r/48lawsofpower

Once as a new hire, in a multinational company, I began my journey there with guns blazing. I was a junior engineer and I thought I had to prove my value at all cost. The first thing I noticed was that the machines had a high downtime.

Unbeknownst to me, the company was trying to save money on mechanical parts and had decided to keep using old parts instead of purchasing new ones. This caused the machines to require higher maintenance time. But this didn’t matter. What mattered more for the technical director is to show management that the cost of machine repair was decreasing.

Oblivious to this priority, and after I did my homework and learned about the accumulated time the machines had to be stopped, I went ahead and ordered the missing parts without consulting my manager. And if you are wondering whether this was a part of my responsibilities, the answer is yes. But unofficially I wasn’t allowed to do that. It was my naive initiative. The “doing more” myth.

When he discovered what I did, he was furious and apparently not pleased at all. He stormed into my office, his face all red, and in a burst of anger he shouted: “Why do you care about the machines’ downtime?”. Someone had apparently told him that I knew about the repair times.

Doing more doesn’t result automatically in more recognition. And this is perhaps the most common myth in modern companies. You assume that: more work, more effort, and more sacrifice will naturally produce upward movement. Sometimes it does but many people spend years discovering a painful reality: execution alone rarely guarantees recognition. Simply because organizations are not pure meritocracies.

Learning this early in my career helped me navigate power dynamics more effectively. One year after this incident, I was summoned to the factory director’s office and I was offered a promotion to replace the technical director.

In many organizations, visibility matters more than volume and perception matters more than effort. Even more important is association which matters more than contribution. Two employees can produce the same amount of work while receiving completely different levels of influence and advancement.

Why?

Because organizations are human systems before they are merit systems.

People reward:

• familiarity,
• emotional comfort,
• political alignment,
• usefulness to their own interests.

Not merely output.

Hard work without positioning often turns people into invisible executors: highly useful, heavily loaded, and strategically ignored. Cogs in the machine.

This becomes even more true in the age of AI. As execution becomes cheaper and more abundant, your ability to shape perception and influence decisions becomes increasingly valuable.

Ive been really impressed by the reviews and compliments people have towards robert greenes work. Should i dive straight in to 48 laws of power or start of with laws of human nature as it is more universal? or is there any other book you think would be a good intro into the world of robert greene?

One of the more effective techniques I’ve noticed is when people act in ways that make their future actions hard to predict. This allows them to put people off balance and even intimidate people with more overt power, disrupting expectations and making people think twice. Other times they’ll use a red herring, and then seemingly inconspicuous details will actually turn out to be parts of their plan. I hear a lot about how to use this tactic yourself, but not a lot about how you can counteract it and see through the smokescreen your opponent is trying to put up.

One way I’ve seen other people in higher positions counter this is to set up very clear and specific rules as to what they’re allowed to do. If someone maneuvers in a genuinely unexpected way, they will immediately pull them aside and demand a full explanation, even for minor details. It looks like cutting down on ways the adversary can potentially maneuver helps a lot.

I read the book 'Mastery' by Robert Greene last week, and I am confused every since.

I am 22 years old, graduating from college soon, have some 'rough inclination' of what I love.

But at the same time I have financial problems going on in my life, following that path seems counter intuitive and scary at times

Most importantly, I have been listening to people like Alex Hormozi and Iman Gadzhi, and there advice being that 'don't follow your passion, make money first, and do whatever you want after that'. I thought of starting with an online business, but now I am in this huge dilemma and have been going through severe anxiety about what I am going to do since a few days...

am I interpreting things wrongly? should I go the make money first way? what are your thoughts on this matter...