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Robert Greene

Robert Greene Biography

American author

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“it is natural to want to employ your friends when you find yourself in times of need. The world is a harsh place, and your friends soften the harshness. Besides, you know them. Why depend on a stranger when you have a friend at hand? The problem is that you often do not know your friends as well as you imagine. Friends often agree on things in order to avoid an argument. They cover up their unpleasant qualities so as not offend each other. They laugh extra hard at each others jokes. Since honesty rarely strengthens friendship, you may never know how a friend truly feels. Friends will say they love your poetry, adore your music, envy your taste in clothes - maybe they mean, often they do not.”

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Book:The 48 Laws Of Power
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“You often do not know your friends as well as you imagine. Friends often agree on things in order to avoid an argument. They cover up their unpleasant qualities so as not offend each other. They laugh extra hard at each others jokes. Since honesty rarely strengthens friendship, you may never know how a friend truly feels. Friends will say they love your poetry, adore your music, envy your taste in clothes - maybe they mean, often they do not.”

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Book:The 48 Laws Of Power
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“When you hold yourself back, you incur not anger but a kind of respect. You instantly seem powerful because you make yourself un-graspable, rather than succumbing to the group, or to the relationship, as most people do. As your reputation for independence grows, more and more people will come to desire you, wanting to be the one who gets you to commit. The moment you commit, the magic is gone. You become like everyone else. People will try all kinds of underhanded methods to get you to commit.”

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Book:The 48 Laws Of Power
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“The most effective attitude to adopt is one of supreme acceptance. The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways. Some people have dark qualities that are especially pronounced. You cannot change such people at their core, but must merely avoid becoming their victim. You are an observer of the human comedy, and by being as tolerant as possible, you gain a much greater ability to understand people and to influence their behavior when necessary”

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Book:Mastery
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“People tend to wear the mask that shows them off in the best possible light - humble, confident, diligent. They say the right things, smile, and seem interested in our ideas. They learn to conceal their insecurities and envy. [...] People continually leak out their true feelings and unconscious desires in the nonverbal cues they cannot completely control--facial expressions, vocal inflections, tension in the body, and nervous gestures. [...] On the other hand, since appearances are what people judge you by, you must learn how to present the best front and play your role to maximum effect.”

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Book:The Laws of Human Nature
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“Fear is not designed to make us feel that we are fragile creatures in an environment full of danger. Its function is to stimulate powerful physical responses, allowing an animal to retreat in time. After the event, it is supposed to go away. An animal that cannot let go of its fears once the threat is gone will find it hard ro eat and sleep.”

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Book:The 50th Law: Overcoming Adversity Through Fearlessness
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“The future of the human race will likely depend on our ability to transcend this tribalism and to see our fate as Interconnected with everyone else's. We are one species, all descendents of the same original humans, all brothers and sisters. Our differences are mostly an illusion. Imagining differences is part of the madness of groups. We must see ourselves as one large reality group and experience a deep sense of belonging to it. To solve the man-made problems threatening us will require cooperation on a much higher level and a practical spirit missing from the tribe. This does not mean the end of diverse cultures and the riches that comes with them. In fact, the reality group encourages inner diversity.”

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Book:The Laws of Human Nature
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“Most of us spend our lives avoiding the thought of death. Instead, the inevitability of death should be continually on our minds. Understanding the shortness of life fills us with a sense of purpose and urgency to realize our goals. Training ourselves to confront and accept this reality makes it easier to manage the inevitable setbacks, separations, and crises in life. [...] By becoming deeply aware of our mortality, we intensify our experience of every aspect of life.”

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Book:The Laws of Human Nature
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“Understand: your mind is weaker than your emotions. But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity--precisely the time when you need strength. What best equips you to cope with tthe heat of battle is neither more knowledge nor more intellect. What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness. No one can teach you this skill; you cannot learn it by reading about it. Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering.”

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Book:The 33 Strategies Of War
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“Corporations and politicians know that they cannot seduce their public into buying what they want them to buy or doing what they want them to do unless they first awaken a sense of need and discontent. Make the masses uncertain about their identity and you can help define it for them. It is as true of groups or nations as it is of individuals. They can’t be seduced without being made to feel some lack. A group like an individual can get mired in routine losing track of its original goals. Too much prosperity saps it of strength. You can seduce an entire nation by aiming at its collective insecurity, that latent sense that not everything is what it seems. Stirring dissatisfaction with the present and reminding people about the glorious past can unsettle their sense of identity, then you can be the one to redefine it. A grand seduction.”

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Book:The Art Of Seduction
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“Understand: we can never really experience what other people are experiencing. We always remain on the outside looking in, and this is the cause of so many misunderstandings and conflicts. But the primal source of human intelligence comes from the development of mirror neurons (see here), which gives us the ability to place ourselves in the skin of another and imagine their experience. Through continual exposure to people and by attempting to think inside them we can gain an increasing sense of their perspective, but this requires effort on our part. Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own beliefs and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware. When it comes to studying another culture, it is only through the use of our empathic powers and by participating in their lives that we can begin to overcome these natural projections and arrive at the reality of their experience. To do so we must overcome our great fear of the Other and the unfamiliarity of their ways. We must enter their belief and value systems, their guiding myths, their way of seeing the world. Slowly, the distorted lens through which we first viewed them starts to clear up. Going deeper into their Otherness, feeling what they feel, we can discover what makes them different and learn about human nature. This applies to cultures, individuals, and even writers of books. As Nietzsche once wrote, “As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion.”

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Book:Mastery
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“To cultivate his inner Athena, Pericles first had to find a way to master his emotions. Emotions turn us inward, away from nous, away from reality. We dwell on our anger or our insecurities. If we look out at the world and try to solve problems, we see things through the lens of these emotions; they cloud our vision. Pericles trained himself to never react in the moment, to never make a decision while under the influence of strong emotion. Instead, he analyzed his feelings. Usually when he looked closely at his insecurities or his anger, he saw that they were not really justified, and they lost their significance under scrutiny.”

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Book:The Laws of Human Nature
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“We can see two forms of [contradictory behaviour]: Early on in life some people sense a softness, vulnerability, or insecurity that might prove embarrassing or uncomfortable. They unconsciously develop the opposite trait, a resilience or toughness that lies on the outside like a protective shell. The other scenario is that a person has a quality that they feel might be antisocial - for instance, too much ambition or an inclination to be selfish. They develop the opposite quality, something very prosocial.”

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Book:The Laws of Human Nature
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“In our culture we tend to denigrate practice. We want to imagine that great feats occur naturally—that they are a sign of someone’s genius or superior talent. Getting to a high level of achievement through practice seems so banal, so uninspiring. Besides, we don’t want to have to think of the 10,000 to 20,000 hours that go into such mastery. These values of ours are oddly counterproductive—they cloak from us the fact that almost anyone can reach such heights through tenacious effort, something that should encourage us all.”

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Book:Mastery
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“Understand: your mind is weaker than your emotions. But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity--precisely the time when you need strength. What best equips you to cope with tthe heat of battle is neither more knowledge nor more intellect. What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness.No one can teach you this skill; you cannot learn it by reading about it. Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering. The first step in building up presence of mind is to see the need for ii -- to want it badly enough to be willing to work for it.”

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Book:The 33 Strategies Of War
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“To the extent that we believe we can skip steps, avoid the process, magically gain power through political connections or easy formulas, or depend on our natural talents, we move against this grain and reverse our natural powers. We become slaves to time – as it passes, we grow weaker, less capable, trapped in some dead end career. We become captive to the opinions and fears of others.” (9) “This intense connection and desires allows them to withstand the pain of the process – the self-doubts, the tedious hours of practice and study, the inevitable setbacks, the endless barbs from the envious. They develop a resiliency and confidence that others lack.”

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Book:Mastery
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“Lo que la gente diga de si misma no importa; dirá lo que sea. Ve lo que ha hecho; los actos no mienten. También puedes aplicar esta lógica a ti mism@. Al analizar una derrota, identifica las cosas que habrías podido hacer de otra manera. La culpa de tus fracasos la tienen tus malas estrategias, no las trampas del contrincante. Eres responsable de lo bueno y lo malo en tu vida. Como corolario de esto, ve todo lo que hacen los demás como una maniobra estratégica, un intento por conseguir la victoria. Quienes te acusan de desleal, por ejemplo; quienes intentan hacerte sentir culpable y hablan de justicia y moral, tratan de obtener una ventaja en el tablero.”

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Author:Robert Greene
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“The Great German general Erwin Rommel once made a distinction between a gamble and a risk. Both cases involve an action with only a chance of success, a chance that is heightened by acting with boldness. The difference is that with a risk, if you lose, you can recover: your reputation will suffer no long-term damage, your resources will not be depleted, and you can return to your original position with acceptable losses. With a gamble, on the other hand, defeat can lead to a slew of problems that are likely to spiral out of control. With a gamble there tend to be too many variables to complicate the picture down the road if things go on. The problem goes further: if you encounter difficulties in a gamble, it becomes harder to pull out—you realize that the stakes are too high; you cannot afford to lose. So you try harder to rescue the situation, often making it worse and sinking deeper in to the hole that you cannot get out of. People are drawn into gambles by their emotions: they see only glittering prospects if they win and ignore the ominous consequences if the lose. Taking risks is essential; gambling is foolhardy. It can be years before you recover from a gamble, if you recover at all.”

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Book:The 33 Strategies Of War
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“The two board games that best approximate the strategies of war are chess and the Asian game of go. In chess, the board is small. In comparison to go, the attack comes relatively quickly, forcing a decisive battle.... Go is much less formal. It is played on a large grid, with 361 intersections — nearly six times as many positions as in chess.... [A game of go] can last up to three hundred moves. The strategy is more subtle and fluid than chess, developing slowly; the more complex the pattern your stones initially create on the board, the harder it is for your opponent to understand your strategy. Fighting to control a particular area is not worth the trouble: You have to think in larger terms, to be prepared to sacrifice an area in order eventually to dominate the board. What you are after is not an entrenched position but mobility. With mobility you can isolate your opponent in small areas and then encircle them... Chess is linear, position oriented, and aggressive; go is nonlinear and fluid. Aggression is indirect until the end of the game, when the winner can surround the opponents' stones at an accelerated pace.”

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Book:The 48 Laws Of Power
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