The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations

by Robert Greene

The fifth chapter is about the creative process itself. And the idea is that once you do enough work on a project, enough preparation, and you’ve had all of these months of experience delving into the subject, you often reach a state of creativity where ideas come to you out of nowhere. And suddenly this was happening to me. After all my research and all the preparation, by the time I had reached chapter five, ideas for that chapter were coming to me while I was taking a shower, while I was taking a walk. I was even dreaming about the book and ideas were coming to me in my sleep, confirming what I was writing about. And this made me very surprised and very inspired. And then I came to chapter six, which is about mastery itself—the final chapter. The idea is that even further along in the process, you start to have a very intuitive feel for the subject. It’s almost as if the book or the project is living inside of you. You can compare it to a chess master where the chessboard feels like it is inside his brain, inside his body, and he can feel what comes next. I felt that the book was living inside of me and that I had what I call a fingertip feel for what I should be writing. There was this sort of fast-paced, intuitive series of ideas that would come to me out of nowhere. And this was an incredible experience, an incredible feeling—a feeling of great power. I’m not claiming that I’m special, that I’m some sort of genius, or particularly gifted or talented. In fact, the who...