Status and Control Are Two Different Things

What exactly is status? It’s the attitude others hold toward you when you deeply engage in and collaborate on games that matter.

Investors don’t care who runs management. They care about only two things: the speed of value appreciation and asset security. With those two secured, it makes no difference whether employees acknowledge you or not. From an investor’s perspective—closer to the essence of a commodity society—as long as the money is yours to command, and as long as it’s growing rapidly, does it matter if no one in the entire company even knows your name?

If you treat “face” as life’s purpose, and other people’s attitudes toward you as life’s purpose, then sorry—not that the world isn’t worth it, but the thing you’re chasing itself is pure nonsense.

Most people’s real problem is that they’ve never built their own system. They’ve been wandering through systems built by others, constantly worrying about whether they appear respectable or not within those other people’s frameworks.