I’m thinking about powerful personalities. What makes a powerful personality? Some attributes that come to mind are:

• Self driving, i.e there’s something inside that person that pushes them to touch reality and cajole others in various ways.
• Self esteem, i.e they see themselves as worthy actors within the world; they have the capacity to have convictions, pursue those convictions, and not shirk away. The self driving is why they stand-up, the self-esteem is why they stick around and persist.
• Gregarious, loud, performance-oriented, action-oriented. Whatever the opposite of solipsistic is; they are that.
• Willfull. (Perhaps this is a more all-encompasing wrapper we can put over ‘self-driving’. They will social states into existence. Again, social reality is malleable, and the powerful personality knows this and plays with it.
• Colourful. They are quirky and idiosyncratic in ways that leave a mark on one’s memory. They are more than just small-talk. There’s a charisma/gravity.

Why am I thinking about this?

Dwarkesh used the phrase in his review of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B Johnson.

Life is boring without colourful characters and powerful personalities. Nothing gets done without these drivers of social reality, advancers-of-the-plot.

I respect them – and I will work towards better embodying the skills I seek to learn from them.

Adelante.

Krish