do. Then they get stuck. They get stuck because there are parts of this that cannot be reached without training, and training almost always arrives from outside you, in the form of a mentor or some other external input that you did not and could not generate yourself. Two Machines Here is the mechanism that makes the stuck part predictable. Your ego will tell you that you are perfect and that you can do this alone. It will tell you that you will do it in two weeks. It says this with complete confidence, and the confidence is the tell, because the ego is not an action machine. The ego is an influence machine. It does not do anything. It has never done anything. What it does is talk to you, and what it says is designed to move you. The ego is built to build you up and then crush you down. That is not a flaw in it. That is its function. So the sequence runs like this. The ego tells you that you can do it alone, in two weeks. You believe it, because it sounds like you. You try. Two weeks pass. You have not done it, and in your own words you have failed. Now the ego gets its second helping. Having had its piece of cake by inflating you, it has another piece by punishing you. It puts you down with exactly the same confidence it used to lift you. You listened to it both times. That is the loop. This is not particular to the work I do with people. It runs through everything. The ego inflates you until you believe you are Superman, or Superwoman if you prefer, and when you fail to be Superman it collapses you. It can do this because it was never yours in the first place. It was built from external factors. Your parents had an early input into the structure you now call yourself. So did your teachers. So did your peers. And siblings, which I nearly forgot, and should not have, because siblings have a very strong influence on how you come to perceive yourself, often stronger than the adults, because they were in the room longer. None of those people were trying to build you an accurate instrument. They were each responding to their own conditions. What they left behind is a structure that tells you what you can do without any reference to what you can actually do. That is the thing that says two weeks. That is the thing that says no training required. The Body Knows Better Set the ego’s account beside the body’s account and the difference is immediate. The body has a few innate abilities and has to learn everything else. It even had to learn to walk. Watch a walk slowly and you find that every step is a fall. You propel your weight forward, which destabilizes you, and then you put a foot out to catch yourself, and to keep moving you keep doing this, over and over, risk and recovery, risk and recovery. It is an action. The body does it. The ego has no part in it whatsoever. Nobody was ever talked into walking. Nobody walked in two weeks because a confident voice told them they could. The same holds for anything the body acquires. If you want strong muscles you build them in stages. You lift a weight you can lift, then a slightly heavier one, and the tissue responds to the load it has actually been given, not to the load you have been told you can handle. You cannot suddenly be on a stage with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It cannot happen. There is no version of the ego’s promise that makes it happen, and every gym in the world is full of people finding that out on the first day. What I am describing is exactly the same. Exactly the same. The increase comes in stages, and at each stage there is more power than there was at the one before. Not the promise of power. The thing itself, measurable in what you can now do that you previously could not. Why the Time Is Not Wasted So it takes a long time. People hear that as bad news, and they hear it as bad news because the ego has already told them a shorter story, and the long version now sounds like a punishment or an obstacle. It is neither. The length of time is not for nothing, and it is not a hindrance. It is the load being applied. It is the muscle responding to what it has actually been asked to carry. Each stage is the condition for the next one, in the same way that the fall is the condition for the step. If you removed the time you would not arrive faster. You would remove the mechanism by which anything increases at all. I should be careful with the word build, because the ego has already borrowed it. Nothing is being built that was not there. What you are is already there, as the drive to persist that Spinoza calls conatus. What increases is how much of it gets expressed, how much of it gets through the structure your parents and teachers and siblings left in place. The weightlifting is not manufacturing a new person. It is removing, one load at a time, the difference between what you can do and what you were told you could do. The ego will keep talking through all of this. It has nothing else to do. It will offer you the two-week version again next month, and it will sound just as certain. The body will be doing the other thing, the slow thing, the thing that works. One of them has lifted something. The other has only ever described it. This is a public episode. 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