Every signal you send accumulates. The pause before you answer, the credit you quietly redirect upward, the alliance you chose not to make, the sentence you stopped before it became dangerous — none of those moments disappear. They settle into something durable. They become what people carry about you before you walk in. That means power is not only what you do in a moment. It is what people have been trained to expect from you before the moment begins. Greene calls reputation the cornerstone of power, and the word cornerstone is doing real work there. A cornerstone is not decorative. It is structural. Everything else is built on top of it. Greene argues that reputation precedes a person into every room and shapes how others perceive and treat them before they act. Think of two people entering the same negotiation. One has a reputation for patience and precision. The other has a reputation for volatility. The terms of that room are already different before either of them speaks. The first person's reputation is doing quiet work — lowering resistance, raising credibility, making the other side calculate more carefully. The second person's reputation is also doing work, but it is working against them. Their opponents are already looking for the provocation, already planning around the outburst. The reputation arrived first and set the conditions. Greene contends that a solid reputation can allow influence without direct confrontation, because people's expectations and fears do some of the work for you. That is the efficiency of it. You do not have to win every room from scratch if the room has already been shaped by what people remember. Now, what the earlier laws have been building toward is exactly this. Managing how you appear to the person above you — that is Law 1 protecting the image a superior holds of you. Choosing allies by incentive rather than sentiment — that is Law 2 keeping the wrong associations from contaminating what others assume about your judgment. Concealing intentions, restraining speech — both of those are, at their core, acts of reputation management. Every unguarded word Coriolanus spoke became part of how Rome remembered him. Every careful phrase Louis XIV withheld became part of how his court feared him. Reputation is where those choices accumulate. Greene frames it as stored perception. The memory of past behavior that changes the cost of future action. A person with a strong reputation for reliability does not have to prove themselves each time — the proof is already on deposit. A person whose reputation has been damaged has to spend energy just to get back to neutral before they can move forward. What Greene is pointing at, across these first five laws, is less a set of separate rules than a single recurring argument: that power often turns on what others have been given reason to believe about you, not on what you are actually doing in any given moment. The laws are variations on that theme — different arenas where perception either works for you or against you. The question the episode has not yet answered is what to do with that argument once you have it — how to hold Greene's framework without letting it flatten every relationship into a calculation. That is where the episode turns next.