Thread by @startupdaemon

LAW 14: Pose as a friend, work as a spy.

@RobertGreene advises to avoid open confrontation with people, and seek to uncover their hidden plans and desires instead, wielding polite banter as a weapon.

To amplify your Power of Mind, point the spyglass to yourself first.

1. Take a third-person point of view to your actions and sensations. Study yourself and identify your strengths and weaknesses. Be merciless.

Just like people can reveal valuable information in small talk and mindless chatter, your own mind can throw up important insights into your psychology and Being in the shape of innocent thoughts and sensations.

Pay attention, and to yourself first.

Does something innocuous make you unsettled or energized? Do you obsess over something of no obvious importance?

Follow the energy trace all the way through resistance to insight into your unconscious drives.

2. Understand that the dialectic rules everything of Mind – a strength easily manifests as weakness when left misunderstood and undeveloped.

3. Complacency is the destruction of character. Always be watchful of your habits and dispositions.

4. You can test your character like you can test the character of anyone else. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations to uncover hidden triggers and weaknesses.

The practice of discomfort is essential practice of Mind, and Blood in the Game its ultimate form – self-imposed pain to test one’s own desires and convictions.

startupdaemon.net/2018/02/04/blo…

5. Authentic connection requires that you pay attention and relentlessly study the people around you.

If they rely entirely on a shared past, your relationships will be unfulfilling, shallow and fragile.

In the long run, the mental laziness of wishful thinking will bear harm and disappointment, friends and family will turn distant and burdensome.

If you believe infantile pop-culture narratives, you’ve earned all the suffering you’ll get.

6. Understand that the past could be a fluke and conditions are always changing.

To win life, develop perception unclouded by fear and wishful thinking.

Two very different people can act the same way because of sheer circumstance.

Knowing people's inner world is how you remove your relationships from the mercy of happenstance, how you make connection independent of conditions.

7. Power is about control of the future. Actions are the best measure of character, but words and emotions can reveal intentions and potentials – allowing you to predict what people's futures hold.

8. Future unfolding is inherent in the present moment.

Understand that being present and paying attention are about grasping both what is immediate and what potentials it holds as a coherent whole.

This is an essential element of High Awareness.

To be present is to experience present and beyond-present without judgement and expectation.

9. You can use directed attention to see into the futures of others as well as your own.

It takes no magic and witchcraft to level up in perception.

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Or wander blindfolded through a mediocre life.

startupdaemon.net/signp