Robert greene quotes

One could draw up all different kinds of adversity depending on what your weakness is.

You have the power to think differently about who you are. You have the ability to turn off the critical voice inside of you. That's not you. That's coming from the culture. That's coming from the outside of you. You've internalized the voice of your parents, your teachers, your friends.

Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life's artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist.

Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity.

Keep your friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent

Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own belief and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware.

Remember: The best deceivers do everything they can to cloak their roguish qualities. They cultivate an air of honesty in one area to disguise their dishonesty in others. Honesty is merely another decoy in their arsenal of weapons.

People are more complicated than the masks they wear in society.

Mastery is not a function of I.Q. or natural talent or wealthy parents who can send you to the best school, but rather the result of going through a learning process, fueled by the desire to grow and the persistence to push past any obstacles.

Everybody in life is struggling for power, and some people use morality and righteousness as a weapon, while others use different means, even passive aggression. From a distance, we are all fighting, and I am looking at this from a distance.

Mastery is not a question of genetics of luck, but of following your natural inclinations and the deep desires that stirs you from within.

The Crown. Place it upon your head and you assume a different post-tranquil yet radiating assurance. Never show doubt, never lose your dignity beneath the crown, or it will not fit. It will seem to be destined for one more worthy. Do not wait for a coronation; the greatest emporers crown themselves.

You're not going to be persistent and tenacious enough if you don't love what you're doing. If it's not something that excites you, that appeals to you deep down inside.

You can die from someone else's misery — emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.

In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can enver focus enough to learn.

The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self - our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.

Never waste valuable time, or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of others—that is too high a price to pay.

Most people have no sense of self-awareness. They're not aware of what they really want. They knew it when they were younger but then as they get older they listened to parents, they listened to peers and they think that, for instance, money is the most important thing when it really isn't.

The key to success in any kind of start up is your level of persistence. It's not so much your intellect. The Zuckerburg's, Pages and Brins, that succeed have such a level of belief in what they are doing that they will put up with the kind of crap that most people won't put up with, they are incredibly persistent and resilient.

A lot of, a big problems that people have nowadays is that they can't stand moments of no stimulation in their life so they're constantly lurking, looking for entertainment, video games.

If I could simplify the whole game of power and strategy in one equation, it would all hinge on the capacity to see events around you exactly as they are. The closer your mind is to reality, the better your strategies, your responses in life.

The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.

If you're just letting the time pass at your job, it's just dead time and you'll never get it back. If at that job you're learning and you're observing and you're seeing about people and connections, it's suddenly alive time.

Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside.

Most people are perpetually locked in the present. Their decisions are overly influenced by the most immediate event; they easily become emotional and ascribe greater significance to a problem than it should have in reality.

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.

Those qualities that separate us are often ridiculed by others or criticized by teachers. Because of these judgments, we might see our strengths as disabilities and try to work around them in order to fit in. But anything that is peculiar to our makeup is precisely what we must pay the deepest attention to and lean on in our rise to mastery.

Hasty climbers have sudden falls.

The world wants to assign you a role in life. And once you accept that role you are doomed.

If you're not careful people will judge you based on these appearances and they will pigeon hole you that this is the person that you are. Your shy, your aggressive, your this type or that type and you lose the control of the dynamic, they become the ones that determine who you are. A powerful person never loses control of the dynamic they are in someway in control.

There's no more of an excuse for blaming other people or the world for at least not trying what you should be trying.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.

Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have). As children, we wanted to monopolize the attention of a parent, to draw it away from other siblings. This sense of rivalry... makes people compete for the attention.

Your unhappiness is a way of speaking to you, it's telling you something isn't right.

Her seductive power, however, did not lie in her looks [...]. In reality, Cleopatra was physically unexceptional and had no political power, yet both Caesar and Antony, brave and clever men, saw none of this. What they saw was a woman who constantly transformed herself before their eyes, a one-woman spectacle.Her dress and makeup changed from day to day, but always gave her a heightened, goddesslike appearance. Her words could be banal enough, but were spoken so sweetly that listeners would find themselves remembering not what she said but how she said it.

If we experience any failures or setbacks, we do not forget them because they offend our self-esteem. Instead we reflect on them deeply, trying to figure out what went wrong and discern whether there are any patterns to our mistakes.

You must always be prepared to place a bet on yourself, on your future, by heading in a direction that others seem to fear.

All great leaders since Moses have known that a feared enemy must be crushed completely. (Sometimes they have learned this the hard way.) If one ember is left alight, no matter how dimly it smolders, a fire will eventually break out. More is lost through stopping halfway than through total annihilation: The enemy will recover, and will seek revenge. Crush him, not only in body but in spirit.

Understand: you are one of a kind. Your character traits are a kind of chemical mix that will never be repeated in history. There are ideas unique to you, a specific rhythm and perspective that are your strengths, not your weaknesses. You must not be afraid of your uniqueness and you must care less and less what people think of you.

Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter

Be as fluid as water, do not give your enemies anything solid to atack

I just know who I am and what's comfortable for me and I don't personally do things in life because others do it or because that's what society tells me I should do.

Trouble can often be traced to a single strong individual — the stirrer, the arrogant underling, the poisoner of goodwill. If you allow such people room to operate, others will succumb to their influence. Do not wait for the troubles they cause to multiply, do not try to negotiate with them — they are irredeemable. Neutralize their influence by isolating or banishing them. Strike at the source of the trouble and the sheep will scatter.

Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all cost. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses.

Boldness makes even the smallest animal dangerous

Think of it this way: 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.

Win through your actions, never through argument.

When it comes to power, outshining the master is perhaps the worst mistake of all.

No moment is wasted if you pay attention and learn the lessons contained in every experience.

Ethics and power are separate. Ethics and morality. I think life would be miserable if there weren't some kind of code that people operated by, but history is full of many, many people who have gotten power by very unethical means, and people who were very ethical, who get no power, people who have the most brilliant, lovely, wonderful, nice intentions and bring about horrible things in the world because they don't know how to play the power game.

The worst thing is to sit and whine and complain and obsess about money as if that were the only sign of your worth as a human.

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

Understand: people will constantly attack you in life. One of their main weapons will be to instill in you doubts about yourself – your worth, your abilities, your potential. They will often disguise this as their objective opinion, but invariably it has a political purpose – they want to keep you down.

Everybody knows what they were kind of drawn towards or what they're gifted at and it's more of courage and looking at yourself and saying, "I'm going to try something and move back in that direction." So it's less of an intellectual problem and it's more of an emotional problem because as you get into your 30's and 40's you get addicted to a paycheck and a comfort and you delude yourself into thinking this is what my life is and you lack the guts to be honest with yourself and to make that change.

To be strategic in life is like any skill whether it's basketball or learning a language, it takes effort and practice and I think most people don't think that it's something that they could just do, you know, naturally.

If you're meant to do something like writing and you end up going into banking or finance, your going to be miserable. You're trying to fit something into a square peg and a round hole. It's just never going to work.

If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.

Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.

All the most successful people nowadays who are truly successful and innovative in their field are not people motivated by money.

Any momentary triumph you think you have gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory. The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate.

There is something I call social intelligence. You can do a lot in life on your own and you can do all kinds of stuff, but if you're really bad with people, if you're really naive or aggressive and push people away, if you don't know the political environment you're in, it invalidates all the things you know. You're not going to get anywhere.

I just do what I want to do without hurting other people and you know, I wish other people would do the same.

People around you, constantly under the pull of their emotions, change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending on their mood. You must never assume that what people say or do in a particular moment is a statement of their permanent desires.

If you're really driven and you want something deep, hard enough in life, you're going to get it.

It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause by yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others — playing people against one another, making them pursue you.

Be relentless in your pursuit for expansion.

For the future, the motto is, "No days unalert."

It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.

The moment people feel they know what to expect from you, your spell on them is broken.

When our emotions are engaged, we often have trouble seeing things as they are.

Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think.

Nothing is given to you.

Never take your position for granted and never let any favors you receive go to your head.

If you view everything through the lens of fear, then you tend to stay in retreat mode. You can just as easily see a crises or problem as a challenge, an opportunity to prove your mettle, the chance to strengthen and toughen yourself, or a call to collective action. By seeing it as a challenge, you will have converted this negative into a positive purely by a mental process that will result in positive action as well.

When people are too present, too familiar or too in our face, something happens to us psychologically. We begin to tune them out, we begin to get sick of them, we begin to know them so well and become so familiar with who they are that we loose a bit of respect for them. You pass a certain threshold with the fact that you're too present in their lives, too much in their face and once that threshold is passed you're never going to repair it they have lost a certain respect for you.

No one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you.

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power

I have an argument that to master any field, it's simple: it's a function of time. How much you devote yourself to the process, how much experience you get, how much you're willing to expand your limits, how willing you are to develop your own style. If you're willing to put 10,000 hours, something amazing is going to happen.

You could have a lot of money at your fingertips, the finest education and intellectual knowledge, but if you are governed by fear none of that will matter. You will remain tied to dead ideas and stale strategies. You will not be able to adapt. You will lose what you have.

You have a set of skills, a way of looking at the world, and often in childhood it was revealed to you by things that you were just kind of naturally drawn to.

The human tongue is a beast that few can master.

The problem with human beings is that they can't sit alone in a room for more than an hour.

If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox way, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them.They will find away to punish you for making them feel inferior. It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch. Share your originality only with tolerant friends and those who are sure to appreciate your uniqueness.

There's physical adversity, that if you are someone that likes exercise like I do, I exercise everyday. When you exercise, there's pain involved and so you're putting yourself through adversity in that situation. It's never totally pleasurable and there are moments where it's kind of boring or painful and you know that in doing that, you're making your mind and body tougher and more resilient. So must be able to deal with the boredom that happens in life.

We happen to live in an era that is incredibly wrapped up in notions of political correctness; everything is seen through the lens of politics. But being political and politically correct is just another way of fighting, another form of power and strategy, an insidious means of manipulation.

Few are born bold. Even Napoleon had to cultivate the habit on the battlefield, where he knew it was a matter of life and death. In social settings he was awkward and timid, but he overcame this and practice boldness in every part of his life because he saw its tremendous power, how it could literally enlarge a man(even one who, like Napoleon, was in fact conspicuously small).

The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.

Things like reading a book or learning a language, or taking a walk - they're not stimulating. Your mind has to sort of learn how to deal with that kind of stimulation on its own. So that's a very important form of adversity.

When you have any kind of success in life, that's like the most dangerous moment that you're in because you're going to tend to think wow, I can just keep repeating what I've done. I'm a great person. People love me. All of the sudden they're giving me all of this attention. You get drunk on it and you lose your sense of balance and your sense of detachment. I know it's happened to me.

Nothing is stable in the realm of power, and even closest of friends can be transformed into the worst of enemies.

The point of the adversity is to toughen your mind so that you can handle difficult circumstances in life. Your mind, toughen just like you toughen your body. So it really depends on what you need. It really depends on the individual.

True genius, in strategy or anywhere, lies in self-control, self-mastery, presence of mind, fluidity of thought.

What's good for me is certainly not good for other people.

I believe that everything happens for a reason, and what seems bad at first might in fact be something of a blessing.

In the past, Being able to follow what you're naturally "should" be good at was limited to a very few people in a country like the United States, It was white men who basically had the privileges - or, you name whatever country it is, there's some group of elites who, through various processes of democratization and things like the internet and the information that's available. It's exploding!

Life goes by very fast. And the worst thing in life that you can have is a job that you hate, that you have no energy in, that you're not creative with and you're not thinking of the future. To me, might as well be dead.

People go into things for the wrong reasons.

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

Fear creates its own self-fulfilling dynamic- as people give into it, they lose energy and momentum. Their lack of confidence translates into inaction that lowers confidence levels even further, on and on.

Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.

The big difference is, as a man, I can go to a bar at two in the morning and people will be like "He's just a fun guy! That's cool that he can balance all these things." But if you see a person that you know who has two young kids and is a mom, there's no way those perceptions are the same. It's like "Oh, there must be a problem." That's usually what women face.

Only create associations with positive affinities. Make this a rule of life and you will benefit more than from all the therapy in the world.

When you raise your opinion of yourself and what you are capable of it has a decided influence on what you do.

Understand: A person of power instills a kind of fear by deliberately unsettling those around him to keep the initative on his side.

You're always feeling powerless in life. If you're in an abusive relationship or working for what we call a psychotic boss sometimes the only option is to leave because you're emotions get so entangled with these manipulative people that staying there you're just helpless because they're good at passive aggressive games and you're not, so you have to leave.

Never whine, never complain, never try to justify yourself.

In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine.

You are facing death and danger and competition, but at any moment, you can decide to have a fearless mindset.

Nobody is born without fear. We are all born into this world screaming and crying, a bloody mess. We're afraid of failing. What differentiates people is that some of them tend to deal more with fearful situations and understand that it's hurting them in life. That by becoming fearful they're maiming themselves and they learn to move past these fears.

If you are worried about what others might think and about how your position in the group might be jeopardized, then you will never really create anything.

Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. Some people are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger. If you want to turn people down, it is best to do so politely and respectfully, even if you feel their request is impudent or their offer ridiculous.

Become who you are by learning who you are.

If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.

If you want to be powerful in life you have to enjoy the process. You have to get pleasure out of making the thing that you're making. There has to be that kind of purpose behind it. If your purpose is simply gaining power, if that becomes your end in life then you end up sort of destroying yourself because you lose the sense of detachment that's very necessary.

Love is a lock that linketh noble minds, Faith is the key that shuts the spring of love.

Any titles, money, or privilege you inherit are actually hindrances. They delude you into believing you are owed respect.

We must create our own world or we will die from inaction

Being the free woman who is sexy and out there is a performance in a way, and being the stay-at-home mom and wife is a performance in itself. All of those performances are living and force you to make decisions about who you really are. Women have to put those performances ahead of things sometimes. Men aren't perceived in the same way.

Some people are a little bit better than others, some people are great, some people are superior. It depends on the level of effort.

With such a deep rooted interest you can withstand the setbacks and failures, the days of drudgery, and the hard work that are always a part of any creative action. You can ignore the doubters and critics. You will then feel personally committed to solving the problem and will not rest until you do so.

Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feel motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive.

Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.

When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity... you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others

Be wary of friends—they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.