The 5 LAWS Of Human Nature You Can Use TODAY | Robert Greene & Lewis Howes

don't accept what you see with your eyes look for something deeper what is the meaning behind this the dark side has come out because you repressed it instead of dealing with it so the idea was you need to people are all different you're not going to change them they are who they are because of their circumstances and instead of judging everyone learn to the laws of human nature help you understand why people do what they do and robert greene breaks down in this video the advantages to using these laws in your life your relationships and your work if you enjoy this make sure to subscribe to the channel leave a like and comment your biggest takeaways below [Music] you have to be able to take every kind of negative experience or emotion in life and find a way to transmute it into something healthy and positive so how do you take that thought and turn it into something life affirming and productive and so my way is okay that very well may be i better make the most of what the time that i have because in 200 years i'm nothing right also through my books i will have a life that will go on i will have a legacy work on that think about people reading you in the future so i use it any kind of negative thing this is sort of the idea of a more fatty that i've talked about in my books any bad thing that fate brings you you have to find a way it's like alchemy using the philosopher's stone you transform that into gold through a mental process how do you think we can transform ourselves into the p the person or the people we want to become when there only seems to be negative experiences in our life i'm hearing you talk about transmuting negative into a positive how can we truly transform ourselves into this desired dream life when it seems like everything is out to get me the government isn't the way i want it to be my friends are not the right friends what do you think we can start to do to transform ourselves well i would tell people to read chapter 8 of the laws of human nature because i go deeply into that which is the law about your attitude and the idea is you have a viewpoint a perspective it's like the lens on a camera and it's through that lens that you view the world and you view people and you view events and no two people see the same event in the same way right and so your attitude how you look at the world will determine what you get in life so if you're focusing on all the obstacles if you're focusing on the government if you're focusing on covid if you're focusing on this person to give me that thing my parents didn't give me that thing that's you creating your attitude you're building it it's something it's like a crystallization process so this crystal starts getting bigger and bigger and bigger as each new crystal is added and you crystallize this negative defensive attitude towards life and that's what you're gonna get and there's simple examples of that so if i'm if i'm kind of come to this interview and i'm sort of defensive and i don't really feel good about lewis i'm not sure what's going to happen you've picked that up on me because you're a very astute person you're very sensitive you pick it up and so you're not going to be very friendly to me so my initial attitude creates a reaction which is negative it starts from me but because most people are kind of paranoid and don't have that self-awareness they'll think god louis is such an pardon i don't know yeah yeah oh yeah i'm not on television he was such an he's so cold why is he but it's coming from me and you're not realizing it so you create how people react to you you create how negative circumstances affect you yeah so you know we have covid and jobs are being wiped out left right and center you're having to spend a lot of time alone at home your life has been massively disrupted most people and you can see this as like god damn it why did this have to happen my life is ruined i'm not gonna go anywhere blah blah blah you know and you start maybe drink a little bit you start putting on some pounds that covered whatever they call it code 15 or whatever yeah right well it's understandable it is a very devastating kind of bomb that exploded here but on the other hand you could say this is an opportunity and i'm not trying to be pollyanish about it because i don't i'm not a pollyannash person as you know i wrote the 48 laws of power and i never have no one ever has to say that i'm polyamorous after i wrote that book but it's an opportunity and the opportunity is on many levels to rethink your life to rethink your values to rethink where you're going to rethink what your career should be what your relationship to other people should be it's a way it's a time to reorient yourself to who you are and what you like and what you you know what your goals are and what makes you unique it's a time to read books and enlighten yourself and enrich your mind so if you take that attitude then i mean ryan holliday wrote the best book on this subject i encourage people to read the obstacle is the way if you have that attitude where obstacles are actually the path forward nothing's going to stop you but it's all how you look at things it's kind of a mental process that you switch to seeing the positive side so a stroke is like the worst thing that happened to me it it ruined so much but it's also been a blessing in some ways because it's really made me appreciate my life and appreciate the people around me and i'm now writing my seventh book and i you know i keep having this thought that i could die tomorrow because i you know i'm i'm in a very vulnerable state for catching the coronavirus once you've had a stroke things it could happen you know i gotta get this book done man i am so motivated i'm working so hard on it because you know i see that this is like my great opportunity to express something before i before i am dead yeah so it's really just that switch inside of that lens how you look at the world that will change what you're just talking about yeah what are the greats in history what have they done when they lose a war they uh you know their a family member dies they go through a life-threatening condition what are the great presidents rulers leaders of the past what do they do in those moments of tragedy that allow them to bounce back and then rebound into something more powerful or greater than before is there common themes from the past that you've seen well abraham lincoln faced a lot of that stuff he he dealt with a lot of death early on in his life with his parents and people around him and he suffered some major setbacks um and then you can think of like winston churchill um who who also dealt with like he led a campaign a war campaign and during world war one that was a major disaster he was in disgrace and he was a very manic depressive person and he became very very depressed and he bounced back a lot of it is getting back to your attitude and towards thinking a particular way so defeat and failure is the greatest thing that could ever happen to you to say it again defeat or failure is the greatest thing that could ever happen to you why because when you're successful you tend to not learn anything you think wow my book my business got so much it did so well i've got the midas touch anything i do is going to be great and look i've got all these people around me these sycophants say robert you're wonderful you're great i love what you did your books fantastic et cetera et cetera and slowly slowly i don't learn anything and then my next project is a disaster because i've become grandious because i'm not really moored in reality failure teaches you your limits it makes you realize what you did wrong it shows you what you could do differently you know so making it a personal example because it's always easier for me to do that i did a book with 50 cent called the 50th law and the first iteration of that book i wrote and i've never had this happen before people weren't really liking it and then the editor the publisher dropped the whole project and i was facing a major disgrace 50 was going to lose faith in me i lost a project and it was a big blow to my ego and i haven't we all have egos and so we found a new publisher and he said robert we'll we'll do the book but you've got to rethink it and i need this book in eight months you want me to start all over after a year working on this book and you want it in eight months no way but then i realized okay what is it that i did wrong and he said you didn't make the book a robert green book you made it too much about 50 cent people want to read you they want to read about your your ideas they don't want it to be so much about him they wanted a combination of the two but you were you were you were being too humble here and i go okay and i listened to him and i wrote the next book and it took me i i worked like a fiend and i got it done in eight months and i took every lesson to heart about how i can fail and it taught me very valuable lessons about the books that i write and how i need to have faith in my style and my ideas and not worry that if i'm working with the celebrity that i have to give him all the attention failure taught me this and success didn't teach me anything so failure or defeat you know great generals in battle that's what they would learn but the greatest general in history i believe was napoleon bonaparte and napoleon bonaparte had 10 years of the greatest success anyone has ever had in military history from 1796 to 1806 he was on the top of the world he crowned himself emperor and then he had eight years or ten years of most abysmal failures it's because it all went to his head he lost touch with who he was he lost touch with his own military strategies that were grounded in success he became too conservative that's the other thing that success will do it'll make you conservative it will make you you have to hold on to what you've done and keep repeating it and the world success and and great things happen by being not conservative by being open with your ideas and challenging yourself and always trying something new and being willing to change so that's i think the lessons there what would you say are three questions we should ask ourselves when we face some type of tragedy some type of big loss failure near-death experience break up what do you think you said you started becoming introspective and asking yourself and changing your attitude what three questions should we ask ourselves well i don't know if i'd get to three but i'll start with one yeah the first one is could it have been worse could it have been worse it could have been worse or well you're asking me for questions yeah yeah could have been worse yeah i mean let's say um you know i broke up with the girlfriend and she had very embarrassing pictures of me and she posted them all over the internet well thank god that didn't happen you know or i could have died that's always the last one you always say could have been worse i could be dead right as long as you have your body and your mind together you can recover i tell people and you can recover from the worst possible disaster even public humiliation you can recover from because fortunately nowadays people have short memories and they'll always remember your last success so things are never as dire as they appear to be so it's could it have been worse what is the worst scenario that could have happened well luckily that didn't happen yeah the next question is like i would say what is the lesson i could learn from this so if it's a breakup with someone and i've been through them we all have it's like instead of thinking that it was just putting blame on her or yourself it's thinking of was this the right person for me there's going to be someone else right first of all maybe i wasn't actually the right person for her and maybe i was partially to blame for this so what can i learn about relationships going forward and what can i learn about what i want from a relationship maybe i want something a little more stable or maybe i need something a little more exciting to sort of see to be future oriented and that's really critical because i talk a lot of people who are going through hard times with covet is always being future oriented so we tend when we're in the moment of a bad thing like a breakup or a failure or you know like something like a disaster yeah because we're so enmeshed in the moment and when in the mesh to the moment things seem much larger than they are right it seems so big right but with time and distance if you look back two years ago it doesn't seem so big anymore right so you need some perspective and you need to understand that two years from now you'll be on to another business or you'll be on to another relationship and things will be much better so be future oriented that's one of the key things key elements about people who are very successful in life they're always sort of oriented towards the future what's the next project what can i what am i going to be doing in five or ten years as opposed to obsessed with the past i think people who have the hardest time in life are so obsessed with the past that that scumbag he he destroyed me he he ruined my last project that they hold on to all this this crap right they're so weighed down by the past their parents they whine they complain people who are future oriented it's i'm on to the next thing it's like they say in basketball next man up our star player was injured all right next player come on let's just go we got to win this game right yeah so that's sort of the thing is being future oriented and thinking like that i started it's really hard when you're in the moment of stress or breakup or chaos or you get fired from your job it's you feel like it's it's such a big deal it's so messy it's so painful it's hard to think outside of that moment when you're in it i went through a breakup a couple almost two years ago and i remember feeling like ah this is like this kind of sucks it's in the moment you know people are judging you and i just kept saying to myself over and over again i'm gonna have hindsight now i think this is i was like this is around january time i was like this might be like six to eight weeks of some like drama or whatever just gossip let me think it's gonna be new year's eve one year from today exactly like what's the lesson i'm gonna learn from this experience exactly how much stronger am i gonna be how much more how much more humility will i have you know maybe i'll connect with someone new that'll be a better relationship you know all these things i just kept saying anytime i felt like the moment was bigger than me let me have hindsight now in a year six months two years i want to be on to something else and people will either move on with me or move out of my life that's the perfect example that's exactly what i'm saying yeah i mean honestly it's hard as you said in the moment right it's very hard and so you can't beat yourself up you can't like god damn it why am i like this why can't i just be like robert or lewis said i'm not like that yeah so when things first happen and they're bad i beat myself up for several weeks but it only lasts for several weeks and then i pick myself back up so be patient and understand that right after something bad you're gonna be depressed it's okay to be depressed it's okay to feel bad about yourself to even blame yourself but you're going to pick yourself up and be patient about it you know yeah it's a process how important is expressing emotions and feelings of the greats that you've studied or the people you've been around do they express their emotions and feelings publicly do they do it privately do they journal do they suppress their emotions and just act and just have a positive attitude all the time what do you think is the importance or lack of importance well i think everybody's different but in general if my knowledge of psychology and um all the books i've read is that you pay a price for repressing your emotions that repressing something eventually comes out and the great psychologist carl jung he was the one who kind of studied that in great depth when you repress for instance your dark side of your dark emotions they come out in other ways right so try to always like present yourself as this very stoic person when in fact you're not you're going to pay a price for it it's going to come out in ways you can't control right there's going to be a negative consequences to that and so on the other hand you don't want to be this person who's constantly emoting and telling everybody what you feel like it's very irritating you have no self-control and people are judging you yeah you look like this weak person who can't control your own tongue you can't control it yeah okay so i compare it in my books and in in talks to the metaphor of the rider and the horse right so you're right the rider of the horse is your rational brain and the horse is your emotion it's the animal part of you it's what makes you angry or excited or fearful the rider is what makes you kind of you know get get things done yeah if the rider on that horse i don't know if people have ridden a horse i used to ride a lot when i was a kid if you hold the reins too tightly if you're trying to control the horse and repress it the horse feels it it feels it in the way your thighs are constricting it horses are very sensitive animals right and it won't do anything it won't follow any of your instructions it won't go anywhere or it will freak out and will run far away and it'll throw you off the horse but if you just let the horse go anywhere the horse also feels that the horse has been tamed to some extent because this guy has no respect for it right he's not trying to do anything and the horse will go wherever it wants you have no control people who know how to ride horses they know they have to have a balance you have to hold the reins not too tightly but you have to be able to guide the horse you have to squeeze with the thighs but not too tightly the horse you have to feel relaxed and one with the horse the horse that gives in and you can go anywhere so you want to balance in life you want to be able to understand your emotions right you want to be able to stand why you're angry why you're fearful why you're frustrated and not just give in to the emotion like let the horse go anywhere so that maybe next time you understand well maybe i don't need to feel anger or fear because it's not really related to anything so you have a balance you understand the horse the emotion and you can control it to some degree but not over control it or repress it because like i know if i get angry a lot i have ang i could have anger issues right mm-hmm um the moments where i give into it i regret i sent that angry email to my agent oh man the next worst yeah do you apologize a lot after you're angry or do you just kind of say i'm just a grumpy old man now just like well i am a grumpy old man but yeah i do apologize oh that's nice apologies are good it's a good thing to do yeah um but yeah i feel terrible right and so you have to go through a process like before you send that email why am i angry do your hindsight thing will i be feeling angry in three weeks no is it really important is it possibly my own fault when you go through that process you're not repressing the anger you're not pushing it down so then it explodes three days later when you yell at somebody who inadvertently crosses your path that's what happens you repress it but you understand it and you let it work for you you know okay i won't write that angry email but then you can use your anger for other things like writing a book right etc or believing in some social cause that's important yeah etc so it's a balance where's your biggest insecurity in your life whether it be when you first started writing books you know 20 years ago to where it is now well i'm very insecure like yeah but i try and turn it into something positive meaning when i finish a book i don't really know if it's if it's that good or if it's going to be successful i'm very worried that i'm not connecting to the reader to the audience and so what that does for me is i never kind of rest i'm never comfortable i never assume wow this is a masterpiece it's going to do really well and so when i'm writing the book and it's in all my books i'm thinking very very deeply about the reader how's the reader going to assimilate this information will it help him or her will it strike a chord will it resonate with their life what they think of people that they know so i'm trying to connect very very deeply to the reader because i'm insecure because i don't take them for granted i think where a lot of writers and people go wrong is they believe in their own myth they believe that what they've written is so good or that they don't have to make that effort to connect to people you know a lot of professors are experts or people who are in a particular very specific field they assume that their knowledge is you know that other people know what they know and they kind of talk down to the reader and i never try to talk down to the reader i try to elevate the right and what would you say is your main insecurity is it a fear of judgment that people may not like your writing or they may not like you or that you're not good enough or what's the probably all of it yeah yeah um you know i i kind of grew up that way um my parents were not the type to coddle me or to say you're great robert or if it came home with straight a's it's like ah so what they do very much oh wow even if you guys cared they cared but oh you can always do better even if you got a perfect score oh yeah yeah okay you could have done it faster you could have done yeah yeah it's kind of a jewish thing i have to say but um so i never felt secure about my work uh maybe when i was younger you know i tried to write i tried many different forms of writing i tried writing novels and i think in my 20s i was a little more grandiose i believed that what i was writing was really great and it wasn't it kind of sucked so it's been a process of also getting over that kind of youthful exuberance and you know taking more time and thinking more deeply about what you're doing but um i have a lot of insecurities i mean that's that's one of them yeah and you talked about detaching from our emotions is there is there more value in detaching from our emotions or because we are emotional and insecure we create better work by holding on to those emotions well that's a great question um if you didn't care do you think these books would be as as good as they are well probably the source to get back to your first question the source of my insecurity is i kind of have a desire to please people to impress them i'm just being very honest here um and this probably went back to very early on so i've always wanted to get the best grades and be the best people in the in the class but there's a there's a weakness in that it seems great you're getting straight a's you're doing well in sports etc but there's actually an insecurity of a self-doubt where you're trying to please people and maybe you go a little extra hard so in that sense compensating for your insecurities in that way can be a positive thing so my insecurity by itself could destroy me and that i would never get the effort up to make write a book or do something back from putting it out yeah because if i doubt myself maybe it's better never to try anything a lot of young people have this problem they have a negative attitude where they they think that well if i don't do anything if i just be a slacker at least i won't fail and i can kind of make i feel myself feel better that i'm the best slacker that there is you know if you don't try too hard you're never going to fail you're never going to have the pain of failure so that's the negative side of insecurity but it can also motivate you to try even harder to actually get work done and to make it something really great and to doubt yourself constantly you know which is how i kind of use that right using the doubt to push yourself to put out better work yeah i mean it probably you know i had a we can get this i had a stroke a couple months ago probably is what led to this and is not a necessarily a good thing but i worked so hard on this book five years five years testing over it every word every sentence yeah yeah and i was thinking you know um how can i make this more accessible because a lot of the information i had was from kind of heavy sources like psychologists people who were psychoanalysts who've studied human nature very deeply and they use a lot of jargon and you can't really figure out exactly what they're saying and i want to make it under readable for the average reader out there so the effort of constantly trying to connect to people is i think comes from an insecurity but it's turned into something positive yeah it's a great question i never had never been asked this before do you feel like it's worth putting out these books that reach millions of people at the detriment of potential health challenges yeah i mean if you ask me if i could have a choice of not writing the book and never having this physical problem i would have chosen writing the book really for sure why is that because i have i may be physically crippled a little bit and i'll get over it but i have this for the rest of my life i can feel really good about myself i could die tomorrow and i know that i wrote what i wanted to create i expressed what my life was meant to express so that's a great feeling that even in the worst depression i could have with my body not responding the way i want i can feel a great deal of pride that i actually got this thing done and it didn't kill me is there a way to create masterpieces without doing that and staying healthy and peaceful in your mind well you know you'd think i would have because i exercise every day you swim i swim i i mean i'm a fanatic even now with my stroke i'm exercising every day aerobically and uh eat well and i meditate wow and i you know i do everything right but it's still it's still led to this yeah it's a good question i think my next book because i am getting older yeah and this happened i'm gonna have to kind of find a better way to do it a little bit to still write something shorter with a lot of work but not maybe take five years right you know take a year now two years maybe three years three years maybe two three years yeah yeah wow so you're already thinking about the next book yeah on in the ambulance on the way home from the hospital i had an idea for my next book really what was that well it's very it's very primitive i've not really totally developed it but it's about how um how the bad things in life how negative things um are actually i mean it's similar to ryan's book but it's a different spin on it how they you actually learn more from negative than the positive yeah like you learn this is i thought in the ambulance back home i thought of all of the people i knew who handle adversity terribly i'm not going to name names sure sure some of them are related to me sure who handle adversity really badly and i thought i don't want to be them and as i thought about that i thought hmm there's something interesting in that thought like who i don't want to be we never think like that but it's actually very interesting so um and it's also getting in touch with um learning from your bad experiences but also um it's kind of a book about negativity and i know that sounds really bad and negative sure sure but how we're so attached to what we see in life to what's in front of us to what the appearances people have to their masks they wear and i want you to think of what isn't there what you're not seeing what's invisible i kind of go into it in the tr in the chapter about generations and trends in society and all my books i'm trying to tell people don't accept what you see with your eyes look for something deeper what is the meaning behind this if you're planning a strategy or making a big decision in your life what is it that you're not considering so it's kind of about negative space i know it's very primitive but i i i can promise you i'll turn it into something sure it's beautiful yeah well in sports they always talk about you know you learn more from your losses than your wins that's right you're not everything's fine when you win you're like ah everything's forgiven that's right like let's just keep doing it that's what you're losing that's when you're like okay we evaluate everything that's right well some people don't so people know how to do that but you that's how you have to profit from your losses i do that with things i've written that didn't quite work out you know i've written books that i had to completely rewrite that were dead ends like the 50 cent book i had a version of that book that we did together that wasn't working at all and i learned a lot from what i did wrong there i learned for instance the problem of that book in its first version was that i wasn't being myself i was trying to be please him more i've learned to always sort of be myself but i had to learn that by trying to be someone else so that sort of is what you're talking about [Music] how do we understand the strength of someone's character whether they're toxic whether they're they have high values besides this you know the things that we can see of like okay they broke their word or they're negative or things like that how do we really determine someone's character well the first thing you have to do the most important thing is to realize that determining people's character is the most important thing that you have to do in judging them so normally we think if someone's very charming that that's great or if they're really good looking or if they're very successful so if we're looking let's say we're looking for a business partner or a romantic partner or a colleague to work with we're going to base our decision on those kinds of appearances like people can be very good at deceiving you with being very charming and flattering or they have a brilliant resume and you'll be seduced by that and what you want to do the first step in that law is to say no that's not how i'm going to judge people my main value is their character and the strength of their character and character is something from deep deep deep within the word character comes from the greek um kairos which means to carve and character is something really deeply carved inside the person it's who they are at their core it creates patterns of behavior that they can't even really control it's who they are genetically it's who they are from the early values of their parents so you want to connect to that you want to see that it's not immediately visible to you because people will disguise their character you want to see that and you want to value it more than anything else and what you want are people with strong character and what that means is people they have an expression for metal they call it tensile where a metal is stronger if it can give a little bit and it's because if something is too rigid it breaks so you want people who are adaptable who can be fluid who aren't weak because that metal isn't weak who have an inner strength and a core to them but they can bend they can learn they can adapt they can change you want to see people um who are empathetic you know who who know how to get along with other people so if you have two people to choose and one has a glittering resume but the other person understands human nature and is superior in a social sense and can also has a good work ethic you choose that other person you don't choose necessarily the person with that glittering resume um and so the one one of the things you look for are patterns in people in judging their character because people reveal themselves in the past they reveal who they are through their actions they try and disguise it but they reveal it so i say in that chapter nobody ever does anything once so let's say you have a friend who does something kind of nasty to you they talk behind your back then they'll say oh robert robert that was just something came over that isn't me you know i'm sorry about that that just happened circumstances made me do that and you'll be likely to believe them but the fact is if they've done that once they've probably done it many times if people gossip and you hear them gossiping about other people they'll probably eventually gossip about you so you want to be able to look at people's patterns and look at their past and see trends and understand that if they've done certain things in the past they will continue to do them because we humans have compulsive behavior we are compelled to repeat the same mistakes over and over and over again how do we how do we stop that pattern if we recognize it within ourselves my character's been off i've been doing something you know for years a certain way that i don't want to do anymore how do we do it so we can strengthen our character but also say you know what i believe this other person can have a stronger character through breaking a pattern or is it just not possible of course it's possible at the end of every chapter i show you how you can turn this potentially negative quality into a positive quality so when it comes to you and your own patterns you have to first realize that you have these patterns before you can even begin to break them so awareness yeah honesty this book about awareness and being honest with yourself if you don't admit that you have these patterns then you can't possibly break them i know in writing books i have terrible terrible patterns like what well stressing so much over things that aren't that important obsessing stressing obsessing i take note cards for everything that i read all my research and i take way too much too much information i have like thousands of them writing i have to stop and i say stop being so such a perfectionist it's it's like you're wasting your time it's been book after book after book i'm very aware of it and i'm very aware of breaking that pattern but you have to see it and be honest with yourself in order to break it you know right so that's the first step is is seeing the pattern and then not struggling against it not trying to be somebody who you're not but finding a way to use that pattern to use that problem to your advantage similar to what ryan holliday wrote in his book the obstacle is the way i have an example in the book of um an actress joan crawford from the hollywood classical period and she had a very troubled childhood um didn't know her father her mother beat her men abused her etc and she managed to take and it was creating terrible patterns in her life and she found a way to turn that around to use all of those disadvantages and make them make herself much stronger and very powerful performing by bringing all of the pain in her childhood into her acting by becoming so focused on the director because she had been abused she was very sensitive to other people she used that sensitivity to focus on the director and other actors to be in tune with them to connect with them to build a relationship essentially yeah she was very aware of her own weaknesses and her own fragility and she was able to use that as a strength so with other people it's never hopeless i mean some people are toxic i talk a lot of their about toxic characters people those are the kinds of people who can't really change their patterns are too ingrained and we've all met people like that we've all had to deal with the narcissist who's so deeply self-absorbed there's nothing that's ever going to save them or pull them out of that that's self-absorption unless they have like a near-death experience or they have someone close to them that's true you know something that's true big awakening that's true or they get sick or whatever right you're right that happens that does happen sometimes sometimes it does but you have to be honest that there are people out there you can't be naive there are people out there who are toxic who are dangerous who can ruin your life you hire the wrong person and i've i've dealt with a lot of in my consulting with a lot of people who hired a business partner who ended up sort of taking the business from them very common scenario you have to not be naive and recognize these toxic types and often it's best not to try and change them because trying to change them entangles you in a lot of their drama and it just it's just never gonna happen you might be trying for years and wasting your time and energy but you know people have to be able to to change themselves you know they have to be motivated you can help illuminate some of their patterns and their problems but it has to come from within yeah now you talk about the law of self-sabotage yeah and you know we could self-sabotage ourselves by attracting toxic people but also what are other ways that we sabotage ourselves well um it's this is a chapter about your attitude in life right and um the point of that chapter is related to human nature is none of us see the world in the same way so you and i could go watch a movie it's the same movie that we're watching i love it i see something you hate it you see something else you don't experience it the same way we're watching the same world the same reality but we experience it differently everybody you meet is experiencing their world differently than you are so you have an attitude that colors what you see and some people have an attitude that tends towards the negative and i describe a negative attitude to something that's closed so you're not open to new experience you're trying to close that lens you once you have certain beliefs certain ideas about life and you're not willing to change them right because that gives you a sense of security and so you want an attitude that's expansive where you accept people you're not always judging them you're not negative about them you understand that people can't necessarily help who they are um you're open to change you're open to being to having adventure and that kind of attitude kind of gives you a certain degree of freedom so that the worst thing that happened to you and you're able to transform that into something good so um your question was how do we recognize when we're sabotaging ourselves and what's the things we do most to self-sabotage well um if we have a setback or a failure in life which is inevitable do we do one of two things do we analyze ourselves and see what we did wrong and how we could change ourselves or do we immediately look outward and blame other people that person screwed me society doesn't like me because of these circumstances i'm i'm screwed and i can never help it it's the world it's not me that's a self-sabotaging pattern of behavior because if you're always pointing fingers at other people and blaming them you're never going to learn from your experiences and you're going to end up being quite bitter so that's probably one of the most the main sources of the self-sabotaging so you could easily say this stupid bee that stung my neck that caused this blood clot and this high pressure in me i blame the bee for this stroke that i have screw you b or you could take responsibility and say well what did i do to my health leading up to the bee sting you know for years and taking full ownership and responsibility that's what i'm hearing yeah that's what you're hearing yeah the story and the perception around the experience the way you see that movie playing out well having a positive attitude around it and ref being and reflecting about you the role that you played and what happened so we can't we're not in charge of everything that happens in life there are circumstances that are beyond our control right but a lot of what does happen to us is something that we do that we are responsible for there are amazing studies about the role of attitude and what happens to you in life so they have this thing called the pygmalion effect teachers who treat a student as if they are smart and going to do well those students end up doing well right so how you treat people how you think about yourself has a great impact on what happens to you when doctors prescribe a new medication there's always the same trend that when a new medication has been invented the success rate is like 80 percent because people believe in it because it's new and then like two years later it starts going down because it's not yeah it's a placebo effect so if you believe something is going to work if you believe that you are great and you you deserve good things that you are a good student you will end up making those things happen so how you look at yourself will often determine what ends up happening to yourself so if you're talking about what what causes self-sabotage if you go through life thinking god i'm not really that good you know there's something wrong with me i don't really deserve good things i don't deserve to have a lot of success or to have a lot of money people read that off of you a major theme in this book is that we are masters at reading people's body language and non-verbal behavior so when somebody feels that they don't deserve things it's kind of an off-putting quality in them and it pushes people away so you create self-fulfilling dynamics by how you look at yourself and your attitude i had a chapter in the 48 laws of power called think like a king to be treated like one and there's a story of christopher columbus who came from dirt poor poverty but imagined that he was royalty and by imagining that people started treating him like that and as they treated him like that he felt even more kind of greater about himself and he was able to so to convince the king of portugal to give him these ships when in fact he was sort of a mediocre uh captain so your attitude and how you think about yourself sort of determine how people treat you and what happens in life [Music] confront your dark side and make it work for you as opposed to repressing it right so everybody has a dark side i don't care if you're mahatma gandhi or or whomever you have a dark side right and um it comes out in ways that you're not even aware of and i explained in the book where our dark side originates from you know as a child we had a lot of powerful emotions that we couldn't control we would hit our sister we'd play terrible practical jokes and are not talking personally yeah terrible practical jokes we'd be kind of mean aggressive but also we'd be very loving which is true as well would be a full range of things and then you learn as you get older robert you can't hit people in school stop that don't be like that don't play those practical jokes it's bad people don't like it and you get older and older and you start repressing that those kind of feelings that are very natural to you right because we all have aggressive impulses we all we we love our parents but there's also a side of us that doesn't like them we resent them it's natural but we have to repress all that because we have to be good social animals we have to be good little kids we have to be little angels at school we have to be angels at work all this pressure like i've got to repress all that i've got to be this perfect person i have to be someone who pleases who's very nice blah blah blah and then when you're 28 you start becoming addicted to alcohol and you don't know why you start getting really angry you have anger issues you yell at people you don't know why you you're like a 45 year old person with a very steady profession you leave your wife and you run off with a 19 year old you know you know destroying everything that you've built the dark side has come out because you've repressed it instead of dealing with it so the idea was you need to understand your dark side confront it and make it work for you and i have a dark side i have you know every chapter in the book you know sometimes now i think my answer wasn't the right answer but i'll go with it anyway it's all good um in writing the book i kept having to say i wrote a chapter on narcissism robert you're a narcissist you know i wrote a chapter on on uh on the dark side i go robert you have a dark side the same thing with the chapter on aggression and like what is my dark side and you know i had to analyze it and deal with it and think about it and think about how i my any success i've had in life is because i managed to use those that dark those dark emotions in my work and channel them because they have tremendous energy to them they power you forward so i had anger coming out of working in hollywood i kind of hated the environment i hated people's hypocrisy i hate all the sycophancy and all that i was really angry but i didn't let the anger turn inward i channeled it into the 48 laws of power so i used my dark side and i really liked that law because it showed me that i'm a victim of this but i also unconsciously learned how to use what i'm what i'm writing about so i kind of drew on my own experience yeah i love that you talk about this because there's so many great artists that write songs that become hits and you know big best-selling books and movies out of pain right out of a breakup out of a drug addiction out of rehab out of whatever this painful thing that happens to them and they express from their pain and it somehow connects to other people in the world to their pain and becomes this hit whatever be a song or video or movie do you think anger resentment frustration is a greater power to create over love or if we came from a place of love could it be that much more powerful our creation well that's a great question and it really depends on who you are um you know sometimes those those dark energies have more kind of ener you know power behind them they impel you they do and and love it's just kind of mel you know love doesn't necessarily make you want to write a book although it it can but for me personally i'm speaking from personal experience it wasn't love that made me want to write a book it was anger and bitterness right i'll show you yeah yeah i'll show you eventually whereas you know i love this yeah it's not gonna and the reason why that happens is people in our day-to-day life are so repressed we have to be so politically correct we have to be so pleasant and smiling etc that when your work expresses anger or expresses pain people love it they're drawn to it because finally someone's expressing what i'm feeling but no one else is talking about you know right that's powerful yeah yeah you know the person that i think a lot about in the dark side is kobe bryant and i was going to talk to him about it when i if i could have um because he confessed this he had a lot of dark energy he had a lot of anger and he was so competitive he wanted to crush you on the basketball court and he spoke of it in those terms it wasn't like a friendly little basketball game this was war but like michael jordan he tried he transmuted he channeled this energy into being a good teammate and to just defeating the other team working as a good player a colleague with his other his teammates but he learned to channel it early on it kind of destroyed him a little bit it kind of ruined his relationship with shaq in a way but then he learned that that darkened that anger etc was the source of his power it's kind of like star wars and jedi type thing you know and how you you use that that dark energy and transform it into something positive do you think there's a basketball player or an athlete or someone who could not have dark energy and anger could have love who could be just like i'm just grateful for my my family my my wife my kids like my health and i'm just gonna go out and channel my gifts to serve to inspire because i love the sport do you think there's no no you think you think anger is the way it's like chant learning the channel anger and competitiveness and ambition and the desire to win you know um is a very powerful motivating factor very powerful um you know maybe if you're an ice skater or a sport like that where you're working in pairs and something dancing or yeah you don't maybe want to have that kind of issue i can get that but like football or basketball or even baseball you know i don't think so and all the the greats that i've studied all are pretty much a very similar profile and there have been examples of players who don't have that that drive who are more kind of into being friendly and nice and loving and they don't go nearly as far i'm afraid to say it the greatest players lebron james is probably the greatest player now you're from cleveland right i'm from columbus but ohio ohio that's all we're ohio yeah are you a laker fan i'm a laker fan now because of lebron okay i'm a lebron fan okay well me too now um yeah but that guy is driven driven right you can see in his face he doesn't want to lose he's not going out there with love in his heart i mean he's a very generous person he's a very loving person outside basketball but on the court no i don't think he's an animal yeah he's an animal on the court it's interesting because i was very anger driven from my teens to my 20s maybe a little bit my early 30s i was driven by anger to compete to be the best to win but it always left me it left me achieving and accomplishing and kind of proving people wrong but it always left me feeling like still unfulfilled inside how can someone be driven by anger or frustration bitterness and achieve and feel peace at the same time is that possible yeah because that's not the goal in in it is not like beating other people and humiliating them that's the dark side and that's giving into the dark side the goal is to be the best at your sport to win a championship and then to give back to the community to make a lot of money and then donate a lot of it or become you know like lebron has done with the schools in ohio etc to be a good role model but when you reach the top you have that luxury and so it's more like what are you doing this for so when i had my 48 laws before i'm sorry to talk always about myself it's kind of the narcissist in me it's all good i admit it um you know it wasn't about making fun of all those hollywood executives who i disliked then it wouldn't have been the book that it was it was i want to help people i want to use my energy my frustrations to show people that they don't have to suffer the way i suffer other people suffer in the work world fears are the laws of power you don't have to be so naive you can understand that you don't need to never outshine the master so i was able to put my energy in there and get some of my yayas out in doing it but for a higher purpose to help people right i think that's the difference right yeah and so i tell people you feel anger but there's a lot of injustice in this world particularly nowadays right a lot of things are just wrong in this world today and if i were young i would my anger would be exploding because there's so much that's wrong channel it into a worthy cause into justice into leading some kind of movement that's a brilliant way to take your dark energy and metamorphize it into something really positive yeah believe it or not because in my last book martin luther king was one of my heroes that i wrote about he had some of those frustrations and some of that anger you know he grew up in in atlanta where there wasn't as much racism because he was in a relatively good neighborhood his father was a preacher he was sh he saw racism but he was a little bit shielded from it and then he had his first encounters particularly when he went up north to like boston believe it or not it was in the north and he had his first real encounters he had a few before that but and then he's like god he was really angry about it really it really was an eye-opener and he learned that he couldn't give in to that kind of emotion what he was going to do with his life is he was going to use it to help blacks and the sun was going to return to the south his path he thought was to stay in in boston new england because it was like cushy etcetera but then he realized no i've got to take all this bitterness that i feel and i've got to go back to the south at the risk of my own life and help my my people you know so working for a cause is probably the best way you can channel some of that dark energy so how do we be angry about a cause but not being a prisoner to that thing that unjust thing that's happening in the word the world is there a way we can still like be angry and in movement and creation mode but not be a prisoner to that situation what would be what would being a prisoner mean um i think like allowing it to affect you emotionally to consume you to control you to make you focused on that thing all the time as opposed to just well it's where your energy is is it about you is it about you and your emotions and your anger or is it about helping people and about the cause so is it for something greater than yourself and if it's for something greater than yourself then you're not a prisoner of it because you're you know you're you're getting outside your own ego and you're actually actually working to help people okay but i can tell you a lot of social movements and revolutions if you want to call it are reform movement they peter out because they lose energy they lose a drive the initial impetus sort of isn't quite there and you've got to be able to keep it alive you know how do you keep it alive because you you you feel nothing has changed the injustice is there i mean look at someone like martin luther king what he had to put up with constantly constant failures constant rejection everybody cr he dealt with so much envy it was insane even people within the movement were constantly belittling and criticizing him but he kept his uh minds focused on the greater prize the ultimate goal which is what you want to focus on but you have to use that energy or it's going to peter out because life will wear you away you'll get older you relax you don't want to you know you don't want to have to spend so much time doing this you know and you you get soft and the energy dries up and you need that energy every time i write a book i'm starting from ground zero and i'm going okay robert what's going to motivate you what's like something that really irritates you and it makes you angry and pissed off right yeah okay because now feeling that you're going to get over that mountain of writing the book and you're going to feel every time you write a chapter you're going to feel that emotional kind of thing in your gut and you're going to express it but i'm not doing it for me it's because i know it's going to help people you know yeah so for my new book i'm really frustrated and irritated by how limited people are about their thinking and i'm not blaming people because i have the same problem it's like the world is this insanely awesome thing to be alive do you know what it means to be alive do you know how everything had to fall into you know go back to the big bang which is what i'm writing about now and all the little pieces that had to fall into place for life even happening on the earth and then for animals and then for a giant asteroid to hit earth you know some 70 million years ago so the dinosaurs are wiped out none of this had you wouldn't be here lewis wouldn't be here if your parents hadn't met so your life is like this insanely unlikely thing that ever happened do you know how awesome it is to how awesome it is to look out and see stars in the sky or things around you and people are not they're locked in their little banal worlds of social media center they're not opening their minds up to what it means to really be alive and it makes me angry that's good so i'm gonna that's why i'm gonna write the book what's the title of this book are you sharing that yet or not yeah the love is sublime so it's about how we can think differently or how we can open our minds to possibilities yeah it's it's to reanimate your soul so you feel excited about things so you feel like you know when you were a child you were curious about so many things you were open so many experiences things were constantly wowing you and then you become blase and kind of cynical and you don't want new experiences because they kind of mess with your familiar patterns and then your life kind of closes and closes and closes and the sublime is opening your mind up as far as possible as wide as possible and opening your mind and your spirit like that makes you more creative makes you more energized makes you a better human being etc and so i have to write a book with a sense of purpose i don't write books for money i swear on the bible i do not write books for money the money comes in and i'm very happy it's comfortable but i don't write going what's the most marketable book i can do next it's like what do i need to express in this moment you know yeah what does sublime mean what is the definition well you really want to get into the weeds there um it comes from the latin word sublime and there's several meanings of it but the one that i like is the lehman is the is what's called a threshold it's like a door that leads from one place to another right and sub means right up to so sublime is right up to the limit and the way i interpret it is is that that door is death itself on the other side is death and so i i draw a kind of i have a metaphor it'll be through the book and on the cover of a kind of a circle right and just we tend to our brains tend to work in these kind of conventional patterns our minds our thoughts etc right and that circle is where the limits that we will not go past we will not think thoughts beyond that we'll stay in the circle yeah and won't go beyond it right just beyond it is this region of the sublime and it goes in very different arrows and each arrow is a chapter but the main arrow is death itself and when you go up to that door and you appear on the other side you see something that's going to shake you up that's that it's going to transform you like a transformed me right you're going to realize how short your life is how weird it is to be alive the possibilities of what it means to actually die near-death experiences are pretty pretty awesome amazing things people have had near-death experiences and they've been completely enlightened by them right and so that's the ultimate sublime experience is going up to that threshold of death itself one of the most powerful parts of this whole book in my mind and in life is are you enrolling people in your vision in in being the king or queen and getting the ships that you want are you are you stepping up and enrolling people and getting people to say yes to you yeah or your dreams or hire you or date you or marry you yeah or are you not showing up in a way that people want to say yes to you right and i feel like key question my whole business has been built on getting people to say yes when i had nothing you know i was on my sister's couch ten years ago yeah no money yeah no skills no degree and it was an energy that i had to learn how to just get people to say yes and more and building momentum around that so i'd love to talk about this becoming a master persuader and the first thing you talk about is which i think most people aren't doing you say is to deepen your listening and get a better listener most people don't have the patience to care about someone else they're so concerned about what they think about them well people always talk about being a better listener and their advice is usually very weak i mean it does ineffective because okay i've become a better listener yeah i'll try that but it's very hard to overcome certain patterns so i try to tackle the question of why is it that you're not a good listener and at the root of that is you're more interested in yourself than you are in the other person you won't deny that you will say oh no no that's not me that's not me i really like people but the truth is you're more interested in your own thoughts and your own ideas things that you're so certain about your own experiences than about that other person and what they're saying what's going on inside them if you can flip that around if you can actually feel the motivation to get inside lewis and get inside his head in his experience then you will suddenly will become a better listener that's the key not just telling people to listen more the key is the quality of the listening and the emotion involved so if i feel i want to get inside that other person inside their life then suddenly you will start listening what will make you interested in other people well first off is the idea you don't know them normally when you're let's say you're on a first date with someone or you're just meeting someone you have assumptions about them you create a simplified version of who they are and that's what you think you know and that'll stay with you forever instead you want to think that person is more interesting than i imagine i their first appearance isn't really who they are they're like a book that i could read we love going to movies and getting inside other characters and what motivates them being taken along for a ride think of the people that you meet in life as a character in a movie you want to know what motivates them they are more interesting than you think they've had traumas they've had problems from their early childhood they have fantasies they have a shadow a dark side to their personality they're not revealing they're more complicated and interesting than you think so if you're motivated to understand what makes them tick their experience suddenly you will start listening yeah so that's the key to me and it's not easy why is it so hard for people because for me it's it's been an easy thing because i've used my insecurity of not feeling like i was smart enough growing up because i was one of the poorest students in school yeah so i was like my voice doesn't matter as much let me just ask smart people what they think right and it became a huge advantage for me right because i've learned that being the most interested person in the room you become the most interesting well the key is really so much in the book is are you motivated to change yourself do you want to become successful in life this book is trying to realign your priorities and how you look at the world normally your focus is on yourself and on your work and the techniques in your work you know the the skills you have to master and i'm telling you the key to success in life is people we're a social animal you know or like dogs or wolves or whatever chimpanzees we're a social animal and how we interact with people will determine how far we get you can be brilliant at hacking computers or whatever but if you're terrible with people your life is going to be hell so you are you motivated to become somebody supremely skilled at understanding and working at peop with people that's the whole point of the book you have to buy into that you have to buy into the fact that you're usually bad at dealing with people you're not seeing who they are you're seeing reflections of your own your own fantasies or projections you have to admit that you're not good at dealing with people and you need to improve if you're that if you understand that and you want to change and you're motivated to get out of your shell then you can make that leap i'm a big advocate of baby steps you're not going to suddenly transform yourself into bill clinton overnight right right remember every thousands of people's names and yeah or suddenly become a great listener so every day you give yourself little tests so you have now lunch with this person who you normally find kind of boring all right for ten minutes i'm gonna i'm gonna shut off my internal monologue and i'm gonna force myself to listen to them and i'm gonna glean some information some nugget about their character that i never understood before i'm gonna ask them about their childhood i'm not going to be like cl it's it's not going to be that kind of inquisition where i'm asking them you know penetrating questions but in a relaxed mood i'm going to find out about something that that really motivates them or something deep or some traumatic experience they had you force yourself day by day to take little baby steps in which you try to learn something about people that you didn't know before yeah and get interested in them in their experiences i think a lot of people are asking the wrong questions too i think you got to start learning to ask different questions like what what do you mean i think a lot of questions are very service-y and i know you wanted to keep it relaxed as well you don't need to be like tell me your data yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's also there's ways you can start opening that up and i think for me i know if i want to get the most out of someone i have to give the most myself i have to start with vulnerability or opening up in certain ways i can't just expect someone else to open up if i don't but i think certain questions like if you're meeting someone for the first time as opposed to what do you do or where do you work it's what are you most excited about right now yeah or what's something you've been having a challenge with in your life well the thing i tell people to look for because i'm a very big believer in non-verbal communication in the course of a conversation if you keep it kind of open and flowing people's eyes will light up when a certain topic is mentioned it could be their children it could be their work it could be their parent it could be something in their life that their whole body language changes they relax i know if you suddenly asked me about the los angeles lakers i would be excited i would be very excited because that's one of my deep passions in life is basketball in the lakers yeah the people you got my hometown guy lebron james oh you're from cleveland i'm from ohio wow ohio but i how do you feel about this i feel bittersweet because i wish he stayed in cleveland oh you did i wanted to win one more there but you know i live in la now so it's nice that he's here at least and then i can go to some games and watch him that's right because i didn't get to go watch games and cleat ones so that's right so i'm like you know if he's gonna go anywhere this is that's right that's right that's good yeah yeah i never used to like lebron but now i love him but now you love him greatest player in the world yes for sure so you light up about that look at you're getting excited talking you can see it if somebody inadvertently brought that up they could see like oh wow man i like to talk for hours about the lakers you know but there everybody has a topic like that it could be something a little more intellectual more interesting than sports but look for you're not paying attention to people's body languages and other things so as an observer as a good listener you're not just hearing their words you're looking at their eyes their facial expressions i have a chapter on that how to differentiate between the fake smile and the genuine smile wow and then it's it's very real you know a real smile lights up the whole face it alters how the eyes look you want to see when you've hit something like that or when you've done the opposite you get that kind of scowling micro expression uh you right but people aren't observant they're they're in their own shell they're not seeing people are constantly giving out signs of their likes their diversions you know their values and you're missing them because you're not paying attention is it because we're too obsessed with how we look or what other people are judging about us is that why we're closed off or not observant i think it becomes kind of a habit and that's the main part of it that we're worried about how we look and how they're judging us but also part of that habit is you know life is difficult in this world in the modern world we're absorbing too much information on our phones et cetera and and and it's very you know competitive world out there so naturally we turn inward naturally we're thinking about ourselves we're thinking about what we need to do you know our own anxieties or they're talking and i'm thinking about i have to i can't change that appointment tomorrow kind of thing because you're thinking about your own problems etc and naturally so but the whole thing is is my books are all about getting outside of yourself and finding other people more interesting than yourself in some ways yeah i'm always doing that yeah you don't you don't need this book yeah i know this is great though i i think you you know for me i do need this book because there's always another level of like what am i missing what am i not seeing and how can i get to where i want to be faster you talk about inspect people with the proper mood yeah what does that mean and how do we do this well this is a key to influence and persuasion i'm trying to make the case in this book about human nature that we are animals that we have an animal side to our nature that you have to understand and we are extremely vulnerable to the emotions and moods of other people i trace that back to how we evolved as primates and the need our ancestors had for understanding the moods of the people in the group or the tribe before language was invented so we're extremely vulnerable to the moods and attitudes of other people if someone visits us and they're in a depressed mood it will tend to lower our energy we've all had the experience think of it yourself you go through life and you encounter 10 different people and there's always one in those 10 people that kind of makes you feel happy the moment you meet them an old friend or whomever while you're smiling you're laughing though your mood changes and there's one in 10 that every time you meet them they feel like man your mood changes in a bad way well it's because you're feeling something it's not just the fact that you're a friend there's something nonverbal going on our moods are extremely contagious and so you can persuade people more through you infecting them with your mood than through your words true words are not necessarily the best means of of influence energy energy the way you show up attitude it's like if there's a negative room or people having a negative conversation there's 10 people and someone enters it with a positive energy and just starts connecting with each person you see the mood lift in a positive way right but it could also be if everyone's having a good time and one person comes down and it's like just being negative and taking everyone down and saying stupid stuff you're like we've all been through that then everyone's mood goes down again goes back to life as an enrollment game you're either enrolling people in the way you want to show up or they're enrolling you and that energy well so this this should be like a really exciting concept to you with the reader because what it means is you can you can alter people by how you approach them with your energy absolutely right so i mean i wrote about that a lot in the art of seduction um errol flynn was probably the greatest seducer that ever lived if we counted the number of women he slept with it's close to 3 000. wow and he only died when he was 50. so if you do the math it's pretty insane he was an unbelievable seducer and i researched this as deeply as i could why and women would write memoirs about it and they would mention their experience they said being around errol flynn was like having drunk three martinis he was so relaxed and so comfortable with himself he had a kind of animal spirit where he was just really himself and very comfortable very open that being around him you just you felt all of your resistance and all your defenses just melting away there were other greats to do like duke ellington was like that so on the level of seduction and and male or female how you approach them your mood more than what you say about yourself and your own insecurities will have a much greater impact more than the pickup lines or whatever it's the i believe so their confidence a relaxed undefensive quality is will will go very far i remember how did he how did he die alcohol wow he was just he's a major alcoholic he drank himself to death probably was unfulfilled huh it's probably unfulfilled well yeah you know 3000 women it could be kind of it gets kind of soulless afterwards gosh he was a great he's a very interesting character but i remember i was in paris when i was 21 i was living there i was working in a hotel there was a man it was a hotel where all the models stayed there was this brazilian man who was obsessed with all the models in the hotel and he was the greatest seducer i've ever seen in my life and one day i was walking down the street with him and some other friends and this other woman came running up she realized he was a seducer and was not had not been honest and was cheating on her and i will never forget how he responded he was so relaxed and so undefensive about it and he didn't apologize he was just this is who i am more or less in his body language and she completely relaxed and changed you know and i thought god normally it would have been this yelling match and he completely defused it with his sort of relaxed attitude you know so it's a whole language that you need to master is how your moods infect other people and i tell people experiment with that yeah normally with this one person you're locked in a dynamic where you always are kind of reacting the same way try next time approaching them with a completely different mood think something differently about them suddenly force yourself to think that this person is really really like good-looking and exciting and seductive and you'll see that you're thinking of them in a certain way will change how they respond to you wow as opposed to being defensive and guarded and reactive and angry judgmental yeah and you said you do not judge other people you accept them as they are well that's a key throughout the whole book you're not going to influence people if you're judging them right that's the key through the whole book the book starts with a quote from schopenhauer meaning that if you come across people who are bad just think of them as or as toxic just think of them as a sort of kind of mineral that you're that you're encountering that you're a scientist people are all different you're not going to change them they are who they are because of their circumstances and instead of judging everyone learn to accept them and to kind of understand that you you are fatal you are flawed and so are they so kind of get rid of your superiority yeah because that's not going to influence them if you're trying to persuade them to do something judging them and making them wrong is only going to make people more defensive right well that's true but the other point is your superior your sense of superiority is usually not justified i'm making the point in this book the the number one thing about human nature is that we tend to deny that there is such a thing i'm not aggressive i'm not narcissistic i never feel envy i don't have a bad side to me it's the other people right right i don't have any of these bad qualities we all do that we all yeah you have these qualities as well as anyone else if you can be honest with yourself you'll be a little more humble and realize you're not so perfect and not superior which will make you less judgmental about other people before we continue this video make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day what do you think is the greatest skill or a couple skills that any 20 to 30 year old kind of in their 20s should be learning how to master today from the skills of psychology the skills of human nature the skills of understanding people which skill should that be the the best thing is to be able to get inside the minds of other people if you develop that skill the sky's the limit nothing will ever stop you because people are like a mystery they wear a mask and you don't have any idea what they're thinking and i have this metaphor in human nature which i never wrote but imagine a device was created in which some app that you could not know the thoughts and feelings of the other person do you know the power you would have be insane okay you're not i can't give you such an app i can't invent that but you can develop half of that power by becoming someone of insane empathy and it's not easy and not everybody's born the same way but it begins with a one very simple step and that is normally you go around more interested in your own thoughts and ideas you're thinking about your boss you're thinking about your girlfriend or boyfriend you're thinking about this person who said this that or the other and you're locked in your head and it's like a record like in the old final days going around and round around the same grooves right and even when you're sitting there talking with someone on a date or something you're thinking about yourself you're still in there right because you find yourself more interesting than the other person and it's very human i'm not judging it but inevitably you think your own dramas your own ideas your own problems are essentially more interesting than the other person so if that's the that's your starting position you're naturally going to be more absorbed in yourself you can just switch it around and you tell yourself the other person is more interesting than me their life their thoughts their ideas it's like an undiscovered world it's like going to tahiti or something and visiting another culture they have experiences you've never had they have a world that's not your world it's fascinating why do people love movies they love movies because they get to go inside other people's characters and they get to vicariously live in them it's voyeurism you can have that in everyday life if you switch that thing where you're more interested in other people and so when you listen to them you're not listening with the idea of do they like me are they thinking about me what does that have to do with me i'm sorry using that voice you know blah blah blah blah kind of a windy voice what's it about me me me me thinking just in a zen way absorb yourself in their words and their energy and think about what what they're saying what's the subtext behind them what's the body language revealing what is it that motivates them what is their inner life like i can't get inside lewis howe's thoughts it's impossible but i can get inside your moods and emotions because we humans are very susceptible to the moods of other people we can feel them so i can start to if i'm open enough i can understand the tone in your voice i can understand the subtext of what you're saying and i could pick up the emotion behind it and what you're intending and once i do that well then if someone says something i don't have to take it personally because now i understand that it probably comes from other things that have nothing to do with me yeah or i want them i want to persuade them to help me on a project well now i know what their world is like what their spirit is what their problems are i'm gonna mold what i'm saying to plea to get them interested in my idea doors open up to you left right side the whole universe opens up to you once you put you're able to put yourself in the mindset and the point of view of other people enter their spirit that's the single greatest step you can have so you're about to start your first job and you're all insecure and you're all worried about you and what people think about you try me it's not easy it's not natural try and make that switch and don't think about yourself and try and figure out what is your boss like what is he or she what are they what is motivating them what are their insecurities what are their doubts what is this person feeling that and suddenly you're gonna navigate this social environment in a much different level i love this this is powerful i think so to get in the minds of other people would be the greatest skill by far and the way to do that i'm hearing you say is through empathy through asking interesting questions through listening no it's taking this one step which is other people are more interesting than me i love going to see movies that other person is like hannibal lecter i'm sorry that's not that's not a good choice sure could be but or they're like this other character in some other movie i don't know choose whichever one you want right betelgeuse there you go okay wow that was a long time ago yeah i remember just thinking of a fascinating character they're like that they have a they have stories they have drama right their childhood was probably weird they come from a culture from a city from a background that's not your city or background and to try and understand it now some people are harder to do that with than others there are people out there who are like just total and you don't really want to have to get into the world right you feel like you're getting yourself taking a shower of mud or something or excrement or whatever you don't want to get into the world but even then it pays if you've got a psychotic boss it pays to get inside their mind so that you don't take things personally so you can understand where they come from so even with horrible people being able to understand who they are will will prevent you from taking everything personally so having the understanding that other people are more interesting than me having that framework in your mind allows you to look at them differently or as interesting right they have stories to tell they have a life that's that's fascinating they're like a character in a movie i want to understand it and asking questions allows you to understand it you have to be careful with questions because if you're so obvious if you're going tell me about that yeah yeah so did you did you love your mother did your father be here yeah so how do we get to know them without being intrusive well it's an art so um you know people love to talk about their childhood right and their successes and yeah yeah but i found like childhood is the main thing everyone has this kind of emotional attachment to their experiences as a child to where they grew up to their parents to their family to their earliest friends it's got all sorts of emotions surrounding it that are very potent yeah and uncontrollable so a very kind of slip in question about someone's childhood and then asking a few leading questions and letting them do the talking so if you're peppering them with questions you look like a lawyer or someone who's or someone like me who just interviews people for a living right so you want them to do 90 percent you can't 90 that it's obvious what you're doing 80 or so people love to talk right if they do 70 of the talking they're not even aware that they're doing that but you're letting them talk you're letting them be the star but you find a foothold into their what excites them and you get them to talk and open up about their childhood and then occasionally a question and then occasionally you go into your own life to sort of show oh yeah you had that i had something very kind of similar mirroring people is a slightly manipulative trick i don't doubt that i talk about that in seduction but it's very powerful they're starting telling you things about their childhood that are powerful you go yeah i had something very similar and you probably have had something similar yeah that's a really potent way of connecting to people but you've got to be subtle it's an art to getting people to talk and open up to finding that thing that lights their face up that gets them excited you know yeah i think uh the book influenced by cialdini i don't know if you've studied that book but just likeability allows you to is one of his main i think it's seven or eight keys of influence but he talks about likability and the more someone can see that they like you through mirroring or through yeah we have one thing in common makes them like you more yeah so finding that commonality social proof there's like a bunch of other things um i can't remember all seven of them but yeah likability is one of the biggest things it's one of the reasons why i'm just always trying to have fun just be playful and kind of ease the moment for people so they can feel like oh this is relaxing and fun and playful well i must admit that's why you're a good interviewer and i know that because i've had i've been with many bad interviewers who are kind of tense and nervous and defensive and they're insecure right and they make you feel that way and you but you have an energy that kind of brings out that part of at least for me that's good if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here if you don't have a goal you suffer and then you get cruel and bitter and resentful and then you start to actively try to make the world a worse place

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 276,642

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, robert greene interview, robert greene, robert greene motivation, robert greene 48 laws of power, robert greene mastery, robert greene laws of human nature

Id: 58lPBudZQmE

Length: 92min 6sec (5526 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021