Robert Greene Speaks at the Dream BIG Forum in Ukraine

the chaos of the world is not something to fear but something to exploit now you can come up with all kinds of incredible combinations of ideas because of this chaotic wild world that we're living in this is the source of all creative thinking I'm very excited to have finally escaped sunny and very boring Los Angeles and to be here in beautiful wet and historic Kiev you and before each talk I like to dedicate it to the memory of my father who passed away before I had any success so thank you Father now I have a lot of very exciting materials to cover today ideas that I think can radically help you in your lives so please excuse me without further Ado if I don't Dive Right into my material now we humans of the 21st century live in very dangerous times the environment that we have to operate in we have to deal with trends that change not by the year but by the week by the day even by the hour we have to deal with people's shorter and shorter attention spans and the Relentless competition among groups and companies for their attention if we're not extremely careful we might say or do one wrong thing and then get eaten alive on social media it is very hard to ever feel like we are in control of circumstances in control of Our Lives I compare this environment to descriptions of 19th century battlefields gunfire and smoke everywhere and no way to tell who is the enemy and who is on our side on this very bloody battlefield of business today however we can notice a select group of entrepreneurs who not only can handle this increased chaos but can also thrive in it and have lasting success these entrepreneurs include of course Elon Musk Richard Branson the late Steve Jobs Peter Thiel and your very own yonkum and not to make this an exclusive male Club I would also include Ann vociki the CEO of 23andMe and Lynn George the CEO of Sunrun now the question we must ask today it what what is the secret of such power and success for these people some of you might say it's their creativity or it's some sort of special skill or knowledge or it's their Relentless persistence and willpower all of these factors undoubtedly play a role in their success but there are only pieces of a larger puzzle I want to know what is the single underlying quality that is the source of such power to know that quality would allow us to be able to follow in their footsteps now I'm here today to tell you that after 22 years of extensive research on this subject and Consulting with some of the most powerful people in the world in various Industries I believe that I have discovered that secret that one quality that they all share and that quality is their attitude their mindset how they look at the world you might think that what you want of Elon Musk is his creativity his confidence his Charisma but what you really want and what you really need to adopt is his attitude which is the source of all of his other powerful qualities now I direct your attention to that very strange figure that you see behind me [Music] [Music] live in the future that Circle represents the world that we live in our reality but we create that reality we set its limits by how we look at the world how we interpret events by our attitude most of us operate with ideas and strategies that are stuck in the past we never quite feel capable of taking bold action we have to wait until we're ready to start that business we see people through the lens of our insecurities we unconsciously shy away from adversity and challenges and we avoid the thought of our own mortality in essence we operate out of fear when that happens that Circle becomes smaller our vision of the world becomes limited as do our actions and our ideas and the smaller that circle gets the harder it is for us to handle the chaos of this world to exploit opportunities to alter the circumstances in our lives but the beauty of our attitude is that we can change it it can become clay in our hands we can work to drop our fears to expand that Circle by changing how we look at ourselves how we look at other people how we think about adversity and how we think about the future these arrows pointing outside of the circle indicate the Limitless potential of each every one of you they indicate a greater you within you that is waiting to come out your inner Elon Musk if you will this is the secret to Lasting success and it is not that complicated all it requires is some knowledge about this concept and some exercises to practice which I will give you later on now some of you might ask Mr Green can we really aren't aren't some of us born with a particular attitude can we alter that attitude particularly if we have faced a lot of hardship and failure in life and aren't you exaggerating the power that we might have through this change of attitude well to answer that question I want to tell you a story about the childhood of the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov who grew up some 160 years ago in the town of Tegan Rock a mere 450 miles from here Kiev now Chekhov had a most miserable childhood every almost every morning his father Pavel yogorovich would beat him but at least he was not alone in this for he would also beat his four brothers and his one sister his afternoons were almost worse his father while his father would go out drinking he would ask Anton to mind the family grocery store it was so cold in the grocery store that if Anton Chekhov tried to do his homework his fingers would freeze up and he couldn't move them the store was the Gathering Spot for all the local drunks who would come in there to buy their vodka and all day long Anton would have to hear their raunchy jokes and their depressing stories in his few hours that he had to himself Anton would amble through town and he would wonder about himself maybe I am as worthless and lazy as my father says I am maybe I deserve to be beaten then in 1875 when Anton was 15 his two older brothers ran away to Moscow to escape their overbearing father in the meantime the father had so mismanaged the running of the grocery store that it was facing bankruptcy and before he could be carted off to death to debtor's prison he ran away to Moscow to join his two other Sons the mother was forced to sell the family house and its possessions and then she took her two youngest children to go to Moscow to join the rest of the family Anton was left alone in taganrog to sell the remaining possessions to keep a little bit for himself and to finish his studies in the first few weeks and days alone in Target Anton was beside himself with rage and bitterness at his father who was the source of all of these miseries but he had no time to feel depressed or feel sorry for himself he had virtually no money and he was trapped in tagonrog he hired himself out to wealthy families as a tutor he decided he wanted to become a doctor but in order to get into medical school he would have to study much harder so he started to frequent the town library and there he discovered books on literature and philosophy this had an explosive effect on his young mind he could travel mentally far beyond tagonrog into the realm of ideas he was not trapped at all thoughts came to him he wasn't Lazy by Nature at all he loved absorbing his mind in the in the in the ideas and the lives of his students in his tutoring he could support and take care of himself he was not worthless at all finally alone he could think for himself and reaval reevaluate his life even tag on the road was not that bad all of its strange characters in town were now supplying him endless material for the short stories that he was beginning to write then one day as he was walking through town the greatest day of his life he had an epiphany his grandfather whom you can see in this picture had been born a serf and beset with feelings of rage and inferiority he began to beat all of his sons but the grandfather had saved enough money to buy his family's freedom and he set up all of his sons in different businesses but no one had as much emotional baggage as Anton Chekhov secret as Chekhov to discovered was to taste for just a moment that freedom and sense of power that can come from letting go of the past and facing the future with the fearless and life-affirming attitude once you taste this freedom and power there is no going back you will want more and more of it we shall return to this idea of the foretaste of power and how to achieve it in your lives but right now I want to go more deeply into the science behind this idea of the attitude the great psychologist Carl Young once wrote attitude is the Readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way to have an attitude means to be ready for something definite even though this something is unconscious for having an attitude is synonymous with an a priori orientation to a definite thing what this means is that in the course of a day your brains are receiving thousands of stimuli from the world and your minds interpret the stimuli according to this a priori orientation or disposition our minds anticipate excitement or danger in what we perceive and this colors what we see no two people see the same events in the same way our interpretations of the stimuli can vary depending on our mood whether we are happy or depressed but in general each one of you has a predominant orientation a way of anticipating events we are never a conscious of this but because it occurs so naturally and quickly we assume that we are seeing the world as it is instead of the fact that we are actually seeing the world as filtered through our attitude and this attitude can be a mix of factors it can be a product of genetics some of us are simply born more anxious than others it can be a product of powerful experiences in childhood or in youth now let me explain how this attitude works by giving you an example let's say we're taking a walk through a forest path on a very beautiful day on a very beautiful sunny day and we're alone suddenly we turn a corner and the path is blocked by the stream in front of us there is no way to continue this walk unless we somehow cross the Stream now one of you might look at this scene and notice that across the stream is a beautiful Meadow where the path continues you will notice some rocks in the Stream that you could possibly jump across to get to the other side you don't mind if you fall and you don't care if your clothes get wet it's a fun challenge so you decide to jump across the Rocks you go to the other side to the meadow and you continue your beautiful Blissful walk through on this path now another one of you will look at this scene and see something much differently you will notice clouds on the horizon that might indicate rain in an hour or two you notice some moss on on the rocks and you imagine yourself slipping and hitting your head on them and if you fall into the water you might catch a cold and get sick and even if you somehow managed to cross the stream you're gonna have to re-cross it on the way back no it's not worth it although you feel frustrated that this is the end of the walk you turn around and go back here two people are seeing the exact same thing but one sees only dangers and obstacles while the other person sees a fun challenge we can see the same dynamic in business as an entrepreneur you have a goal a project or a startup to realize you begin the process but suddenly there's some obstacles that block your progress one of you will focus on the bad things that will happen if you go ahead and so you turn around another one of you sees the obstacles as an opportunity this means that most people will be discouraged from proceeding and you'll have the entire feel to yourself you embrace the challenge it's a test it's a way to prove yourself it's a way to test to toughen yourself up this is the entrepreneurial mindset which you must work to adopt for yourself we can compare the attitude to the aperture of a lens when you are fearful that aperture tends to close down giving you a narrow perspective on the world if you take in less you have less to fear but as your mind closes down you miss seeing opportunities and coming up with new ideas some of the best ideas in business are creative combinations that no one had ever thought of such as micro technology and music and voila the iPod but if that lens opens up and expands suddenly you can see all kinds of combinations and connections out there in the world that nobody else is seeing because they're fear of because of their fearful closed lens the way they're looking at the world in this case the chaos of the world is not something to fear but something to exploit now you can come up with all kinds of incredible combinations of ideas because of this chaotic wild world that we're living in this is the source of all creative thinking your attitude is either opening or closing your mind making you a conventional thinker or a youthful creative Maverick now there are two sides to this power of altering your attitude the first side the one we have been exploring now demonstrates the power you have by altering your altering your attitude will alter your behavior making you less fearful more open and creative the other side is the social effect the effect that you have on other people through your attitude this creates what I call a self-fulfilling Dynamic and if you can understand this concept it is like magic it gives you the power to influence people in this world to understand this side we have to understand a basic law of human nature we are social animals to the core we are incredibly susceptible to the moods and emotions of other people all of this occurs unconsciously and non-verbally imagine a common social setting we are meeting a person for the first time and they come up to us and they seem somewhat insecure and defensive we can smell their insecurity they're scrutinizing our faces looking for any kind of sense a sense of displeasure on our part we can't help feeling defensive and guarded in their presence and they pick this up which makes them even more insecure we end up feeling defensive in their presence and we don't really even understand why now imagine the opposite scenario we're approached by someone who comes up to us who is smiling and feels confident they seem to be open to us listening to us they seem to like us without even ever knowing us and we can't help but open up to them so one attitude actually increases resistance while the other attitude lowers resistance there have been all kinds of fascinating scientific studies who have debt that have demonstrated this phenomenon for instance it has been shown that if teachers merely think that their students are smart and are going to get into University without ever saying a word their students pick this up and they actually perform better than other students similar Studies have shown that if we merely think positive thoughts about another person that they are good and interesting that other picks it up non-verbally and it has a positive effect on them now if you are a leader in any level you must simply understand this concept deeply for it gives you the power to influence people to lower their resistance to get them to follow you without ever even asking them to do it so let's go through the various attitudes and the effect that each one produces another people the first attitude is the hostile attitude the person with a hostile attitude actually expects and anticipates negative behavior from other people such a type of person with his attitude likes to present themselves as tough and in command but actually they're deeply afraid of their employees they think that people are never working hard enough they expect mistakes and betrayals from others they try to micromanage the actions of even the lowest employee in the group the entire company internalizes this attitude and creates a hostile environment in which there is constant infighting and and mutual suspicions ironically this leads to the very mistakes and betrayals that the leader feared the most I personally witnessed this at the company American Apparel where I served on the board of directors the CEO Dove Charney had this kind of hostile attitude and it led to his downfall the opposite of the hostile attitude is the empathetic attitude the one that you must try to adopt the person with the empathetic attitude begins with the opposite assumption basically that people are good and smart and loyal or that these qualities must be cultivated and brought out of them I once consulted with a basketball coach a coach of a team in the NBA he was about to start a new job and he wanted my advice his previous team had stopped listening to him and tuned him out I told him that he had been too Stern and too controlling trying to control their every move on the basketball court I advised him to let go and stop controlling I advised him to think positive thoughts of each of his players and to treat them as individual if they made mistakes he was to forgive them but to keep teaching them he could be tough but from an empathetic starting point and the results of this experiment that we went into together have been astonishing this year the team has become much more cohesive they are opening to his teaching and to listening to him and they can take initiative if there are any other bad apples on the team the players themselves will do the policing for the coach this season the team is exceeding all expectations they're having a very successful season okay the next attitude is the anxious attitude people with the anxious attitude like to present themselves as being very prudent very conservative and very careful but in fact they are riddled with fear they value routines and can't stand any kind of Chaos they repeat the same strategies over and over again and if there's any kind of stress they crumble they're deathly afraid of losing and so in things like negotiations they actually lose more by their careful and cautious approach [Music] the entire company internalizes their anxious moods and because of this they miss all kinds of opportunities in the world the company has an overall stultifying atmosphere which is what you will find in a lot of large corporations now the opposite of this is the Bold adventurous Spirit whom I believe Elon Musk exemplifies musk is like an Explorer from the 16th century he's always thinking big a car company a space rocket company Transportation Systems I remember talking to a so-called expert a few years ago who assured me that Tesla was going to fail he told me that nobody ever tries to start an automobile company from scratch the reason is the car manufacturing requires heavy capitalization the costs of materials are extremely expensive and labor costs are through the roof he predicted that after a few years of being improv unprofitable Tesla would go under but look at what happened to Elon Musk through his bold and adventurous Spirit he captivated the public which then poured money into Tesla's stock this supplied him with the very Capital that he needed to create such a large infrastructure it gave him enough money to wait out the couple of years of not having any profits now the stock price of Tesla was and is incredibly inflated but who cares it became a self-fulfilling Dynamic his incredible belief in himself made other people believe in him and part with their money the Bold adventurous Spirit actually gives you the power to alter circumstances in your life much as it did for Elon Musk and people love working for those who have this kind of spirit mm-hmm next there is the insecure attitude Leaders with this attitude will often present themselves as being incredibly aggressive but actually they're re they have very fragile Egos and are riddled with insecurities this could be Michael Eisner the former CEO of Disney or it could be I'm afraid to say president Donald Trump such people cannot stand any kind of criticism they have to be surrounded by yes men and sycophants they constantly have to have their ego fed everyone around him has to be so careful and color their words and so such a leader never gets to hear what is really going on in the world and everybody in the group tends to internalize this insecure attitude and become insecure themselves become selfish and self-serving now the opposite of the insecure attitude is The Confident self-image The Confident attitude such a person has a very strong ego an incredible sense of Destiny they act like a tree they act like a king to be treated like one now I believe that 50 Cent exemplifies this and 50 Cent is the one on the left in case you didn't realize now who is 50 Cent he was a drug dealer a common Hustler on the streets of South Side Queens such Hustlers or a dime a dozen and all of his former friends and colleagues are either dead or in prison now now what is the difference with 50 Cent well from a very early age he had an incredible sense of destiny that he was destined to be someone very very successful he had this in his imagination when he was nine years old and it became a self-fulfilling dynamic people who've been around 50 like I was for six months you can sense this self-belief and it gives them incredible Charisma their confidence also happens to rub off on you sorry the next attitude is the entitled attitude this is a person who thinks who likes to appear very aristocratic and Regal but they're actually very very afraid of people they expect obedience and respect without ever having earned it they want others to do all the hard work and if ever there is a mistake they immediately look for scapegoats to blame people who work for this type end up feeling extremely resentful because we live in times where people are distrustful of authority and no one likes working for Kings or Queens such types often Inspire hatred in their employees and if there's the slightest setback all the knives will come out the opposite of this is the self-reliant attitude this is someone who works harder who's a leader but works harder than everybody else and is actually trying to earn their respect Steve Jobs exemplified this in his second stinted apple he was already someone highly very successful but no one worked harder than he did he held himself to the highest standards he was a perfectionist and if there were ever any kind of mistakes done in the design of his products he was the one to blame for that he took responsibility and look at the effect of all this all of his employees wanted to work that much harder to earn his respect and to live up to the high standards that he had set now I know I have overloaded you with a lot of information tonight but I want to now turn to how we can actually turn this information into something practical in your day-to-day lives the first task is to assess your own attitude and to do this you have to have some distance from yourself to assess your attitude look at how you relate to other people are you quick to form negative judgments of them do you forgive people's flaws or do you actively exaggerate them we can also look how other people react to us do we notice that they are somewhat guarded and real and and defensive in our presence or are they relaxed we can examine the degree of connection that we established between people do we always have to run after people to get them to do things for us or do they come to us out of their own desire and willpower to assess our attitude we can also look at how we Face adversity if there are mistakes do we try to learn from them or do we instantly blame other people for these mistakes how do we respond to criticisms and challenges do we tend to always repeat the same stale strategies from the past or are we open to new ideas remember we can't see our own attitude it is too unconscious we have to look at it through our actions through our patterns of behavior and through how other people see us on this same note engaging the attitude of other people we must avoid those who have a negative unhappy attitude they will infect us with their miseries their constant drama and their insecurities on the other hand we must associate with those with an expansive attitude for they will and they will infect us with their joy and their confidence okay now I want to examine how we can actually practice this in our daily lives and expand our attitude the first one on there is yourself and I want you to actively try to expand your image of yourself so here's an experiment you can do tomorrow try to drop everything that people have said about who you are and try to reimagine yourself think of yourself as having Limitless potential with resources of energy and resilience that you haven't even begun to tap into imagine for yourself a powerful sense of destiny that at your birth you were actually faded to accomplish something great reassess your ambition ambition nowadays is almost seen as a dirty word but it's not it's a great thing it's the source of anything that is powerful and and fantastic in this world stop feeling the need to be so humble and self-deferential in life if you have a pet project that you've been wanting to do think of actually starting it in the near future repeat these meditations that I've given you on a daily basis now when it comes to past present and future I want you to loosen your relationship with time I want you to let go of everything in the past like Chekhov did write down on a piece of paper all of your past hurts and traumas and pain and failures and then look at it and then take a match and light that piece of paper on fire you're going to stop carrying with you your entire lives all of this emotional baggage you're going to light it on fire and you're going to finally let go of it in the present if you are facing some kind of challenge or important decision I want you to drop the same old ideas and strategies from the past and try to look at it from a different angle ask yourself what would Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or 50 Cent or Leonardo da Vinci do in the same situation when it comes to the future I want you to be a Visionary I want you to have a clear image of where you're going to be in five years long-term thinking is the only way to handle all of the chaos in our world every month or so re-examine this Vision that you have of your future and try and strengthen this Vision turn yourself into a student of the Zeitgeist always looking for what are the trends that are about to happen in the years to come and for that purpose you need to look at young people who are always the signpost of future trends okay next it comes to people and once again I'm asking you to loosen your relationship with people your first impulse is to always judge people and I want you to take a pledge to tomorrow you're going to try something very very different you're going to try to understand them instead of Judge them take someone in your immediate circle who you have never gotten along with and who rubs you the wrong way try as an experiment to figure out why they are the way that they are think of them as a fascinating character in a movie and you want to understand their story instead of foisting Your Own Story upon them the next time you meet this person try to think without ever voicing them some actually different or even positive thoughts about them and see how they respond do they respond differently does it alter the dynamic between you with the toxic people in your life and believe me there are a lot of toxic people out there try to refrain from getting emotional and sucked into all of their drama try to understand why they are so toxic what is their story so that you can better defend yourself and not get all emotional in their presence next when it comes to adversity I want you to embrace adversity and even failure an entrepreneur who has never failed once is not a true entrepreneur by trying to realize your vision or your or your business perhaps before you're actually ready to start you will make so many mistakes but it is only through the mistakes that you make in starting up this business that you can actually learn and toughen yourself up so hunt down challenges and even conflicts look at the story of Lynn George whom I have met it is a remarkable woman in 2007 Lynn wanted to start up a solar energy company but everyone told her she was too young too inexperienced and the sub text was that as a woman she did not have the fortitude to survive in such a Cutthroat industry with competitors like Elon Musk these doubts lit a fire in her she was going to prove that all of these people were wrong she decided that if she did some research and she decided that if she could make solar energy cheap and simple to buy that she could pave her way into the market then in 2008 the market crashed and her startup completely collapsed most people would have given up at that point but now she was determined to make it work she realized that she had made some terrible mistakes with this startup that she had expanded too quickly so Having learned these lessons and toughened herself up she started again and now Sunrun is the largest residential provider of solar energy in the United States its capitalization is close to three billion dollars now when it comes to death your fear of death is the source of all of your other fears in life and what limits you you need to begin to confront your mortality and meditate it on a daily basis like I do this is not a morbid thought but something that should energize you it will make you appreciate every single day that you are alive it will give you a sense of urgency to realize your dreams before it is too late as in the story of Chekhov by confronting your mortality you will actually increase your Zen your sense of zest in life and your sense of adventure now I know I've completely overloaded with you with information and you're all probably having headaches right now so no more information I promise I'm going to Simply tell you a story one of the most inspiring stories of modern times it is the story of Charles Lindbergh in 1926 Charles Lindbergh was a 24 year old pilot delivering mail on the route between Saint Louis and Chicago one night as he was flying to Chicago he had this very strange Vision he imagined to himself what if I could fly past Chicago and keep on flying forever it would be like a Magic Carpet Ride Now what began as a dream suddenly inspired some other thoughts what if he could be the first person to cross the Atlantic in a plane that flight from New York to Paris would be 48 Hours sort of the equivalent of that Magic Carpet Ride so we thought next how could I turn this dream into reality well first I'm going to have to find some backers for my plan he had a vision he would fly alone in a single engine plane he would only take what was necessary for the flight he wouldn't even take a parachute in the days after that flight he was a man possessed all he could think about was how he could realize this dream he went over in his head every single detail what would the plane be like what would be the route that he would take to Paris he thought of every possible objection from other people his youth his inexperience all of the dangers involved his pitch to backers Financial backers would be very simple they would be associated with one of the greatest Adventures of the 20th century they would be associated with the future of Aviation he would present his youth as an advantage he was Fearless persistent and ready for any kind of challenge in his first meeting with potential backers he heard the same objections over and over again he needed a much larger plane a three-engine plane he needed to take an experienced Navigator with him it was too much for one person to handle try to explain to him all the dangers of this such a heavy large plane with all of that added fuel might not ever take off or climb and if it ever crashed all that extra fuel would only be that much more dangerous such a plain such a large plane would be very expensive and his vision was of something small fast lean and inexpensive in dozens of meetings with backwards he faced rejection after rejection the same concerns the same worries but he never felt discouraged and finally after the 50th rejection he found a businessman in St Louis Who Loved flying himself and who gave him a thousand dollars as the first as a first in um it was the first installment he put him in touch with other businessmen and one St Louis businessman actually loved his pitch he was excited by Lindbergh's youth by his enthusiasm and by his attention to detail he came up with a group of other businessmen that raised fifteen thousand dollars exactly what Lindbergh needed to fought to finance this flight the next step was to find the company that would build his plane and he made a very important decision he chose a very small company in San Diego that no one had ever heard of Ryan Corporation they would be more motivated to be to work with him there would be less bureaucracy to deal with they would not bother him with all of their worries and concerns interest in longer flights was now gaining momentum and somebody now offered a reward of twenty five thousand dollars for the first person who could cross the Atlantic in a plane the problem for Lindbergh was that there were many other competitors who were prepared to make the crossing and who already had their planes and with so many competitors it seemed almost impossible that he would be the first person to cross but Lindbergh told himself sometimes you just have to be insane enough to not even think about such things and keep on going by April of 1927 his Rivals were preparing to cross the Atlantic but they're in their test flights they kept crashing and Pilots were dying left right and Center as Limburg had predicted their planes were simply too heavy to take off and climb then on May 9th two experienced French Pilots took off from Paris to cross the Atlantic and that looked like the race was over but the next day their plane disappeared somewhere over Newfoundland and they were never found his other Rivals were now waiting for a break in the weather the race to cross the Atlantic was now the biggest news story of the year but nobody took Lindberg seriously he was too young his plane now called the spirit of Saint Louis was ridiculously small he was just thought of as a foolish Daredevil to test his plane Limburg flew it from San Diego to New York and he loved what he felt this plane was so light and so fast and so powerful and he felt his confidence growing by the day by mid-may he was in New York and he had two other Rivals who were now ready to try and make the crossing but they were all waiting for a break in the rainy weather then on May 19th Limburg heard that there might be a slight clearing in the skies and that's all he wanted to hear he would make a go of it the next day but that night he had no sleep he was too excited and the flight that would take probably 48 hours would mean that he would go virtually three days without any sleep it was hard enough to go 48 Hours by yourself without sleep and guide a plane over expansive water that no one had ever done before but 72 hours was almost insane the next day nevertheless he had his plane taxi to the runway and there he saw that there were no other competitors they were all waiting for better weather but he hesitated he hesitated to have the blocks on his landing gear lifted away for takeoff he looked at the faces of the other men who were there waiting to help him and they all looked like they were attending a funeral first there was his lack of sleep Zen there was the fact that it was still raining out it was drizzling and the ground was soft and wet then there was the over five thousand pounds of fuel on his plane and those very small Landing wheels that you can see in that photograph chances were great that the plane might take off but it would probably fall and crash and he would die and this would be the end of him right there he felt all kinds of fear and doubts rising in him and then he suddenly said stop my whole life I have never been afraid and now is not the time to get into indecision so he gave the nod for the land for the blocks to be moved off the the landing gear [Music] so the first few seconds were extremely bumpy and nerve-wracking the plane kept hitting the ground and then bouncing up but then finally it managed to take off and there he was in the air and a few hours later he was crossing the Atlantic and it was like that Magic Carpet Ride that he envisioned but then there was the lack of sleep that was Haunting him he felt like death was sitting there in his cockpit talking to him trying to befriend him hmm but this thought of imminent death and disaster helped keep him alert and awake there were all of these unexpected storms that he thought threw him off course but then suddenly 40 hours into the flight he spotted land what seemed to be Ireland he was three hours ahead of his schedule and uncannily on course it was a moment of unbelievable ecstasy for him much greater than the excitement that greeted him when he finally landed in Paris a few hours later years later Limburg wrote of this experience only eight months ago it seems as many years I was sitting in the reality of my male cockpit dreaming of a plane that would fly across the sea now I'm in the spirit of Saint Louis on that very flight the dream has become the reality and the reality the dream such things happen then in fact and not alone in Fable whatever a man imagines he can attain if he doesn't become too arrogant arrogant and encroach on the rights of the Gods now listen like Lindbergh you will be told that you were too young for your big dream that you are too inexperienced for such an ambitious project they will tell you that there are too many people out there who have more money and more resources they will tell you it's too risky that it can't be done that you need to wait you need to adhere to the conventional way of doing things which means having a large team of people help you and take control of your vision they will take your vision and pull it apart and transform it into their own and then if you manage to avoid all these pitfalls and you start your project you will inevitably encounter up obstacles and then all the doubters and critics will come out of the woodwork all of this might make you want to turn back but as I said earlier once you experience the freedom and sense of power that comes from letting go of the past and facing life with a confident life-affirming attitude there will be no turning back you will stop listening to people who try to arbitrarily set limits on what you can achieve and you will have that touch of Madness and Insanity that all great inventors and Builders have just enough Madness to try something that no one else has tried before and just enough Insanity to pull it off so thank you so much for all of your patience I apologize for how long this has taken I wasn't expecting that we would have translations by this but thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Robert Greene

Views: 101,532

Keywords: robert greene, robert greene books, ukraine, kiev, lecture, talk, speech, long speech, youtube, human nature, history, mastery by robert greene, mastery, wisdom, knowledge, learning, learn, motivational, motivation, inspiration, education, educational, inspirational, Роберт Грин

Id: q0PWBMo_hDc

Length: 51min 35sec (3095 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 17 2023