The Daily Laws

In the preface Greene explains the book's purpose. The human brain evolved to see reality clearly in a dangerous environment; now «the leopards have been replaced by people playing subtle political games». Our culture fills our heads with false ideas about how the world should be: good schools and connections are the key to success, mistakes must be avoided, narcissists and envious people are rare and we are not among them. Greene suggests reading the book as a kind of bildungsroman in which the reader is the hero who matures by shedding illusions.

January's theme is the «Life's Task», and it opens with Greene's most personal text. Greene wanted to be a writer from the age of eight but went into journalism to make a living. One day an editor says over a third martini: «You don't have what it takes to be a writer. Go to law school, Robert.» The remark sets off years of wandering: construction work in Greece, teaching English in Barcelona, a hotel front desk in Paris, a detective agency in Los Angeles — some sixty jobs in all. At 36, in Venice, Greene meets a book producer, and from that meeting comes the idea for «The 48 Laws of Power».

January's daily entries come mostly from «Mastery» and urge readers to reconnect with their earliest inclinations. Marie Curie, aged four, stares spellbound at the lab equipment in the family study. The anthropologist Daniel Everett falls for the language of migrant workers in a cowboy town on the Mexican border. The neurologist V. S. Ramachandran collects seashells in Madras and years later makes discoveries about phantom limbs. Temple Grandin is diagnosed with autism at three and a doctor recommends lifelong institutionalisation, yet Grandin finds a way forward. Each page is short and striking.

Some of the new pieces are the best thing in the book. Greene urges you to «embrace your strangeness», recalling that «The 48 Laws of Power» frightened publishers but the unusual format stayed. Greene describes a childhood delight at making new words from the letters of a word the teacher wrote on the board, and uses the «paradoxical intention» effect to explain why chasing money and status directly backfires: the harder you try to sleep, the more sleep escapes you. The advice is simple but sincere.

We also looked at the first days of February, which are among the book's most useful entries. On 1 February Greene writes that the goal of an apprenticeship is not money or fame but «to transform yourself»: every field has rules built up over centuries, and a newcomer must first «submit» to them. On 2 February Greene describes taking on nineteen-year-old Ryan Holiday as an assistant: Holiday had read even the sources in Greene's bibliographies to understand Greene's way of thinking. The lesson is clear: don't just take from a mentor — think about what you can give them.

January also reveals the book's weakness. The «Daily Law» lines often turn into generic motivational slogans: «Today, do the thing that makes you feel most alive.» Several days repeat the same idea with a different example. Greene's style, built on historical examples, gains force from context in the long books; here, in half-page excerpts, it sometimes shrinks to a famous person's success story.

• One page per day — short, easy, no need to read in order
• New, personal texts from the author's life
• Each entry notes the book and chapter it comes from