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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.
People want power and they want to disguise this wanting of power. And so, they play games.
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.
Daily Law: You were obsessed with it as a child for a reason. Reconnect with it.
Daily Law: Do something today that you used to love doing as a kid. Try to reconnect with your impulse voices.
Adapt your inclinations. Avoid having rigid goals and dreams. Change is the law.
Concentrate on maintaining a high sense of purpose, and the success will flow to you naturally.
Embrace your strangeness. Identify what makes you different. Fuse those things together and become an anomaly.
Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That’s your source of power.
You must be able to distinguish between small matters that are best left to others and larger issues that require your attention and care.
The ability to sense the overall dynamic in any situation, to foresee problems and solutions before anyone else will bring you to the heights of power.
Take credit from those below you. Give credit to those above.
It is also often wise to pay the full price—there is no cutting corners with excellence.
Learn to pay and to pay well.
Power is timeless. People may not be beheaded for making mistakes; instead they’ll be summarily fired.
The desire for power is part of our nature. It is a part of how we evolved over millions of years. There is no point in denying our nature. It is who we are. And not only are we not going to deny it, but we are going to accept that this is the human being that we are, the product of evolution. There is nothing wrong with the fact that in this world people are playing political games. There is nothing wrong with the fact that there are seducers and con artists. It is the Human Comedy since the beginning of recorded history. It is just reality, the world as it is. Let’s stop fighting it.
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.
Never take appearances for reality.
greed does not pay.
I maintain in The 48 Laws of Power that the feeling of having no power over people and events is generally unbearable to us—when we feel helpless we feel miserable. No one wants less power; everyone wants more.
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.
What people lack in life is not more reality but illusion, fantasy, play.
If we are kind and unobtrusive, no one will be offended—in fact, we will seem saintly and likable. In truth, timid people are often self-absorbed, obsessed with the way people see them, and not at all saintly.
The incompetent and stupid are far more dangerous because we are never quite sure where they are leading us, until it is too late.
suddenly, a young Napoleon crosses our path, a person who does not respect tradition, who fights in a new way. Only then do we see that our ways of thinking and responding have fallen behind the times. Never take it for granted that your past successes will continue in the future. Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different, and you cannot assume that what worked before will work today.
The inner space of the human brain matches the outer space of the Universe; it is nearly infinite in scope. (And all this speed and power come from an organ composed of the basic elements found in rocks.)
The False Sublime comes from external sources and leaves no lasting internal changes except for increased dependency on the substance itself.
