Many readers learned the basics of Machiavellianism and manipulation from Robert Greene‘s popular “48 Laws of Power“.

Unfortunately, some of these laws are based on ancient examples, and some principles don’t apply as well to the modern age of the internet, AI, and influencer-based power.

In this article, we update The 48 Laws of Power with modern strategies and examples that work in today’s world.

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

Intro: Why Laws Need Updates

Modernity transformed the context. Here’s an overview:

Download a high-resolution version of the modernized 48 Laws table here

Most examples from The 48 Laws are historical, and many are from ancient history.

While many power principles still apply, context also matters, and context has changed dramatically.

For example, the influence of bosses and social groups over individuals has waned. Today, everyone, and especially high-value men, enjoys more freedom and power than ever.
In this context, laws like “fit in” or “never outshine the master” carry fewer benefits and higher opportunity costs.

In a world with more freedom, information, and distributed power, soft power, prestige, and ‘pull’ approaches become increasingly effective compared value-taking strategies.

Let’s review some laws for more details:

Law #1: Leapfrog Your Boss

❌ Law 1: Never outshine the master. 
✅ Law 1: Learn everything from your master, then move past him

❌ Law of Power #1 is Dated Because it Slows Down Ambitious Men

In Greene’s contexts of kings, castes, and little social mobility ‘never outshining the master’ was a good rule of thumb.
Keep your head down, and… Stay safe. But safety behind an average boss underperforms ambitious men in modern contexts.

HBR research finds that ‘gatekeeping managers’ hold your career back.
And ADP finds that staying in the same role 3+ years slashes your chances of raises or promotion. Today, it doesn’t pay to play small.

✅ Modern Application: Switch Jobs, Network For Power & Options, Be Your Own Boss

In today’s world of high mobility and optionality, it pays better to be bolder: network, switch jobs for higher pay, and leapfrog your boss with high-visibility projects.

🙋‍♂️Lucio’s Experience: Leapfrogging & sidestepping my masters

Lucio:
I outshone my boss in sales and got to negotiate with the other higher-power MD for a higher position, salary, and equity package (see the story here).

Better yet, I’m living my best life after I quit having ‘masters’ and focused on my life passion and mission: TPM and Power University.

Law #4: Speak Up

❌ Law 4: Always say less than necessary
✅ Law 4: Speak up, be visible, and build your personal brand

❌ Law of Power #4 is Dated Because Silence Makes You Disappear

We live in a fickle and narcissistic world where quiet men are outshone by the many who speak more and louder.

✅ Modern Application: Speak Up, Gain Leadership & Visibility

Today’s dominant leaders speak up to gain status and frame conversations to their liking.

Modern social media also offer new, unparalleled opportunities for fame.
Many influencers gained popularity with over-talk (ie: Ben Shapiro built an empire by commenting on every news).

Law #5: Get A Great Online Reputation & Live Free IRL

❌  Law 5: So much depends on reputation. Guard it with your life. 
✅ Law 5: Curate your online reputation, and live freely in your real life

❌ Law of Power #5 Is Dated Because High Mobility Makes Large Reputation Investment Low ROI

Most ambitious men will go through countless new social circles where reputation restarts from zero every time.

Plus, modern men don’t need a fixed social circle but can walk their own path, ‘sigma style’ while meeting women and making friends outside of social circles.

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s note: this is how I like living

✅ Modern Application: Focus on Online Reputation

Modern reputation doesn’t run with word-of-mouth but with Internet searches, social media, and AI.
Digital reputation sticks beyond changing groups and people.

In real life, focus on gaining the respect of the people that matter, and forget all the rest.

Example: Keanu Reeves & The Heart of Gold

Few know Keanu Reeves in person, but many think he is great because of his online reputation.

Law #7: Lead With Honor & Reap The Benefits of Higher Productivity

❌  Law 7: Let others do the work for you, but always take credit
✅ Law 7: Make people feel valued and give credit. They work harder, the pie grows, and you reap the rewards.

❌ Law of Power #7 is Dated Because Team’s Output Matters Today

Servants couldn’t do much if their masters took credit, and feeding themselves and their families was the only priority.

But empowered employees expect better, and value respect and organizational fairness (Cohen-Charash and Spector, 2001).
This Mad Men TV series portrays this more modern dynamic:

Report: (accuses bosses of stealing her idea)
Boss: It’s how it is, you should be thanking me
Report: (quits some time later) <— The boss loses a valuable asset

Those who stay, less talented and demotivated, will have lower productivity, which long-term undermines the credit-taking boss.

✅ Modern Application: Motivate Your Team, Reap the Benefits of Higher Productivity

Higher productivity means bigger pie for all—including for the leader.

This approach is particularly valid for masculine and agentic men who value achieving goals, not just ‘looking good’.

Also read:

• The realpolitik guide to management

Law #11: Make Others Crave Your Presence & Attention

❌  Law 11: Learn to keep people dependent on you
✅ Law 11: Make people want to depend on you

❌ Law of Power #11 is Dated Because Dependency is Costlier

It was easy for masters to make peasants dependent. In today’s world, dependence is costlier, rarer, and not the peak of power many think it is.

✅ Modern Application: Get High-Value Men & Women to Want You

The stronger currency of influence is not low-value dependence, but emotional investment from high-value people.

Top men earn it with high value and good social strategy.
Even if others may not strictly depend on them, they want them, crave them, and sometimes emotionally need them.

These are the types of high-value, power-savvy men we build inside Power University:

Law #13: Appeal to Higher Ideals With Prosocial Frames – Then Capture The Profits

❌ Law 13: When asking for help, appeal to people’s self-interest, never to their mercy. 
✅ Law 13: Appeal to higher ideals to signal honor, attract top talent, and sell to the wealthy

❌ Law of Power #13 is Dated Because When Basic Intrinsic Needs Are Met, People Crave Higher Value

Self-interest in a world where basic needs are met underperforms.

Maslow’s hierarchy suggests that people who meet basic needs crave self-actualization.
And research supports it: engagement and teamwork grow when people do not think of what’s in it for them (see Haslam, 2011).

✅ Modern Application: Provide For Material Self-Interest, But Focus on Higher Ideals & Values

Today’s most influential men go beyond pure self-interest and attract with higher ideals.

People are willing to work for less and for longer if they feel good about it.
In marketing, make people feel less self-interested. The highest margins happen when people feel good and can virtue-signal ‘ their goodness.

More examples include Starbucks and fair trade, and Dolphins-safe tuna.
Read more:

• Corporate manipulation

Law #17: Lead With Warmth, While Holding Onto The Tools of Coercive Power

❌  Law 17: Keep others in suspended terror: cultivate an air of unpredictability. 
✅ Law 17: Maintain the tools of control, but lead with honor to attract the best talent.

❌ Law of Power #17 is Dated Because it Backfires in Modern Leadership Context

Erratic behavior for “air of unpredictability” requires absolute power. Even there, it’s high risk: research shows that despots often meet premature death.
In modern contexts, ‘suspended terror’ would drive the best talent away.

✅ Modern Application: Be a High-Power, Yet Honorable Leader

Be a strong and prestigious leader, make them crave your rewards.
Just like a Godfather, allies will remain closer if you keep the terror for your enemies.

How to be a leader

Law #18: Build A Fortress – Then Act As If You Don’t Have One

❌ Law 18: Do not build fortresses to protect yourself – isolation is dangerous. 
✅ Law 18: Fortress your life by covering your downsides. And then enjoy life carefree

❌ Law of Power #18 is Dated Because Modern Fortresses Don’t Require Isolation

Modern fortresses are not literal fortresses; They’re strategic tools of high-value men, including multiple bank accounts, prenup agreements, doomsday bunkers, legal weapons, bodyguards, multiple passports, etc.

✅ Modern Application: Protect Your Downsides For Greater & Safer Cooperation

Fotress your mind first, and then fortify pragmatically. Never depend so much on anyone that they could ruin you. Ensure that you’ll always land on your feet, even if they betray.

Read more:

• Fortressing strategies for top-1% men

Law #24: Learn Office Politics, But Never To The Detriment of Skills & Results

❌  Law 24: Play the perfect courtier 
✅ Law 24: Be a king

❌ Law of Power #24 is Dated Because Modern High-Value Men Don’t Need to Be ‘Yielding’ to Win

Greene states that the perfect courtier is ‘yielding and indirect’, associated with submissiveness, low power, and low honor.
It may have been helpful with egotistic kings, but modern high-value can skip it.

✅ Modern Application: Live Like a King

Modern high-value men don’t need to be literal kings to live like kings.
Smart and strategic men can have it all: attractive women, a life of freedom, and the fulfillment of pursuing meaningful goals.

Law #27: Create A Self-Help Movement of Easy Fixes

❌ Law 27: Play on people’s need to believe to create a cult-like following
✅ Law 27: Market easy fixes

❌ Law of Power #27 is Dated Because Cults Attract Low-Value People

With mass education and secularization, cults struggle to gain traction—attracting mostly the gullible and needier (the ‘value-control tradeoff™’ principle).

Beyond being dishonorable, modern high-value men can do better than leading a pack of bottom-1%.

✅ Modern Application: Sell Hope & Fast Results

The most profitable modern cults are self-help movements of dogmatism and easy solutions.

There is an endless market for this naive self-help, ranging from the law of attraction to pop-psychology ‘tricks’.

In many ways, that’s The 48 Laws of Power ‘secret’: simple laws that are supposed to make you powerful (they may not).

The blurring line between self-help, quackery, and nonsense started with ‘Think and Grow Rich‘

Law #30: Make Your Accomplishment Inspirational – They Can Do It Too!

❌ Law 30: Make your accomplishments seem effortless.
✅ Law 30: Make your accomplishment seem impossibly hard: they’ll admire you, and nobody will try to match you

❌ Law of Power #30 is Dated Because Today’s Culture Respects Hard Work

Today, people admire and respect hard work.
Talent alone may even make you less authoritative (ie, ‘it’s easy for him, he’s good looking’).

Instead, everyone loves and respects hard-working underdogs. Most modern influencers use this new law:

✅ Modern Application: Frame it as Both Talent & Hard Work

Deep down, innate talent always impresses because it’s a timeless indicator of ‘good genes’.
So, to combine the best of both worlds, play both.
This is the frame:

It always came easy for me, and I also worked on it hard

Law #34: Dress With Sprezzatura to Display Power

❌ Law 34: Be royal in your own fashion: act like a king to be treated like one.
✅ Law 34: Dress down when others must dress up to display your power and independence

❌ Law of Power #34 is Dated Because Brands & Suits Don’t Signal Power Anymore

Dressing well signaled power when dressing well was hard. Not anymore: suits and knock-off brands are available to everyone.

If anything, overdoing ‘royal fashion’ with business attire can signal lower-class overcompensation.

✅ Modern Application: Dress Casual to Display Superiority When Everyone Else Must Follow Dress Code

Dressing down when others must dress up signals you’re above the rules.

A good power move is to mix real wealth indicators with dressing down. For example, nothing screams “I don’t need your approval” like a disheveled man getting out of a Ferrari.

Modern disdain for appearances can also signal agentic goal-focus, an evolution apparent in Steve Jobs.

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s note: dress well for attraction
Dressing to look good is important in dating and when working your way up. Dress well, without being a try-hard.

Law #38: Conform to the Leaders When Starting, But Soon Make Others Adapt to You

❌Law 38: Think as you like, but behave like others.
✅ Law 38: Think, be, and behave as you like, find others who do the same, and avoid sheep

❌ Law of Power #38 is Dated Because Modern Empowered Men Don’t Need to Toe Anyone’s Line

Conforming is still helpful when starting out, but it holds you back as you grow.
Most of all, never adopt it as a mindset. Today, this law is too disempowering for modern high-value men. Always think of yourself as a free man, and work to soon mold it into your reality.

✅ Modern Application: Be a Leader, Not a Follower

Conform to the leaders and the role you want to have, not to random others (‘power alining’ in our lingo).

But most of all, focus on gaining status so you can lead. Or quit the hierarchy altogether, do your own thing, and be your own man.

Law #46: Appear Perfect

❌  Law 46: Never appear too perfect
✅ Law 46: Appear as perfect as possible

❌ Law of Power #46 is Dated Because Modern Men Don’t Depend On Lower-Value People to Like Them

The original law made sense in a world of small and fixed tribes, but today it pays better to be bolder.

Also read:

• Frenemies and how to spot frenemies (frenemies are the envious par excellence)
• Vulnerability is not power: don’t overdo it

✅ Modern Application: Leave Behind Average Frenemies, Focus on Yourself & Associate With High-Quality People

Focus on winning, instead of making losers feel better about themselves.

In the modern world of interconnected high mobility, you can leave average people behind and associate with other winners.
Do that.

How to Win in the Modern World

If Robert Greene’s laws are the operating system of the past, you can improve on a 400-year-old code.

In the age of AI, digital reputation, and high mobility, following dated advice isn’t just slow, but a liability.

We constantly upgrade Power University to be the ultimate update. It’s the only strategy lab designed for high-value men who want to master the science of modern influence, power, and dominance.