Robert Greene "Mastery" on Between the Lines

today on between the lines you'll see how the ultimate power of mastery is within your reach when you meet Robert Greene welcome I'm Barry Kubrick Robert is making his fourth appearance on between the lines his best-selling book the 48 laws of power is a classic and has been read by many of the most influential people in the world now with his book mastery he distills the wisdom of the ages revealing that we all possess the secrets to mastery within us and the keys to unlock and release that power I'm a writer today because I was a reader when I was 11 years old and it was really do need you do not need to prove your state of happiness to anybody most of these speeches were as much as a months in preparation characters were heroes in his book of seekers of truth in and a story that that involved a lot of karate I'm get a chance to really talk about what's real and Robert welcome back this is the fourth appearance on the show and I'm as excited as I was on the first one well thank you for having me it's a pleasure and a deep honor so thank you well Robert this book I was talking with my son and I said even the first few pages you begin to taste where you're going and how you're going to lay this out for us map literally out this course of mastery and then you finally realize that what Roberts really talking about is the ability for all of us to become masters right yes you know I I have this this I always sort of write better when I there's a little bit of anger in me let's put it that way or I'm annoyed and what starts to annoy me even in books like outliers which is a great book is this notion of there's this genetic component or its statistics or its luck or you were born in this year or you had these parents or they sent you to that school and that's plays like the major role in the success you're having in life and I've been redoing research on masters and powerful people for 16 years and that is not the anecdotal evidence that I'm coming up with these are people who go through a deep learning process who are so connected to what they're studying that they absorb lessons faster they learn quicker and they reach mastery if you know that process if you know some of the steps that I'm going to reveal in the book it's open anyone and one of the people I profile in mastery is Temple Grandin who's born with autism if someone born with autism can reach this level of mastery why who couldn't reach it well that's what you get you really get you you you begin to believe that you know you can do this I mean it's a powerful feeling by the way yeah well I'm trying to ground it in in six million years of evolution this is how the brain evolved so long ago when our most primitive ancestors were struggling with a very tense struggle to survive and the brain developed in a certain way towards mastering the environment towards learning something so well that you have a feel for it an intuitive feel in this case for hunting for for the environment it's hardwired into our brain this power is hardwired in there and it's a process of awakening it and thank God we live in the 21st century where it's a power that's now open to men women any ethnicity anybody you know you said these words it feels as if it has its own external reality and while I was reading this the Masters that you quote that you really study through here past and present by the way you get this and I say it almost religious spiritual sense I can't quite put my word on it because you you dance around that yourself a little bit okay but you sense that there is a calling that there is a mission that there's almost a destiny that each one of us and you specifically state that it's so important to realize our uniqueness that each one of us in our own unique way has this and we must this is the pot that was that struck me this isn't you have no choice you literally almost almost imply do it or die I mean not I don't mean that you know but it's so important that we tap into this yes I mean the one thing I'm trying to to radically shift your perspective on who you are and your whole concept of what makes you happy and fulfilled in life trying to build in this this idea that there is a vocation for you that you have a calling in life that it stems from something deep inside that you as you say you're born unique and in childhood in your early years you're kind of in tune with this you're drawn to sports to chess to mathematics to music something draws II for me it was history and writing you can't explain it it's pre verbal it's so powerful and as you get older that voice gets weaker and weaker and weaker you listen to your parents you listen to peers and you're in your 20s your 30s you don't know who you are you followed the wrong your path you're a lawyer but you don't want to be a lawyer you're lost and it gets too late to regain it and this is a book about really connecting to that primal curiosity that you have Einstein talks about this you're like a child everything it makes you feel inspired connecting with that and redesigning your career to at least mesh with this it's not easy no and that's in fact if there was one word that kept coming up from all was it takes persistence she as you said sheer persistence it is a non-stop journey it's not a conclusion by the way that was what when Eli my son and I were talking it's not a end point you do not quote unquote become a master I mean of course we consider people masters but this is really a journey that takes place throughout your life and it's never too late yeah I've discovered in the in the research and I interviewed nine contemporary masters for this book that the people who really get far in life really achieves something it's not that there's so goal-driven they don't think I want to become a master I want to write this great book they're actually people who enjoy the process of their work like I enjoy putting the book together researching and building it if all I thought about was the end and getting money and attention and being on Barry Kubrick it wouldn't work you have to actually literally enjoy the details that are involved in your work and how do you do that well you choose a career that at least excites you in some way where you can handle the setbacks the tedium the practice the boring hours it's inevitable if you want to be a great violinist you're not going to be born that way you have to put in the ten thousand the twenty thousand hours and the more you do it the more pleasurable it becomes more pleasurable it becomes the harder you practice well you call it discovering your life's task and in fact it's the step that actually precedes the steps towards mastery in a certain way it's it's something that you must do that before you can go into what we'll say the apprenticeship and all the different levels later on which we'll talk about you must discover that task and that may look by the way as you say here too it's not necessarily this you know light bulb goes off it could happen from so many different modes in so many different ways and over such a different span of time it could happen quickly it could take a while to find out one's life's mission yeah I have talked in the book about Martha Graham the great dancer who totally revolutionized the world of dance and she was interested in theater as a child but her father was a psychiatrist who studied insanity and he would always come home and talk about body language and how he could read body language and sense if someone was possibly criminal you know insane and she was fascinated by this idea of body language and theatre but she didn't know what she wanted to do then she saw her first dance performance when she was 17 and 18 and she realized this could be something where I could express and go into all these really primal interests that I have and it was something that she didn't really develop until she's in her 20s it doesn't necessarily happen in one moment it's a process that you go through but you have to be self-aware and connected to who you are you know here's the words that caught my mind the principle is simple and this is when we already start going into the levels of mastery the apprenticeship level its transformation of your mind and character and I thought wow that's interesting the principle is simple but the transformation of your mind and character that's not simple right well you know that's sort of a line for the apprenticeship phase where I'm saying you enter life you leave College you leave the house the home and you're basically a naive person that's out of that's disconnected from reality you don't have your feet on the ground you don't understand people you don't understand politics and the social political environment in a work world you're starting at zero and you're slowly going to transform yourself into someone who's realistic who has skill who has discipline who has self mastery and so you're really you're transforming yourself through this process and you have to literally feel like you're starting a once you enter the work world if you enter thinking that you know something that you're already smart you're three steps back it's so it literally is a process of transforming yourself well in this apprenticeship stage which is this as I said once you find your life's task and you begin to apprentice one of the key things you say we must apprentice ourselves in is failure because that is the one if there's a common denominator through everyone who's achieved mastery in fact Thomas Edison who you used failed more than anyone in the history they I remember that great line when they said to him how did it feel to fail you know a thousand times to invent the lightbulb and he said I didn't fail a thousand times I learned 999 times of how not to do it well I often have the thought I don't know quite how to articulate it but it's the negative experiences in life when things don't work that your eyes open up that you actually literally learn you learn through the lessons and the things that you didn't do right and I talk in the book about Henry Ford that you know the guy who invented the automobile industry as we know it this was a man who started his own business in the 1890s it failed miserably and in the automobile industry you generally got one chance he found investors the second time he failed a second time now that was usually the end of anybody's career he's tried a third time and the third time succeeded and his whole attitude was I needed these failures in order to learn in order to build some character in order to know what I didn't want to do in order to know that this I had to keep the finance ears out of the design process you need those negative lessons in life to sort of show you the way and you need to embrace them well that's why it's so important to feel the passion about it because otherwise you would give up you would quit if you didn't realize that this was quote a calling quote a destiny quote a mission however you want to phrase it you would just I failed once maybe it have enough guts to go the second time but the question is do you have enough to go the third the fourth the fifth because you know it takes years to figure all this out and even though as you say sometimes you know it'd be great if we could find a mentor but even that as you say in the book is it's still your self-directed apprenticeship it's not something that you know someone's gonna come to you and just sweep you up and say I'd love to mentor you you know I mean maybe one in a million but not for most of us yes I mean one of the big examples in the book is that I love is Charles Darwin in the sense that he seems sort of a lost child his father thought he was a little bit dull-witted and then he goes on this voyage around the world to South America and eventually the Galapagos where he discovers his calling as a naturalist as a scientist and basically hits upon the dissolution at the age of 26 and then he proceeds to spend the next 35 years of his life proving this one theory and you have no idea how tedious that was he spent eight years studying barnacles alone he never lost hope he never got just depressed or lost his energy because he was so excited by the discovery process by what he intuited as a 26 year old that he had this incredible patience to go through all of it also the incredible criticism that he had to endure for this revolutionary theory so only by feeling personally connected to what you're doing to feel engaged in it and it applies to science as much as to heart are you able to withstand the criticism and the negative experiences that go that are part of the process to mastery well one of the things that you in fact right next to that would being able to withstand it I think the word you use is this connectiveness and then masters can make these different connections that then become the whole and I think that's one of the things that allows you to have that endurance is because it's not so much as a single focus as it is connecting all those dots that help you develop the strength the seasoning the wisdom to achieve the goal yes I mean also the brain I'm really obsessed with the brain in this book because I'm trying to tell you that you have this tool this tool is the brain and it's sort of built for bringing you to mastery so the more it's not just knowledge it's also experiences that you need and the more you allow you feed the brain this natural power the more it will reward you with this sort of creative energy but there is so much pain I want to read read a few of the things in regards that the only real these are your words the only real impediment to mastery is yourself and your emotions you cannot suppress such emotions they are normal to the process what you can do is have faith in the process and you even state that frustration is a sign of progress but you know that doubt that when you doubt your mission mm-hmm I must tell you there's probably no greater pain than accept the death of a loved one or something of that nature yeah but it's all how you how you look at it so let's let's say for instance that you're you're learning the piano or you're writing a piece of music and it's not working out and something isn't right you've hit a block I hit these blocks in my writing if you have the attitude oh damn I don't I'm not good enough this is wrong I I don't know what I'm doing you're gonna find yourself turning that into an even more negative experience if you stop and you say the fact that it's not working it's not working for a reason and I'm going to push past this moment and find out how I can make it work and I always find in my writing that I use the frustration and the blocks to actually help make the work much better but I don't ever let it get me down so it's as you said trusting the process the brain goes through a process of learning you the more you're exposed to something the better you understand it the more skill you will develop you have to sort of trust that that's going to happen now you added something that I thought when when you think of what some masters do you almost think that they're operating in a vacuum but the truth here is there's a social intelligence that you say without that you can't really achieve the mastery and social intelligence sometimes you don't think of some of the quote geniuses of our time which is different mastery as you said is different than genius but that's that's that part caught my attention for some reason really strongly well I don't want to give people the impression that mastery is only about the sort of geeky knowing enough about your field and being some great computer engineer we humans are the pre the the finest social animals on the planet we are definitely defined as social animals it's the source of our power the ability to read other people's minds they call us the theory of mind that I can put myself inside the head of Barry Kubrick right now and sort of try to imagine what he's thinking no other animal that has it we developed this power I go into the science behind it and the whole concept of mirror neurons and what that really means you can't divorce who we are from the powerful social instincts and intuitions that we have and the problem that we have in the world today is that people don't develop that side of their character they don't know how to read people they don't know how to sort of stop that interior monologue and focus on the other person and try and get inside their skin and use their natural empathy it also helps you develop political skills the social skills that you need and you know how you need that in your work wealth and I need it in my work world it helps develop all sorts of aspects of your brain as a writer having empathy helps me get into characters I want to make you give you the idea that the brain is this interconnected Oregon and the social and emotional and intellectual parts are all equally important and if you try and divorce them you're not going to get to the mastery level well you know I'm going to read your words here you say masters inevitably possess another quality that complicates the process yeah they are not easily satisfied by what they are doing an interesting dichotomy and one that you can see would cause someone who is striving for their mission the biggest problem of all and you say you have to have the ability to reverse those emotions when you see the setback you must look at it not as a setback as a new point to the journey when you see your you've got that writer's block you can't look at it as a negative you got to look at it as a positive this writer's block I'm gonna now think of a way to get out of this and those are the connections that then those synapses is just keep flying around that's right and and the example that comes to mind when you say that is is the great architect Santiago Calatrava who I interviewed for this book and Collett rava would say the greatest danger he faced in designing a building is after five six years of working on a project it would go stale and it no longer felt alive to him and he didn't know why he was doing it and it was a terrible feeling and so what would happen if whenever that happened to him is he would reassess it and then throw everything out he would throw out all the drawings all the six years of work and start all over and it'd be and people would look at him collect he was crazy he did it because he had to get back to that sort of freshness that he needed to be more creative and in the moment and he said I I didn't care I don't care if I have to throw out six years of work the feeling of making it better and being more alive in the moment is what matters I thought that was sort of a powerful way of expressing it yeah specially since as I said before the doubt is such a powerful feeling linguae to have it it requires such belief literally to turn that stuff around you need that internal voice you need to be critical with yourself you can be over critical you can be a perfectionist and go too far but look at someone like a Steve Jobs he eternal eyes that voice he was incredibly self-critical he kept pushing himself further and further on each design thing that he was involved in and look at the end result so I'd rather err more on the side of hearing that critical voice than not having one at all I think that critical voice is so important when you don't internalize it and blame yourself see that's when I think that then you become that paralysis of analysis as you said you become too much of a perfectionist you're not going to let it go and then if you don't and you just keep you don't ever finish anything so there is a nice balance you must have that doubt must be there but you you must have that strength to let it go enough to move forward well has helped a lot I know with writing books or whatever they say you know in living in the real world you have only two years to write your book you have only so much many years to be alive a good deadline will usually cure you of that procrastination I can I have to laugh because my wife and I we joke I always give myself ninety days and and I tell you I don't mind failing at the end of 90 days I didn't succeed at that particular time right I'll give myself another 90 days and I'll give myself another 90 days you know sounds very good that's why you're a master oh please but thank you anyway I'll take I'm taking that one to the bank but Robert as much as we strive for mastery and willing to put in the time and patience there was one thing you said in here and that was we must allow for serendipity and I thought wow because so much of life really is random and not in our control we have to be aware of it when it comes our way yes you're right I mean that that kind of gives you the ultimate power because you don't control everything and I basically frame it this way the human being as it evolved is the supreme opportunist in nature that's how our brain became what it is how we emerged from being this weak little creature to these powerful animals that rule the world we are supreme opportunists we come upon a rock it looks a little different we realize that rock could be a weapon could be a scavenging tool could turn into a knife that's how our brains operate naturally we see everything around us what can that do how can we use this or that and scientists are the supreme opportunists they use serendipity all the time I talked about Thomas Edison he hears a funny sound on the Telegraph and he realized that funny sound could turn into the invention of the phonograph and recording the human sound what person on this planet would ever connect those two things hearing a whirring noise and realizing he could use that to to then record the human voice that's the kind of power the brain has if it's open if it's making these connections left and right and center but you need to have built up the years of practice and to have a fluid open adaptable mind and that sort of as you point out that's where the ultimate creative power the mind can have you know you say also you just wrote it in passing I think maybe once maybe twice but I think it's the benefit and you said something about people who are masters or as I said that's almost a conclusion but strive for mastery they actually get younger as they age yes it's a I love this phenomenon and I catalog it and the icon of that is Benjamin Franklin he's in his bio I have to say my favorite man of history almost like that three of them he is one of ours is such an amazing fantastic story and you don't know Benjamin Franklin do you read like a long biography and what a man but this guy's in his 80s and people are meeting him and they're going he it's like talking to a 20 year old his mind is so open you know what happens when you get older your mind closes you get rigid you you have all these sort of stale ideas that you keep repeating Benjamin Franklin was like a 20 year old he had no stale ideas his mind was still crisp and aliveness but he only could have lived 20 more years who knows what else he would have come up with so III love that phenomenon because it's so hopeful maybe I can be like that as I get older Robert I'm sure you are going to be our time as I said I could spend hours here but our time is up I'm going to end with these words every moment every experience contains deep lessons for us we are continuously awake like Ben Franklin never merely going through the motions thank you rob it so much for waking us up thank you for having me on your show Barry it's always a pleasure and a deep honor thank you and thank you for joining us now before Robert leaves I'd like to leave you with these additional words from mastery there exists a form of power and intelligence that represents the high point of human potential it is the source of the greatest achievements and discoveries in history it is an intelligence that is not taught in our schools nor analyzed by professors but almost all of us at some point have had glimpses of it in our own experience I'm Barry Gibb Rick feel the power of mastery between every glimpse of your own experience see the intelligence of human potential that you possess thank you so much Robert oh thank you very good nose nice if you'd like to get in touch with us on a DVD or transcript of our show catch an episode online or receive our weekly updates go to wwl CS org slash BTL

Channel: Barry Kibrick

Views: 90,073

Keywords: Mastery (Book), Robert Greene, Between The Lines (Award-Winning Work), barry kibrick, Self-help (TV Genre), Public Broadcasting Service (TV Network)

Id: WRYw-dt4HtY

Length: 26min 27sec (1587 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2015