Other times it’s like you’ve turned into an aging heavyweight throwing punches that just don’t hurt anymore.

1. Take over at a household name with a legacy of technological wizardry. Miss the boat on a make-or-break market shift. Drive Wall Street daffy with earnings warnings and scattershot recovery schemes. Watch your market value plummet 70% over three dreadful years. You’re going to take a powder, all right: Ask former Lucent CEO Rich McGinn.
2. After finally making it to the top, you call your first executive team meeting. You scan the room and see not only anxious looks, but also claw marks – a sickening collection of ugly claw marks. These people have long memories, so don’t plan on getting their backing anytime soon.
3. Put on slippers and a bathrobe. Fetch The New York Times off your front lawn. Freeze in your tracks as you scan the front-page story about you - yes, you -and realize the paper has talked to every enemy you’ve ever earned and a half-dozen you never dreamed existed. Turn crimson from embarrassment and rage as you realize these people are painting you as a pathological liar on all matters personal and professional - family background, academic accomplishments, military record, business achievements. Fibs, fibs and more fibs, chronicled for the world in excruciating detail.
   This image does not build job security when you’re CEO of an IBM subsidiary, as ex-Lotus boss Jeff Papows knows.

4. Develop a reputation as a visionary ... and a taste for Internet chat rooms. Strike up an exchange with who you think is a 13-year-old girl. Arrange to meet "her" at an out-of-state location, where you learn that your online friend is actually a grown-up FBI agent. Get busted, fired, tried, convicted and sentenced to home detention before you can say "write once, run anywhere." Former Infoseek executive Patrick Naughton now writes software for law enforcement as part of his probation.
5. Just one time. You may be a teetotaler 364 days of the year, but make a drunken fool of yourself once at a company Christmas party and you might as well polish up the ol’ resume. You’ll have all the power of near-beer from that day on. Oh, your co-workers will tell you it was really no big deal. ... They’ll be lying.
6. Be an assertive No. 2 guy at a company where the No. 1 guy is a megalomaniac who collects yachts and yes men. Former Oracle President Ray Lane will tell you what this does for one’s power. Someone’s got to go, and it won’t be the guy with the bigger boat.
7. Rile’em in Redmond. You’ve built a "wunderkind" rep in a rocket ship of a company on the merits of a revolutionary technology - oh, let’s call it a Web browser. Microsoft develops a knockoff and starts giving it away for free. Only time stands between you and a major power outage. Marc Andreessen, and those who fondly remember Netscape can bear witness.
8. Fail to pay attention to the little things: Leave your résumé on the copy machine; tell a dirty joke within earshot of the CEO’s prudish secretary; let the boss catch you doodling during his budget presentation; or make the local paper for shoving a Little League ump. … You don’t have to slam onto a rocky shoal to lose power.
9. Ride Novell and NetWare all the way to the bottom of the deep blue corporate sea. You really can’t help yourself. You grew up on NetWare and launched your executive career when it was the be-all and end-all network operating system. You’d rather renounce your citizenship than switch to Windows, and you don’t have the stomach for Linux. You’re going down. The only question is when.
10. Decide that space aliens have visited our planet and that the day is fast approaching when the known laws of physics will no longer preclude us from visiting theirs. Post your thoughts in a manifesto on a personal Web site called "The Quest for the Truth."

Go ahead and enlighten the masses, if you’re like former USWeb CEO Joe Firmage and have already made your millions. If not, you might want to avoid this particular power faux pas.