The 18 laws
18 tap a card to read it in fullReading paths
3Greene's order: master yourself, then decode others, then handle the social dynamics. Builds the vocabulary you need for the later laws.
The five that change the most about how you read a room. Irrationality, role-playing, envy, defensiveness, aimlessness.
Greene at his most surgical. Repression, grandiosity, envy, death denial. Read these slowly and with someone who'll tell you the truth.
I recently finished Robert Greene's The Laws of Human Nature and it wouldn't leave me alone. Eighteen laws, each one a separate pattern in how people actually behave (not how we like to think we behave). I kept catching myself watching the patterns play out in real life: in meetings, in news cycles, in my own head.
So I built the thing above. Eighteen cards, one per law. Tap any of them to read my full take, with two real-world examples and a short list of behavioural things you can do this week. About a thousand words a law, around twenty thousand total. Your read-progress sticks between visits.
If a card grabs you, that's the one to start with. If not, the canonical order at the top is a fine path. Either way, the actual book is much richer than this map. Robert Greene wrote it; if you want the deep version, grab a copy on Amazon{target="_blank" rel="noopener"}.
A note on attribution. The names, the structure and the underlying observations are all Greene's (The Laws of Human Nature, Profile Books, 2018). The writing is mine, the modern examples are mine, and any wrong reading of his ideas is mine.