The Power Moves is the #1 resource on power on the web.
This website pioneered power dynamics as a novel approach to self-development, social skills, (social) success, and goal-achievements.
And today, it keeps on researching, teaching, and expanding the field of power and social strategies.
ThePowerMoves.com helps you acquire power, status, mates, and success with people and through people.
This website is one of the highest traffic social skills websites in the world and, at the time of writing, the highest-traffic dating website*.
The reason why so many people come visit ThePowerMoves.com is simple: the advice and strategies work.
It’s evidence-based, field-tested, it gets results, and there are thousands of happy students and community members to prove it.
It’s difficult to define The Power Moves though, as it’s is a one-of-a-kind place.
It’s the only major website dedicated to power and power dynamics, advanced social skills, and social strategies across all realms of socialization (dating, friendships, business, family, etc.).
But it’s also about general personal self-development, personal empowerment, flourishing, and becoming a “force for good” in the world.
The Power Moves lies at the intersection between self-empowerment, positive social contribution, social skills, and life strategies.
Research-Based Work
Power dynamics is a fundamental aspect of socialization to achieve status and (social) success.
Probably it’s the most important aspect.
Yet, mainstream self-help, including self-help focused on social skills, either does not deal with it at all, or deals with it inadequately.
Academia has done something more, with lots of research on leadership, endless research on “what makes a good leader” and, more recently, on intersexual dynamics.
There are some important limitations, though.
Research on leadership does not say much about how to acquire the leadership position -climbing social hierarchies-, says little about the dark and manipulative side of leadership, and academic research is also not meant to be a practical guide.
Also, topics such as social strategies, office politics, manipulation, and frame control, are still either under-researched, frowned upon as “dark psychology“, or flat out ignored.
So this website, together with its vibrant community, is also at the forefront of codifying power dynamics as a novel and unique branch of social skills and self-development.
This website leverages published studies, but science is not enough. So it adds two other equally fundamental pillars of knowledge:
3 Pillars of Knowledge
The Power Move shares knowledge and strategies only when supported by the three main tools of human enlightenment:
- Experience-based
- Science-based
- Critically vetted & processed
The Power Moves only publishes articles and strategies where the author is quantitatively and qualitatively master-class in all three pillars.
Why all three?
Because experience alone is not enough, science alone is not enough, and IQ/critical thinking alone might sound cool, but it is also not enough.
All three of them go together here.
Information delivery: simple, practical, & with real-life examples
This website seeks to be eminently practical.
We believe that information is great.
But if you can’t make it easy to access, understand, and apply in real-life… Then it remains at the level of mental masturbation -mental masturbation is fine just as masturbation is fine, but the “real thing” is just better :)-.
So this website presents information in a manner that is easy to understand, digest, internalize and apply.
This is why this website uses so many pictures, charts, and embedded videos: it’s to provide concrete examples for effective, real-life learning.
In the words of Scott Young:
“People only learn abstractions through concrete examples”
Scott Young, author of “Ultralearning“
History
ThePowerMoves.com launched in 2017.
Going from zero to a minimum survival income was bound to be hard work with uncertain results.
But it didn’t feel like a big decision.
It just felt like the most normal thing to do.
Corporate environments weren’t the best fit for Lucio’s temperament.
He loved observing and learning about office politics, social climbing, and games people play.
But he didn’t exactly love being in the middle of them -he was all too aware of the small-pond syndrome, and wanted none of that-.
Lucio’s approach was a scientist’s approach: he loved observing, studying, and field-testing.
But… Without getting too “personal” about it.
He knew that to truly learn, you also need to be part of the game. That, he did. He played the game. But he did not want to become the game.
A few things of the workplace life troubled him.
The last straw might have been a(nother) colleague being bullied and manipulated out of her rights just a few days prior.
But he knew the issue was larger. It wasn’t a single person. It was the spirit of generations of nameless men and women robbed of their rights -and of a real chance in life-.
Sometimes victims of abuse of power, bullying, and greed. But ultimately, Lucio believed, victims of ignorance.
But that’s also the beauty and opportunity of it.
The great news about ignorance, is that you can change it.
Maybe with a hint of hubris, Lucio thought he could help change that.
By the time Lucio decided he had had enough with corporations, he had worked enough on the other areas of socialization and self-empowerment that he could put together several pieces of the life puzzle.
And power dynamics, he thought, was the most crucial -and missing- piece of the self-empowerment puzzle.
But there was little around to properly teach power dynamics.
While learning and studying, Lucio had looked hard for answers that, in hindsight, were all related to power and social power dynamics. But he couldn’t find any resource for that.
And he had to find those answers on his own.
That was a common issue for all the many others who needed that kind of information. Plus, many other people were too “good” to even find those answers on their own.
And those who were naturally equipped with a high “power quotient” or naturally Machiavellian weren’t exactly going to share it -they were using it, and not always for value-adding purposes-.
Putting all those answers together, and delivering them in a simple, easy-to-apply format, was going to improve a lot of people’s lives, he thought.
It was also going to make a lot of people’s lives easier -and a lot of assholes’ lives harder, Lucio enjoying both sides of the coin-.
But who was going to do it?
Lucio felt he could have done it. And he thought he was well-suited for the challenge.
As an introvert and highly sensitive person, Lucio had a natural knack for sensing -“feeling”, as we later called it- the power dynamics that many others were missing.
And it also came in handy that Lucio wasn’t born with great social skills. That meant he had to consciously learn them, engineering social effectiveness one piece at a time. And that made it easier for him to help others along the path that he himself had to walk: he had to walk that exact same path, after all.
Creating a place to help people along that path, helping them to learn power dynamics, was going to allow those people to take a stand in life, and come into their own.
That was going to be his call.
The business opportunity well blended with a certain sense of duty and responsibility. It’s the sense of duty that if you can fix, help, or build something good, you must.
And the business opportunity made that call financially viable.
That’s how ThePowerMoves.com was born.
Robin Hood Spirit
The Power Moves Launch
In May 2017, ThePowerMoves.com launched.
In the beginning, it was a few articles on how to deal with assholes.
Writing articles took a looong time. Lucio started the website with no idea on, well, anything about how to start a website.
Soon from inception, there were lots of courses and book and reviews.
One of the core beliefs behind ThePowerMoves was that time is limited, and we can’t waste time on mediocre or poor information. The Power Moves was going to help people go straight for the highest-quality information.
That also perfectly meshed with Lucio’s personality. Since he was a kid he had the drive and hunger to make sense of the world, while having little patience for BS and un-tested, un-proven speculation.
Now it was time to turn that approach not just to learn from others and review others, but to develop the new field of power dynamics, and the novel approach to social skills and strategies.
Lucio dedicated himself 100% to ThePowerMoves when he finally dropped his last job as a freelance real estate agent in December 2017.
The website grew very quickly.
It was 2.000 users a month in December of 2017.
It more than doubled in January 2018 and more than doubled again in February 2018 to reach 8.000 visitors/month.
The formula of depth and quality of content delivered simply and with real-life examples worked well.
People loved it and reported concrete, significant improvements in their lives.
By the end of 2018, the site had moved past the 100.000 visitors a month.
ThePowerMoves: Featured In
At the time of writing, March 2019, ThePowerMoves.com still hasn’t celebrated its second year in business and Lucio hasn’t focused much on marketing so far.
So he likes to think that it was the quality of the content and information that led him to be quoted as a subject matter expert on people, psychology and social dynamics, on the following websites:
- BBC (on the psychology of travelers)
- Psychology Today (on the psychology of unfaithfulness in committed relationships)
- Glassdoor (on “unconventional ways” to land a job, ie.: social power moves)
- Business Insider (on cheating and dating)
- Forbes (on the dynamics of G+ groups and communities any personal experience with G+)
- Yahoo (on passive aggression)
- Inc (on social engineering)
- NBC (on social skills and effective network-building)
- Market Watch (the psychology of self-talk and controlling one’s own perceptions and emotions)
- ResearchGate (a scientific research publication linking to some of my reviews)
- Countless mentions on Reddit, Quora, forums and universities’ private groups
Plus many more. And still counting.
About The Founder
Note:
We changed this section’s title from “author” to “founder” because today the development is, in large part, community-based.
Lucio Buffalmano is a sociologist and a member of APA (American Psychological Association).
Edit: he didn’t renew the membership in 2022
He obtained his master’s degree from La Sapienza -department of communication and social research- in 2011 with a thesis on the socio-psychological roots of the financial crisis.
To Lucio, the sweetest aspect of personal power is freedom.
The freedom to live life the way he wants, doing what he loves doing, whenever he feels like doing it.
It starts from the morning, waking up with no alarm telling him when he should wake up.
And then researching voraciously, living life to expand his knowledge with real-world experience, and then sharing that wisdom in the most effective way possible.
ThePowerMoves.com is where Lucio shares that condensed knowledge.
And Power University is the website’s course curated to be the quickest, most effective way to turn that knowledge into ready-to-apply social (and life) strategies.
* According to Similarweb, which lists “competitors” as dating websites, and picking the highest-ranking websites in that competitors’ list, TPM comes out #1.
We don’t make much of it though. First of all, we don’t see ourselves as just a dating or relationship website. Plus, these rankings change, sometimes quite randomly and, albeit it does say “something”, I don’t consider the number of visits as the best indicator of quality.