#48 LAWS OF POWER LAWS MANUALS#

He turns down a lot of consultancy work because he is only drawn to people with interesting life stories, whether Charney (he's on American Apparel's board of directors), 50 Cent (they collaborated on 2009's The 50th Law) or Barack Obama. I'm so earnest in trying to give people so much information that I overdo it.' He laughs almost inaudibly.

'I'm not like Malcolm Gladwell, who makes millions from that kind of thing. For one thing, he doesn't think he's a great public speaker. His bestsellers (including the similarly gimlet-eyed The Art of Seduction and The 33 Strategies of War) have made him a wealthy man, but he could be even richer if he took all the offers that came his way. Back in the US, he meandered through journalism and into Hollywood, before finally publishing The 48 Laws of Power in his late 30s. After studying classics at college, Greene travelled around Europe, working dozens of menial jobs while trying to find the right outlet for his writing. His father sold cleaning supplies while his mother was a housewife with thwarted artistic ambitions. On that subject, Greene himself had an 'insanely middle-class' upbringing in Los Angeles. So maybe this book won't sell because I've loaded the donkey with all that baggage, but I do at least try to debunk the idea that it's all about your parents and education and wealth.' 'I was under a lot of pressure to write something faster and shorter and easier for people to consume and I resisted that.

#48 LAWS OF POWER LAWS MANUALS#

Mastery is an illuminating book but its message (the secret of success is working incredibly hard for many years) is much tougher and more exacting than the follow-your-dreams manuals with which it will share the self-help shelves. 'I was a little worried that young people would think the only game was being political and manipulative when really the bigger game is being so good at what you do that nobody can argue with your results,' he says. Greene is accustomed to defending his first book, but I suspect he's trying to move beyond it with his latest, Mastery, which studies how talent is developed, using a heavily researched slew of examples including Einstein, Darwin, Goethe and John Coltrane. 'Opening the curtain and letting people see the Wizard of Oz.' 'I felt like a child exposing what the parents are up to and laughing at it,' he says. It was making me angry.'Įven if The 48 Laws of Power can be read as a bastard's handbook, he wrote it to demystify the dirty tricks of the executives he encountered during a dispiriting period as a Hollywood screenwriter. 'I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. 'I believe I described a reality that no other book tried to describe,' he says. Greene doesn't think he's evil, obviously, but nor does he consider himself particularly good. I don't have to pretend to be this mastermind.' I had to learn to be the man inside the quotes. 'Charles de Gaulle said, I realised that when people met me they were expecting to meet Charles de Gaulle. 'I'm not Henry Kissinger.' In conversation at his London publisher's office, as in his books, he always has an apt quotation to hand. 'I'm not who people expect me to be,' says Greene, an earnest, thoughtful 53-year-old with a somewhat tense smile. But when you advise your readers, 'Discover each man's thumbscrew' (Law 33) or 'Pose as a friend, work as a spy' (Law 14), some are prone to expect the worst. Other fans think he's the solution, including Will Smith, American Apparel CEO Dov Charney (who calls it 'the Bible for atheists') and so many rappers, from Jay-Z on down, that the New Yorker dubbed him ' hip-hop's Machiavelli'. They're the ones that read The 48 Laws of Power, his bestselling 1998 debut, saw the world depicted as a writhing snakepit of treachery and mind games, and felt that the author must be part of the problem. S ome people think Robert Greene is evil.

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