WHY SUCCESS Comes From MASTERING Your DARK SIDE | Robert Greene & Lewis Howes

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 any success i've had in life is because i managed to use those dark emotions in my work and channeled them i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness please welcome welcome back everyone in the school of greenhouse podcast i am so excited we have one of my favorite guests back on the show robert greene who is a new york times bestseller of many books the 48 laws of power the art of seduction the 33 strategies of war the 50th law mastery and the laws of human nature which is one of my favorites that you've done so welcome back my friend you were you were the first episode on school of greatness episode one i think we're at episode 1020 somewhere around there now so your episode won almost eight years ago wow i'm so honored it's fun man and we just did our thousandth episode and we did the top 10 moments of all thousands episodes and you were the number one moment oh really you were the number one which interview the first one we talked about the first one and we talked about how uh you know i launched this with an idea and a dream to inspire people but i launched it with one episode and one listener and one guest and you were the first guest thankfully you came on and uh what you know more than one person listened but there was you launched something and the first person has to buy your book and read it the first person has to listen the first person has to watch the movie like wow you got to start with one so it's been fun to look back now over 250 million downloads wow a thousand episodes we get over 10 million downloads a month and it all started with you wow i feel very humble and very appreciative yeah i'm very grateful that i could do do that for you because you deserve it thank you thank you some people you wonder a little bit they're kind of you know i don't know if they're if they're very substantial but you deserve it i appreciate it i think my mission's always been i think we have a lot of similarities in the fact that well we don't the fact that you're way smarter and more talented than me as a writer but we observe people and we observe history and human behavior yeah and we just do it in different ways yeah you're great at researching and putting together ideas complex ideas from the past and present to making something understandable and how we can improve our life and i think i'm really good at reading human beings and observing environments you are deserving body language to try to connect i saw that in our last interview when you were interviewing me about the human nature book your questions were really pertinent and you really understood you've obviously been a student of psychology and human behavior yeah for a long time so thank you appreciate it uh my first question is we had you on a couple years ago right after you had a stroke which was you almost died right your wife was in the car with you i think you were driving he was driving your wife essentially said pull over because something was wrong and you were like no everything's fine as you were like you know falling over or something and she essentially saved her life and your life by stopping and recognizing it you went to the hospital you had a stroke and it's been a two-year recovery of i saw you last time and i was you know i was really sad of of you know your physical well-being because i want to see you healthy but you've had a a pretty positive attitude i think in the last couple of years i'm curious what has been the biggest lesson for you with going through a massive stroke where it's hindered your relationships where it's hindered your physical activity your ability to work on the things you're passionate about what's been the big lessons well i'm very driven person so i wasn't going to let this defeat me because the alternative was was losing hope and becoming suicidal and i wasn't gonna let that happen also i knew i had another book that i really really wanted to write so i had to keep living you know and i was in a coma for a while and things were a little bit touch and go during that and i feel like there was something willed inside of me unconsciously that kept me alive the other weird thing is i spent a lot of my time alone swimming hiking riding it just so happened just by coincidence that my i was driving when my wife was there and so i have a feeling that i kind of almost was ready to have my stroke once she was there i can't say that for sure these are you know weird kind of psychic almost kind of thoughts but i felt like there was some willpower in me that was keeping me alive so i could keep going but the main lesson was um it's it's been a struggle i can't say it's been easy i can't like lie and say i've just figured it all out and i'm this incredible superhuman being i've had moments where i've cried i've had moments where i felt like giving up it's like a daily struggle and i other people you know i know a lot of people in this world suffer they have it a lot worse than i do i have like a comfortable life i have a lot of money i have my books etc but on the level of like my body just every day has been a struggle you know i wake up can i walk will i fall can i hold this in my hand so dependent on other people and a very independent person so i've had to really really work on myself and really develop a lot of patience which i don't have and the thing is when you get an illness like this or something happens like that the natural thing is just to sort of wait it out and wait until your body recovers and people said i would have a full recovery two years down the line or so so the tendency would be just to let it go and let time take its healing process but i wouldn't let that i don't know why but i was like no i'm going to work out every single day i'm going to do therapy two or three hours a day i bought a special bicycle because i can't do a normal bicycle it's a recumbent bike where you sit down man it's like the hardest thing you have to get up these incredible hills and like 80 year old grandmothers are whizzing by me on their bicycle this is outdoors outdoors in different parks yeah but i'm just i'm just determined to beat the thing and sometimes it beats me so every day is like a battle you know it's like a boxing match who's going to win but i'm not going to give up i just keep trying trying i'm going to see a new therapist i'm working on new exercises i'm working on different parts of my body i'm trying to build strength in certain muscles so i can start walking normally because as you know working out swimming and hiking and bicycling that was like my main way of de-stressing i loved it i love being out in nature i love being alone with my thoughts and to have that ripped away it was like having you know part of your whole body taken away from you so um but uh you know i'm pretty relentless that's that's my lesson i didn't give up which book of yours that you've written and the lesson in in that book have you had to lean back on more than any other lesson or principle from all the books how is it which one is like really ah that's interesting that i wrote about this five years ago and now i really need to apply it well the last three books would be more applicable so there's the book with 50 cent the 50th law which is about fear and overcoming your fear and in fact the last chapter was about the fear of death in that book and um you know i've had to deal with a lot of fear and you don't know what it's like every day you're walking and you don't know the next moment you're going to fall i've had several falls and falls are literally what will do you and so it's constant fear and i just won't let it affect me i push past my limits i do things that i'm not supposed to do i take hikes even though i have to hold on to somebody to do it people think i'm crazy so i had to deal with my fear mastery taught me that repetition doing something over and over and over again like any kind of skill learning a skill like basketball whatever leads to something so every day just using my left hand instead of my right hand forcing myself and slowly getting used to it that taught me a lot and then the laws of human nature you know i have a one thing that when you have a stroke it affected the right side of my brain which destroyed the left side of my body and supposedly when the right side of your brain is damaged it tends to make you more emotional and i've definitely become more emotional so i've had to learn to control some of my anger some of my impatience some of my frustration and obviously the laws of human nature a lot about that and the last chapter is about having to deal with death and so with all of the things i'm dealing with and all the kind of god damn it why can't i do that i have to keep reminding myself i'm alive i'm going to write another book the birds are out there chirping it could have been a much different story last month six weeks ago was the second year anniversary of the stroke and i had this thought this could have been the second anniversary of my death wow and what people would be like gathering together or maybe they would maybe they wouldn't but you know it would be like the anniversary of my death but it's not i've been given a second lease and i have to think about that every single day isn't that crazy to think that when you die hopefully people will think nice things about you and every year they'll get together and say hey let's tell a nice story about our friend or that we lost hopefully but isn't that crazy to think that someday we're gonna die yeah and someday no one's gonna remember us it's a weird thought um and it's also like i wrote about this a camera i think it was in the 50th law where enough time passes nobody remembers you no one 200 years from now no one will even know who lewis house was or robert greene you know and so you're all choices of you are gone yeah it's it's a weird thought and you might be in a history book or something maybe maybe if the planet is still here yeah yeah that's true but this is sort of what my next book is about 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 if you 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 wanted 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 eight 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 cove 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 pick 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 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 coveted 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 going to go anywhere blah blah blah you know when you start maybe drink a little bit you start putting on some pounds that covet whatever they call it total 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 i'm not trying to be pollyannaish about it because i don't i'm not a polygamist person as you know i wrote the 48 laws of power and i don't 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 it 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 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 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 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 feed 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 my 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 covin 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 gonna 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 destroyed me he ruined my last project that they hold on to the 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 to 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 going to 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 relation 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'm gonna 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 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 trying 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 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 writer 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 into 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 um the moments where i give into it i regret i sent that angry email to my agent oh man the next the worst you feel bad 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 have you 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 that it explodes three days later when you yell at somebody who inadvertently crosses your path that's what happens when 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 etcetera or believing in some social cause that's important yeah et cetera so it's a balance i'm curious about um 48 laws of power and laws of human nature this is probably a hard question but i'm going to throw it out there anyways what was your favorite uh law from the 48 laws of power pre-stroke and what would you say is your favorite one now and same for uh human nature favorite favorite kind of law of human nature pre-stroke that you're like this is the thing i'm seeing in my life that i really connected to and now something that you lean on or connect to in a different way wow that's a tough question it's hard i get it i mean there's so many yeah well um first thing that comes to mind maybe well for me for the 48 laws of power um is this this will be kind of uh symmetrical but law number one was always like the most important one to me never outshine the master because it was the first law it was the first successful book i ever had when i first pitched it to the man who who produced the book i told him the story that initiated the the never outshined the master and i had personally violated that law on several occasions and it caused me a lot of misery and pain in my life why why what why why do they cause you a lot of misery and pain by violating well i um this is before i wrote the book so i had a job in the film business and television show with a very famous person whose name i will not mention and i was a researcher on it and i was the best researcher there by far you know you would you count success by how many stories you found and what got actually filmed and yours got filmed the most i had like a 60 raid or something like that wow i knew i was the best and then i got fired why right because you're outshining the master well at the time i thought she hated my guts you know i pissed somebody off i said the wrong thing and i could i was capable of sometimes doing that because i could have an attitude and i was blaming other people etc but then you know it sort of started dawning on me and then later when i wrote the book it was very clear to me that i had inadvertently made her think that i was felt greater than she was that i was after her job other people were really praising me and not praising her so much i was getting too much attention and it happened another time a second time right i wasn't controlling myself and so that law had a lot meant a lot to me because it was very painful being fired is a very painful experience i don't know if you've ever been through that no i haven't really no i mean i'm not at a job oh i mean i got i mean actually i did get i got fired once by getting in a fist fight on a golf course as a ground i was a grounds crew kid when i was like 14 13 and uh we were playing around this is a long story we were playing around like throwing leaves at each other and someone punched me in the back of the neck as i'm like throwing leaves at him because we're raking up like leaves and grass on the golf course he punched me in the back of the neck and then i just went crazy and got into this fight and we got two fights real fights in my life that was one of them and um we walked back i walked back to the uh kind of the grounds crew shed and washed my knuckles off as they're bleeding and i was just high on adrenaline and the the kid who i got to fight with walks back a couple minutes after me and i couldn't recognize his face he was interested in that i mean it was just like it was an animalistic reaction when someone punched me it was just like you know i mean it only lasted for maybe 10 seconds and then someone took took us off there was other people around and kind of broke it up but it just kind of hit him in the right spot i guess and it kind of swelled over his eye looked like a softball in his eye and i was just like wow and it was really the first time i feel like i had any power as a 13 year old and the grounds crew like leader or the the boss saw him walk up kind of yelling at me and he just goes you're fired and he like writes a check and gives it to him and he's like get out of here and never come back and i was like so that was my only moment that was that was law number one b never punch a colleague exactly never punched anyone so but for you it was he was stressed one emotional getting fired yeah i mean you take it personally etc and you and you were like i was the best i was i mean i haven't had many jobs i don't didn't stay at a job more than a year my whole life but um i always whenever i had a job i worked very hard at it and you know i was very conscientious so that was very painful but don't you want to i would think if someone's excelling on my team i'd be like celebrate them and and keep going why don't you want that or do you not want people to well lewis come on wouldn't you want people to accelerate i didn't read chapter law number one reminder of egos i understand but yeah in a perfect world where angels were everywhere and we all just had wings and we were all just all out for other people and for the greater good yeah right but we happen to live in this planet that's not like that i know we're descended from primates we're much different from that so how do you have egos how do you grow with like how do you improve in a career but not outshine too much so you stay in the career i guess well you have to read law number one but um you know you have to first understand a very basic principle of human psychology yeah everybody has an ego and everybody you meet is insecure they have insecurities okay but your boss the person above you has even more insecurities and a larger ego than other people and you don't think so you you're probably aware that they have an ego but you don't think they have insecurities because they're the boss you know but actually they're always worried about whether people like them whether people respect them whether people think they're doing a good job or not they're riddled with doubts and they're constantly and they're constantly looking out for people to see though their body language said does that guy really respect me does he have an attitude etc you don't think that you think if i just try hard to please the boss it will work out wonderful wonderfully but you might be doing something else you might be stirring up their insecurities so you have to always be aware in life of people's insecurities you know it's like lesson number one it's gonna save you a lot of painful moments the people you deal with are riddled with doubts they're riddled with fears they have things hanging over them from childhood they're wondering about themself and you inadvertently are feeding their insecurities and you never intended to and then you find wow look what happened you don't even understand why it happened that way so when you're fired for outshine the master you don't know why you were fired it's very hard to learn a lesson when you don't know why it happened that's what's so complicated and tricky about people because when people do something that's kind of harsh and negative they never tell you why they're doing it they always have a cover story a narrative right they have a way of deflecting it as if they aren't to blame and so you're confused that's why i wrote the laws of human nature because you're continually confused because people never tell you what they're really doing why they're motivated why they behave such a way and you take their words and their appearance for reality and it's not reality so you know that's the source of so much of your painful experiences in life okay so law number one never outshined the master was the the law that you were really leaning into pre-stroke is there one post stroke that you think about that that sticks to you more that connects to you in a different way now yeah i would say assume formlessness which is law number 48 so that's why i said the symmetry look at you like this um and that's all about kind of being fluid and adapting to circumstances and never having like a concrete form it's a very military law it comes from sun tzu and like the perfect army doesn't have a form you can't figure out where they are what their strategy is their strategy has no form or or the great swordsman miyamoto musashi who said that you know nobody ever knew what my strategy would be i was completely formless so it's a way of being very fluid in life and very open and never doing the same thing twice and adapting your certain your what you do to the circumstances around you and when you have a stroke you know it's not easy to do that right because your body certainly isn't capable of being fluid so your mind has to be fluid i have to retrain myself from not getting stuck in certain ideas and certain patterns of thinking certain negative things and certain frustrations and certain ways of looking at the world i have to be fluid and take each day as it comes and adapt myself to this new body that i have yeah so i think about that law a lot how does someone you know you have a book on mastery how does someone master the art of something if they're always trying something new every day or if they're always formless and reinventing themselves every day or you know from these the swordsman you're saying it's like he's always in a new strategy but if you want to master something you typically have to do something over and over to master it correct yeah well that's the thing about my books and about the laws they're about circumstances ah so i'm not saying assume formlessness for all you people out there who are 18 years old who are about to enter the work world are 21 just be formless no master something and then when you've mastered yeah multiple things you can adapt miyamoto musashi was fighting for 20 years as a swordsman in life and death battles and he eventually developed this power of his right but if he were formless without ever having any experience he would have been killed in his first sword fight so you know you have to have discipline you have to assume like this is what i'm doing and like this is my career path as you talk about as you mentioned in mastery and you have to put in the hours the 10 000 the 20 000 hours and then when you get to the level of a master like a bobby fischer in chess then you can do anything you want you're on another level you can be as formless as possible right so um yeah you're right i'm not advocating that for just anybody out there but for me and my situation yeah after i've had you know the success and it's also for people who've suffered a major blow like that like an illness or something where your habits of thinking can get very set and very rigid where every day you wake up and go wow why do i have to be like this why couldn't it happen this differently as opposed to being open to what life brings me every single day and not developing a kind of a defensive rigid attitude one of the things that i love about your journey and story is that you mastered so many different types of writing over 20 30 years i think you were like first in a newspaper and then a magazine and then screenwriting and then certain types of books and then weird but you know you did all these different styles of writing that you tried a lot of things mastered them to a certain point which gave you the range uh to kind of write in the way you do now it gave you the ability to write the way you do now which i think is interesting so i like you say that when you're in your 20s like find something to to hang on to to master for a few years then you can go to the next thing and that'll give you more range well there's a i don't know if i can remember my metaphor but it's it's like you want a path in life when you're 20 21 22 but you don't want it to be so rigid because you're gonna burn out you're gonna get bored and you're gonna give up you want that path to be like that instead of like this so you can go this way you can go this way you go this way and go this way but if your path is like that you'll never find anything because you'll try everything so i knew i was to be a writer and i tried eight different forms of writing you know you want to be a musician you try writing music you try learning instruments producing you go into entertainment a lawyer as a musical or whatever you try different things but you know this is what i love in life if you have no idea what you're going to love and i get i deal with that because i help consult with people who come to me with that very issue robert i don't know what my life's task is i never had any dedication when i was a kid that's the worst situation to be in there are ways to solve that but that's really that's really painful because you have no idea where to go but you you want to have a sense but you want to be fluid and open so that eventually what happens is you hit upon the right thing right you and most of us are never gonna hit the right thing in 25 no i was 36 37 your age wow when it happened so maybe i'll start to feel like i'm hitting the right thing soon yeah you found it a little earlier you found it out like eight years ago yeah i think so but i think it's always evolving and growing and you know you got to be fluid with it so it's funny because i'm i've been consistent with the the main thing which i started a podcast almost eight years ago and i said i'm gonna do it once a week for a year and see how it goes see if i like it learn but i gotta be consistent enough for a year then i did twice a week for the second year now we've done three a week for the last five six years i guess now and i've been consistent in one thing trying to improve you see me from the first episode to now in the different stages the leveling out the production the set this you know everything the audio quality video all these different things my skills but also i wrote a book i'd never done that before we did live events it's like i'm trying new things as well that i'm not that good at to start but we start to master them over time right to create more range and diversity so but i'm still sticking to the main thing is the main thing right and evolving as i go so that's the perfect way to do it because you know you need challenges in life too um so you know i always look at it this way if you're you're you're here this is your skill level a challenge like here is going to really improve you if the challenge is here it's too much you'll fail and it'll have bad consequences if you're here and you're below your level you're going to get bored so the optimum thing is to always choose your next project that's a little bit above you so you can learn and feel excited and challenged and have that that adrenaline rush from trying to meet the challenge and get there and all your energy is involved so that's the proper way to do things in life for me so what about the laws of human nature what was one that you that you were like uh this is my law this is the one that i love the most right now for whatever reason pre-stroke to the one now that you think about more as important for your life well um my favorite chapter was kind of about the dark side of human nature the shadow 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 explain 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 we're not talking personally yeah you know i did the same thing 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 that 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 over 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 channeled 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 and and and love it just kind of melt 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 darken 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 learning the channel anger and competitiveness and ambition and the desire to win you know um is 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 grades 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 he's 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 i'll meet you 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 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 et cetera 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 but i'm sorry to talk always about myself which is 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 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 that 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 son who's 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 you realize 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 movements 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 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 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'll 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 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 gonna 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 what 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 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 etc 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 law of the 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 per 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 is sublime mean what is the definition well you really want to get into the weeds there it comes from the latin word sublime and there are 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 it 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 um and so that's the ultimate sublime experience is going up to that threshold of death itself but there are other experiences that i'm going to be talking about as well i'm excited about that that'll be fun that'll be fun what about the uh i think you mentioned in the laws of human nature the first one confront your dark side what about the one you're thinking about more now that connects to you well obviously the chapter on death you know um not so much now but right after my stroke because that was the last chapter chapter 18. i finished it pretty much in may of 2018 and i poured a lot of energy into it because i kind of think a lot about mortality etc and i and i really thought and i did research and put a lot into it and then two and a half months later it happens after the book came out after i finished writing it out you finished writing the book and i come out yeah i gotcha like what is the irony there the gods are somehow like messing with me right yeah because the fact that the stroke happened was like a series of chains of events that were pretty unlikely so it was almost like faded to happen right and so i had to reassess all right robert you wrote that is that really true is it really true that it make it alters how we look at other people yeah it does you were true but the the what happened was the chapter was written from an intellectual position and the experience was not intellectual it was very real so when i had my stroke and i was in the hospital in the first days i had this feeling in my stomach of almost like my bones melting that they were soft that the inside of my body was soft and so i later thought that that was the feeling of death that's that's still in me this feeling of softness so death was no longer an idea it was in my gut it was in my viscera it was a feeling and so you know i had to think about that and i actually did write that that death is a feeling it's not an idea but here it was it was brought to me in in you know an in experiential way wow i think that experience you had is going to be very powerful for the next book i hope so being able to share your experience of being on the brink of death yeah i'll tell you what um wow i'm going to mention this in the book is um i had planned on writing this book the sublime 14 years ago it was to be my the book i wrote after the the war book and then i got sidelined in different projects and i had always had the idea when i did this that i was going to go have these incredible sublime experiences i was going to go travel to antarctica to experience it i was going to go paragliding i was going to take boats in this area i was going to of all these adventures i was going to live my book and now i can't do anything i can't do one i can barely even go outside the house so what do i have to do i have to live in my head wow i have to imagine all of it and i think it's a very good thing because if i've been able to just go around and have all these adventures i'd look like this kind of privileged kid who could just use his money but the readers are gonna say i can't go to antarctica you know but everyone who's reading the book is gonna be in my position more or less you're not having you don't have the money or the power to do all these things but it's in your head it's how you think about it so it's altered how i'm gonna write the book and how i think about the reader i think imagination has got to be one of the most powerful things we can have the power of our imagination what did einstein say about imagination something that's like more powerful than knowledge or something like that but it's what you're talking about earlier about being able to alchemize something having an idea that then we can transmute into real life and creation and i think it's hard to create something meaningful without having a meaningful imagination which brings you back to being a curious mind from childhood yeah and being able to express yourself and be curious well i mean i look at it this way you know we're all going through a very difficult time now a lot of people out there really suffering circumstances are very harsh but their work etc and the tendency is that you don't imagine what else that could be what what what the future could be what you could be doing with your life so the lack of imagination is really holding you back so the idea that i want to plan in people's brain with my next book and in general is things don't have to be the way they are because you're in this situation in the present doesn't mean it has to be that way in two months or a year from now there are other possibilities try and imagine a different path for your life in a year or what that could be like try and imagine a different relationship you can be and if you're stuck in something but don't keep in this little small little circle of thought so imagination is extremely powerful and extremely important yeah you mentioned martin luther king as someone you're really inspired by and from the past who are the top two people that you've researched or written about in any of your books that you really connect with the most as an inspirational leader from the past or human being well this person is a little bit more on the devilish side because i have to i have to you know not act like i'm i'm you know this mother teresa here um and that would be machiavelli machiavelli was the inspiration for the 48 laws somebody i've always loved because he's such a realist he explains this is not how life should be this is how life is this is how people are this is what the world is like and when i was 17 at 16 when i first read the prince of wow i didn't really understand the book wow this is powerful this is really it's talking to me this is really saying what it's like with my friends in high school etc i could relate to his honesty because so many people are so dishonest and i love him because he's a man of the renaissance people don't understand this about him he wrote a hardcore book like the prince but he also wrote much more intellectual book like the discourses he also wrote one of the wickedest plays comedies ever written in the history of theater a place so sacrilegious that it shocked everyone at the time and people stood and it's a very funny play called mandrigola he was like a poet he was a great seducer of women even though he was physically ugly he was like a really weird guy he was interesting and i loved his stories right so he'd be one and the other one would be from master was leonardo da vinci i mean these are from the same period in fact they probably crossed each other's path um but da vinci you know he was like not human he he thought on a level that was so superior that was so almost god-like that it fascinated me you know it's a theme that i have in my new book people who are so far ahead of their time that it's uncanny and i have examples in history of this people who are a thousand 500 years ahead of their time how can that be you know is it just coincidence or what is it and i'm fascinated by well he was doing drawings of military tanks of flying planes of you know all kinds of elaborate technological devices that some have never even been invented you know and where did this come from he was also like one of the first people in history who observed nature just for itself he loved like plants and flowers and animals without thinking about god or religion he was one of the first animal lovers in history i'm an animal lover right i love any kind of thing yeah cats right i have cats but i love dogs two cats i have two cats but i love horses i love dogs i love them all he had no people were so cruel to animals back then nobody had pets like that yeah just stray animals and they just were just there to kill rats wow you know etc he would go in the marketplace in florence with birds were being sold he would buy them and open the cage and let them fly away you know he had great empathy for other animals creatures who the church said didn't have a soul but he believed that animals had souls and he was the first person really so i'm obsessed with people like that who are so far ahead of their time is he even the second guy well is there a woman from the past that you're right patra cleopatra why why well because i wrote a book about seduction yeah yeah and you know i'm obviously uh have a side to me that's very into seduction i wouldn't have written the book you know and in my 20s i was kind of a player you know i know it's hard to believe now but i was yeah i was a bit of a rake and so um and cleopatra was kind of like almost my ideal in a way when i read about i haven't met her obviously but she was very smart she was quite an intellectual i've always been very attracted to very smart women right um she was very well read she had the library of alexandria there she'd read all the green classics she was a lot smarter than the men around her she was a lot smarter than marc anthony i wouldn't say she was smarter than julius caesar but she was his equal and she was insanely good seductress she was very theatrical she knew how to create these insane spectacles and what man wouldn't be impressed by that you know she knew that marc anthony was like this kind of raging sensualist so she seduces him by creating this insanely decadent barge that floats down the nile river with all these weird animals on it and people fanning you with giant things and all gold and everything you know mark anthony goes on a tour of all the cities on the nile with the on this barge and he was totally seduced she was like constantly putting on this theater and believe it or not she supposedly wasn't that beautiful we don't have any images from her but description said that she had a bit of a nose etc but she had her energy was really interesting so that would probably be the woman of my choice 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 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 had 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 um 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 just switch it around and you need to 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 don't 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 going to mold what i'm saying to plea to get them interested in my idea doors open up to you left right and center 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 going to 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 beetlejuice there you go okay wow that was a long time ago yeah yeah just thinking of a fascinating character they're like that they have us 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 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 yeah yeah 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's just interviews people for a living right so you want them to do 90 of them can't 90 that it's obvious what you're doing eighty percent are said people love to talk right if they do seventy percent 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 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 what yeah i think uh the book influenced by chaldini i don't know if you 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 so finding that commonality social proof there's a 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 yeah that likes to yammer how does someone not be insecure an interviewer a someone trying to get a job when they're doing an interview with their potential boss when you're with someone who's you're inspired by or higher status or not on a influenced position how do you not be insecure or nervous okay one simple answer i mean there might be exceptions but it's pretty simple do your homework be prepared so if you go into an interview you're naturally nervous but if you've prepared prepare the out of it you research that person you know who they are you know what the company is like you know what the position is why the other person was fired what they're going to need from you you're going to feel a lot less insecure than if you just kind of go in and wing it right okay so if you're on any kind of project i talked in the war book about alfred hitchcock the film director and my wife is a film director it's a nerve-wracking task you've got an army of 80 people who are all gee and insecure and ego-ridden etc they're all secretly hoping you fail so they can be the director yeah okay it's a nightmare right and hitchcock would like people were astonished she'd be on the set she'd be falling asleep oh really okay yeah yeah go ahead he was like buddha he didn't care he was never upset or anything people how could that be directors are the most nervous bitter people they're so control freaks it's because he prepared every detail he knew beforehand he knew every shot that he wanted what the clothes looked like what the colors how the framing would be he storyboarded in exact detail and he said that by the time the film was being shot i was bored because i knew everything that how it was supposed to be so he could be calm because he was so well prepared so if you do your homework it's maybe not going to get rid of all your insecurities and all your nervousness because degree of nervousness is okay because you have to understand the physiology adrenaline is a very powerful emotion and feeling a little bit of doubt and a little bit of fear will drive you keep your eye to keep you awake and alert so you don't want to be so confident that you'll just do anything you want a little bit of tenseness yeah but if you prepare and you and you've anticipated the situation it will get rid of 80 of those doubts that you have we were talking about before and i have a couple final questions for you we're talking about before self-doubt before we started recording and i'm curious your thoughts on doubt doubting ourselves and how do we train our minds or our bodies or our life so that doubt doesn't keep us from accomplishing with what we want or keep us from trying something we want because i think a lot of people don't do something because they doubt themselves so much from the fear of failure or the fear of success or people judging them what's your thoughts on this well um the main thing is is you have to try something you have to do something right and of course if you're full of doubt and insecurities it's going to be very hard and so what separates the person who is going to learn is on the way to success from somebody who won't will be that person who's 22 23 they tries it they do it they take that job and they write that thing or they do that whatever it is that the other person maybe wouldn't try because they're not afraid of failing right so a certain level of you can't control that because some people are born that way i don't know if they're born that way but something about them in their dna has given them that drive but if you don't have that drive if you have your insecurities understand pain is a very powerful motivating factor but if you're 22 and you don't try something you don't feel the pain so why not and then you're 23 then you're 24 you're not feeling pain then you're 28 you're still not feeling pain and you're 32 you're starting to feel a little depressed and you're 35 man and you're 40 you're picking up the bottle you know okay so understand that you're 22 that life is very difficult and that you're gonna you're down a path towards something really really bad unless you get your act together and try that first thing because what happens people have studied fear and it's very important i know back in 2001 i was in vienna austria and i was watching i was in a theater i was in the middle of this this very packed audience and there was a fire and people were panicking and running around and i got such a sense of claustrophobia it killed i was like aha and from then on i couldn't get on an airplane i couldn't get in an elevator i was like developing major claustrophobia right and then i went i saw a therapist and she said you got to expose yourself you got to go back in that elevator you got to go back into that airplane and then you realize it's not so bad and you'll get over it but avoiding it you'll never get over the fear so take that first step do whatever it is that you thought you couldn't do and don't be afraid because that is the most important moment in your life and then you realize it's not so bad okay people are making fun of me i failed but they never tried anything i at least tried and i have an idea for my next but it wasn't so bad you know but if you never make that first step i don't care the wisdom of solomon won't be able to help you right you'll always be stopping before you can so you've got to be have the guts to make that first step and then the doors will open for you it's what i'm hearing you say is it's an experiential event it's not a theory of okay let me think my way out of the fear the insecurity of the doubt it's like no i have to practice this and experience the feeling of i failed or someone laughed at me or i tripped and fell whatever it is you've got to experience it you have a good way of summarizing what i'm saying because you said it better than i did well this is something i've been fascinated by because i think so many people are doubt themselves and their doubt is what keeps them from going after what they want getting into the relationship they want getting out of the relationship they want you know getting the job all these things and they're afraid of failure they're afraid of success and they're afraid of people's opinions or judgment when they take this action and i i tell people that the simplest thing you can do is write a list of your biggest fears and insecurities circle the top one the one that scares you the most and then do that until you feel at peace with it or at least you can embrace it essentially become batman of that fear right and live with the bats of that fear that insecurity where then it becomes a powerful thing for you and this is what i did in my teens and twenties from being terrified of public speaking and i went to public squeezing class every single week until i felt like wow i feel powerful up here not powerless right and i did it with so many different things that i was insecure about until they became skills as opposed to fears and insecurities i think and so i love that you said you've got to expose yourself to the fear you've got to re-go into the elevator go back to that theater that had the fire right and breathe and feel comfortable so you can live your life and then we go back to the thought about you know that question could it have been worse yeah well think of it this way if you don't try that thing it's going to be a lot worse for you down the road you're going to never get anywhere and and you're gonna the pain will be intense in 15 years you're not feeling it now but have that hindsight to realize that the worst thing in life the worst feeling of all is to see that you wasted your potential that you had dreams and you never even tried them and then you're in your 50s your 60s you're facing death why was i alive i didn't do it i could have done this that or that never even tried remind yourself of that you know they used to have emperors in in ancient rome would have a slave walking by them and whispering into their ear you're going to die you're immortal you might die tomorrow you might die tomorrow right and that was like a reminder of their mortality and that they had to not get so up wasn't wasn't that a story from marcus aurelius where he had someone talk to him and say you're just a man or something or maybe was that who was i can't remember but someone had someone just say every day you're just a man right the more powerful he became yeah to kind of keep him more grounded right you're just a man or you're going to die or just have that whisper you're gonna fail you're gonna you're gonna be you're not going to realize your dreams you're going to waste your life you're wasting your life you're wasting your life you're wasting your life you don't want to feel that way i know like it's hard it's coming from a position of privilege and i don't deny that sure but i was not i didn't have anybody help me i all my success was pretty much on my own i worked really hard but i can tell you this that prior to my success i was really unhappy i was really unhappy i was very depressed i even had moments i was suicidal i felt like i could do something but i wasn't able to do it and then the ability to write my books now i don't have that feeling anymore and it's the greatest thing in the world to not ever feel like you know that that that doubt and that depression it's like a constant exhilaration it's amazing i i finished it i wrote that book i did it you know i i can feel good about myself and i want other people to understand that you may not it doesn't have to be a grand project but it has to be something that makes you feel like you know because when you're a child you have these dreams everybody had these dreams you're gonna be the best basketball player in history like me like i thought i was right you know a jewish kid's gonna be a great basketball player okay you know or i'm gonna be the best this would be a great writer and then you get older and you lose those dreams and it's very depressing it's very debilitating and you want to keep some of that child within you alive and some of that ambition some of that desire to achieve something great and having ambition is not a bad thing it's a dirty word today because people think it means you're selfish but your ambitions can be towards achieving things that help people as well what's the greatest fear for you now that you haven't yet conquered or overcome or insecurity that you're still dealing with i don't know lois [Laughter] you know um i i have a believe it or not a tremendous fear of failure like um still after all these massive hits and millions of book souls and every time you get a i'm neurotic and i don't do that every every book is a hit and just changes lives well it's because i don't know from my background i come home with straight a's and my parents would go okay so what what's next okay so it's instilled in me some way i don't know why but so i'm writing my new book my first chapter and i'm going this isn't working it's it's too intellectual it's not going to hit people it's not relevant to their lives i have to change it i have to change it if i write the book like this people are going to laugh at me and i go through that every single time in every single book now i'm able it's kind of a split personality because in the back of my mind i know i'm kind of playing a game but i still play the game and it keeps me motivating it keeps me working so i must say i'm still deathly afraid of failing my readers and of them being disappointed in me and going i thought robert was this great writer and look he's put out this man what's wrong with him he's getting old and soft i'm still afraid of that wow well i guess that's why you keep showing up keep creating yeah to help you overcome that if you're being back invited back to those that's it that's it uh this has been powerful and i think a lot of people got to love this i want them to if you're listening right now and something inspired you or you're watching make sure to send a tweet to robert greene let him know what you enjoyed about this or on instagram robertgreen official post a story tag robert so you can see it even though i'm not sure how active you are on instagram but someone's watching there so you'll get the information and the laws of human nature on facebook if you don't have all of robert's books make sure to get them right now and also get on your newsletter i think you have a newsletter right where they can opt in for when the the future book comes out i'm not sure if ryan probably manages live for you still but go to your website which is powerseductionwar.com powerseductionwar.com the and is spelled out and war.com go there get on his newsletter or just go check it every month because the book's coming out hopefully in the next couple years but this is going to be your best book yet i'm already declaring it i hope so i'm declaring it because i know you're not going to let yourself down or people who read it down you're that neurotic i am that nervous you're that neurotic i sure as tell him and i don't deny it you've we've got some other interviews we've had on our show we'll link those up in the show notes if you want to hear robert's definition of greatness and his three truths you can go listen to those uh final question for you what's the question you wish more people would ask you that they don't ask you i don't really have a you know when people put you on the spot like that you have to be like so quickly and i'm not i'm kind of a slow brain is there anything you wish more people would have discussions about that they don't with you well i don't know i mean you know um i'm kind of really into the zeitgeist i wrote a chapter about that in human nature about the times that we're living through you know i tend people tend to think that i'm just interested in individuals and psychology now but i'm also very interested in in our culture and our society and how it fits into the larger scheme of history so sometimes people don't ask me so much about that chapter and about what do you think is going on right now in the world today where are we what is the moment that we're in and how does it compare in the past because i've read a lot of history i'm not bragging because it's probably led to my stroke to be honest with you you know thousands of books and so i have this innate sense of patterns of history of things that repeat of things you know people go through certain crises and so it makes me very attuned to the spirit to the feeling in the air now so you know what do you think is going to happen in the next few years based on history in two minutes the overview of what you've experienced from all the historical events to what we're facing i think the human spirit can't deal with too much stagnation can't deal with so on the one hand we're afraid of change on the other hand we're deadly afraid of boredom and stagnation and things have been stagnant for too long and we're on the verge of what i think could be a revolutionary generation it's not carved in stone because social media has kind of disrupted the apple cart so to speak but young people are the are the motors of change in this world they will create culture they will create new movements they will create keep the world alive because they enter the world and the world doesn't fit who they are because it was created by boomers or whomever so they want to mold the world into something that's more like them so they're the motors of all the changes all the trends in fashion all the trends in the arts in politics etc but things have been too static for a long time we live in a situation where the politics and the structures have not really shifted in 50 years they're ossified and so i think this human spirit is sick of it if i were 20 years old i would be sick of it i would say this is not the world that i want to live in and so i feel like there's going to be an outbreak at some point where people are going to say i want to live i want something more alive i don't want this world is so unequal you know i i'm somebody who rants against the inequalities of wealth etc and just the kind of rigid social framework that we're living in i think there will be an outburst i can't i'm not nostradamus so i could be wrong in five years people might be laughing at me but i sense and other people have been who write about the generational phenomenon say that the millennials were the crisis generation and that's always followed by the revolutionary generation which would be the generation y or whatever you call them wow or z generation z what should we how should we be preparing ourselves if this comes true what can we do now for the next couple years to prepare ourselves well embrace it embrace it i i did a podcast about it and a lot of people were upset going well you know revolutions i mean come on look at the soviet union or communist china revolutions are bad they're ugly look at that and i my response is change is the healthiest thing that can happen right even if it's a change for the worse it's okay because humans need a vitality we need things that are different we need a different landscape social landscape around us right so welcome it don't be a defensive little rat who's got to live in their own little hole and everything has to be the same the world is changing it will change without whether you like it or not technology will change your world whether you like it or not young people will change the world whether you like it or not so it's a lot better to embrace it and feel excited about the opportunities that are coming out because if you look at the just take it from the business point of view it's a devastated it's like a hurricane happening all the businesses that are gone the jobs lost everything the travel industry they're devastated restaurant industry yeah what happens when that new things are going to spring up new ideas are going to spring up there's going to be new ways i think the new the future for for that kind of world is going to be giving people experiences because they've been locked up in their house for a year and they want so like you go to a hotel or a restaurant you want to give people a little bit of an experience it's not just something so flat and like on social media so people feel more alive there's going to be opportunities you're not even aware of so be open to the change and be excited about it that's the main thing that to prepare yourself for robert thank you for always opening up and being honest and real every time you come on thanks for being episode one and now one thousand something uh hope you come back on many other times two thousand two thousand yeah hopefully we'll come back on a tooth well before then but uh your next book will have you back on for sure if you guys wanna hear more about uh robert's ideas on the zeitgeist and what's happening in culture then let me know and maybe we'll bring you back on sooner in the next six months after the election and everything to see what do you think is gonna be happening moving forward and what we can do about it so robert thank you so much appreciate this i really enjoyed it thank you if you want to learn more about how to master your mind check out this next video right here so when people begin to disengage and get beyond themselves you are at your absolute best when you get beyond yourself and getting the person to that point how does someone get to that point yeah so we teach them that formula we teach them

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 626,471

Rating: 4.8926191 out of 5

Keywords: robert greene, robert greene interview, robert greene speech, robert greene motivation, lewis howes, lewis howes speech, lewis howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success motivation, 48 laws of power, transform yourself, master your dark side, laws of human nature, change your life robert greene, success principles

Id: Ombb-Weu5iU

Length: 104min 42sec (6282 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

His books are a game changer.

[u/CrTigerHiddenAvocado]

Interesting post. Howard Storms NDE experience literally changed my life for the better.

[u/BrendaBeeblebrox]

P.S.- At first I wrote "the best non-fiction writer" then I remembered Malcolm Gladwell, so had to edit it, but forgot to edit "writer"