The entrepreneurial life is one of challenge, work, dedication, perseverance, exhilaration, agony, accomplishment, failure, sacrifice, control, powerlessness... but ultimately, extraordinary satisfaction.
Twelve-step programs require people to accept their powerlessness and turn their lives over to God or another higher power. Many adolescents question religion, and in general teenagers aren't going to turn their lives over to anyone.
Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness.
We are becoming able to see the pursuit of external power for what it is and the futility of trying to escape the pain of powerlessness by changing the world. When we look inward, not outward, we can dismantle the parts of our personalities that have controlled us for so long - such as anger, jealousy, vindictiveness, superiority, inferiority.
The pain of powerlessness is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the earth school, and everyone shares it.
Anything that we do to make ourselves feel worthy and safe is a flight from the pain of powerlessness. Every pursuit of external power - every attempt to change the world or a person in order to make yourself feel valuable and safe - is a distraction from the pain of powerlessness.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?
To be a minister means above all to become powerless, or in more precise terms, to speak with our powerlessness to the condition of powerlessness which is so keenly felt but so seldom expressed by the people of our age.
There's simply anger over the accountability that Yelp brings and also this feeling of powerlessness because so much power is now being put in the hands of the consumer. But the important thing that gets lost with some of these business owners who are very upset with us is it's the whole picture that counts.
What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body.
