50th law of power pdf free download

Some go too far, others not far enough. And yet others make all the right moves and are able to draw power unto themselves with an almost superhuman dexterity.

This bestselling edition shares with us the wisdom of great thinkers such as Machiavelli, Sun-tzu and Carl Von Clausewitz, as well as legacies of statesmen, warriors, seducers and con men throughout the ages.

By using this workbook, you'll find out how to stand out of the crowd, how to be the most desired person amidst your peers and superiors. In the book "The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene, Greene the author of several other bestselling books like; The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, and The 50th Law gives out 48 laws through which we can gain maximum power and control in life.

He was of the opinion that life is filled with principles that make things happen. Without the knowledge of these principles, we'll simply be victims of life. That's not a good thing for anyone which is why you deserve to know the principles of power. In this workbook you will get; Chapter by chapter summaries for guidance and recollection of the 48 laws Questions which hone your insight and stretch your own boundaries Concise key point sum ups at the end of each chapter to capture crucial facts And much more!

The summary aspect of this book serves as a refresher to help you keep touch of the 48 laws of power and its pecks without having to go back to reread the original book each time you feel like you've forgotten a thing or two. While the workbook aspect helps you put what you've read into practice to help make it stick both in your head, and in your everyday life.

In order to maximize the benefits of this book, you need to attempt ALL questions. Take out the time to reflect on the answers before you write them down and don't be in a hurry. If you need to take some time off when answering the questions, then by all means do so. Overall I feel the book delivered on its purpose.

Personally the book was inspiring. I of course had been a casual fan of 50 Cents music but I had no idea that behind the scenes was a man who overcame so much and intelligently clawed his way to the top.

And it was so good that I read through it quickly and went out and bought all of Greenes other books. Greenes books paint a picture of reality as it is not as some want it to be. They give you the tools to protect yourself and thrive in the world.

They are that powerful and good. So do I recommend this book? Absolutely for yourself and maybe your spouse or kids so they can survive and thrive too.

Before it is too late you must master the art of knowing when and how to be bad — using deception, manipulation, and outright force at the appropriate moments. Everyone operates with a flexible morality when it comes to their self-interest — you are simply making this more conscious and effective. If leaders are fearful, hesitant to take any risks, or overly concerned for their ego and reputation, then this invariably filters its way through the entire group and makes effective action impossible.

Complaining and haranguing people to work harder has a counterproductive effect. You must adopt the opposite style: imbue your troops with the proper spirit through your actions, not words.

They see you working harder than anyone, holding yourself to the highest standards, taking risks with confidence, and making tough decisions. This inspires and binds the group together. In these democratic times, you must practice what you preach. You must work the opposite angle, thinking first of the public. You need to keep your focus on their changing needs, the trends that are washing through them.

Never lose touch with your base. Boredom is their great enemy and fear. Whatever they manage to get slips through their hands as fast as it comes in. You, on the other hand, want to outlast your rivals. You are building the foundation for something that can continue to expand.

You had a need and hunger for knowledge, to overcome this ignorance, so you observed the world as closely as possible, absorbing large amounts of information. Everything was a source of wonder. With time our minds tend to close off. At some point, we feel like we know what we need to know; our opinions are certain and firm. We do this out of fear. If we go too far in this direction, we can become extremely defensive and cover up our fears by acting with supreme confidence and certainty.

What you need to do in life is return to that mind you possessed as a child, opening up to experience instead of closing it off.

Let go of your preconceptions and even your most cherished beliefs. Listen to the people around you with more attentiveness. See everything as a source for education— even the most banal encounters. Imagine that the world is still full of mystery. When you operate this way, you will notice that something strange often happens.

Opportunities will begin to fall into your lap because you are suddenly more receptive to them. Sometimes luck or serendipity is more a function of the openness of your mind.

But there is more involved than just that. There is also the morale of the enemy soldiers, the political leaders who set them in motion, the minds of the opposing generals who make the key decisions, and the money and resources that stand behind it all. A mediocre general will confine his knowledge to the physical terrain. A better general will try to expand his knowledge by reading reports about the other factors that influence an army.

And the superior general will try to intensify this knowledge by observing as much as he can with his own eyes or consulting firsthand sources. Napoleon Bonaparte is the greatest general who ever lived, and what elevated him above all others was the mass of information he absorbed about all of the details of battle, with as few filters as possible. This gave him a superior grasp on reality. Your goal is to follow the path of Napoleon.

You want to take in as much as possible with your own eyes. You communicate with people up and down the chain of command within your organization.

You do not draw any barriers to your social interactions. You want to expand your access to different ideas. Force yourself to go to events and places that are beyond your usual circle. If you cannot observe something firsthand, try to get reports that are more direct and less filtered, or vary the sources so that you can see things from several sides. Get a fingertip feel for everything going on in your environment—the complete terrain.

After prison, his mission in life was to figure out the source of the problem for blacks in America. Finally he arrived at what he believed to be the root cause— dependency.

If they could end this dependency, they would have the power to reverse everything. When you do not get to the root of a problem, you cannot solve it in any meaningful manner. People like to look at the surfaces, get all emotional and react, doing things that make them feel better in the short term but do nothing for them in the long term. This must be the power and the direction of your mind whenever you encounter some problem—to bore deeper and deeper until you get at something basic and at the root.

Never be satisfied with what presents itself to your eyes. See what underlies it all, absorb it, and then dig deeper. Always question why this particular event has happened, what the motives of the various actors are, who really is in control, who benefits by this action. Often, it will revolve around money and power—that is what people are usually fighting over, despite the surface gloss they give to it.

You may never get to the actual root, but the process of digging will bring you closer. And operating in this way will help develop your mind into a powerful analytical instrument. But most people, out of fear, limit their view of the future to a narrow range—thoughts of tomorrow, a few weeks ahead, perhaps a vague plan for the months to come.

We are generally dealing with so many immediate battles, it is hard for us to lift our gaze above the moment. It is a law of power, however, that the further and deeper we contemplate the future, the greater our capacity to shape it according to our desires. With your gaze lifted to the future, you can focus on the dangers looming on the horizon and take proactive measures to avert them.

All of this gives you an increased power to reach your objectives. As part of this process, look at the smaller problems that are plaguing you or your enterprise in the present, and draw arrows to the future, imagining what they could possibly lead to if they grow larger.

Think of your own biggest mistakes or those of others. How could they have been foreseen? Generally there are signs that seem so obvious afterwards.

Now imagine those very same signs that you are probably ignoring in the present. It should be the same in the game of life. Everyone is playing to win, and some people will use moral justifications to advance their side. In this area, you are fiercely realistic. You understand that everyone is after power, and that to get it we all occasionally manipulate and even deceive.

That is human nature and there is no shame in it. As part of this approach, you must become a better observer of people. This cannot be done on the Internet. It must be honed in personal interactions. You are trying to read people, see through them as best you can. You come to understand, for instance, that a person who is too obviously friendly after too short a time is often up to no good. If they flatter you, it is generally out of envy. Behavior that stands out and seems excessive is a sign.

Pay more attention to the details, to the little things they reveal in their day-to-day lives. Their decisions reveal a lot, and you can often discern a pattern if you look at them closely. In general, looking at people through the lens of your emotions will cloud what you see and make you misunderstand everything.

Think of this as a ritual you will engage in every few weeks—a rigorous reassessment of who you are and where you are headed. Look at your most recent actions as if they were the maneuvers of another person. Imagine how you could have done it all better—avoided unnecessary battles or confronted people who stood in your way, instead of running away from them.

The goal here is not to beat up on yourself but to have the capacity to adapt and change your behavior by moving closer to the reality. The endgame of such an exercise is to cultivate the proper sense of detachment from yourself and from life. It is not that you want to feel this detachment at every moment. There are times that require you to act with heart and boldness, without doubts or self-distance. On many occasions, however, you need to be able to assess what is happening, without your ego or emotions coloring your perceptions.

Moving to a calm, detached inner position to observe events will become a habit and something you can rely on amid any crisis. At those moments in life when others lose their balance, you will find yours with relative ease. As a person who cannot be easily ruffled by events, you will attract attention and power. Realists, according to conventional wisdom, can be practical to a fault; they often lack a feel for the finer, higher things in life. Taken too far, such types can be cynical, manipulative, Machiavellian.

They stand in contrast to dreamers, people of high imagination who inspire us with their ideals or divert us with their fantastical creations. This is a concept that comes from looking at the world through the lens of fear. It is time we reverse this perspective and see dreamers and realists in their true light.

Realists, on the other hand, are the real inventors and innovators. They are men and women of imagination, but their imagination is in close contact with the environment, with reality—they are empirical scientists, writers with a sharp understanding of human nature, or leaders who guide us thoughtfully through crises.

They are strong enough to see the world as it is, including their own personal inadequacies. Let us take this further. The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality. The money he had earned the previous few years as a corner hustler was all gone, and his once loyal customers had all found other dealers to buy from.

A friend, now running a fairly large crack-cocaine operation, offered Curtis a job bagging up drugs. He would be paid a daily wage, and not a bad one. Curtis desperately needed the money, so he accepted the offer. Perhaps further down the road his friend would cut him in on some of the action and he could reestablish his own business. But from the first day on the job, he realized that this was all a mistake. He was working with a group of other baggers, all former dealers.

They were now hired help; they had to show up at a certain time and bow down to the authority of their employers. Curtis had lost not only his money but also his freedom. This new position went against all of the survival lessons he had learned up till then in his short life. Curtis had never known his father, and his mother had been murdered when he was eight years old. His grandparents had essentially raised him; they were loving and kind, but they had a lot of children to look after and not much time to give individual attention.

If he wanted any kind of guidance or advice, there was nobody in his life to turn to. What all of this meant was that he was essentially alone in this world. He could not rely on anyone to give him anything.

He would have to fend for himself. Then crack cocaine exploded on the streets in the mids and everything changed in neighborhoods like his. In the past, large gangs controlled the drug business, and to be involved you had to fit into their structure and spend years moving up the ladder.

But crack was so easy to manufacture and the demand was so high, that anyone—no matter how young—could get in on the game without any startup capital. You could work on your own and make good money. For those like Curtis who grew up with little parental supervision and a disdain for authority, being a corner dealer was the perfect fit—no political games, no bosses above you.

And so he quickly joined the growing pool of hustlers dealing crack on the streets of Southside Queens. As he got further into the game, he learned a fundamental lesson. There were endless problems and dangers confronting the street hustler— undercover cops, fiends, and rival dealers scheming to rob you. If you were weak, you looked for others to help you or for some crutch to lean on, such as drugs or alcohol. This was the path of doom. The only way to survive was to admit you were on your own, learn to make your own decisions, and trust your judgment.

Do not ask for what you need but take it. Depend only on your wits. It was as if a hustler, born amid squalor and cramped quarters, possessed an empire.

This was not something physical—the corner that he worked or the neighborhood he wanted to take over. It was his time, his energy, his creative schemes, his freedom to move where he wanted to. If he kept command of that empire, he would make money and thrive. This was a turning point. He looked at the other baggers.

They all had suffered downturns in fortune—violence, prison time, etc. They had become scared and tired of the grind. They wanted the comfort and security of a paycheck.

Perhaps they could go on like this for several years, but the day of reckoning would come when there were no more jobs and they had forgotten how to fend for themselves. It was ludicrous for Curtis to imagine that the man now employing him to bag would some day help him set up shop. They think of themselves and they use you.

He had to get out now, before that empire slipped from his hands and he became yet another former hustler dependent on favors. He quickly went into full hustling mode and figured his way out of the trap.

At the end of the first day, he made a deal with the baggers. He would dole out the daily cash he had been paid for the job to all of them. In return, he would teach them how to put less crack in each capsule but make it look full he had been doing this on the street for years.

They were then to give Curtis the extra crack that was left over from each capsule. Within a week, he had accumulated enough drugs to return to hustling on the streets, on his terms. He would rather die. Years later, Curtis now known as 50 Cent had managed to segue into a music career, and after a fierce mix-tape campaign on the streets of New York in which he became a local celebrity, he gained the attention of Eminem, who helped sign him to a lucrative deal on his own label within Interscope Records.

But the more time he spent in their cushy offices, the more he had the feeling that he was at yet another turning point in his life. The game these music executives were playing was simple: They owned your music and a lot more.

In return, they lavished you with money and perks. They created a feeling of dependence—without their massive machine behind you, you were helpless in the face of a viciously competitive business. In essence, you were exchanging money for freedom. And once you internally succumbed to their logic and their money, you were finished.

You were a high-paid bagger doing a job. And so, as before, Fifty went into full hustling mode to reclaim his empire. In the short term, he schemed to shoot his own videos, with his own money, and come up with his own marketing schemes. To Interscope it seemed like he was saving them time and resources, but to Fifty it was a subtle way to regain control over his image. He set up a record label for his own stable of artists from within Interscope and he used this label to teach himself all aspects of production.

He created his own website where he could experiment with new ways to market his music. He turned the dependence dynamic around, using Interscope as a school for teaching him how to run things on his own. All of this was part of the endgame he had in mind—he would run out his contract with Interscope, and instead of renegotiating a new one, he would proclaim his independence and be the first artist to set up his own freestanding record label.

From such a position of power, he would have no more executives to please and he could expand his empire on his own terms. It would be just like the freedom he had experienced on the streets, but on a global scale.

But over the years you tend to give all of this away. You spend years working for others—they own you during that period. Without realizing it you squander your independence, everything that makes you a creative individual.

Before it is too late, you must reassess your entire concept of ownership. It is not about possessing things or money or titles. You can have all of that in abundance but if you are someone who still looks to others for help and guidance, if you depend on your money or resources, then you will eventually lose what you have when people let you down, adversity strikes, or you reach for some foolish scheme out of impatience.

True ownership can come only from within. It comes from a disdain for anything or anybody that impinges upon your mobility, from a confidence in your own decisions, and from the use of your time in constant pursuit of education and improvement.

Only from this inner position of strength and self-reliance will you be able to truly work for yourself and never turn back. If situations arise in which you must take in partners or fit within another organization, you are mentally preparing yourself for the moment when you will move beyond these momentary entanglements.

If you do not own yourself first, you will continually be at the mercy of people and circumstance, looking outward instead of relying on yourself and your wits. The old power centers are breaking up. Individuals everywhere want more control over their destiny and have much less respect for an authority that is not based on merit but on mere power. We have all naturally come to question why someone should rule over us, why our source of information should depend on the mainstream media, and on and on.

We do not accept what we accepted in the past. Where we are naturally headed with all of this is the right and capacity to run our own enterprise, in whatever shape or form, to experience that freedom.

We are all corner hustlers in a new economic environment and to thrive in it we must cultivate the kind of self-reliance that helped push Fifty past all of the dangerous dependencies that threatened him along the way. For Fifty it was very clear—he was alone in the house he grew up in and on the streets. He lacked the usual supports and so he was forced to become self-sufficient. It is harder for us to realize that we are essentially alone in this world and in need of the skills that Fifty had to develop for himself on the streets.

We have layers of support that seem to prop us up. But these supports are illusions in the end. Everyone in the world is governed by self-interest. People naturally think first of themselves and their agendas. An occasional affectionate or helpful gesture from people you know tends to cloud this reality and make you expect more of this support—until you are disappointed, again and again. You are more alone than you imagine. This should not be a source of fear but of freedom.

When you prove to yourself that you can get things on your own, then you experience a sense of liberation. You are no longer waiting for people to do this or that for you a frustrating and infuriating experience.

You have confidence that you can manage any adverse situation on your own. The following year he was convicted and sentenced to three consecutive life terms. Through it all Carter vehemently maintained his innocence, and in he was finally exonerated of the crimes and set free. But for those nineteen years, he had to endure one of the most brutal environments known to man, one designed to break down every last vestige of autonomy.

Carter knew he would be freed at some point. But on the day of his release, would he walk the streets with a spirit crushed by years in prison? Would he be the kind of former prisoner who keeps coming back into the system because he can no longer do anything for himself? He decided that he would defeat the system—he would use the years in prison to develop his self-reliance so that when he was freed it would mean something.

For this purpose he devised the following strategy: He would act like a free man while surrounded by walls. He would not wear their uniform or carry an ID badge. He was an individual, not a number. He would not eat with the other prisoners, do the assigned tasks, or go to his parole hearings. He was placed in solitary confinement for these transgressions but he was not afraid of the punishments, nor of being alone.

He was afraid only of losing his dignity and sense of ownership. He knew he would grow dependent on these weak pleasures and this would give the wardens something to take away from him. Also, such diversions were merely attempts to kill time. Instead he became a voracious reader of books that would help toughen his mind.

He wrote an autobiography that gained sympathy for his cause. He taught himself law, determined to get his conviction overturned by himself. He tutored other prisoners in the ideas that he had learned through his reading. In this way, he reclaimed the dead time of prison for his own purposes.

When he was eventually freed, he refused to take civil action against the state—that would acknowledge he had been in prison and needed compensation. He needed nothing. He was now a free man with the essential skills to get power in the world. Think of it this way: dependency is a habit that is so easy to acquire. We live in a culture that offers you all kinds of crutches—experts to turn to, drugs to cure any psychological unease, mild pleasures to help pass or kill time, jobs to keep you just above water.

It is hard to resist. But once you give in, it is like a prison you enter that you cannot ever leave. You continually look outward for help and this severely limits your options and maneuverability. When the time comes, as it inevitably does, when you must make an important decision, you have nothing inside of yourself to depend on. Before it is too late, you must move in the opposite direction. You cannot get this requisite inner strength from books or a guru or pills of any kind.

It can come only from you. As happened with Carter and with Fifty, you will find that self-reliance becomes the habit and that anything that smacks of depending on others will horrify you. We began life as willful creatures who had yet to be tamed.

We wanted and demanded things for ourselves, and we knew how to get them from the adults around us. And yet at the same time, we were completely dependent on our parents for so many important things—comfort, protection, love, guidance.

And so from deep inside, we developed an ambivalence. We wanted the freedom and power to move on our own, but we also craved the comfort and security only others could give us. In adolescence we rebelled against the dependent part of our character. We wanted to differentiate ourselves from our parents and show that we could fend for ourselves.

But as we get older, that childhood ambivalence tends to return to the surface. In the face of so many difficulties and competition in the adult world, a part of us yearns to return to that childish position of dependence. We maintain an adult face and work to gain power for ourselves, but deep inside we secretly wish that our spouses, partners, friends, or bosses could take care of us and solve our problems. We must wage a ferocious war against this deeply embedded ambivalence, with a clear understanding of what is at stake.

Our task as an adult is to take full possession of that autonomy and individuality we were born with. It is to finally overcome the dependent phase in childhood and stand on our own. We must see the desire for a return to that phase as regressive and dangerous.

It comes from fear—of being responsible for our success and failure, of having to act on our own and make the hard decisions. We will often package this as the opposite—that by working for others, being dutiful, fitting in, or subsuming our personality to the group, we are being a good person.

But that is our fear speaking and deluding us. If we give in to this fear, then we will spend our lives looking outward for salvation and never find it. We will merely move from one dependency to another. For most of us, the critical terrain in this war is the work world. Most of us enter adult life with great ambitions for how we will start our own ventures, but the harshness of life wears us down. We forget the essential truth that all humans are governed by self-interest.

Our bosses keep us around out of need, not affection. They will get rid of us the moment that need is less acute or they find someone younger and less expensive to replace us. If we succumb to the illusion and the comfort of a paycheck, we then neglect to build up self-reliant skills and merely postpone the day of reckoning when we are forced to fend for ourselves. Your life must be a progression towards ownership—first mentally of your independence, and then physically of your work, owning what you produce.

Think of the following steps as a kind of blueprint for how to move in this direction. It was drudge work and he hated it. Cornelius was a willful, ambitious child, and so in his mind he made the following determination: within a couple of years he was going to start his own shipping enterprise.

This simple decision altered everything. Now this job was an urgent apprenticeship. Instead of dull labor, it was now an exciting challenge.

He used the money to buy a boat and began ferrying passengers between Manhattan and Staten Island.