The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations

by Robert Greene

To play well, to raise your game, your focus must be total. As in pool, so in life. Suckers and beginners are locked into the single-ball-at-a-time mentality and get all excited when they knock one in on a clever shot, but leave themselves nowhere to go. They never learn the angles above the angles above the angles.

Iceberg Slim is one of my favorite authors. To Iceberg, the world is divided between hustler and sucker. You are either one or the other. The sucker has no angles on life, no sense of the art of indirection, and can only make one stupid play at a time. The hustler always aims for the angles, learns how to play them, and becomes an artist in the game.

Daily Law: The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear. If you are already established in a group, temporary withdrawal from it will make you more talked about, even more admired. You must learn when to leave. Create value through scarcity.

Daily Law: Never let people think they have you completely figured out. Create some mystery around you.

Daily Law: We are all actors in the theater of life and the better you play your role and wear the proper mask, the more power you will accrue.

Never Impugn People’s Intelligence The best way to be well received by all is to clothe yourself in the skin of the dumbest of brutes. — BALTASAR GRACIÁN

The feeling that someone else is more intelligent than we are is almost intolerable. We usually try to justify it in different ways: “He only has book knowledge, whereas I have real knowledge.”

Given how important the idea of intelligence is to most people’s vanity, it is critical never inadvertently to insult or impugn a person’s brain power. That is an unforgivable sin.

Daily Law: Subliminally reassure people that they are more intelligent than you are, or even that you are a bit of a moron, and you can run rings around them.

Daily Law: Seem to want something in which you are actually not at all interested and your enemies will be thrown off the scent, making all kinds of errors in their calculations.

This is the wine that intoxicates them. They are dying to fund your project, to introduce you to powerful people—provided, of course, that all this is done in public, and for a good cause (usually the more public, the better).

Daily Law: You must figure out what makes others tick. When they ooze greed, appeal to their greed. When they want to look charitable and noble, appeal to their charity.

When you are weaker, never fight for honor’s sake; choose surrender instead. Surrender gives you time to recover, time to torment and irritate your conquerors, time to wait for their power to wane. Do not give them the satisfaction of fighting and defeating you—surrender first.

Daily Law: If you find yourself temporarily weakened, the surrender tactic is perfect for raising yourself up again—it disguises your ambition; it teaches you patience and self-control, key skills in the game.

Daily Law: In commanding influence in the world, human beings—a devoted army of followers—are more valuable than money. They will do things for you that money cannot buy.

Daily Law: Build up a reputation: You’re a little crazy. Fighting you is not worth it. Create this reputation and make it credible with a few impressive—impressively violent—acts.

Leaders must know how to balance presence and absence. In general, it is best to lean slightly more in the direction of absence, so that when you do appear before the group, you generate excitement and drama.

Keep in mind that talking too much is a type of overpresence that grates and reveals weakness. Silence is a form of absence and withdrawal that draws attention; it spells self-control and power; when you do talk, it has a greater effect.

In a similar fashion, if you commit a mistake, do not over-explain and overapologize. You make it clear you accept responsibility and are accountable for any failures, and then you move on.

The Seductive Visuals The people are always impressed by the superficial appearance of things. — NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

Daily Law: Never neglect the way you arrange things visually. Factors like color have enormous symbolic resonance.

Never Reform Too Much at Once It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. — NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

Daily Law: If you are new to a position of power, or trying to build a power base, make a show of respecting the old way of doing things. If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement on the past.

Make Others Come to You

Daily Law: If on one occasion you make it a point of dignity that others must come to you and you succeed, they will continue to do so even after you stop trying.

Control What You Reveal Never start moving your own lips and teeth before the subordinates do. The longer I keep quiet, the sooner others move their lips and teeth. As they move their lips and teeth, I can thereby understand their real intentions If the sovereign is not mysterious, the ministers will find opportunity to take and take. — HAN FEI-TZU

Power is in many ways a game of appearances, and when you say less than necessary, you inevitably appear greater and more powerful than you are. Your silence will make other people uncomfortable. Humans are machines of interpretation and explanation; they have to know what you are thinking. When you carefully control what you reveal, they cannot pierce your intentions or your meaning. Your short answers will put them on the defensive, and they will jump in, nervously filling the silence with all kinds of comments that will reveal valuable information about them and their weaknesses. They will leave a meeting with you feeling as if they had been robbed, and they will go home and ponder your every word. This extra attention to your brief comments will only add to your power.

Daily Law: Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.

Play to Their High Self-Opinion The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself. — JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

If you need a favor from people, do not remind them of what you have done for them in the past, trying to stimulate feelings of gratitude. Gratitude is rare because it tends to remind us of our helplessness, our dependence on others. We like to feel independent. Instead, remind them of the good things they have done for you in the past. This will help confirm their self-opinion: “Yes, I am generous.”

Create an Air of Mystery Mix a little mystery with everything, and the very mystery stirs up veneration. — BALTASAR GRACIÁN

Count Victor Lustig, the aristocrat of swindlers, played the game to perfection. He was always doing things that were different or seemed to make no sense. He would show up at the best hotels in a limo driven by a Japanese chauffeur; no one had ever seen a Japanese chauffeur before, so this seemed exotic and strange. Lustig would dress in the most expensive clothing, but always with something—a medal, a flower, an armband—out of place, at least in conventional terms. This was seen not as tasteless but as odd and intriguing. In hotels he would be seen receiving telegrams at all hours, one after the other, brought to him by his Japanese chauffeur—telegrams he would tear up with utter nonchalance. (In fact they were fakes, completely blank.) He would sit alone in the dining room, reading a large and impressive-looking book, smiling at people yet remaining aloof. Within a few days, of course, the entire hotel would be abuzz with interest in this strange man. All this attention allowed Lustig to lure suckers in with ease. They would beg for his confidence and his company. Everyone wanted to be seen with this mysterious aristocrat. And in the presence of this distracting enigma, they wouldn’t even notice that they were being robbed blind.

Daily Law: People love mysteries and enigmas, so give them what they want.

Never Conventional No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected. — JULIUS CAESAR

Daily Law: Make a point of breaking the habits you have developed, of acting in a way that is contrary to how you have operated in the past; practice a kind of unconventional warfare on your own mind.

Play to People’s Fantasies The most detested person in the world is the one who always tells the truth, who never romances I found it far more interesting and profitable to romance than to tell the truth. JOSEPH WEIL, AKA “THE YELLOW KID”

The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment. To gain power, you must be a source of pleasure for those around you—and pleasure comes from playing to people’s fantasies.

Never promise a gradual improvement through hard work; rather, promise the moon, the great and sudden transformation, the pot of gold.

Daily Law: Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

Mirror Their Values

When you go into society, leave behind your own ideas and values, and put on the mask that is most appropriate for the group in which you find yourself.

Daily Law: Complete free expression is a social impossibility. Conceal your thoughts, then, telling the prickly and insecure what you know they want to hear.

I want to take you away from thinking of seduction as just the sort of thing that men do to women or women do to men. It’s something that permeates our culture. It’s in advertising. It’s in marketing. It’s on the internet. It’s in politics.

People are dying for more of this kind of seduction in their lives. They want some enchantment. They want some drama. They want pleasure. They want to be taken on a ride, an adventure. It’s a desire cemented in childhood. Seduction is like reaching the child in a person. When you were a child, what was the greatest pleasure? It was being picked up by your mother or father and being whirled around and taken through the air and twisting and turning. The sense that someone was taking you somewhere, that you were under their control—it made you laugh, it gave you this incredible joy. That’s what’s happening when you’re watching that movie: it’s taking you on this journey where you don’t exactly where you’re going or what’s happening.

People don’t have enough of that in their lives. It’s an amazing power that you could have.

It starts with the desire to be a seducer. You might be tempted to think, “Oh, I don’t want to be a seducer, I’m not interested in seduction.” Yes, you do. Yes, you are. Think of the walls that people normally have up—you can’t get through to your kids, you can’t get through to your spouse, that employee, those coworkers. They’re closed off to you. It makes you so frustrated. Now think of a time in your life where you sensed that you had power over another person, that someone was under your spell, that the things you said excited them and interested them. There’s electricity in your back and forth. It’s amaz...

If you’re someone that does too much calculation in the seduction process—this is what I’m going to do, step A then B then C—it’s not seductive. People can smell your coldness. We sense that the other person is trying too hard, that they’ve read The Art of Seduction, that they’re applying the twenty-four strategies. It doesn’t work.

You must bring out natural qualities that you have. And I maintain that every person has natural qualities that make him or her authentically seductive.

Delay Satisfaction The ability to delay satisfaction is the ultimate art of seduction—while waiting, the victim is held in thrall.

Coquettes seem totally self-sufficient: they do not need you, they seem to say, and their narcissism proves devilishly attractive.