Become the Master of Your Destiny | Robert Greene Speaks To SMU Dallas

you want to be accumulating as many skills as possible having an active sense of this is the path that I'm going to forge for my life it's flexible you're open to things that happen in the moment but you have that inner radar that I'm talking about where you can recognize a false path from one that's a real opportunity thank you so much for coming all of you this is this is my first time in Dallas my first time in Texas so I'm really happy to be here and I really want to thank SMU for allowing me to have this opportunity I really really want to thank Noman for for setting this all up he's the most powerful person in Dallas as far as I know next to Mark Cuban so thank you Noman for doing all of this I really appreciate it um now there's this question that people have been asking famous people and friends for for hundreds of years now and the question is as follows if you were stranded on a desert island and you could only have one book that you could take with your have with you what book would that be now some people answer the Bible which is a great answer you know this would be very inspiring and give you a lot of support during probably a very difficult time other people who want something maybe a little more entertaining but still inspiring would say Moby Dick or War and Peace War and Peace being very long so you could you know draw it out for a while some people with a sense of humor would say Robinson Crusoe well when they asked the writer the famous English writer G.K Chesterton what book would you take if you were stranded on a desert island he gave a much different answer he said that he would take Thomas's guide to practical Shipbuilding okay now I actually happen to be one of the few people who's actually seen Thomas's guide to practical shipbuilding it it's from the 19th century late 19th century I was in the British museum I went to the private collection I actually saw it and it's an amazing book it's got incredible illustrations beautifully it's something you you could spend hours reading it happens to have a chapter in there that explains how you could build any seaworthy vessel from a few planks of wood how you can construct it with virtually no tools how you could make a mast and rigging from plant material how you could launch this this vessel at what time of year to launch it how to navigate using the stars and the North Star an amazing book so imagine you were had this predicament which book could you take if you had something like tolstoy's War and Peace it would certainly be more entertaining than Thomas's guide to practical shipbuilding but after you read it one time two times three times you started to get sick of it and as you on the island three years and four years and you're getting more and more depressed and suicidal you probably are going to stop reading it and one night you're going to use it for firewood Thomas's guide on the other hand it might seem like a dull book from the day one you're trapped on this on this desert island you're filled with this incredible confidence and hope you no longer feel like you're trapped on this island you know that if you use this chapter you can you can get yourself off the island you can start building your own ship it's going to take months probably years but as you're building this little vessel to get escape from the island or you create you're learning a valuable skill You're Building confidence you're feeling more and more excited about what's ahead then maybe you launch this vessel then maybe you get to another Island and or to some Port where now you could read all of the books you ever would want to read and then you could write a bestseller about your experiences and say sell the movie rights on and on and on huh so to me this is like the ultimate book this isn't a book that you read for pleasure in these circumstances this book can literally transform your life transform your circumstances save you from the most miserable despondent condition and bring you back to civilization so I naturally I I applaud the spirit of GK chesterton's answer his practical spirit it's a practical spirit that informs all of my books but I can go even further than that I would say that my book my new book Mastery is my attempt to write Thomas's guide for practical shipbuilding for the everyday world it's a book that I don't want you to sit there and read for entertainment in some passive sort of sense it is a book that I want you to use to literally transform your life transform the circumstances of your life and I make the case in the book that in fact all of us all of you are stranded on a metaphorical Desert Island and what I mean by that is in the past 40 years ago men mostly men would have a job like my father where they would essentially work at one position for their whole life my father worked for 40 years for Empire Chemical Company and in that time you felt not so long ago you felt that the company that you work for was there to protect you there was a loyalty that went in both directions you felt that they that they weren't going to fire you for for no reason at all if for some reason you ran into trouble with your career you had a sense that your your family your community perhaps even the government could help you out if you had a degree like in law or you went to medical school or you got an MBA that was essentially a lifelong ticket to lucrative employment now of course here we are in the 21st century and that world that my father knew is completely completely wiped Away by the tsunami of the 21st century it is gone it is a dream none of us are going to work for the same company in our lives for 40 years the Empire chemical companies are are dinosaurs we're going to work for three or four years at this company at that place whatever there's no longer a sense of loyalty going both directions we don't feel like that company that place that we work for is necessarily going to protect us from Cradle to the Grave we no longer feel the security that if we got into trouble we really could rely on our family or our community and we certainly can't rely on the government at all so in some sense the only thing that we can really rely on is ourselves we're thrown back on ourselves we have to depend on our own resources we are essentially stranded and to take this this metaphor even further the world that we all know now is completely different in other ways it used to be that a company would have four or five competitors uh that they that they could identify and that were clear now in this globalized environment there are hundreds and thousands of competitors hundreds of thousands of people competing for the same small pieces of power even more so the the um businesses and the the crafts that we practice they're changing by the day by the hour it's very hard to keep on top of all the changes that are going on in our different businesses I maintain it's as if we're facing this vast chaotic ocean before us and to navigate this ocean is extremely difficult and it's very easy in our careers to get lost to lose a sense of where we're actually headed well I designed Mastery as a way to help guide you in this in this journey I'm telling you in the book that you actually have the resources the the raw material to help you navigate this environment to get to power and Mastery and success and fulfillment that there actually is a North star an inner kind of radar that all of you possess that can help you navigate this new environment they're there but you're not aware of these resources and this inner radar you're not exploiting them you're not using them just like building a ship on an island the getting to Mastery is a step-by-step process a journey I take you through that journey I show you that you need to go through what I call an ideal apprenticeship in which you accumulate skills and you learn how to learn I show you how you need to identify a mentor and work with a mentor how to develop social intelligence so you can protect yourself from from the manipulative people in your environment how you can by staying with this process how you can awaken that natural Creative Energy that I believe all people have how you can push past the ten thousand hours to twenty thousand hours to the point where you have what I call high level intuition and you have mastered your field as just as much as an Einstein or Steve Jobs now the book is very long it's very complicated and I don't have a lot of time this evening so I want to focus on what I said earlier about these resources that all of you possess about this inner radar that you actually have this is the first chapter of Mastery what I call the life's task it is by far the most important chapter it is the most important principle in the book and I maintain that if you don't understand this principle it is actually very very difficult to achieve any kind of success or long-term power or Mastery in this world so please pay attention now now when we look at our lives and our career path it generally goes like this we're born I think we can all agree on that we then enter an education system and then somewhere around high school maybe a little earlier maybe a little later in the back of our minds we become aware of the fact that we actually have to earn a living and this is a very tough realization for some now some people who find this this realization a little too harsh um and admit fills them with anxiety they choose what I would call a direct path they gravitate towards something like law or medicine or go for an MBA or some kind of obvious direct craft or skill where they feel they can make a lot of money quickly something lucrative there might be some interest I don't mean to deny that they might not genuinely be interested in medicine or law or business but if these fields weren't so lucrative they probably wouldn't choose it one of the more overriding concerns in choosing a path like that is the money and nobody would deny that but many more of us in life choose what I call an indirect path so we enter the university system we figure out a major that we think corresponds more or less to something that we like and then suddenly we're thrown out into the real world to fend for ourselves and we have to choose particular career path that might suit us but we can't choose anything that we like and so a lot of our choice depends on what's out there where we live who are the connections that we have where we can get some money together where we can find a position and so we take that first step that first important career step and then what generally happens after three or four years perhaps the job is no longer there or we're tired and bored and we sort of we have to make an adjustment in our career path and we choose something else maybe something a little bit related maybe something not really related and then every three or four years another adjustment on and on and on and if you were to lift yourself up and look at this career path over 10 20 30 years you would see sort of this zigzagging motion where it goes where the person ended up like 30 years later has very little relationship to where they started even people who take the direct path in life the same scenario I knew for instance this lawyer that I met in Los Angeles he went into law because he actually thought it was an interesting field and he he intended to become perhaps a criminal prosecutor a D.A and then get into a career in politics and for reasons he couldn't really help mostly because of his wife Etc he found himself moving to Los Angeles where he had to get a job as an entertainment lawyer and he ended up an entertainment law and here he was like babying actors with their egos and movie directors something he had never intended and he was pretty unhappy and he was Consulting me to help rescue him from that and I find that scenario over and over and over again in my Consulting business people who were in their 40s and they say I have no idea how I ended up where I am I'm not unhappy I'm not completely unsuccessful but I never really intended to get in this career that I find myself in it happened by some weird random chain of events now if you examine this way of of people of how we look at our lives we can make a few generalizations a lot of the choices that happen in this career path are from external reasons where is the money who do we know where do we live what are other people doing a lot of these choices and this career path that we take is somewhat passive it seems to depend on a lot of chance and good luck and opportunities that suddenly appear and finally we can say that we never really look at our overall life at the overall pattern of our life instead we're thinking in terms of blocks of three years or four years or not even that maybe months of I gotta get through past this obstacle I gotta get this job and I'll think about the future later there's no overall arching sense of a purpose of a goal to our lives and I find this problematic the human being and I'd explain this in my book we're very unique very strange creatures animals are basically programmed they're programmed to respond in a certain way to events in their environment we humans have free will a wonderful thing we have Consciousness but with that Free Will and that Consciousness comes a certain element of pain that freedom can be very painful sometimes we don't know how to fill up our days we don't know how to make a choice what is it is this the right choice to take in this in this particular career path could there be something better there seems to be nothing really truly guiding us and telling us how we must work our lives this lack of purpose that many of us have is lack of a sense of a goal is even worse in this in the in the modern world where things are are changing so quickly and I think it's actually the source of a lot of secret frustration and a depression that a lot of people have in the past that sense of a purpose and a goal was filled through religion in a very deep and Powerful way and we're missing that in the world so I maintain in mastery that there is another way of looking at your life a much different approach one that I obviously promulgate and it goes like this each human being each one of you was born completely completely unique your DNA never occurred in the past and will never again occur occur in the future an incredible thought if you ever spend time to think about to ponder that the same thing could be said about your brain your brain is configured in a particular way that has never happened in the past will never happen in the future this uniqueness that you're born with is a perp there's a purpose there's a reason behind it our culture who we are depends on the diversity of people that exist within it each person bringing their own personal skills their own uniqueness to Bear it within our culture expressing all of this different skills and ideas creating this kind of rich soil it's why we celebrate a period in history like the Renaissance so this uniqueness that you were born with is your purpose is your fate is your destiny now how does this uniqueness that each one of you have how does it manifest itself it manifests itself beginning at the age of three or four years old you probably can't remember it but as a child you were naturally drawn to certain things to certain activities you're very young it's a pre-verbal thing you're drawn to certain patterns to certain ways of thinking to rhythms to music perhaps to to a physical activity Albert Einstein when he was five years old his father gave him a compass and he suddenly looked at this compass and the idea that the needle would move according to this magnetism in the North and the North Pole it fascinated him that there was this invisible force that existed in the universe from that moment on all he could think about were these forces that you couldn't see but that acted upon the physical world that was his sudden his uniqueness manifested at the age of five that I have in the book the great African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston she realized at the age of six that she was obsessed with mythology that took her well beyond the the black Township that she lived in Florida and she realized at that point that it was words itself and creating this kind of Mythic universe that obsessed her that was her manifestation of this uniqueness Steve Jobs when he's six years old he sees these electronic Gadgets in his garage and he's fascinated with these electronic gadgets and how they work not just how they work but the look of them and the design of them as we get older as we get seven or eight or nine years old the these differences these inclinations I call them Primal inclinations they become a little clearer they're not so nebulous we realize that we were meant to be a writer or to to work do Sports um of one person I forgot to mention that I love is is Tiger Woods he's 16 months old he's sitting in the high chair he can't even walk yet and he's watching his father hit golf balls in the garage against Annette and he's like can't wait until he can get on his feet and start imitating his father anyway as we get older it becomes a little clearer what these natural inclinations are I liken it to a voice inside our head it's a metaphor there's not literally a voice at least I hope not but there's like a voice and it's saying this is what you should be doing no man or whoever it is this is what you should be drawn to this is what you were meant to accomplish when you do it you feel an ease a kind of power if it's playing the piano it doesn't mean that you have don't have to practice there's still a lot of pain but in doing it you feel this kind of natural ease it works whereas if you do something that doesn't fall within this wheelhouse this what you were meant to do you experience the opposite you experience a lot of resistance this voice is telling you this is what you're drawn to this is what you should be doing now what happens with most people I maintain is that voice that we have gets fainter and fainter and fainter the first thing that intervenes is usually the education system we have to start we're interested in in books and literature and now we have to start learning algebra and suddenly this pain in our head and and it means to I don't maybe I don't like learning at all maybe I don't like education and then it infects how we naturally love writing itself the second thing that intervenes is our parents God bless them but they sometimes say you don't want to be a dancer you don't want to be a writer you don't want to be a you know an entrepreneur you need to go here and we take it seriously and we listen to them and then there are peers they're all interested in this particular field and we're naturally conformists and we find that that's something that infects us more and more down the line to the point where we don't even hear that voice anymore and we're finishing our graduate work or finishing the university system we're about to enter the career world and we're completely disconnected ourselves from that and suddenly when those critical first choices come up that I mentioned before we take a wrong step we don't know really what's to guide us in those those early moments and generally what happens I think with a lot of people is if they do take a wrong step in your 20s you can kind of fake it you're young you look good you have a lot of energy enthusiasm and you can get by you don't have to be completely in love with what you do but as you get into your 30s it starts to catch up with you the fact that you're not in love with what you do you're not really engaged with it you're not emotionally connected to it so you start not paying less attention you become more interested in your hobbies and in a family and playing golf or whatever you lose connection to the changes going on in your field and then all of a sudden in your late 30s and and maybe early 40s the worst thing that can happen to you happens you become replaceable somebody younger better looking and More in touch with Trends and a lot cheaper they're going to replace you and now where are you you're in you're in a lot of troubles Where You Are well Masters people who are powerful people who are successful they hear that voice when they're eight or nine years old they hear it even more as they get older as they enter adolescence that Voice May fade in and may fade out a little bit it happens to everyone it's human nature but it keeps coming back it keeps directing them to a particular career to a particular direction that they're going to take in life um the fact that they feel that they have to make a particular Discovery they have to invent this kind of business they have to express some idea in a book this gives them a deep emotional connection to what they're learning to what they're studying and we know from the Neuroscience of how the brain works that a person who's paying deep attention who's focusing who's really listening is going to learn much faster than someone who's disengaged who's bored So the faster you learn the more skill you develop the more skill you develop the more pleasure you're having in learning and then you enter what I call a cycle of accelerated returns that will lead you to Creative Energy and to Mastery being emotionally connected to what you're doing being personally involved and excited pushes you gives you this incredible momentum that pushes you past all of the obstacles that usually stop a lot of people you have the patience and the persistence persistence being the most important quality in this world for achieving Mastery and success because you have a reason for doing it a purpose you can push past the criticisms that people that you're inevitably going to face now this doesn't mean that there isn't an element of chance involved with people who are Masters who are hearing this voice of course there'll be opportunities that come up that they hadn't foreseen it's this it's within all of their stories but what they have is they can recognize what a real opportunity is and exploit it from a false path from a path that shouldn't be taken a lot of people make choices dependent on on money or or are getting attention they make the choices from inner reasons this is something I have to do this is something that attracts me personally and because of that they make all of the right choices all of these people and I've interviewed many of them I interviewed nine contemporary Masters in the book I've worked as I said as no man said I did a book with 50 Cent but I consult with a lot of them and all of the people that I've researched they all Express this sense of Destiny or fate they were destined to do what they what they ended up doing they felt it as a child and they felt it later on in life all the way through now I know this might seem abstract or poetic to you so I want to give you two examples of this idea in action and how it could affect your life one a historical example one a contemporary one that showed two different approaches to the sense of fate or destiny guiding you um and the first one they're both narrated in My Story by the way and the first one is a historical example it's the scientist Michael Faraday I don't know how many of you have heard of Michael Faraday he was born in the 1790s in England his father was a blacksmith a blacksmith he had a family of 12. a blacksmith doesn't necessarily or it's very low on the social class system he doesn't make a blacksmith still make a lot of money but to make matters worse Michael Faraday's father was continually ill so he couldn't work very much he had 12 children to support in other words Michael Faraday came from extreme abject poverty in London England in the 1790s and yet he went on to become one of the greatest experimental scientists that ever existed it was his discoveries that led to the electric motor and to the field theories that revolutionized science and led to the theory of relativity and all of the technological wonders around him and so you might say well this is a story of of a man who overcame a lot of adversity but that doesn't even begin to explain the story of Michael Faraday to be a scientist in England in the early 19th century you had to have access to the Laboratories you had to have access to Scientific journals to the work of the of your peers in science the only people who could do that were people who went to the university there were you could count the number of universities on one hand that were available in England for that to get to a university you had to go to one of the great they call them Public Schools what we would call private schools in England a place like Eaton to get into eating you had to come from the upper upper upper upper upper classes nobody nobody from the background of Michael Faraday could begin to enter that process he wasn't facing a glass ceiling he was facing a concrete wall it is absolutely impossible that somebody like that could have had a career in science so how did it happen well I'll try to explain um he came from a family that was very religious and part of their religious belief it was it was a weird sect called sand dominions part of the religious belief was that the spirit of God manifested itself in everything around you in lights in in carpets in in trees and flowers God was there in everything and young Michael Faraday from the age of six seven years old was obsessed with this idea and he's looked at everything around him the clouds in the sky the plants and he wondered how was God's presence manifested in these things and he was asking endless questions of his parents and everyone he could find and one day this intense very curious young man wandered into a local Bookseller it was like a Bookseller and a book binding shop and this is the first time he had really ever seen books besides the Bible because he was not he did not go to school he was not educated and he was just amazed by the sight of these books and the owner of the book I'm sorry of the bookstore was very Charmed by this intense young man and so they became friends and and young Michael kept returning to the Bookshop and so finally the Bookseller sort of decided he would help him and he offered young Michael a job as an errand boy and because they were so poor he had to accept you but he was he was very excited to be connected to this to this Bookseller so he worked as a as a Aaron boy and he had such a great work ethic that the owner said all right I'm going to offer you a position as an apprentice bookbinder and this was an amazing coup for him now for seven years he would serve as an apprentice and at the end he would have a craft as a book binder and the amount of money he could make as a book binder was amazing compared to where he came from so he accepted for the first two years the owner was absolutely in love with this young boy because he'd never seen anybody with such an incredible work ethic and so he offered young Michael something that he never offered before he said look the books I have in my Bookshop you're never going to find in any library in all of London I want you to take any book that you want and take it home and read it you can read any book that we have and so he took this seriously and he read everything in the Bookshop and soon he realized that what he really loved was science and in particular electricity and chemistry what he fascinated him about electricity and chemistry was that there was this sort of unknown thing going something happened that you couldn't see just like the effect of God there was something moving it and it felt almost spiritual to him so his love for chemistry and and electricity was almost a spiritual thing so he devoured every book he could on the subject and then one day when he was about 15 or 16 this book fell into his hands that he had to bind that changed his life it was called Improvement of the mind it's this remarkable seven 18th century self-help book that basically was going to instruct you if you didn't have all the good luck in life if you didn't go to a university this is how you could improve your mind this is how you could educate yourself the book advocated being very active you just didn't read a book you actually went out and practiced things you you had like experiments you're interested in science you conducted experiments you didn't just learn how to read and write you learned how to draw you just didn't read a book you went to lectures and and took notes on these lectures Etc and wanted you to be very active and involved with anything that you learned well Michael Faraday took this book everywhere it was literally his second Bible he devoured it he he applied every single idea in it he learned how to draw he did experiments in the back of the Bookshop he went to lectures and not only did he take notes on every scientific lecture he went to he would go home and then he would expand the notes into chapters full of drawings and diagrams of everything that he had seen on the stage and after months and months of doing this he had compiled an encyclopedia of science that was this thick an extremely impressive encyclopedia and one day a man walked into the Bookshop Mr dance was his name who actually belonged to the Royal Institute in in in great in England of uh Institute that promoted The Sciences very prestigious and the owner was very proud of his book binder and he showed him this encyclopedia that this intense 17 year old had compiled and Mr dance was astounded and he said um I'm going to offer you something that I normally wouldn't do and Humphrey Davey who's the preeminent chemist in England of the time is giving a series of lectures at the Royal Institute it's not open to the public but I'm going to personally invite you to this series of lectures he was Michael Faraday was this was Heaven for him he went to these lectures and he took the most copious notes that he had ever taken in his life he was so excited but also he was a little bit discouraged he realized that this man Humphrey Davey was a genius that he thought on a whole different plane and that by just reading books and going to lectures Michael Faraday would never ever be able to enter the this sacred world of science he was closed from it he could never be Humphrey Davey by just doing what he was doing he needed to have a mentor he needed to somehow get entree into the secret private world with Laboratories and all of that so we decided he would go on a little campaign he wrote letters to all the great scientists and he wrote letters in to Humphrey Davey himself offering his services at the most menial position a few months later he got a letter from Humphrey Davey himself Humphrey Davey was blinded in what temporary blinded by one of his dangerous chemical experiments that he had done he saw the letter from Michael Faraday and he had heard from Mr dance what an intense incredible work ethic this young man had and he offered Michael Faraday to have one week with him as his personal assistant obviously he he took up this offer and for that one week he he not only did everything that that uh Humphrey Davey asked of him he was so polite and respectful he made sure that he didn't push himself too much it wasn't so clear that he was angling for a position he tried to he cleaned everything that he could he just went the extra mile but Fortune unfortunately there was no position there was only for one week so he had he was back to working in the Bookshop well his his apprenticeship was nearing it and and he was about he was getting he was feeling desperate because once his apprenticeship ended he would have to enter the book binding business and once he did that his career his opportunity for entering science would be completely closed so now he wrote Humphrey Davey again gently reminding him of things that he had said during that week about experiments that he was maybe considering he then sent Humphrey Davey the as a gift the um the book that he had compiled of his lectures with all these beautiful drawings very impressive book once again two months later he receives a letter asking him inviting him to come to the Royal Institute and suddenly he was offered the job of his lifetime to be Humphrey Davy's assistant that very morning Humphrey Davy's assistant had gotten into an argument with him and he was fired for insubordination and the opportunity of a lifetime opened itself up and he became his Apprentice it meant a great sacrifice because he would be cleaning tubes cleaning out the fireplace he was going to be the most menial slave you could imagine but this was the opportunity he had been dreaming of well the rest is history after eight years of serving an apprenticeship on Humphrey Davy and learning all of the secrets and applying himself so diligently he made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science basically an experiment I describe in the book on on the nature of electromagnetism a discovery that led to our first electric motors it made his career it got him into the Royal Institute and his career was made now if you look at the story of Michael Faraday from the outside you might be tempted to say well man this guy had a lot of luck a lot of good fortune I mean first of all he wanders into the One Bookstore he gets the one job where he could read books that's pretty lucky the guy offers him all of these these books he can read he then gets that Improvement of the Mind falls into his hands that's a pretty lucky coup then that man Mr dance wanders into the store who then can get him to see Humphrey Davey that's pretty lucky the fact that the guy got blinded and experimented needed an assistant and then got in an argument on and on and on this guy you know it looked like pretty much good fortune that allowed Michael Faraday to get there but that's completely ridiculous it completely ignores the essence of the story it was that Spirit within him that intensity that Curiosity that impressed other people it was that inner radar that I'm talking about that sense of fate and destiny that made him wander into that bookstore itself and that that energy that he had that impressed the owner any young man who wandered into a store wasn't going to be offered the same job the same thing with that Improvement of the mind that fell into his hands it could fall into the hands of a thousand people but nobody would have used the book to the same degree that Michael Faraday used it Mr dance wandering into this into the store was impressed by what he had compiled by the diligence the the work ethic and the the persistence that this young man demonstrated it was he himself that created these circumstances by his energy by his interest by the love he showed for what he would for the work that he was doing excuse me so I maintain that Michael Faraday hearing this voice within him was able to make these the most critical decisions in his life and that it was by feeling the sense of Destiny early on in his in that he wasn't destined to be the son of a blacksmith that he wasn't destined to be just a book binder working in a bookshelf for his whole life that he was fated from when the fact he first read that book on electricity and chemistry to be a great scientist that was what pushed him past all the incredibly impossible obstacles that he faced in life the other example I want to share with you is of a contemporary example a woman that I interviewed for the book I a mini Albert Einstein one of the most brilliant women I've ever met her name is Yoki matsuoka um yokimatsuoka and her her story illustrates a much different way of approaching this sense of Destiny the one I find very relevant to our times was born in Japan in in the group grew up there in the 70s and as a young girl she realized that she was kind of peculiar she was interested in sports she was very good at sports tennis and swimming but what she really liked about sports was how the body could accomplish so many amazing graceful things how the mind and the body could work together she was also really interested in machines and Technology but she was interested almost in in what made them tick what made them work what made them alive she was also interested in in math and the hard Sciences and as a child as a young girl she somehow imagined that she would be able to combine all of these interests in some career whatever that would be but in Japan you had to specialize from a very early age you had to choose something very particular you couldn't be a generalist like that and so she made a very critical decision she found her way to the United States and got admitted to UC Berkeley as an undergrad in states she could have much more freedom to choose a a broader path she decided she would major in electrical engineering this seemed the perfect sort of opening field for her because studying electrical engineering you could design all kinds of machines but there were many different Avenues you could take one day her she confessed to her professor that her lifelong dream or the dream that she had when she was a young girl was to build a robot that could play tennis that would be how she could combine all those weird interests of her and to her surprise he didn't laugh at her he said well we have a robotics class here at Berkeley it's his new field it's very exciting and I want to invite you to take the class she took the robotics class at Berkeley and suddenly a light bulb went on her head and said this is the field for me this is perfect she went on to pursue this more deeply and then got herself admitted to the most prestigious robotics laboratory in the world the robotics Lab at MIT at MIT they were designing the new state-of-the-art robot and she volunteered to be the one that would design the hand this would be her chance to do all those things that she'd always wanted to do as a child combine all those weird interests of her she started going deeper and deeper into the study of the hand and how to build it and suddenly she realized that this wasn't enough her electrical engineering background wasn't enough she wanted to know what made the hand so human so alive how the hand is connected to the brain so she decided after she got her degree at MIT to get a PhD in neuroscience at MIT which he proceeded to do with these two degrees she then went on to design a prosthetic robotic hand that was absolutely astounding it was incredibly lifelike it was more human than any hand anybody had ever designed this was somebody 25. it became the industry standard and it catapulted her to fame she got the MacArthur genius a grant on and on and on she decided to create her own field that she called new robotics it was a mix of Neuroscience and Robotics she would be on the frontier of Designing Technology and products that would be more and more lifelike they would simulate how the human brain actually works she went on after going into new robotics to then segue into a field that really fascinated her in Green Technology she went on to work for a company called Nest Labs where she is right now in Silicon Valley she's the senior vice president in charge of Technology she worked on designing a thermostat for the house that operates almost as your personal assistant this thermostat learns from your behavior how you need to heat up your house and and in the same in the same process able to save a lot of energy but kind of adapts to who you are and how you watch the television and on and on and on and turns it on and off according to all this you know an amazing device and she's going to be inventing all sorts of other devices like that now the thing about Yoki matsoka that I find fascinating and where I consider this a more modern example is that she doesn't know when she's eight or nine or 12. what exactly she she should be doing like Michael Faraday did it was this sort of general idea of a direction that she needed to take in life which I think is more human and is how a lot of us feel but feeling this kind of inner radar this strong sense of what she was meant to do of the kinds of things that fell within that wheelhouse of power that were that were comfortable and easy and felt right to her she was able to make all of the right choices she was able to find her way to the United States where she could have the freedom to explore more she found her way to what she recognized from the moment she got into the robotics lab that this was the right thing for her she realized that she was designing it that she needed to take this further and study Neuroscience on and on and on if she had rebelled against her faith the sense of Destiny she would have stayed in Japan or she would have stayed just learning how to be an electrical engineer and design robots she would not have become a master by following her Fate by accumulating all of these different incredible skills that I outlined to her she can essentially write her ticket she's able to create businesses or products or ideas that completely reflect her uniqueness and what you can say about these great Masters that I'm talking about these Highly Successful People whether it's yokimotsuoka Michael Faraday Steve Jobs on and on and on is that they are unique they are unirreplaceable they are one of a kind they are Originals um basically because they've followed the path that I've outlined for you tonight so in conclusion I wanted you to leave here with four basic maybe slightly counter-intuitive ideas that I want you to ponder long after you leave here the first is I want you to think of a sense of Destiny of Fate actually applying to you and your individual lives I want you to think wider than you normally think as opposed to I want to study this particular field or I need to get this job I want you to think of the larger Arc of your life and the sense that you were born with this uniqueness that I have mentioned and that you were destined or fated to actually create build invent right do whatever it was it doesn't have to be on the order of an Albert Einstein or Yoki matsuoka or Tiger Woods it can be smaller it could be you were meant to start this simple kind of business you were meant to express this this particular idea in a movie or a film or whatever it is but that sense that you are connected to your destiny to a sense of purpose is so vital and so important and I want you to think about that in terms of your own lives the second thing is I want you to connect the sense of this uniqueness that I mentioned this these Primal inclinations now how this might be counterintuitive is often we think of what makes us different or strange as something that we have to run away from something that is not good but in fact that is the source of your strength that is the source of any kind of power you're going to have in life and as you're entering if you're in your early 20s or you're even older and you you're thinking about your career and where you're headed you have to go through a process you have to think back to your earliest years to those fields that it excited you in that Primal way like excited Albert Einstein with the compass they're there that information is there you're just not paying attention to it you have to look at the kinds of things in the present that excite you with a curiosity that's beyond normal I know for instance with myself whenever I look at open the New York Times and ever there's an article about our earliest ancestors I have to read that article I have to devour everything about it I'm so fascinated with that subject I don't care if it's about the teeth that they discovered in the earliest Neanderthal I I just have to read it I maintain that all of you there's something like that in the newspaper on the internet that's a sign of something of that uniqueness that I'm talking about there's also the negative side of the coin there's also the things that you hate that you've discovered in as you're in your career that you're that you that you don't want to ever have to deal with one of the people that I interviewed Paul Graham one of the Contemporary Masters he learned early on that he hates any kind of bureaucracy any kind of political environment that's the flip side of these natural Primal inclinations that I'm talking about so I want you to go through this process and reconnect with these this uniqueness that I believe each and every one of you have the third thing is I want you to think of your career path not as this sort of random thing that just sort of happens to you that you live in the moment whatever appears you have to take or this direction or that direction the usual passive approach that a lot of people have I want you to think of your career path as actually a work of art something that you are creating that you are forging that you are making that it's not something that just happens to you if it's something that direct path I mentioned something that you know from early on that you're going to be the next Michael Jordan then don't listen to other people and go take that direct path and see where it leads if you're not Michael Jordan you're gonna probably you could end up becoming a good great basketball coach or teacher or whatever the path that many people have taken in life I have the example in the book of Freddie Roach The Great boxing trainer who basically failed as a boxer and then realized that he was meant to be a trainer you you take that approach if it's more the indirect idea which I think is true for many of us you make you find that first all-important step like yokimatsuoka did with electrical and Engineering a path that offers you many branches and many possibilities for you to explore your twenties are what I call your apprenticeship years is the years that you should be accumulating as many skills as possible we're entering a skill based economy where the people like Yoki matsuoka who've accumulated two or three or four skills they can write their ticket for the future you want to be accumulating as many skills as possible basically though having an active sense of this is the path that I'm going to forge for my life it's flexible you're open to things that happen in the moment but you have that inner radar that I'm talking about where you can recognize a false path from one that's a real opportunity and finally I want you to get over this notion that I find so annoying that so many people have that success and Power in life is dependent on something like genetics like some people are born with a larger brain or they have wealthy parents who are able to send them to the right School or or it's all a matter of luck what really makes people successful and Powerful in life and it's not just me saying this I read hundreds of books on the subject what makes people successful is their degree of motivation okay I could repeat it a hundred times but it's true every time I say it when you are motivated when you feel yourself emotionally engaged in the subject you learn faster you learn what could take somebody 10 years to learn you can learn in two years when you feel emotionally engaged with something you're able to push past all the obstacles the sense that it's genetics or the size of our brain or our parents money you can't control any of that obviously and they can become kind of crutches for some people but the amount of motivation you feel the emotional connection you have to what you're studying or doing that is something within your control that is something you can choose to take and it is you're going to find people giving you all kinds of great advice about your careers about where you should go if you know for your MBA Etc but if there's one piece of advice that I think is more important than that is that is it is this idea of following this these natural inclinations and creating your own career path and finding a way to engage the deepest motivating parts of your psyche so thank you very much for listening to all of this I know I've I know I've overburdened you with information loaded you like pack mules um but I want to encourage you to ask me any questions yeah one of my favorite books of all time oh I forgot to say that okay hold on um Paul Graham I actually have read a lot of Articles I'm trying to prep for this program so I knew there was a connection I knew there was a connection when you started talking about articles that I've read but what astonished me about the book and obviously I love the way you presented the material and me being kind of a sales guy I really like the presentation but how did you actually bring together all the stories and quotes because again as I was reading them which book you're referring to oh sorry 48 Laws so I guess what I'd like to hear is just how you did that and maybe also the time frame that it took you in this project or do you love correct yes well I was younger I was like I was like 38 years old uh I was pretty desperate because I hated where I was working in Hollywood and jobs that didn't fit me so I was extremely motivated which fits in with my idea that I just talked to you about um and what's it took me two years to write and that includes reading hundreds of books for the research organizing all of that material which was a massive task writing it editing it honestly when I look back I have no idea how I did it um I don't think I slept I worked on Christmas my birthday my mother's birthday I just didn't stop and what was hard was I had no template all of my subsequent books I have kind of a system that I've created with my note cards Etc I had no system I had nothing to go by and as you know for better or worse there's no other book like that with this things on the side and the quotes and the images so I had to create it and I think maybe just the excitement of building a book that is so different was just a lot of fun it was kind of like a a Lego type thing you know I'm just constructing this thing and I just I think it was uh just my desperation and my motivation that made me work harder than I've ever worked in my whole life yeah did they talk about specific ations a person should take as well as from the studies in the book oh yeah I mean I told you it's Thomas's guide to practical Shipbuilding you know I'm I'm there pretty Hands-On um I covered the first chapter in depth here tonight giving you a pretty good feel for it but each of the there's six chapters there's sort of six kind of phases leading to Mastery so for instance in the apprenticeship chapter I told I show you how you should it's not just you learn you get in the University system a certain way of learning and I'm trying to say well no there's a different way of learning a different way of learning that's more active and here's how you do it here's examples of people who've done it and you have to become a consummate Observer you have to sort of Tamp down your ego and your need for attention and learn how to observe people and learn how to observe the rules of of the environment that you're in on and on and on so it's extremely practical practical oriented for each phase that I've taken through is that sort of your question okay um did you all hear that no okay go did you realize when you wrote these books there was a market Niche and if so did you reverse engineer any of your ideas to that to address that or was it all from sparking an idea you know it's an important question and you know it's never black and white these kind of things but my percentage is much more loaded away from the market Niche idea a lot there are people who think first of that what is the niche I can fit in where's the market who's going to be interested in this book and then they proceed to write it and I can't do that um I have to start with something that really personally excites me and interests me of course I you know that could be about something that nobody wants to read about so I'm not going to write a book on that subject maybe when I'm in my 80s I'll write that book but for now you know I have to make a living so it's a 10 part of the equation but 90 of it is what excites me and I've been interviewing 50 cents other people been reading about Napoleon Bonaparte and I noticed that all these people had ended up with this sort of intuitive power the kind of thing that Gladwell talks about in outliers and blink um where they have a feel for what should be next a feel for Trends Etc and I was fascinated by this and I thought I have to write a book about it nobody really explains where that high level intuition comes from and because I was fascinated with it I decided I would go do the research on where it came from and then out of the research Mastery came it wasn't exactly the book I had intended from the beginning these things involved but it came from a deep personal obsessive need to understand something that nobody else was writing about when I wrote The Art of Seduction which was a you know sort of a natural segue from 48 Laws but there was no book out there on this subject and I can tell you I know that because I researched it pretty thoroughly there was nothing on there out that they you either had books uh that were like for pickup artists on the most banal level about how to pick up some woman in a bar or you had some some you know lacanian theory about the about the unconscious that was equally uh you know irrelevant not the thing that would bridge the gap between it our everyday exam knowledge you know experiences of seductions because there was no book out there and I love the subject I wanted to write it so that's sort of how I operate first of all go Bears and welcome to Texas what did you say go Bears go Bears which Bears Berkeley bears oh okay okay thank you could be the Chicago Bears I don't know um question for you you have an interesting background you study Classics you worked in Hollywood you've written these uh very interesting and popular books yeah do you have your own personal story of your road on and off uh your experience on and off the road to Mastery and uh that Primal urge that Drew you through to where you are today well um yeah I mean I don't know how interesting it is but um I I knew from as a kid that I wanted to write I I'm sort of obsessed with words and the sounds of words and and all that um but I never could figure out what I should be writing you know so after college I thought maybe I'd write the Great American novel but that didn't really work out and then I got into journalism because I thought that would be a good discipline and it was it was a very good discipline but I didn't like it because you wrote something and it didn't last people would read it and then a week later they forgot about it and that really bothered me I wanted something that would last but it disciplined me it showed me how to write in a deadline how to how to edit my own my own writing and then I wandered into Hollywood thinking that in Hollywood I could have a little more freedom and create something a little bigger but then I realized that you had no power in Hollywood you wrote something and then nine other people would gang tackle you and change it and you were just a peon you had no control and I wanted control and so I wasn't happy um and I was 36 years old or something like that my parents were beginning to get a little worried about me and uh and I was in Italy on this weird project and I met this man yoastelfers who's a book packager and we were both kind of a little bit unhappy with this project that we were invited to in Italy we were walking along the caves of Venice Italy and he said in his Dutch accent which I won't imitate do you have any ideas for books and it was sort of that Michael Faraday moment or whatever on my own small level where I realized wow yeah books would be it would be something that would last more than a week and I would have complete power and control nobody could meddle with me this was what I was destined to do and I improvised an idea that turned into the 48 Laws of Power I I told him that I knew this Machiavelli is this sort of Timeless Spirit what we're experiencing here in Italy is something that people experienced 500 years ago in Florence and then I told him a story the story of Nicholas who Kay and which ended up being the first story in in 48 Laws of Power never outshine the master anyway the the lesson here was I was ready for this moment I was desperate I had accumulated all this knowledge and experience and when that opportunity came I I seized it with everything I had and you know now my my mother and my father got arrested him they don't feel like I'm such a loser so it had a happy ending you know you mean in my new book because the other books are mostly dead people you know and uh I felt like I'd interviewed I felt like I interviewed a Napoleon book part I mean 50 was great 50 was really the first person that I ever did that to I just come off writing the 33 strategies of war and I'd spend a lot of time with Napoleon Bonaparte and that means thousands of pages of books for the amino material on him I really felt like I knew him but now I have the chance to meet a real life Napoleon Bonaparte I called 50 the Napoleon Bonaparte of hip-hop you know he's like the embodiment of the 48 Laws of Power and it was so exciting to meet him and he's such a great guy so personable and I learned a lot from him that that was probably the most exciting because I was around him for about six months I was attached to his hip I had the most bizarre surreal experiences you know and you know this this kind of nerdy white guy you know middle class guy from La hanging out and it's pretty strange places I don't think anything could equal that because the other guys I interviewed people I interviewed for the new book they were always with them for a couple of days and they were fun and interesting but nothing like the trip that 50 took me on so that would probably be my personal favorite yeah can you expand on suffer pools gladly well you know there's a there's a phrase in the Bible That's become kind of a an expression called suffer Fool's glad and somehow in our modern world of God totally inverted which is something that kind of bothers me the original expression meant that you're constantly surrounded by fools half the world are fools or whatever the percentage is and and maybe you're a bit of a fool and what you need to do is you need to suffer you need to be able to put up with fools and laugh at them and not take them seriously that's what it means in the Bible and that's the wisdom in the Bible and then somehow it got turned around in modern times where where it seems to be a virtue that you don't suffer fools gladly that you don't put up with them that you get angry about them that you confront them that you try to change them and on and on and on and on and on and the idea that I try to say it's part of my chapter on social intelligence which is I'm trying to tell you that you're not going to be a master in this world unless you know how to get along with people we're social animals you can't just be a nerd a tech guy that has no contact with people you have to learn how to be with people and be socially intelligent and it's actually a beautiful form of intelligence and one of the aspects is to learn how to suffer fools gladly and I tell you what I think a fool is a fool is somebody that doesn't have the right kind of set of priorities in life they magnify the little things that we should just not worry about into some huge dramatic thing and the huge dramatic things that completely ignore they have no sense of proportion and we encounter them every day in our lives and in fact we encounter a little bit of them in ourselves we all have a foolish side so let's all be patient with fools if you try and change them or fight them you're only going to waste valuable time and energy in your short life learn to laugh at them learn to know it's part of the human comedy I find that that's going to save you energy in the end and I have stories in there of how not only do you suffer fools gladly but you turn it around to an advantage so I have a story in there Daniel Everett who's a great kind of anthropologist and linguist and he came up with a radical new theory on Linguistics and suddenly he finds himself being attacked by everyone in the field but they're attacking him in this ad hominem manner as if he's a charlatan they're not attacking his ideas and it's driving him crazy and now he's dealing with fools and he decides that what he's going to do is he's going to turn into his Advantage he's going to make sure now from now on that anything he presents in a book or a lecture is airtight they would usually pinpoint one little small thing and something he said that could be inconsistent and say Therefore your whole theory is wrong okay from now on I'm not going to make anything inconsistent so he took the foolish aspect of these attacks and he decided he would make it would make him stronger and would make his ideas stronger that's what suffer fools gladly is about and I have other examples there in the book I think we have time for one last question category albeit maybe Business Schools specific goes to schools or corporate CEOs or is there any specific guitar well I wouldn't say target market but just Mark a second that you're finding is reaching out to that quotes and leveraging well that's somebody pointed out earlier from my Wikipedia page it's the most requested book in prisons uh but I don't want to do I don't want you to focus on that um and they're probably some CEOs who've been who are in prison um who've used the book um a lot of business people a lot of Wall Street people obviously and the a lot of Hollywood agents that's sort of a natural fit uh the hip-hop people um you know but it's funny because I've been announced 14 years those books been out almost 15. um I get emails from all kinds of people and so I'll get emails from a woman who who works in the art an art Grant profession and she's telling me what an incredibly Machiavellian environment the art Grant world is you know and and how people are meeting up on the 48 Laws of Power to help them in that environment and then I get some email from an actor telling me you know how she's using the book for that environment or on and on and on so and now I'm invited it's used a lot now in universities Bentley universities I'm going to be over there in the fall it's a very very prestigious mostly Business School in Massachusetts they have a leadership class and they use the 48 laws that powers a textbook I'm going to be going over there in the fall and helping them with one of their classes it's been using as a textbook in quite a few universities including USC Marshall School of Business Etc so it's it's pretty Broad and you know a lot of athletes um I do you know I've been approached by NBA players you mentioned Lamar odium Lamar Odom Etc you know so I don't know man I I don't know where I would draw the line I think it's it sort of transcends all of that hopefully oh thank you [Applause]

Channel: Robert Greene

Views: 290,649

Keywords: robert greene, robert greene books, mastery by robert greene, lecture, talk, dallas, texas, speech, youtube, smu dallas, job, career, mastery, master, motivational, motivation, inspiration, inspirational, destiny

Id: vlDghD69_xU

Length: 71min 20sec (4280 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2023