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

by Robert Greene

Extend the law of scarcity to your own skills. Make what you are offering the world rare and hard to find, and you instantly increase its value.

If you go back hundreds of years, you could not have failed to see people die in front of you. You might see it on the streets or in your home. Most people had to kill their own food. You saw animals being slaughtered in front of your eyes.

Daily Law: We can use our imagination in this as well, by envisioning the day our death arrives, where we might be, how it might come. We must make this as vivid as possible. It could be tomorrow. The Laws of Human Nature, 18: Meditate on Our Common Mortality—The Law of Death Denial

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. —Marcus Aurelius

Try to look at the world as if we were seeing things for the last time—the people around us, the everyday sights and sounds, the hum of the traffic, the sound of the birds, the view outside our window.

We come to imagine that we always have more time than is the reality. Our minds drift to the future, where all our hopes and wishes will be fulfilled. If we have a plan or a goal, we find it hard to commit to it with a lot of energy. We’ll get to it tomorrow, we tell ourselves.

Daily Law: Imagine that you have been spared from a death sentence, now every day is one you didn’t think you’d get. Live accordingly. The Laws of Human Nature, 18: Meditate on Our Common Mortality—The Law of Death Denial

You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire. —Seneca

Sun Tzu talked of a “death ground”—a place where an army is backed up against some geographical feature like a mountain, a river, or a forest and has no escape route. Without a way to retreat, Sun Tzu argued, an army fights with double or triple the spirit it would have on open terrain, because death is viscerally present.

Daily Law: Put yourself in situations where you have too much at stake to waste time or resources—if you cannot afford to lose, you won’t. Place yourself on “death ground,” where your back is against the wall and you have to fight like hell to get out alive.