I pulled Kang Joon-man’s Power Changes the Human Brain off the shelf for the first time in a while. Early in the book, there is a piece about the collective desire in Korean society for ipsin-yangmyeong, the old idiom that means to establish oneself and make one’s name known. After reading it, I started thinking that this phrase, which had always felt natural to me, contains a rather naked structure of desire. To rise to a higher position, secure a wider field of recognition, and eventually have a meaningful name within the world one belongs to. In a society where ipsin-yangmyeong becomes a universal goal, knowing is no longer an act of satisfying pure intellectual curiosity. It becomes an attempt to understand how power works, with the acquisition of power as its final destination.
While reading, I found myself asking whether I too had unconsciously come to hold ipsin-yangmyeong as a goal. It was not an easy question to answer.
Relatively recently, I have found myself thinking often about how to gain influence inside an organization. Why are some opinions accepted while others disperse into the air? Why does the same statement carry different weight depending on who says it? Why does a good proposal not always lead to a good result? In the past, I treated these questions as somewhat secondary. I thought it was enough to write good code, present reasonable evidence, and quietly do the work that needed to be done.
But at some point I began to think that this alone was not enough. Organizations do not move by logic alone. Trust between people, roles, timing, interests, and implicit hierarchy all operate together. In other words, an organization is not a closed system but an open world. There are too many variables, and causality is often blurry.
After a brief period of questioning and thinking, I was able to arrive at one answer. What I pursue is not so much power as influence. Rather than designing tactics inside a power game, I wanted to fill myself with better things and have those things properly recognized. But then the next question made the answer blurry again. How different are power and influence, really?
At first, I thought the two could be clearly distinguished. Influence is the power for my opinion to be accepted by others, while power is the power to hold the final right of decision. The former is closer to persuasion, the latter to decision. Influence requires the other person’s consent, while power is the ability to skip that process of consent.
Written this way, I seem closer to someone who wants influence rather than power. What interests me is not the act of climbing to a higher position itself, but the process by which an opinion gains force inside an organization. Why do some problems remain neglected even though everyone knows about them? Why are some proposals rejected no matter how reasonable they are? Conversely, why do some people’s words pass easily even without sufficient evidence? I was curious about those scenes.
But it is also difficult to say that the two are completely separate. I began to think that as influence grows, it may naturally come closer to power. At first, one goes through a long process of persuasion to make one’s opinion understood. But once one becomes the decision-maker, much of that process can be skipped. The more tiring repeated persuasion becomes, the more one may begin to desire the efficiency of decision-making authority.
Perhaps power-oriented people and influence-oriented people are not different species, but people standing at different points on the same line.
In my own case, I still do not know where on that line I stand. For now, power itself does not hold much appeal for me. I see first the fatigue and risk that gather around it. Persuading someone is tiring enough, but mediating someone’s interests, standing at the center of conflict, and fully bearing the responsibility of decision all seem even more exhausting. Power may glitter from a distance, but up close it is probably accompanied by a considerable amount of noise and dust.
Even so, I cannot say that I have no desire to be recognized. I want my opinions to be treated as meaningful within the organization I belong to, and I want the problems I consider important to be treated as important. This is certainly a desire. I just do not yet know whether that desire points toward a higher position, toward a more accurate definition of the problem, or simply toward the confirmation that I am a useful person. I also cannot say with certainty where the purpose of this desire lies. In fact, there may not be only one purpose. People usually do not move by pure justification alone, nor by pure self-interest alone. I think most desires spread somewhere in the middle, in a blurry form.
For now, I do not want to judge too quickly what type of person I am, or which type is good or bad. The result of such a judgment can change endlessly depending on perspective and situation. For now, I only want to take one step back and observe what shape my mind has, and how that shape continues to change.