[Music] [Applause] [Music] Rober green yes you've got a degree from Declan you've been a journalist Hollywood sonorous you've worked in in the Grand Hotel in Paris not a Grand Hotel not a grant to tell no hotel certainly these are spicy solutions and ladies are okay on a caesium it's it's a very small hotel but very nice hotel okay and you've worked too in a private detective agency yes so many many many many lives and you turn at 39 a best-selling author with power yes and you are an adviser for artists for sports and a lot of CEOs - yes so my first question would be a quite quite direct why should we listen to you to reach mastery with mastery well there's an expression in English which is the proof is in the pudding which basically means the result the results are there you read the book and if you think if it rings true and it brings results then what I write about is true so I don't want to imagine that somehow I was gifted with some sort of magic secret you read the book and you can decide for yourself whether I really know what I'm talking about but that said I will say the following since 1995 I've spent my whole life studying very powerful very successful people mostly dead all the greatest his figures in history for example my third book I was sort of obsessed with Napoleon Bonaparte I wanted to figure out why no polian was such a great general but I did that with all sorts of other powerful people and at the same time because of the 48 laws all of these am i speaking too fast okay sorry I forgot sometimes all of these people came to me for advice and it was a little bit shocking because I was just a writer of CEOs very people very high up in the finance world athletes actors directors they wanted consulting advice it was sort of like being a psychoanalyst for power they were probably too embarrassed to admit they had a problem to people that they knew they couldn't ask their wife or their friends so they could come to me and confess all of their weaknesses in dealing with people so the long story short is but the past 16 years all I've been doing is reading about and studying and deeply analyzing successful people and interacting with them one-on-one in a very direct way I'm also on the board of directors of a publicly traded company in the states of American Apparel so I've seen a lot they're basically based on all of that experience all of those hours of reading and thinking I believe I came up with a new way of looking at excellence or what I call mastery because I've noticed that there's a pattern all of these people in whatever field sport including sports or sciences they go through a very similar process and nobody talks about it nobody writes a book about it it's like it's like a secret or something it's not taught in Business School I'm sorry to say and I wanted to describe what I've discovered and I believe my 16 years of maniacal obsessive focus on this one subject has allowed me to be able to say something that has some validity to it but I'll let you decide okay could you describe the steps to reach mastery the one the one that I described in the book through your own pass okay well the book begins with the most important step of all and I'm saying if you don't do this step you're never going to reach mastery and it's basically discovering what your calling is in life what your vocation is what you were meant to do because the idea is very simple in order to reach mastery you have to accumulate so many hours of practice and experience so that your brain can have so much information and experience that connections start occurring there's a we'll talk about later the famous 10,000 hour rule that you might be familiar with you have to reach that level of knowledge and experience it doesn't matter what field it is you could be a manager a football player it doesn't matter you have to accumulate experience you're never going to get there unless you have an actual love for what you're doing the song doesn't mean every moment is thrilling but you have to be personally and emotionally engaged on a level so for me I knew since I was a pretty young that I wanted to be a writer it was pretty clear to me that I wanted to be a writer but I didn't know what I wanted to write I could write novels plays essays books on history I just didn't know so I explored after I graduated I went into journalism and I did that for several years and I learned a lot in journalism I learned how to write with a deadline I learned how to write clearly and concisely and organize my thoughts but I didn't like I didn't like journalism it didn't suit me because it's kind of for me it felt a little bit ugly I didn't like I wanted to be able to write about things that were what are more philosophical than just the day-to-day stuff going on so then I traveled all around Europe as you already explained and I worked I did everything I worked you know construction work I taught English I worked in the hotel I worked for a television company I tried different forms of writing I wrote novels I wrote plays I wrote essay nothing really quite worked and then I'm starting to think well maybe I'm a bit lost so I'm going to come back to Los Angeles where I'm born and raised and I'm going to go to the film business and that way I can make a good living my parents will be happy and I can write so I go to the film business and I spent years doing that of a four or five years and it was fun and pretty glamorous and all that but it didn't suit me I didn't like it because you would write something and you had no power you would write I would think a brilliant screenplay and then twelve people would come in and they'd change everything that you wrote it was very frustrating and so why that fits my book all right well then that same at that same moment about 1995 where I'm about 36 years old and I'm getting kind of desperate my parents are really getting worried about me and it doesn't look good for my future because I'm 36 I'm not a young kid anymore I meet a man in Venice Italy where I have a job and he's a book packager and he asks me one day do you have an idea for a book and that was if there is a light bulb moment a moment of aha that was my moment because just the fact that he said the word book I go home I god I should be writing books that's what I met was meant to do not screenplays not articles not television a book I was so happy I came out with an idea about power based on all of my experiences because working in Hollywood in journalism in different countries I've seen a lot of really Machiavellian people particularly in Hollywood I had seen all sorts of really ugly maneuvers I worked for a film director a man who was a producer who wanted to direct his first film but he didn't he couldn't do that because it would look bad because he had written the screenplay and it just didn't look good so what did he do he hired somebody he knew would fail he hired someone young too the job he knew the guy was was going to fail and then he could come in and rescue it and be the director and it was so Machiavellian and it worked but he like ruined this young man's reputation because he was fired off of a job I saw that like over and over and over again anyway in the book I say that once you know what your vocation is you have to go through an apprenticeship you have to learn as much as possible you have to accumulate those 10,000 hours you have to develop skills learning is what you're after not money I certainly during those 15 years didn't make a lot of money but I learned so much I learned how to write I learned how to write stories that were not just concise but also fun because I tell stories in my book and I learned about human nature in psychology everything that I had experienced was the perfect apprenticeship for writing the book that I wrote the 48 laws of power so I I knew what my vocation was I explored I tried things out I accumulated experiences I didn't get I didn't give up on myself and then I was able to enter what is the most important phase in the book which is what I call the creative active phase based on all that knowledge you have an experience you suddenly can become creative with it and when I had the chance to write the book It was as if a lid had been taken off my head and I could be just I could explode with all of the creativity I wanted to do and create a book that was really different it might have failed which it didn't luckily it might have failed but I was going to be as unconventional and creative as I could so you know I could go on and on with basically my story for those 15 years pretty much illustrates the pattern of mastery that I described what would be a good metaphor to describe reaching mastery yes well I had had this metaphor came to me in a dream that mastery was like a house and I didn't know what the dream meant so I thought it was kind of interesting and I have a whole thing in the book about creativity involves being close to your unconscious and letting be a little looser with how you think about things and so I explored this metaphor of the house and I thought this is what it's like you have a house and there's the basement and the basement is kind of your unconscious and when you become when you're a child and you're born and you enter the world you're in this room and this room is full of light and what I mean by that is you suddenly you're so excited about the world and you can everybody here can remember when you were five or six years old you have this hunger to learn the world seems so interesting to you at least to me it did you wanted to learn about dinosaurs and history and science and everything and so you're in this room that's just flooded with light and you're just excited about everything but slowly you're leaving the room and you enter like this hallway that gets narrower and narrower and narrow and darker and darker and you just sort of trapped in a conventional area where the same things repeat that light isn't there anymore and you're just going down this narrow path in which there's nothing new I know that sounds very depressing mastery is like a staircase you're you're finally you're in a weird way you're returning to that childhood like moment you're going up the staircase step-by-step you're learning about whatever it is your skills are and I know you're mostly as a business here but it could be any field and you're advancing your you'll learn more one day the next year you know even more and you arrive at a point where you now enter a room that is so much vaster filled with so much light and it's like the child the room that you were when a child by even better and why is it better because you have the mind of a child and I'll describe later what I mean by that at some point you have the openness of a child wants to learn in the can the fluidity and you have all of this experience and practice and the endgame of mastery is to reach what I call high level intuition which all masters have Steve Jobs had it Albert Einstein had it Mozart had it they don't have to think anymore ideas come to them it's at their fingertips when you're in that room full of light you understand things in such a deep immediate way and so then I thought okay now I understand my own dream about why mastery is kind of a house it's poetic so I understand it's not you know it might might not you might not understand it but that's how I've never put it in the book so you asked me but that's sort of how I imagined it how do you define mastery and how would you describe it as a depression while I care if mastery was a color or taste or Nana mum uh-huh well okay mastery is a form of intelligence now I I maintain in the book that we put too much emphasis on intellectual intelligence that we think intelligence is just a matter of books and going to school and getting the highest grades but there's something else this is an intelligence that comes from practice from actual experience and it's not just intellectual it's also emotional because in order to reach mastery you have to be very strong you have to put up with all the criticisms that people throw at you you have to put up with failure you have to put up with people doubting you you have to put up with your own boredom my god 10,000 hours I'm so sick of doing the same thing over again you have to put up with that you have to be tough so mastery isn't easy and it requires something emotional which is persistence determination resilience the the motto of Leonardo da Vinci who was the icon of my book is ostinato Grigory I don't know for any Italians out there it means rigorous persistence and I'm da Vinci said the only reason I am so much better is I am more persistent that's the secret to my success if I encounter a problem I won't let go that was the secret of Einstein that was a secret of Steve Jobs so it's this intelligence that you get from not just your knowledge but also your experience in your practice and at that point you're at what I call high level intuition and you your thinking is much faster so you watch a great chess player they don't have to sit there and think about a move they thought they've already seen in a glimpse twenty moves ahead that's how Bobby Fischer thought he thought he could already see the game a half hour later what was going on and without having to think he knew exactly the right move okay so that's mastery and I you know you read the book you'll give a go into obviously more depth describing but I consider this ultimate intelligence that we can reach now the Chinese game will always be the first one an animal Oh an animal yeah it is what I would say is like like a centaur so it's actually a half animal half human because if you look at animals operate through instinct and they don't have to think which means they stay alive because if they thought they wouldn't be alive their state you know quickly I know to escape danger etcetera we have animal instincts but we think and that makes us kind of slow and it makes it kind of dangerous mastery is mixing the animal in the human we're at that point you're thinking is so quick that you have the instinctive reactions of an animal course an eagle a lion or whatever it is it's like and I'm always wanted to write a book about what I call human stupidity levity Zoo men eventually I will and that be pity to men is the fact that you're you're neither an animal nor a human you're gifted with reason but not enough to figure things out your emotional like an animal you have reason but you can't put them two together and your emotions are constantly making you make bad decisions master Urich above that you're supremely rational and click in your thinking so I Machiavelli had the idea of the perfect power person being part why in part Fox but he also said it was part animal part human so I'm being a little Machiavellian here what was the next one I don't know if it was a dish all I taste oh it tastes yeah you asked me that and I thought I wouldn't be a dish it would be a wine it would be a wine that has been in existence a vineyard that's been existence since the Year 1200 and for 800 years they've been perfecting their vineyard and you are able now to taste 800 years of mastery these people have figured it out and that wine is so so good because of all of that experience and work that has gone into it it's been a question about how having a htc or a business a business school degree is a chance to to reach mastery well no I say it's a it's a trap not a chance it's like you're walking along and you fall in a hole a puii and that's what that's what business school is and you have to climb out and if you can climb out you'll be successful otherwise you're just going to stay in that hole because I guess I'm saying that because I'm American and I have a certain relationship to it but also because if I study all of the people I think are the most successful in business they didn't learn anything that they're doing from business school first of all they were all rebels they they didn't like school they didn't like university but also you have the phenomenon in the states where the most successful companies now are founded by people who have no business degree the two guys who founded Google were scientists studying statistics at Stanford so now when they start a business they're not burdened with all of that crap that they've learned in Business School and they're ables I'm sorry I hope I'm not offended and now they're able to start a business in a way that nobody ever thought of before and look Google is structured in a way but nobody has ever done before they structured in a way inspired by their work at Stanford in a weird way that's pretty brilliant but you look at all through Silicon Valley all of these people they don't have business degrees and that's and they're the most successful I interviewed for mastery a man named Paul Graham who has a business it's worth five billion dollars in Silicon Valley Y Combinator I think he's going to be one of the most successful businesspeople in the future because basically Y Combinator is an apprenticeship school in Silicon Valley for startups so he's like an angel but he's an angel that works with a thousand young people every year as opposed to four and he takes 10% of every if your businesses successfully takes 10% and over the years it's now worth five billion dollars he went he's a computer engineer who went to MIT studied artificial intelligence and he started a business is incredible I mean I could go on and on down the line and there are people who went to business school and I do talk to them I just had a meeting in New York two weeks ago with the founders of the people who run three biggest hedge funds in New York it was a meeting on creativity because they're obsessed with how to become more creative in their work and they all admitted that the things they learn in Business School are the worst advice they could get they're trying to get out of it they want they wanted my advice for how they can think more fluidly because it's a school to unify it's a factory for you making you uniform for for making your thoughts go down to that little narrow alleyway in the house they're not teaching you how to be creative they're not teaching you how to be unconventional they're not teaching you how to look for the business that nobody else is starting out there and so they trap you and your job in life is to find your way out of that trap and I'm not saying that there are it's totally useless I mean people who learn science like engineering they have to go to the University and they learn things that are very important so yes and they're technical things that you can be taught I don't even know what EBIT ax is because I work at American Apparel on their board I have no business background I don't know what even tell you is I have to admit it and that's terrible so I've gone to business school I wouldn't know what a bita is you know what even type obviously so there are technical things you have to learn but the creative side the mastery side the side where you're going to show yourself different from everybody else business school is just a disaster so my book is for those who want to do something a lot better than than just being like everybody else you know well that was something I was going to say if again I don't know now what could be your advice to the Dean how could Business School could evolve to help the students reach mastery well I mean they're doing that already in the States and I saw when I went to the University which I was in a couple days ago yes yes that was quite interesting because they make you learn in the old apprenticeship system which is I say the best way to learn is learn by doing you're going to learn more in three months starting your own business than you would learn in 20 years at a business school you're really going to learn how things work and they're doing that they're making you go out and actually work and then then you're getting real-time instruction in law schools in America they're having a program now at NYU where instead of there's like a third I don't know I'm not a lawyer but the third or fourth year of law school that's pretty useless where you're working on your thesis and nothing really happens places like NYU they're making you now go work for a real law firm for that fourth year and see how things really operate in the real world so learning by doing and what we're doing in that if it were business school or law school or whatever is we're actually going back to the Middle Ages to the apprenticeship system that existed in the Guild's of Europe and you know you look at the icon I'm talking so fast feel like I'm on drugs or something you can all follow me you look you have these amazing cathedrals here who build these cathedrals they were people who didn't go to school to learn how to build a cathedral they went to the apprenticeship system and they learned from the day the first day they entered the guild they were working with leather with wood whatever it was with their hands they were given very menial jobs but they were learning there were no teachers there were no books they had no books back then they observed and they worked and after seven years they can now become a journeyman and take a test to become a master and the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe were built by people whose name we have no idea where and they had no schooling but they were master craftsmen because they learned by actually doing something I want us to go back to that world where our master craftsman they make things that are brilliant that are solid that are you know that are built well and you learn best by doing and so maybe business schools and law schools are returning a bit to that idea where the students need to now go out and actually try their ideas in the real world and see how things work you're a great storyteller in your books you are using da Vinci yes it may just intervene briefly I have my an experience if I compare myself and my daughter yes of course a difference in generation I went I took school at HCC some years ago I'm 76 77 t6o many years I graduated in 76 logic said I'll become 60 in a month okay anyway in my time we had to undergo one month after the first year at low level then two years to two months in a foreign countries or a three month also and then another three months in the last year total six months my daughter has to undergo 18 months so three times as much training Asajj she's studying at a sec so one generation three times more that's good or bad either so it is better or worse than not much better runner by doing my yeah right right right she has and in fact she will undergo her studies during four years instead of three oh yeah so if I ask myself is it just a sec or is this a trend you know that's a good trend okay so you use the venetie use a lot of very famous geniuses or langoustine could you tell us more about one that is not as known as zio Sabet which quite which could be quite inspiring for us well there's a lot of people I could choose so it's difficult but it but I'll make it easy for myself there was a scientist called Michael Faraday I don't know how many of you have heard of Michael Bell case a lot of you have heard of him he's one of the greatest scientists he's not actually as well-known as an Einstein or a Darwin but he's been incredibly influential weren't for him we wouldn't have electrical motors and it's he who was the first person discover basic field theories that inspired Maxwell and then Einstein okay but the thing about Michael Faraday that's just so unbelievable is he was born over in the 1790s in London in poverty his father was a was a blacksmith and there were like 12 children they belonged to a very particular religious sect called San dominions which is a very strange sect and they also believed in having more children and as many children as possible and at a very early age his father became lame and couldn't work so the family had no food anyway Michael Faraday couldn't go to school because he was too poor he had to run errands for his mother and but he had an incredibly active mind and so one day he wandered when he is about eight nine years old he wanders into a bookstore in London near his home it's a book store and a book binder because in look back in those days the two things were combined and he's sort of always looking at the books like that's magic because the only book he has ever known is the Bible and according to his religion the Bible is not just a book it's the Word of God itself so it's not just pages it's like literally magic so he's seeing these other books like oh my god they like the Bible and he's blown away and he's so excited but he starts talking to the owner of the bookshop and the owner is charmed by this boy who's so interested in books and so michael faraday keeps returning to him every every day almost and finally the man who owns the bookstore says all right I'm gonna offer you an apprenticeship as a bookbinder which your family first he ah he oh I'm sorry he hires him as an errand boy and then he offers him an apprenticeship and his family's ecstatic he's now going to have a trade at the age of 12 he'll serve seven years bookbinding and for faraday now he can work in this bookshop and he can read every single book that could come in there and there were no libraries really back in those days and there weren't really bookstores for people who were poor he now had the chance to read so he starts reading and reading and reading every night that's all he does he takes the books home and read and he decides I love science I'm I love science I love electricity electricity is like God things are moved but you can't see where who's moving it and he's obsessed with electricity so he gets all the books on electricity that he can and he starts doing experiments in the back of the of the book binding place and the guy who owns it is very open to that and he decides I'm going to become a scientist but the the weird thing is you can't become a scientist unless you go to Oxford or Cambridge or maybe the University of Edinburgh at that time just forget it absolutely impossible there's not one single example of a scientist who ever succeeded without going Oxford Cambridge and the son of a blacksmith who's an apprentice bookbinder can't go to Oxford and Cambridge so how will it ever happen and I posed myself that riddle because in the biographies they don't really go into it how did he do it well one day one of the books that he reads is like a how-to book written in the 18th century about how to improve the mind and he's obsessed with that book and it gives you lessons on how you can teach yourself how you can become an autodidact and it tells you that you should take notes on everything and you should learn how to draw also that you can draw things and you should go to lectures as many lectures as possible he follows it to the letter and he ends up going to all of these lectures and creating his own science book because he can draw really well and he after several years he has a volume this thick of all of his notes well-organized into books with all of these drawings and one day there wanders into a into this bookshop a real scientist from the Royal science of Academy Royal Society and he sees this book it he goes my god this is oh this is a wunderkind this is a prodigy who is this young man he meets him and he says wow you're amazing I'm going to let you come to the meetings of the Royal Society which is not open to the public and he does that and anyway I'll shorten the story a little bit through that introduction he's eventually introduced to one of the great greatest scientists of that era named Humphrey Davy a great chemist Electrical engine electrician and it one day Humphry Davy's assistant gets in an argument and is fired and so Humphrey Davy remembers this little this young man who's so eager who taught himself everything and he says I'm going to do something really strange I'm going to hire him as my new laboratory system and that was usually generally only reserved for people who'd gone to Oxford and Cambridge so now he has an apprenticeship with me greatest scientists of the time he's watching him night and day he learns how to make chemical experiments of the highest order and he becomes the greatest experimental scientist Michael Faraday of the 19th century and he did it because of this incredible self education he discovered things that all of the people going to Oxford and Cambridge never discovered about electricity he created an experiment to physically demonstrate how electricity can move something which led to the first motor a brilliant highly creative man and he got there because he was so persistent and so hungry and found his vocation so he illustrates all in my laws and I fell in love with him because he he had nothing to start with he had everything against him any and he was able to reach it thank you you are telling in the book that one of the best way to succeed is to value differences exceptions anomalies yet tell us a bit more about it well that's the thing when I was with the hedge fund people they got the most excited about it I was telling them about anomalies and the idea is that normally we're trained to see patterns that's how the human brain works we see something happen and we now try to find a way to make it fit into our experience that happened there and that means this because I've seen it before and this is what I learned in business school and this is how I was trained and what happens is there are anomalies there are things that don't fit into any patterns that you know about and you tend to not either you ignore them or you put them into categories that you previous the are already there and then don't really fit because we're uncomfortable with mysteries and uncertainties we are in a rush to explain things and the most creative people are not afraid of these anomalies they're excited by them and they look at them and they study them so an example that I gave the hedge fund people that they could understand really well yeah is the Google itself and in the 90s the search engines if you're old enough to remember where things like Alta Vista right and they had a really strange system well it was kind of logical at the time they were basically based on how many times something was cited on the Internet and if you put a search in there it would send you to things that had the most citations on that but then it would give you really strange results sometimes because sometimes the reason why things were said so the reason why they were cited so many were it was a recipe article that used a word as related to something and it didn't work it worked 80% of the time when you were searching for something but 20% of the time it just didn't work you didn't come up with the right search and people at the time thought well that's it well eventually we'll approve improve this system of searching we'll figure it out but the guys at Google of they weren't at Google they would Stanford page and Brin said no let's look at the things that aren't working let's actually change the entire system let's focus on those anomalies because they're really interesting why is this happening and based on that reflection they decided that they would come up with a completely different form of search based on the citations in a scientific journal but not not the number of times something had been cited but where it was cited they created I'm not describing it very well excuse me but they've created the all government algorithms of the search engine by looking at what wasn't working whereas everybody else could only see ignored what wasn't working because I didn't want to look at it in business you want to look at everything that ever other people are doing and then you're going to create something that's not any different you want to look at those things that nobody else is doing those anomalies those ideas that have been ignored in the past that's creativity what I described in my book is the mind is like a muscle that tightens up as you get older it gets tighter and tighter and tighter and you go to yoga class for your body because your muscles are all getting tight and you go and you stretch out and your body gets all stretched out well that's what your mind means your mind needs to be stretched out like with yoga and so I'm giving you exercises to stretch it out to stop thinking in these patterns that are just going like Steve Jobs compared it to a record album he lay it up and just goes round and round and round the same grooves that's how your thinking is so I'm trying to give you exercises to loosen it up and one of them is to look at it nama Li's in another book so one you are you've written with a 50 cent yeah and the first chapter is about being realistic yes for me mastery is a way to be closer to reality yeah could you tell us more about it yeah I know it so far that I do a book with 50 cent but he I part of some of the people who came to me for advice were rappers and he and I developed a friendship and he's an incredible entrepreneur who started several very highly successful businesses in the States anyway the book that we did together is about fearlessness and the role that fear plays in your life and how damaging it can be and the first chapter is your fear of reality and I'm saying or we're saying that what you need to become is what we call a radical realist and I consider myself a radical realist a brutal brutal realist radically honest with myself and with how things are working in the world so I can be as practical and pragmatic as possible and so mastery is about that realism on several levels okay so when you first enter a work world or when you're first learning something like the piano you don't understand the reality your vision of it is totally naive if you can remember back to the time when you had your first job and you entered that job it's like a world a new world you don't understand where the power is why things work who's doing what you're full of all sorts of illusions about yourself about other people and slowly you're going to get rid of those stupid illusions about work and about yourself and you're going to understand the reality ah this guy is the one with power even though it doesn't look like he is alone with power and that other person who seems so arrogant he really doesn't have the punch you slowly understand the reality but you also understand yourself you also through this process understand your own limitations your own defects what you need to improve slowly so you're discovering who you are you're also discovering what you were meant to do but then there's another chapter in the book called social intelligence gosh I feel like I'm overloading you people this is like like I'm overloading myself huh okay there's a chapter in the book on social intelligence because my idea is you not just simply have to be good technically with your work you have to be good with people because we're social animals and if you're not good with people all of your talent will be useless so they're only six chapters in the book and one of them one of the longest chapters is on social intelligence and I maintain that our problem as social animals is that were naive that we enter the work world filled with these problems from our childhood and I explained them more deeply in the book and what I'm trying to say is you don't see people as they actually are you see people reflected through your own weaknesses your own desires you see people what like you want to see in them but you're not seeing them as they are and the process that you want to go through is to reach a level where you can understand people where you can improve your odds so you for instance sitting in the front row I don't have any idea who you are I just met you I don't know you but maybe I could take a moment and I could try to understand what your day was like today and put myself in your place normally if I thought about you I think you remind me of somebody in Los Angeles my father sunder Sutter and I would totally misinterpret who you are you're not like them you're different you have your own experiences the process then is trying to understand people as they are and not how you think they are and that's social intelligence and that's reality so you know I'm never going to completely understand you I could you know your wife can be married to you for 40 years and she doesn't know you but there are levels of understanding of people that are deeper and deeper if you cut off your own naivete in your own interior monologue it's the subject of my next book actually I'm writing a whole book just on that but um so that's another level of reality that you're entering and so mastery is understanding all of these realities other people yourself and your field it's not a book about a human's book about social intentions no that's another book I do have it in social intelligence I say there's an expression that comes from the Bible called suffer fools gladly I don't know how its translated in French there is something about lays a blue tea I don't know how it is but and basically I'm saying in their part of social intelligence is there are fools all around you and I find what a fool is I define a fool as a person who has no sense of proportion they think things that are big are really small and they think things that are small are really big so they take some petty little problem and blow it up into something use ridiculous and what's really important they just totally ignore so they have no sense of scale and you're surrounded by fools and you have a side that's a little bit foolish yourself because we're all like that so you can't get angry you can't get upset you can't run away because they're there they're working for you right now they're in your offices you have to accept them and you have to use them for your own purposes so that's sort of the idea that's the only thing I talk about that it's easy man but I will someday write a whole book on that you are talking and you're writing about some limiting limiting beliefs and the one is about a innate talents so is in a tenant blessing well see I wanted to take my cannons and destroy the idea of innate talent so that nobody anymore could talk about it but I don't know if I succeeded I don't believe in it now there are people who were born with certain I call them inclinations and there are people who are born with a higher IQ that's for sure we know that but is that a talent no talent is something you acquire it takes years to acquire there is not a three-year-old in the world who has talent it's not a three-year-old in the world who can start up a business who can solve a new form of mathematics or make a discovery that's that's talent they don't have it so talent is something you acquire they have natural inclinations that push them in certain directions they have higher IQ perhaps but there's a phenomenon science have studied this now for the past thirty years since the invention of IQ and first of all they've discovered that a lot of children with unusually high IQs are rarely the ones that end up being highly successful it's very rare I mean as it happens I don't mean very rare but there's no numerical correlation between high IQ and success in fact there's even less so that more of a correlation that people of high IQs have problems they have emotional problems they don't get along with other people they feel isolated in alienate so by the time they're 14 they get they're starting to have social problems that then make it harder to be successful in their field if they find something like science where they don't have to deal with people they can maybe get get there somehow but I use in the book the example of Charles Darwin and he had a cousin named Gault and I forget his first name and they now can go back in history I don't know how they do it but they can measure people's IQs back historical figures I don't ask me how and they measured Darwin's IQ which is in 150 maybe hundred sixty which is pretty high but Gault and his cousin had IQ oh well over two hundred this man was genius genius genius born with a high IQ how many people out there have heard of goal I mean nobody probably he was very smart but Darwin who had much lower IQ is the one that we've heard of because as I said earlier it's an emotional quality and people who were born with such large brains they often don't develop the proper emotions that you need there's too sensitive there are too spoiled they don't know how to work with other people they're not patient and so they're not the ones that start up the great businesses or make the great discoveries not always but general but often you're talking about hard work about famous 10,000 hours yeah could you describe those house of people practice and how could we practice them in as a manager in company well there's a I don't know how many of you know the ten thousand now it's an amazing to study very briefly there's nobody if there's anybody who hasn't heard of it a man named Anders Ericsson study people who did chess and music very closely and he discovered pretty magically at that close to the 10,000 hour mark of practice and experience so for chess that means all the hours of practice reading about chess and playing games after 10,000 hours of experience people reach another level something has happened to the brain they're they're become grandmasters it doesn't happen at 8,000 or 9,000 it can happen in 9950 or something like that but pretty close there that is really interesting and so it's probably the same thing in music and then he goes back and he finds that in other areas like in sports etc so that means that at that mark the structure the structure of the brain has physically altered and I can explain that and he can explain that as well why that happens but the point isn't merely counting the numbers that's the problem people have they think oh well I just had 10,000 hours I'm going to be Einstein or Steve Jobs that's no it's not that work like that it's not just the number of hours it's the quality of the hours so number one it's the intensity if you spend eight years focusing deeply on a problem trying to solve it working night and day you're going to accumulate 10,000 hours in eight years and it's going to lead to something amazing if it's spread over 30 years where you're just tinkering on the weekends nothing's going to happen it needs an intensity of time because intensity of time it's almost like a mathematical formula those connections that happen in the brain at 10,000 hours they're going to start happening really quickly whereas if it's spread out over time you don't have all of that energy flow you forget things they slip from your memory from your long term memory so it has to be intense and there has to be other things like what's known as deliberate practice which means we tend to practice those things that were the best at so let's say we play the piano and we're really good at playing Baroque music and Bach will tend to just keep playing that because it's it gets easy and seems fun whereas the things that we don't like we don't practice whatever that would be so our skill becomes very lopsided right and a person to ten thousand hours you have to practice the things that you're not good at so you can develop a really well-rounded skill because those if you sit there and simply repeat things that you're already good at that doesn't count for the $10,000 I'm sorry so the quality matters and the intensity matters and then that will make that $10,000 really important as a manager you know that's the art of dealing with people and I mean there are other things involved but it's it's a skill in in how you motivate people how you get people to work together how you get rid of people who are or malcontents that's the art it's the art of dealing with people and I don't think they're really any books that are going to break you to that other level they could the book sitter can help you but the most important thing are is the experience the day-to-day experience of managing people and seeing what works because every group that you deal with is different there's never the same group twice it's like a chemistry thing where the eight people that you work with four years ago and now you have eight new people it's just not the same so you have to be alive in the moment and you have to see what's working there and you can't apply the rules that worked eight years ago right so slowly you're accumulating experience with people I'm going to be interviewing for my next book a lawyer a very famous lawyer in California named Howard Weitzman Howard Weitzman he's not a manager but he was in the OJ Simpson case he was one of the defense lawyers for the OJ Simpson trial you might have heard he is a master at juries he knows he can read a jury like a like Ciampino seanpauley own could read the rosetta stone he can decide a VAT guy he's not going to vote for a ho J I just know it I can tell I can read him he can also see during the trial that uh we're beginning to win him over through his body language through how he talks et cetera this man is a master at reading people but it's a it's the function of doing it for 20 years and there's nothing that can replace that so my when I'm saying mastery and the ten thousand hours is going to be a function of of how long you're doing it and how you're observing things in the moment so if you're observing people and each experience and not simply seeing what you think is there like what happened eight years ago you're going to be accumulating that ten thousand hours I don't know if this is making any sense is it okay I mean there are other things I could say about management I've written other books on that but I'll stop there my last question before the audience question is you've you've written book about power strategy seduction what are the bridges and what are the differences between mastery on all your pieces of work well they're all related because they all come from my brain so they're all like pieces of me you know and you know power came from a moment where I just emerged from Hollywood which was which was like power central you know all just this is just all about power so naturally that just came out of me but I have an unusual idea of power idea of power is it's not something violent or aggressive it's actually something very soft the softer your power the better because we live in a world where aggressive we don't like aggressive people and if you look too obvious and you're too brutal and you're too mean you're not going to get very far so my form of power is indirect power and I use the metaphor of the court of Louis the 14th here you have a court not far from you well actually vert sighs pretty far of all these courtiers who are forced now to live in the palace of their side they have to give up their nice little shadows all around France and they've Louis forces them to live in Versailles and they're all power-hungry but they can't be ugly about it they can't be violent about it if anybody seems to be trying too hard the other courtiers and that person is not is isolated so you have to be very indirect and very subtle and you know how to have to know how to approach louis xiv without appearing to approach to louis xiv and how to say something bad about that person that really looking like you're saying something bad so it's softness and that's the metaphor that I use in power so it's a book about that kind of I hate to say it but manipulation so naturally the second book is seduction because seduction is even the higher form of that form of power because if you're able to make it so that other person gets a pleasant feeling from what you're doing and they don't realize that you're actually taking something from them my god you have incredible power over which is the secret of publicity and marketing you're taking from people but they don't because you're making them so happy and then obviously from that I arrived decided to write a book on strategy because all of these books involve strategy and then 50 cent because I met 50 cent and really what what 50 cent represented for me was I have spent all of my time studying dead people and I was a little bit tired of it you know I love Napoleon he's amazing but he's dead and I didn't get to talk to him but I can talk to 50 and I can like I have a laboratory rat that I can study and so that was the excitement of there I could I could he could be my Napoleon in the present that I could dissect and then mastery if I could say on the final thing is it does represent a little bit of a softening of me because it's not a Machiavellian book I am older I don't know if I'm wiser but I'm older and I recognize that you know people who read power they get a little bit obsessed with it they think that that's the only thing that matters I think we're entering a world that's changing and that really matters is not so much all of your charming back Evelio skills it's your real ability to get things done and have real skill and be able to solve problems and be creative so I was a little bit worried about young people because I was a little bit worried that they were losing touch with process that because of all their iPhones and little blah they think everything should come quickly fast easily that's how the world should be and they're losing touch with what it means to be a human being that's not a criticism because it happens to all of us I also have a I phone I know it's like it's not a criticism but they're losing touch with what it meet what real intelligence comes from which is going through a slow process that involves tedium but it brings incredible fruits so I wanted to write a book that shows what I think the ultimate power is that you can have if you reach a level of creativity you are irreplaceable and that's the ultimate position to be in in life because what will happen maybe not to you because you are all there successful but for a lot of people you become you reach a point where somebody else could do your job so why you well then if that happens then you can bet that the people above you will find someone fifteen years younger who's a lot cheaper and a lot fresher somebody they can torture they can't torture you anymore and they have to pay you more and more and more all right get the fresh twenty five year old in and out with a forty year old but if you are so creative and so you've mastered it they can't do that and in fact you don't have to work for other people you'll be working for yourself so that's the ultimate game not knowing all of the Machiavellian laws which is important but what really matters is making yourself irreplaceable in life so that's sort of why I wrote mastery and there's a chapter in the 50th law that talks about mastery so I expanded it into a whole book there's a chapter in mastery about social intelligence and I will now expand that into a whole book so like pieces of a Chinese puzzle you are used to did a lot of dead people but you've interviewed I think nine nine Alive geniuses yes could you just conclude before the question about one that you would like to share well they were all great I interviewed nine contemporary masters so it just didn't look like there's a book of dead people and that mastery is something from you know the Rembrandt period so they were all scientists etc but the one of the carrot they're all characters I like this woman yoky Matsuoka I really wanted to make an effort to get as many women in the book because I'm trying to say mastery is seems like such a male word but I but women are our masters and they're just as they're probably even smarter than we are so I really wanted to have as many women female examples and yoky Matsuoka is this she's born in Japan and she's strange she's not like she didn't feel comfortable in Japan she started off as a girl as a tennis player she wanted to become a tennis pro and she was really good her favorite players were John McEnroe and Andre Agassi she sort of identified with rebels and in Japan Japan isn't really a rebel friendly country at least if you're young me it probably even when you're older and so her parents decided to send she was also left tennis and she was a science geek she just was a master at math and physics so she's pretty smart young girl anyway her parents decide to send her to a Florida for the best tennis academy and she goes to high school there and she decides she doesn't want to leave the states because this is where she can thrive she doesn't have to be in Japan where they first of all it's very bad for girls in Japan at least at that time if you wanted to be in science forget about it you had no chance so America was maybe the only place she could do it and so she decides to not do tennis anymore because she's not really gifted for that she gets admitted to Berkeley and she studies she decides to study Electrical Engineering doesn't know why but electrical engineering is one of those fields that you allows you to go in many different directions so while she's there she realizes that she's sort of fascinated with robotics with robots doesn't know why a lot of Japanese people actually I don't know why are interested in robots weird but she was fascinated with robots and so she's allowed now with the graduate students to sort of help them with her electrical engineering to develop a robot she decides that that's the field she's going to go into and she I think she's very smart so she gets admitted to MIT to the robotics lab there and that's the that's the highest place you can get to study a subject like that and so she decides that she wants to be there just there designing the ultimate human robot in at MIT she's going to be the one in charge of designing a hand because she loves tennis and a hand is really important to her she's obsessed with the human hand but in doing that all the other people they're all these Engineers and they're all trying to think like an engineer so they take they make a hand full of all these motors and stuff and the hand can't move it's so packed with motors it has no flexibility so she has the idea I want to cry a hand for robots that is like a human hand that acts like a hand that feels like a hand that operates like a hand so that means I have to go now study neuroscience and she goes and she gets not only a PhD in robotics she gets a PhD in neuroscience and in biology so she studies the connection between the brain and the hand and she studies biology so she knows all of the bones in the hand based on students based on like eight years of this intense research she creates her own field called new robotics the neuroscience and robotics in which she is going to be at the forefront of creating artificial things that feel human and she can do that because she understands the electrical process of the signals sent from the brain to the hand she can regret she designs a hand while she is still at MIT that is still being used today it's so brilliant it's so lifelike and people who have prosthetic hands are using that hand that actually can pick things up and that nobody could do that before but she doesn't stop there because she's relentless she's nothing ever she can't stop at something so she decided she's she's interested in technology and wants to be able to do something that contributes to Humanity because she's very she's a person like that and so she goes and works for a company called nest in Silicon Valley which is now got bought by Apple and is worth billions of dollars but she was there at the beginning designing a thermostat their first product was a thermostat for your home a thermostat that thinks like a person so this thermostat follows you around the house it's just on your wall it's not literally following you but it's following you and figuring out your habits what you like what makes makes you feel warm what doesn't make you feel warm and it adjusts to your personality and it heats your house like that and they're going to be creating products for your home that have that kind of human Sensibility this is the future of technology they're human izing technology you may not be aware of it and I wasn't I was fascinated because she's combining electrical engineering robotics neuroscience biology and business and you know so that's mastery on many levels because she's not just a dilettante she understands these fields and she's connecting them in a way that's really really important so that's my one of my favorites thank you and it's your time I wanted to that meeting to be a conversation between both the author and you so what would be your questions so I need clarity on one point because in several occasions you mentioned to us that we would need to discover what we were meant to do then came the question about innate talent where you say this is crap basically you just need to work hard and get to these 10,000 hours and you'll see the light but for me there is some kind of employment because no there's not it's just I didn't have enough time to explain it but it's like I'm glad you brought it up there's no contradiction I assure you okay well there's innate talent like let's say your brain is you have a higher IQ and therefore you know you can do math equations when you're three that people normally can or they're examples of children who can draw really well when they're like four five they don't turn into great artists so what I'm talking about is different I hope I can make it clear I'm saying that you everybody is born different scientifically it's obvious your DNA is one of a kind so there's nobody else with your DNA of course we can say the same thing about a sheep but there's a difference with humans but first of all your DNA is completely unique your brain is wired in a way that no other human brain is wired and it's in your configuration the human brain is an insanely complicated or Oregon and so there are amazing differences at birth in the date in the brains of babies not in the size the size of baby of braids are generally the same it's a myth that some people are born with a larger brain human braids are generally all the same size but they're wired configured differently the hemispheres the right and the left hemisphere and other things like that I'm saying that that uniqueness that you have scientifically is physically manifested when you're three or four or five years old you may not remember it but you felt drawn to certain things you felt drawn to music to working with to people in groups or to sports or to competition it's a little bit pre verbal so those words don't really express it quite well I know me I was attracted to the sound of words just the sound of words enchanted me there was something like that for you and it's like they're these writers and go to himself one of my masters that I write a lot about in the book he describes compares it to a seed that's planted now are you going to cultivate that seed into something into excellence or are you going to ignore it when you're five or six or seven you become a little bit more aware of it you become aware that you love reading me I discover I like to read maybe I like to write but what happens with people is they start listening to their parents a little Robert you should you shouldn't study that literature no you need to go to law school okay mom okay you're right then you start listening to your teachers who tell you here you're really bad at this and you're not you know you need to study this and and then you listen to your friends who are saying wow it's really cool to be a rock star I think that's what you should be and pretty soon you're 17 years old and that voice that was inside of you that was saying Robert words writing you don't hear it anymore you hear what everybody else has told you you have no idea who you are you enter school and you go into finance when you should have been a poet that's a bad example where you enter law when you should have been something else because you're not in touch with you been listening to other people you know everything else but yourself and so you no longer are working with your natural inclinations and it doesn't mean that you're at your six years old we know that you should be a lawyer it does it's not that simple or banal it's more general that if you're headed in a direction that excites you you feel it in your body I'm telling you that that inclination at three or four is actually a physical thing because when you do it it felt really good it felt like you were doing the right thing when you were doing sports oh man yeah I know playing football that was it if you feel it it's a physical sensation and you've lost touch with it over the years and that's why the concepts seem so weird to you what a vocation well it isn't weird because I can show you all of the great masters in history who went who heard that voice and stayed true to it and ended up doing amazing things Steve Jobs he's five years old six years old and he's walking down the street I forget the name of the city in California where he grew up Sunnyvale I think and um he looks in a window of an electronic shop and and his eyes just light up Wow what are those things and it's and what's interesting is he's not just interested in electronics he's interested in how they look and they're designed now you can draw a line from five-year-old Steve Jobs to fifty five-year-old Steve Jobs the same obsession with electronics and how they're designed and how they look and the interface between those two that voice you stayed true to there are people who lose that voice and then refined it later in their life and get back to their vocation and the reason is if you don't love your work you're going to burn out you're going to stop paying attention you're not going to be creative you're going to be rigid and conventional so it's absolutely essential that you more or less get back in touch with those what I call primal clinician does that explain the difference okay okay we're going to put it the office is mysterious it is the sushi sashimi book and do you have a way to connect with that that with the inner voice again yes I do I do it's not it's not easy because nothing that's easy is worth it in life everything has to be difficult I'm afraid to be good so and I have clients I consult with people I've been doing this before mastery came out but I've been doing it since with mastery came out people come to meanness I have no idea I mean I liked your book robber but really I have no idea that doesn't make it you might as well be talking to me in in Greek or so it makes no sense to me okay let's let's go through a process now because what happens is people stop they're not in touch with themselves they don't even know what they really like and dislike they think they like this kind of music because everybody else likes it but they don't not really aware that actually they don't like that kind of music they like something else all right I'm going to help you get back in touch with what you really like and don't like I I must say in general after my years of experience that men have a harder time with this than women women are a little more in touch I don't mean to generalize they're a little more in touch with what they like and don't like but so first of all I'm going to say all right let's go explore your child that'll be the first thing that we'll do I know it might be difficult but let's talk about things that happen to you when you were very young things that you really excited you maybe you don't remember the mom we're going to dig we're going to do we're going to find it out and if you can't remember anything because you maybe had a bad childhood well go alone you were 14 or 13 and we'll find that fact that there were subjects that really excited you you know like I'm 11 years old I don't know why but books on war man they just so much excited me one thing cuz I was vile but I love the strategy I love figuring out why in World War two d-day actually worked you know oh my god okay that's a sign that some young man is really interested in strategy well that probably happened to you it doesn't have to be an intellectual subject it could have been making things with your hand or it could have been working with other people in some relationship type sense I don't know but there was something like that all right let's talk about it let's talk it out and let's also figure out when you lost it okay that's the first thing that we're going to do then we're going to go and we're going to look at the things in the present that continue to excite you and that you have not been able to explore because there's going to be subjects little touching points like an acupuncture I push there anymore okay so those will be good and bad things they'll be like wow I you know for me I actually I have so I keep talking about myself it's just easier when I open the New York Times every morning and I see an article about the latest find about really our earliest ancestors I am so mad that that interests me so much okay so I know that that's a sign of some interest it's not it's more than just an interest in prim and our most early ancestors it's an interest about who we are in a really deep sense that's what it really is okay let's figure out what it really is that because this thing excites you whatever it is I don't know I don't want to make it up because it'll sound bad what does that really mean about what it really is it that's exciting because there's a larger pattern there but also what repels you this is another thing that we're talking about likes and dislikes so I come across a lot of people who just can't work with other people they can't stand politicking and I understand it really well it obsessed them morally they hate people who are playing political games okay I tell them all right if that's the case you shouldn't be working in an office there's a thing for you that's called being an entrepreneur that's what you need to be doing you need to be working for yourself or with one other person because you can't tolerate political games and also what you're going to have to do is because it's you always gonna have to play political games you're going to have to find a partner or an assistant who's good at it who can cover your weaknesses so I find out what you don't like so we go through a process and we slowly get them to discover not in a narrow sense ah I was born to be an entertainment lawyer no it's something a little bit larger I was meant to work with people in a certain way as a manager okay or I was meant to be something more creative okay now we have to take that knowledge we have to turn it into something realistic which is a new direction you're going to take in life you don't suddenly quit your job you have to earn a living you have to pick your you have a wife and or a husband and family to help support so realistically we have to plan a way that you're going to slowly because nothing good ever happens quickly as I said we're going to slowly redirect the path of your life and through that you're going to discover yourself like I discovered that I hated journalism and I hated Hollywood and I hated this other thing and I found what I wanted but I went on a journey now you need to go on that journey and that it uh so it works like that and it takes weeks and months and a lot of people quit oh boy you're getting you're late [Laughter] Wow Wow so it's a process but I'm a realist so I don't like taking people's waste taking people's money and not giving them results it bothers me I only take on people I think I can help and I do I've helped people go on that I use a California word journey but okay on that journey and and change their life you know no no no I don't I should I have like this young man I'm working with in Los Angeles I've helped him a lot he graduated Yale recently and he's doing a start-up in Los Angeles related to the film business which will probably he's going to be making a lot more money than I'll ever make and so all I'm asking him is he's going to put me on the board of directors of his company so that does that'll be my reward you know cuz he didn't he hasn't paid me I haven't asked for any money because he's too young he's just starting out so instead of asking for a percentage of his business I'm asking to be put on the board of directors and the reason why is as I told we didn't discuss this but for me learning is more valuable than money the money will come if I'm really smart so being on a board of directors I can learn how businesses work I really like doing that so he's not he's going to give me a better gift instead of money he's going to give me a great experience to see a company from the ground up which will be in a very soon be worth a hundred million dollars I'll be there and see it and now I can talk with even more validity about mastery because I'll have learned something what's that yeah maybe maybe you know what I've come to the point where I have more money than I know what to do with so I don't I'm not really interested I mean it's not fabulous I'm sure all of you are worth more than me but I I don't what do I need to do I am writing and reading and I don't need it you know so you know I mean I do get paid for being on board of directors that's true so and stock ops okay so listening to you it's like you've studied people that have successful and so you derive some kind of method methodology to reach success so I'm struggling with this because there is your point of view that there is a methodology to reach success but also there are people that say that success is just come out of statistics so that means that well there is like no way to explain success I don't know if you read this book I'll deal I am sure and and it's just like it's more of a chance than actually actual work so I don't I'd like to hear your point of view on that okay I know how liars and I know Malcolm Gladwell and he's a great writer and I I admire him very much and it's a great book but I totally disagree I mean basically he's saying like he just to make you aware of what it is there's a great hockey player in the United States called Wayne Gretzky he's no longer plays why was Wayne Gretzky able to become a hockey player well I'm studying statistics people who were born in this year from this town in Canada have a greater chance of becoming a great hockey player and so where you were born and when you were born play an incredibly important role in your success so for instance you could have been born in Georgia in the south of the states and loved hockey but you're not going to become successful because people born in Canada were the ones who became the most successful and they can reduce a lot of these things to statistics about when you were born where you were born your your income level and stuff like that now I'm not going to say that chance does not enter into the equation for instance the family you were born into your income level the school you're going to the coal sure that you're born into of course that plays a role and for instance with me also luck plays a role I happen to met a man who asked me if I had an idea for a book and I told him and then I'm now I'm writing books if I hadn't met him I probably wouldn't be here right now so luck enters into the equation but let's let's look at it from another point of view let's say that we can give this numbers and there's like what really explains a person's success and 100 percent is the explanation what is the role of chance well Raby chance plays 20 percent of a role maybe that high and it's true it does and maybe your parents and how they have brought you up plays another 10 their 20% role let's add it up there is a margin there that cannot possibly be explained by science or statistics an element of willpower an element of determination there is no way you could statistically say that Frederick Douglas I don't know if you who Frederick Douglass is Frederick Douglass was an African American born into slavery in the South who managed to escape to the north and became an anti an abolitionist and a great writer and it was like the Michael Faraday story how did this manic manage that because he has no education how did he teach himself how to read because they've kept a black slaves illiterate they would never live a black slave read it was absolutely forbidden he managed to figure out a way how to read he taught us a blah blah blah blah there is no statistical system in the world that could have predicted Frederick Douglass I'm sorry because there were known there's no statistical system that could predict 50 cent of all of the hustlers on the streets dealing drugs and cocaine they've all been shot and killed why 50 why Thomas Edison Thomas Edison came from a family that was complete very poor uneducated or Ferriday or William Shakespeare Shakespeare came from a family that was very uneducated more middle-class but not of a level that would explain why he became Shakespeare why you can't give me the statistic and I'll tell you why because there's an element of willpower and of temperament and a character and a desire that cannot be reduced to a statistic and to me yes that 90% of Statistics is interesting but I am infinitely more interested in that 10% because with that 10% we can improve ourselves but if we think there's all about statistics while I might as well give up you know I wasn't born in Canada so I can't be a great hockey player it's just so irritating it's so irritating and so many people in America think like that I just want to I just want to kill them and the I'll give you an example of where statistics is insanity now in statistics is entered into basketball and it's my favorite sport basketball so everything is reduced to statistics and how we judge a player and it has a value but they decided that only certain shots are work better than others either you probably I don't know if yet you know about how a basketball is played but it used to be that a great player could make a shot from 15 feet out and that only counts for two points but if you can make a shot from 20 feet out that counts for three points so using statistics they can show that you actually have a better chance of scoring more if you shoot from further out and make a 3-point shot then if you just do the fifteen you know make the two-point shot but it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because now players only practice the three-point shot because that seemed the only value but in the past people used to not value that and there were players who had a more rounded game who could make both the to point and the three-point shot so statistics change how people act as they respond to it in a way that's irrational so I what I say is Americans are a little crazy they get something and they just go way too far with it statistics are important they're interesting but they're not the whole picture you know I'm sorry that was a bit long okay one or two more questions and I don't really have a question it's just so maybe it's a thought or suggestion and you're talking about anomalies and negative and all of these of everything that's not working well yeah there's also I would say how would I say positive Anna Louise or or people who are outliers but above the average above above the curve and what I see is that you you you've you've been studying them for 15 years so basically you take the people who are also very very few that's very interesting um yes I don't know it my understanding is that you've been really interested in studying these people and what I was thinking is that well maybe you've all study in Napoleon and people who were famous and who have biographies that are well-documented but I was just thinking that many of them who are maybe not celebrities not as famous as Napoleon do and and I was just thinking there's these everyday geniuses or let's I would not say geniuses but just people who who are successful and they are way considering the distance their death disk traveled I someone said that success is more of the distance you've traveled and not not really it should be should calculate that distance considering where it's coming from and I was just thinking that there are a lot of people like that who maybe we need every day who are successful and but who come from from such really hard who had a really hard of bringing whoever scheme very far is there any way of studying these people as well because they have so much to learn from them and maybe we would feel more comfortable studying these people then comparing ourselves to Napoleon for sense well of it's a great question I have to figure out how to answers okay well first off I do try and make the point in interviews because I didn't necessarily make it in the book so much that I'm not just talking about Steve Jobs and all these other great people I got interviewed by the New York Times for mastery but they decided to interview me for their home section I don't know why because I don't live in a great I've lived in a nice house but not a good palace so they came to my house and they're photographing my house and I said you know yes the same question you and I said the man who did the tile work on my house he is a master he came from Guatemala he was very poor he fled Guatemala to Mexico he got jobs and construction and just like the learning-by-doing he was did construction jobs he observed people very closely and how to be clever he got better better jobs he finally came to California and now for 20 30 years he does masonry and he had a feel for how to lay the tiles on our house because we have earthquakes in California and the ground moves and how to design that the whole thing he was brilliant and I told the guy in New York Times he's a master he has no education but he loves his work he's been doing it for twenty thirty years there are chefs who are like that there are housewives like that but they have the same pattern they have been doing something that they loved for a long enough period of time that they reach this level of excellence so let's get rid of the idea that I'm only talking about geniuses and Steve Jobs okay that's that's the first the other thing is I always always try to find examples of people who came as you say from further away because that's much better illustration of my idea Michael Faraday is a great illustration of the idea I talked in mastery of a woman named Dora Neal Hurston the great American writer she's African American who absolutely know where she came from was a black woman becoming a published writer in the United States was impossible and she was working as a maid in people's houses how she was able is in the book to write to turn herself into a writer and become the first woman black writer in history in America is an amazing story so I'm always looking for the people who traveled further because I agree with you but on the other level hand I do think that there's something to be learned from the exceptions and I was in fascinated because one of the people I interviewed as the contemporary masters is a great neuroscientist named V s Ramachandran from India he now works in the States he's a professor of neuroscience and his specialty is the strangest brain diseases that you can find the anomalies and his philosophy it is by find by looking into those really weird diseases that people have like they suddenly don't recognize their own parents anymore and their neurological diseases I can learn about how the brain really functions and he's made incredible discoveries about the human brain by just studying these very rare diseases and he was saying you know Robert that's sort of what you're doing so I'm able to find the pattern that I think applies to the people that are famous it applies to them but we don't I can't read about them I'm not reading the stories about your neighbor who's working at a job I there's no books written and it's also hard to dramatize their lives I mean I could but I probably have to be a better writer to make your neighbor who who's been doing this job for 20 years and and is good at it I don't know how to write that so I have to find Napoleon and Napoleon teaches us something that no other general can ever possibly teach us which is why Napoleon why was he so great the podium was so great because he was more organized than any other general he had more information in his head and that information was better organized therefore he knew more and he could predict better what happened now that gives you as a strategist an idea about how you could become a better strategist because my books are about how to improve yourself so I have to study those who've come to come to the highest point so I can give you a whole philosophy of Napoleon and how you could apply that and become a more organized thinker who has a better grasp on a situation whereas I couldn't do that if I studied a mediocre general and there are plenty of mediocre generals what am I going to learn from them you know that's sort of my long-winded answer to your question I didn't answer it I didn't satisfy you didn't want to hear oh okay okay all right I always do a little bit I'm a bit buzzed I'll use more so we will end this conversation but you can discover the books and you can talk to robots I had a last question what would be you talked with at Google at a sec agency ah what is the question that nobody asked you that you want to answer that question yeah yeah yeah that question okay no uh I don't know I don't know I think a very good answer since 10 o'clock this morning till now I've been talking and I just I don't know if I can I have any more ideas about I think I've been asked everything so preps around oh okay thank you very much thank you very much [Applause] you [Music]
