6 ideas
Job performance has only a weak relationship to tenure, promotion, and pay, because bosses cannot observe most work directly and judge it through impressions. The person who controls your advancement cares about their own standing, so making your superior look and feel good matters more than excelling at tasks they barely see.
People want to believe that organizations are fair and that good people get what they deserve, so they discount evidence that ruthless or self-promoting individuals succeed. That belief keeps them from studying and copying what actually works, and it lets them rest on performance while others build influence.
Power comes from controlling scarce resources such as budgets, jobs, information, or access, even if those resources start small. Picking a unit or role where you can build something from nothing, and where you are central to networks and information flows, gives you leverage that later turns into formal authority.
Observers infer power from behavior: taking up space, interrupting, showing anger rather than sadness, and speaking with certainty. Because people judge power from these displays, projecting confidence helps create the actual influence it signals, in a self-fulfilling way.
Being memorable matters more than being liked, since people favor what is familiar and prominent over what is merely competent. Asking for help, favors, and resources works more often than people expect, because asking flatters the person asked and creates obligations. Willingness to break norms and put yourself forward separates the powerful from the overlooked.
Once gained, power brings constant scrutiny, loss of privacy, and time demands, and it tends to produce overconfidence and less attention to others. Many powerful people fall because they stop watching their backs and trust too readily. The skills that win power do not keep it unless you stay alert to how having it changes your own behavior.