There is this thing about poet-philosophers. The poet tends to exaggeration to make his point. The philosopher delves into various facets of human nature. When you combine the two, you get things like, 'There is no worse enemy to success than impatience" and, later, "The worst enemy to success is anger" and so on. If you take it all literally, you get into debates about which characteristic is actually the worst. What you need to do, instead, is just understand that impatience is bad, anger is bad and leave it at that...unless you are making a living out of infructuous debates.
So, Tiru says this and you know how to take it...
Pallaar PagaikoLalir paththaduththa theemaiththe nallaar thodarkai vidal - Tirukkural
To lose the friendship of the wise is ten times as bad as gaining the enmity of many - Loose Translation
According to Tiru (and, possibly, almost anyone else), as a leader, you need to surround yourself with people who wish you well and have the ability to guide you properly in times of trouble. The difficulty is to get such a set of adviser whom YOU trust - those with goodwill may lack ability and/or unconscious or conscious biases; those with ability AND goodwill may still have an ax to grind and so on. So, it IS very tough to get a good set of advisers around you.
Enemies are easily gained, in fact. I mean, you could gain a deadly enemy simply because you, unknowingly, smiled at HIS enemy; with a careless tweet; with a Like on Instagram...About the one thing that is sure is that most people seem to be walking around actively looking for a reason to get triggered. So, if you wake up in the morning with 'x' enemies and went back to sleep without any increase in that number, you must have been in a dark room silently meditating...and, even then, it is very likely that you added ten enemies because you did NOT acknowledge their posts on social media. So, many enemies are a given. You need not do ANYTHING to get them.
So, yes, if anything Tiru understates the issue. To lose those rare good advisers is a thousand times worse than gaining many enmities. Not just ten times. But, then, you have to excuse him. He did not live in the times of Social media!
