I am somewhat at odds with “The 48 Laws of Power“.

I do want to win, but I prefer winning with win-win approaches and achieving my goals while adding value to the world. It’s doable, because I’ve done it.

And the research literature shows that immorality harms leadership. High-quality men, including honorable men, tend to make for better leaders and also get the most out of their teams.

So in this article, we’ll turn the 48 Laws of Power into the new “48 Laws of Leadership”:

👉🏼 For the complete book guide, see the main 48 Laws of Power guide.

The 48 Laws of Leadership

❌ Law 1: Never outshine the master
✅ Law 1: Honor Mentors Until Growth Stalls
Respect your mentors and stick with them as long as you are learning. Once you’re better, focus on moving past them: it’s best for all.

❌ Law 2: Never put too much trust in friends, learn to use enemies.
✅ Law 2: Pick Trustworthy People, and Prepare Contingecy Plans Anyway
Give enough trust to people that they feel empowered, but not enough that they could ruin you. Learn to tell trustworthy individuals from toxic ones and make sure you only have trustworthy ones around.

❌ Law 3: Conceal your intentions.
✅ Law 3: Align Your Values to Your Goals for Authentic Honesty
You can’t 100% honest, 100% of the time. But be ‘as honest as possible’. Be strategic in competitive environments, but be more honest in close and win-win personal relationships to get the best of both words.

❌ Law 4: Always say less than necessary.
✅ Law 4: Speak Wisely to Earn True Respect
Speak only when needed and when you can add real value. That way, people will come to see you as a true wise man and everyone will listen when you open your mouth.

❌ Law 5: So much depends on reputation. Guard it with your life.
✅ Law 5: Ensure People Know You’re a Honorable Man. Especially other Quality People
Don’t become a slave to what people think of you. And remember: only reputation with honorable and high-impact people matters. Forget the rest.

❌ Law 6: Court attention at all costs.
✅ Law 6: Build Inner Strength Over External Validation
Narcissists are weak and, dependent on external validation as they are, not in control of themselves. Make yourself into a man who does not depend on external validation instead (read “the antifragile ego” to start).

❌ Law 7: Let others do the work for you, but always take credit.
✅ Law 7: Give Credit to People Who Earn It: They’ll Work Even Harder
Build your team around group identities and foster an environment where people want to work “for the team”. You will automatically reap the benefits as a leader.

❌ Law 8: Make other people come to you. Use bait if necessary.
✅ Law 8: Attract Through Your Quality & Copetence
Pull is always better than push. Make people want to come to you based on your knowledge, skills, and personality.

❌ Law 9: Win through your actions, never through argument.
✅ Law 9: Win with Actions and Arguments
Actions and arguments are two faces of the same coin. Make sure you’re good at both and that your actions and words support and reinforce each other.

❌ Law 10: Infection: Avoid the unhappy and the unlucky.
✅ Law 10: Help Great People Up When They’re Down. Avoid Takers
Help momentarily unhappy and unlucky people: they will love you once back on their feet. Avoid toxic people, no matter how lucky or happy they are. Also: luck doesn’t exist. you make your own luck.

❌ Law 11: Learn to keep people dependent on you.
✅ Law 11: Excel to Make Everyone Want You
Avoid the mindset of keeping others dependent. While it seems powerful, it’s needy. Strong men don’t even want dependent people because they’re a burden to them.

❌ Law 12: Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim.
✅ Law 12: Build Goodwill With Honorable Character
You will not be able to always be 100% honest, but strive to be as honest as you can, as often as you can. Every time you behave ethically and in line with your professed values, you build a reservoir of goodwill.

❌ Law 13: When asking for help, appeal to people’s self-interest, never to their mercy.
✅ Law 13: Pay Enough, and Inspire with Higher Ideals
Avoid appeals to self-interest only, or you attract low-quality people who only think of “what’s in it for me“. Psychology shows that extrinsic motivation and appeals to higher ideals work better.

❌ Law 14: Pose as a friend, and work as a spy.
✅ Law 14: Be a True Friend to Great People, Spot False Ones
Be a good friend, but learn to judge people’s true character. Learn to read the signs of frenemies and drop these people.

❌ Law 15: Crush your enemy totally.
✅ Law 15: Avoid Wars, Display Teeth to Discourage Aggressors. But Win Whenever Attacked
There will never be a war to end all wars, so always seek to avoid wars. But if you really must, attack covertly or make it impossible your enemy can retaliate (crushing him may be a valid option then).

❌ Law 16: Use absence to increase respect and honor.
✅ Law 16: Deliver Value With Your Presence So Your Absence Hurts
Focus on delivering as much value as possible with your presence. Then, once you’re away, your presence will be sorely missed.

❌ Law 17: Keep others in suspended terror: cultivate an air of unpredictability.
✅ Law 17: Make People Admire You, Respect You Too, and Always Punish & Banish Takers
Make others admire you is your goal #1. But if someone disrespects you, put them back in their place. Admiration and respect, even respect out of fear, aren’t opposite, they go together.

❌ Law 18: Do not build fortresses to protect yourself – isolation is dangerous.
✅ Law 18: Fortify Wisely, Without Making it Look Like You Are
A bastion of power to retreat to will make you more confident outside of it. Ensure you portray them as a power display, rather than defensiveness.

❌ Law 19: Know who you’re dealing with- do not offend the wrong person.
✅ Law 19: Discern Worthy Connections
The original “law” is based on fear and defensiveness. Instead, know who you’re dealing with because not everyone is worth your time, attention, and help.

❌ Law 20: Do not commit to anyone.
✅ Law 20: Always Have Exit Strategies, and Only Commit to Honorable People
Commitment limits your freedom, but can also bring benefits. Just make sure it’s a win-win. And if they stop contributing, it’s fair for you to move on.

❌ Law 21: Play a sucker to catch a sucker- seem dumber than your mark.
✅ Law 21: Feign Weakness Strategically
If you are not yet sure who you’re dealing with, pretend to be dumber to truly assess people’s character. And if you must go on a war path, pretend to be weaker and dumber to induce your opponent into mistakes.

❌ Law 22: Use the surrender tactic: transform weakness into power.
✅ Law 22: Shun Unwinnable Battles
Never fight unwinnable wars. Avoid most “winnable” wars, too: they rarely are as “winnable” as they look on paper (and as presented by power-craving generals).

❌ Law 23: Concentrate your forces.
✅ Law 23: Focus Deeply on What Matters
Don’t waste your time on today’s countless distractions. Find something meaningful and fulfilling and give your full attention to it.

❌ Law 24: Play the perfect courtier (royal advisor).
✅ Law 24: Master Skills, And Politics
Politics is important, but competence is harder currency. Skills are transferable while politics disappear the moment you leave an organization or a group (read “the futility of social status“).

❌ Law 25: Re-create yourself.
✅ Law 25: Craft Your Identity Intentionally
Choose who you want to be, then work to become it. Choose your identity wisely, because it will determine how you think, how you act, and, ultimately, the direction of your life.

❌ Law 26: Keep your hands clean.
✅ Law 26: Stay Honorable
Build your life and character so that you never even have to stain your hands. Little by little, seek to think and behave more and more like the man you aspire to be.

❌ Law 27: Play on people’s needs to create a cult-like following.
✅ Law 27: Become Worthy of Admiration
People want to look up to someone. Become someone who is worth looking up to.

❌ Law 28: Enter action with boldness.
✅ Law 28: Boldly Pursue Your Goals From Beginning to End
Don’t just enter bold, stay bold. Pick worthy goals, and then commit to them.

❌ Law 29: Plan all the way to the end.
✅ Law 29: Plan Flexibly Toward Goals
Things never go according to initial plans, so focus on startig and reinventing along the way. It’s all about getting there, not about following plans.

❌ Law 30: Make your accomplishments seem effortless.
✅ Law 30: Showcase Effort and Grit T
rain until getting things done will be effortless for you. But never be shy about telling people how hard you worked: Everyone admires grit and staying power, and that’s what you want to teach your best followers.

❌ Law 31: Control options: get others to play with the cards you deal with.
✅ Law 31: Nudge to Make Others Fel Empowered; Command When Required
Nudge towards a certain option. But if you’re sure about the path, don’t be afraid to tell the team what’s gonna happen. People respect masculine but fair commands.

❌ Law 32: Play to people’s fantasies.
✅ Law 32: Tailor Pitches to Your Audience
Pitch your ideas and opinions in a way that fits your audience, not yourself.

❌ Law 33: Discover each man’s thumbscrew.
✅ Law 33: Understand People Deeply
Learn to read people, both bad and good side. But lead mostly with positive appeals, and never with cutting remarks. That’s not leadership, that’s toxic bullying.

❌ Law 34: Be royal in your own fashion: act like a king to be treated like one.
✅ Law 34: Dress to Impress, Then Transcend It
Dress well because everyone judges books by their covers. Once you have enough power, skills, and reputation, dress however you please.

❌ Law 35: Master the art of timing.
✅ Law 35: Grasp the Zeitgeist, But Transcend It
Study, learn, and understand the spirit and the zeitgeist. But never let it control you. And don’t be afraid to lead towards new ways.

❌ Law 36: Disdain things you cannot have: ignoring them is the best revenge.
✅ Law 36: Achieve Your Goals, Transcend Materialism
Weak minds let what they don’t yet have control them. Strong minds focus on the work needed to achieve. The enlightned minds learn not to need anything.

❌ Law 37: Create compelling spectacles.
✅ Law 37: Develop Outstanding Products, Market Them Accordingly
Marketing and product are two faces of the same coin: curate both.

❌ Law 38: Think as you like but behave like others.
✅ Law 38: Adapt Then Shape Culture
Learn how your social group thinks and behaves and, as a beginner, adapt to it. As you grow and start getting more and more responsibility, start shaping that culture for the better.

❌ Law 39: Stir up waters to catch fish.
✅ Law 39: Zero In On The Issue, Strike With Precision
Avoid collateral damage: it wastes effort, creates resentment, and it’s the hallmark of poor work.

❌ Law 40: Despise the free lunch.
✅ Law 40: Get What You Earned, & Give to Other Givers
Despise the freeloader’s mindset. Use generosity as a tool for influence and persuasion, and to repay the givers.

❌ Law 41: Avoid stepping into a great man’s shoes.
✅ Law 41: Follow Great Mentors and Outdo Them
Timidity is for mediocre men. Seek great men to learn from, and be a worthy successor.

❌ Law 42: Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.
✅ Law 42: Address Problems at the Root
If facing a mutiny, address the mutineer first. But fire everyone else too: they already showed their character.

❌ Law 43: Work on the hearts and minds of others.
✅ Law 43: Appeal to Both Heart and Mind
Appealing to both is often more persuasive (Aronson, 1972).

❌ Law 44: Disarm and infuriate with the mirror effect.
✅ Law 44: Inspire Mirroring Through Excellence
Mirroring is following. Don’t waste time with low-level power games: become leader others want to mirror, instead.

❌ Law 45: Preach the need for change, but never reform too much at once.
✅ Law 45: Lead Bold Change Effectively
Effective change is the hallmark of leadership. Frame it the natural consequence your values, lead the way, praise people embracing change, cut the insubordinate… And soon you’ll have a much-upgraded team.

❌ Law 46: Never appear too perfect: it creates envy and enemies
✅ Law 46: Cultivate a Culture of Learning from Mistakes
Foster an environment where people aren’t afraid of mistakes. Reward those who own up to them and learn from them. But never commit mistakes on purpose to be more “relatable”: it levels you down.

❌ Law 47: Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory know when to stop.
✅ Law 47: Exceed Goals and Raise Standards
If your overshoot your goal: keep going. It’s the time to be bold and go from victory to triumph.

❌ Law 48: Assume formlessness
✅ Law 48: Embrace Impermanence Without Attachment
Enjoy everything, but don’t get attached to anything because everything in life is transitory. You included.

Why Honorable Leadership

The 48 Laws of Power is a good text to learn more about power, but focusing on the dark side only isn’t realistic, it’s biased.

Leadership in democracies and free societies calls for leaders to make other want to follow.
And that’s rarely with over-manipulation and games. Coercion and manipulation become increasingly more obvious over time, harm your reputation, and drive the best people away.

But let me be honest now:

No list of laws will make you effective. Not at gaining power, and not at leading.
To be really effective, you must learn how to calibrate the principles.

That’s why in our flagship course we focus not on maxims, but on developing the skills that allow you to be effective any time, anywhere.

Also read:

• Laws of effective leadership
• How to be a great manager
• How to be a honorable man
• 48 Laws vs. Power University: Power University is our course that turned thousands of men into effective and honorable leaders