These laws are not for Joe Schmo who’s got a colleague he doesn’t like.” So what does he mean? “I’m talking about the way large companies deal with each other, for example in technology it’s a dog-eat-dog environment. “When I say ‘Crush your enemy’, I don’t literally mean it.”
When pressed, it appears that Greene takes most of his laws with a healthy pinch of salt. Also the wife of a very well-known NBA player contacted me recently – she feels she’s lost the limelight and wanted my help thinking about her own career.” At the moment I’m helping a university professor who got fired for very ugly political reasons. But the emails and letters I get are so effusive, most people tell me ‘You saved my life, thank you’. There are some borderline cases where maybe somebody got inspired. Evil or manipulative people don’t need a book, they just do it anyway. “It would make me feel terrible if I thought that. “That’s a cat’s paw,” he says, referring to my question.
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It’s not a manual on how to be as creepy as possible, it’s a book about what’s going on in the real world.”īut does he ever worry that he is making the world a worse place? Greene looks affronted. “My favourite one was a magazine headline that called it ‘Chicken soup for the soulless’. I ask him if he minds such comments: “Not really,” he chuckles. No wonder The New Yorker described Greene’s original book as a manual on “how to be a creep”. Phew – I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of a man whose other unnerving laws include “Keep others in suspended terror” (Law 17) and “Pose as a friend, work as a spy” (Law 14). I’m quite intuitive at smelling out the bad, the snakes. “Yes, but I’ll probably analyse you more after you’ve gone.
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Sitting in his comfortable living room stuffed full of books and record albums, Greene is quite intense and jittery, watching everything I do like a hawk: “Wow, your handwriting is very interesting,” he says, as I make some notes. His next, The 33 Strategies of War, taught readers to apply battleground thinking to everyday life, from “Create a threatening presence” to “Destroy from within”. Power was followed by The Art of Seduction, a manual on how to make the masses adore you – and snare a mate. Charmingly, Charney also furnishes every employee he fires with their own copy. Fidel Castro has reportedly read it, the famed Hollywood producer Brian Grazer has personally sought out Greene’s advice, as has Charney, who says of Greene, “I call him Jesus”. Not that its adherents all admit to using its sometimes dubious principles – such as Law 15: Crush your enemy totally. It remains one of the most requested books in prison libraries.
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The “bible for atheists”, as Dov Charney, the founder and CEO of American Apparel, has described it, has been embraced by rappers, movie moguls, captains of industry and criminals alike. And it’s not only business students who have become devotees. The 48 Laws of Power has sold 1.2 million copies in the United States alone. His first book is likely to remain his most influential. Plumbers can be masters, the guy who did my patio is a master, some people are masters at raising really great children.” “I don’t mean to intimidate people with my examples,” says Greene, sipping a cup of tea.
There’s a sense of entitlement, an attitude of ‘If my phone isn’t fast enough, screw Apple’.”įor every master, I say, there must be thousands more who aim high and fail. Greene nods: “There are so many distractions now – I’m really concerned that people in the future won’t know how to build a bridge or create a political movement. The level of dedication Greene advocates – 10,000 hours of apprenticeship for example – is impossible for most people. Greene uses historical ‘masters’ such as Charles Darwin and Mozart as examples, as well as modern ones like the architect Santiago Calatrava.Īlthough inspiring overall, some aspects are discouraging. Key is identifying one’s life’s passion, then undertaking an apprenticeship and finding a mentor to guide you. I think anybody who did would be a horrible ugly person to be around,” laughs Greene, who has just written a new book called Mastery, a sort of self-help book on how to fulfil your own intrinsic potential. “Everyone assumes I practise all of my own laws but I don’t.
So I am surprised to be greeted by an affable bespectacled man, wearing slightly crumpled clothes, at the door of his Spanish-style bungalow off a busy street in Los Feliz, a bohemian area on LA’s west side. One would be forgiven for thinking that Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, the international bestseller on how to shin up the greasy pole, must be an arrogant megalomaniac living behind security gates in one of Los Angeles’s smartest neighbourhoods.
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