Robert Greene -- The Reason You're a Mess is Lack of Control

but real pleasure fulfillment comes from something much longer so when you reach a point where you're 30 years old you've been serious you've learned all these skills you've gone to school but you've tried different jobs and now you're ready to start your own business and you have that level of wow i've done all these great things that is a much greater pleasure and thrill that you'll ever have in life than from something immediate [Music] hi my name is robert greene and i'm the author of six books including the 48 laws of power and the art of seduction and you're watching behind the brand with brian elliott everyone i'm brian elliott welcome to another episode of behind the brand robert thank you so much for your hospitality having us into your home i usually ask my guests how did you get this job how did i get this job well i'm very lucky but it's also a mix of luck and a lot of hard work i was in my this was we're going back 25 years i was kind of a very struggling writer here in hall in los angeles i was about 35 years old i wasn't i was kind of depressed things weren't really working out i wasn't very successful and i was in italy on yet another job and i met a man there who was also on the same job who's a packager of books kind of like a producer of books he designs them and puts the whole thing together one day we were in venice italy and he just asked me a question do you have any ideas for a book robert and suddenly i don't know what it was it was a sunny day the gods were smiling on me and all of my pain and everything i had been through in life it just welled up in me and i improvised a pitch probably the greatest pitch i've ever done about a book about power and i told him a story and i kind of gave him an idea what it could be like he was so excited he said robert you write a treatment for that and i'll try and sell it and i'll pay you for a year and a half to write it until we sell the book and that was a turning point in my life you know when it came out i was 39 and i suddenly went from this kind of somewhat failing you know like one of the millions of failing screenwriters in los angeles to this whole other world and it was the turning point in my life and i've never looked back so that's why i'm here if i hadn't met that man i'd probably still be in that stupid one-bedroom apartment in santa monica an alcoholic and who knows what else that is an amazing story um you know in this series we like to tell origin stories so if it's okay let's go back a little further in the chronology maybe another you know uh 20 years and i ask it with context because there's a lot of young people and maybe not so young people with life experience who may be resetting right now and it's kind of a big reset or maybe they're coming out of school and they want to know what they uh they're trying to figure out what to do with their lives what were you thinking early on as a kid um i'm from this area too i was born actually in van nuys in van nuys hospital not too far from here in the valley um and uh have stayed in la my entire life so i i love this little neighborhood i love you know we're on the east side today but um what did you what do you think about when you're growing up well um i was very ambitious i'm still very ambitious i don't deny i don't hide it you know i wanted to be famous i wanted to be successful and i was always drawn towards words and language i was obsessed with words from a very early age and then suddenly around the age of 9 or 10 i got really in love with books and i knew by the time i was in high school that i wanted to be a writer it was very clear to me who are some of you those early influences well i was reading a lot of novels like theodore dostoevsky was one of my favorites i read a lot of novels of theodore dreiser i read a lot of i read machiavelli's the prince when i was 15. i was even reading nietzsche when i was in high school these were some of my main influences among many many others and then so i knew i wanted to become a writer and you know a lot of people they can say well robert you're lucky because you have that clarity but it's not that easy because i didn't know what i wanted to write right yeah and put a timestamp on that what what time period are we talking about here you mean the actual year you want me to reveal my my age well i think that you've earned it i think you know you have a certain amount of life experience i don't care um well we're talking about i was born in 1959 yeah so we're talking like the mid 70s basically yeah i mean so you know hemingway sort of just had his final hurrah maybe a decade before that and you know and so that was maybe you know a part of that i think putting timestamps on stuff is so interesting because it really gives it context and relevancy of what was happening at the time i mean this is you know uh pre-vietnam war uh this is you know america coming out of the the 50s uh a very happy time heading into a very divided time right yeah yeah i was sort of like the end of the whole hippie drug era you know i went to berkeley it was my first college it was kind of depressing actually because you know sort of the the rag end of the whole exciting movement of the 60s there were a lot of drugs it was very kind of a heavy time actually the mid 70s is a very weird confusing time for a lot of people my dad talked a lot about it uh he he grew up in that same time period that same area oh i'm the same age as your dad wow well he said he followed the grateful dead around and uh so did i and uh big deadhead i'm a total deadhead it was yeah and you know he the way he describes it it was fascinating but also complex and volatile and yeah i mean sort of everything nothing has changed right since then it's still kind of volatile and complex even today uh okay how about your parents do they say robert you should really think about a career in engineering or get a real job as an attorney or something forget about this writing thing well um you know i'm jewish and so jewish parents their dream is their son to be a lawyer or a doctor you know and i never lived up to their dreams um and they knew i wanted to be a writer and they were they were wonderful parents i shouldn't complain they never tried to to you know overtly tell me what to do it was kind of you know they've kind of covered about where i should go in life but you know i was i had long hair i could show you pictures i look like a total druggy hippie back then they were a little bit concerned um but they were very understanding and when i got became went to brooklyn i was an english major they didn't say oh start going to law school and things like that yeah but this is also sandy koufax era too right like the i met sandy kovacs when i was a kid is that right one of the high points of my life yeah i mean amazing right and yeah you know if sandy can do it robert can do his writing thing right sandy was a pitcher i wasn't going to be at baseball but well what i mean is sandy we didn't go into medicine or law and he's you know a prolific jew uh and my dad all of our family on my dad's side's jewish as well with new york roots and then moved out here to hollywood so that resonates with me a little bit i'm picking up on the vibe okay so you you got past sort of the maybe the push back of the parents you had enough courage or at least uh freedom that they allowed for you to flex and go find yourself here at berkeley um so what did you do between sort of the 20s and that age 39 where you're a middle-aged man with your very first real marker of success at least according to the world well i had a lot of fun so after i graduated college i went and lived in europe for several years i traveled around with a backpack and then i got jobs i lived there for like several years i ended up living here for about four or five years combined with several trips over there i worked in a hotel in paris i was a receptionist i did construction work in in greece i taught english in barcelona i worked in a television company in london i was a tour guide in dublin ireland i had a blast and i was trying to write novels and then i went back to new york i never lived in new york before thinking i would get into journalism because i wanted i had to make a living right i couldn't just write poetry and novels and such so i got into journalism and i got a job at esquire so that was legitimate my parents you know they could they could be proud of that and i got that job through my writing skills i sent them a short story and i was in journalism for many years wasn't a good fit yeah i mean it kind of sounds very hemingway-esque you know traveling europe and living in paris and and you know also the editorial yeah right i mean it's sort of uh well uh not quite as sexy as hemingway because i wasn't working for very interesting magazines esquire was but afterwards it kind of declined essentially the lesson is it wasn't a good fit for me and i could have blamed one time an editor took me to lunch something i'll never forget i've talked about it before and i he was going to talk about an article i had written and basically he had like had his third vodka gimlet or whatever he drank and he said robert you're not going to make it as a writer you don't have the talent you're too undisciplined your writing is too all over the place you don't know how to communicate go to law school go to business school i'm telling him to save you a lot of pain and you know instead of getting all upset and angry i was initially i don't deny it it kind of sunk in that maybe because i wasn't excited about this career it was showing up in my work it was maybe my fault so then i went back to europe and i tried writing more novels and wandering around i came back to la to do my hollywood career you know and i tried screenwriting i worked for a famous film director i was his assistant i had some very interesting adventures i learned a lot about writing and making things dramatic etc i learned a lot about power and the power game through the master manipulators in hollywood that i observed and then you know i wasn't that's when we come to 1995 and i'm this depressed 36 year old living in my apartment in santa monica there's so much there to unpack i mean uh if i could just maybe highlight some of the lessons that i'm hearing um one it seems like you had tremendous self-awareness you know you were at least self-reflective enough to to take the criticism and sort of take inventory and decide whether or not that was accurate i think that was probably another very pivotal moment in your life it sounds like where you could have you know sort of the rubber hits the road or you you have this come to god moment where he's like what am i gonna do and maybe the lesson for people who are watching who don't have the life experience that robert has is um sometimes you do have to get brutally honest with yourself and you have to listen to the critics at least the ones that you know what's that journalistic saying consider the source if the source is somewhat reputable it's probably worth considering and then you take an inventory now that said there have been a lot of people who've gone on to greatness who were told very early on that they would amount to absolutely nothing right i remember this you know i think einstein was three or four years old before he could even talk and they thought he was he had you know mental challenges or walt disney i can remember you know was told not creative at in the least uh martin luther king jr i mean the list goes on of everyone who was told to sit down and shut up and they'd amount to nothing and then they went on to greatness in my experience i think if we're going to call that adversity or an obstacle or setback or a punch in them face i think we have two choices you know you can get knocked down and stay down and kind of crawl away and go away or you can stand back up and come back and fight another day it sounds like that's what you did you you know you had this awareness you came back the other thing i want to point out is [Music] this idea that it's not original to me but i i continue to hear it in themes as i talk to people with great minds like you is that nothing goes to waste so i remember you know my very first job actually i have to confess right now that i lied about my age uh you had to be 16 to work at the lamppost pizza and uh but i was 15. you sure you want that information to be out there i think it's safe now it's past the uh what do they call it i don't want to read about this in the in the newspaper but apologies to you know everyone who would be ashamed of me for lying but i i had a goal in mind i wanted to buy my first car was which was a 69 vw beetle it was 1500 i wanted to get my license on my birthday when i turned 16. so i lied and i worked for a year while i was 15 at the pizza place um i washed dishes most of the time and then you know worked my way up to making the pizzas eventually i was even like you know serving the people anyway i was running the place by the time i was 16. i look back on that now and the experience i had dealing with people and listening to my co-workers or trying to you know all of that stuff i'm now somewhat using even now that experience is so useful and so i think about nothing goes to waste you say you were struggling and maybe drinking too much and yeah probably it was a hard time but at the same time you're traveling you're in paris and you're in greece and you're getting all this life experience uh like hemingway who put himself in the battlefield right even though he wasn't in the war and and that's what probably helped you get to this point of you know where where luck meets opportunity right and you you sort of are ready and prepared when when the knock comes yeah very well put i mean i think the key is is that i knew deep down inside of myself that i was a good writer that i was that i was worth having some kind of success in life i didn't get down on that part i doubted you know whether i could be a screenwriter or a novelist etc but i knew deep down that i was the only thing that i'm good at yeah well you were dialing the frequencies right just trying to find the right right station yeah you were you were in the ballpark right you were yeah you're on the radio down i just had to dial the right frequency yeah and so when i look back on it maybe it's a skewed perspective but it seemed almost like fate that i had to go through all of these kind of lost moments but um but they were teaching me they had a reason behind them i was almost being directed in this in this way and so you know my girlfriend and i we once counted that i had like at least 60 different jobs i seen every kind of power maneuver i have had the worst bosses in the history of mankind i can i can tell you right i had all kinds of experiences and i had learned in journalism how to write snappy how to write well under a deadline it all came together when i had to write the 48 laws of power all those awful bosses that that you know tortured me i could put them in the 48 laws of power completely disguised by kings and princes etc so it was like the perfect use you say nothing was wasted yeah so so let's talk about power because it's a 48 laws is an iconic book um you have a new book out what is the title the daily laws yeah so let's let's roll back a little bit from into 48 and then roll into the new one so break down some of the maybe the the most important laws there's 48 i mean i'd love to talk about all 48 but maybe pick a couple that really stand out to you as useful in the context of again my audience you know these are people that read inc magazine these are go getters these are men and women who are ambitious and trying to just crush life at the same time trying to enjoy it and not work for how do they hold their own how do they keep their power well um there are many as you say there are 48 laws one of the laws is i think the most important i can't remember the exact title of it but it's basically make people dependent on you so you want you don't want to appeal to people's love to the fact that they like you you want to appeal to the fact that they need you because if they love you love is a very tenuous emotion in fact it doesn't work very well in the work situation it causes all kinds of problems they'll get rid of you tomorrow even though they like you but if they need you it's like pulling out all of these roots of a plant to get rid of you it's going to cause all kinds of damage all over the place they need you and they can't get rid of you so you need to make sure that your position in a company in life in general you're the only person who can do that so you're not talking about bringing in bagels every morning because that's easily replaced what how so how do we become irreplaceable or well it depends on on on the nature of your work obviously i mean i talk in that particular chapter of several strategies so you're let's say you're in a corporation you kind of don't just depend on one person you just don't aren't just necessary to the boss but you spread yourself out to three or four different networks you get a sense of every how the whole company is functioning you have your roots in this place and this place in this place so you have more knowledge it's kind of spread around and to get rid of you is going to cause a lot of problems because you're not only involved here but you're both here here and here and you have knowledge that nobody else has so you want to have a kind of knowledge and skill base that makes you unique you know so um and that means like just don't depend on one skill but have several skills and don't be afraid to do that that's i think is probably the key strategy here but when it comes to if you're an entrepreneur it's the same dynamic for an entrepreneur it's the same dynamic for me the way you make yourself necessary and others dependent on you is to be the only person who can do this job you are so you unique there's only one elon musk there's only one steve jobs right they're irreplaceable they've they're not afraid to be themselves to do to do that have their own style and so you know that's that's what secures their position so if i wrote books like everybody else i wouldn't have that position of power but because i'm the only one for better or for worse who can write books the way i do i have secured a position in the publishing world so it's a law that applies everywhere yeah let me ask you about critics because i think it's a it's a tightrope right like uh you're walking this fine line of being abrupt or brash or you know and it seems like the more power and influence you have the more criticism and pushback you might get you know we we see bezos go into outer space we're like his rocket looks like a giant penis uh it's just a flex who cares he didn't make it to the moon right it's like minimizing everything that he just accomplished because he's the richest man in the world or second richest at any given time it's easy to throw stones at him right so how much if you're if you're the person who maybe is trying to gain the influence of power how much credence and how much do we listen to the critic and how do we how do we manage that well it depends on you know you have a sense of in my book mastery i call it knowing your life's task this was what you were meant to accomplish in life right and you're very firm about it and you feel very confident about it and so when people come like that editor did and tell me that you shouldn't be a writer you're able to deflect it because you have a dream and nothing will will you know get you to sidetrack from that dream but also having a sense of accomplishment so it's not just you're a artist not that you're a con artist you've actually accomplished a b and c in life right so if people come and attack me i don't really care because i have this that i can always fall back on i have a book that sold two million copies how many people can say that i don't care bring it on it's i'm fine with that but the one other thing i would say about that is is that you want to in the case for all people of power in any position you are in life i have a law in the 48 laws of power called never appear to perfect and the danger in the world today is the number one danger is envy we live in a time of social media etc where it's massive envy where we know what everybody else is doing in life and we don't like to admit that we're envious so we attack people passive aggressively we subvert them we try and throw obstacles in their way we criticize them when in fact we envy them and the strategy there is to learn how to deflect envy so if you're jeff bezos or elon musk you have to have some humor you have to have some self-deprecating humor you have to take the criticism that comes and kind of laugh at it and go along with it so that you don't appear all stiff and rigid and defensive so that's the other thing i would say yeah and i think they call that becoming thick skinned or whatnot right you you become accustomed i mean the reality is and i can speak from experience sometimes uh the criticism really hurts because it's true it's like oh that was i guess you're right and that's when it really stings right but you know it's an opportunity to to take that in and you know absorb that for what it is and if it is true at least in my case i've tried to to use that as a as a great um gift that the stranger has given me i mean on a regular basis when i publish a video or write an article there's always you know with the thumbs up there's always at least one thumb down and even you know uh my young son who's uh 13 he'll say dad who is this person that keeps giving you a thumb down and i said you know what um it's probably one of my peers or someone who wants to be and do what i'm doing and and it could be that's my theory at least uh or it could be some dude in his underwear in his in his mom's basement with nothing better to do but um but you're right we have to balance that out we have to be able to distinguish between what is legitimate criticism and you have to look at the source yeah right so whenever i write a chapter i give it to my girlfriend anna cause she's a great editor i trust her she critiques the hell out of them but i've trusted her but if some shmo off the street is writing on a youtube video comments about me etc i don't pay it any attention because i don't know who he or she is or what their credentials are right anonymous doesn't get much credibility with me if they want to show their face and show up and and you know spar with me i'm happy to do so and listen to their their criticism but anonymous no i'm curious was there an alternate title to 48 laws was that just it from the very means like this is what it is there was we had a few versions of it one version was it the black book of power a black book is kind of like a summation like the ultimate book on a subject but we thought that that sounded a little too dark and evil and when people would know i did what how to take that but that was one of the alternative titles almost there's like a like a james gandolfini style like a people's names that you could look up that would maybe not yeah translate very well i got you but then also uh i the number 48 kind of shifted originally i had like 52 laws we didn't like the number 52 because it seemed too obvious like 52 weeks in a year or something and so we kind of i tried to narrow it down to 48 because 48 is such a powerful number whereas the 47 laws of power so what is it about fours and eights that's powerful it's just obvious you don't have to think about it 48 it just seems like something it's two times 24 hours in a day two days it's just got a resonance to it there's kind of a symmetry to the idea of 48 you know i think i could have done 44 laws because that has a nice symmetry to it but there's just something i don't know if it's in retrospect where because the book has had success that 48 seems so powerful but the number just has a visceral feel to it i can't even explain yeah sometimes you just know and it's intuitive and it's it's just instinctual i love it uh any other powers that come to mind that you want to share that are uh that are noteworthy we should talk about well uh there's one in their interaction with boldness and this is particularly applicable to entrepreneurs it's about how human nature we're kind of impressed and intimidated by people who dose them who enter in with a lot of confidence and boldness and a bit of drama and surprise it kind of appeals to the animal in us we're put back on our on our on our on our feet and we're like whoa what's going on here it's impressive it creates it creates a distinctive impression whereas if you kind of enter in like with your business or your book or in work in a meeting and you're kind of half-assedly promoting an idea it already looks weak before it even started right if you don't have confidence in your own idea how can i have confidence and there's an element almost of and con playing a con man and i have a story in there of christopher columbus who was in fact came from the lower classes had no aristocratic connections was a mediocre navigator and captain and he went and proposed this to the portuguese king this incredible expedition as if he was an aristocrat he was full of all this confidence and it you know it created an impression on the other there must be a reason for that confidence so having a sense of you were destined to accomplish something that you're you feel that it's going to it's going to succeed it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy yeah now a couple years back i had susan kane on and susan is famous for writing that book quiet it's a book about introverts and extroverts in fact she also talks about ambiverts a hybrid of introvert extrovert can introverts do this as well can they sort of uh exude or you know at least uh convey this confidence even when they're not feeling so confident sometimes i mean i am sort of a classic introvert i have to say um and sometimes i you know i i don't want to be the loudest in the room because it just annoys me um what would you say to introverts well i'm an introvert i'm a classic introvert and yet i i've used it it's more a sense of you feel a con you have to know your strengths and play to your strengths so if i tried to show this kind of confidence and boldness on a basketball court i'd be laughed off if i tried to show it with my artwork and my painting and my doodling i wouldn't be able to pull it off but i know that i have one thing that i'm strong at it's with words and language and writing and so i can pull off being bold because i feel inside myself that inner confidence you have to almost deceive yourself that you can accomplish this so i can go on the list through classic introverts have been incredibly successful albert einstein was a terrible introvert even though he became he seems like he's sort of this comic person who's good with people he's terrible very you know very awkward and timid but he knew one thing that he was so good at and he pushed on and pushed on and pushed on it and when it came to physics and relativity there was nobody else who could argue with him so play to your your strength play to what you know what you're good at what you've accomplished and even the worst introvert in the world like myself can how can exude that kind of boldness yeah so let's talk about this i mean i'm hearing you tell me uh your answer already but let's just maybe flesh it out a little bit more which is this idea of you know should you follow your passion or you should follow what you're good at what is the order of operations well it's very clear you have to know yourself you have to know who you are and you have to do some searching in there so the passion thing it's kind of a cliche in a way i want you to look at the things that you were drawn to when you were three years old four years old five years i do consulting work with a lot of people people who are kind of confused about what i call your life's task and we go through a process you want to see something that attracted you here so deeply you can't even put it into words because the way the human brain works is that you don't learn things with any kind of intensity unless your emotions are deeply deeply engaged unless you're excited by the subject right and so if you're kind of in a field that is because of the money or because it kind of half interests you you're not going to be learning you're not going to have that intensity of focus that all successful people have there's there's a kind of a a level that you hit where the work is exactly what you were meant to do it's what excites you it's what your skill level you're up to the challenge maybe it's a little above you and it brings out the best in you and you want to find out what that field is or what that subject is and so once you find it everything else will fall into place so for me i knew it was writing i just couldn't figure out which writing form of it but once it occurred everything else just fell into place for me i want to go back to that moment at 39 that moment of desperation but also of opportunity when it was knocking was there a time that you sort of gave up and you thought this is not working out you know and it sounded like you were sort of at the end of your rope at that moment at that crossroads i can sort of picture it as a movie scene in my mind right now but i'm also willing to bet that you are very close to just throwing in the towel at that in that very moment too um talk about that how did how are you able to survive that because again the context of this question is i'd be willing to bet that a lot of people give up too soon yeah they quit because it's too hard or they don't see the results talk about that well when you're 36 years old 35 years old it's very easy to quit because you're not in your 20s anymore and you're starting to think i need to make money i don't want to be living hand to foot for the rest of my life so i understand that a lot of people reach that point you know and i was very depressed i was kind of going up and down and up and down i think okay now i'm going to write this this will be successful i'll sell this screenplay etc you know and then it wouldn't happen it'd be down etc so it was kind of a roller coaster and there were moments when i was pretty much ready to give up but i was never going to like suddenly go to law school or go to business school i was too old for that yeah so i was thinking of um sorry i was thinking well maybe i need to try a different form of writing where i can make a living you know maybe i need to get into television and sell my soul even though that'll be very very depressing for me because i don't feel comfortable with that form of writing i have to get practical in some way and that was a very depressing thought because you know we all have dreams particularly when we're a child and to me the worst thing in life the worst feeling is you had dreams and you can never live up to them they never they never happened in reality yeah and so that would have been giving up on a dream it would have been selling my soul i would have been able to write but i would have been unhappy i probably i may not even be alive right now if i had fallen down that rabbit hole and i recognize how lucky i am yeah well it's kind of a shakespeare wrote about that too right um what is the quote i can't probably get it there's a tide in the there's a i was thinking about the the one about regret you know um either pen or tail you know where he talks about if you didn't try to do what you thought you were capable of doing that you would live with the regret and effectively that's the definition of hell yeah as is living with great the the greatest pain of what could have been yeah well da vinci has a quote on that that i use in my book mastery he says i forget i can't quote it i can't remember but the essence of it is at the end of a day of working hard you feel kind of a satisfaction that you've got a lot accomplished at the end of your life when you feel like you've worked hard and you've kind of done what you were supposed to do you feel like you had a blessed life and the reverse of that which he doesn't discuss is it's the end of your life you're in your 60s or 70s and you're reflecting back about all your missed potential that is true hell so what should we be measuring while we're alive and kicking you know how should we be measuring our success beyond the vanity metrics right you can look at your your book and you sold two million copies that's amazing but what if you write an amazing book and it sells less than that you know it's still valuable right still making an impact but how how do we measure the success what's your recommendation well um it depends you know you don't have to sell as many copies like that but um if you have an id if you give all of your effort if you work really hard and you put all of your focus into it and you've done like you wrote a book with lots of research and you know it's a good book and yet it only sells 2 000 copies you can feel a bit upset about you're going to be upset about it no doubt but you're going to bounce back because you knew that you put in all the effort and you know failure is a good thing failure teaches you what your limitations are because if you go through a life and you have success after success you're never learning and then you're gonna you're gonna have a much further much worse downfall because you're gonna get grandiose so failure is a good thing as long as you put in the effort as long as you did your the job the best you could okay it didn't sell so much i can learn from it and i can go on to the next project because if that failure defeats you inside then you're done because you're never going to recover your your confidence your next effort is going to be even more you know half-assed etc so you have to it's all comes from within so when you have that failure learn from it and put yourself in a position where you're ready to make to bounce off to the next project yeah i love that talk about mastery well mastery came out in i think 2013 2012 something like that i was basically writing it because honestly i was getting a lot of feedback from my first three books a lot of my readers are young i have a a they skew a little bit male 18 to 30 it tends to be and i was getting emails about power and war and seduction that was beginning to trouble me it was as if people had the idea that just kind of being a artist and playing the political game was enough to be successful in life it reminds me of like that movie wall street with uh was it gordon gekko was his name that character is just like just snow plow everyone you know typical kind of 80s yeah mentality yeah and i was feeling like a young a lot of young people were having that and that's not you know that's important i wrote the books it's important to be able to understand the power game how to deal with egos etc but if your work isn't based on anything real if you don't have real skills if your work is shoddy all the in the world won't be able to cover it up right it's going to show through and i was really worried that people didn't understand how to make things how to build things i was having visions in my mind 40 years from now bridges would be collapsing because people don't know how to be engineers anymore they learn a sense of of the process of mastering something right a lot of it comes from social media and the internet where people have this impression that you can have power and admit that they're shortcuts for anything right well yeah and people have written books on it right i can think of tim ferriss the four hour work week it was a life hack and with all great intentions by the way right all great intentions but completely contrary to my belief i believe there are no shortcuts in this life you have to be able to put in the work you have to be able to fail you have to try again you have to go through an apprenticeship phase you have to try and get a mentor you have to learn then maybe you can become creative and here's how you become creative and once you reach that point where all of your knowledge the skills reaches that creativity mastery level the game will flow and it'll be easy and you'll have a great life okay but get out so the reason i wrote mastery is we humans only do things that are pleasurable right we're attracted to the things that give us pleasure and we we refrain from things that give us pain but we how do we define pleasure for most people particularly young it's instant i want things that are quick i want to get that that jolt from a two-hour movie or from a video game or maybe from a week's worth of work oh yeah the whole fast food movement was born on that yeah but real pleasure fulfillment comes from something much longer so when you reach a point where you're 30 years old you've been serious you've learned all these skills you've gone to school but you've tried different jobs and now you're ready to start your own business and you have that level of wow i've done all these great things that is a much greater pleasure and thrill that you'll ever have in life than from something immediate so think of your sense of pleasure draw it out to 5 years 10 years 20 years have a plan so when you reach a point where you actually realize your dreams that is the ultimate high you can ever have so i wrote that book to make people aware that reaching a point of mastering creativity is is the most ecstatic thing it's a peak experience to use maslow's terms it's worth going through all the pain yeah it reminds me of the marshmallow test too this famous psychology study the marshmallow test you know this where they put you know a marshmallow in front of this like a five-year-old and they said you know if you'll just wait uh 15 minutes uh we'll give you two marshmallows so don't eat it and they would put the marshmallow in front of the kid and they would leave the room of course there was a two-way window and they would watch it and you know the there was uh kids who had just couldn't wait and they just devoured the marshmallow and then of course there were a certain number that would you know just wait okay i'm going for two and i think they followed those kids for a couple of days oh wow that's a great study well and and definitely found as they extrapolated that that the kids who were able to wait and have patience were more successful at least on paper than the kids you know they do they do like three marshmallows and four and then find out that the four marshmallow kids were like turned into like super right i'm sure that there's a lot of diminishing returns on that martial studies i've never heard of it yeah uh but it's i think it was done in the 60s pretty famous but but what you're saying in essence is um and i feel this too all the time even now that i'm older than i used to be when i was coming out of school and that is patience you know and again we've kind of come full circle back to nothing goes to waste right that the the dues i paid washing the dishes the pizza place then was a springboard for me to you know do the other things in my life deal with difficult people um bosses who were on an ego trip let's now bring this full present um talk about what's what is most on your mind right now and as you've you know written this new book what you'd like people to take away from it what what was your intention you know there's kind of been a theme to all of my books all six of them although they'll cover all sorts of different subjects and if i could boil it all down to it's having a realistic attitude towards life it's to not look to be able to look at yourself with a degree of honesty and say these are my strengths these are my weaknesses to be able to look at people and understand some of who they are and not project onto them your own emotions and not see into them what you want to see into them but who brian elliott actually is a process of kind of empathy and this sort of social skills that we can develop and the ability to see the world as it is these are the trends happening in the world this is the future of my career this is where the world is going you have that kind of realistic attitude it's like a sharp diamond it'll cut through anything you imagine if just you had one of those powers if you could see into people and see through their smiling masks and understood what's really going on imagine the power you would have be amazing so yeah do you think that you've changed significantly you know as robert you know who you are i think you know identity i kind of feel like i'm still kind of figuring out who i am but at the same time in the same breath i would say i sort of feel like about every decade i kind of reinvent myself or rediscover myself have you had that experience yes and no it's kind of a balance between the two so the person that i was at five years old there's kind of a through line going all the way to me now i'm 61 62 yeah right so um i can kind of see the child still inside of me that i'm still kind of robert green that that little boy who was really interested in war and baseball etc but yes i've gone through many changes and the period in which i wrote the 48 laws of power is not where i am right now so i've gone through many shifts and i think that's very healthy yeah and we're a product of our environment too and again that's why we went back to context you know when you were thinking about what you were thinking about in the 60s uh yeah things change and environments change and even you know where you were born how much do you think about nature and nurture do you think about this at all yeah well you know part of our problem these days is we're too black and white in the way we think things are never one way or the other they're always a mix and that's kind of where wisdom comes from is being able to see the middle way so we're a mix of nurture and nature undoubtedly genetics play a component and i talk about that in mastery so the fact that i have this insane attraction to words is genetic i don't i'm sure of it and there's a great book called the five frames of intelligence by howard gardner in which he says the way your brain is wired there's one kind of set of intelligence that you're attracted to could be math it could be kinetics and movement it could be patterns and which will lead to like music etc but you have those are genetic no doubt about that but then nurture plays an incredibly important part just think of the fact that you're one years old do you know how vulnerable and what a sponge you were when you were that young your whole life depended on one or two figures you were paying such deep attention do you know how the in the power that has on you you're not aware to this day how you were formed in those first months of your life in a completely pre-verbal way so they're both equally equally playable so people who emphasize one or the other they're just foolish i think yeah i got to talk to sir ken robinson uh before he passed uh we became fast friends i was you know definitely enamored with his work he wrote the book element which is you know kind of along the lines what you're talking about finding your true passion fish to water bird to air uh and he talks about this idea of how we some of us you know the the plan that's not in the minds of the people who are in our control or our governance or maybe our parents sometimes gets beaten out of us or or we get talked out of it you know i shouldn't be a writer you know that you're never going to make any money or forget about singing or filmmaking or you know uh that's the thing we have to be careful of that um that nurture because sometimes it's you know it's uh it's ironic how unnurturing it can be people with good intentions give bad advice you know oh you mean when you're very young you know it doesn't i don't think it's i think it's age agnostic i think you know um and that's why i was sort of wondering you know um how you what are the signals to know whether you should pivot or or give it up and go to law school you know a lot of people will just quit and so it's it's always on my mind because maybe i'm i'm close to it all the time i come right up to the uh you know to the to the bubble and then uh something happens good and then i can i can go back and you know i don't have to break well it all comes to us i was talking about a realistic attitude it all comes down to being able to see into yourself with a degree of clarity so the great psychologist ab abraham maslow called it i believe impulse voices and he says that when a child is six eight months old they have these impulse voices they like this candy they like this bit of food and they hate that one it's something inside of them they know it they're aware of it in a very primal pre-verbal way and so they choose this thing that they're going to eat we all have these voices but then as we get older we lose sense of them we're not hearing them anymore because we're hearing teachers telling us this is what we're good at this is what we should be hearing friends we're hearing the culture saying this is what's cool and what's not cool by the time we're 16 years old that impulse voice is drowned out by a hundred other voices and we don't know who we are anymore and it's very depressing and it's why people turn to drugs and alcohol and porn etc they lose a sense of themselves of who they are and that is the worst thing that can happen to you so it's a matter of self-awareness and going through a process we talk about the need you know patience of being able to look at yourself and i what i get people to do is we go through a process of journaling and we dig deep and we say these are the things i could see when i throughout my life that i love that when they happen when i hear about them i get so excited these are the things i hate and i give them an example of myself i know for instance if i open the internet or the new york times or any newspaper and there's an article about early humans from 80 000 years ago i have to read that article i am so obsessed with our origins it's been that way since i was four years old that's the impulse voice and on the other hand i hate working for people i hate political games i hate the feeling that i have to play that i have to court this incompetent buffoon who's my boss that's another impulse voice that's now sending you have to be an entrepreneur robert yeah i love that you're so in tune maybe a couple final questions what do you consider your greatest failure ie learning experience or and juxtaposed by your greatest accomplishment well they're kind of two sides of the same story i mean i don't know if this is quite your question um but i did a book with the rapper 50 cent right called the 50th law is my fourth book and um so the the the story combines both sides so um was this a publicist idea or your idea like well i it was kind of um a publicist put us to his age and put us together and then uh i don't like working with other people as you as you all know now and i don't like co-writing either well it's such a departure from i mean it's like oil and vinegar well there's no there's no power in it but um i really liked him i thought he was really interesting he wasn't what he i thought he would be like and i wasn't what he thought i'd be like and i thought there could be an interesting book here bringing this kid from southside queens who's a crack dealer and this middle-aged jewish boy from los angeles whose father was a chemical salesman who would ever think of putting those two things together something will happen okay so i'm starting to write the book i'm a little bit intimidated because i want to please 50. i want this so i'm focusing a lot about him i'm interviewing him and i'm writing about his business about his life and in the process i was kind of losing who i was you know and my voice and what would make the book really interesting it's supposed to be a combination and then the publisher simon and schuster they had some of the chapters together they basically said you know they cut lose the deal they said it's off we're kind of firing you in essence the contract were avoiding the contract they didn't like the content they didn't like the content they thought it was taking too long both of those things both of those things and that was really painful because up to then i had three books that were very successful i'd never really known failure on that professional level it was very painful to me what are you talking about i'm robert greene i write books come on yeah yeah and then my agent got me in touch with somebody else who was a very smart guy bob miller he was with harper back in those days and he's he led the manuscript and he said robert the problem here is that there's too much there's not enough of you in it right you need to bring more of yourself into this book and it was painful to hear but he was right i listened to him because he's an he's a very established publisher and so i go okay i'm gonna and then they said all right well i'm gonna get you a new deal with harper that's the good news the bad news is you only have eight months to write it and that's like i can't write a book in eight months never been able to do that okay but i had no choice it was like get rich or die trying you know i either succeed or this is another this will be a failure that may hurt me really hurt me in the long run and so i got into it with incredible energy and i poured myself into the book a little less 50 a bit more of me and because i only had eight months i was writing with like this urgency that i never had before i pulled it off wrote the book and it's been very very successful since then sold hundreds of thousands of copies 50 loved it so um that was kind of like a seed of failure i wasn't being myself and then true success i returned to being myself i mean we were just sitting back you know chopping it up reminiscing about the good old days and all that you know tracking my roots where i came from

Channel: Behind the Brand

Views: 277,915

Keywords: Bryan Elliott, Behind the Brand, entrepreneur, Robert Greene, Robert Greene Daily Laws, Robert Greene interview, Robert Greene 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene books, Robert Greene Behind the Brand

Id: -wWhgP2W0gY

Length: 52min 15sec (3135 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021