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Benjamin Franklin kept a scorecard of his own faults and marked it every night for years. In his twenties he wrote down 13 virtues he wanted to master: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility. He drew a table in a small notebook, one column for each day of the week and one row for each virtue. Every evening he went over his day and put a black mark in the square for every fault he had committed. He worked on one virtue at a time, a week each, so that he went through the whole list four times a year. His daily plan began with a question he asked himself at five in the morning, what good shall I do this day, and ended with another at night, what good have I done today. He kept the notebook for most of his life. A good character does not happen by accident. It has to be built with intention.
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If you manage anything, a team, a business or just your own money, read Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. The book is about why the things you run keep doing what you did not want them to do. One of her famous examples is a car dealer. His sales go up a little, so he orders more cars. The cars take weeks to arrive, so he keeps ordering, and when they finally turn up he has far too many. He cuts his orders, runs short, and orders too many again. One small bump in sales turns into months of swings, and the harder he tries to catch up, the bigger the swings get. Meadows shows that nearly everything you manage works like this. There is always a delay between what you do and what you see, and most mistakes come from not allowing for it. She was the lead author of The Limits to Growth, the 1972 report that modelled the whole world economy, and she wrote this book to teach ordinary people what she had learned.
Two months after winning the Second World War, Winston Churchill was fired by the people he had saved. Germany surrendered in May 1945. Britain voted in July. When the results were counted on 26 July, the Labour Party had won by a landslide and Churchill was out of office the same day. He was 70. His wife Clementine, who wanted him to retire, told him over lunch: “It may well be a blessing in disguise.” He answered: “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.” He did not retire. He stayed on as leader of the opposition for six years, at an age when every other wartime leader had gone home, and wrote six volumes of history about the war. In October 1951, at 76, he won the election and walked back into Downing Street. Only you can decide when you are finished.
Parkinson’s Law by C. Northcote Parkinson was written in 1955 and it explains your workplace better than anything written since. Parkinson was a naval historian, and his evidence was the Royal Navy. Between 1914 and 1928 the number of ships fell by two thirds and the number of sailors by a third. In the same years the number of officials at the Admiralty rose by nearly 80 percent, from about 2,000 to more than 3,500. Fewer ships, more admirals. He found the same pattern everywhere he looked: an organisation grows at the same steady rate every year whatever the amount of work there is to do, because officials want to multiply subordinates, and because officials make work for each other. The opening sentence is the one everybody knows: 'work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion'. Read it once and you will see it in every meeting, every new job title and every email that did not need sending.
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Abraham Lincoln spent his twenties paying off a failed shop. At 23 he and a partner named William Berry bought a general store in the village of New Salem, Illinois, on credit. They had no money and little idea how to run it. Lincoln later said they did nothing but get deeper and deeper in debt until the store “winked out.” Then Berry died, and Lincoln became responsible for his share as well. He owed about 1,100 dollars at a time when he earned a few dollars a week as a postmaster and surveyor. He could have left the state and never paid, as many men on the frontier did. Instead he stayed and paid it off a little at a time for more than ten years. He joked about it as his “national debt.” While he was paying it he taught himself law, got elected to the state legislature and built the reputation for honesty that carried him to the presidency. Being broke in your twenties is not a verdict.
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Today, after seven years of work, The Law of the Sublime is out in the world.
When I started this book, I had an ambitious plan. I would go down the Amazon, find chimpanzees in the wilds of Africa, and cross the Gobi Desert, then write about those experiences of awe.
Then, on a hot August afternoon in 2018, I had a stroke while driving in Los Angeles. A blood clot cut off oxygen to my brain, and within seconds I lost consciousness. When I woke up in the hospital, I learned how close I had come to the point of no return. My left hand was frozen into a claw, and I could barely feel my left leg, but something strange happened.
On the ambulance ride home, I looked out at the people on the street, and for a moment I felt I could be inside their bodies and hear their thoughts. It was marvelous and weird, and I knew it was time to write this book.
I couldn't type, so I wrote every page by hand, dictated it, printed it out, and edited it all over again. I couldn't take the long hikes that had carried me through my six previous books. Then one afternoon I woke from a nap in my backyard to find a grasshopper inches from my face, and I understood that this small backyard would have to be my Amazon jungle. The lizards, the hummingbirds, the insects became my teachers.
My limits turned out to be a blessing. They forced me to find the Sublime in the simplest things, and that is what this book is about.
Most of us live inside a circle: an everyday consciousness shaped by culture, convention, and, more and more, technology. That circle keeps shrinking, and we grow bored and restless. Just outside it is the Sublime, a realm that is frightening and exciting at once, pulling us out of our comfort zones and opening us to a much wider reality. The book maps 12 points outside that circle, and each one is a different face of the Sublime.
Inside, you'll find stories of near-death encounters, astonishing discoveries, and radical changes of consciousness, along with exercises and meditations so you can feel the Sublime yourself, not just read about it.
The Sublime doesn't require travel or exotic adventures. It only requires a new pair of eyes for the reality all around you.
The Law of the Sublime is available now in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook.
Thank you for your support of my work. I hope you enjoy reading this book, and I look forward to hearing your feedback.
With gratitude,
Robert Greene
If you haven’t read Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, you are probably looking for happiness in the wrong places. In the 1960s Csikszentmihalyi watched artists at work and noticed something odd. While a painting was going well they would work for hours, forgetting to eat, oblivious to everything, and then lose interest in the finished canvas almost completely. The reward was not the picture. It was the state. He spent decades interviewing surgeons, climbers, chess players and factory workers and found that they described the same experience in the same words. He published the research for the public in 1990 and the book has been in print ever since. It is a book about one of the best feelings a person can have, and about what it takes to get into it.
Marie Curie could have patented radium and become one of the richest people in the world. She published the method instead. She and her husband Pierre spent four years in a leaking shed in Paris boiling down tons of ore to isolate a few grains of a new element, and by 1902 they had it. Radium was soon selling for more than any substance on earth, because doctors wanted it to treat cancer. The Curies owned the only method for producing it, and they could have patented it. They decided not to. Pierre said that if their discovery had a commercial future, that was an accident by which they must not profit. Marie wrote later that they refused to draw any material profit from it and published everything without restriction so that anyone could use it. She won two Nobel Prizes, lived in a modest flat and died of the radiation she had handled with her bare hands.