The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature

by Robert Greene

Some 2,600 years ago the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, “Become who you are by learning who you are.”

In fact, it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt. You will fail to question the element of luck, making you think that you have the golden touch. When you do inevitably fail, it will confuse and demoralize you past the point of learning.

Learning never exhausts the mind. —Leonardo da Vinci

When I’m asked how I define mastery or what phrase guides me in my own life or in writing a book, I say, “It’s getting to the inside.” I’m always trying to move to the inside of things. On the outside, things look a certain way—kind of dead, because you’re just seeing the appearances. When you get to the inside, you see the heart beating, you understand it, you get the reality. When you start learning to play chess or the piano, for instance, you’re on the outside. You just see the exterior, visual, surfaces of things. And you’re learning the rules or the basics. And it’s very slow and tedious. You don’t really have an understanding. It’s all kind of confusing, a blur. Eventually, though, if you stick with it, you worm your way to the inside of it. And you’re feeling the thing come alive.

cultivating Negative Capability will be the single most important factor in your success as a creative thinker. The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces. Daily Law: Develop the habit of suspending the need to judge everything that crosses your path. Consider and even momentarily entertain viewpoints opposite to your own, seeing how they feel. Do anything to break up your normal train of thinking and your sense that you already know the truth.

Act before it becomes impossible to disentangle one strand of misery from another, or to see how the whole thing started.

The greatest danger you face is your general assumption that you really understand people and that you can quickly judge them. Instead, you must begin with the assumption that you are ignorant and that you have natural biases that will make you judge people incorrectly. Each person you meet is like an undiscovered country, with a very particular psychological chemistry that you will carefully explore.

To separate yourself from the mechanical and reactive types, you need to get rid of a common misconception: the essence of strategy is not to carry out a brilliant plan that proceeds in steps; it is to put yourself in situations where you have more options than the enemy does.

Never take it for granted that your past successes will continue in the future. Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different, and you cannot assume that what worked before will work today.

Return to the harder or softer sides of your character that you have lost or repressed.

feelings are nothing final or original; behind feelings there stand judgments and evaluations which we inherit in the form of . . . inclinations, aversions. The inspiration born of a feeling is the grandchild of a judgment—and often of a false judgment!—and in any event not a child of your own!