The character you seem to have been born with is not necessarily who you are: beyond the characteristics you have inherited, your parents, your friends, and your peers have helped to shape your personality.

Shape Your Personality

The Promethean task of the powerful powerful is to take control of the process, to stop allowing others that ability to limit and mold them. Remake yourself into a character of power. Working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and pleasurable life tasks.

Take Control of the Process

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define it for you.

LAW 25: Re-create Yourself

People who wear their hearts on their sleeves out society are tiresome and embarrassing. Their sincerity notwithstanding, it is hard to take them seriously. Those who cry in public may temporarily elicit sympathy, but sympathy soon turns to scorn and irritation at their self-obsessiveness-they are crying to get attention, we feel, and a malicious part of us wants to deny them the satisfaction.

The Weakness of Sincerity

The first step in the process of self-creation is self-consciousness-being aware of yourself as an actor and taking control of your appearance and emotions. As Diderot said, the bad actor is the one who is always sincere.

The Predominance of Self-Consciousness

Create a memorable character that compels attention, that stands out above the other players on the stage. This was the game Abraham Lincoln played. The homespun, common country man, he knew, was a kind of president that America had never had, but would delight in electing. Although many of these qualities came naturally to him, he played them up-the hat and clothes, the beards. (No president before him had worn a beard.)Lincoln was also the first president to use photographs to spread his image, helping to create the icon of the "homesun president."

Creation of a Memorable Character

"Know how to be all things to all men. A discreet Proteus-a scholar among scholars, a saint among saints. That is the art of winning over everyone, for like attracts like. Take note of temperaments and adapt yourself to that of each person you meet-follow the lead of the serious and jovial in turn, changing your mood discreetly."

Good actors control themselves better. They can play sincere and heartfelt, can affect a tear and a compassionate look at will, but they don't have to feel it. They externalize emotion in a form that others can understand. Method acting is fatal in the real world.

Learn Self-control and adopt Plasticity

﻿Do not people talk in the society of a man being a great actor? They do not mean by that he feels, but that he excels in simulating, though he feels nothing.

Draws on the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Von Clausewitz, and others, combining them with the legacies of powerful people throughout history to offer essential ideas of the ways of power.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

books

Books

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum.   Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.

Robert Greene is an American author of books on strategy, power, and seduction. He has written six international bestsellers, including The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, and The Laws of Human Nature.

BALTASAR GRACIAN