The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations

by Robert Greene

These entries will show you that what matters is not education or money, but your persistence and the intensity of your desire to learn; that failures, mistakes, and conflicts are often the best education of all; and how true creativity and mastery emerge from all this.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. — MARCEL PROUST

At your birth a seed is planted. That seed is your uniqueness. It wants to grow, transform itself, and flower to its full potential. It has a natural, assertive energy to it. Your Life’s Task is to bring that seed to flower, to express your uniqueness through your work.

You have a destiny to fulfill. The stronger you feel and maintain it—as a force, a voice, or in whatever form—the greater your chance for fulfilling this Life’s Task and achieving mastery.

The month of January is all about discovering and developing your Life’s Task, your purpose, w...

Discover Your Calling Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it’s the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated. — JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

You possess a kind of inner force that seeks to guide you toward your Life’s Task—what you are meant to accomplish in the time that you have to live. In childhood this force was clear to you. It directed you toward activities and subjects that fit your natural inclinations, that sparked a curiosity that was deep and primal. In the intervening years, the force tends to fade in and out as you listen more to parents and peers, to the daily anxieties that wear away at you. 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.

Daily Law: Mastery is a process and discovering your calling is the starting point.

Reconnect with Your Childhood Obsession

Daily Law: You were obsessed with it as a child for a reason. Reconnect with it.

The Voice The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within. — ABRAHAM MASLOW

These childhood attractions are hard to put into words. Abraham Maslow called it “impulse voices.” He noticed that children know exactly what they like and dislike from a very early age. It is extremely human and powerful. You had those impulse voices too. You hated this kind of activity and you loved that other one.

Daily Law: Do something today that you used to love doing as a kid. Try to reconnect with your impulse voices.

It Is Already within You Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this something as a signal calling in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am. — JAMES HILLMAN

Daily Law: Ask someone who recalls your childhood what they remember about your interests. Get reacquainted with those early passions.

Daily Law: What’s something you’ve always felt a pull toward? Dive deep into it today.

If we desperately need to find an intimate partner or make friends, we are more likely to push them away. If instead we relax and focus on other things, we are more likely to fall asleep or give a great talk or charm people. The most pleasurable things in life occur as a result of something not directly intended and expected. When we try to manufacture happy moments, they tend to disappoint us. The same goes for the dogged pursuit of money and success.

Many of the most successful, famous, and wealthy individuals do not begin with an obsession with money and status.

Then a few years later he saw the great jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker perform live, and the sounds Parker produced touched Coltrane to the core. Something primal and personal came through Parker’s saxophone, a voice from deep within. Coltrane suddenly saw the means for expressing his uniqueness and giving a voice to his own spiritual longings. He began to practice the instrument with such intensity that within a decade he transformed himself into perhaps the greatest jazz artist of his era.

You must understand the following: In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field and border on the religious. For Coltrane, it was not music but giving voice to powerful emotions.

Daily Law: Are there people whose work affects you in a powerful way? Analyze this and use them as models.

Daily Law: Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That’s your source of power.

Daily Law: Confront one of your limitations—one of the obstructions in your path—today. Break beyond it, climb over it, think your way around it. Don’t run from it. It was created for you.

Ignore your weaknesses and resist the temptation to be more like others. Instead, direct yourself toward the small things you are good at.

Do not dream or make grand plans for the future, but instead concentrate on becoming proficient at these simple and immediate skills. This will bring you confidence and become a base from which you can expand to other pursuits.

Daily Law: When in doubt, focus on the things you know you do well. Expand outward from the center.

A false path in life is generally something we are attracted to for the wrong reasons—money, fame, attention, and so on. If it is attention we need, we often experience a kind of emptiness inside that we are hoping to fill with the false love of public approval. Because the field we choose does not correspond with our deepest inclinations, we rarely find the fulfillment that we crave. Our work suffers for this, and the attention we may have gotten in the beginning starts to fade—a painful process.

twofold: First, to realize as early as possible that you have chosen your career for the wrong reasons, before your confidence takes a hit. And second, to actively rebel against those forces that have pushed you away from your true path. Scoff at the need for attention and approval—they will lead you astray. 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.

Daily Law: If you’re on the false path, get off. Find energy in rebellion.

But without a sense of direction provided to us, we tend to flounder. We don’t know how to fill up and structure our time.

Daily Law: Think back on the moments when you felt deeply and personally connected to an activity. Think about the pleasure it brought you. In such activities are signs of your true purpose.

Stop listening so much to the words and opinions of others, telling you who you are and what you should like and dislike. Judge things and people for yourself. Question what you think and why you feel a certain way. Know yourself thoroughly—your innate tastes and inclinations, the fields that naturally attract you. Work every day on improving those skills that mesh with your unique spirit and purpose.

Not following this course is the real reason you feel depressed at times. Moments of depression are a call to listen again to your inner authority.

Daily Law: Reflect on those moments in life when you were active (followed your own path) and those moments when you were passive (followed what others wanted). Compare the emotions you experienced.

Exercise

To make yourself less dependent on others and so-called experts, you need to expand your repertoire of skills. And you need to feel more confident in your own judgment. Understand: we tend to overestimate other people’s abilities—after all, they’re trying hard to make it look as if they knew what they were doing—and we tend to underestimate our own. You must compensate for this by trusting yourself more and others less.

You must be able to distinguish between small matters that are best left to others and larger issues that require your attention and care.

Daily Law: It is simple: depending on others is misery; depending on yourself is power.

Operating with long-term goals will bring you tremendous clarity and resolve. These goals—a project or business to create, for instance—can be relatively ambitious, enough to bring out the best in you.

The problem, however, is that they will also tend to generate anxiety as you look at all you have to do to reach them from the present vantage point. To manage such anxiety, you must create a ladder of smaller goals along the way, reaching down to the present.

Such objectives are simpler the further down the ladder you go, and you can realize them in relatively short time frames, giving you moments of satisfaction and a sense of progress. Always break tasks into smaller bites. Each day or week you must have microgoals. This will help...

Daily Law: Keep in mind that your calling could be combining several fields that fascinate you. Keep the process open ended; your experience will instruct you as to the way.

Daily Law: What would you work on if no one was looking? If money were no object?

social pressures to conform. These counterforces can be very powerful. You want to fit into a group. Unconsciously, you might feel that what makes you different is embarrassing or painful. Your parents often act as a counterforce as well.

Daily Law: The process of following your Life’s Task all the way to mastery can essentially begin at any point in life. The hidden force within you is always there and ready to be engaged, but only if you can silence the noise from others.

Eventually, you will hit upon a particular field, niche, or opportunity that suits you perfectly. You will recognize it when you find it because it will spark that childlike sense of wonder and excitement; it will feel right. Once found, everything will fall into place. You will learn more quickly and more deeply. Your skill level will reach a point where you will be able to claim your independence from within the group you work for and move out on your own.

Daily Law: Knowing in a deep way who you are, your uniqueness, will make it that much easier to avoid all of life’s other pitfalls.

The Ideal Apprenticeship TRANSFORMING YOURSELF In the stories of the greatest masters, past and present, we can inevitably detect a phase in their lives in which all of their future powers were in development, like the chrysalis of a butterfly. This part of their lives—a largely self-directed apprenticeship that lasts some five to ten years—receives little attention because it does not contain stories of great achievement or discovery. Often in their Apprenticeship Phase, these types are not yet much different from anyone else. Under the surface, however, their minds are transforming in ways we cannot see but contain all of the seeds of their future success.

The first is that when you want to learn something, motivation is absolutely key. At the university, during those two or three years of studying French, the stakes were not high enough for me to learn. The only thing was to get a good grade, but my life or my happiness or my work did not depend on it. There in Paris, it was sink or swim. I had to learn. I had to get a job and meet people. Because of this high motivation factor, my brain absorbed information at a much higher rate. I learned more in one month than in two or three years of university French because I was so excited.

I also learned the importance of the intensity of your focus, of being immersed in something. Practicing every single day for hours upon hours, having the language ringing in my ear, dreaming in French, my attention was intense and focused. And because of that, I learned rapidly.

But the most important lesson of all was that you really learn in this world by doing things, by practice. Not by reading books or taking tutorials. You need to be out on the street, interacting with people, trying things out, learning from ...