Robert Greene on Reading, The Laws of Power, and Detecting Lies | Knowledge Project Podcast Archive

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  The 48 Laws of Power lasts because it tells the truth about power that polite books avoid.

  Published in 1998, when Greene was 39 and had 'no success' after jobs in Hollywood and journalism, the book sold steadily for two decades and is nearing two million US copies. He designed it to feel timeless by drawing on all cultures and periods of history. He wrote it out of 'hunger and anger' that books about power were so skittish about the manipulation he'd seen in offices and politics. He admits some literary license, but says every chapter reflected things he'd lived through or seen. Some readers hate it for exactly that reason. Its success then brought him into consulting with powerful people in music, politics and business, including 50 Cent, which made him 'a little more sophisticated'.

• 02

  Social intelligence is more than half of any power situation.

  His next book (on human nature, in progress during this conversation) grew from Mastery's chapter on the 'seven deadly realities' of people, which drew huge reader response. It became 18 timeless elements, including envy, grandiosity, irrationality, narcissism and passive aggression. You can be brilliant at coding, he says, but if you can't deal with people you won't get far. Knowing your own aggression or narcissism is what lets you improve. He also deliberately added more stories about women, such as Coco Chanel, because 'you can't write a book about human nature if it's all white men'.

• 03

  Great books show deep thinking and are willing to speculate. Bad ones have one idea and repeat it.

  After roughly 2,000 books of research, Greene can tell from the back cover or the first five pages whether a book has 'juice'. Weak books state an interesting idea in chapter one, then repeat it, or grind an axe. He found Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs rushed and shallow, and says 5,000 pages on Napoleon never quite nailed 'what made him tick'. He admires Robert Caro's Master of the Senate as 'an incredible treatise on power'. He mostly reads biographies and dead authors, and avoids contemporary pop nonfiction (even Malcolm Gladwell) so he won't overlap with it, aiming for the 5% that's truly his.

• 04

  His note-card system: mark the margins, wait weeks, then transcribe onto cards by theme.

  He reads a good book carefully and marks passages in the margins, skipping 'like hell' through bad ones. A couple of weeks later he copies the notes onto cards, each headed with a theme such as 'envy'. If one book yields nine cards on a theme, it may anchor a chapter. Irrationality alone gathered more than 100 cards from more than 50 books. He writes by hand with a fountain pen because 'there's a logic to it', it makes him think more deeply, and he can flip through 2,000 physical cards, backs included, faster than on a screen. He taught the system to Ryan Holiday.

• 05

  Let the themes emerge from the research, like reducing a sauce.

  For the 48 Laws he read Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz and Nietzsche without knowing what the book would be. About 80 recurring themes emerged and were 'whittled down' to 48. The human nature book went from about 30 themes to 24 to 18. Keeping the project open-ended keeps it alive: 'you can sense the brain matter of the writer flickering on the page.' Decide everything in advance and 'it dies on the vine'.

• 06

  Translate history into psychology you can act on, such as Napoleon's flank attack.

  Writing The 33 Strategies of War meant asking how Napoleon's flanking maneuver applies to someone at a Silicon Valley software firm. The answer is indirection: no punch is more powerful than an unexpected one from the side. A frontal approach lets rivals raise their best defenses. A surprising sale, seduction or competitive move works on the same psychology as Austerlitz. He spent months with annotated Chinese texts of Sun Tzu to understand what force and momentum really are.

• 07

  Sustain hard mental work with routines, and be 'a bit of a tyrant' about your time.

  Each book takes him about four years. He writes three hours a day, which is 'about all I can stomach'. He meditates every morning (Zen, for about eight years), swims a mile and a half nonstop every third day, hikes, and does a yoga and Pilates routine. A daily 20-minute back routine, holding each pose about a minute, ended his back pain. He says no to almost everything near the end of a book. It's lonely, but constant distraction short-circuits the unconscious processing that produces ideas in the shower.

• 08

  Realism means widening the small slice of reality you perceive: yourself, other people and the times.

  Maybe 95% of our mental processing is unconscious. Raising your awareness to 6–7% makes you a realist. First, ask why you're drawn to a book, a person or a field ('know thyself'), so you can choose work that fits 'your weirdness'. Second, stop projecting onto others; you can be married 30 years and not know someone. Third, read the zeitgeist and your competitive environment. Ask questions like Socrates, assuming you know nothing about the person in front of you: 'the worst sin today is people feel like they know everything.'