Robert Greene ON: The Laws of Mastery, Power and Human Nature & Harnessing Your Dark Side For Good

when you're excited about a project when you feel alive and energized then time is a much different experience than when you're bored so you can create your relationship to time right so i'm not ready well there's a strategy for that you should always take action a little bit before you were ready is the advice i give several months before you're ready go ahead and do it try it because you're gonna rise to the occasion [Music] hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the number one health podcast in the world thanks to each and every single one of you who come back every week to listen learn and grow now you know that the podcast is just an excuse for me to reach out to amazing people incredible minds and the people that i want to sit down with the most and pick their brain and today's guest is someone that i've wanted to do that with for a long long time i remember reading his books years ago we've been in touch for quite some time to try and get this scheduled and today i'm so grateful because he's made the effort to be here physically present with us in the studio he's none other than robert greene the author of some of my favorite books we have the laws of human nature his new book that's out right now called the daily laws i highly recommend that you go and grab your copy and of course uh the greatest one of all time in my opinion the 48 laws of power so we're going to be diving into these three books today and robert himself and i hope that you'll all be making notes this is one that you want your notebook out for it's one that you want to get your pen and pencil out for and i'm so grateful robert thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me jay my pleasure no it's an honor to have you here honestly i've been looking forward to it me too me too so i mean i'll tell everyone the story me and robert were about to record three or four months back and we both had a friendly conversation and i think you were asking me where i live and i was saying i live in la and i i live in hollywood and you were saying you live in los feliz and we were like well we we're like 15 minutes away and so we said let's do it in person and i'm so happy that we made that possible and all the effort you took to be here so thank you yeah my pleasure i love getting out of the house so it's actually fun for me amazing well you know your work is legendary it's you know to say it's a best-selling book or anything is an understatement your work is impacted the way people think and live and make decisions and people look to your books as law books and textbooks they don't see them as just story books or a quick read they're reference books almost and i guess my biggest question to start off is where did your obsession with power come from you know i guess is you'd have to go back to my early childhood um maybe you know i felt as a child a little bit helpless around my parents in some ways i was a very sensitive boy i still have that that issue they were great parents but they weren't the most overtly affectionate and so i was always kind of wondering and observing them and trying to be careful around them i didn't do anything to upset them so i became kind of an observer of people and my main thing was as sort of a protective device to not be heard and to be able to have a degree of control over the people around me so i didn't feel like i was you know going to get yelled at or something like that and then as i entered the work world um you know i kind of it was sort of a rude awakening for me because i had studied you know literature and languages my major was ancient greek and you know things that are completely impractical in this world and then i enter the work world with all of my dreams my illusions my fancies and it's like slapped in the face this is not what i expected i had many different jobs i lived in new york i did journalism then i lived in europe i traveled around because i couldn't really find out what i wanted to do i worked in a hotel in paris i taught english in barcelona i did construction work in greece on an island in greece i worked in a television company in london you name it i did it and i had all kinds of bosses i saw all kinds of power games and manipulations going on and so taking that knowledge from my childhood of observing people seeing how they operate seeing what's really going on behind their minds because people wear masks they don't tell you what they're thinking they don't want to admit that they want power that they want to control you or manipulate you in some way and so i was always kind of a decipherer of people and what their real thoughts were and to me figuring people out is a form of power and then i worked in hollywood which is kind of the ultimate power environment you know because nobody in hollywood wants to admit that their goal is power they want to make it all worry about art or about creativity liberal causes blah blah blah but really they wanted power it was the most power hungry environment i had ever witnessed i observed a kind of a double face think quality going on on the one hand they would present this front to their employees to everyone else but really they were practicing all of these games these kind of power games going on and so that's what sort of inspired my first book the 48 laws of power because my my sympathies are more on the side of the underdog i don't have a sympathy for a hollywood executive for a michael ovitz for a ceo of a company i have sympathy for the poor guy like myself who is thrown into these environments doesn't understand him is a bit naive right it doesn't know the rules of power that these generally white men at least back in that era seem to know instinctively and so i wanted to like reveal to everyone what goes on behind closed doors the real games of power that people play so it's not that i'm obsessed with it but i feel like people like myself are often too naive they don't understand what they're about to get into they don't understand how rough and brutal the world can be and i actually wanted to kind of help them and reveal the kinds of things that i learned the hard way i love that learning journey because so much of what we seek are the gifts and gaps from our parents you know whether they give us a gift and we chase that gift or they they have a gap in their parenting we try and fill that gap and it's amazing how everything seems to really really stem from that where how do you define power in the way you guide people in this book towards power because i think power has changed power has shifted its meaning has evolved and i wanted to know what you define as power well people have this misconception of power they think it has to do with you know ceos and presidents and it's kind of ugly and dirty i have a much different conception of it it's something that has to do with your daily life now i have the idea that much in our lives we cannot control you can throw a number out 95 percent you can't control disease you can't troll the people that you meet it's by chance that you met your wife and you fell in love and you ended up marrying her you kind of fall into jobs there's much in life that is way beyond your control but there's a margin that you can control right and it's mostly about your relationships it has to do with your children your spouse your partners your colleagues at work your bosses and the feeling that you have no control over them that they can do whatever they want that you have an idea and you want to sell it to them or you want somebody to stop their annoying behavior and you have can't control them they're completely oblivious they won't listen to anything you say is to me the worst feeling for a human being to have right where animals that need that sense of i can influence my environment i can influence the people around me and the sense of helplessness is a very very primal feeling it's like when you take an animal and if you have dogs or cats and you put them on their belly they feel exposed they feel terrified and that's when they attack you well that position is like being on our belly i can't control my teenage son he's into drugs my husband or my wife isn't listening to me ugh my boss is doing you know you want the ability to be able to at least defend yourself or to have some influence or power over them it's a small margin because there's much you can control but to the degree that you can have some of that power and you can and then there's one other aspect probably the most important aspect that i'm forgetting here is power over yourself self-mastery right because a lot of the problems that you have in life you can't really control yourself you're you're subject to all these emotions these moods these things that grab you that obsess you that possess you your mind has these recurrent thoughts you have no self-control and it drives you crazy you have a habit you want to get rid of you take some program some class and three months later you're back at it ah you know what is it so the sense that you can control yourself to a degree and the sense that you can have some influence over people is power and the more you have it the greater the feeling you have because you can get avoid that helplessness that makes all of us kind of crazy yeah i really love how you grounded that definition of power in self-mastery because that seems to be where everything else loses control you know it's like if we're out of control then everything seems out of control and so so much of our lust or envy or greed or anger has the ability to distract and derail us completely when there's no self-power right and why do you think it is you mentioned that why do you think it is that we all have an and i can relate to this and i think you know when you referred to yourself as as someone who struggled and you know couldn't figure it out and was surprised by what happened and you know i i would say the same that you know i grew up uh being bullied for being overweight and i was the one a few indian people in my entire area that i grew up in in london we're in london i was in north london so majority area of tottenham and wood green yeah which are not considered south asian areas and when i look back at that time in my life i also feel like i at one point in my life was an underdog and why do you think it is that so many underdogs have such a negative view of power i feel like so many people today whether they consider themselves underdogs or not when we think of words like power or influence we think of them as negative things we think of them as being as you said like dirty or toxic or plagued why is that and how do you healthily transform your belief around power well that was sort of what i wrote the book about but a lot of it comes from our culture which i think plays a very often a very negative role in our lives it teaches us the wrong kinds of lessons and so back in the days when it was television now it's whatever you watch and whatever medium you know all of the villains in the world were these power hungry people and in black coats with cars with the with the windows kind of blacked out you know and doing all sorts of evil ugly things that's what we think of as power it's like a cultural trope that we've all digested you know this kind of machiavellian character who's out to kind of destroy people nobody thinks of power in a positive sense and it's madding it drives me crazy it's incredibly hypocritical when self-help books are written and they're trying to say that power or ambition or influence are ugly things when the writer himself or herself is actually a very powerful person who has influence who has control it's awful it drove me crazy it's why i wrote the book you know so i try and tell people look who's one of the great saints that we hold up in our culture mahatma gandhi right i certainly venerate him he's an amazing person and i read very deeply about gandhi and i wrote about him in my third book the strategies of war and his goal was to throw the english out of india so they could finally experience in independence because the people had been subjugated for so long that they had forgotten what it meant to be human in a way right a very noble goal but he realized quickly on how difficult it would be so he had to be strategic and so he had things like the salt march where he very much plotted in advance that he knew using his method of civil disobedience where once the police came out you were not to fight you were to accept them if they beat you you accepted it you never fought no violence but he knew that that back in the day before television that the media the newspapers would cover their their english bobbies or whomever they were beating these these people up and it would play horribly in england because people in england thought that they were very liberal and open-minded that they weren't these horrifying imperialists he was strategic he knew that he had to get maximum publicity for very ugly confrontations years later martin luther king another icon who also practiced civil disobedience did utilize the same tactics in his campaigns in selma and montgomery at one point it was very controversial he had children of the age of 13 14 involved in this march that they would get beaten up people were in his group cascading for this how could you be like that he knew that that would play on television now to the white audiences around america they'd be horrified if you want power in this well if you are fighting for a cause if you want some kind of justice you have to be strategic you have to think like that you have to think in terms of power people just don't give themselves up you know if we have the metoo movement now men are not going to give up all their control in a place like hollywood you have to hit them you have to be strong you have to be forceful it's a power game and i can't stand people who are naive who think that just being themselves just being virtuous is going to get what they want in life if you're going to fight for something you have to be able to meet the enemy on their terms of power so that's sort of how i like to explain to you there's nothing unhealthy about gandhi or or mlk as far as i know yeah no thank you so much for sharing that perspective i it i definitely feel very aligned with that i've often said to people when people have asked me like jay how have you created what you've created or how are you building your work and businesses and i've always said that to me sincerity and strategy have to go together sure that uh data and intuition have to go together like it's you can't have one or the other and so to only be sincere and loving and compassionate and kind well actually a lot may not happen and to only be strategic and influential and powerful you may end up lose your soul lose your soul exactly well beautifully said like you lose your soul but when you have two together and it is a fine balance and it is a you're always juggling both and you don't get the perfect amount you're always in percentages and proportions but the idea that you you can't ignore this side there's a beautiful quote you reminded me of from martin luther king where he said those who love peace need to learn to organize themselves as well as those who love war right and i think that's beautiful yeah and i think that's what we're saying that and that's what i saw when i first started to share the messages i'd learned from living as a monk and the vedas and that tradition for me it was if i'm not strategic about this or if i'm not focused or organized about this then i might as well give up now because it's not going to spread itself no and so i'm really happy to hear your perspective on that how do the laws become things that you use versus getting lost in what we just said of losing your soul in power now driving you because i almost feel like when you start using the rule the laws you end up feeling a sense of power and then that power can consume you often it can become toxic some people start that way they start with an agenda and they utilize the powers wrongly but want to speak of someone who starts off in a more noble cause but then now the laws are using them versus them using the law you have to understand there's an offensive and a defensive side to the laws okay and i always tell people who have these kind of compunctions about crush your enemy totally i don't want to do that neither do i okay so if you're reading a law and it kind of triggers this ah i can't do that then it's not something you should do anyway it's gonna it's not gonna fit your way of doing you have a certain style a certain belief system certain values i'm not telling you to go outside your values but look at that law which is probably the ugliest in the whole book crush your enemy totally and understand that in the business world that law prevails 95 percent of the time when a company like google or any tech company has an enemy their mo their goal is to get rid of them completely to buy them out so they have no competitors right look at amazon but even smaller businesses dealing with rivals it's a dynamic in the business world so you need to be aware of it and not be naive you don't have to practice it but you need to be aware of it other laws are just simply trying to show you what how you know we're we're animals that kind of base our opinions a lot on what we see and perceive we don't often think too deeply we kind of take people based on their appearances so there's a law of power in there called always say less than necessary very kind of common sense law and the idea is that if you're in a meeting with people that man or woman who talks less generally has an aura of power particularly a boss they seem enigmatic mysterious and when they do something say something everybody's hanging on their words what did that mean would say whereas people who talk a lot give the impression that they're weak they signal weakness they can't control themselves so they can't control themselves how can they control anything in the business world right so we sense that in people so be aware of that you're probably talking too much in a lot of circumstances and maybe you can control that and so this is kind of a way of defending yourself in an environment where people will tend to see you as weak if you can't have any self-control right so there are if you see that a law that's ugly that makes you skin crawl you don't want to do it i have no problem with that i there are a lot of laws i don't practice in there but you need to be aware of them you need to be aware that other people are practicing them so that you don't become their victim then there are other laws that yes you should practice right like appealing to people's self-interest when you're trying to influence them or or despise the free lunch where you learn to pay for things and be generous with your time and your money for people so it depends on the law but i hate it when people say oh what an evil book those are people who haven't read it because the half the laws are more than half have nothing evil about them and the other half are about opening your eyes i never say you have to practice this i'm just making you aware of reality of what goes on in the world is it possible to and and i agree with you fully i i think if you read the book you you can't see it as an evil book or a controlling or manipulative book at all you know that's and you can tell clearly it's not your intention it's not who you are like and and that's what i want to ask you how much of a role does intention play in some of this work because i i wonder if you thought about that when you were writing it do you think about it now in terms of how your intention fits in with the law or your reason why you're doing it the cause behind the law that you're using does that impact or affect the quality of the effectiveness of the lord does it make a lot work better does it does it have any power does intention have any power you mean if your intention is for something good or for something correct correct well it depends unfortunately in the world today and you know i've had this experience and we read about in the news a lot of people who have a dark side whom we might consider rather immoral in their behavior get pretty damn far right yeah and they use these laws and they don't pay any consequences so there's no kind of ultimate justice in this world although there might be in a religious sense i don't deny that at all but in a secular world there's no consequences to pay for it so people if they have a lot they do crush your enemy totally and that's their goal they might end up being even better at it than somebody who doesn't really want to go there but then kind of tries it half-heartedly right so um i'm not here to say that justice and goodness always prevails but the people who have those kind of intentions the true sharks in the world they don't need my book right they know it it's in their dna they grew up at the age of five or six seven it's already been implanted in them and i write about that in my last book the laws of human nature you can see that in certain people at a very early age the great therapist psychoanalyst melanie klein identified the greedy baby at the age of six months wow that was already sucking so hard on the mother's breasts and she saw that this this type of baby turned into the type that was actually very aggressive in life so it's inbred very early on people like that have patterns of behavior they cannot control but those people with those kind of intentions who are very manipulative i believe very firmly they don't get ultimately they hit a wall they piss so many people off they don't know the soft side of power they have no self-control because all they know is grab grab grab push push push they don't know when to yield they don't know when to step back right they've only learned one way and so that becomes their downfall what i'm hearing from you is that the intention it's in one sense could could weaken it if it wasn't used effectively but you know you're also saying that if someone does have a positive intention or a good intention then it is likely that they may be happier with that power to some degree definitely oh definitely and i think that's what i find so fascinating i see what you mean yeah right does it like yeah it's the relationship i i guess we both know a lot of powerful people who would consider themselves to be not happy yeah and and i i ask myself then what is the role of power in the world because i feel like a lot of people in your situation when they didn't feel any power at home or they didn't feel a sense of significance at home often power or significance become pursuits for pleasure and for happiness but power doesn't lead to happiness what does power lead to well i'm not sure i completely agree with that because under the way i've defined power where you feel like okay so let's say you have a spouse who has a very annoying pattern of behavior all right and in my books i train you being direct and yelling at them never works it never works you have to learn this the the art of insinuation of persuasion which often is stepping back which often involves teaching them a lesson mirroring their behavior right and so your intention is not ugly or or bad it's that you you can't live with this person unless they alter their behavior right and so you you think about it you strategize a little bit you take some steps and it works yes got it right i understand yeah so in a relationship often that you know can spell into some degree of power or let's say um you ha you're in a nasty divorce case and there's a child involved and your emotions are to screw that man or woman who is so mean to you and you're gonna have this nasty fight and then you realize oh my god this child that i love is really gonna suffer from it and then you step back and you go no i have to not just react it's gonna it's gonna lead to some an uglier cycle of battles i need to be a little bit more strategic about this i need to pursue this in a softer way right and so you end up feeling better about yourself so i'm not saying all the laws are gonna make you feel better about yourself but the degree that you can control your environment where you're not helpless at work or in a relationship or with your children will give you a degree of happiness it won't fulfill you the way maybe that's the difference here it will give you a sense of satisfaction it will relieve that anxiety it won't make you fulfilled the way your career will if it's done properly but it will help you lose that continual gnawing anxiety that you can't change people that you can't change yourself so i do think there is an element of happiness however you wanted to yeah involved with power no and i think i think that's why going back to your definition of power and that's why i asked ashley eleon that's that's exactly it that when i was referring to my point i was saying that when people have a negative intention and their definition of power is warped then power can end up feeling dissatisfying when you get there because it it didn't really get you what you wanted right right because you couldn't force someone to love you or you couldn't force this person but but actually when it was done in a in the way you're saying like when you realize that actually if i don't exert this power i'm actually using this power to save this situation to to enable this situation to improve i think that's if yeah i think that's what i was uh pointing to and so yeah we're on the same page there's one a couple of uh laws that i love that i wanted to pick out for you so to just mention a bit because i think these are um really really interesting so this one is law 29 plan all the way to the end right and i wanted to ask you how one actually does that and i know you talk about in the book which i want to say for people but for for today's conversation i'd love to how do you plan to the end when sometimes it's really hard to know what's next and what the end is and i think so many people today are you know in jobs for less time they're moving quicker there's so many more opportunities new technologies how do we what does it mean to plan to the end well it's a thought process so you as you as you what point out well enough that things come up that you can't foresee circumstances things change and the ending that you plan for doesn't happen the way you want it to that's fine but to the degree that you go through a mental process and you think about the ending and you have a goal in mind you're going to be much more effective in life so when something comes up you're planning to go here and it forces you that way you're better prepared to take that circumstance and make it maybe veer a little closer to the point that you want right so people the main point of that law is that we are all go around with these dreams and these thoughts and these plans that are so vague i'm going to write a book i'm going to direct a movie i'm going to start a tech startup that's going to make billions of dollars blah blah blah and then we maybe go through a kind of half-hearted process yeah my book's going to be about this yeah my business will be like that right and then you don't really plan deeply enough you don't think because your plans are are infected with wishes right yes and to me the the kind of um the model of that is the invasion of iraq by all of these extremely prudent strategic men like dick cheney etc they thought that that we would be greeted as liberators with people with flowers in their hand and then lo and behold whoa this nasty nasty war in which hundreds of thousands of people are killed ensued they didn't realize that their plans were infected with their dreams with what i call the rosie scenario so when you're going to go sell this movie that you want to you're imagining that people already love it you've already convinced yourself but you don't realize that people are cold they're indifferent so if you plan to the end you think about the goal you think about the other people you think about steps a b c d e to get there you're more concrete and then when things come up as mike tyson said everyone has a plan until you get hit in the face right okay you get hit in the face yeah all right i got to change my plan a little bit yeah you're able to adapt but if you're not thinking clearly about the end you're in deep deep doo-doo yeah that book will never get written or if it if you to start it no one's going to be interested in it etc you have to plan more deeply and the closer you can visualize the ending and be realistic the greater your chances of that's i i succe makes complete sense and i i think we've we've almost lost that ability today i mean i i i yeah i've rarely hear that and that's why i wanted to pick that one because i feel like today and i guess i could see you nodding for anyone who's not watching the podcast right now i'm seeing bro uh yeah it's the idea we've lost that today there's so much of like oh well just try this for a second and try this for a moment and give this a go and it's almost like when you don't you're so right not only do you not get it done i feel like the hurdles seem much bigger yeah because you just didn't comprehend them right but today when people people would argue and that's what i'm intrigued i'd love to hear your opinion a lot of people would say but robert if i comprehend them then i just get disenthused or or i get i feel limited and i just feel like it's overwhelming discouraged discouraged that's what i was looking for yes discouraged i feel so discouraged and overwhelmed and it's too much for me so how do you think about the end but avoid that feeling well i guess you don't you can't avoid that feeling but you work through it well i i mean do you want just the dream do you just want the the vision of that of the great thing you're gonna achieve or do you want the reality right and so you know if you're going to let's say you're you you want to write a book i know that's very lazy because that's what i do well i'm writing my second book right now so this would be very helpful okay all right it's a pretty enormous thing usually i mean if you're if you're somewhat ambitious right and it's going to involve a lot of work and thinking and planning right but um if you overdo the thinking if you think about it every little thing is planned ahead of time then the process kind of loses its joy and its excitement it seems over planned right but you want to have a vision whenever i start a book i have an overall vision of what i want the reader to feel from it what i want them to learn from it right okay and so then i plot very carefully the ways to get there but yeah it's going to take three or four years yeah it's overwhelming yeah it's daunting so what you do is you back off and you create little micro goals so i have planning all the way end means to the end of july right yes yes i'm going to plan to the end of july and by july 31st i'm going to have written 10 pages i'm going to have done this chapter i've done this research then maybe if it's then it doesn't seem quite so daunting and then you can maybe extend it out a few more months and lo and behold the little baby steps you take you're suddenly halfway there wow it's really not as difficult as i thought so you break it down people it just drives me crazy can only think in terms of black and white oh plan all the way the end oh think about that no it's planning all the steps along the way yeah there's a balance involved right so if you do these little baby steps and you give yourself goals you know if you have to work on your own you're starting a bus your own boss it's maddening because nobody's pushing you you have to create continual deadlines i do this to myself by this date i have to have this much written right and it kind of engages your spirit it gets your emotions going it makes you realize you have a deadline you have to get there and it energizes you whereas that vague feeling of oh i want to write a book okay blah blah blah it it's actually more daunting is less energy involved because you never feel like that i call it in my war book death ground strategy when an army's back is against a mountain or the ocean they fight like hell to get out of it because there's desperate and it's either win or die you have to have that approach with your book or something if i don't get this done by july 31st i'm in trouble i better hurry up and do it so break it down and don't don't always every single day think of oh my god it's gonna take so many years etc that's in the back of your head you have a vision but you have other little ends that you're continually planning towards yes yes absolutely yeah and i think like that's the challenge right like when you're writing the page you're thinking about the book and when you're writing about a chapter you're thinking about the book launch and it's like you're thinking about something way bigger than what you actually have to do right now but it's to what you do right now that's going to get that bigger thing and i think if all you did was wake up and say i just have to write a page today which is that microstep you're speaking of then i don't think i have to write a book writing a book is daunting and overwhelming but writing a page or writing a paragraph if that's where you're at like wherever you're at a line you know like that's if that's the case that baby step is what you want to wake up and fix satan i think it's the same with yeah with anything whether you're launching a podcast whether you again i'm being lazy uh whether you're whether you're launching a like you said launching a company whether you're you know whether you're starting a new brand or whatever it may be the problem is we're thinking i need to do this i need to do that thing on the front cover of forbes magazine and it's like that's not what you're doing like this is what you're doing right yeah i mean people who are great craftsmen and i have a book called mastery yes which i discussed the process of creating something if you look at crafts people somebody's building a house or an architect they can't sit there and just suddenly have it happen they have to go brick by brick by brick they have to lay a foundation they have to focus on the foundation et cetera et cetera but at the same time they have an overall vision of what the house will look like so if you're only focused on the day-to-day it loses a little bit of spirit so you need to allow yourself a little bit of dreaming i dream all the time i'm being interviewed by jay shetty while i'm writing the book you know i'm having i'm on the cover of some other matt great magazine whatever you know right you'll allow yourself to have it because it gives you kind of so you need both again you need both you need to balance yes but a little bit more towards the micro ends and then occasionally ah yeah when it's finished i'm gonna have this it'll be wonderful because that'll keep your energy up got it yeah i i couldn't agree with you more the other one i wanted to pick out i mean there's obviously as everyone knows there's 48 to pick out so i'm only picking two and we've spoken about a few of them but you have to get the book to read about the rest of them uh we have master the art of timing i i find that one fascinating too because i think today we're living at a time when people either think it's too late it's too early i'm not sure it's not my time these are the you know these are the things i see on social media these are the things i see people express how do you master the art of timing what is what does that mean well in an abstract philosophical sense let's pull back a second time is a human construct time does not exist in the universe it's eternal there's no clocks there's no beginning or end it's just one massive thing of time that goes on forever right we humans have created time so it's subjective it's psychological so you know the experience that when you were a child a year seemed like a million years oh my god now a year goes like that it's subjective right so you have to understand that first okay so when you're excited about a project when you feel alive and energized then time is a much different experience than when you're bored so you can create your relationship to time right so i'm not ready well there's a strategy for that you should always take action a little bit before you were ready is the advice i give so if you're not ready and it's really a huge task okay maybe wait a little bit take steps to get closer to being ready but several months before you're ready go ahead and do it try it because you're going to rise to the occasion if you feel like you're almost ready and then you start you go but i better work harder because i know that i can do this whereas if you think i can never do it you'll just give up you don't want to give up right so i have in the book many examples of people who forced crime i call it forcing time so i talk about julius caesar and the famous crossing the rubicon right he had an army of only like 5 000 and facing pompei his arch enemy who had an army of hundreds of thousands and to cross the river means he's starting a war and everyone's saying it's insane don't do it you'll never make it and he goes uh the dye is cast and he crossed the rubicon the war was on and he knew that doing that he would have to think every moment give it every all of his intense thinking he'd have to reach the conclusion and he ended up pulling off one of the greatest military victories in history look at barack obama a senator who'd only been in office for one term it's 2007 or so and he decides to run for president everyone thinks you're insane you're not ready for it no one's going to believe it you're not you don't have enough weight behind you he goes doing this step will force me to work harder to gain that energy yes if he was a state representative it wouldn't have been time to force it and try and make it happen but he'd already had enough preparation just enough that he knew if he took that step something would happen the energy the excitement people would catch it it'd be infectious and it would work and look what it did for him so you can be over ready you should always take action just a little bit before you think that you're you're ready for it right so um and then the other thing is to realize that with time is that you want to feel like you're in control of the time that you have yes right so i call it a live time versus dead time dead time is where you work for other people you have no control over your time is not your own it's their time they possess you you're almost literally their slave right and a lifetime is that your own you're your master of it you control it so when you work for yourself which i think is the best position in the world to be and although it's not for everybody you kind of control your own time every moment is alive it's precious right so for me i practice this in my meditation in my daily life particularly since i almost lost my life a couple years ago is every moment is so valuable to me that time i maybe i could be dead tomorrow and you have to think that way and if you think that your time is limited that you have things to accomplish business to start books direct podcasts to start right you're going to force yourself you're going to find the energy if you realize your time is short and you have to kind of force it in a way and not be sitting back on your heels and continuing the wait waiting so i tell people if you have a dream maybe stop waiting so much maybe throw yourself across that river and go and take the action and if you fail you will have learned 80 000 times more than you would have learned in business school you start that tech startup it fails don't worry about your reputation you you learn the incredible things in it so don't be afraid of failure and be willing to always kind of force the time that's where one of the the art of it yeah no that's really well articulated and explained what changed your you you mentioned there what changed for you between knowing time was limited and then experiencing it and actually feeling with it like because i think that's there's i guess there's very few people who have that experience because for some people it literally ends up being the end from a physical standpoint uh but to almost have yeah what does that feel like because i think you're someone who already knew that yeah you knew that you lived like that you wrote this book like you already live like time is limited i have to write books you write phenomenal books and and lots of them yeah what changed what changed in that knowing that theory talking about my stroke yes yes yes yes sorry well you know um wasn't trying to be cryptic guys you see the shirt that i'm wearing yeah do you see kind of a weird little jagged line i see it okay well this is the shirt that i was wearing when i had my stroke right and um i was with my wife we were driving home and she saw whoa robert your face is all weird you're slurring she was freaking out she said pull over that's the last thing i remember i went unconscious and the ambulance came and they took scissors and they cut the shirt right around there they ripped it off me they threw it in a bag then they like put something in to help give oxygen to my brain because it stopped going flowing to my brain so months later i asked my wife whatever happened to that shirt i loved it because she had given it to me like two months before for my birthday i love that shirt she told me the story and oh man and then finally i said can you like sew it together again because she's a good sewer she said yeah okay and so she did and so i wear it and it reminds me because when i was this close to dying there was a feeling inside that i had right it was a feeling that i it's weird it was almost a taste in my mouth and there was a feeling in my bones a kind of a softness like i was melting from the inside out and i could literally feel myself um moving away from life in that moment just before i went unconscious right so reminding of it with things like so now when i wear this shirt it's like a memento mori i can re-experience that feeling and it's so ironic because two months before i wrote the last chapter of human nature about confronting your mortality it's not the same it's abstract this is visceral this is real and people who've had much more powerful near-death experiences than i am know that you don't emerge from that ever the same it changes you right so now i it was an intellectual concept so now when i hear the birds chirping i look out my window the sun is shining i like almost want to cry i'm here to see it and i came that close to never seeing it again you know or people are irritating me no i could be dead and they don't i love them and i can overlook them because they're also mortal they're also gonna die they also have fears it's just changes you emotionally from the inside out so how can people do that who haven't experienced death it's not easy but you have to make the leap from an intellectual abstract concept to something visceral and emotional right so even before my stroke i meditate every morning i would always have a practice of meditating on that moment when i'm gonna die i imagine myself it's an afternoon the sun is shining and this is my last day on earth you know and i can even make myself kind of cry as i do that and i would make myself it's something real because we go around and we live in a culture where death has no meaning we don't see the food that we're eating being the animals being killed people die in hospitals cloistered away whereas our ancestors they saw it on the street they saw the animals being killed it had a presence you live in this abstract world where nothing is real where your mortality is just like something you don't even process get over that jump over that and make that leap make it something emotional and visceral it's not gloomy it's not more but it's liberating because when you think about your death and it becomes real you realize i don't have this much time i better work harder i better appreciate the people in my life i better love them more i better appreciate every moment that i'm alive and it just opens you up in so many ways so it's one thing to have in an intellectual exercise it's another thing to make it more visceral and that's what i'm kind of advocating that's why i love that's a beautiful transition into you know the your new book that's how called the daily laws because that's a daily habit right like that's the only to to make that law feel real you need to practice it daily especially if you've not had a near-death experience and i know that i've practiced that death meditation often in my life when i i don't do every day i do it more when i'm making a big decision it really helps me make big decisions i remember when i was working in the corporate world but really wanted to be doing what i do today and sitting there and asking myself like how will i feel about this in you know on my deathbed that's very interesting i never thought that's very good yeah i was like if i stay in the corporate world how will i feel about this when i'm 80 or 90 or 100 whatever strategy yeah and then how will i feel about this if i tried and failed and how will i feel about if i tried and it works yeah and every part of me was just like you have to try this like even if it fails you'll you'll be so upset at yourself for being 90 and about to die and and you didn't try and so i love that and and and that's why i love the the fact that you've taken out the daily laws what have been some of your daily life changes since the moment you told us about that beautiful meditation have there been other things obviously looking at the birds with the sun what else has changed daily for you i wonder well um a bit of humility so um first of all um you know i look at people now who are old or who have a disability and i understand them on a much deeper level i have much greater empathy for people not just with a disability but people who've lost their job who are poor who have no control over their lives i have greater empathy for them because in the months afterwards i had no control over my body i couldn't walk i still walk in a very kind of wonky way right i was dependent on other people it was dependent on my wife i was dependent on health care caregivers on therapists etc and that feeling of dependence is not something i like because i like somebody really values independence so i had to deal with myself i had to get over my kind of radical individualism my radical sense of being totally independent because i was dependent on other people and i really could empathize with others who have that feeling of dependency it's not a good feeling you have to com you have to learn to accept it in some way and it's not easy and so i learned that there was some negative qualities that i had that i had to confront like my impatience yeah whenever i had a problem or a health issue i would push past it man okay i might i broke my leg well i'm gonna do therapy so in two months i'm gonna be out and i did it right it doesn't work for this you can't push past your way my brain was damaged i can't push past it i have to accept it and that's not easy for someone who's used to just pushing past things like that so i had to deal with qualities that aren't really to me very good like i think patience is a good thing i think it's a virtue and i think it's positive and being able to accept certain things you can't control so i had to learn certain things about myself i had to learn that some of the ideas i had were intellectual where i do have empathy for people but it wasn't as visceral as it is now you know and then on a day-to-day basis i've had to like control my impatience and my wife can attest i often lose it so i'm no saint and i don't prepare to pretend to be there'll be days where i'm like god damn it i can't pick up my toothbrush it's driving me crazy other days it's like come on you can do it's okay you calm yourself down things are okay right everything's gonna be all right so i've had to deal with my own issues on a very visceral real level and deal with them in a way i've never had to do before so it's it's an ongoing process yeah that's such a special answer thank you for sharing that like to get into your head with with what it feels like and humility is such a incredible quality and the hardest to learn and the most painful to to go through and i i remember when we were talking about sickness and health and as as young monks one of our duties or roles would be to take elderly monks to the hospital when they had to get checked and it was part of that routine to make you see that because we were like 21 years old and thought we were super human because because we were like ah sleep who needs to sleep uh you know like food who needs food and you thought so highly of yourself only to realize that you were just lucky because of your age it was just the age of the body that you were winning on it wasn't anything else it wasn't that you were more self-mastered or disciplined uh and and being humbled in that way was such a you know to witness what you're saying like all of these things have been hidden in society they're invisible yeah and when pain becomes invisible we become worse at dealing with it because exactly we become immune to it we never see it so how do we know how to deal with it and so i'm i'm grateful that you're sharing so authentically your pain and what you're going through because you know be very easy for you to say oh yeah i'm i'm just living all my messages and and you know all of us fail to live our own like as in it's not fail it's just it's just hard like you know i i think about it so with the daily laws you've got 366 meditations uh you said you meditate daily what's been your daily meditation practice and and does it change has it stayed the same oh i have a very boring daily meditation practice i want to hear it i do zen buddhism yes okay i've been doing it now for 11 years every single morning i can remember the day i started and um it's basically actually you sit on it's called zazen you sit on these pillows and you're trying to empty your mind right and you know you have a process you learn things from masters i've gone to a zen center here in los angeles i read a lot of books but it's a completely non-intellectual process right you can't think your way to enlightenment it will never happen and that's the problem i have and everybody has oh this is what i need to do blah blah blah blah you can't do it it's like this paradox they describe it in zen as this red-hot ball that you've swallowed and you can't get rid of it you can't throw it up it's there it's stuck inside of you the paradox is thinking won't get it you there so how do i get there so i i'm not going to reveal the whole thing but i i have things called a a koan which is like um like it's like a little parable and it's a very famous koan in buddhism it's it basically it says this one monk asks the zen master does a dog have buddha nature and the monk and and the master replies mu and ma in japanese means nothing or no but it really means nothing that's like oh it's nothing in other words you can't answer the question yes and no have no meaning right because in buddhism there is no discrimination the discriminating mind is the ultimate form of samsara so you need to like get rid of that and meditate on ma so for five years now i've been meditating on ma only ma what does it mean and it you have no idea the richness that will flow from one little syllable like that and meditating it on every day so my meditation is not exciting it's not variety it's the same thing every day right and they're are steps involved in it it's a physical emotional process less than an intellectual one but that's to give you an idea about it yeah no it's it's beautiful to hear about it and uh yeah i love the idea of i remember the monks that i used to live with would always say that you know this whatever you call it enlightenment or revelation whatever whatever word you want to give it it's something that's received not achieved they would always repeat that to us it's received not achieved and and you know as we're all trying to achieve it like i want to have it i want to find it what do i have to do whatever think and and just knowing that it was received gave me so much liberation right in and of itself right knowing that it would be received you know as i continue the path right and it would be revealed as well as i continue so no thank you for sharing i love it i love hearing about people's daily meditation practices i wanted to pick out a couple of the daily lures because what this book beautifully does for everyone is it literally goes through every day of the year so you can open it out on that day why do you think it was important to do that why was it important to have something for july 1st or you know why was it important to have august 20th or whatever it may be well we talked about a little bit earlier about having micro goals so um we all have ambitions we all have dreams and goals and desires that we want and our culture fills us with these kind of vague hopes and dreams i'm going to be this i'm going to be that but really what gets you to where you want are habits are daily habits there are negative habits that you can't get rid of smoking drinking you know online porn whatever your daily habit is you can't get rid of it but there are other habits that like discipline like working every day like taking steps to get reach your goals that are immensely liberating and you can get rid of your bad habits through developing positive habits right so the goal here is to focus less on the giant dreams and on the everyday process of changing your thinking you know i spent a lot of time thinking about how does change occur within a person right yeah me too yeah because we all experience from ourselves the change rarely happens quickly as we like we step back we we we revert to our old habits etc what involves what kind of consciousness do we have to go through the steps to literally change our way of thinking it requires hitting at the roots of things it requires how you think every single day about simple basic things in in your life right it's not grand dreams it's the day-to-day thoughts that consume you that obsess you right so that's what the book is about every day is a meditation and it's kind of structured in the beginning to help you go through your career mostly things from mastery about finding your life's purpose your like what i call your life's task and how to achieve you know a level of mastery and whatever you do then i kind of take you through the 48 laws of power and dealing with toxic people which we inevitably have no you're never going to go through a life without facing toxic negative people and how you deal with them it takes you through how to have influence and be able to persuade people and finally it ends with learning about human nature etc and the last month december is a social this is inspired by the book that i'm currently writing about the sublime about opening your eyes to the insanity of just being alive right now in this world that we live in so that's kind of the process it goes every day focusing your mind on a thought that hopefully will plant little seeds inside of you let's talk about the heart of that the middle of that which was like dealing with toxic people that's actually a question i get asked so often so i'm glad i get to defer to you in this scenario and put you to the task but the idea of like people i hear this all the time jay i'm stuck in a toxic family my workplace is toxic i you know and some people are honest enough to say jay i'm my mind is just toxic like it's not even other people right where do you start where where do you where do you guide people in that journey yeah it's obviously something i've been thinking about and dealing with my whole life particularly in all my different jobs i'd had a lot of bosses that we would qualify as the psychotic boss or no matter what you do that never pleases them kind of thing and the best lesson of all so we can say the different kind of toxic type of people most often they're of the narcissistic variety they're people who are grandiose or people who are aggressive passive aggressive who feel a lot of envy there's like debrided insecurities on and on they're many types but the main thing that you want in lot to develop in life is the ability to detect them before you get involved with them because the way toxic people have learned they've learned strategies since they were six or seven years old how to get power and they embroil you in dramas they get into your emotions right they entangle themselves in in your life they don't come at you saying i'm toxic i'm a narcissist get away from me they know how to appear charming they know how to be interested in you they know how to be moderately pleasing etc they can be they can even be charismatic you get involved with them and then it starts to come out and it's too late because you're emotionally entangled with them they've got their roots inside of you and you're sucked into their dramas and it's really hard to get out particularly in an intimate relationship that's the worst of all the best thing you want to develop in life is the radar to detect them before you get involved with them and it requires a change in how you perceive people so it doesn't mean i don't want people to become paranoid everybody out there that i'm dealing with could be toxic because it's only like five percent of the population or whatever it is truly like that but you want to be able to see the signs beforehand right and you don't want to judge people based on their words based on their charming personality based on their glittering resume you want to be able to judge their character what's deep deep inside of them right the things that they're not are not so visible at first glance right so you have to train how you think about people you have to observe their patterns in life before you met them if this person you're about to get involved in a relationship tells you all of my wives and girlfriends in the past they were just such blah blah blah blah blah and then you you hear that they don't only last a year or so and it was always their fault your antenna should go up something is wrong here this person isn't revealing the truth this probably coming from something within in my 48 laws of power i talk about infection where there are people who have an infecting power on you they've surrounded by all kinds of drama they're they continually present themselves as the victim of other people whereas in fact they're the ones that constantly draw this drama to them because that's how they survive and you're going to find yourself involved with them and it's going to be horrible to get out of the relationship you're going to feel guilty so develop the power to recognize them before you get involved and i have in the laws of human nature tons of advice about that paying attention to people's nonverbal cues to a narcissist tends to have a very animated face but a kind of a deadness in their eyes they're they're kind of listening to you but you can hear that they're actually thinking about themselves or they're they're they're not really connecting to you through the eyes the face is alive but the eyes are dead right there are signs non-verbal cues that will show you that you're dealing with someone who's not i hate the words like sociopathic psychopathic but who is you know generally very inner self-directed right the other thing i have to say is it's easy to judge and say oh the narcissist the to people but we all have these qualities yes we all have narcissistic qualities we all can be passive aggressive right so some of it you can recognize in yourself and there are ways the ways to get out of it but the main thing is to not get involved with these people if you're involved let's say you have a spouse or whatever the best power you can give is the ability to withdraw your emotions from the moment and god knows that is not easy it's a day-to-day thing it's a daily process where you have to tell yourself these little kind of scripts that you tell yourself it's not me it has nothing to do with me it's not personal they have issues from early childhood that have given them these toxic patterns in life they're trying to make me feel guilty but it's nothing to do with me it's not personal over and over and over and over again every single time so you have the ability to detach yourself emotionally from them on a daily basis if you're in a job and you have a toxic colleague or a toxic boss if you can get away from them if you can quit your job if you can move to another part of the office do it because it's worth it it's not worth collecting ten thousand extra dollars a year because with this boss because it's going to damage you emotionally it's going to take you years to recover three years with a toxic boss you may never recover so if you can quit the job nothing no no no job is worth that kind of abuse it's going to hurt you it's going to damage you right and the same in a relationship as well if you can't get out you have to develop a habit of detachment and not taking things personally and oddly enough when people sense that in you like a toxic person's senses that they can't push your buttons it has a powerful effect on them i'm not saying it's going to cure them but they thrive on the ability to push your buttons to see you getting upset and angry just makes them so excited in a perverted way the fact that you're not that you're not taking it personally that you're calm that you're centered that you're thinking to yourself it's not personal it's not personal it's going to have a powerful effect on them it may not end the dynamic but it will have more of an effect that you want than constantly falling for their ploys and their games are getting emotionally sucked into their to their dramas yeah it's almost like you see the you see the magic trick right like you or you're seeing like the the puppet strings yeah and you go i'm gonna cut these strings off now like you know and and that's like you're saying it doesn't necessarily solve it but that person's well aware now that that's not going to work on you right right and and you're so right that that reactivity we have with people that it's like they want that drama they seek that drama because that's what gives them their sense of significance and so you're right that it may not stop that but it definitely makes them think and it definitely makes them check themselves in question they're used to getting away with things they're used to people not seeing through them and just repeat to yourself toxic people do not announce themselves they do not wear little horns on their head saying i'm i'm so devilish or whatever they disguise it so a person who is overly charming on that first encounter who's so nice who's listening to you who wants to help you and please you that's not natural because we've all developed a habit of being slightly wary of strangers and i've learned through my consulting work and my own experience that that person who's trying too hard on the first encounter they're generally um hiding something they're generally conceding intentions that they don't want to give out right their method of throwing dust in your eyes is to appear the opposite of what they are and you're going to fall for that so when people try too hard with one quality or reveal too much of a single quality they're often concealing the opposite so be aware of that as well yeah and that's and that's what you're saying like it's so hard to know whether someone is a god an agenda or someone who's just truly nice like it becomes hard it becomes hard to suggest i i remember when uh there was someone i was building a relationship with and and i said to them i was like you know i i've just really got along with them and they talk about this all the time now and i said something like you know i think i i think we'd be really good friends and they said that they'd never heard anyone say that to them because it just seemed so like lame to some degree to say that to someone but i've always lived that way so i've always been someone who like i will tell you exactly what i'm thinking right now and i will in in that sense not exactly what i'm thinking right now but exactly what i'm feeling in a relationship i i've always enjoyed communicating because i saw people communicate so badly about who they wanted to be friends with and spend time with i was just like i want to tell this person i want to spend time with them and if they don't want to spend time with me i want to hear it now too because i don't want to go home thinking about and that's how i was when i started dating it was like if i was attracted to someone i would always tell them because i actually preferred the failure than the idea of them not knowing and us missing out on an opportunity to have a relationship so i guess my question is is there a way of knowing if there's some sincerity or or or is that just an energetic intuitive thing that comes with time you know this is why i have a chapter on nonverbal communication and loss of human nature we have an animal part of us right where we feel certain things about people on that first encounter or second encounter that's not rational that's intuitive and then we don't trust it yes right and often it happens in a microsecond in a flash you meet somebody and you sense a chemistry or something a little bit wrong right okay but with you if i met somebody like you who seems very genuine and sincere and i can read it in your face and i feel it i don't need to be wary but particularly with women dealing with men because quite frankly the more dangerous toxic type will be made women will often have an intuition a sense of something isn't quite right but they don't trust it and they go on but we all have that feeling trusted and you could be wrong but it doesn't hurt to be a little bit wary of someone it doesn't mean if someone is being like you friendly i want to be your friend that you have to go running away immediately yeah it just means maybe it's an ulterior motive here yes i'm reading body language that tells me no that they're sincere i can let down my guard but there'll be a tiny percentage of me which in the days to come wants to see if they truly yes which is fair because there are people like it's a it's a com classic case of envy where a person who is envious of you becomes your friend that's where most envy relationships occur is between friends right and they they make a point of being your friend they're very friendly they love you they want to help you they want to assist you wow this is great because we never get enough of that in life and then six months down the road they start turning against you start doing things that completely confuse you now probably in your first encounters you could have detected something about them already but people can be tricky so you know with with you i would kind of sense a complete sincerity and i would let down my guard but there are other people that you have to be a little bit wary of it doesn't mean that you cut off contact but you have a little bit of distance and the moment you see behavior that kind of contradicts that initial impression whoa all right and maybe you don't become friend you don't get involved with them because getting involved with a person like that is is going to cost you a lot in the end yeah i couldn't agree more and that applies to business love relationships and i've i've made mistakes because you fall in love too fast you each scenario you just you're moving so fast and so quick and you're involved with someone before you even know it and you never get a chance to say oh do i notice something you know on twitter about this person so no i'm i'm with you what are the things that robert we talked about like people not having power not understanding power developing about i guess what are the things that you believe destroy someone's power by themselves so i don't mean things like reputation and envious people and what are the ways we destroy our own power generally by not having the ability to adapt to circumstances okay so you go through life and if you're successful or have some success you kind of depend on certain skills certain strategies that get you where you want to be and then you find yourself in a position that's new and circumstances that are new and you keep doing the same thing over again and it doesn't work and you get angry and you get frustrated and you blame other people this guy's not listening to me this isn't working it's because you're not adapting right so you need to have this it's a kind of a zen or it's it's asian strategy mindset of every circumstance is different you have to have a sense of flow every thing that you encounter every problem is new what worked in the past won't work again i need to adapt i need to be able to flow and be fluid and adaptable that's the main thing that trips people up it's the wall they continually hit and i've seen it time and again in business with ceos i was on the board of directors of a publicly traded company and people who are very powerful get to a position by being very aggressive by being very charming by being blah blah blah and then they reach a managerial level where they have a huge company and those skills don't apply anymore and they keep trying to push those same buttons and it gets them in trouble and they hit a wall so your ability to adapt and alter your thinking depending on your circumstances will make you not hit those walls i think that's the main thing and then the other thing that happens is grandiosity kicks in i have a chapter in human nature about the about grandiosity and basically what happens is success is very very dangerous success is much more dangerous than failure failure makes you look at yourself when i failed with my body and my after my stroke i had to look at my own limitations whereas success is like a drug it's like a continual hit of coke or whatever wow i'm a god people love me everything i say is wonderful everyone's going around thinking god you're so great robert one yeah and slowly your feet reason higher and higher off the ground you lose contact with reality and boom you fall down because you don't realize that success often has a great degree of luck you're discounting the luck involved you're discounting the role of other people that helped you to get there you think it's all about you right so you take actions that aren't calibrated to reality because you think you you have the midas touch and you don't so those are some of the main barriers to power i think got it yeah those are great answers there's a there's a absolutely brilliant i loved what you said earlier about thinking everything every situation is new having fresh eyes and fresh ears to to to look at a problem to hear a problem and you're reminding me of a beautiful zen story i'm sure you know it of the i'll be i'll do the quick version but the idea of the the person who wants to cross a river so they build a raft the raft helps them cross the river now they carry the raft wherever they go and now they come up to a wooded forest and they're trying to get through and the raft won't let them get through and they realize they have to let go of the raft if they want to go through the forest yeah i never thought of that so that's great yeah the idea that you get so attached to uh this raft saved my life i have to keep it on me forever right yeah and you know i i can relate to so much of that in my life like you know i i often feel that i allow myself to go through a a renewal and a almost and i don't like the word rebranding because it seems so external it's almost like what is the word for an internal rebrand but it's like the idea of i allow myself to just be like who do i want to be at this stage in my life and and what do i truly want to dedicate my life to and this time in my life too and i feel like i'm at that stage right now in my life and because i've i've far superseded things that i thought i would have done and and now i need and want to create the next challenge and the next um you know i'm looking forward to something that's big and that's that's very healthy that's good yeah i'm like looking what's that next big thing that's gonna make me learn new skills and and exactly what is the thing that i want to learn in order to you know and so i'm there right now and when you were saying that i was nodding along and laughing because i can just so relate to that and and thankfully because of good mentors and coaches um you know it's i'm always i'm using success to look inward too as opposed to only failure and of course there's plenty of failure in success too so there's you're always doing both but the idea is to always look inward and and so yeah i'm just i'm i'm actually just sharing that with you because i could relate to it so strongly well um you know the temptation i had after the success of my first book the 48 laws was to kind of keep repeating it to do a 48 laws of power number two which is what a lot of writers end up doing because they're worried about taking on something different they've kind of created their audience they better just sort of keep to it with success you become conservative i better just do what's working right and then but times change there's a zeitgeist there's a spirit of the times people have moved on but you haven't and your your 48 laws of power number two won't work you know so you need to change and i do that with every book that i write each book has to be different as to reflect the spirit of the times has to be a challenge i have to learn new skills i have to go outside of my comfort zone so i think that's sort of a similar thing yeah definitely and i think i saw that because i looked again what we were talking about earlier when you study the people you admire in any field or the companies or whatever it may be you see that you see that constant renewal and initially it's very uncomfortable for the audience as well it's uncomfortable for the community because they're not used to changing and they're not used to seeing people grow in that way and and i think that discomfort is both on the behalf of the individual who's trying to grow and be more of themselves and and it's there for the community too and but but it gives birth to something phenomenal like you're saying the the conservative approach would have never got you there and so i i love that idea and yeah just it's it's been a fun time for me trying to figure it like i'm almost enjoying feeling like i'm at the beginning of my journey again wow and there's some there's some joy in that that's great yeah there's some sacredness and specialness of like oh i forgot how this felt you know you have to write a book on that that's your book that's your next book i'm writing my next one already so this one may have to be laid it down because i'd read that book tomorrow that's great idea wow wow well yeah we'll have to uh we'll have to yeah share notes and collaborate on that because uh i was saying offline i want to share this with we me and robert we're talking about this offline but i want to share with you is the idea of you know i'm really enjoying this conversation with robert because we're almost toggling between the binary and finding the gray and robert's fantastic at getting and and that's what i enjoyed talking to you about so much you're so fantastic at getting into these subtle nuances uh because we you know all of us try and be like should we do this or should we do this like is this the answer is this the answer what's the number one thing and it's you know all of that stuff just sounds good but it doesn't mean anything and i feel like today we've really you know dove into some of those uh in-betweens and nuances so yeah that's great so i wanted to share thank you for doing that because you've been guiding us that way rob i wanted to ask you is there anything that you feel you haven't shared or something that's on your mind or intuitively in your heart they're like jay i have to share this on your podcast or anything right now that's calling you well the book that i'm working on the law of the sublime which is taking a long time is probably going to be three years away for so maybe more so it's almost a little bit too much to tease people with now but it's something that's it's very important to me because back in 2005 2006 i had meant to write a book on the sublime it's a concept that fascinates me and i got derailed by other projects i did a book with 50 cent yes i did mastery human nature and then i had my stroke and the last chapter of the human nature is about the sublime about confronting mortality and so i go this is the time to write this book because it means so much to me and it's been brewing in me for 16 years so there's something very you know personal about it and the idea is i think a problem that a lot of people face today is that their minds are locked they have only one way of thinking about things they've become so conventional and i know it's something i'm not being judgement because i have the same problem so rigid about this is the way the world is this is how things have to be this is how my life has to be this is what meaning is this is where value is in life and i compare it to like a circle and being a social animal our thoughts have to sort of stay within the circle of what ideas are accepted of what behavior is accepted what conventions and codes there are and the sublime is what lies just outside that circle what isn't really something you're supposed to think isn't so something supposed to do isn't a behavior or a value you necessarily are encouraged to have but when your mind touches it tickles it a little bit like whoa it jolts you alive there's another way of thinking there's another way of being in this world how exciting right and that's what makes people search for transcendental experiences what maslow called peak experiences that's why they climb mountains and almost get close to death and falling because it gives them that jolt of being alive it shakes them up and so the ultimate thing be outside that circle is death itself it's the ultimate unknown right and the word sublime means up to the threshold of a door and that door is the door to death itself and so when you peek at it and you look at it that's the ultimate in a sublime thought right okay so that's that of the model but i have these different categories and i want to make you the reader aware that you take so much for granted and i don't want this to be in a polyanish way because the sublime has an element of terror and darkness and fear involved because death is the is the paradigm here but you don't realize in your day-to-day life i've just written these first two chapters and they're in the daily laws so you'll see about them i've given you some excerpts from the new book but it's insane that you live in a world in it the way it is right now if you study the history of the cosmos and how unlikely it is that the earth ended up being the way it is and how rare it is that there may not be life on other planets if there is the rarity of the life that we know of the the prog the animals the evolution the technology that we have and then if you look at the course of evolution and how improbable it is that humans ever evolved even existed if an asteroid hadn't hit the planet 60 some million years ago dinosaurs would still be around on and on and on multiplied by the 70 000 generations of homo sapiens that preceded you if one of so let's say your parents had never met you would not be here jay you'd maybe you'd be combined in something else okay and think of the narrow possibility that your parents hadn't met multiply that by 70 000 other generations trailing all the way to the first homo sapiens it's astronomical the odds that you exist that you're breathing that you're looking at a world with plants and animals etc is staggering and you never think about it so i'm trying to make you think about things that you never think about in this book and i want you to completely alter and make that going beyond the circle sort of more of a daily occurrence for you so that's what's on my mind a lot right yeah i love that well i look forward to that i purposely didn't dive into it too much because i know that's right we we need to wait for it and i i hope we get to have another conversation when that comes out but uh no we look forward to that and i i i can agree with you more the inconceivable is is such a beautiful meditation in and of itself to meditate on the inconceivable nature of where we are and what's possible and what's around us and it needs to be part of our daily life for that uh entrance into the the splendor and and how sublime it can be so yeah i love that and and we look forward to that uh robert we end every on-purpose interview the final five these are the fast five rapid fire rounds so answers have to be one word to one sentence maximum i may go off on a tangent but let's see so robert green these are your final five the first question is what is the best advice you've ever received i remember years ago my brother-in-law said something about learning to watch the grass grow basically the idea of things only happen over time and i was 21 at the time and i wasn't listening and i've learned since then that the most beautiful things occur slowly and with patience and if you can sit there and watch the grass grow that's that's pretty great that's beautiful uh what's the worst advice you've received uh you need to capitalize on on the 48 laws of power and make a lot of money which i ignored that's brilliant that's a great answer that's a great answer uh third question what's your current purpose i have certain books i want to write that are very mean a lot to me i want to create them before i die because i know that my life is short i may not have as much time as i want so that's to realize all the books that i wanted to write question number four is uh what's something that other people value that you don't it's gonna sound uh not right but i'll say it anyway it's money i mean i have it's easy for me because i have enough of it and i'm comfortable but it's never been my goal it's never ruled my life doing what i want to do all that money means to me is freedom to do what i want to do i never focus on what i can do to increase my bank account yeah so um i i don't really value it and it drives my mother crazy for instance thank you for sharing that i love that uh and question number five if you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow what would it be be yourself be as weird as you want to be stop listening to other people and doing what they tell you just follow what your soul tells you what makes you different and be weird we need more weird people who are more individuals who are unique who create art and businesses that reflect themselves so just be you be weird let a thousand flowers blooms they used to say in china that's beautiful robert green everyone on on purpose make sure you go and follow robert across social media and we'll have the links to all of robert's books uh in all the descriptions the daily laws is out as you're listening to this episode and of course the 48 laws of power and the laws of human nature mastery and robert's other books are available too robert i want to thank you for just being uh such a wonderful uh guest on the show for making the effort just for those of you who don't know robert has traveled here to be here with us in the studio uh despite you know all the physical challenges that he faces on a daily basis and i really want to honor you for that and thank you for that it's uh it's a real show of your your effort and love for what you do and uh i i don't take it for granted i i really value it so thank you thank you so much for inviting me here jay i was definitely worth the trip out of my house so i really really enjoyed it amazing thank you if you want even more videos just like this one make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here i'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book think like a monk from think like a monkbook.com check below in the description to make sure you order today

Channel: Jay Shetty Podcast

Views: 788,433

Keywords: Jay Shetty, Jay Shetty Podcast, Jay Shetty Interview, On Purpose Podcast, Jay Shetty Inspiration, Jay Shetty Motivation, Jay Shetty Video, Self help, Self improvement, Self development, entrepreneur, success habits, purpose podcast, Jay Shetty relationships

Id: BIQ5NSVfw0o

Length: 88min 48sec (5328 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021