What Rome’s Philosopher King Told Me To Tell You About Absolute Power
by Kalika Yap
A founder I know told me she couldn’t remember the last time an employee had said no to her.
And she said it happily. She’d meant it as good news. Things are running smoothly, everyone’s aligned, no friction anywhere.
I’ve been in the trenches for 27 years, and I’ve learned to hear that sentence differently.
Because I’ve said it myself. And both times I said it, I was about to make a mistake nobody around me felt able to stop.
You Have More Power Than You Let Yourself Notice
I know “absolute power” sounds like a phrase for emperors and dictators, and that you’re a woman running a business with a payroll and a leaking roof.
Stay with me anyway.
In your company, you decide who comes in and who goes. What gets built. What gets paid, and when. Who gets the difficult client. What everyone spends Tuesday doing.
Whether a person’s rent is comfortable next month.
In a company of ten, you are the weather.
Nobody handed you that. You built it, mostly by working harder than was reasonable for longer than was fair.
But it’s real, and it’s sitting in your hands right now.
And it’s doing something to you that nobody warns you about.
What the Research Actually Found
Dacher Keltner is a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and he runs the Greater Good Science Center. He spent years studying what power does to the people who hold it.
His finding is more unsettling than the usual story about power making people cruel.
He found that the first casualty of power is our attention to other people. Power wears down the path to empathy, meaning the ability to step out of your own view and into someone else’s.
Sit with the shape of that for a moment.
The empathy that earned you the power is the very thing the power then takes away.
You listened well, so people trusted you. People trusted you, so you grew.
You grew, and now there’s less room to listen, and fewer people willing to give you anything worth listening to.
Power doesn’t usually arrive as a moral failure. It arrives as a slow loss of eyesight.
The Notebook He Kept For Himself
Which brings me to the one person in history who held about as much power as a human being can hold, and who left behind his private notes on trying to stay whole inside it.
Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome from 161 to 180 AD. Historians have called him the philosopher king, and the ancient writer Cassius Dio simply called him the philosopher.
He kept a notebook that was never meant for us. No audience, no argument, nobody being persuaded.
In Book 6, he wrote himself this:
“Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar, that thou art not dyed with this dye.”
He was the Caesar when he wrote it.
He wasn’t warning himself about a life he might take up. He was warning himself about the one already in his hands.
But the part I find lovelier is where he chose to begin the whole thing.
Book One Is a Thank You Note
Book 1 of Meditations is seventeen entries long, and every one of them is a debt.
Gregory Hays titled it “Debts and Lessons” in his translation, and the name fits. Marcus goes through his life naming the people who made him and what each one gave.
His grandfather, for character and self control.
His mother, for her reverence and her generosity, and for living simply though she didn’t have to.
His first teacher, likely a household slave, who taught him not to take sides at the races and to put up with discomfort without complaining.
Rusticus, who taught him to work on his character. Apollonius, who taught him to stay steady no matter what arrived.
He even thanks the man who handed him his own copy of Epictetus.
The most powerful man alive opened his private journal by naming everyone he owed.
And here’s the part that stopped me when I found it.
Keltner’s eleventh principle, drawn from the research, is that lasting power comes from expressing gratitude.
A Roman emperor and a Berkeley laboratory, arriving at the same practice, eighteen centuries apart.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think gratitude is the thing that keeps your attention pointed outward, at the actual people in front of you, which is exactly what power quietly turns off.
Your Step-by-Step Guide: Staying Awake Inside Your Own Power
Step 1: Date Your Last No
Think back. When did someone who works for you last tell you, out loud, that you were wrong?
Give it a real date if you can.
If it was recent, take a breath. That’s a healthier company than most.
If you have to reach back months, or you can’t find one at all, that isn’t proof you’ve been right. It’s information about the room you’ve built.
And be soft with yourself here. Nobody sets out to build a room like that. It gathers on its own, one small deference at a time.
Step 2: Write Your Book One
This is the practice, and it’s the one I’d most like you to try.
Sit down and write your own version of Marcus’s first book. The people you owe, named, with what each one gave you.
Not a vague warm feeling about your team. Specific people, specific gifts.
The first client who paid full price without flinching. The employee who stayed through the bad year. The friend who told you the truth about your pricing. Your mother, maybe, or whoever taught you to work.
Write until you run out. Most women find it takes far longer than they expected, and that the finding is the point.
You are not self-made. None of us are.
And remembering that with real specificity is what keeps your eyes pointed at people rather than at yourself.
Step 3: Collect the Tuition
Friction is information. Power removes friction. So you have to put some back by hand.
Choose one person and ask them directly. “I need you to tell me when you think I’m wrong. Not softened. I’m asking on purpose, and I won’t hold it against you.”
A senior person on your team. A founder who’s in it too. An old friend from before the business. Someone on your board who doesn’t need anything from you.
Then when they do it, thank them, even while it stings.
How you receive it the first time decides whether there’s ever a second.
Step 4: Give Some of It Away
Keltner’s research suggests power lasts when it’s shared rather than held.
So find one decision you’ve been making alone that doesn’t need you. Hand it over completely, including the part where they might do it differently than you would.
The budget for one project. The hiring call for one role. What the team does with one afternoon a month.
You’ll feel the pull to take it back. Let it go anyway.
Watch what someone does when they’re trusted rather than directed.
Step 5: Four Minutes Before Sleep
Seneca described his own version of this. When the lamp had been carried away and his wife, who had long known the habit, had gone quiet, he’d go back over the whole day and hide nothing from himself.
Three questions:
What bad habit have you cured today?
What fault have you resisted?
In what respect are you better?
That’s the whole practice. In bed, in your head, or in a notebook nearby.
One request. This is a looking, not a trial. You’re gathering information, never a verdict on your worth.
The night it becomes a place where you take yourself apart, it’s stopped helping, and you’ll set it down within a week anyway.
Be as kind to yourself in the dark as you’d be to a friend telling you the same things.
If You’d Like Someone In That Chair
Some of what I offer the women I coach is simply being the person in the room who isn’t managing them.
No agenda. No career resting on agreeing with you. Just someone who’s been building for 27 years and will tell you kindly what she sees.
No pitch. Just a real conversation about what you’re building.
Keep building. Keep shining. Keep showing up.
DOWNLOADABLE WORKSHEET
Your Book One
Inspired by Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Your Book One is a 30-minute reflection on the people who shaped you and the leader you’re becoming. You’ll name what you owe, examine who still tells you the truth, and identify practical ways to lead with more gratitude, openness, and trust.
