Book Review: The Daily Laws by Robert Greene

Misbah Haque  (00:00):

Hey everybody, what’s going on? This is Misbah Haque. Welcome back to another episode of Pod Mahal. Today, I wanted to take some time to do a little book review on quite possibly one of my I’d say top three favorite books of 2021. And it’s one that I’m really recommending to a lot of people right now, even though I don’t have an affiliate code for Kindle or that stuff, which I feel like I should. But I’ll still include the link below to Amazon, if you want to get this. I think that one of the reasons that I love this book is because it reminds me of the daily stoic, if you are a fan of Ego is the Enemy, the obstacle is the way some of those books are writings by Ryan Holiday. His mentor was Robert Greene.

Robert Greene has written some of the most prolific books of our time in terms of like, how much he, how much time he puts into researching. And you may have heard some of his books like Mastery, that’s a really powerful one, the art of seduction, the 48 Laws of Power, and things like that, he dives into a lot of like, human nature type stuff. And I will say that even me, I didn’t appreciate his writing. Even though I respected it, I didn’t appreciate it as much as I could have. Mostly because of like, How long, and how a lot of the books are really deep and thorough, and that’s really good. But in terms of sometimes, like keeping your attention I had a tough time getting through some of the books, right.

But in this new format, basically he distills down like 25 plus years of writing, and you get kind of he points in each entry, I guess, like, which book or which talk or which, whatever it’s from. So that way, if you want to explore the full book or the full talk that he did, you can go ahead and do so. But it’s basically also dated, all the way from January 1 to December 31. And has a bit of an order to it.

So it starts out kind of like what he says is one of the most important things, which is finding your life’s task, planting the seeds for mastery. Then February is the ideal apprenticeship, transforming yourself. March the master at work activating skills and attaining mastery. April, the perfect courtier I don’t even know how to say that Playing the Game of Power. May the supposed non players and power recognising toxic types and disguise power strategies. June, the Divine craft, mastering the arts of indirection and manipulation in July the seductive character penetrating hearts and minds August the master persuader softening people’s resistance. September The Grand strategist rising out of tactical hell, October, the emotional self coming to terms with our dark side, November the rational human realizing your higher self in December, the cosmic sublime expanding the mind to its furthest reaches. So I just read you the Table of Contents, because I’m not going to read one of the posts out of there. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. But I think the Table of Contents did it justice in terms of if any of those topics attracted you, it has kind of a rhythm to it. But you don’t have to read it in that way, like flipping open to today’s date only. But they’re designed to be like only a page less than a page. Most of the entries are less than a page. And they’re designed to be meditations that you kind of ponder on and think about. And Action kind of arises out of when you consume it this way. 

There’s a lot in here that I totally would not have consumed because they’re just in these larger volumes of books that  I just, I’m not there yet. Maybe I would in the future, but this makes it very consumable. Somebody asked me if they should get it on audiobook. I think you could. You definitely could. And if it’s read by him, that’s even better, but I personally like having the hard copy where you can see it, you can highlight it. And all that good stuff. Here is the other reason that I’m even going ahead and I wanted to kind of do the review on Pad Mahal, is when you view it from the lens of someone who’s as a creator, or a writer, in any format. Every word pulls you through to the next sentence, you kind of see his mastery in that you see his mastery and being able to distill down very big chunks of information and concepts into very digestible metaphors. And how does he do it if, I haven’t counted but what is it? 500 words, 700 words, what fits on a page, I find it really impressive to watch. Like, how does he title each one of these entries? You know, how did he start? How does he end it? How does he explain his point, these are all things that, to me kind of even transfer over into like, Instagram captions, right or content of any format. There’s a flow to his teaching here, where you can see him in real time storytel. He’s a great storyteller. And if you have one thing I would recommend, also, if you don’t even want to buy the book, before even buying the book, go listen to a couple podcasts that he has done. Because they are so fascinating. 

He’s somebody who is really, really engaging on a podcast. And I’ve mentioned this before, but I enjoy hearing the aftermath, the afterthought, the director’s cut version of how the author feels about their book, and what their reflections are now that they’re getting some feedback. And now that it’s out in the world, now that it’s done, they’ve moved on, they have some distance they often drop even more gems and podcasts that just aren’t in the book. So I recommend checking some of those out. He does a great one with Jordan Harbinger from The Jordan Harbinger show, one of them was envy. 

He did that a couple years ago. And then he did an updated one, like another one for this book. That’s really awesome. But yeah, I would recommend checking it out. I think it’s really, if you want to watch somebody in a masterful way, like look beyond the writing, it’s not just writing, it’s the thinking. And it’s articulating into words. So it’s a form of scripting, for some of you who aren’t writers, but you are making videos, you’re doing podcasts like to have something scripted like this, or you’re probably posting on Instagram, even like, I mean, not all these are, are directly just Instagram posts, but what I’m what I mean, the ability to condense the ability to tell a story in such a short amount of words, and to do it with really sometimes like controversial topics or tough topics to talk about. And there’s a lot of lessons here that I think as a small business owner, or freelancer or coach you can really take a lot out of from just a creation standpoint. And then there’s a whole nother side of it that you will get from just the meditation side of it and opening it up randomly from day to day, I like to do that. A lot is just open to a random page and kind of start reading. It also depends on the kind of the season that you’re in, so that’s where the Table of Contents was helpful as what season are you kind of in right now with whatever skill you’re reading to learn, and maybe you start in January. Accordingly in the table of contents, I hope this was helpful in terms of giving you a little bit of background on what you can expect out of this book. If you dive into it. 

Totally think it’s worth it just for the sake of like, watching kind of a master do his thing. I know there’s a crowd or there’s a side that’s totally like, Oh, it’s just repurpose stuff and pulled from old blogs and books and things like that. And they for some reason discount the value that it still has, but I’m really in the opposite boat where it’s so valuable to get an updated reflection from a thinker like this. And also just the ability to summarize like I said, that’s the biggest thing I know I have trouble with sometimes. Keeping it tight, keeping it short and watching somebody Who has great word economy do, it’s a treat so definitely check it out I included the link below even though I’m not an affiliate thingy or whatever, but check it out. And remember, head over to podmahal.com to check out free resources to help you start a podcast and help you with your podcasting workflow. We’ve got free podcasts, a launch checklist, the budget book for equipment, and a workbook to help you kind of  go through some prompts and questions to help shape your ideas. All that is again at pod mahal.com And check us out on Instagram that’s @podmahal. Feel free to DM me. I love to hear from you. But thank you so much, once again for tuning in. And I will talk to you soon!