The Concise Laws of Human Nature
Robert Greene
A guide to the motives people hide, including from themselves. You can't read other people until you've looked at your own worst habits.
This is the shorter version of Robert Greene's The Laws of Human Nature. It covers eighteen patterns that he thinks drive how people behave, usually without them noticing: irrationality, envy, grandiosity, conformity, short term thinking, and a dozen more.
Each law is built around a person from history, and Greene uses their story to show the pattern in action. Then he turns it on the reader. His recurring point is that everyone has these tendencies, including you. Most of the damage comes from believing you're the exception. The chapter on the shadow, the side of your personality you hide and deny, makes this clearest. What you repress tends to leak out in ways other people can see long before you do.
Greene writes as if you're being let in on something, and the tone can get dramatic. Underneath it is a lot of careful reading of history and psychology.
It's on the shelf because it's honest about something most books on people skip. Before you can read anyone else well, you have to look at your own envy and vanity, and that part is much less fun.
