You can allow yourself to become corrupt in order to succeed financially, and try to hide that corruption from your family... but A) children, with a decade to study you, are lie detection beasts and they will see your true self, and B) the cognitive dissonance you need to frame your abusive behavior as “normal business” will interfere with your ability to learn new things that conflict with your internal narrative. Those blind spots make adjacent things harder to learn, leading to spreading blind spots, which eventually become a generalized learning disability.
See for example the Theranos board. Living as a CEO/power broker type can lead to debilitating dementia in middle age.
This is one of the reasons we so rarely see middle managers drop back down into individual contributor roles. Early dementia literally inhibits the clear thinking required for production work. In a leadership role they can rely on the management hierarchy for executive function, but lose the ability to do it alone.
Fantastic! Congratulations! You just found a way to articulate the underlying concept of Perception Management and Reality Distortion Fields.
Bravo!
Even if you don't have academic sources, that greatly crystallized many anecdotal observations I've collected!
EDIT: What? I'm not even being sarcastic or tongue in cheek. I've seen the aftermath of what the poster has described many times in my career in terms of cognitive shift occurring in certain roles.
I'm not being judgemental even, one way or another, but I've run into a phenomena similar when trying to get something across to organizational leaders, to the point of having to conduct meetings behind closed doors and refusing to end the meeting until the point can be successfully communicated from all involved.
As to whether it is a learning disability or not, no comment, but there is definitely an effect on capability to reconcile organizational reality with physical reality.
If you haven't run into it, I suppose I must just be either the luckiest or unluckiest fellow on the planet. I'm still not sure whether or not there is an unwritten acknowledgement or tacit agreement to not call out or discuss the phenomena, because it never seems to make anyone comfortable. Whereas I find the idea liberating, because it means there is at least a reason for communication difficulties that is possible to overcome, even if it isn't terribly fun for everyone involved.
It's one thing to disagree, or to not have access to certain information to reason on.
It's another completely to know, and knowingly deceive, feign ignorance, or go out of your way to avoid having to come to terms with something.
And yes, I understand my view does not make me super popular in some circles, where fast and loose with the truth is more the norm.
