How to understand power | Eric Liu | TED-Ed Animation

Eric Liu’s TED-Ed animation on “How to Understand Power” helps us understand power and its sources, which is vital to becoming effective in public life. Power can come from six primary sources: physical force, wealth, state action, social norms, ideas, and numbers. We learn that power is always dynamic, and it flows like water through everyday life. Nonprofit and government policy-making is an effort to freeze and perpetuate a specific flow of power. Power compounds, and the only way to prevent one person from accumulating all power, is by setting rules to distribute power equitably. To be powerful, one must learn to read power and write power (i.e., understand the system and create change). Citizenship is all about practice, consensus-building, and conflict management. Ultimately, the question of power is not just about benefiting oneself but whether or not one wants to benefit everyone.