21/05/2026
“POWER IS TRANSIENT “
A Prepared Mind Reflection
Let me say something that will make the powerful uncomfortable and the powerless oddly relieved:
Power does not belong to you. It is only ever on loan.
I have watched men and women too mistake a title for an identity, a seat at the table for a throne, a season of influence for a permanent address. They decorate themselves with power the way a rented house is furnished with great care, great investment, and no ownership.
And then the lease expires.🤷♀️🤷♀️🤷♀️🤷♀️
I have lived, worked hard enough, and paid close enough attention to know that power is not a possession. It is a passage. It flows through people, not from them. The moment you forget that, the moment you start to become your position rather than occupy it, power has already begun its quiet departure.
This is not pessimism. This is PHYSICS.
Everything that rises, redistributes. Every wave that crests must, by the very laws of nature, recede. The tides do not apologise. Neither does time.
The Roman Senate did not anticipate its own obsolescence. Neither did the British Empire. Neither did the most powerful CEO who was escorted out of the building last Tuesday with a box of personal effects and a severance agreement, or the MD that was relieved of his appointment by mere TV announcement while on an official assignment somewhere.
Power is not malicious in its departure. It is simply indifferent. It does not care how long you served, how hard you fought, or how much you sacrificed. When its work through you is done, it moves on. Like a river, it will find its next channel.
So what does a WOMAN or MAN with a prepared mind do with this truth?
She or He does not run from it. They do not bargain with it. They do not spend their energy pretending it isn’t true.
THEY build something that outlasts it.
Because here is what I have come to know, not from textbooks but from the texture of my own life, the antidote to transient power is lasting impact. Titles fade. Positions are vacated. But what you built, who you developed, what you changed, what you stood for that calcifies into legacy.
And legacy is the only form of power that compounds after you leave the room.
I have seen powerful people become fragile the moment power shifted. No more phone calls, no more seasonal gifts and suddenly everywhere becomes quiet .
They had confused their influence with their identity for so long that when the influence went, they had no self to return to. That is not power. That is dependency wearing power’s costume.
A Woman who truly commands a room does not need the room to survive. She was someone before the room existed. She will be someone after it empties. MY IDEOLOGY.
That is the difference between power borrowed and power built.
Do not be seduced by the applause of a season, it is TEMPORAL.
Do not restructure your soul around a position that will one day be advertised with your job description, minus your name.🙏🙏
Use the power while you have it. Use it ruthlessly well. Open doors. Break ceilings not for yourself alone, but for the WOMAN behind you who doesn’t yet know the ceiling exists. Build institutions. Demand equity. Make decisions that will outlive your tenure.
And then, this is the part that requires the most courage, HOLD IT LOOSELY.
The tightest grip is often the sign of the most fear. The leader who cannot let go is the leader who stopped leading and started clinging. There is a difference, and everyone in the room can feel it, even when no one says it.
Power that serves is power that echoes.
Power that hoards, corrodes.
The most powerful WOMEN I know and I mean powerful in the way that actually matters, the kind that reshapes rooms and rewrites futures, they all share one quiet quality, they are not afraid of what comes after. They are not building empires for the ego. They are building something that works without them.
That is not weakness. That is the highest form of strength.
So the next time you feel power slipping through a restructuring, a political shift, a changing season, a transition you did not ask for do not panic.
Pause.
Ask yourself, What did I do with it while I had it?
That answer is the only record that will survive the audit of time.
“POWER IS TRANSIENT “
Your impact does not have to be.
Engr. Egan Adat Okon-Effiong, Ph.D
Prepared Mind Advocate