Delving into psychology, deception, structure and power. 10 minutes of reading that will change you for the rest of your life.

Book Summary — The 48 Laws of Power #3

A Timeless Guide to Gaining Power

15 min readApr 7, 2021

This is the third summary (Laws 25–36) of The 48 Laws of Power. Read the Laws 1–12 here and Laws 13–24 here.

Laws 25–36 are some of the most eye-opening sections of the book, revealing fundamental truths about the world and actually changing my behaviour. In particular, make sure to read:

Law 28: Enter Action With Boldness. If you are wary, hesitant, do not do it. This translates into your actions.
Law 29: Play All The Way to The End. The importance of planning, having a goal.
Law 36: Disdain Things You Cannot Have — Ignoring Them is the Best Revenge. By acknowledging a problem, you give it existence and credibility. See Lessons from Fight Club — Stop Caring

Without further ado, here is a summary of The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene.

The 48 Laws of Power is a book of wisdom, a compilation of tactics, and a rich set of brilliantly tested ideas for thriving in any era. No matter how you feel about the dubious power plays that have occurred and the amoral instructions of this book, the fact is that they exist. The laws of this book you will either use or will experience being used against you.

“He who forgets the past is destined to repeat it.”

Let us stand on the shoulders of giants, therefore, and learn from 3,000 years of philosophies, legacies, statesmen, warriors and seducers.

Law 26 — Keep Your Hands Clean

Good name and reputation rely more on what we conceal than on what we reveal.
Sometimes you will have two options after a mistake: apology and excuses, or a scapegoat. Always choose the latter. Apologies open up doubts about our competence or intentions as well as making people feel uncomfortable. Excuses satisfy no one.
Like a surgeon, you must cut away the tumour with speed and finality.
The mistake does not vanish with an apology; it deepens and festers.
Brutal justice had to be done to bring order to the region but after a few years, people resented it. Separate yourself at some point from this hatchet man or even bring him to justice: it satisfies them and means you cleaned it up.
Shift guilt onto an outside figure that can then be banished or destroyed.
This profound need to exteriorize one’s guilt, to project it onto another person or object, has an immense power, which the clever know how to harness.
However, the scapegoat should not appear too weak and punishment too cruel: remember, you are the victim.
‘Folly consists not in committing folly, but in being incapable of concealing it.’ The wise conceal the blunders they have made.
Make use of the cat’s paw. Get someone to do do the dirty dangerous work, bear the bad news… You only bring joy and glad tidings.
Get people to do your bidding without trealising they are being manipulated. For example, Cleopatra with Caesar and Mark Antony.
You must never bloody your own hands but remember that power cannot survive without the constant squashing of enemies. Use such people, outside of your immediate circle, those who enjoy doing you favours.
Two uses of cat’s paw: to save appearances, to save effort and time.
The granting of a favour is never simple. If done with fuss and obviousness, the receiver feels burdened by obligation. A favor done indirectly and elegantly has 10x more power.
Let only the good come from you and the evil from others.
Indirectly extricate your friends from distress without imposing yourself or making them feel obligated to you.
Truly powerful people are never in a hurry or are overburdened. They find the right people to do the effort. They develop the arts of finding, using and, in time, getting rid of these people when their cat’s paw has been fulfilled.
Organise your goals, intentions — much easier to guide others into moves that accomplish what you want done.

Law 27 — Play on peoples’ need to believe to create a cultlike following

Keep your words vague but full of promise, emphasise enthusiasm over rationality.
We have a desperate need to believe in something. Do not let this gullibility go to waste.

Keep it vague. Keep it simple. Use words of great resonance but cloudy meaning.
Emphasise the visual and the sensual over the intellectual. Else boredom and scepticism will come. Fill their eyes with splendour.
Structure — create rituals, hierarchy, talk like a prophet.
Disguise source of income.
Set up an us-versus-them dynamic.
Make sure members believe they are part of an exclusive group. Manufacture notion of devious enemy (and enemies if you have none)
Realise the power you can gain by ascribing change to something external and mysterious.
People do not want to hear that change has come about from hard work, or exhaustion, boredom, or depression.
Our tendency to doubt, the distance that allows us to reason, is broken down when we join a group.

Law 28 — Enter action with boldness

If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitation will infect your execution.
Boldness and hesitation elicit very different psychological responses in their targets.
The bolder the lie, the more convincing it becomes. When entering negotiations, go further than you planned.

People have a sixth sense for the weakness of others. If, in an encounter, you demonstrate your willingness to compromise, back down and retreat, you bring out the lion even in people who are not necessarily bloodthirsty.

By intimidating with a bold move, you establish a precedent: in every subsequent encounter people will be on the defensive, in terror of your next strike.
Halfheartedness means you see options where there are none, you create problems.
Hesitation creates a gap that allows others to think, to hem and haw. Creates awkward energy and doubt. Boldness destroys such gaps because it leaves no time for reflection.
The bold draw attention.
If they have suspicions, don’t back down, ask for more.
Boyars — men who despise you. When they sense your growing boldness, law low, show neither ambition or discontent. Do not negotiate with them, you create opportunities.
The sudden bold move, without discussion or warning, obliterates these toeholds.
When you are as small as David was, you need a Goliath to attack. The larger the target, the more attention you gain. The bolder the attack, the more you stand out from the crowd, and the more admiration you earn.
Voice what the public feels. The world will honour you, the underdog, with glory and power.
We may disguise our timidity as a concern for others, in reality, we are really self-absorbed, worried about ourselves and how others perceive us. Boldness makes people feel more at ease since it is less self-conscious and less repressed.
Boldness draws us outside our own realm of inwardness and reflection.
The price you set may be the price you receive — what you ask for is what you get.

If boldness is not natural, neither is timidity. It is an acquired habit. You must root it out. Your fears of the consequences of a bold action are out of proportion to reality. The consequences of timidity are worse.

Reversal: However, boldness should be used at the right moment. Going through life only armed with audacity would be tiring and also fatal. You may benefit from being able to feign timidity.

Law 29 — Play All The Way to The End

To stop — to aim for a goal and then to keep to it- seems almost inhuman. Think about achieving your goals and then keep wanting to go further. We don’t know when to stop. We’re hungry. It’s like if you don’t know how much money you need the default always becomes more.
Never tempted by the siren call for more.
The ability to ignore immediate pleasures and dangers translates into power: the power of being able to overcome the natural human tendency to react to things as they happen.
Do not let your plan be vague
Really they are only focusing on the happy ending, and deluding themselves by the strength of their desire.

The seventeenth-century Frenchman Cardubak de Retz:

“The most ordinary cause of people’s mistakes is their being too much frightened at the present danger, and not enough so at that which is remote.”

Those dangers are the mistakes, the plans we would instantly abort if we realised we were avoiding a small danger to step into a larger one.
So much of power is not what you do but what you do not do — the rash and foolish actions that you refrain from before they get you into trouble
Ask these questions: Will this have unintended consequences? Will I stir up new enemies? Will someone else take advantage of my labors?
Unhappy endings are much more common than happy ones- do not be swayed by the happy ending in your mind.
Do not retreat into your shell like a turtle after reaching your goal.
It is the end of the action that determines who gets the glory, the money, the prize. Your conclusion must be crystal clear, and you must keep it constantly in mind.

Planning gives clarity which rids you of the anxiety and vagueness that are the primary reasons why so many fail to conclude their actions successfully.

See the ending and tolerate no deviation.
So often once things are set in motion it is they which guide us and sweep us along.
If you are locked into a plan too rigidly, you will be unable to deal with sudden shifts of fortune. Build-in alternatives and be open to new routes toward your goal.
However, most people lose less from over-planning and rigidity than from vagueness and improvisation. No good can come from refusing to think far into the future and planning to the end. Only having a clear objective and a far-reaching plan allows you that freedom.

Law 30 — Make Your Accomplishments Seem Effortless

To gain mastery in your craft, you need to invest considerable time and effort. But you must conceal all the toil, practice and clever tricks that go into your actions. It only raises questions and makes you look weaker.
Concealing means: hiding your tricks and shortcuts, hiding the look that you are straining and suffering, controlling your tendency to be loose with your secrets.
Avoid the temptation of revealing how hard you work: when you know the secrets behind anything, it is no longer awe-inspiring.
Teach no one your tricks or they will be used against you.
Power depends on appearances and in making your actions seem natural and done with ease, mystery surrounds your actions. The appearance of having an exclusive gift is immensely powerful. People believe you can do much more, eliciting not only admiration but a touch of fear.
Your powers are untapped and no one can fathom their limits.

For whatever action [nonchalance] accompanies, no matter how trivial it is, it not only reveals the skill of the person doing it but also very often causes it to be considered far greater than it really is. This is because it makes the onlookers believe that a man who performs well with so much facility must possess even greater skill than he does.
Baldassare Castiglione

Law 31 — Control the options: Get others to play the cards you deal

The best deceptions are the ones that seem to give the other person a choice.
Give people options that come out in your favour whichever one they choose. E.g your absence or the prospect of life w/o you — see Ivan the Terrible
Words like “freedom”, “options”, and “choice” evoke a power of possibility far beyond the reality they entail. When examined closely, the choices we have (marketplace, jobs, elections) have noticeable limitations.
We rarely focus on the missing options, rather just the fact that we can choose between A and B

There are many ways of “controlling the options”:

Colour the choices. Present options in such a way that your preferred one seems the best.
Force the resister. Force those who resist to do the very thing you don’t want them to do. They enjoy doing the opposite of what you ask them to do. Appear to advocate the opposite.

3. Alter the playing field. Make it so that the only options your opponents have are the ones you give them.

4. The shrinking options. Raise the price everytime the buyer hesitates and another day goes by. Excellent for the chronically indecisive, who will fall for the idea that they are gettong a better deal today than if they wait till tomorrow.

5. The weak man. Describe and exaggerate all kinds of dangers as much as possible. With the weak you have to be more aggressive. Use fear and terror to propel them into action. Try reason and they will always find a way to procrastinate.

6. Brothers in crime. Entangle your opponents/victims in your deception or crime so there is a bond of blood and guilt between you. Implicate in your deceptions the very person who can do you the most harm if you fail. It will narrow their options and buy their silence.

Law 32: Play to People’s Fantasies

Avoid telling people the truth unless you are prepared to face the anger that will result.
Life is harsh and distressing. If you can conjure up a fantasy or be a source of pleasure in people’s lives, people will flock to you.
Never promise gradual improvement through hard work, but rather a great and sudden transformations.
Never be distracted by people’s glamorous portraits of themselves and their lives: search and dig for what really imprisons them.

The Reality: Change is slow and gradual. It requires hard work, a bit of luck, a fair amount of self-sacrifice, and a lot of patience.

The Fantasy: A sudden transformation will bring a total change in one’s fortunes, bypassing work, luck, self-sacrifice, and time in one fantastic stroke.

Fantasy must remain to some degree unrealised, literally unreal.

The Reality: The social realm has hard-set codes and boundaries. We understand these limits and know that we have to move within the same familiar circles, day in and day out.

The Fantasy: We can enter a totally new world with different codes and the promise of adventure.

The key to fantasy is distance. Always keep it cloudy and vague. Keep them close enough to see the mirage in the distance, but far away enough that they keep dreaming and desiring.
Your fantasy, what you are offering them, should be ungraspable. Never let it become familiar.

Law 33: Discover Each Man’s Thumbscrew

Everyone has a weakness: an insecurity, uncontrollable emotion, need, or perhaps a small secret pleasure. Once found, you can turn it to your advantage.
Pay attention to gestures and unconscious signal. There is little to be learned from our conscious behaviour.
Most weaknesses begin in childhood: perhaps they were pampered or indulged in certain areas and certain emotional needs going unfulfilled.
Find their childhood needs: those things that when you touch on it, they act like a child.
Overt traits often reveal the opposite. The man thumping his chest or projecting himself loudly usually reveals insecurity: they are often big cowards. The uptight scream for adventure whilst the shy are dying for attention.
You will find people’s weaknesses in the opposite of the qualities they reveal to you.
There are two voids: insecurity and unhappiness. Fill their emotional voids, give them social validation. Find the roots of their unhappiness.

Law 34: Be Royal in Your Own Fashion. Act Like a King to be Treated Like One

We teach others how to treat us
The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated: In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you.
For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others.
By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown.
Leaders who try to dissolve the distance between those below them with a false chumminess gradually lose the ability to inspire loyalty, fear or love.

The Problem

1. We set up boundaries that only get firmer with time.
2. We come to expect less from the world.
3. We accept limitations that are really self-imposed.
4. We bow and scrape and apologize for even the simplest of requests.

The Solution

Deliberately force ourselves in the opposite direction.
Downplay the failures and ignore the limitations.
Make yourself demand and expect as much as a child.

Your belief in yourself will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Strategy of the Crown

If we believe we are destined for great things, our belief will radiate outward.
This outward radiance will infect the people around you.
Your limits and boundaries disappear.
5. It will surprise you how often it bears fruit.
Be overcome by your self-belief.

Even while you know you are practising a kind of deception on yourself. Act like a king or queen, you are likely to be treated as one.

The Difference

The crown may separate you from other people.
It is up to you to make that separation real.
You have to act differently, demonstrating your distance from those around you. One way to emphasize your difference is to always act with dignity, no matter the circumstance.
Do not confuse regal bearing with arrogance, it betrays insecurity.

People have expectations for how a king should act, and you must meet them in order to be treated like a king.

3 Strategies to Reinforce a Royal Demeanor

The Columbus Strategy:

1. Always make a bold demand.
2. Set your price high.
3. Do not waver.

The David and Goliath Strategy:

1. In a dignified way, go after the highest person in the building.
2. By choosing a great opponent, you create the appearance of greatness.
3. This puts you on the same plane as the chief executive you are attacking.

The Gift Strategy:

Give a gift of some sort to those above you.
By giving your patron a gift, you are saying that the two of you are equal.
It is the old con game of giving so that you can take.

The gift strategy is subtle and brilliant because you do not beg: You ask for help in a dignified way that implies equality between two people, one of whom just happens to have more money.

Law 35 — Master the Art of Timing

Fouche, a cat with 9 lives. He always recognised the spirit of the times. He did not side with the loser, he changed teams depending on who was on the downside. When the times were against him: moderates/radicals/kings in power, he kept his cool and maintained a low profile, patiently building up support among the bulwark in his next rise to power.

Recognise the moment to hide in the grass or slither under a rock, as well as the moment to bear your fangs and attack.

The time of a child is long and slow whereas for an adult it whizzes by frighteningly fast. Time depends on perception and perception can be willfully altered.
Inner turmoil of emotions makes time move faster. Once we control our emotional response to events, time will move much more slowly.

Long-time: years-long kind of time. Defensive. Waiting for opportunity.
Forced time. This is short-term time, which we manipulate as an offensive weapon
End time: The opportunity has come and now the plan must be executed with speed and force. There must be no hesitation.

Law 36 — Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them is the Best Revenge

By acknowledging a problem, you give it existence and credibility. See Lessons from Fight Club — Stop Caring
A small mistake is often made worse and more visible when you try to fix it.
The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.
You choose to let things bother you. You can just as easily choose not to notice the irritation → what you do not react to cannot drag you down in futile engagement.

The best lesson you can teach an irritating gnat is to consign it to oblivion by ignoring it.

If it is impossible to ignore, conspire to do away with it, but never waste time and energy drawing attention to the bothersome insect that will go away or die on its own.
‘If we really think very highly of a person, we should conceal it from him like a crime.’ — Arthur Schopenhauer.
Italian proverb — to disregard is to win regard.
By acknowledging other people, even if only to fight with them, you open yourself up to their influence.
Sometimes don’t engage, negotiate or compromise — you’ll just get bogged down.
By ignoring people, you cancel them out. Play the card of contempt.

‘Desire often creates paradoxical effects: The more you want something, the more you chase after it, the more it eludes you. The more interest you show, the more you repel the object of your desire.’ This is because your interest is too strong — it makes people awkward, even fearful. Uncontrollable desire makes you seem weak and pathetic.

Turn your back on what you want.
By paying undue attention to a puny enemy, you look puny.
It is tempting to want to fix our mistakes, but the harder we try, the worse we often make them.
Do not make excuses or denials: stir the waters, make it worse
Never show that you are offended or that something has affected you.
Show contempt publicly but keep an eye on the problem privately. Do not let it become a cancerous cell.

If there is something you want but realise you can’t have, act as if it never interested you in the first place. Never draw attention to it by complaining.
When attacked by an inferior, deflect people’s attention by making it clear that the attack has not even registered. When you have committed a blunder, make less of your mistake by treating it lightly.
Treat your mistake with disdain — it forces them to respond with similar indifference else they seem low and petty.