Hey fellas,
On the smaller scale, once you're high enough status, you won't be challenged by people who know you well or realize the potential social repercussions of doing so. So, to an extent, you will see a subsiding of DIRECT challenges as you become socially more established in higher default social positions.
You WILL tend to get people testing the waters, but once you're socially savvy enough to be high status most of them you brush aside without even realizing they were trying to challenge you. You just ignore them, and they get brushed away. Or, you ignore them and let the girl handle them for you. In that regard, it's rather easy.
However, as you rise further in status, the lower status people frequently begin to resent you, even if you're a "benevolent king." Imagine the good-natured jock at school who dates all the pretty girls and is always friendly with everyone, but still has low status individuals whisper mean-spirited things about him behind his back because they want to dismiss his success as a fluke and elevate themselves as the ones who "should" be successful. Or think of a guy like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, who no matter how good a job he does with his company, there are countless pundits speculating and speaking ill of each man, trying to elevate their own status by condemning someone else.
The challenges usually don't come from other high status individuals once you're high enough status. Instead, its lots of little insignificant people nipping at your heels, trying to bring you death by a thousand cuts, instead of some guy trying to tool you out at a bar somewhere. It's why celebrities come to hate the paparazzi and delve into drugs; it's to escape all the little people digging away at them to dismiss their success, call them incompetents who somehow got lucky, and elevate themselves at the others' expenses by proclaiming that THEY are the REAL talents / experts / ones who "should" be successful / listened to / celebrated / honored / loved.
The frustrating thing about this is that you can't "beat" it, like you can with a normal social challenge. In a normal social challenge, some guy tries to challenge you for your girl, you just ignore him, and he leaves looking and feeling like a fool. But when you're high enough status to attract hundreds or thousands of millions of random dissenters (e.g., imagine a president or a prime minister, and all the detractors HE attracts), you can't address them individually... it's impossible.
I have a theory that the dictators who crush dissent don't usually do it out of an effort to stay in power, in fact; I think they do it because they simply can't handle the sheer crush of nameless, faceless challengers, and instead just want to destroy anyone who dares raise a voice or a fist against them.
The only thing you can try to do at this stage is simply tune this out, not expose yourself to channels of dissent except through filters (e.g., people who are monitoring discontent for you and telling you the core messages that keep cropping up), and trying to address the core messages where possible to take away the teeth of challengers. If you let yourself be exposed to too much of the constant negativity, defeatism, and vitriol of low level challengers when you're high-enough status, it eventually wears you down and breaks you.
Anyway, that's what I meant
Chase
