The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations from the author of the bestselling The 48 Laws of Power

Immerse yourself in the world or the industry that you wish to master.

Do not be afraid to bring out the more sensitive or ambitious sides to your character. These repressed parts of you are yearning to be let out. In the theater of life, expand the roles that you play. Don’t worry about people’s reactions to any changes in you they sense. You are not so easy to categorize, which will fascinate them and give you the power to play with their perceptions of you, altering them at will.

Since you are on your own, it is up to you to foresee the changes going on right now in your profession. You must adapt your Life’s Task to these circumstances. You do not hold on to past ways of doing things, because that will ensure you will fall behind and suffer for it. You are flexible and always looking to adapt. If change is forced upon you, you must resist the temptation to overreact or feel sorry for yourself.

Embrace your strangeness. Identify what makes you different. Fuse those things together and become an anomaly.

In your thinking, learn to blend the analytical with the intuitive in order to become more creative.

Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if attacked. . . . A powerful desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their . . . endowment. —Sigmund Freud

Daily Law: It is simple: depending on others is misery; depending on yourself is power.

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.

You cannot make anything worthwhile in this world unless you have first developed and transformed yourself.

Work at what connects to you emotionally and ideas will come to you.

The brain is designed to learn through constant repetition and active, hands-on involvement. Through such practice and persistence, any skill can be mastered.

Rid yourself of the desire to find shortcuts

To separate yourself from the mechanical and reactive types, you need to get rid of a common misconception: the essence of strategy is not to carry out a brilliant plan that proceeds in steps; it is to put yourself in situations where you have more options than the enemy does.

Act before it becomes impossible to disentangle one strand of misery from another, or to see how the whole thing started.

When I left him, I reasoned thus with myself: I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know. —Socrates

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.

Daily Law: The person with the more global perspective wins. Expand your gaze.

Let a Sense of Purpose Guide You Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings blessed death. —Leonardo da Vinci

Daily Law: Think back on the moments when you felt deeply and personally connected to an activity. Think about the pleasure it brought you. In such activities are signs of your true purpose. Mastery, I: Discover Your Calling—The Life’s Task

What you need is a mental filtering system based on a scale of priorities and your long-term goals.

Work every day on improving those skills that mesh with your unique spirit and purpose

Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education. They tell you about your own inadequacies.

Daily Law: No calling is superior to another. What matters is that it be tied to a personal need and inclination, and that your energy moves you toward improvement and continuous learning from experience. The Laws of Human Nature, 13: Advance with a Sense of Purpose—The Law of Aimlessness

Learn to imagine more possibilities than you generally consider. Avoid fixating only on what is present. Ponder what is absent.

Depending on Others Is Misery

The single greatest action you can take for acquiring creative power is to reverse this natural impatience. Daily Law: Imagine yourself years in the future looking back at the work you have done.

The Laws of Human Nature, 1: Master Your Emotional Self—The Law of Irrationality

Daily Law: Learning how to learn is the most important skill to acquire. Robert Greene, full address on Mastery to the Oxford Union Society, December 12, 2012

if you’re in a boxing ring and the boxer punches you in the face, you don’t whine about the unfairness or the cruelty. No, that’s just part of the game.

Displaying anger and emotion are signs of weakness; you cannot control yourself, so how can you control anything?