The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations

by Robert Greene

In your quest for power, you will constantly find yourself in the position of asking for help from those more powerful than you.

What they do not realize is that even the most powerful person is locked inside needs of his own, and that if you make no appeal to his self-interest, he merely sees you as desperate or, at best, a waste of time.

Daily Law: When asking for anything, uncover something in your request that will benefit the person you are asking, and emphasize it out of all proportion. They will respond enthusiastically when they see something to be gained for themselves.

Use Your Enemies Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure. — TACITUS

Kissinger arranged a Saturday-morning meeting with three of the alleged kidnappers. Explaining to his guests that he would have most American soldiers out of Vietnam by mid-1972, he completely charmed them. They gave him some “Kidnap Kissinger” buttons and one of them remained a friend of his for years, visiting him on several occasions. This was not just a one-time ploy: Kissinger made a policy of working with those who disagreed with him. Colleagues commented that he seemed to get along better with his enemies than with his friends.

Whenever you can, bury the hatchet with an enemy, and make a point of putting him in your service.

Daily Law: As Lincoln said, you destroy an enemy when you make a friend of him.

Better to Be Attacked Than Ignored Burning more brightly than those around you is a skill that no one is born with. You have to learn to attract attention, “as surely as the lode-stone attracts iron.”

At the start of your career, you must attach your name and reputation to a quality, an image, that sets you apart from other people. This image can be something like a characteristic style of dress, or a personality quirk that amuses people and gets talked about.

Once the image is established, you have an appearance, a place in the sky for your star. It is a common mistake to imagine that this peculiar appearance of yours should not be controversial, that to be attacked is somehow bad. Nothing could be further from the truth. To avoid being a flash in the pan, and having your notoriety eclipsed by another, you must not di...

Society craves larger-than-life figures, people who stand above the general mediocrity. Never be afraid, then, of the qualities that set you apart and draw attention to you. Court controversy, even scandal. It is better to be attacked, even slandered, than ignored. All professions are ruled ...

Daily Law: Make no distinction between kinds of attention—notoriety of any sort will bring you power. Better to be slandered and attacked than ignored.

The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere—everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it protects you from—it cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target.

Daily Law: Because humans are social creatures by nature, power depends on social interaction and circulation. To make yourself powerful, place yourself at the center of things, make yourself more accessible, seek out old allies and make new ones, force yourself into more and more different circles.

Create a Cultlike Following Having a large following opens up all sorts of possibilities for deception; not only will your followers worship you, they will defend you from your enemies and will voluntarily take on the work of enticing others to join your fledgling cult. This kind of power will lift you to another realm: You will no longer have to struggle or use subterfuge to enforce your will. You are adored and can do no wrong.

Daily Law: People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow. In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power.

Do Not Commit to Anyone I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married. — QUEEN ELIZABETH I

It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause but yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others—playing people against one another, making them pursue you. If you allow people to feel they possess you to any degree, you lose all power over them. By not committing your affections, they will only try harder to win you over. Stay aloof and you gain the power that comes from their attention and frustrated desire.

Daily Law: Play the Virgin Queen: give them hope but never satisfaction.

Flattery can do wonders, but it comes with risks. If it is too obvious, the flatterer looks desperate, and it is easy to see through the strategy. The best courtiers know how to tailor their flattery to the particular insecurities of the leader and to make it less direct. They focus on flattering qualities in the leader that no one else has bothered to pay attention to but that need extra validation. If everyone praises the leader’s business acumen but not his or her cultural refinement, you will want to aim at the latter. Mirroring the leader’s ideas and values, without using their exact words, can be a highly effective form of indirect flattery.

Be Royal in Your Own Fashion With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception they are overcome by belief in themselves: it is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those around them. — FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

It is up to you to set your own price. Ask for less and that is just what you will get. Ask for more, however, and you send a signal that you are worth a king’s ransom. Even those who turn you down respect you for your confidence, and that respect will eventually pay off in ways you cannot imagine.

Daily Law: Judge your enemies carefully, looking at their past patterns. Sometimes it is best to convert them into an ally and neutralize them. But with others it only pays to be merciless and crush them totally.

If done correctly, the sowing of rumors can so infuriate and unsettle your rivals that in defending themselves they will make numerous mistakes. This is the perfect weapon for those who have no reputation of their own to work from.

Daily Law: Destroy your rivals with rumors.

Daily Law: People sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.

A true alliance is formed out of mutual self-interest, each side supplying what the other cannot get alone. It does not require you to fuse your own identity with that of a group or pay attention to everyone else’s emotional needs.

Daily Law: Cultivate real allies. Find those with mutual self-interests and make an alliance.

Make Your Accomplishments Seem Effortless

All the great Renaissance artists carefully kept their works under wraps. Only the finished masterpiece could be shown to the public. Michelangelo forbade even popes to view his work in process.

A Renaissance artist was always careful to keep his studios shut to patrons and public alike, not out of fear of imitation, but because to see the making of the works would mar the magic of their effect, and their studied atmosphere of ease and natural beauty.

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.

Daily Law: The harder we try to fix our mistakes, the worse we often make them.

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.

You need to train yourself to pay less attention to the words that people say and greater attention to their actions.

Daily Law: What you want is a picture of a person’s character over time. Restrain from the natural tendency to judge right away, and let the passage of time reveal more and more about who people are.

Be Careful Whom You Offend

Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. A man who is of little importance and means today can be a person of power tomorrow. We forget a lot in our lives, but we rarely forget an insult.

Daily Law: Swallow the impulse to offend, even if the other person seems weak. The satisfaction is meager compared to the danger that someday he or she will be in a position to hurt you.

Look at Their Past The most significant indicator of people’s character comes through their actions over time. Despite what people say about the lessons they have learned, and how they have changed over the years, you will inevitably notice the same actions and decisions repeating in the course of their life. In these decisions they reveal their character.

When Ivan the Terrible died, Boris Godunov knew he was the only one on the scene who could lead Russia. But if he sought the position eagerly, he would stir up envy and suspicion among the boyars, so he refused the crown, not once but several times. He made people insist that he take the throne. George Washington used the same strategy to great effect, first in refusing to keep the position of commander in chief of the American army, second in resisting the presidency. In both cases he made himself more popular than ever. People cannot envy the power that they themselves have given a person who does not seem to desire it. Daily Law: Be most suspicious of those who seem unambitious.

Daily Law: Your best defense is to be wary of people who are too quick to charm and befriend, too nice and accommodating at first. Such extreme niceness is never natural.

Daily Law: In gauging strength or weakness, look at how people handle stressful moments and responsibility. Look at their patterns: what have they actually completed or accomplished?

Daily Law: By pretending to bare their heart to you, clever nonplayers know they make it more likely that you will reveal your own secrets. They give you a false confession in hopes that you will give them a real one.

For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities. — NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI Machiavelli calls this “the effective truth,” and it is his most brilliant concept, in my opinion. It works like this: People will say almost anything to justify their actions, to give them a moral or sanctimonious veneer. The only thing that is clear, the only way we can judge people and cut away all this crap is by looking at their actions, the results of their actions. That is their effective truth. Take the Pope, for instance. He will sermonize forever about the poor, about morality, about peace, but in the meantime he presides over the most powerful organization in the world (in Machiavelli’s time). And his actions are basically concerned with increasing this power. The effective truth is that the Pope is a political animal, and that his decisions inevitably involve maintaining the Catholic Church’s preeminent place in the world. The religious verbiage is simply a part of his political gamesmanship, serving as a distracting device.

Daily Law: Judge people by the results of their actions and maneuvers, and not by the stories they tell.

The ability to measure people is the most important skill of all in gathering and conserving power. Without it you are blind:

Before embarking on any move, take the measure of your mark or potential opponent. Otherwise you will waste time and make mistakes. Study people’s weaknesses, the chinks in their armor, their areas of both pride and insecurity. Know their ins and outs before you even decide whether or not to deal with them.

Two final words of caution: First, in judging and measuring your opponent, never rely on your instincts. You will make the greatest mistakes of all if you rely on such inexact indicators. Nothing can substitute for gathering concrete knowledge. Study and spy on your opponent for however long it takes; this will pay off in the long run. Second, never trust appearances. Anyone with a serpent’s heart can use a show of kindness to cloak it; a person who is blustery on the outside is often really a coward. Never trust the version that people give of themselves—it is utterly unreliable.

Daily Law: What possible good can come from ignorance about other people? Learn to tell the lions from the lambs or pay the price.