In life, the most expensive tuition fee is often not money, but ignorance of how power and rules operate. A person who doesn't understand how power works tends to become passive at critical moments: they can only accept rules set by others during interest distribution, they cannot find their own lane in life direction, they are unclear about who their abilities serve in teams and organizations, they fail to detect risks in advance, and they are more likely to have others rewrite their fate through narrative control.

The essence of power is making others obey, and obedience inevitably brings about changes in will. It can be realized through coercion, or through vision and temptation that makes people willingly follow, or even through fear and despair that forces people to make choices against their conscience. Money, violence, and discourse are merely resources of power; true power comes from controlling human weaknesses—fear of death, greed, and ignorance.

However, power itself possesses expansionist and exclusionary characteristics. It continuously seeks relevance, tends to expand boundaries and exclude sharing, and even manipulates those who possess it. Many grassroots conflicts and arrogant behaviors in reality are often not the result of individual depravity, but rather the natural expansion of minor power in the absence of constraints.

For ordinary people, the most important response to power is not evasion, but maintaining clarity and self-reflection: remain vigilant against forces that make you "willingly" obey, learn to weaken others' manipulation of your will through knowledge and independent thinking; meanwhile, when you possess even a little power, you must realize it is a dangerous tool. Only by maintaining reverence and restraint toward power—neither being oppressed by it nor corrupted by it—can people guard their boundaries and dignity in complex social competition.