The Nature of Human Nature

What Robert Greene is talking about is very much the Freudian method I've written about a few times in here—

• Examine a behavior or attitude in other people by paying attention to their actions
• Examine it in them further by listening to their self-reporting about it (and see how well their self-reporting lines up with the reality you observe in them)
• Examine the same behavior or attitude in yourself through deep introspection

And of course, the same applies to your own self-reporting as to theirs—be very judicious about when you're being truthful and when you're not. None of us want to think of ourselves as bad people, we want to see only the good in ourselves, but often that means we refuse to be honest about some of our worst traits. And when we do that, we tend to also scapegoat other people who have the same traits. The traits you tend to accuse others of having, especially the ones you get really worked up about, quite possibly are the same traits you're trying not to see inside yourself.

This is projection—the act of pretending like one of your own bad traits doesn't really exist in you, but in someone else. It's very common human behavior, and is the reason for things like Shadow Work or self-examination of other kinds. In fact, it's largely what Socrates was talking about when he said

"The unexamined life isn't worth living."
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It's the most vital and important kind of self-development a person can do. You can't do much to improve other people's behavior, the only behavior (or attitude) you can do anything about (aside from that of your children, by teaching them properly), is your own.

This looks like a really good and detailed breakdown of Greene's book:

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