Powerful people have fans and others around them who know and think about their lives. If you are wealthy, powerful, or famous, you will constantly be getting all kinds of social invitations and other requests for contact and communication from complete strangers. This is not a problem in and of itself. But it becomes a problem when many of these strangers get deeply offended and even enraged if you turn them down or do not respond. (After all, they know so much about you, how could you not want to know more about them?). This anger can turn to scorn, and hatred.
Now you are powerful, and power—as much as it attracts admiration—also attracts haters who want to upend your power. Those haters can say incredibly nasty, vile, hurtful things about you, things they would rarely say, in a tone they would never use, when speaking to a real-live human being, even one they hated, face-to-face. In the age of social media, these negative opinions, insults, taints, slights get shared and RTed to infinity at the speed of fiber optics—all the more complexity.
You have now reached the level of serving as a social object, and as such, others develop all kinds of opinions about you—many of them very negative—which they bond with others over discussing and sharing publicly. Or people can simply lie, make stuff up, quote you out of context, spread rumor and innuendo and gossip about you.
Entire alternate realities of fantasy, fiction, fancy, legend and gossip will be spun around your persona in the media, much of which will bear little relationship to reality. Yet it all takes on to the level of absolute truth in minds of fans and detractors. Any attempt on your part to defend against false accusations or to correct misconceptions will be seen as further confirmation of the truth of the rumors, dismissed as a defense mechanism, and mocked further.
Welcome to the house of mirrors. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
No wonder many celebrities melt down, break down, and crack up. Few of us could handle this level of pressure. The larger your fame, wealth, and success, the more moving parts there are in your empire. The more people who depend on you. (And, when there’s more people involved, there’s more potential for drama, infighting, power plays, office politics, freeloaders, sycophants, sponges and backstabbers.)
Being lord over your own little empire of resources and attention can certainly be glorious. But it’s far from care-free. It’s one of the most complex, full-on, high-pressure, emotionally-fraught endeavors a human could undertake. Navigating this level of complexity requires almost super-human levels of management and leadership.
Author of the Source Article: Michael Ellsberg