Always Adopt the Religion of the Country You’re In
Leadership advice from Napoleon Bonaparte on how to succeed by making yourself welcome wherever you go
“With the Bible guiding him about the faith of the Druze and Armenians, the Koran about Muslims, and the Vedas about the Hindus, he would be well supplied with suitable quotations for his proclamations to the local populations virtually wherever this campaign was finally to take him.”
Conquerors like Napoleon knew how to get people to like them, even while he was preparing to take everything away from them.
He knew how to get on people’s good sides, to ingratiate himself with them, and he did this not by ridiculing their beliefs or trying to impose his own, but by making people think that he shared them.
There’s genius in this approach, and it can help us get everything we ever wanted.
I’ll be completely honest with you: there are people out there who think that I think they’re the smartest people in the entire world.
They think that I agree with their asinine theories about how the world works and what they believe about human nature.
They think that their favorite book is my favorite book, or that I hate the same people they hate (hint: I…
