Think like a king but move like a pauper

"Don't outshine your boss. Being defeated is hateful, and besting one's boss is either foolish or fatal. Superiority is always odious, especially to superiors and sovereigns."

Nuanced indeed, with bosses you can help them, joke with them, work harder and better than them, but never make them feel stupid.

If anything, these days you may not lose your head for such transgressions, but perhaps your reputation will take a beating. In any case, the higher you are in the echelons of power, the more it pays to think like a power-player but behave as though you are in danger of losing everything with your next move. Think cautiously, consult Gracian and if you really can’t make the right decision, try to behave ethically.

Create and immerse yourself in networks of information

"Associate with those you can learn from. Let friendly relations be a school of erudition, and conversation, refined teaching. Make your friends your teachers and blend the usefulness of learning with the pleasure of conversation."

Examine the lives of some of the most successful people in history and you’ll find that at any given time they went out of their way to cultivate meaningful relationships with individuals and personalities who were more intelligent than them in some way, and would work hard to keep them connected with each other, and with themselves to create a network of influence and knowledge that they could always seek refuge in.

Building a network like this around themselves which they could feed, expand, and enrich with new personalities meant that they could dip into it for advice, information, and solutions to the challenges they faced and for the decisions they had to make. By befriending intellectuals and by cultivating friendships with teachers, they also ensured that they were never bored, and could always learn and teach at the same time without being afraid of alienating or insulting others in turn.

Keep your storehouse of knowledge well-stocked

"Be well informed. The discreet arm themselves with a store of courtly, tasteful learning: not vulgar gossip, but a practical knowledge of current affairs. They salt their speech with witticisms, and their actions with gallantry, and know how to do so at the right moment. Advice is sometimes transmitted more successfully through a joke than through grave teaching. The wisdom passed along in conversation has meant more to some than the seven arts, no matter how liberal."

Didn’t George Bernard Shaw write, “If you’re going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh. Otherwise they’ll kill you”? Haven’t the great scholastic traditions handed down to us from the ages emphasized the value of debate and conversation in the learning process?

Here are some ways you can keep yourself in the game:

• If you’ve built your network, engage with it. Milk it for information. Renew it and rejuvenate it with praise and favours. Contribute to it, prune it, and curate it. Continually seek new personalities to add to it. Your network is a living, breathing information library – if you can keep it that way.
• Read more widely than those around you. Cut down on sleep if you have to.
• Make an effort to read and apply lessons and information from other disciplines within your own.
• Combine information and lessons from different disciplines to improvise solutions for your present challenges.
• Aspire to read more widely than you’re actually able to.
• Every time you read an article, pause after you’re done and try and summarize the key concepts of the article mentally with just three brief bullet points.
• Read more than one newspaper every single day, and try to read different viewpoints to challenge yourself and shake up your thinking.
• Clean up your Facebook and Twitter feeds so you’re only following news sources that you are interested in and can interact with. If it’s too late to do this, create new profiles that will allow you to do this.

These are all some of the ways to keep your storehouse of knowledge well-stocked, so that you will never be left clueless in any conversation.

At the same time, learn to also develop the art of conversation and of asking questions that will help you get the answer that you want quickly.

It’s reflected in the old adage that I learned when I was younger: If you see a carpet-weaver weaving a carpet in the street, don’t ask him what he’s doing. It should be obvious that he’s weaving a carpet, and now you’ve wasted some of his patience and your time. Ask him instead to show you how he weaves his carpet, and learn from him. In the process of the conversation ebbing back-and-forth, you’ll learn why he weaves carpets, what he sees in his designs, and how he wants to improve his craft. Such a conversation will be more enriching, and will likely allow you to relate his stories to your own so that you actually learn something as a result.