Opinion
Greene: Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs was rushed and shallow.
“You know, I like Walter Isaacson. I think he's a very fine biographer, but You know, even like the Steve jobs that he's rushed, he's got to write it because she just died. And like, I don't really feel like when I read that book, I understand the man, Steve jo…”
Insight
Greene: Most Books on Power Ignore How Manipulative People Truly Are
“A lot of the books out there that talk about power in this world, I feel like really unrealistic. They're very wary of the truth. And the truth is, as I discovered in all my different jobs, is that people are, can be very manipulative. They don't show it. It's…”
Insight
Greene: Entering a book with a rigid outline kills the writing
“And so it's a growing process, as I said, you keep it open, because if you go into a book, oh, I know exactly what it's going to be, and how many chapters, and what, it dies on the vine.”
Opinion
Greene: Much contemporary nonfiction is thin and poorly thought through
“Some of it, quite honestly, is really bad. I just say it outright. You know, I read books About envy, or I have them on my shelf. I have dozens of them, and they're so thin, and they're so unthought through and they're so irritating that I much prefer the way …”
Insight
Greene: Excessive talking signals insecurity, whereas admitting mistakes signals authenticity
“They're talking so much, but that's always a sign of insecurity. A kind of a quietness, a seriousness people who kind of admit that they're not always right generally are signs of the non-bullshitter.”
Assertion Contradicted
Greene: "48 Laws of Power" sales spiked after Donald Trump's election.
“Every now and then there'll be an article and suddenly the sales spike, or when Trump got elected, suddenly the sales spiked.”
Insight
Robert Greene: Technical competence without interpersonal skill will not lead to success
“In order to be good in your field, you have to know how to deal with people. That's Well over half the equation in any kind of power situation, so you could be brilliant at coding or whatever it is that you're good at, but if you don't know how to deal with pe…”
Insight
Greene: Projects should remain open-ended early on to maintain creative discovery
“In any project, you need to keep things a little bit, you have to keep things open-ended, so that you're just constantly discovering, and that keeps you excited and energized and creative, so I never kind of close the book.”
Insight
Greene: A book on human nature cannot focus solely on white men
“You can't write a book about human nature if it's all white men”
Insight
Greene: Handwriting notes fosters deeper thinking than typing on a computer
“Writing things out by hand has a logic to it. So when I'm going through a book, and I'm taking notes, and I'm scrawling with my fountain pen on a card, I'm actually thinking more deeply than when I'm sitting there typing stuff on the computer. I don't know how…”
Disclosure
Greene actively avoids reading Malcolm Gladwell to preserve his own originality.
“He's a great writer, but I try not to read his books because I don't want to be covering or overlapping or being inspired by what's already out there. I want to hit something new. I want to be original. I want to say something that comes from my brain.”
Insight
Greene: Indirect approaches create decisive psychological advantages over direct frontal confrontation.
“When you approach people indirectly it has tremendous psychological advantage power. So when you hit people from the side with an attack there's no punch that's more powerful than boxing than the one that comes from the side and is unexpected. It has relevance…”
Insight
Greene: Constant distraction deprives the brain of space for unconscious idea processing.
“The way the human brain works is your best ideas come to you when you're not thinking about them. You know if you're sitting there always doing other things and chatting with people and texting them, The brain won't have the mental space to unconsciously proce…”
Insight
Greene: A person's favorite conversational subject is always themselves
“People love to talk about themselves. I mean, that's, Law number one of human psychology. People, the favorite subject for anybody, myself included, is myself.”
Disclosure
Greene was fired from a television research job for outshining his superiors.
“Law number one of the book is never outshine the master, and I probably violated that law maybe three or four times prior to writing the book where I'd be the researcher on a television show and I was so good at it that everybody hated me. I was like, you know…”
Insight
Greene: Speaking Less Forces Others to Reveal Weaknesses and Desires
“The less you say, the more other people talk. The more other people talk, the more you learn about their weaknesses, and you learn about their
Hidden desires, and what makes them tick, and the less they know about you, and the less they know about you, the bet…”
Insight
Greene: True power requires assuming formlessness and willingly discarding prescribed rules.
“Law 48 is assume formlessness, and that means all 47 laws are, can be kind of nonsense, and you should just ignore them, and you should just be in the moment and not go into situations thinking of, oh, I better do law 41
You be, you must be alive to the circum…”
Insight
Greene: Approaching unfulfilling work with a learning mindset transforms "dead time."
“When you're working for someone else and you're flipping burgers at Burger King, it's dead time. They own you. And, but if you're working at Burger King, And you've just read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, and you're thinking about it, or you're working at …”
Assertion Supported
Robert Greene's "48 Laws of Power" is approaching two million copies sold.
“To be honest with you, I mean, we've sold, it's actually inching up more towards two million these days.”
Assertion Supported
Greene: Coco Chanel's Nazi sympathies remain a major historical black mark.
“Coco Chanel ended up being kind of a Nazi sympathizer. It's the main black mark on her story, a very large black mark.”
Assertion Supported
Greene taught his famous physical notecard research system to Ryan Holiday.
“And I know Ryan was a friend of yours who I taught this system to essentially He does the same thing. He writes them out.”
Disclosure
Greene caps his daily writing at three hours to avoid mental burnout.
“And then, you know, I just do three hours every day of the writing because it's about all I can stomach.”
Insight
Greene: Zen meditation creates spectator-like distance, reducing your immediate emotional reactivity.
“The meditation has helped me an awful lot in controlling my emotional responses. 90% of the meditating, I do a practice, a form of Zen meditation, and what you're doing is, it's hard to concept to relate, but the idea is, You're thinking of your thinking as if…”
Robert Greene