Robert Greene explains Why PEOPLE take advantage of YOU.

i think marcus is saying you're like a boxer in the ring and when someone uh he says when someone gouges you with your their nails or butts you with their head you have to you can't just run away crying or even accuse them of being a cheater you have to adjust your fighting right uh style accordingly and you have to he says you can be wary of them but like you can't get out of the ring right right yeah um so it's kind of a metaphor for life and um so the idea is that when you enter the world as an adult the work world it is like an arena it is like a boxing match some people play by different set of rules i forget what the normal boxing rules are called the uh you know what that guy his name no it doesn't matter there's sort of a standard for behavior in the boxing ring some people abide by it some people don't they hit below the belt they hug you they do all kinds of things that are not you're not supposed to do um and you know this is like human nature so schopenhauer has this quote that if you're walking down the street and you hit your foot against a rock you don't go get angry at the rock right well people are rocks in your way sometimes right they're just i don't mean that to to de-personalize them i mean in the sense that they are who they are they have their own nature and that nature isn't yours and it's going to clash with you sometimes and that is just what it means to be a human being an adult in in the world today in any world so are you going to be like complaining and blaming the fact that it is a boxing ring are you complaining that people have a nature where they have an ego or they're full of envy or they're passive aggressive and then in the in the source in the in the process of complaining you're putting yourself at a continual disadvantage because you're draining yourself with all these useless emotions and you're not playing proper defense against them because you're all consumed with kind of personalizing the situation or are you gonna have some distance and be like a boxer in a ring and be smart and intelligent about it you know and i just think it's a brilliant metaphor for life it's a brilliant metaphor for being in control and for accepting the fact that some people play a little bit dirty some people are going to hit you it's going to hurt but you don't whine and complain you just figure out how are you going to defend yourself better some people say life is is a dance and he says actually it's more like wrestling yeah because you have to be dug in and ready for sudden attacks right right do you agree is is life a boxing match or a wrestling match like is it is you know because you say this in your books all the time ago as in war so in life right do you is that the the lens that you look at the world through well to some degree i mean um conflict is kind of inherent in the human condition so your path through life is never going to be easy there's always going to be resistance there's always going to be people who oppose you i i got when i wrote the war book i also the other metaphor was the samurai warrior that was a major theme in it and musashi talks about the stance of the warrior yeah and it's the stance that matters how you meet the adversary how you position yourself how you're calm how you position the sword and how you're ready for the attack the attack might not come or the opponent might just give up and walk away or there may be somebody who come from behind but you're ready you're prepared you're in the proper stance so i always think of it kind of in those terms are you prepared so i don't want people to be paranoid i don't want them to go around thinking everybody's evil and they're about to attack me i want you to be in life to have this kind of composure this stance like a warrior you're prepared for the worst you're not expecting the worst but you're prepared for it if it happens and if some kind of crap comes your way you know how to fight you know how to defend yourself and you had to get out of bad situations and i say that because i myself before i wrote the book i violated a lot of times the stance that i was in was all wobbly i was too emotional i wasn't strong i wasn't like in a firm position etc so fight to see what their psychology was see what their weaknesses were what their strengths were so he could neutralize their strength and he never repeated the same strategy twice he always looked at his opponent as an individual i have to adapt to their style i have to mirror them sometimes so he had this one quote about if i yawn and i feel tired i will induce that in my opponent because emotions are contagious sure sure although i'm not really yawning and feeling it i'm going to make this person tired by my apparent lack of physical attitude so i found that brilliant you know because so many people in life they're bad strategists most people are awful strategists because they're locked in the past and they're constantly repeating what worked a week ago a month ago a year ago they don't look at the individuals they're dealing with their employees and say this person has a particular psychology this one's very different i have to approach each person differently they take the path of least resistance and they do this kind of cookie-cutter approach where i'm just going to apply the same strategies to each person and musashi was the complete opposite of that if you expect everybody to be good in this world you're in a lot of trouble you know what are you going to do when you deal with people who aren't good but yeah you have to be willing to get your hands dirty so let's say a classic example like you're there's a cause that's very important to you like the climate or you know justice in america you know racial justice in america all very important issues that we all most of us believe in you know if you you have to be willing to get down and dirty here because you're playing with politics you're playing with people who are going to resist you're playing with major corporations we're going to bust your balls we're going to be incredibly manipulative and downright evil in co-opting your good idea and and kind of you know neutralizing it so if you're going to be pl if you want to create something if you want to actually um have results you have to be willing to get a little dirty and you have to get be willing to be strategic you have to understand that the other side might not be playing by the same rules that you're playing with you know a lot of warfare is with asymmetry not just of weapons but of also of ethics you know like the democrats and the republicans i know those people are going to rant about that or when we pla we're going against vladimir putin these are people who have more options than we do because they're ethically not bound by the same norm there's self-imposed limitations the self-imposed limitations are a one-way street yeah yeah so you know and i talk in my books about two people mahatma gandhi and martin luther king and how at certain moments where they were so invested in the results of getting the english out of india of bringing racial justice to america that they were willing to do things that were actually a bit kind of manipulative downright manipulative so that's where it's you know but that's another point too it's not just that it was manipulative like in that they would they you know martin luther king deciding like hey we're going to use children in some of these uh marches because even though we know they're likely going to be in danger because it will help but i think it's also the key there to me is going just because your cause is right and this ties in directly to the laws of power about uh never appeal to mercy always appeal to self-interest like just because your cause is correct or right or just you can't just expect everyone else to be on board with that so it's not they were they also understood they had to convince people they had to get them to see something so they they they understood that it just wasn't theirs because they they were on the right side of history it's like uh might doesn't make right and right doesn't make might you have to figure out how to sell whatever it is that you're selling and understanding that yeah most people are indifferent as best or they have some vested interest in not caring about what you're talking about i think about that even as a writer it's like no not that many people like books you know like you're you're it's an uphill battle to get people to read a book and so you can't just expect that because you care a lot about it everyone else will care right well it's hard it's not natural for us to get outside of ourselves our natural position which is sort of what i talked about in human nature about our narcissism that we all have is i have a great idea everybody must think it's a great idea right i i think the world is this way and should be this way everybody should be feeling that way you know it's just natural sure but it's it takes it takes effort to get outside of yourself and to imagine that people come from different cultural backgrounds they didn't weren't raised like you they're a different gender they're a different race they have different backgrounds and different belief systems to try to think about that and also think about the universal qualities that all people share you know and so the problem if you could if you could boil down the problem with humans into one line it's the fact that they're always taking the path of least resistance they don't want to put effort and that and it requires effort to strategize to think of your opponent to think of what makes them different it takes strategy to think about what will persuade them what will get people to join your cause you know it takes effort to get outside of yourself and see how other people might view it but we don't want to do that we want to just be lazy and just assume that everyone's on our side

Channel: selfmastery

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Keywords: Robert greene, The 33 strategies of war, Robert greene interview, Robert greene books, Why people take advantage of other people, Why life is unfair, How to win in life, How to defeat competition, self mastery, human behavior, human psychology, self actualization, personal development, motivational, mental health, Life advice, Philosophical thinking, Physics, Habit, Addiction, Viral, Top, Life hacks, Wisdom from Robert greene

Id: LOYdDqPNYaQ

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 02 2022