Mastery (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene Book 1)

by Robert Greene

If you look at these events through the lens of the Naïve Perspective, you will focus only on what other people have done to you—the mistreatments you endured from them, the slights or injuries you felt. Instead, you must turn this around and begin with yourself—how you saw in others qualities they did not possess, or how you ignored signs of a dark side to their nature. In doing this, you will be able to clearly see the discrepancy between your illusions about who they are and the reality, and the role you played in creating this discrepancy. If you look closely enough, you can often perceive in your relationships with bosses or superiors reenactments of the childhood family dynamic—the idealizing or demonizing that has become habitual. By making yourself aware of the distorting process of the Naïve Perspective, you will naturally grow less comfortable with it. You will realize that you are operating in the dark, blind to people’s motivations and intentions, vulnerable to the same mistakes and patterns that occurred in the past. You will feel your lack of real connection to other people. The desire will naturally arise from within to change this dynamic—to start looking outward instead of focusing only on your own feelings, to observe before you react. This new clarity about your perspective should be accompanied by an adjustment of your attitude. You must avoid the temptation to become cynical in your approach as an overreaction to your prior naïveté.