I'll use this comment as a mental exercise for the sources of power that I found. Disclaimer: I'm no sources of power expert ;) Just a person who's intrigued.

I'll use this comment as a mental exercise for the sources of power that I found. Disclaimer: I'm no sources of power expert ;) Just a person who's intrigued. - Meditation: nowadays it seems a bit more mainstream, but I still think doing Vipassana or other body-scan related techniques is a source of power. The idea of emotional intelligence felt like a concept, but when I actually felt a tangible improvement, I understood the concept intuitively. - Mental simulation: this is more a generalization of meditation. But if psychology shows you can learn to play piano just by vividly imagining it, it has merit, since you can now learn it anywhere. - Specialized communities: Hacker News is a prime example. It's the first time I learned so much about tech (despite studying CS). Evaluating a community is a matter of its own though. - Interdisciplinarity: this is more domain specific but it works for me in uni. I learned my academic writing thanks to psychology classes and learned LaTeX from CS. Combining the two allowed me to improve my writing in ways I never imagined. A natural consequence is that I get higher grades during interdisciplinary courses (e.g. serious games). - Geo-arbitrage: we all know this one. Living in a cheap country (e.g. somewhere in Asia), while working for an expensive country such as the US. - Good peer to peer teaching: I owe all most of my dating skills to one person who taught me after years of small successes and reading a lot on the topic. Finding the right teacher is the hard part. - Six degrees to separation: I tried it once as an experiment. I didn't reach the person I wanted to reach, I was impatient as well. But I got a lot further than I thought. The hardest thing is that you don't know the full topology. So my best guestimate was to contact the hubs (people that know many people), and Facebook will show you who your hubs are :) While I've never done this type of thinking before, here it goes. My bets for new sources of power: - Machine learning: I think there are enough applications that haven't been explored yet. I mean small projects. For example, machine learning algorithms to write awesome music to MIDI and then you adapt it to your taste as a music producer. - Game development for the Rift: it's not massively adopted yet and game-design approaches need to be reinvented a bit. Anyone who wants to share or give feedback? :)