The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations

by Robert Greene

I had learned the importance of going at it every day, being disciplined and excited at the same time. I had learned the value of intense focus, and that the more books I wrote the easier it would become. I applied the same thing to doing interviews. You learn by doing, over and over, practicing and practicing. And from this, you slowly get a pleasure, a joy from the process itself and from mastering something. And that joy and that pleasure stays with you for your whole life. It is embedded in your brain.

If you want to write a book, write it. If you want to be a musician, make music. If you want to start a business, go ahead and start it. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes or failing; you learn best through failures. Find someone who is a master at music or at business and attach yourself to them. Get an education at their feet, doing whatever tasks they assign you. Immerse yourself in the world or the industry that you wish to master. This is better than all the books or courses you could read or take in the world—learning by doing.

Submit to Reality 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

Daily Law: Learning how to learn is the most important skill to acquire.

Ryan put in the work to know what would actually help me. He saved me time. Then, I had a problem with my internet presence. Ryan said he could improve it. He helped me create my website. He had real internet skills. For me, as someone who was in his late forties at the time, I didn’t know the internet that well. He took a problem off my hands. And because Ryan knew he wanted to be a writer, I could help him hone his researching and writing skills. I taught him how a book was made soup to nuts. I taught him the notecard method I created and mastered, which he used to eventually become a highly successful writer himself.

The mentor-apprentice relationship is a very mutually beneficial relationship. When you are in the inferior position and you are looking for a favor from someone who is powerful, you have to get outside of yourself and think of their needs. Obviously, mentors have a lot to give you. But, more important, you have to have something to give them. Daily Law: Find a master to apprentice under, but instead of thinking about how much they can give you, think about how you can help them with their work.

You must never disdain an apprenticeship with no pay. In fact, it is often the height of wisdom to find the perfect mentor and offer your services as an assistant for free. Happy to exploit your cheap and eager spirit, such mentors will often divulge more than the usual trade secrets. In the end, by valuing learning above all else, you will set the stage for your creative expansion, and the money will soon come to you.

Daily Law: Get one good piece of advice or guidance today from a master of your profession or of life.

Your main goal in the Apprenticeship Phase must be to learn and accumulate as many real-life skills as possible, particularly in areas that personally excite and stimulate you.

Life is short, and your time for learning and creativity is limited. Without any guidance, you can waste valuable years trying to gain knowledge and practice from various sources. Instead, you must follow the example set by Masters throughout the ages and find the proper mentor. The mentor-protégé relationship is the most efficient and productive form of learning. The right mentors know where to focus your attention and how to challenge you. Their knowledge and experience become yours.

Daily Law: What to look for: Whose work inspires you? Whose style excites you? Who do you want to be like in ten years?

When you practice and develop any skill you transform yourself in the process. You reveal to yourself new capabilities that were previously latent, that are exposed as you progress. You develop emotionally. Your sense of pleasure becomes redefined. What offers immediate pleasure comes to seem like a distraction, an empty entertainment to help pass the time. Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings. You develop patience.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased. — RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The more we speak and practice, the more fluent we become. Once you take this far enough, you enter a cycle of accelerated returns in which the practice becomes easier and more interesting, leading to the ability to practice for longer hours, which increases your skill level, which in turn makes practice even more interesting. Reaching this cycle is the goal you must set for yourself.

When you enter a new environment, your task is to learn and absorb as much as possible. For that purpose you must try to revert to a childlike feeling of inferiority—the feeling that others know much more than you and that you are dependent upon them to learn and safely navigate your apprenticeship. You drop all of your preconceptions about an environment or field, any lingering feelings of smugness. You have no fears. You interact with people and participate in the culture as deeply as possible. You are full of curiosity.

Daily Law: Master the details and the rest will fall into place.

There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.

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.

In any case, to apprentice as an entrepreneur you must act on your ideas as early as possible, exposing them to the public, a part of you even hoping tha...

Daily Law: Act boldly on one of your ideas today.

Daily Law: Time is the critical variable. Take one thing off your plate today to make more time for your Life’s Task.

Daily Law: Strive to be the only one who can do what you do and make the fate of those who hire you so entwined with yours that they cannot possibly get rid of you.

Daily Law: Make a list of the people in your life who live with purpose. Prioritize spending more time with them.

As a child, Napoleon Bonaparte found himself drawn to games of strategy and to books that presented examples of leadership in action. Entering a military academy, he was not focused on a military career and fitting into the system. Instead, he had an obsessive need to learn as much as he could about all aspects of the military arts. He read voraciously. The extent of his knowledge impressed his superiors. At a very early age he was given an unusual amount of responsibility.

At the endpoint of his development, he came to possess a remarkable feel for battle and the overall shape of a campaign. In his case, this became known as his infamous coup d’oeil, his ability to assess a situation with a glance of his eye. This made his lieutenants and rivals imagine that he possessed mystical powers.

Daily Law: Find the deepest pleasure in absorbing knowledge and information. Feel like you never have enough.

Reading books and materials that go beyond what is required is always a good starting point. Being exposed to ideas in the wide world, you will tend to develop a hunger for more and more knowledge;

Mingle with as many different types of people as possible. Those circles will slowly widen.

Daily Law: Try the thing you don’t think you’re quite ready for.

You will probably have several mentors in your life, like stepping-stones along the way to mastery. At each phase of life you must find the appropriate teachers, getting what you want out of them, moving on, and feeling no shame for this. It is the path your own mentor probably took and it is the way of the world.

You want to learn as many skills as possible, following the direction that circumstances lead you to, but only if they are related to your deepest interests.

Like a hacker, you value the process of self-discovery. You avoid the trap of following one set career path. You are not sure where this will all lead, but you are taking full advantage of the openness of information, all of the knowledge about skills now at our disposal.

You see what kind of work suits you and what you want to avoid at all cost. You move by trial and error. You are not wandering about because you are afraid of commitment, but because you are expanding your skill base and your possibilities. At a certain point, when you are ready to settle on something, ideas and opportunities will inevitably present themselves to you. When that happens, all of the skills you have accumulated will pro...

Daily Law: In this new age, those who follow a rigid, singular path in their youth often find themselves in a career dead end in their forties or overwhelmed with boredom. The wide-ranging apprenticeship will yield the opposite—expanding possibilities.

When I began writing my fifth book, Mastery, several years ago, something very strange and exciting occurred. This was a particularly difficult and complicated book to write. First of all, I had done my usual research: reading several hundred books, taking thousands of note cards on them, structuring them into various chapters, etc.

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...

Learning never exhausts the mind. — LEONARDO DA VINCI

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.

Steve Jobs personified this craftsman ethic. He inherited it from his father, a man who loved to build things with his hands, and the love of perfection, for making something just right, is an attitude he transferred to the design of products for Apple. That’s the master’s goal: to make things well and to feel pride in it.

Imagine yourself years in the future looking back at the work you have done. From that future vantage point, the extra months and years you devoted to the process will not seem painful or laborious at all. Time is your greatest ally.

We all possess an inborn creative force that wants to become active. This is the gift of our Original Mind, which reveals such potential. The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas. It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent. To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it the source of our misery.

What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude. We become too comfortable with the knowledge we have gained. We grow afraid of entertaining new ideas and the effort that this requires. 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.

Daily Law: Do what the mind wants to do—explore, entertain, and embrace new ideas.

When a machine malfunctions, you do not take it personally or grow despondent. It is in fact a blessing in disguise. Such malfunctions generally show you inherent flaws and means of improvement. You simply keep tinkering until you get it right. The same should apply to an entrepreneurial venture. Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education. They tell you about your own inadequacies. It is hard to find out such things from people, as they are often political with their praise and criticisms. Your failures also permit you to see the flaws of your ideas, which are only revealed in the execution of them. You learn what your audience really wants, the discrepancy between your ideas and how they affect the public.

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

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?

When you start something new, a large number of neurons in the frontal cortex (the higher, more conscious command area of the brain) are recruited and become active, helping you in the learning process.

The frontal cortex even expands in size in this initial phase, as we focus hard on the task. But once something is repeated often enough, it becomes hardwired and automatic, and the neural pathways for this skill are delegated to other parts of the brain, farther down the cortex. Those neurons in the frontal cortex that we needed in the initial stages are now freed up to help in learning something else, and the area goes back to its normal size.

If we were to take a look at the frontal cortex of those who have mastered something through repetition, it would be remarkably still and inactive as they performed the skill. All of their brain activity is occurring in areas that are lower down and require much less conscious control.

Daily Law: The more skills you learn, the richer the landscape of the brain. It’s up to you.