Never outshine the master.

• Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please and impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents, or you might accomplish the opposite—inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are, and you will attain the heights of power.

Never put too much trust in friends, learn how to use enemies.

• Friends often conceal things to avoid conflict; this can be dangerous.
  • Keep friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.
  • Whenever you can, bury the hatchet with an enemy, and make a point of putting him in your service.
  • Use enemies to define your cause more clearly to the public, even framing it as a struggle of good against evil.
  • It is better to know who and where your opponents are than not to know where your real enemies lie.

Conceal your intentions.

• Use decoyed objects of desire and red herrings to throw people off the scent:

  • If people have the slightest suspicions of your intentions at any point in the deception you practice, all is lost. Do not give them a chance to sense what you are up to: Throw them off the scent by dragging red herrings across the path. Use false sincerity, send ambiguous signals, and set up misleading objects of desire. Unable to distinguish the genuine from the false, they cannot pick your real goal.
  • Hide your intentions not by closing up but by talking endlessly about your desires and goals - just false ones.

• Use smoke screens to disguise your actions:

  • Deception is always the best strategy, but the best deceptions require a screen of smoke to distract people’s attention from your real purpose. The bland exterior—like the unreadable poker face—is often the perfect smoke screen, hiding your intentions behind the comfortable and familiar. If you lead the sucker down a familiar path, he won’t catch on when you lead him into a trap.
  • A helpful or honest gesture can divert from a deception.
  • Patterns will also help mask a deception.
  • Often, the key to deception is being bland and acting humble.

Always say less than necessary.

• Silence generally makes people uncomfortable - they will jump in and nervously fill the silence.
• Generally saying less makes you appear more profound and mysterious.
• Be particularly careful with sarcasm - rarely is it valuable.
• Be careful with arousing suspicion or insecurity by being silent. At times it is easier to blend by playing the jester.

So much depends on reputation - guard it with your life.

• Work to establish a reputation of outstanding quality, whether generosity or honesty or cunning.
• A good reputation can save you much - a lot of work is done in advance by your reputation.
• Once established, always take the high road when attacked.

Court attention at all costs.

• Surround your name with the sensational and scandalous
  • Draw attention to yourself by creating an unforgettable, even controversial, image—court scandal. Do anything to make yourself seem larger than life and shine more brightly than those around you. Make no distinction between kinds of attention—notoriety of any sort will bring you power. Better to be slandered and attacked than ignored.
  • At the beginning of your rise, spend all your energy attracting attention. The quality of attention is irrelevant.
• Create an air of mystery
  • In an increasingly banal and familiar world, what seems enigmatic instantly draws attention. Never make it too clear what you are doing or about to do. Do not show all your cards. An air of mystery heightens your presence and creates anticipation—everyone will be watching you to see what happens next. Use mystery to beguile, seduce, and even frighten.
  • Remember: Most people are upfront, can be read like an open book, take little care to control their words or image, and are hopelessly predictable. You will emanate an aura of mystery by simply holding back, keeping silent, occasionally uttering ambiguous phrases, deliberately appearing inconsistent, and acting odd in the subtlest of ways.
  • Do not let mystery turn to an air of deceit; it must always seem a game, playful, unthreatening.

Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit.

• You must secure the credit for yourself.
• Learn to take advantage of others’ work to further your own cause.
• Use the past, a vast storehouse of knowledge and wisdom. Learn this and you will look like a genius.
• Note: be sure to know when letting other people share the credit furthers your cause.

Make other people come to you - use bait if necessary.

• The essence of power is keeping the initiative and forcing others to react, keeping them on the defensive.
• Master your anger yet play on people’s natural tendency to react angrily when pushed and baited.

Win through your actions, never through argument.

• When aiming for power, always look for the indirect route.
• Verbal argument has one use: deception when covering tracks or caught in a lie.

Infection: avoid the unhappy and unlucky.

• The most important person to avoid: the sufferer of chronic dissatisfaction.
• Examine someone’s history to recognize these people: turbulence, a long line of broken relationships, etc.
• The other side of infection is equally valid: some attract happiness through good cheer, natural buoyancy, and intelligence.
• Use this rule to counteract your own undesirable or weak qualities.

Learn to keep people dependent on you.

• Do not mistake independence for power; power requires a relationship.
• To cultivate this: possess a talent and creative skill that cannot be replaced.

Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim.

• Learn to give before you take - an actual gift, a generous act, a kind favour, an “honest” admission - whatever it takes.
• Selective honesty is best employed on your first encounter with someone.
• A history of deceit will cause any act of generosity to be viewed with suspicion—counter by openly embracing your reputation for dishonesty.

When asking for help, appeal to people’s self-interest, never to their mercy or gratitude.

• Do not be subtle: you have valuable knowledge to share, you can make him rich, and you can make him live longer and happier.
• Train yourself to see inside others’ needs and interests, and desires.
• Distinguish differences among powerful people and figure out what makes them tick. When they ooze greed, they do not appeal to charity; when they want to look charitable and noble. Do not appeal to their greed.

Pose as a friend, work as a spy.

• During social gatherings and innocuous encounters, pay attention. This is when people’s guards are down, and they will reveal things.
• Give a false confession, and someone else will give you a real one.
• Contradict others to stir them to emotion and lose control of their words.

Crush your enemy totally.

• Recognize that you will accumulate enemies who you cannot bring over to your side, and that to leave them any escape will mean you are never secure. Crush them completely.

Use absence to increase respect and honour.

• The truth of this law can most easily be appreciated in matters of love and seduction.
• Another example of this law exists in economics - scarcity increases value.
• Note: this law only applies once a certain level of power has been attained. Leave too early and you do not increase respect, you are simply forgotten. Similarly, absence is only effective in love and seduction once you have surrounded the other with your image.
• In the beginning, make yourself not scarce but omnipresent.

Keep others in suspended terror: cultivate an air of unpredictability.

• Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behaviour that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.
• Unsettle those around you and keep the initiative by being unpredictable.
• Predictability and patterns can be used as a tool when deceiving.

Do not build fortresses to protect yourself - isolation is dangerous.

• The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere—everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it Protects you from—it cuts you off from valuable information, and it makes you conspicuous and an easy target. Better to circulate among people, find allies, and mingle. You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd.
• Retreat to a fortress and you lose contact with your sources of power and your knowledge of what is going on.
• If you need time to think, then choose isolation as a last resort, and only in small doses.

Know who you’re dealing with - do not offend the wrong person.

• Recognizing the type of person you’re dealing with is critical. Here are the five most dangerous:
  • The Arrogant and Proud Man: any perceived slight will invite vengeance. Flee these people.
  • The Hopelessly Insecure Man: similar to the proud man, but will take revenge in smaller bites over time. Do not stay around him if you have harmed or deceived him.
  • Mr. Suspicion: sees the worst in others and imagines everyone is after him. Easy to deceive - get him to turn on others.
  • The Serpent with a Long Memory: if hurt, he will show no anger but will calculate and wait. Recognize by his calculation and cunning in other areas of life - he is usually cold and unaffectionate. Crush him completely or flee.
  • The Plain, Unassuming, and Often Unintelligent Man: this man will not take the bait because he does not recognize it. Do not waste your resources trying to deceive him. Have a test ready for a mark - a joke, a story. If the reaction is literal, this is the type you are dealing with.
  • Never rely on instincts when judging someone; instead, gather factual knowledge. Also never trust appearances.

Do not commit to anyone.

• It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause but yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others—playing people against one another, making them pursue you.

• Part 1: Do not commit to anyone, but be courted by all.

  • Stay aloof and gain the power that comes from attention and frustrated desire.

• Part 2: Do not commit to anyone - stay above the fray.

  • Do not let others drag you into their fights. Seem interested and supportive, but neutral.
  • Staying neutral allows you to keep initiative, and take advantage of the situation when one side starts to lose.
  • You only have so much time and energy - every moment wasted on the affairs of others subtracts from your strength.
  • Make sure to maintain emotional objectivity in the affairs of others.

Play a sucker to catch a sucker - seem dumber than your mark.

• No one likes feeling stupider than the next person. The trick, then, is to make your victims feel smart—and not just smart, but smarter than you are. Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you may have ulterior motives.
• Intelligence, taste, and sophistication are all things you should downplay or reassure others that they are more advanced than you.

Use the surrender tactic: transform weakness into power.

• When you are weaker, never fight for honour’s sake; choose surrender instead. Surrender gives you time to recover, torment and irritate your conqueror, and wait for his power to wane. Do not give him the satisfaction of fighting and defeating you—surrender first. By turning the other cheek, you infuriate and unsettle him. Make surrender a tool of power.

• The essence of the surrender tactic: inwardly, you stay firm, but outwardly you bend. Your enemy will be bewildered when properly executed, as they will be expecting retaliation.

Concentrate your forces.

• Conserve your forces and energies by keeping them concentrated at their strongest point. You gain more by finding a rich mine and mining it deeper, than by flitting from one shallow mine to another—intensity defeats extensity every time. When looking for sources of power to elevate you, find the one key patron, the fat cow who will give you milk for a long time to come.
• Concentrate on a single goal, a single task, and beat it into submission.
• Note: when fighting a stronger enemy, you must be prepared to dissolve your forces and be elusive.

Play the perfect courtier.

• The Laws of Court Politics
  • Avoid Ostentation: modesty is always preferable.
  • Practice Nonchalance: never appear to be working too hard; your talent must appear to flow naturally, with ease. Showing your blood and toil is a form of ostentation.
  • Be Frugal with Flattery: flatter indirectly by being modest.
  • Arrange to be Noticed: pay attention to your appearance, and find a way to create a subtly distinctive style and image.
  • Alter Your Style and Language According to the Person You’re Dealing With: acting the same with all will be seen as condescension by those below you and offend those above you.
  • Never Be the Bearer of Bad News: the messenger is always killed. Bring only glad news.
  • Never Affect Friendliness and Intimacy with Your Master: he does not want a friend for a subordinate.
  • Never Criticize Those Above You Directly: err on subtlety and gentleness.
  • Be Frugal in Asking Those Above You for Favours: it is always better to earn your favours. Do not ask for favours on another person’s behalf.
  • Never Joke About Appearances or Taste
  • Do Not Be the Court Cynic: express admiration for the good work of others.
  • Be Self-Observant: you must train yourself to evaluate your actions.
  • Master Your Emotions
  • Fit the Spirit of the Times: your spirit and way of thinking must keep up with the times, even if the times offend your sensibilities.
  • Be a Source of Pleasure: if you cannot be the life of the party, at least obscure your less desirable qualities.‍

Re-create yourself.

• The first step in the process of self-creation is being aware of yourself and taking control of your appearances and emotions.
• The second step is the creation of a memorable character that compels attention and stands above the others on the stage.
• Rhythm, timing and tempo over time also contribute greatly to the creation of a character.
• Appreciate the importance of stage entrances and exits.

Keep your hands clean.

• Part 1: Conceal your mistakes - have a scapegoat to take the blame.

  • It is often wise to choose the most innocent victim possible as a sacrificial goat. Be careful, however, not to create a martyr.
  • A close associate is often the best choice - the “fall of the favourite”.

• Part 2: Make use of the cat’s-paw.

  • Use those around you to complete dirty tasks to hide your intentions and accomplish your goals while keeping your hands clean.
  • An essential element in this strategy is concealing your goal.
  • Devices like this are best for approaching those in power or planting information.
  • You may also offer yourself as the cat’s paw to gain power.
  • Note: you must be very careful in using this tactic, as being revealed would be disastrous.

Play on people’s need to believe in creating a cult-like following.

• How to create a cult in 5 easy steps:
  • Keep It Vague, Keep it Simple: use words to attract attention with great enthusiasm. Fancy titles for simple things are helpful, as are the use of numbers and the creation of new words for vague concepts. All of these create the impression of specialized knowledge. People want to hear there is a simple solution to their problems.
  • Emphasize the Visual and the Sensual over the Intellectual: Boredom and skepticism are two dangers you must counter. The best way to do this is through theatre, creating a spectacle. Appeal to all the senses, and use the exotic.
  • Borrow the Forms of Organized Religion to Structure the Group: create rituals, organize followers into a hierarchy, rank them in grades of sanctity, give them names and titles, and ask them for sacrifices that fill your coffers and increase your power. Talk and act like a prophet.
  • Disguise Your Source of Income: make your wealth seem to come from the truth of your methods.
  • Set Up an Us-Versus-Them Dynamic: first, make sure your followers believe they are part of an exclusive club unified by common goals. Then, manufacture the notion of a devious enemy out to ruin you.
  • People are not interested in the truth about change - that it requires hard work - but rather, they are dying to believe something romantic, or otherworldly.
• The most effective cults mix religion with science.

Enter action with boldness.

• Some of the most pronounced psychological effects of boldness and timidity:
  • The Bolder the Lie, the Better: the sheer audacity of a bold lie makes the story more credible, distracting from its inconsistencies. When entering a negotiation, ask for the moon, and you’ll be surprised how often you get it.
  • Lions Circle the Hesitant Prey: everything depends on perception, and if, on a first encounter, you demonstrate a willingness to compromise, back down, and retreat, you will be pushed around without mercy.
  • Boldness Strikes Fear; Fear Creates Authority: the bold move makes you seem larger and more powerful than you are. If it comes suddenly, with stealth and swiftness, it inspires much more than fear - you will be intimidating, and people will be on the defensive in future.
  • Going Halfway with Half a Heart Digs the Deeper Grave: if you enter action with less than total confidence, problems will cause you to grow confused rather than push through.
  • Hesitation Creates Gaps, Boldness Obliterates Them: when you take time to think, you create a gap that allows others time to think. Boldness leaves others no space to doubt and worry.
  • Audacity Separates You from the Herd: the bold draws attention and seems larger than life. We cannot keep our eyes off the audacious.
  • Most of us are timid. We want to avoid tension and conflict and be liked by all. We are terrified of consequences, what others might think of us, and the hostility we will stir up if we dare go beyond our usual place.
  • You must practice and develop your boldness. The place to begin is in negotiations. How often do we ask too little?
  • Remember: the problems created by an audacious move can be disguised, even remedied, by more and greater audacity.

Plan all the way to the end.

• The ending is everything. Plan it, taking into account all the possible consequences, obstacles, and twists of fortune that might reverse your hard work and give glory to others. By planning to the end, you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances and will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead.
• The ending is everything - the end of the action determines who gets the glory, the money, and the prize. Your conclusion must be crystal clear, and you must keep it constantly in mind.

Make your accomplishments seem effortless.

• Some think exposure to how hard they work and practice demonstrates diligence and honesty, but it just shows weakness.
• Sprezzatura: the capacity to make the difficult seem easy.
• What is understandable is not awe-inspiring. The more mystery surrounds your actions, the more awesome your power seems.
• You appear to be the only one who can do what you do, and because you achieve accomplishments with grace and ease, people believe you can always do more.

Control the options: get others to play with the cards you deal with.

• Withdrawal and disappearance are classic ways of controlling the options. You give people a sense of how things will fall apart without you and offer them the choice: I stay away, and you suffer, or I return under my conditions.

• We actually find choices between a small number of alternatives more desirable than complete freedom of options.

• The following are among the most common forms of controlling the options:

  • Color the Choices: Propose multiple solutions, but present the preferred one in the best light compared to the others. Excellent device for the insecure master.
  • Force the Resister: This is a good technique to use on children and other willful people who enjoy doing the opposite of what you ask them to: Push them to choose what you want them to do by appearing to advocate the opposite.
  • Alter the Playing Field: In this tactic, your opponents know their hand is being forced, but it doesn’t matter. The technique is effective against those who resist at all costs.
  • The Shrinking Options: A variation on this technique is to raise the price every time the buyer hesitates and another day goes by. This is an excellent negotiating ploy to use on the chronically indecisive, who will fall for the idea that they are getting a better deal today than if they wait till tomorrow.
  • The Weak Man on the Precipice: He would describe all sorts of dangers, exaggerating them as much as possible, until the duke saw a yawning abyss in every direction except one: the one Retz was pushing him to take. This tactic is similar to “Color the Choices,” but you have to be more aggressive with the weak. Work on their emotions—use fear and terror to propel them into action. Try reason, and they will always find a way to procrastinate.
  • Brothers in Crime: This is a classic con artist technique: You attract your victims to some criminal scheme, creating a bond of blood and guilt between you. They participate in your deception, commit a crime (or think they do), and are easily manipulated. It is often wise to implicate in your deceptions the very person who can do you the most harm if you fail. Their involvement can be subtle—even a hint of their involvement will narrow their options and buy their silence.
  • The Horns of a Dilemma: This is a classic trial lawyer’s technique: The lawyer leads the witnesses to decide between two possible explanations of an event, both of which poke a hole in their story. They have to answer the lawyer’s questions, but whatever they say, they hurt themselves. The key to this move is to strike quickly: Deny the victim the time to think of an escape. As they wriggle between the horns of the dilemma, they dig their own grave.
  • Controlling the options has one main purpose: to disguise yourself as the agent of power and punishment.

Play to people’s fantasies.

• The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

• Never promise a gradual improvement through hard work; rather, promise the moon, the great and sudden transformation, the pot of gold.

• The key to fantasy is distance - the distance has allure and promise, seems simple and problem free. What you are offering, then, should be ungraspable. Never let it become oppressively familiar.

Discover each man’s thumbscrew.

• How to find weaknesses:
  • Pay Attention to Gestures and Unconscious Signals: everyday conversation is a great place to look. Start by always seeming interested. Offer a revelation of your own if needed. Probe for suspected weaknesses indirectly. Train your eyes for details.
  • Find the Helpless Child: knowing about a childhood can often reveal weaknesses, or when they revert to acting like a child.
  • Look for Contrasts: an overt trait often conceals its opposite. The shy crave attention, the uptight want adventure, etc.
  • Find the Weak Link: find the person who will bend under pressure, or the one who pulls strings behind the scenes.
  • Fill the Void: the two main emotional voids are insecurity and unhappiness.
  • Feed on Uncontrollable Emotions: the uncontrollable emotion can be a paranoid fear or any base motive such as lust, greed, vanity or hatred.
  • Always look for passions and obsessions that cannot be controlled. The stronger the passion, the more vulnerable the person.
  • People’s need for validation and recognition, their need to feel important, is the best kind of weakness to exploit. To do so, all you need to do is find ways to make people feel better about their taste, their social standing, their intelligence.
  • Timidity can be exploited by pushing them into bold actions that serve your needs while also making them dependent on you.

Be royal in your own fashion: act like a king to be treated like one.

• How you carry yourself reflects what you think of yourself.
• Use The Strategy of the Crown - if we believe we are destined for great things, our belief will radiate outward, just as a crown creates an aura around a king.
• The trick is simple: be overcome by your self-belief.
• This may separate you from people, but that’s the point. You must always act with dignity, though this should not be confused with arrogance.
• Dignity is the mask you assume that makes it as if nothing can affect you, and you have all the time in the world to respond.
• There are other strategies to help:
  • The Columbus Strategy: always make a bold demand. Set your price high and do not waver.
  • The David and Goliath Strategy: go after the highest person in the building. This immediately puts you on the same plane as the chief executive you are attacking.
  • The Patron Strategy: give a gift of some sort to those above you.

Master the art of timing.

• Three types of time and how to deal with them:
  • Long Time: be patient, control your emotions, and take advantage of opportunities when they arise. You will gain long-term perspective and see further in the future.
  • Forced Time: the trick in forcing time is to upset the timing of others - to make them hurry, make them wait, make them abandon their own pace. Use the deadline, apply sudden pressure, change pace to use this.
  • End Time: patience is useless unless combined with a willingness to act decisively at the right moment. Use speed to paralyze your opponents, cover any mistakes, and impress people with your aura of authority and finality.

Disdain things you cannot have: ignoring them is the best revenge.

• Desire creates paradoxical effects: the more you want something, the more you chase after it, the more it eludes you. You need to do the reverse: turn your back on what you want, show your contempt and disdain to create desire.
• Instead of focusing attention on a problem, it is often better not to acknowledge it’s existence:
• Sour-grapes approach: act as if something never really interested you in the first place.
• When attacked, look away, answer sweetly, and show how little the attack concerns you.
• Treat it lightly if you have committed a blunder.
• Note: make sure to show the above publicly, but to monitor the problem privately, making sure it is remedied.

Create compelling spectacles.

• Words often go astray, but symbols and the visual strike with emotional power and immediacy.
• Find an associate yourself with powerful images and symbols to gain power.
• Most effective of all is a new combination - a fusion of images and symbols that have not been seen together before, but that clearly demonstrate your new idea, message, religion.

Think as you like but behave like others.

• Flaunting your pleasure in alien ways of thinking and acting will reveal a different motive - to demonstrate your superiority over your fellows.
• Wise and clever people learn early on that they can display conventional behavior and mouth conventional ideas without having to believe in them. The power these people gain from blending in is that of being left alone to have the thoughts they want to have, and to express them to the people they want to express them to, without suffering isolation or ostracism.
• The only time it is worth standing out is when you already stand out—when you have achieved an unshakable position of power, and can display your difference from others as a sign of the distance between you.

Stir up waters to catch fish.

• This is the essence of the Law: When the waters are still, your opponents have the time and space to plot actions that they will initiate and control. So stir the waters, force the fish to the surface, get them to act before they are ready, steal the initiative. The best way to do this is to play on uncontrollable emotions—pride, vanity, love, hate.
• Angry people end up looking ridiculous. It is comical how much they take personally, and more comical how they belief that outbursts signify power.
• We should not repress our angry or emotional responses, but rather that realize in the social realm, and the game of power, nothing is personal.
• Reveal an apparent weakness to lure your opponent into action.
• In the face of someone angry, nothing is more infuriating than someone who keeps his cool while others are losing theirs.
• Note: do not provoke those who are too powerful.
• There are times when a burst of anger can do good, but it must be manufactured and under your control.

Despise the free lunch.

• What is offered for free often has a psychological price tag - complicated feelings of obligation, compromises with quality, the insecurity those compromises bring, on and on. By paying the full price, you keep your independence and room to maneuver.

• Being open and flexible with money also teaches the value of strategic generosity.

• Avoid these people who fail to use money creatively and strategically, or turn their inflexibility to your advantage:

  • The Greedy Fish. The greedy fish take the human side out of money. Cold and ruthless, they see only the lifeless balance sheet; viewing others solely as either pawns or obstructions in their pursuit of wealth, they trample on people’s sentiments and alienate valuable allies. No one wants to work with the greedy fish, and over the years they end up isolated, which often proves their undoing. Easy to deceive with promise of money.
  • The Bargain Demon. Powerful people judge everything by what it costs, not just in money but in time, dignity, and peace of mind. And this is exactly what Bargain Demons cannot do. Wasting valuable time digging for bargains, they worry endlessly about what they could have gotten elsewhere for a little less. Just avoid these types.
  • The Sadist. Financial sadists play vicious power games with money as a way of asserting their power. They believe the money they give you allows them to abuse your time. Accept a financial loss instead of getting entangled.
  • The Indiscriminate Giver. These people give to everyone, and as a result no one feels special. Appealing as a mark, but you will often feel burdened by their emotional need.
  • Never let lust for money lure you from true power. Make power your goal and money will find it’s way to you.
  • Note: bait your deceptions with the possibility of easy money, and many will fall for it.

Avoid stepping into a great man’s shoes.

• If you cannot start materially from ground zero - it would be foolish to renounce an inheritance- you can at least begin from ground zero psychologically.
• Never let yourself be seen as following your predecessor’s path. You must physically demonstrate your difference, by establishing a style and symbolism that set you apart.
• Repeating actions will not re-create success, because circumstances never repeat themselves exactly.
• Success and power make us lazy - you must reset psychologically to counter this laziness.

Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.

• Trouble can often be traced to a single strong individual —the stirrer, the arrogant underling, the poisoner of goodwill. If you allow such people room to operate, others will succumb to their influence. Do not wait for the troubles they cause to multiply, do not try to negotiate with them—they are irredeemable. Neutralize their influence by isolating or banishing them. Strike at the source of the trouble and the sheep will scatter.
• In every group, power is concentrated in the hands of one or two people.
• When troubles arise, find the source, and isolate them - physically, politically or psychologically. Separate them from their power base.

Work on the hearts and minds of others.

• Remember: The key to persuasion is softening people up and breaking them down, gently. Seduce them with a two-pronged approach: Work on their emotions and play on their intellectual weaknesses. Be alert to both what separates them from everyone else (their individual psychology) and what they share with everyone else (their basic emotional responses). Aim at the primary emotions—love, hate, jealousy. Once you move their emotions you have reduced their control, making them more vulnerable to persuasion.
• Play on contrasts: push people to despair, then give them relief. If they expect pain and you give them pleasure, you win their hearts.
• Symbolic gestures of self-sacrifice can win sympathy and goodwill.
• The quickest way to secure people’s minds is by demonstrating, as simply as possible, how an action will benefit them.

Disarm and infuriate with the mirror effect.

• Mirror Effects can disturb or entrance others, giving you power to manipulate or seduce them.
• There are four main Mirror effects:
  • The Neutralizing Effect: do what your enemies do, following their actions as best you can, and they are blinded. A reverse version is the Shadow - shadow your opponents every move without them seeing you.
  • The Narcissus Effect: look into the desires, values, tastes, spirit of others, and reflect it back to them.
  • The Moral Effect: teach others by giving them a taste of their own medicine. They must realize you are doing to them the same thing they did to you.
  • The Hallucinatory Effect: create a perfect copy of an object, a place, a person, that people take for the real thing, because it has the physical appearance of the real thing.
  • Understand: Everyone is wrapped up in their own narcissistic shell. When you try to impose your own ego on them, a wall goes up, resistance is increased. By mirroring them, however, you seduce them into a kind of narcissistic rapture: They are gazing at a double of their own soul. This double is actually manufactured in its entirety by you. Once you have used the mirror to seduce them, you have great power over them.
  • One way to create a mirror for someone is to teach them a lesson through an analogy, avoiding the reactionary increase in resistance you’d encounter if brought up directly.
  • Note: avoid mirrored situations you don’t understand, as those involved will quickly see through it, and the mirrored situation will not live up to the original.

Preach the need for change, but never reform too much at once.

• Borrow the weight and legitimacy from the past, however remote, to create a comforting and familiar presence.
• Humans desire change in the abstract, or superficial change, but a change that upsets core habits and routines is deeply disturbing to them.
• Understand: The fact that the past is dead and buried gives you the freedom to reinterpret it. To support your cause, tinker with the facts. The past is a text in which you can safely insert your own lines.
• A simple gesture like using an old title, or keeping the same number for a group, will tie you to the past and support you with the authority of history.

Never appear too perfect.

• Either dampen your brilliance occasionally, purposefully revealing a defect, weakness, or anxiety, or attributing your success to luck; or simply find yourself new friends. Never underestimate the power of envy.
• The envy of the masses can be deflected quite easily - appear as one of them in style and values. Never flaunt your wealth, and carefully conceal the degree to which it has bought influence. Make a display of deferring to others, as if they were more powerful than you.
• Use envy to motivate you to greater heights.
• Keep a wary eye for envy in those below you as you grow more successful.
• Expect that those envious of you will work against you.
• Emphasize luck, and do not adopt a false modesty that will be seen through.
• Deflect envy of political power by not seeming ambitious.
• Disguise your power as a kind of self-sacrifice rather than a source of happiness for you. Emphasize your troubles and you turn potential envy into a source of moral support (pity).
• Beware signs of envy: excessive praise, hypercritical people, public slandering.
• Note: once envy is present, it is sometimes best to display the utmost disdain for those who envy you.

Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop.

• Understand: In the realm of power, you must be guided by reason. To let a momentary thrill or an emotional victory influence or guide your moves will prove fatal. When you attain success, step back. Be cautious. When you gain victory, understand the part played by the particular circumstances of a situation, and never simply repeat the same actions again and again. History is littered with the ruins of victorious empires and the corpses of leaders who could not learn to stop and consolidate their gains.
• The powerful vary their rhythms and patterns, change course, adapt to circumstance, and learn to improvise. They control their emotions, and step back and come to a mental halt when they have attained success.
• Good luck is more dangerous than bad luck, because it deludes you into thinking your own brilliance is the reason for your success.
• Note: There are some who become more cautious than ever after a victory, which they see as just giving them more possessions to worry about and protect. Your caution after victory should never make you hesitate, or lose momentum, but rather act as a safeguard against rash action. On the other hand, momentum as a phenomenon is greatly overrated. You create your own successes, and if they follow one upon the other, it is your own doing. Belief in momentum will only make you emotional, less prone to act strategically, and more apt to repeat the same methods. Leave momentum for those who have nothing better to rely upon.

Assume formlessness.

• The powerful are constantly creating form, and their power comes from the rapidity with which they can change.

The first psychological requirement of formlessness is to train yourself to take nothing personally. Never show any defensiveness.

• When you find yourself in conflict with someone stronger and more rigid, allow them a momentary victory. Seem to bow to their superiority. Then, by being formless, slowly insinuate yourself.
• The need for formlessness becomes greater as we age, as we become more likely to become set in our ways and assume too rigid a form. As you get older, you must rely even less on the past.
• Remember: Formlessness is a tool. Never confuse it with a go-with-the-flow style, or with a religious resignation to the twists of fortune. You use formlessness, not because it creates inner harmony and peace, but because it will increase your power.
• Finally, learning to adapt to each new circumstance means seeing events through your own eyes, and often ignoring the advice that people constantly peddle your way. It means that ultimately you must throw out the laws that others preach, and the books they write to tell you what to do, and the sage advice of the elder.
• Note: when you do finally engage an enemy, hit them with a powerful, concentrated blow.

7 rules of power

RULE 1: Get Out of Your Own Way

• Before we strategize, I note that in our brief conversation, Christine has mentioned several times that she is the only woman in the setting (her three peers and boss are all men), is the youngest and has the least seniority in the company. I am sure that is all true because we are discussing observable demographics, but, I say, let me give you three other adjectives that describe you. You are the only one in this group with an MBA from a prestigious business school, the most analytically skilled, and the person who has run the project with the greatest economic impact. She sits up a little straighter and agrees. So, I say, we have six adjectives to describe you, three that imply you are not as deserving, and three that enhance your status. You get to pick which three you want to carry around in your head. How people think of themselves invariably influences what they project to others and what behaviors they will enact. The lesson: use self-descriptive adjectives that convey power, and eschew attitudes that, even if accurate, fairly or unfairly, diminish your status.

• Talented people, with objectively amazing accomplishments, hold self-descriptions that disempower themselves and that, if and when internalized, inappropriately limit their career prospects. Powerful, accomplished, successful people tell their stories in ways that downplay their gifts and accomplishments. Such behavior is unhelpful.

• Mastering imposter syndrome, and describe yourself in positive rather than self-deprecating ways, is critical for achieving power and success. If you do not think of yourself as powerful, competent, and deserving, it is likely that, in subtle and possibly not-so-subtle ways, you will communicate this self-assessment to others. Others are not likely to think more favorably of you than you do of yourself. Colleagues expect that you will, at least to some extent, self-advocate and self-promote—and if you don’t, that behavior will be held against you.

• Write down the adjectives you use to describe yourself, both to yourself and to others. Check with friends to see if your list is correct. Then ask yourself what descriptors you need to get rid of in order to project yourself in a more powerful way. Ask yourself what positive adjectives about yourself—language that gives credit to your accomplishments and credentials—you under-utilize in your interactions with others.

• Record yourself as you interact in professional settings throughout a day or week. Then analyze how many times you begin an interaction by apologizing for intruding, for interrupting, for taking the other person’s time, for offering your ideas. Ask friends and colleagues how often you actively participate in the discussion and forcefully offer your opinions, and how often you begin interactions by apologizing for offering them.

• As you describe yourself to others, as you articulate a narrative of your career so far, as you create a personal brand, do you talk about your accomplishments, your credentials, or what you have done successfully? Or do you attempt to appear modest and self-effacing, downplay your achievements, positions you have held, honors you have achieved, and your talents? Using these exercises, figure out how you are going to change your self-image and self-presentation in ways that reduce how frequently you get in your own way by being too modest and thereby hinder your ability to project—and achieve—power. Change your behavior, and your attitudes about yourself and your place in the world quite likely will follow. That is because self-perception theory posits that “individuals come to ‘know’ their own attitudes, emotions, and other internal states partially by inferring them from observations of their own overt behavior.” People figure out what their attitudes are from the information available to them when they describe their attitudes, and salient information about their own behavior, therefore, comes to influence their beliefs and attitudes. Consequently, an individual can increase their confidence by acting more confidently and can build their sense of their own power by describing themselves in a more powerful fashion.

• People often worry about their organizational competitors for advancement, about what their bosses think of them, and about their relative skills. All of these things are important. But possibly the single biggest barrier to having power is ourselves. Therefore, the first rule of power is to get out of your own way.

• Different people are willing to do different things in order to succeed. Just because you won’t network, flatter, or self-promote, certainly does not mean that all of your competitors will be as circumspect. To the extent people opt out of doing things their colleagues are willing to do—tactics that build power—they put themselves at a disadvantage.

• An important part of being “willing to do what it takes” is sticking with efforts to build power and get things done in the face of opposition, criticism, obstacles, setbacks, and failures. Almost everyone, at some point in their lives and careers, will run into seemingly insurmountable obstacles and determined opponents who may unfairly deprecate others and spread misinformation about rivals. Because these difficulties are inevitable, I believe that persistence and resilience—sticking with things, while being sensible and changing strategies or approaches as necessary—frequently determine whether people will succeed in their rise to power.

• Phrases like “Be true to yourself” and “Find your own true north” seem excessively self-referential and are not what leaders must do to succeed. Leaders need allies and supporters; one of the primary tasks of a leader is to recruit both. This task is more readily accomplished if the leader is true not to themselves but instead to the needs and motivations of those they seek to recruit.

• The story of President Lyndon Johnson, as told in Robert Caro’s biographies documents a man who spent his life studying others, and in the process came to know their wants and needs. In the American Experience film on Johnson, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin described how the Senate, with only one hundred members, was perfect for Johnson, who could master every detail of his colleagues’ personalities—their wants, needs, hopes, and fears. With that knowledge, Johnson could build relationships with them and also understand precisely how to persuade them to do what he wanted. If you want to have allies—always a good thing if you want to influence—you obviously need to provide others with something so they will support you. Maybe it is the perception of similarity—for instance, Johnson could deepen his southern accent when he talked to Southerners and could present himself as having views consistent with those of liberal Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey and conservative Georgian Richard Russell as the occasion required. If you want others to support you, you need to be able to answer the question: What’s in it for them if they do?

• What is true in politics is true in organizations of all types. The people with whom you work have agendas, insecurities, problems, and needs. So stop focusing on trying to figure out who you are. Instead, focus on who your allies and potential allies are. Become a student of the people whose support you need. The sooner you do, the faster you will develop the information and insights necessary for strategically building the alliances you need to succeed.

• The first rule of power is about acknowledging and accepting who you are but not letting that identity define who you will be forever. It is about understanding the importance of social connection but not letting the need for acceptance overwhelm what you want to get done, and the necessity of pursuing your own interests and agenda. It is, in short, about getting out of your own way and getting on with the task of building the power base that will provide you the leverage to accomplish your goals.

RULE 2: Break the Rules

• SOMETIMES, WHEN YOU WANT TO ATTEND a fancy dinner where you can meet amazing people and expand your network, or create a favorable reputation owing to your ability to organize others and get things done, you have to break some rules. Consider the actions of Christina Troitino, currently a YouTube employee and a former student in my class. Troitino described how she was able to “crash” an exclusive dinner at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, a place where Stanford business school students mostly go to hang out with each other—something they could do in Palo Alto. Each year I challenge the students to do something at Sundance that they could not do locally, like meet some of the powerful figures that attend this major event. Troitino accepted the challenge. To get into the fancy dinner with her boyfriend, Troitino broke one rule by showing up without announcing her “plus one.” To wrangle a spot at the dinner in the first place, she defied social norms and conventional expectations by cadging an invitation to a prestigious, closed event instead of passively waiting years to achieve the status that would have made such an invitation automatic.

• Breaking the rules meant fundamentally taking the initiative—not waiting to obtain permission or, for that matter, even asking for anyone’s approval, but just creating things—in this case, an event. By so doing, Troitino put herself in a central network position and built a brand as someone who gets stuff done.

• Rule breaking and violating social norms to build power fundamentally entail undertaking behaviors—taking initiatives—that are “different” and unexpected. Most importantly, rule-breaking requires being proactive and doing something—in Christina’s case, initiating contact with sponsors of a prestigious dinner and starting a cross-business school activity.

• A study in Social Psychological and Personality Science concluded, “When people have power, they act the part. Powerful people smile less, interrupt others, and speak in a louder voice … The powerful have fewer rules to follow.” Or, phrased another way by Lord Acton and empirically demonstrated by social psychologist David Kipnis, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The powerful are freer to defy social norms and conventions and get away with them, and thus, powerful people are more likely to enact socially inappropriate behavior.

• One would hope, perhaps, that powerholders who break the rules fall from grace and lose their power … Or might the very act of breaking the rules actually fuel perceptions of power? Norm violators who are not sanctioned gain power from their ability to violate the rules, signaling they are different from and more powerful than people who (presumably must) adhere to social expectations. This passage helps to explain why Donald Trump’s lying has not caused him more difficulties. Lying, which violates the social norm, to tell the truth, is frequently not sanctioned, and because it also violates expectations, actually increases perceptions of the person’s power. There are obviously limits to the positive effect of norm violations on perceptions of power, but the idea that violating rules and social conventions might increase someone’s power is a principle that ought to be taken seriously. The idea helps explain many aspects of social life in workplaces, not just in politics.

• Note that Christina Troitino engaged in a series of small but important behaviors that would be unexpected from someone in a low-power position. She sent a very short email asking about the dinners without providing an extensive personal biography, only describing herself as a writer for Forbes. She waited forty-eight hours to respond to the email explaining her dinner options. And she showed up with an uninvited guest without letting the organizers know in advance. In this way, she acted as if she had the power to break with expectations and do what she wanted. Possibly because of these behaviors, she was able to get herself (and her partner) into a highly exclusive dinner.

• Because most people follow the rules most of the time, people who don’t can and often do catch their interaction partners off guard. This element of surprise can work to the perpetrator’s advantage because others do not have time to prepare for the interaction and decide how they want to respond.

• Calacanis walked into people’s offices without an appointment, thereby breaking the rules of how you interact with powerful people—or maybe expectations of how you should approach anyone. Caught off guard and surprised by his audacity, the admissions director was impressed enough with Calacanis’s drive to get him admitted to Fordham. And the dean, surprised and lacking a plan for how to handle Calacanis’s financial situation, reacted on the spot by connecting him with the business school computer lab, where he then more than doubled his wages.

• Although conflict is common in workplaces, with one study showing that employees spent on average almost three hours each week engaged in conflict, some 60 percent of workers never receive any basic training in dealing with conflict situations. This absence of training, coupled with people’s desire to be liked and accepted, means that most difficult situations are avoided rather than being confronted, and most people are conflict-averse and therefore seek to avoid arguments. In practical terms for exercising power, this means that resistance to what you want to do is likely to be less than you expect because people will be reluctant to confront you and risk a difficult interpersonal conversation. Therefore, it is easier and often more successful and productive to just do what you want and to ask forgiveness for something that you have done instead of seeking permission for it beforehand. Once you have completed or accomplished something, it becomes a fait accompli and difficult to undo. Moreover, the benefits and consequences of what you have done are no longer hypothetical but real, which also makes others reluctant to undo what you have done and thereby destroy the benefits produced. Once Troitino had created a successful cross-school event, who was going to criticize her for raising money for charity while providing a fun experience to numerous students—even though she had asked no one’s permission to organize the event? Robert Moses, New York’s master builder, who wielded immense power over a forty-year career, was a genius in employing the strategy of turning his plans into physical reality—even before he had permission to do so. Often Moses would start his projects prior to obtaining all of the necessary permits and sometimes even the funding to complete them. He understood that once a park or playground was constructed, it was much more difficult and less likely for others to undo his creations.

• Caro commented on the lesson Moses had learned: “Once you did something physically, it was very hard for even a judge to undo it.” In fact, once anything is done, it is harder to undo—and that includes instituting awards, events, and ceremonies. Do something first, and sort out the consequences later—even if this breaks some rules.

• When Keith Ferrazzi, marketing guru, and best-selling author, graduated from Harvard Business School in 1992, he was deciding between accepting a job at the consulting firms McKinsey or Deloitte Consulting: “We tried to talk Keith into coming to join us over McKinsey,” recalled Pat Loconto, the former head of Deloitte. “Before he accepted, however, he insisted on seeing the ‘head guys’ as he would call them.” Loconto agreed to meet Ferrazzi at an Italian restaurant in New York City. “After we had a few drinks … Keith said he would accept the offer on one condition—he and I would have dinner once a year at the same restaurant … So I promised to have dinner with him once a year and that’s how we recruited him … That way, he was guaranteed access to the top.”

• A bold move, for sure. But what is the downside? Often the worst thing that can happen if you ask for something, like a dinner with the CEO, is rejection, being told no. But people probably weren’t going to get what they had asked for in the absence of asking for it in any event, so nothing is really lost. Maybe people suffer the sting of being turned down. Most good salespeople will tell you that if you can’t stand being rejected, don’t go into sales—and everyone is selling themselves and their ideas all the time. Get used to asking, being turned down, and asking again, or for different things from different people.

RULE 3: Appear Powerful

• How you “show up” is important, maybe even determinative, of your career trajectory, how much power and status others accord you, and whether you keep your job. Regardless of your formal title, there is inevitably some degree of uncertainty or ambiguity about your potency and strength. Therefore, others will assess you to ascertain how seriously to take you, whether to defer to you or perhaps ally with you. As the late social psychologist Nalini Ambady noted, “The ability to form impressions of others is a critical human skill.”

• Research shows that people form impressions of others, often precise assessments of personality, very quickly, using “thin slices”—just a few seconds—of behavior. People then make subsequent decisions and judgments about others using those small snippets of behavior. Research also demonstrates that even these quickly formed first impressions are surprisingly durable. Their persistence arises in part because of the pervasiveness of confirmation bias, the tendency to seek and interpret evidence in ways consistent with existing beliefs or expectations. Therefore, if you want to attain and maintain power, the third rule of power is to appear powerful, because others will treat you and make decisions about you depending on how you show up, and those decisions will often act in ways to make the initial impressions become true. For instance, if people think you are not too smart or competent, they will ask you questions that preclude your demonstrating how much you know, and give you few opportunities to demonstrate your intelligence and competence. As the social psychologist Robert Cialdini once insightfully remarked to me, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

• The first recommendation about showing up in a powerful way: don’t use notes or a lot of other props or cues, particularly things that would cause you not to make eye contact with the person or people you are speaking with.

• People’s reactions to the physical and behavioral appearance of power are at least partly instinctual and subconscious. Our forebears, in order to survive, had to be able to quickly ascertain friends from foes and also who was likely to prevail in the struggle for dominance. Therefore, the ability to quickly size others up was—and is—an evolutionarily adaptive skill. Consequently, “We form first impressions from faces despite warnings not to do so. Moreover, there is considerable agreement in our impressions, which carry significant social outcomes. Appearance matters because some facial qualities are so useful in guiding adaptive behavior that even a trace of those qualities can create an impression.” Of course, these automatic responses are not invariably accurate. However, “the errors produced by these overgeneralizations are presumed to be less maladaptive than those that might result from failing to respond appropriately to persons who vary in fitness, age, emotion, or familiarity.”

• Every day, or at least occasionally, people around you are going to ask that question: Why do you have a senior role? What gives you the right to be in a position of power and influence? Part of the answer comes from your actual job performance, from your skills and competence. But a big part of the answer derives from how you act and speak—how you show up—and if you show up in a way that inspires confidence in your capabilities. Most normal people prefer to feel good about themselves, and that means feeling good about their employer, whose brand they carry as a consequence of their employment. People, in their motivation to feel good about themselves, want to associate with organizations—and people—who appear as if they are successful and are going to triumph during battle or another sort of struggle. People also mostly respond positively to signals of strength. Although we like to think people root for the underdog, when it comes to their own identity, they would prefer to be with the winners.

• Certain emotional displays convey strength; others do not. Therefore, it is important to convey powerful emotions and avoid expressing those that signal lower status. In this regard, many people find it counterintuitive that anger is a powerful emotion and that displaying it is often a smart power move—even when, or possibly, particularly when, someone has made a mistake or has been uncovered in some malfeasance. By contrast, expressing sadness or remorse and apologizing conveys much less power—and therefore should be avoided under conditions when appearing powerful and competent is important, which is more frequent than most people think. The logic behind the argument is straightforward. Anger is associated with coercion and intimidation. Displays of anger, as examples of coercive and intimidating behavior, are typically not viewed as nice, normative, or possibly even socially acceptable. If the powerful get to break the rules, then that heuristic association means that breaking the rules can create perceptions of power. Similarly, if the powerful are permitted to display anger more readily than the less powerful—because displays of anger fall outside customary norms for behavior, and only the more powerful are permitted to violate social expectations—then displays of anger can create perceptions of higher status. This logic leads to the recommendation to display anger as a way of acquiring power.

• In a field study at a software company, Tiedens found that people who expressed anger more frequently had been promoted more, earned more, and scored higher on their managers’ assessment of whether the employee should be promoted in the future. Consistent with my earlier point about getting beyond the need to be liked, Tiedens concluded: “Although anger expressions… result in the perception that the expresser is unlikable and cold, likability was not related to status conferral.”

• Apology is almost the opposite of expressing anger and is many people’s default option when confronted with blame. There are three important downsides to apologizing that ought to cause someone to think very carefully before doing it. The first and most obvious downside is that apologizing “inherently associates a transgressor with wrongful behavior.” Responsibility for a bad outcome might have been ambiguous or contested, but once someone apologizes, the association of that person or organization with the negative action or outcome is unambiguously established. Someone who apologizes incurs psychological costs, as an apology can affect people’s self-perceptions. In two experiments, researchers concluded that the act of refusing to apologize “results in a greater feeling of power/control, value integrity, and self-worth.” Therefore, not apologizing is consistent with people’s (and organizations’) desire for consistency and self-affirmation—powerful, effective, good people and organizations don’t engage in wrongdoing, so they don’t have anything to apologize for. And possibly most importantly, an apology affects not just the social actor that apologizes, by implicating credit and blame and affecting people’s feelings about themselves. An apology also affects what others believe about that social actor. Because apology is a low-power behavior, others will see entities that apologize as possessing less influence, status, and prestige—and this will influence those perceivers’ behavior as a consequence. Thus, apologizing reduces the likelihood that the apologizer will benefit from the perception of being powerful and prestigious. As one review of the research literature on apologizing noted, “Transgressors who apologize in situations in which competence is relevant to suffer a negative impact on their perceived competence … To the extent that thanking and apologizing are considered polite speech, research has found that the use of polite communication reflects negatively on the speaker’s perceived dominance, power, and assertiveness.” The research on apologizing highlights the frequent trade-offs in the social perception of people between being seen as warm or competent.

• Because people want to feel proud of what they are involved with and to believe that they and their colleagues will be successful, one of a leader’s most important tasks is to project confidence. When someone projects confidence, others are more likely to follow and support them—and for that matter, to hire and promote them. Moreover, if a leader projects confidence, then, following the ideas of contagion, others are likely to feel more confident and act accordingly. The importance of projecting confidence is why the first rule of power was to lose the scripts, language, and body language that suggests anything other than self-confidence and potency, even if that confidence is unwarranted by objective reality or not what a person is feeling in the moment.

• It is not that personality does not matter at all, but behaviors often are more important. For instance, with respect to confidence and power, one study had participants randomly assigned to adopt an expansive (high-power) or closed (low-power) pose and then present a two-minute speech in a simulated job interview. People who adopted the high-power pose were more likely to be assessed as employable and have their performance rated higher.

• The recommendations to display confidence and anger contradict the conventional wisdom that advises people to display vulnerability as a way of connecting to others, to be soft in how they show up as a way of encouraging others to come to their side to offer comfort and assistance. What to do depends on which motive is stronger in a given situation—the motive to associate with strength and success, or the motive to offer help and feel close to someone who has expressed vulnerability. Both are possible, but my reading of the evidence suggests that it is generally better to bet on the motive of being associated with strength and winning, and then to bask in the glory of the powerful.

• One way of parsing these conflicting ideas comes from a study of self-disclosure. As the authors note, “Self-disclosure is becoming an increasingly relevant [and common] phenomenon in the workplace.” The authors conducted three experiments to ascertain the consequences of self-disclosing any form of weakness. They found, in the context of task-oriented relationships, “that when higher status individuals self-disclosed a weakness, it led to lower influence … greater perceived conflict … less liking … and less desire for a future relationship.” These negative effects did not occur when the individual self-disclosing weakness was a peer in terms of status. My conclusion: it is particularly important to demonstrate confidence—and competence—in task-oriented settings, especially when you hold a higher-status position and others expect you to provide leadership and reassurance. So, yes, you can express vulnerabilities and insecurities among friends, or when you hold a position in which you are not a leader. But in high-status and task-relevant positions, you are much better off keeping any insecurities to yourself. People want to be aligned with someone who they think is going to win, to prevail, so doing anything that disabuses them of that belief is probably a mistake.

• Non-verbal behaviors associated with power, status, and dominance:

  • More gestures
  • More open body posture
  • Less interpersonal distance (placing oneself closer to others)
  • More controlled arm and hand gestures
  • Louder voice
  • More successful interruptions of others
  • More speaking time
  • Longer gazing time
  • Higher visual dominance ratio (look + talk > look + listen)
  • More disinhibited laughs

• Powerful speech has several characteristics. First, it is simple. Powerful speech consists of mostly one-syllable words and no complex sentence constructions with subordinate clauses. Powerful speech is easy to understand, which is one reason it is powerful. The powerful speech also does not impose large cognitive burdens on the listener but rather draws conclusions for them in simple, easy-to-understand words.

• A second feature of powerful speech is the absence of hedging words such as “sort of” or “kind of” and few hesitations such as “um” or “er,” as well as a lack of polite forms. Powerful speech uses powerful words—words that evoke vivid images and arouse people’s emotions—words such as “injured,” “death,” and “problem.” Powerful speakers make declarations instead of asking questions. The powerful speech takes into account the fact that the final words in a sentence are important—you want to end strong. Such speech uses pauses and variations in pacing for emphasis and to hold the audience’s attention. Most importantly, powerful speech repeats ideas and themes. Evidence shows that “people are more likely to judge repeated statements as true compared to new statements, a phenomenon known as the illusory truth effect.” Two experiments demonstrated that “people were more misled by—and more confident about—claims that were repeated, regardless of how many [sources] made them.”

• People are fundamentally trusting. When people tell stories about their lives and careers and personas, few—maybe no one—bother to do the simple work of checking with prior subordinates, business partners, and so forth to see if the stories match the reality. People become committed to their decisions. Once people have invested either financially or emotionally in a relationship, that commitment hinders their admitting they made a mistake in judgment. Situations are ambiguous. How much power—or competence, for that matter—a person actually possesses is often difficult to discern. All of these factors, and more, mean you should definitely follow Rule 3, and to the extent possible, appear powerful.

RULE 4: Build a Powerful Brand

• Brand was important because, as Chau notes, “in order to succeed at a fund, you need to do the best deals possible. In order to do the best deals possible, you need to maximize your chances of actually seeing those deals. There’s only so much you can do one-on-one, and brand felt like an incredible way of marketing, where you were able to be top of mind for people.” Chau had started a podcast called WoVen, which stands for Women Who Venture. The podcast gave her “the opportunity and the right to ask women who were very senior in their careers or founders of public companies to talk for an hour.” Because most people said yes to her invitations, Chau expanded her network strategically and significantly. Moreover, her own status was enhanced through her association, in the podcasts, with high-status people. People are known partly by the company they keep. One study observed that having a prominent friend in an organization boosted an individual’s reputation as a good performer. Social psychologist Robert Cialdini recounted an oft-told example of this phenomenon of status by association: “At the height of his wealth and success, the financier Baron de Rothschild was petitioned for a loan by an acquaintance. Reputedly, the great man replied, ‘I won’t give you a loan myself, but I will walk arm-in-arm with you across the floor of the Stock Exchange, and you soon shall have willing lenders to spare.’” Because status and prestige rub off on others, people publicize their connections with successful others. The implication: One way to build a powerful brand is to associate with other people and organizations that are themselves prestigious.

• Chau not only used her podcast to connect with and become associated with prominent others, she also blogged regularly about topics that portrayed her as a thoughtful investor in the consumer space. She wrote a chapter for a book, a long-form thesis on social media. She commented that she was the only person to help get speaking gigs for the author’s book tour. She notes that the writing made it possible for her to come across as someone founders should talk to, “instead of ‘Hey, I’m this random woman, Laura, at some random venture fund, and you should talk to me about your next round of fundraising.’” Chau began running panels of about twenty people. “I’ll pick a topic I’m trying to get smarter on,” she says. “Then I’ll find three senior operators, and I’ll ask them to be a panelist. It’s a way for me to build my network of operators, and then I’ll go invite the twenty founders that are building companies in this space that I want to meet. In the panel, I get all of this content from the founders and the operators who are much more expert than I am and develop it into a blog post I can put out.” Chau also published a newsletter, called Taking Stock, which was opt-in for anyone she emailed with or who came to any of the events that she hosted. She uses the newsletter “as a way to stay loosely connected with the tech community.” In it she shared resources, selected blog posts she wrote, and used it as a channel for feedback and nominations for people to attend her events. In 2021, Chau launched a weekly Clubhouse show called Hot Deal Time Machine, in which she did retrospectives on some of the hottest VC-backed deals. In her conversations with the founders and the VCs who backed them, she sought to learn from their experience. As she noted in an email to me, “It’s been a fun way to build an audience on a new platform while building relationships with the guests on the show. I’ve also been documenting the highlights from the conversations in my newsletter.” The podcast, the newsletter, the Clubhouse show, the blogging, the panels, and the conference appearances all helped Chau develop a presence in the venture community. “By being out there and having this kind of brand, it makes it much easier for people to then say, ‘Come on my podcast,’ or ‘Will you sit on this panel, or do this keynote?’ There’s sort of this circuit of speakers where I think people just look at who spoke at the last conference and then invite them to their conference. It’s the ones that people tend to see. So once you’re in the circuit, you can stay on the circuit, and reach a much broader audience.” Chau nicely described the many aspects of the flywheel effect of personal branding—how one thing led to another, and through these activities, someone could differentiate themselves in what would be an otherwise highly competitive space. They could stand out from the crowd. By so doing, their credibility, connections, and power would grow. That’s why building a powerful personal brand is the fourth rule of power.

• A brand needs coherence. At its best and most effective, a brand brings together aspects of someone’s personal and professional life in a way that makes it clear why they are uniquely qualified for some position or to found a company in a particular industry.

• Everyone needs a brand. Your task: think of a short (two-or three-sentence) way of describing yourself and your accomplishments that bring together your expertise, your experience (what you have done), and a way of integrating that with some aspect of your personal story. For instance, I saw a woman from Puerto Rico speak passionately in my class session on branding about the need to build a technology/knowledge-based economy to promote economic development there, and how that integrated with her own technical background and her prospective job at Thoma Bravo, a large private equity company and provider of capital founded by someone with Puerto Rican heritage. I also heard an African American physician, also getting a business degree, talk about the pressing issue of unequal access to healthcare and health outcomes, how he had experienced that growing up, and how his career trajectory incorporated ways of addressing that problem. Once you develop a brand statement, get feedback on it from professional colleagues and friends. And then think about how you are going to get that message out into the world.

• Laura Chau’s parents came to the US from Vietnam. She has developed a personal style that includes advocating for herself and trying to stand out, which goes against stereotypes. Taller than many Vietnamese immigrants, she intentionally wears high heels, which make her 6 feet, 1 inch tall, and intentionally dresses very stylishly. The height and clothes help make her distinctive. She commented: “For many people, I’m like, ‘You’re the tallest Asian woman I’ve ever seen.’ By not being the stereotypical Asian woman who keeps her head down and works hard, I think it’s helped me stand out more.” The idea of using clothes and physical appearance as part of branding is not a new or unique idea, but that does not make it any less important. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos notoriety always wore the same black outfit as a way of signaling she did not have time to worry about what to put on. Steve Jobs also had a look (that Holmes was possibly trying to emulate). Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was famous for his hoodies, at least for a while. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square and ex-CEO of Twitter, has altered his appearance over the years, going from a punk style to a more buttoned-down, CEO-like look and, in spring 2020, showing up at a congressional hearing wearing an unkempt “pandemic beard.” It is interesting to compare the number of articles commenting on his appearance in Washington to the number describing his testimony. The frequent commentary on different or unusual CEO appearances makes the point that people need to think carefully about what they want to convey through their looks and then do things consistent with that objective. Former San Francisco mayor and California Assembly speaker Willie Brown, the African American politician and lawyer we met earlier, who came from a poor background in Texas, ultimately dressed in (very expensive) Brioni suits and drove fancy cars. Dubbed the “best-dressed man in California” by Esquire magazine, Brown said the secret to his success was style. In a 1984 60 Minutes interview, Brown commented about whether he was a living piece of art. He sought to convey through his appearance—his look—that he should be taken seriously, that he had resources, and also, by standing out in the crowd, including among his fellow legislators with his clothes, that he’d developed a shrewd way of positively differentiating himself.

• Once someone has a brand, a story, and a narrative that is compelling and integrates aspects of their professional (and possibly personal) life, it is essential to disseminate that narrative widely. It is also useful to match the outlets to the nature of the brand being promoted. The ways of broadcasting messages are almost endless.

• While I was in Tallinn, Estonia, speaking at a conference a number of years ago, I and my spouse had a private dinner with writer John Byrne—in town speaking at a different event—and his partner. After a lot of wine, I commented to Byrne that he was at least as responsible for the mythology of success around former GE CEO Jack Welch as Welch himself. He agreed as he had been the writer behind Welch’s hagiography—pardon me, his completely truthful and complete autobiography. Byrne’s sentiment was not false self-promotion. In the words of a senior executive who reported directly to Welch, there were tens of thousands of other employees at General Electric, so why should Welch get so much disproportionate credit? Because he was the one with the story. The success of business autobiographies, not just commercially as books but as tools to create a narrative and a brand that burnishes their subjects’ image, has led to a profusion of books about corporate leaders and entrepreneurs. Many if not most of them are incomplete in their details and obviously self-promotional, but they still succeed in creating a brand.

• Part of brand building and creating a positive reputation is ensuring that you get credit for your work. That entails being willing to tell your story and eschewing any false sense of modesty or the belief that your work will speak for itself. Your bosses and colleagues are busy and often focused on their own objectives. Don’t expect them to necessarily notice or credit your accomplishments.

• Deborah Liu, formerly vice president for Marketplace at Facebook, a board member at Intuit, and recently appointed CEO of Ancestry.com, had worked at Facebook for more than eleven years. An engineer with patents to her name and prior experience at PayPal, Liu used to think her performance would speak for itself. As she told me, she went to Facebook to build what would eventually become its games business and Facebook Credits. The business she had helped build was so significant—about 15 percent of total revenue—that it was a separate item in the earnings report and in the S-1 when the company went public. She commented, “When we finished, we had never really talked about it and no one cared. A couple of people from the team left the company and everyone else went on to do other things.” With Liu’s career not progressing as well as she thought it should, and being frustrated with the lack of recognition for her and her team’s work, she availed herself of some executive coaching—it was through her coach that I met her. The coaching convinced Liu that she needed to tell her story and also the story of the teams she was leading so they could get credit for their work, something that she had not done in the past. When Liu returned from maternity leave, she started a new project that was called Mobile App Install Ads, which enabled Facebook to recommend apps to download. “This was 2012 when we were getting killed for not solving mobile monetization, as we barely had ads on mobile,” she said. “Our team was asked to address this. At the time, we were a brand advertising company, and we were building the first direct response advertising vertical from a team not in Ads.” Liu had learned to let others know what she and her team were doing. She explained: I told everyone I met, “We’re going to solve mobile monetization, and here’s how we’re going to do it.” Our core team was like five people—three engineers, a borrowed data scientist, and myself. But I posted about what we were doing everywhere internally. I wrote decks and strategies. I went to Mark [Zuckerberg] and I pitched him on it. I did everything I could to get the work out because we had so few resources. Everybody wanted to help. The partnerships lead from Europe said, “I’ll take this product to market for you.” And they went and met with developers and explained how it worked and set them up to test this new type of ad. It was about telling the story over and over. Not only did everyone know about this product, but then people started spreading the word for us. The executives mentioned the product in an earnings call. By telling the story and connecting it to the biggest problem in the company, we got dozens of people to help us in their spare time. People wanted to be part of something that was going to address an acute need. They heard the story and wanted to be part of writing it. Even to this day, many years after we gave up the product, the story is told of a small team that did something incredible at a time that was critical to the company. Today, the product is a leader in its space, but it is small relative to the scale of Facebook. But the narrative has become a touchpoint that inspired other teams that want to do something big. Deborah Liu wound up getting more credit for a smaller product achievement than she did for something of greater economic significance because she had created and told a narrative—repeatedly—that possessed all of the elements of what people wanted to hear.

• Saint Joseph College professor Richard Halstead observes that “the story of the hero’s journey has been told and retold … for centuries.” It captures the “strength and perseverance of the human spirit,” speaking to the challenges people face and the possibility of personal transformation and triumph. The story’s structure is often the same: a person faces an unexpected setback, which becomes an opportunity for learning and personal transformation. Having learned an important lesson, the individual reengage in a way that produces success, thereby validating the learning and development they have experienced. Therefore, Deborah Liu’s story illustrates a second important lesson beyond the importance of telling others about what you and your team are doing and repeating that story frequently. To build a lasting brand, you also must craft the narrative in a way consistent with the hero’s journey, so that people are more likely to remember it and, more importantly, embrace its inspirational message.

• Many people, particularly women or those raised in cultures that inculcate the value of modesty, are reluctant to engage in what feels like self-promotion. The problem is that if you don’t tell your story, you cannot be sure that anyone else will, either, or whether others in the organization will see what you have accomplished. One way to overcome the reluctance to engage in personal branding and self-advocacy is to reframe what this activity entails and means. Deborah Liu talks about how she inspired another person to do this:

• I was doing a talk at this event and we were talking about self-evaluation, and this woman said, “I’m just really not good at self-promotion.” And I said, “Do you see what you just did there? If you treat your self-evaluation as self-promotion, you are not going to talk about the work that you’re doing. You’re not going to do it justice. If you call it helping your manager understand the impact that you have, if you call it helping your team get the recognition it deserves, would you see it differently?” And she said, “You’re right. I’ve been thinking about this all wrong.”

• This small reframe can help people understand the necessity—and the importance—of telling their story, and the story of their colleagues, while making them more comfortable in undertaking the critical task of building their brand.

RULE 5: Network Relentlessly

• In the mid-1990s Kordestani joined Netscape, the famous browser company cofounded by Marc Andreessen, just as the internet was taking off. His work in marketing and business development there was good, but Kordestani didn’t think his career was progressing as well as it should. So, he told me, he took my class’s message—that performance was often not that important and social relationships and sponsorship mattered more—to the maximum and radically changed how he spent his time. Kordestani decided to devote less time to the technical aspects of his job and more to building relationships and interacting with people both inside and outside of Netscape, so he could be more noticeable and known. After all, if no one knows or notices someone, their good work will not help them much because it will be invisible.

• The old saying “it’s not what you know but who you know” has at least some truth. Who you know, and how many people you know, matters for your influence and for your career. Therefore, Rule 5 of the seven rules of power is to network relentlessly. Your networking may not permit you to hit the proverbial lottery as Omid Kordestani did, to write best-selling books and build a consulting firm like Keith Ferrazzi, or to become a successful real estate investor like Ross Walker. But networking and building social relationships will, as much evidence demonstrates, build power and accelerate your career.

• Yusuf was smart, with an unusual ability to read situations and build relationships with people. He also had another source of power. As the head of the strategy, he had great exposure to the senior executive team, attending many executive board meetings where he would present his group’s analyses. He also interacted with numerous people and units across the organization. In a diagram of the communication structure inside SAP’s senior ranks, strategy—Zia Yusuf—was in a central position, as the nature of its work entailed acquiring and transmitting information across the organization, leaving the unit and Yusuf with profound informational advantages.

• Centrality affects visibility. More people will know and know about people who are more central, and that visibility will often work to those people’s advantage for becoming the focal point for information and opportunities. Centrality also affects access to information. People in central positions saw more information—because more communication flowed through them—and had greater direct contact with more people. The implication: when people evaluate jobs and roles, one dimension they should account for is the centrality that will accrue to them from occupying that job or position. Other things being equal, choose more central jobs.

RULE 6: Use Your Power

• Johnson understood three things. First, when a person is new in a position, they have time, before their opponents get a chance to coalesce, and while the incumbent is in sort of a honeymoon period, to get a lot done. This includes actions that will help perpetuate their power on the basis of their accomplishments and the changes they make to institutionalize their power. Second, enemies tend to last longer and keep grudges more than friends remember favors. This means that practically speaking, the longer someone is in a position, the more opposition they will accumulate, the more precarious their position will become, and the more difficult it will be to get things done. Thus, because their time in a powerful role will be limited, people need to act quickly to accomplish their agenda. The increasingly politicized nature of organizations means that the tenure of leaders has shortened. A 2019 article noted that “last year 17.5 percent of the CEOs of the world’s largest 2,500 companies left their posts—representing the highest rate of departures that PwC … has tallied” since it began studying CEO tenure. In 2000, the average CEO could expect to be in their job for eight years; over the 2010s, that declined to just five years. Big-city school superintendents last an average of five and a half years. Hospital CEO tenure also averages about five years. “Since 2012, the turnover rate was 17% or higher which is the longest period of time the rate has been so high.” What is true for CEOs is true for many other senior roles in organizations of all sizes and types. Third is the idea that power is not some scarce, limited resource that becomes depleted by being used. Instead, the more someone uses their power to get things done—including structuring the world around them and changing who works with and for them in ways that support themselves and their objectives—the more power they will have. Using power signals that you have it, and because people are attracted to power, the more you use your power and demonstrate that you are powerful, the more allies you will accumulate. Therefore, Rule 6 is to use the power one has, maybe even using more than people think you have. Using power effectively is more likely to perpetuate it than to exhaust it.

• When Gary Loveman became COO (and later CEO) of what was then Harrah’s Entertainment, he moved out some senior people, including the head of marketing, who had recently won the Chairman’s Award for his performance. The chief financial officer, Loveman’s principal rival for the CEO job, eventually left to become CEO of a competitor. Loveman’s plan for the ultimately very successful transformation at Caesars Entertainment (the company’s name after Harrah’s purchased the corporation that owned Caesars Palace and other casino hotels) depended on the use of advanced analytics, which required a new set of skills. Loveman brought in people with those skills, because, he noted, he did not have the time to train existing personnel in the new, analytically based capabilities. Such personnel replacement is common for new leaders in organizations of all types, who typically bring in their own teams to help them lead organizational transformations. At Stanford Healthcare, within a couple of years of Amir Dan Rubin’s arrival, virtually all of the senior leadership and department heads and leaders, even three levels down, were new. Not everyone from the old regime was up for meeting Rubin’s new, higher performance expectations, and few people like to have their underperformance displayed in charts and graphs. Later, at OneMedical, Rubin recruited people he’s worked with before. Likewise, wherever Rudy Crew has gone as superintendent—New York, Miami—he has brought in some of his own people to fill senior roles and implement his school improvement efforts. In 1999, when Kent Thiry became CEO of kidney dialysis provider DaVita, then called Total Renal Care, he had already “reached out to a set of people who had been with him in his previous dialysis venture, people whom he trusted, liked and respected.” He recruited Harlan Cleaver to be his chief technology officer, Doug Vlechk to lead the organizational change and culture-building efforts, and Joe Mello to be COO. Enhancing performance and making change requires people with the requisite skills and also alignment with the vision. Loveman has said that the prior chief marketing officer at Harrah’s had made his career taking pictures of crab legs and beautiful venues. Loveman’s strategy instead called for using analytics to identify the most profitable customers and then building greater levels of customer loyalty by treating the people who made the cash register ring differentially based on their economic value to the enterprise. The previous incumbent did not have—nor could he likely develop—the quantitative chops to handle the new tasks.

• When hiring allies to help a newly installed outsider lead an organization, it is useful to work with people who understand one’s communication and operating style, which makes everything move more quickly and efficiently. It is also important, maybe essential, to have everyone on the same page. People you have worked with before are less likely to resist your strategy and improvement initiatives—or to sabotage them.

• Replacing people, then, has two positive effects on your power. First, it staffs the organization with people who have aligned perspectives and the competence to execute effectively, and that increased performance will help cement your power. And second, it provides you with allies in situations that are often challenging and politically fraught.

• Research confirms the intuition that succession often leads to turnover among the people who report to the new leader. Turnover in the management team is particularly evident in the case of outside succession and if prior performance was lower. It is not only in politics where leaders bring in “their” team; this happens in organizations of all kinds, including businesses. The problem becomes, then, how do leaders remove people in the context of labor laws that often restrict their freedom of action, even in parts of the US and more so elsewhere in industrialized countries where people cannot be fired without cause? Moreover, setting aside legal and regulatory issues, how can one rid oneself of opponents and rivals in ways that appear to be more benign and socially acceptable? Couch the turnover as part of a performance improvement effort in which new skills and a commitment to better results are required—a situation that is often true while also being politically useful. Another way is to send one’s “problems” to a different and maybe even better position elsewhere, removing them from the immediate environment where they can cause difficulties while earning gratitude for helping their careers. I have come to call this method “strategic outplacement.”

• Employing strategic outplacement requires that the person not act on their natural feelings of resentment or anger toward rivals or sources of other difficulties. This ability to act strategically and dispassionately is a rare but important quality that few people possess.

• Because perception helps create reality, wielding power in ways that demonstrate power, and doing things that signal power, helps to ensure that power will be perpetuated.

• A strategy for entrenching power is to ensure that there are no likely successors in place. One of the reasons that Jack Valenti was head of the Motion Picture Association of America for thirty-eight years was that he did a good job representing the industry—and he ensured that there was never a likely successor in place.

• I once served on the board of a publicly traded portable ultrasound company. I noticed that whenever the board was effusive in its praise of a senior executive other than the CEO, that executive was soon gone under one pretext or the other. I commented to one of my fellow board members that the best way to keep talent in the organization would probably be not to overly praise them to the point that they might appear to be a plausible successor for the CEO role. Removing likely alternatives as a method for holding on to power is an old, and often effective, strategy.

• It is possible to hold multiple overlapping roles that make it difficult for rivals to get rid of someone because that person would need to be removed from multiple positions in order to remove their power—a much more difficult task. Robert Moses exemplifies this principle. At one point, Moses held twelve positions simultaneously, including “New York City Parks Commissioner, head of the State Parks Council, head of the State Power Commission, and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.” Moses mastered the use of public authorities that could issue bonds and collect revenues such as tolls, which increased his independence from the legislative appropriations process and provided yet another source of his enduring power.

• By demonstrating the power and the willingness to use it, by accomplishing things, and by establishing structures that institutionalize power, the use of power becomes self-reinforcing.

RULE 7: Success Excuses (Almost) Everything

• SOUTH CAROLINA SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM ONCE called ex-president Donald Trump, before he took office, “a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot.” Graham was one of many Republicans who vigorously criticized Trump during the 2016 campaign as he “called the future president a ‘kook,’ ‘crazy’ and ‘unfit for office,’ among other things.” Yet in 2019, when Mark Leibovich wrote a profile on Graham for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, he asked Graham, who by that time had become one of Trump’s most vehement, vocal, and loyal supporters, to explain the change. Graham’s response has much to say about how achieving a position of power changes things, including someone’s relationships with other people:

• “Well, O.K., from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it’d be odd not to do this,” he [Graham] said. I asked what “this” was. “‘This’” Graham said, “is to try to be relevant.” Politics, he explained, was the art of what works and what brings desired outcomes. “I’ve got an opportunity up here working with the president to get some really good outcomes for the country,” he told me. An outcome of particular interest to Graham at the moment is getting re-elected to a fourth Senate term in South Carolina, where Trump owns commanding approval numbers.

• It was not just Graham who accommodated Trump as the Republican party marched “headlong … into the far reaches of Trumpism.” Nor are changed in people’s perceptions of others once they have achieved power and renown confined to the realm of politics. Lists of most-admired CEOs often include people who have backdated stock options (Steve Jobs), had relationships outside of marriage with underlings (Bill Gates), violated SEC orders (Elon Musk), had to flee countries to avoid prosecution (Carlos Ghosn), been forced from their jobs over a scandal (John Browne of BP), and were criticized over the work environment for both blue-collar and white-collar employees (Jeff Bezos). The desire to be close to power, almost regardless of how achieved or the wielder’s current behavior, implies that people should not fret too much about their path to power. Once power is achieved, everything—well, almost everything most of the time—will be all right.

• I ask people to develop a brand that succinctly captures who they are and what they stand for. Class members determine the people to whom they should be connected and then strategize how to forge those relationships, often expanding their network during the course. I ask people to become more comfortable with pushing the rules and to lose the scripts and self-descriptions that hold them back. I encourage them to practice acting and speaking in a more powerful fashion. These exercises “force” people to think strategically about forging a path to power. This forcing function, along with providing people the knowledge—and the confidence—that they can actually expand their power, are some of the more important aspects of my teaching. Knowledge and confidence turned into action by having people develop relevant behaviors, create and change people’s actions and get them unstuck. This stimulus to action is important because many people remain fundamentally ambivalent about seeking power, notwithstanding the general acknowledgment that, in most social organizations, power is necessary to get things done. This ambivalence about seeking power arises partly from the worries people have about acquiring power and what it might take to do so. For instance, people worry about the process of obtaining power. What if their actions offend people? What if they stress the bounds of propriety and push the envelope of social norms? People also worry about the consequences of becoming more powerful. What if, in their rise to power, they create enemies and rivals of the people they outcompete? What if, as is almost inevitable, their success provokes jealousy and resentment? What if the nail that stands out does actually get hammered down, and, like the legend of Icarus, having flown too close to the sun, they fall?

• Worries aside, many people seek power because it is a strong motivational force. Studies going back decades have found that the strength of power motivation predicts holding a position of power and is associated with displaying artifacts that signal prestige and status. Moreover, research shows that there is no reliable gender difference in the strength of the power motive between women and men. However, not everyone is equally motivated by power, and power is something that at least some people abjure, possibly because it signals too much ambition, overly individualistic, selfish behavior, or excessive Machiavellianism. To be clear, power and influence are almost invariably necessary to get things done and change lives, organizations, and the world. Yet to help rationalize their reluctance to pursue power, people find ways of worrying about the steps they may need to take to acquire it and what will happen to them upon doing so.

• Response to these concerns is that people should downplay their importance or relevance because power itself makes many problems, including what someone did to acquire that power, mostly disappear—the heart of Rule 7. Moreover, in order to fall from power, you must have achieved it in the first place, so you can worry about losing power after you have it. Of course, holding a high-level position often generates jealousy. People envy success and status, not powerlessness. But power also increases others’ desire to be close to and associate with the power holder. Having power increases people’s visibility and the scrutiny of their actions, thereby increasing the likelihood of their facing criticism as a result of the greater attention. But power also increases people’s willingness to overlook a powerful person’s misdeeds.

• People’s power increases the likelihood of others trying to unseat them. There are invariably more contests for positions at the top of the pyramid than for spaces at the bottom. Power, however, also increases the number of supporters someone has, because people are attracted to and by power and want to be in the orbit of the powerful. There is more competition for positions at the top of the hierarchy, but there are also more individuals who want to be allied with those on or going to the top. If you are going to be successful in acquiring power, you probably will have to break some rules—that was, after all, the theme of chapter two. Yet rule-breaking also helps to create power. In short, acquiring and holding power does unleash some social dynamics that are inimical to the power holder. However, possessing power and status, and occupying a dominant position also calls forth social processes that act to perpetuate someone’s power. In fact, the evidence suggests that you needn’t worry too much about what you did to acquire power—or, for that matter, falling from power. That is because many organizational and social dynamics perpetuate advantage once acquired rather than diminish it. This chapter describes why its title is customarily true: power and success will generally lead others to forget or forgive what you did to attain them. Simply put, Rule 7 is that power and its associated prestige excuse almost everything. Its implications are straightforward: your task is to acquire power, and once you have it, you will probably keep it.

• People are attracted to power and success; they seek it out and strive to be close to those who possess both. As a result, their prior relationships and judgments about others can and do change to accommodate their desire to be associated with and proximate to the success of the powerful. The implication: once someone acquires power, status, and money—the trappings of success—people will alter their opinions and behaviors in ways that are (1) consistent with that power and (2) congruent with the desire to be close to powerful people.

• One motivation for people to hang on to positions of power, like CEO roles, is their recognition that once they are no longer in that role, the motivation for others to be associated with them diminishes dramatically, and therefore they can find themselves with much-reduced status—and personhood. A friend of mine, a former CEO of a large organization who then was in a very senior (but not top) role in yet another mammoth company in a different industry and now is running a start-up he founded, sent me this email: “I hope your experience has been different, but I have found that enduring friendships are hard to maintain as I get older. I truly value ours.” I believe the issue this person confronted is not so much about aging; rather it reflects the consequences for interpersonal interactions arising from moving out of high-status/high-power roles into a position with less formal power and control over vast resources. And yes, many people are much less interested in someone at that point.

• The ability to create a narrative and then tell it repeatedly until it becomes seen as truth helps people retain their power. The fact is that venture capitalists, other investors, and even employees and customers love a nice founding myth about an enterprise, which typically elevates the role of one entrepreneur and writes their colleagues out of the picture. As long as the story “sells,” inspires, and has some element of truth, observers won’t care about its full veracity. They are interested in the vision, in the narrative, in creating a tale useful for attracting investment, customers, and employees, not something historically accurate. Therefore, the ability to get one’s story out early, often, and convincingly creates a reality that can then perpetuate a person’s power, regardless of any inconvenient disconfirming facts. The case of Jack Dorsey illustrates the dynamics of this process. As nicely described by technology reporter Nick Bilton, Dorsey contributed to the founding of Twitter but did not conceive the idea behind it, nor was he there when its predecessor company, Odeo, a maker of podcasts, was created by Evan Williams. Dorsey did become chief executive of Twitter, but he was not a great manager and was forced out of the company. What happened next was consistent with the idea of this chapter that success, or the illusion of success, can make all things right—and reconstruct an image: After he was stripped of his power at Twitter, Dorsey went on a media campaign to promote the idea that he and Williams had switched roles. He also began telling a more elaborate story about the founding of Twitter. In dozens of interviews, Dorsey completely erased Glass [Noah Glass, the originator of the idea] from any involvement in the genesis of the company. He changed his biography on Twitter to “inventor”; before long, he started to exclude Williams and Stone too. At an event, Dorsey complained to Barbara Walters that he had founded Twitter, a point she raised the next day on “The View” … Dorsey told the Los Angeles Times that “Twitter had been my life’s work in many senses.” He also failed to credit Glass for the company’s unusual name … Dorsey’s story evolved over the years … Dorsey began casting himself in the image of Steve Jobs … adopting a singular uniform: a white buttoned-up Dior shirt, bluejeans, and a black blazer … In Silicon Valley, most companies have their own Twitter story: a co-founder, always a friend, and often the person with the big idea behind the company, who is pushed out by another, hungrier co-founder. As one former Twitter employee has said, “The greatest product Jack Dorsey ever made was Jack Dorsey.” In the end, the reality of Jack Dorsey, who is now worth billions of dollars, becomes the story that was made up. At this point, no one, other than maybe some journalists and professors, really cares about the actual origins of Twitter or Jack Dorsey’s makeover. Power gets to write history, and in so doing, helps perpetuate the power itself, and many of the foundations on which it was built.

• Power is scarcely the only social domain where self-perpetuating, self-confirming forces are at play; the self-fulfilling prophecy concept is a useful way of understanding many phenomena. But the fact that power does provide some degree of insulation for the powerful has important implications for those who seek to take down the powerful, and also for people thinking about how and if to build their power. Simply put, once you are in power, you are likely to remain there because of all of the processes I have described in this chapter. And much of what you have done to achieve power will indeed be forgiven or forgotten as people construct stories based on the twin desires for consistency and to be close to those in power.

Quotes

Be wary of friends—they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.

Knowing about your rival is critical. Use spies to gather valuable information that will keep you a step ahead. Better still: Play the spy yourself. In polite social encounters, learn to probe. Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please and impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite—inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.

Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelop them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be too late.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.

Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable. Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen. Meanwhile, learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their own reputations. Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them.

Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all cost. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses.

Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause. Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you a godlike aura of efficiency and speed. In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered. Never do yourself what others can do for you.

When you force the other person to act, you are the one in control. It is always better to make your opponent come to you, abandoning his own plans in the process. Lure him with fabulous gains—then attack. You hold the cards.

Any momentary triumph you think you have gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory: The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate.

You can die from someone else’s misery—emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.

To maintain your independence you must always be needed and wanted. The more you are relied on, the more freedom you have. Make people depend on you for their happiness and prosperity and you have nothing to fear. Never teach them enough so that they can do without you.

One sincere and honest move will cover over dozens of dishonest ones. Open-hearted gestures of honesty and generosity bring down the guard of even the most suspicious people. Once your selective honesty opens a hole in their armor, you can deceive and manipulate them at will. A timely gift—a Trojan horse—will serve the same purpose.

If you need to turn to an ally for help, do not bother to remind him of your past assistance and good deeds. He will find a way to ignore you. Instead, uncover something in your request, or in your alliance with him, that will benefit him, and emphasize it out of all proportion. He will respond enthusiastically when he sees something to be gained for himself.

Knowing about your rival is critical. Use spies to gather valuable information that will keep you a step ahead. Better still: Play the spy yourself. In polite social encounters, learn to probe. Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.

All great leaders since Moses have known that a feared enemy must be crushed completely. (Sometimes they have learned this the hard way.) If one ember is left alight, no matter how dimly it smolders, a fire will eventually break out. More is lost through stopping halfway than through total annihilation: The enemy will recover, and will seek revenge. Crush him, not only in body but in spirit.

Too much circulation makes the price go down: The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear. If you are already established in a group, temporary withdrawal from it will make you more talked about, even more admired. You must learn when to leave. Create value through scarcity.

Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.

The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere—everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it Protects you from—it cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target. Better to circulate among people, find allies, mingle. You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd.

There are many different kinds of people in the world, and you can never assume that everyone will react to your strategies in the same way. Deceive or outmaneuver some people and they will spend the rest of their lives seeking revenge. They are wolves in lambs’ clothing. Choose your victims and opponents carefully, then—never of fend or deceive the wrong person.

It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause but yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others—playing people against one another, making them pursue you.

No one likes feeling stupider than the next person. The trick, then, is to make your victims feel smart—and not just smart, but smarter than you are. Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you may have ulterior motives.

When you are weaker, never fight for honor’s sake; choose surrender instead. Surrender gives you time to recover, time to torment and irritate your conqueror, time to wait for his power to wane. Do not give him the satisfaction of fighting and defeating you—surrender first. By turning the other cheek you infuriate and unsettle him. Make surrender a tool of power.

Conserve your forces and energies by keeping them concentrated at their strongest point. You gain more by finding a rich mine and mining it deeper, than by flitting from one shallow mine to another—intensity defeats extensity every time. When looking for sources of power to elevate you, find the one key patron, the fat cow who will give you milk for a long time to come.

The perfect courtier thrives in a world where everything revolves around power and political dexterity. He has mastered the art of indirection; he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the most oblique and graceful manner. Learn and apply the laws of courtiership and there will be no limit to how far you can rise in the court.

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define it for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions—your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

You must seem a paragon of civility and efficiency: Your hands are never soiled by mistakes and nasty deeds. Maintain such a spotless appearance by using others as scapegoats and cat’s-paws to disguise your involvement.

People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow. Keep your words vague but full of promise ; emphasize enthusiasm over rationality and clear thinking. Give your new disciples rituals to perform, ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf. In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power.

If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.

The ending is everything. Plan all the way to it, taking into account all the possible consequences, obstacles, and twists of fortune that might reverse your hard work and give the glory to others. By planning to the end you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead.

The best deceptions are the ones that seem to give the other person a choice: Your victims feel they are in control, but are actually your puppets. Give people options that come out in your favor whichever one they choose. Force them to make choices between the lesser of two evils, both of which serve your purpose. Put them on the horns of a dilemma: They are gored wherever they turn.

The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

Everyone has a weakness, a gap in the castle wall. That weakness is usually an insecurity, an uncontrollable emotion or need; it can also be a small secret pleasure. Either way, once found, it is a thumbscrew you can turn to your advantage.

The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated: In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you. For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others. By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown.

Never seem to be in a hurry-hurrying betrays a lack of control over yourself, and over time. Always seem patient, as if you know that everything will come to you eventually. Become a detective of the right moment; sniff out the spirit of the times, the trends that will carry you to power. Learn to stand back when the time is not yet ripe, and to strike fiercely when it has reached fruition.

By acknowledging a petty problem you give it existence and credibility. The more attention you pay an enemy, the stronger you make him; and a small mistake is often made worse and more visible when you try to fix it. It is sometimes best to leave things alone. If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.

Striking imagery and grand symbolic gestures create the aura of power—everyone responds to them. Stage spectacles for those around you, then, full of arresting visuals and radiant symbols that heighten your presence. Dazzled by appearances, no one will notice what you are really doing.

If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox ways, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them. They will find a way to punish you for making them feel inferior. It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch. Share your originality only with tolerant friends and those who are sure to appreciate your uniqueness.

Anger and emotion are strategically counterproductive. You must always stay calm and objective. But if you can make your enemies angry while staying calm yourself, you gain a decided advantage. Put your enemies off-balance: Find the chink in their vanity through which you can rattle them and you hold the strings.

What is offered for free is dangerous-it usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation. What has worth is worth paying for. By paying your own way you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit. It is also often wise to pay the full price—there is no cutting corners with excellence. Be lavish with your money and keep it circulating, for generosity is a sign and a magnet for power.

What happens first always appears better and more original than what comes after. If you succeed a great man or have a famous parent, you will have to accomplish double their achievements to outshine them. Do not get lost in their shadow, or stuck in a past not of your own making: Establish your own name and identity by changing course. Slay the overbearing father, disparage his legacy, and gain power by shining in your own way.

Trouble can often be traced to a single strong individual —the stirrer, the arrogant underling, the poisoner of goodwill. If you allow such people room to operate, others will succumb to their influence. Do not wait for the troubles they cause to multiply, do not try to negotiate with them—they are irredeemable. Neutralize their influence by isolating or banishing them. Strike at the source of the trouble and the sheep will scatter.

Coercion creates a reaction that will eventually work against you. You must seduce others into wanting to move in your direction. A person you have seduced becomes your loyal pawn. And the way to seduce others is to operate on their individual psychologies and weaknesses. Soften up the resistant by working on their emotions, playing on what they hold dear and what they fear. Ignore the hearts and minds of others and they will grow to hate you.

The mirror reflects reality, but it is also the perfect tool for deception: When you mirror your enemies, doing exactly as they do, they cannot figure out your strategy. The Mirror Effect mocks and humiliates them, making them overreact. By holding up a mirror to their psyches, you seduce them with the illusion that you share their values; by holding up a mirror to their actions, you teach them a lesson. Few can resist the power of the Mirror Effect.

Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day-to-day level people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt. If you are new to a position of power, or an outsider trying to build a power base, make a show of respecting the old way of doing things. If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement on the past.

Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. Envy creates silent enemies. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity.

The moment of victory is often the moment of greatest peril. In the heat of victory, arrogance and overconfidence can push you past the goal you had aimed for, and by going too far, you make more enemies than you defeat. Do not allow success to go to your head. There is no substitute for strategy and careful planning. Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.

By taking a shape, by having a visible plan, you open yourself to attack. Instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp, keep yourself adaptable and on the move. Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed. The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order. Everything changes.

References

• https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/48-laws-of-power-robert-greene
• https://manassaloi.com/booksummaries/2022/08/25/7-rules-power-jeffrey.html