To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that’s real power.

The line condenses a core Randian theme: achievement is not a matter of wish, tradition, or brute force, but of rational cognition directed toward a chosen purpose. “Thought” names the active use of reason—conceptual clarity, planning, and understanding causal reality—while “know what you are doing” stresses competence and conscious agency rather than drifting or obeying. “Real power” is thus framed as intellectual and practical mastery: the capacity to act effectively because one grasps facts and principles. In Rand’s moral vocabulary, this elevates productive work and independent judgment as virtues, implying that power divorced from understanding (coercion, impulse, or secondhand belief) is ultimately counterfeit and self-defeating.