Law 23 of 48
Concentrate Your Forces.
Focus your resources and efforts on a specific objective or goal. Concentrating your forces allows you to maximize effectiveness and efficiency, increasing the likelihood of success. Avoid spreading yourself too thin by prioritizing tasks and allocating resources strategically.
Independent commentary on a principle popularised in The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the authors or their publishers.
What it actually means
Spread effort produces movement without result. Five things at forty per cent look busier and finish less than one thing carrying your full weight. The same holds for people: a few deep relationships do more than a hundred contacts, because depth compounds and breadth only accumulates.
Where you would have seen it
You are running four side projects. Each gets an hour on Sunday, none reaches the point where anyone else can see it, and by March you have spent a hundred hours with nothing you can show a single person.
Try it today
Choose the project that matters most and give it the first hour of tomorrow. Put the others in a folder you do not open this week.
Where this shows up
Law 23 tends to come up in these parts of life. Follow a path to read the other laws that belong with it:
Leading People · Composure · At Work
Laws that go with it
If law 23 landed, these are the entries people usually read next — they cover overlapping ground: law 1, law 7, law 11.
Never Outshine the Master.
Competence is rarely the problem; displaying it in front of someone whose position rests on being the capable one is.
At WorkLeading PeopleLaw 7Get Others to Do the Work, but Always Take the Credit.
Read plainly this is theft, and it is worth understanding mainly because it will be done to you.
At WorkLeading PeopleLaw 11Learn to Keep People Dependent on You.
Being needed is not the same as being valued, and a deliberate bottleneck is the weakest security there is: the moment you are indispensable in one narrow place, you are also unpromotable.
At WorkLeading People