The 48 Laws of Power

The laws contradict each other. There's a law telling you to hide and another telling you to grab attention at any cost hahaha. But Greene himself hands you the key at the end of each chapter: he shows when the law stops working. That changed how I read the whole book. Not every law in there is a law for life. Many are laws for a context.

Never outshine the master, for example: I had already seen it happen at work before reading, and afterwards I started recognising it in meetings, in negotiations, in how a manager reacts to a piece of work that turned out too good.

What I like about Greene is the amount of real history backing up each law. You can disagree with the morality, but it's hard to disagree with the pattern. It's one of my favourites, and I recommend it to anyone mature enough to separate observing from practising. For someone just starting to read about power, I'd send them to Sun Tzu first.

The biggest problem is the pace. The book is long, repetitive in places, and the cynical tone wears you out if you read it in one go. That same tone is both a virtue and a big problem with Greene. Often overdone. Anyone who reads it as a code of conduct, rather than a catalogue of patterns, risks becoming an unbearable person within six months.