Long story short: You finish reading a book today, then you wake up the next morning to go to work as a different person. That’s what would happen to you when you read a book like “The Laws of Human Nature“.

Some time ago and before reading the book, I had this idea in my mind:

Deep inside everyone of us all emotions reside, there is happiness, sadness, anger, envy, jealousy, narcissism .. and any emotions you can think of, it’s there hiding, only waiting for a trigger.

Then I read this book, I was shocked how Robert Greene proved the same idea, on top of that, he enriched it with real-life stories from history to make it crystal clear.

Only one idea stuck in my mind throughout the book:

In the end, we cannot escape from ourselves !

It’s written in one of the chapters, but it was written a long time ago deep inside my head. You live your life, you try to repress your emotions instead of facing them but in the end, nothing can fix a problem from its roots except acknowledging it and facing it responsibly.

You might have faced bad situations in your past, maybe the worst situations a human can face, what you should know is these situations affected you even if you think that they didn’t, sometimes you find yourself doing things without control “this is when you recognize that such situations impacted the way you react”.

Here is another excerpt that talks about the same point:

You like to imagine yourself in control of your fate, consciously planning the course of your life as best you can. But you are largely unaware of how deeply your emotions dominate you. They make you veer toward ideas that soothe your ego. They make you look for evidence that confirms what you already want to believe. They make you see what you want to see, depending on your mood, and this disconnect from reality is the source of the bad decisions and negative patterns that haunt your life. Rationality is the ability to counteract these emotional effects, to think instead of react, to open your mind to what is really happening, as opposed to what you are feeling. It does not come naturally; it is a power we must cultivate, but in doing so we realize our greatest potential.

Here are my thoughts from the book (and pardon my inconsistency):

Emotions are in control, they can drive us to make the worst decisions in our life, we need to learn how to be ok with them at first and deal with them. Employing rationality can help to achieve this.

Anyone of us can be anything … you can be a good, bad, humble, arrogant or narcissist if you decided to be that kind of a person. Empathy could help in figuring out the real you.

It’s really good to learn how to see through people’s masks. First, we should agree that we observe very little how people act or react, maybe we should pay more attention to observing how people around us at work or life are acting or reacting in different situations and then connect with them in a deeper level.

Let’s agree that you don’t have to keep all people in your life, there are some toxic types of people you might want to avoid or try your best to keep them away from affecting your personal life.

By focusing on understanding the real you by being ok and in inner peace with all your insecurities, you become an elusive object of desire to people in your network.

We need to be aware of our limits, what can we do and be good at, and what can’t we do but other people can.

It’s healthy to confront ourselves with the dark side inside us.

I should mention that the book is an eye-opener to the deep world of humans, what I learned is that there is chaos “a lot of chaos” deep there, people are dealing with this chaos on a daily, hourly, yearly basis … what chaotic social animals are we!