The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations

by Robert Greene

This can be the source of your unhappiness—your lack of connection to who you are and what makes you unique. The first move toward mastery is always inward—learning who you really are and reconnecting with that innate force. Knowing it with clarity, you will find your way to the proper career path and everything else will fall into place. It is never too late to start this process.

Feel some anger and resentment at the parental forces that want to foist upon you an alien vocation. It is a healthy part of your development to follow a path independent of your parents and to establish your own identity. Let your sense of rebellion fill you with energy and purpose.

Moments of depression are a call to listen again to your inner authority.

Some 2,600 years ago the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, “Become who you are by learning who you are.” What he meant is the following: You are born with a particular makeup and tendencies that mark you as a piece of fate. It is who you are to the core. Some people never become who they are; they stop trusting in themselves; they conform to the tastes of others, and they end up wearing a mask that hides their true nature.

We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our school masters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us. — BARON DE MONTESQUIEU

There is much to be known, life is short, and life is not life without knowledge. — BALTASAR GRACIÁN

Daily Law: Acquiring a set of skills is the key to navigating a turbulent work world. The ability to later combine these skills is the best path to mastery.

Such is the fate (to a less violent degree, one hopes) of those who do not make others dependent on them. Sooner or later someone comes along who can do the job as well as they can—someone younger, fresher, less expensive, less threatening. Necessity rules the world. People rarely act unless compelled to. If you create no need for yourself, then you will be done away with at the first opportunity.

Your whole life, therefore, must be treated as a kind of apprenticeship to which you continually apply your learning skills. The month of March will teach you how to activate your skills and internalize the knowledge necessary for a life of mastery.

It doesn’t mean that if you spend years studying something, creative powers will inevitably come to you. You must have a certain intensity to your focus, as well as a love for the work itself that animates the final product. And it also depends on years of prior labor in the Apprenticeship Phase, which I had gone through in writing four other books.

The great masters, including contemporary ones, all manage to retain the craftsman spirit. What motivates them is not money, fame, or a high position, but making the perfect work of art, designing the best building, discovering some new scientific law, mastering their craft. This helps them to not get too caught up in the ups and downs of their career. It is the work that matters. And in the end, these masters end up making

To think more flexibly entails a risk—we could fail and be ridiculed. We prefer to live with familiar ideas and habits of thinking, but we pay a steep price for this: our minds go dead from the lack of challenge and novelty; we reach a limit in our field and lose control over our fate because we become replaceable.

Whenever you find your thoughts revolving around a particular subject or idea—an obsession, a resentment—force them past it. Distract yourself with something else. Like a child, find something new to be absorbed by, something worthy of concentrated attention. Do not waste time on things you cannot change or influence. Just keep moving.

Unknown to ourselves, the mind slowly narrows and tightens as complacency creeps into the soul, and although we may have achieved public acclaim for our past work, we stifle our own creativity and never get it back. Fight this downhill tendency as much as you can by upholding the value of active wonder. Constantly remind yourself of how little you truly know, and of how mysterious the world remains.

Daily Law: Take the long view. By being patient and following the process, individual expression will flow out of you naturally.

Daily Law: Malfunctions are a means of education. They are trying to tell you something. You must listen.

In general, try approaching a problem or idea with a much more open mind. Let your study of the details guide your thinking and shape your theories. Think of everything in nature, or in the world, as a kind of hologram—the smallest part reflecting something essential about the whole. Immersing yourself in details will combat the generalizing tendencies of the brain and bring you closer to reality.

Daily Law: To rise to the level of mastery requires intense dedication. You have to really want it. What would make you have such commitment and dedication?

In following your inclinations and moving toward mastery, you make a great contribution to society, enriching it with discoveries and insights, and making the most of the diversity in nature and among human society. It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.

As the great Renaissance diplomat and courtier Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, “Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.”

The court imagined itself the pinnacle of refinement, but underneath its glittering surface a cauldron of dark emotions—greed, envy, lust, hatred—boiled and simmered. Our world today similarly imagines itself the pinnacle of fairness, yet the same ugly emotions still stir within us, as they have forever. The game is the same. The

Understand: The character you seem to have been born with is not necessarily who you are; beyond the characteristics you have inherited, your parents, your friends, and your peers have helped to shape your personality. The Promethean task of the powerful is to take control of the process, to stop allowing others that ability to limit and mold them.

Daily Law: Remake yourself into a character of power. Working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks. It makes you, in essence, an artist—an artist creating yourself.

Daily Law: Displaying anger and emotion are signs of weakness; you cannot control yourself, so how can you control anything?

Reputation therefore is a treasure to be carefully collected and hoarded. Especially when you are first establishing it, you must protect it strictly, anticipating all attacks on it. Once it is solid, do not let yourself get angry or defensive at the slanderous comments of your enemies—that reveals insecurity, not confidence in your reputation. Take the high road instead, and never appear desperate in your self-defense.

No matter how hard people try to pull you in, never let your interest in their affairs and petty squabbles go beyond the surface. Give them gifts, listen with a sympathetic look, even occasionally play the charmer—but inwardly keep both the friendly kings and the perfidious tyrants at arm’s length. By refusing to commit and thus maintaining your autonomy, you retain the initiative: your moves stay matters of your own choosing, not defensive reactions to the push-and-pull of those around you.

But few are born bold. You must practice and develop your boldness. You will often find uses for it. The best place to begin is often the delicate world of negotiation, particularly those discussions in which you are asked to set your own price. How often we put ourselves down by asking for too little. Understand: If boldness is not natural, neither is timidity. It is an acquired habit, picked up out of a desire to avoid conflict. If timidity has taken hold of you, then root it out.

Daily Law: Your actions must seem natural and executed with ease. When you act, act as if you could do much more. Avoid the temptation of revealing how hard you work—it only raises questions.

Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance. Scrambling your patterns on a day-to-day basis will cause a stir around you and stimulate interest. People will talk about you, ascribe motives and explanations that have nothing to do with the truth, but that keep you constantly in their minds.

Daily Law: Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. Envy creates silent enemies. Defuse it by occasionally downplaying your virtues.

Daily Law: Come to appreciate these encounters as a chance to hone your skills of self-mastery. Outsmarting just one of these types will give you a great deal of confidence that you can handle the worst in human nature.

They tend to see others as extensions of themselves, what is known as self-objects. People exist as instruments for attention and validation. Their desire is to control them like they control their own arm or leg. In a relationship, they will slowly make the partner cut off contact with friends—there must be no competition for attention.

Early on in life some people sense a softness, vulnerability, or insecurity that might prove embarrassing or uncomfortable. They unconsciously develop the opposite trait, a resilience or toughness that lies on the outside like a protective shell. The other scenario is that a person has a quality that they feel might be antisocial—for instance, too much ambition or an inclination to be selfish. They develop the opposite quality, something very prosocial. In both cases, over the years they hone and perfect this public image. The underlying weakness or antisocial trait is a key component of their Shadow—something denied and repressed.