The Exemplary Figures of History

as someone who's read probably way too many books there are lots of historical figures and philosophers who've had a major impact on my work many of them who you know very [Music] well and the following is a compilation of all those moments in which I've discussed these very influential figures on my life here you go I think of Leonardo da Vinci who had a quote at the end of his life saying after you've worked really hard during the day you've toiled at something you go to sleep and you have this great feeling like you accomplished something but when you die do you have that same feeling like I did something I accomplished something now I can die in peace and I think the worst thing is in life would be to reach the age of 60 65 and go God I could have been so much more I could have created something I could have done what I said I was going to do I could have written that book but I didn't to me I tell anybody if you're in your 20 don't ever have that feeling and it'll come quicker than you imagine realize that you want to reach that end with a sense of I did what I felt I could do when I was a child I had these dreams and I reached them shophow has this quote that if you're walking down the street and you hit your foot against a rock you don't go get angry at the rock well people are rocks in your way sometimes right and I don't mean that to to depersonalize them I mean in the sense that they are who they are they have their own nature and that nature isn't yours and it's going to clash with you sometimes and that is just what it means to be a human being an adult in in the world today in any world so are you going to be like complaining and blaming the fact that it is a boxing ring are you going to complain that people have a nature where they have an ego where they're full of Envy where they're passive aggressive and then in the in the sour in the in the process of complaining you're putting yourself at a continual disadvantage because you're draining yourself with all these useless emotions and you're not playing proper defense against them because you're all consumed with kind of personalizing the situation or are you going to have some distance and be like a boxer in a ring and be smart and intelligent about it you know and I just think it's a brilliant metaphor for life it's a brilliant metaphor for being in control and for accepting the fact that some people play a little bit dirty some people are going to hit you it's going to hurt but you don't whine and complain you just figure out how are you going to defend yourself better that connects to the thing that you and I made together which is the am morati coin yes which is the idea the it's also a n phrase of of sort of loving everything that happens to you not resenting it not fighting against it not carrying around a grudge or a burden but sort of embracing braing it and finding the good in it yeah where does that fit in with our human nature it doesn't fit in because it's not natural to us our natural frame our natural starting position is when something bad happens why me to feel sort of a grievance to feel that things aren't fair to feel that other people aren't giving you what you want or what you deserve we start from a position of feeling kind of sorry for ourselves right we deserve more than what we're getting and so a lot of what I'm talking about in this book is overcoming some of these natural elements in human nature and turning them around and using them for another purpose another way and a morati is very powerful in that you train yourself to accept everything that happens it's sort of a banality to say that things happen for a reason but there's some truth to it for n it was this is life life involves pain life involves adversity you're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant your friends and family members they're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant you're going to have failure in life people are going to hurt you but that is life that's what it is so to resist that to be angry about that means to not love life itself there's a a quote uh this French philosopher Baron de Mones a political philosopher from the 18th century that I kind of like and it goes as follows we have three educations in our life the first is from our parents the second is from our school Masters and the third is from the world and the third education contradicts all that we learn from the first two and basically what it means is you go and you learn all of these skills all these very important things in University but essentially the years that follow what I'm going to call your apprenticeship requires a different way of thinking the the rules are completely different it's not the same in fact many of the things that you learn and many of the habits that you learn early in your life are actually the wrong kinds of things that you that are going to help you that you need in this path towards Mastery that I'm drawing character is the core of a person something they can't control something that comes from deep within and it causes people to have patterns of behavior and you want to find people who have a strong character to associate with as opposed to a weak character and what a strong character is is people who are adaptable who are fluid who can admit that they are wrong who can learn from their experience who can take criticism who can work with other people so I want you to focus Focus not on people's Charming exterior on their funny words on their wit on their Charisma instead focus on that deep inner quality that core that character because that's who they really are your character is creating what happens to you in life there's the famous quote of the ancient Greek philosopher heraclitus character is fate Tony Morrison worked as an editor at this public she worked as an editor at this publication house she worked until 6 or 7:00 she took the train home to where she lived in Connecticut she was raising two or three children she would go home cook them meals put them to bed and at 11:00 at night she would sit down and write and that's how she wrote her first novel that's the kind of energy and determination you have to have I always thought that was superum but I could know I could never do that but that but look at who she is and what she became that's because she wanted it so badly she was desperate one of the Masters I interviewed for the book is Temple grandon Temple yeah oh I saw the film that Claire D's portrait yeah well she's a woman born with Autism who's now a very successful scientist a professor of animal studies and you know autism she had when it comes to people skills she's way on the other end there she basically trained herself yeah how to work with people how to be around them she said it was almost like a science equation she approached it as if it were a Computing problem okay this is what people do all right I'm going to have to try and be like that when I'm sitting there giving a lecture and I'm reading my note cards oh the audience hates that all right I'm never going to read from so she studied it like it's a science thing and now she's like a really good public speaker to me one of the greatest American presidents that have ever lived is FDR now FDR was I think a very decent man but he was incredibly Ma rebellion and probably the best biography of FDR was a guy named McGregor burns the title of his book was the fox and the lion which is a phrase from makavelli that sometimes you need to be the fox and sometimes you need to be the lion you need to be clever and crafty and you need to Roar and chew people up need to be able to be both that was FDR he was so clever he knew how to create drama how to create spectacles he had a henchmen I think it's Harry Hopkins who would do all the dirty work for him so he never appeared to be doing anything dirty he was very very clever I think he had high morals I think he had good values and he did great things he led us through a depression he led us through World War II he created our social security system he was a great president but he knew the hard game of power I contrast that with somebody like Jimmy Carter now I know we all have our own personal beliefs here but I growing up in the ear of Jimmy Carter I thought the guy was rather incompetent I thought he wasn't a very good president he was moral you would never find a more moral guy a more decent human being he was a wonderful person I would have a beer with him I would be his best friend but I don't think he played the power game very effectively and so sometimes the moral people aren't really necessarily though those who know how to play the the tough side of the power game and sometimes people who have a little bit of a maav ellian streak but who have decent values like an FDR I think they can be much more effective in those kind of roles honestly this is a tough world out there it's a competitive world people can be difficult you have to have a little bit of iron in your soul you have to be willing to sometimes fire somebody and firing people can be difficult and sometimes you have to be a little tough in who you hire you have to see through the charlatans you have to see through the narcissist Etc you have to be a little bit tough in this world I know that's not everything I know you also have to be gentle and empathetic and I agree completely but I think sometimes people who are too good often don't make the best leaders I'm sorry to say that you said something about people who are Masters or or as I said that's almost a conclusion but strive for Mastery they actually get younger as they age yes it's I love this phenomenon and I I catalog it and the I of that is Benjamin Franklin This Guy's in his 80s and people are meeting him and they're going it's like talking to a 20-year-old his mind is so open you know what happens when you get older your mind closes you get rigid you you have all these sort of stale ideas that you keep repeating Benjamin Franklin was like a 20-year-old he had no stale ideas his mind was still crisp and alive and if he only could have lived 20 more years who knows what else he would have come up with so I love that phenomenon because it's so hopeful maybe I can be like that as I get older from Marcus aelius that's related is um look at things as they are so you're drinking wine think of the grapes being crushed you're having olive oil think of the olives being crushed I don't remember what the other examples were it's a little this is I think one of the reasons people think he's kind of depressing he's like this is a dead pig this is a dead bird well yeah but that's what the food that you're eating you know sure you know that's a lot of the sublime because you're walking around in your world and you're kind of sleepwalking yeah you're not paying attention to things and you're not really seeing things as they are so you're you're drinking your orange juice from some some plastic bottle you're not aware of the oranges or the process or what people went through I mean I know that if you were that might not be that exciting so that's maybe not the best example but being aware of where things come from of what they are what their true nature is you know that's sort of what children how the children think because they're constantly curious they just don't assume that something just came into the world the way it is they want to know how and they want to know why so you live in a world where you're surrounded by things that exist that that kind of you don't really know what where they come from or what what's makes them so interesting and you're not paying attention to it never see a situation as hopeless your own weakness can become strength with clever manipulation the person I used to illustrate it is Napoleon bonapart who was a grand counter attacker that was his favorite strategy in life and Napoleon was a very weird character he actually loved bad situations he almost had a way of putting himself deliberately in situations that were very adverse where everything was against him because his whole mind would rise to the occas and his philosophy was anything negative anything bad happening to you contains the seeds of a turnaround you can turn it around into something positive and you know this could be the fact that your opponent in the battle is suddenly getting a little bit aggressive and carried away and arrogant you can use their arrogance to turn it around I think you know this is sort of a beautiful philosophy in life if you will I talk about Anton COV a Russian writer who's to me one of the great icons for this book and he had a horrifying childhood his father beat him every single day never even knowing why he beat him they grew up in poverty his father abandoned the family when he was young he had nothing in life and he lived in this miserable small town the most miserable town in Russia you can imagine and one day he decided in in the depths of his misery after he was left alone in this town to look after himself at the age of 16 he said I I want to not feel this burdened by all of these bad feelings towards other people I'm going to start thinking that my father can't help himself that he was born a surf and he's been bred to be this awful person and my mother can't help herself and my siblings it's just human nature I'm going to accept them and I'm going to love them for who they are and he felt this insane wave of Freedom he was free of all his NE his own negative emotion that were burdening him day in and day out and it changed the course of his life you have to put yourself on death ground death ground is extremely important death ground means it's from sunu if an army is fighting with its back to the wall it will fight with three times the force it's either win or die you have to feel that you only have 6 months to do it you can't wait 2 years to start your business you have to start it tomorrow you can't take two years to fulfill it you have to give yourself 6 months you need that kind of energy and that desperation to be able to rise to the occasion sunsu wrote that um in every B every battle is one or lost before it is ever fought and basically what he meant was something is going on in the mind the strategy itself that is either right or wrong and by the time you arrive for battle youve either won or you've either lost but the battle he's referring to is the battle in your mind if your mind is filled with all kinds of ideas from the past if you repeat the same formulas that you've used again and again you have already lost the war if on the other hand you try this other approach as you ground yourself in this idea of do not fight the last war which I maintain is the foundation of all solid strategic thinking you have already won the war before it even happens makavelli has that quote so that if you expect everybody to be good in this world you're in a lot of trouble you know what are you going to do when you deal with people who aren't good but yeah you have to be willing to get your hands dirty let's say a classic example like there's a cause that's very important to you like the climate or racial Justice in America all very important issues that most of us believe in you have to be willing to get down and dirty here because you're playing with politics you're playing with people who are going to resist you're playing with major corporations who are going to bust your balls who are going to be incredibly manipulative and downright evil in co-opting your good idea and kind of neutralizing it so if you want to create something if you want to actually have results you have to be willing to get a little dirty and you have to get be willing to be strategic you have to understand that the other side might not be playing by the same rules that you're playing with in my War book I read the B graphy of Mahatma Gandhi one of the saint leest figures in history and I realized that Mahatma Gandhi was actually a brilliant strategist and I'm not saying his use of nonviolence and Civil Disobedience didn't come from the heart he didn't mean it he wasn't actually he didn't actually believe in the peaceful method he did was very sincere but he was very strategic about it and he planned several campaigns like the Salt March in the 20s where he knew for instance that the English public was very liberal minded they had this ideal of themselves they weren't colonialists they weren't imperialists they were doing the best for the world and he deliberately had these marches where he knew that they would be reading in their newspaper and seeing photographs of Indian people being beaten up by Englishmen and their Indian officers on the streets of wherever it would have a terrible impact on the public he thought in terms of strategy Marcus aelia said when two people are fighting in the boxing ring and they're going going at each and they're clawing and hitting each other the one person who gets hit doesn't go you're a bad person I don't like you why did you hit me you know something is wrong with you no you realize that's just part of the game well The Game of Life are people are going to hit you they're going to claw you they're going to scratch you they're going to bite you it's just the part of life and instead of taking everything personally you have to see that it's like a gladiator battle and that some people are bad some people are good some people are not are in between but stop taking everything personally and try to learn from it so if you make a mistake what you want to do if you have failure in life something didn't go right you want to have the be the ability to look Inward and say what did I do wrong and you know a lot of people can't don't have that inner strength but if you want to be successful if you want to get ahead in this world if you're tired of not having any kind of movement or advancing in in in your career you have to develop the skill you have to be able to look at yourself as if you were somebody else as from the outside and say Here's how I could improve here's what I did wrong the last time I did it what's your favorite quote I have one by the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli from the 19th century which was never complain never explain and what it means is don't complain about life don't explain what you're doing or why you're doing it just do it by whining and complaining all you're doing is making people think bad things about you looking weak you know and when you complain a lot you have a mindset where everything is is kind of a potential complaint stop whining and stop explaining yourself and just do things in the world and let your actions speak for themselves I talk in the book about the great basketball player Bill Bradley he's white and he went to Princeton he became a New York Nick in the late 60s and then he became a United States Senator he was very brilliant he was a road scholar Etc but Bill Bradley loved basketball from very early on kind of like Tiger Woods and and golf but he realized that the only thing he had going for him was that he was tall he couldn't jump very well he wasn't physically gift nearly as gifted as other people he just loved the game so he put himself through the most intensely tedious and boring practice routines that he invented in order to make himself a better basketball player so he would set up chairs in his little room and he would dribble in between the chairs until he could do it without ever having looked down at his hand he created these glasses could only see forward he couldn't look down and one time he was so single-minded his family went on a cruise and he took this incredibly long Alleyway on the on the cruise ship down on a lower deck he wore those glasses and he dribbled 200 yards and back back and forth with his blinders on so what happened was through all this practice is he could dribble incredibly well without ever looking down think of all the incredible boring hours he put into that but and I tell people this if you can be creative with your practice so he was very creative with these boring routines that he made and he probably had some fun doing them like kids would make things like that one of the laws of power is guard your reputation with your life it's like your treasure it's how people perceive you and if your reputation kind of precedes you and it can make people even afraid of you before they meet you in the ancient China in like the first century uh ad or so there was this great Chinese General called chuko leang it's narrated in this book called The Romance of three kingdoms and he was so clever he was by far the most clever General that ever lived that armies were already kind of worried before they went into battle with him knowing that he would have some trick up his sleeve they were certain that he was going to do something that they never thought of before so at one point chuko leang is in a castle and all his men have deserted him for whatever reason and he only has like 50 men left in the castle and he years that an army of 20,000 soldiers is advancing and as it's over my career is over they're going to wipe us out and kill us so what does he do he sat himself up on the wall of the castle with like a a harp or a loop in his hand and he just sat there strumming it and humming like a prayer and kind of singing and the the enemy Army approaches they see chuko yangang on the top there he's got some trick up his sleeve he's luring us into the castle where he must have 50,000 men that are ready to Ambush and Counterattack he wouldn't be sitting on that Citadel like that unless he was trying to trick Us in some way and so they end up retreating so a man with 50 men defeated an army of 20,000 men just through the psychological warfare and just through this reputation that he had of being so incredibly brilliant and I think a great coach like Bill bellich kind of has that sort of spirit as well there's a quote from TS Elliot is something to the effect that we humans have a little stomach for reality and basically we love illusion we love stories we love fiction we don't really like reality we see it very much in our culture who do we venerate the most in this culture we don't venerate philosophers if there are any more philosophers we don't venerate practical people who build things we venerate movie stars and celebrities people who manufacture illusion who are fake to the core that's what we admire but it's always bus that way there's a Latin expression that means we humans love deception we love to be deceived and even as children what we loveed more than anything was to hear a story so I've Incorporated that in my books I always begin each chapter with a story kind of lure you into my book I talk in the book about Martha Graham the great dancer who totally revolutionized the World of Dance and she was interested in theater as a child but her father was a psychiatrist who studied uh insanity and he would always come home and talk about body language and how he could read body language and sense if someone was possibly criminal you know insane and she was fascinated by this idea of body language and theater but she didn't know what she wanted to do then she saw her first dance performance when she was 17 and 18 and then she realized this could be something where I could express and go into all these really Primal interests that I have and it was something that didn't really develop until she's in her 20s it doesn't necessarily happen in one moment it's a process that you go through but you have to be self-aware and connected to who you are Napoleon had this idea to the effect of if I appear every day at the theater in Paris people don't respect me oh he's you know the king is the emperor's there okay but if I only show up at the theater once a month it becomes an event and people start talking about me and thinking about me so use absence sometimes because we have this wrong impression that presence being constantly present is what makes somebody kind of fall in love and want us but actually it's a step of absence that creates that if in in like a love situation if you don't return the phone call right away or the text and a day goes by they start to think about you and they start to wonder about thems and in that process of thinking about you they start fantasizing and wondering and and you know that's the powerful position that you have if you use absence well you know who one of the great stoics of the 20th century was no Alfred Hitchcock he had a plan for everything so directing a film if if you've known other people who've done it is an extremely stressful job it's like directing an army into a campaign because problems are arising that you cannot anticipate there's all this pressure there's all this money you've got insane egos of actors producers Etc and so it's like it's a constant Adrenaline Rush going through you can't control your emotions so Hitchcock people would look at him on the set and he'd be falling asleep in the director's chair he'd look like Buddha his eyes were closed why because he prepared for everything he anticipated everything that was going to happen right and so by the time the film came he was completely bored because he knew he he was able to control every aspect of the production according to Keats the Shakespeare's of the world the highly creative types cultivate what he calls negative capability they can negate the ego and its anxieties they are not in a rush to come to a conclusion about the world or any new phenomenon they are completely open to entertaining this idea or that idea at the same time while continuing to observe what's going on around around them they can look at ambiguous or contradictory evidence and not be disturbed or feel the need to explain them away this ability to withstand what seems mysterious to manage the lack of knowing something with certainty is the primary quality of all creative people no matter their profession

Channel: Robert Greene

Views: 145,322

Keywords: historical figures, robert greene, history, philosophy, michel de montaigne, stoicism, stoic, wisdom, heraclitus, marcus aurelius, epictetus, friedrich nietzsche, niccolo machiavelli, amor fati, franklin delano roosevelt, jimmy carter, fdr, temple grandin, the 48 laws of power, the 33 strategies of war, the art of seduction, the 50th law, the laws of human nature, the daily laws, mastery robert greene, napoleon, sun tzu, mahatma gandhi, martin luther king, paul graham, knowledge

Id: RuLySjQSU1w

Length: 27min 34sec (1654 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 19 2024