When talking about self-improvement or personal development, people often focus on specific goals they want to achieve. Little attention is paid to the fundamentals. For me, one of these fundamentals is the concept of ‘sources of individual power’. In this article, I argue why you should guide your life with these sources. I also outline some of their most direct practical applications, which you can implement today.

Social power vs individual power

The concept of power usually refers to the control that an individual or group has over other people’s lives. For example, politicians are powerful because they take decisions that affect the lives of millions of people; this is social power.

In contrast, individual power refers to the control that individuals have over their own lives. In this sense, you are powerful when you pursue your own life projects instead of someone else’s [1], and you don’t depend on the compassion of others or welfare benefits to survive.

Of course, this is a simplification. Individual power is not dichotomous but gradual. Your individual power can increase or decrease depending on several factors, especially your actions and decisions. Social power is also gradual. Moreover, it has an important relationship with individual power. That is, the less individual power you have, the more vulnerable you are to someone else’s social power.

The motivation behind personal development is a sense of achievement and autonomy. This makes it easy to understand why increasing your individual power is fundamental for your self-improvement.

Let’s look at the three sources of individual power.

Sources of Individual Power

As Mario Luna put forth in his book Psicología del Éxito, your individual power heavily depends on three key resources: your health, money, and time. These are your sources of individual power[2].

Book in which Mario Luna develops the concept of ‘sources of individual power’.

If you have optimal health, you have the physical and psychological resources to pursue your own projects. In contrast, if your health severely deteriorates, you will depend on the help of others to do basic tasks. Therefore, taking care of your health maximizes your independence meaning that optimal health makes you individually powerful.

Similar things can be said about money. People with abundant financial resources have a higher degree of control over their lives than those who are not financially stable. Not having money makes you vulnerable to someone else’s social power. For example, a lack of money will lead you to take a job that isn’t congruent with your values. Or worse, you might need to depend on charity or welfare benefits to survive.

Time is also a source of individual power. Managing your time effectively means that you invest it in activities that are congruent with your goals. Therefore, excellent time-management skills increase your individual power. In contrast, spending your time with activities that don’t fit well with your long-term goals is an opportunity lost. That is, the time you spend on this type of activity is a wasted opportunity to pursue your dreams.

Next, I’ll discuss each of the sources of individual power in more detail.

Optimal Health

Your own health is the most important source of individual power. If your health severely deteriorates, your control over your own life is drastically reduced. What’s more, your other sources of individual power (your time and your money) are going to suffer as well. You would spend most of your time recovering and lack the physical capacity to conduct economic activities.

In contrast, enjoying optimal health is the dream. Optimal health means that you have the levels of energy, hormones, micronutrients, physical strength, mobility, and psychological resilience that maximize your chances of success in pursuing your projects and living with independence for longer.

It’s evident that your genetic makeup influences your overall health. However, it’s also true that your own decisions are an essential determinant of your health. Arguably, personal decisions are the leading cause of death in affluent societies.

To put it clearly, every time you smoke or eat cake, you vote for sickness and death. In contrast, every time you cook healthy dishes or go for a walk, you vote for health and life.

Every time you smoke, you vote for getting faster to your death. 

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Many people believe that eating healthy food is boring and that regularly exercising is tiring and painful. But on the contrary, is being in a hospital bed a lot of fun? Or is being so fat that you cannot properly move is a very pleasurable and relaxing experience?

The truth is that a healthy lifestyle takes as much effort as an unhealthy one. You are just procrastinating the effort. Or worse, you are making other people take extra care of you in the future when you become severely sick.

Similarly, a healthy lifestyle is more pleasurable than an unhealthy one. If exercising and eating healthy food becomes part of your daily habits and identity, your brain will adapt. Then, you will find enormous pleasure in going for a run or eating cauliflower, for example.

Basic tips for enjoying optimal health

1. Eat non-processed food. Abandoning a diet based on processed foods is one of the best things you can do for your overall health. This means to ditch the cakes, sandwiches, and pizzas bought at the supermarket. Instead, cook your own food using single-ingredient products. Examples include boiled rice with mushrooms and omelette or boiled potatoes with broccoli and beef. Make sure your diet is varied and includes plenty of vegetables.

2. Exercise regularly. It’s not a secret that a sedentary lifestyle is not good for your health. Adopting the habit of regularly exercising is one of the best ways to protect your health. It does not matter the type of exercise you do. It could be dancing, walking, playing basketball, cycling, or other physical activity that gets you moving. The important thing is that you pick something you enjoy and practice it regularly. In this way, being a sportsperson will become part of your identity. Later, you could try something else if it becomes more relevant to your goals.

Family with baby jogging in a park

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3. Do regular health checks. Regular health checks are an excellent way to prevent getting seriously sick. This is because detecting a health problem early on increases the chances of being able to fix it. It is also useful to assess whether a change in your lifestyle has beneficial or detrimental effects on your health. Let’s say that you want to try a new diet because you think it is healthier. In this case, you could take a blood test before your new diet and after a few months. A change in some parameters (e.g., testosterone) will help you assess whether your new diet is effectively superior. Do not overdo it, though. Getting obsessed with the numbers could be detrimental to your mental health.

Financial Independence

It’s commonly considered that caring about money is for shallow people. Nothing is further from the truth. Money represents the time, energy, and intelligence you invest in economic activities. In addition, the amount of money you get in a market economy largely represents the social value of the products you create or the services you provide [3].

Money is a source of individual power because having money makes you in charge of your life. Good financial habits are strongly valuable to conserve and increase your individual power. For example, having an emergency fund protects you from adverse economic events such as becoming unemployed. It also protects you against needing to be rescued by the State, charities, relatives, or friends. In turn, sound investments passively increase your financial resources over the long term. They also prevent your money from being eaten into your bank account by inflation.

Man flying with dollar notes as a metaphor for financial independence

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Furthermore, money is a source of individual power because you can exchange it for health and time. For example, you could eat high-quality food or do regular blood tests if you have money to pay for it. These two purchases will help you to acquire and maintain good health. Similarly, money will help you free some of your time to invest in more meaningful pursuits. For example, you could hire someone to do some economic tasks for you. Or you could buy a machine or piece of software to automatize some of these tasks.

Money will also help you pursue some of your projects more optimally and with more chances of success. For example, hiring an expert will surely help you learn a skill better and faster.

The ideal regarding money is to become financially independent. That is, having enough assets to maintain your lifestyle for the rest of your life without the need of working. Meanwhile, you will benefit from reconceptualizing your net worth as degrees of financial freedom. This means switching monetary units for the amount of time that you can maintain your current lifestyle without working.

Basic tips to increase your degree of financial independence

1. Your expenses should be lower than your income. That is, you are saving money instead of living month by month. The more you are saving, the better.

2. Don’t get trapped in debt. Debts are a serious threat to your financial independence. They involve regular costs for substantially long periods of time, and you pay interest on them. So, as a rule, it is best is to avoid debts. The only exception is if you are sure that you can pay the debt with the product you are buying. For example, if you buy a house, you can pay the mortgage by renting out some rooms.

Debts are a serious threat to your individual power.

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3. Consider economic gains beyond a salary. It is perfectly possible to become financially independent when you receive a salary for your work. However, the salary would need to be high. You would also need to be quite austere and be very good at managing your savings. Therefore, acquiring additional funds (e.g., through a side hustle) is often a must.

Time well spent

Time is the limited resource of which your life is made up of. When an hour passes, it is gone forever. There is no way to recover it. Therefore, spending your time well is crucial to be individually powerful. But what does it mean to spend your time well?

You spend your time well when you invest it in activities that are important to you. However, this is not enough. The results of those critical activities should be susceptible to your influence too.

Imagine that you are planning to move to France. In this scenario, spending time learning French would be time extremely well spent. Why? Because it is important to your goal of moving to France. Furthermore, your results in learning French depend on your actions and decisions. You would obtain different results depending on the method you use or the time you spend studying.

Learning French as an example of time well spent

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In contrast, spending your time watching a series on Netflix as mere entertainment is time badly spent. For most people, watching a series is not an important activity [4]. Moreover, it is an activity outside of your scope of influence. The plot is not going to change no matter what you do. And the commercial success of the series hardly depends on you watch it or not.

Importantly, time management is the key to the other two sources of individual power: health and money. If you waste most of your time, how will you cook healthy dishes or exercise regularly? If you do not wisely choose the activities you engage in, how will you boost your finances?

Basic tips to spend your time well

1.- Have a daily routine. A daily routine is the best way to spend most of your time well. Of course, you need to fill this routine with activities that are important and under your influence. In the beginning, it might take considerable effort to stick to the routine. However, once it has become a habit, you will find it easy and pleasurable. Do not forget to include time to rest and relax. This is the only way to make any routine sustainable over the long run.

2.- Eliminate distractions. It is not only necessary to allocate time to activities that are both important and under your influence. To spend your time well, you need to focus on these tasks. When engaging in these activities, eliminating distractions is key to paying attention to what really matters. I have written a complete guide on how to overcome Internet Distractions which you might find useful.

3. Transform passive leisure into active leisure. Most people spend a significant proportion of their leisure time on passive hobbies. That is, they merely consume other people’s information. They watch TV, read the news, browse social media, etc., without creating anything meaningful on their own. An easy way to improve the quality of your leisure is to replace passive hobbies with active ones. For example, you could replace watching series for attending evening classes or reading the news for writing poetry.

Or, you could simply add an active component to your passive hobbies. For example, instead of watching series in your own language, you watch series on a language you are learning. Or instead of just simply reading the news, you comment on them on your YouTube channel. This trick will often transform time-wasting hobbies into something more meaningful and under your influence.

A final word

In this post, I have defined individual power as the control that an individual has over their own life. I have also defended that increasing your individual power is the key to self-improvement. I believe that conceptualizing your health, money, and time as sources of individual power has an important benefit. It gives prominence to these three key areas of your life. In doing so, you are setting a solid foundation to excel in other areas, such as your relationships.

Ángel V. Jiménez

Note: This article seeks to popularize the ideas of Mario Luna regarding the concept of ‘sources of individual power’. Many of my arguments are almost translated from his book Psicología del Éxito, which is not available in English. However, I have also added many ideas on my own, with which Mario Luna does not need to agree. Readers who can understand Spanish would benefit enormously from reading Mario Luna’s book.

Notes

[1] I don’t want to give you the impression that the concept of individual power is contrary to voluntary cooperation. Nothing is further from the truth. You can have a high degree of control over your life by cooperating with other people in the same direction. This is the case of a couple buying a house together or raising children. Exchanging goods in the market can also give you a high degree of control over your life.

[2] Originally the concept was simply labelled “sources of power”. I have added the word “individual” to distinguish between individual power and social power. Mario Luna adopted the concept of “sources of power” from Mark Joyner.

[3] Governmental intervention often distorts the alignment between the social value of someone’s economic activities and their income.

[4]. It could be if you are a film critic, or you watch a series to learn a new language.