Daily Motivations - How To Live A Successful Life

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Speaker: Robert Greene is an American author of books on strategy, power, and seduction. He has written seven international bestsellers, including The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, The Laws of Human Nature, and The Daily Laws.Instagram- Daily_motivationsorgFacebook- @daily_motivationsorgSupport us PayPal

You know, life can be kind of difficult, right? You don't really know sometimes where you're headed. Nobody kind of gives you any kind of guidance in this world, right? And they don't tell you when you graduate college, go ahead, go Robert, you go study this. This is what, you know, and this is what your brain is suited for, et cetera, et cetera. You have to find your own path. And so for me personally, I spent, you. years in the wilderness.

So I'm going to give this a personal spin because I think that helps a little bit. Because I can answer it inside my own body here. So I know I want to be a writer, but I can't figure out what the hell I'm going to write. So I leave college and I try journalism because I have to make a living. I have to support myself. And I don't really like it. It doesn't suit me. He writes an article and then a week later it's for,

forgotten, nobody reads about it. And as somebody who studied ancient Greek and Latin in college, I think in terms of thousands of years and not in three days or a week, you know, I want something that I write to be read in 30-20 for, you know, sorry. So it wasn't a good fit. So I quit. I wander around Europe, trying to write a novel with my backpack. I live in London. I live in Paris. I lived in Ireland, I lived in Greece. You name, I taught English in Spain. Trying to write a novel. I had no discipline.

I couldn't do it. It didn't work. And I started to get depressed. Then my dad isn't well. I said, I'm going to move back to Los Angeles. Hey, I'm going to get a job in Hollywood, right? That'll be, I'll make a ton of money. And I'll be writing and, you know, et cetera.

How glamorous, how sexy. You know, movie star, star, starlets on my, knocking on my door, et cetera. Okay, terrible, terrible fit. because I'm a control freak. I don't like people coming in and changing everything I say, and I don't like conforming and I don't like compromise. Sorry, that's a bad thing about me, but I didn't want to have to lower my eye standards

to what they were asking me to do as a terrible fit. All right, now comes the chance. I meet this man, Yo, Stelfer, as we mentioned earlier in Italy, and he says, he asked me if I have any ideals for books, and I kind of improvised the 48 loss of power. The point of my long-winded story here is I had spent 18 years or so acquiring high levels of skill in writing. Okay, I could, I learned in journalism how to write under a deadline under pressure, how to make it dramatic, how to make the opening sentence exciting enough to make you read off further. Trying to write novels,

me about creating stories, which is a huge part of my writing. Working in Hollywood, I learned how to research, which is a huge element, and then the theatrical element, making things dramatic, also story. Okay? All of that time, slowly by slowly, brick by brick, I had developed real level skill, so when it came time to write the 48 lots of power, I could do it. I had learned all this discipline. I had learned how to write under a deadline. I learned how to make things entertaining. The whole bag. And so the world opened up for me. Prior to that time, I was miserable. Really was. I mean, I had good moments too. You're young. You're always happy when you're young. But a lot of times I was miserable. I didn't know why, but I was acquiring skills, not even aware of it.

And so the reason I write that is when you develop that skill, when you're serious about it, because I was very serious about writing, you change your brain. You rewire your brain. It's like, and this is a remarkable power of the human brain that people don't realize. It's something I'm also writing in my new book. This one writer, his name is Schwartz, I believe, is a UCLA neuroscientist. he wanted to help people who had OCD, right, obsessive compulsive disorder. And usually it's drugs and it's talking therapy. He wanted to find out something more effective.

And he found that through certain strategies that he developed, that they could use in their life, that they would get over their disorder. And the point isn't what the strategies were. The point was he did brain scans. And through the strategies that he gave them to do, which I can't remember right now, the brain scans show that they changed the brain. And his point was, through thinking, through developing skills, you literally change matter, you change your brain.

So something non-material like thoughts can literally change material things like the wiring of your brain. You learn skills. You're changing your brain. You're changing the matter of your brain. are connecting that weren't connected before. And slowly, if you do it if you're serious enough, a point will be reached like it was reached in my life where either you will start a business

or someone will ask you to do something like write a book or make a film, and the world will open up for you and you'll be able to do it because you have that, you've laid the ground, you've laid the soil, everything is there, it's rich, and now something great, amazing will sprout up out of it. When you have no talents, you have no skill, you have no skill, life is a series of endless confusion.

You hit this road, you go here, then something else you go here, then you go here, and you end up in a circle and you don't know where the file you are. When you've got skills, Zoom, you know where to go. It's not in Zoom, it's more like, but your head somewhere. Yeah, it's not part of your psychology will radiate outward. But for those that don't, they just don't have that belief. Can you lie to yourself? Can you tell yourself, I am strong and I am powerful?

Well, everybody has some good qualities, right? Everybody, I think almost everybody has something that they can go back to in the past and go, I was actually very good at that. That was actually a good moment. I actually was, you know, scored in that particular moment. And you can think about that. I mean, actors do that all the time in movies. When they want to express an emotion, they go back into their past.

Like, they have to express sadness. they go back and they think about their father, her mother who died, and they call that emotion up. You can call that emotion up of when you did something actually really great. You might have only been in high school when you were on the sports team and you threw the touchdown or something. Okay, think about that and it'll come back to you. Everybody has something that they can be confident about, I hope.

If there was one law that the powerless amongst us, who feel powerless or lost in the current world, one law or one fact of human nature that people who are feeling lost and purposeless and adrift right now should be thinking the most about which one springs to mind well there's no one shop answer to this kind of thing But one law that I would highlight is interaction with boldness. And what I mean by that is if you feeling timid, if you're feeling that you're not confident in something, you will start a project and it will fail because you feel that way,

because you don't enter into it with the right energy. So if you feel, if you take something and you do something boldly, Everybody loves the bold, everybody admires it. Even if it's stupid, even if it fails, it will gain you that kind of attention. And so let's say you're thinking about starting a business. Well, just go ahead and do it and be bold about it and start it and be as dramatic as you can and be as confident as you can. And it creates a self-fulfilling dynamic.

People admire it. They don't admire the timid and the insecure and the guy who spends two years talking about that podcast. I guess he's going to start. They admired that bloke who just decided, all right, I'm going to start it. I don't care. If nobody likes it, fine, you know. I remember this guy interviewed me once. He had a magazine called Bad Ideas.

And it was a really successful magazine in, like, the early 2000s. And I said, where did you get that idea? And he said, my mother told me that to start that magazine was a really bad idea, right? So I thought I'd put the title there, you know, and that would be the title of it. and I just went ahead and started it. And it was very successful because it was a great, like, marketing gimmick. And it also worked, and it was actually full of bad ideas in the book thing, but in a very interesting way.

So being bold, being different. Everybody nowadays, I'm getting up my goddamn soapbox again, and I apologize to everyone about this. But everyone is so similar. Everybody is so afraid. Everyone's trying to be like everybody else. You go out there and you're, start something that's different, that's you, that's unique, that's loud, that proclaims I'm

a different voice on it, you're going to get attention. So I want more bold people in this world. We've got too much fear, you know? I'm not maybe a big admirer of, in some ways of Elon Musk, but damn it, he's always bold and it always works for him. He doesn't start just a minimal business about maybe sending rockets out there. He starts a thing that's going to take you to Mars. He's bold, and people love it. The world moves out the way of boldness. I was thinking as you were speaking about a memory of mine of being at a festival in New York City called Global Citizen.

I was like Beyonce was performing and stuff, all the biggest names in the world. And my friend was drunk. And we were in the VIP section behind the stage, but we could see that there was this access-all-areas artist section. And because my friend was drunk, I've never witnessed anything like it. This guy gets me, takes my hand, goes, come with me.

He walks directly at the... the two massive security guards with this boldness, this conviction, they just move out of the way. I thought you could say they punched him. No, they just moved out of the way because of the way he was walking. They just thought, well, he must be in here. And they moved out of the way. They didn't check his past. They just moved out of the way.

And he continued to do that all day. And it was because he was drunk. He's done a documentary about this. He used to be an alcoholic. So he had this confidence when he was drunk where the world would just, like, move out of his way. And he ended up going in what I believe to be, the president of, some Asian country's dressing room, again, because he was just walking at things. Right.

And the way he was walking, it just moved out of his way. Right. But I've never forgotten that. Actually, I deployed it today when I went for a run with my girlfriend because I wanted to use a bathroom in a restaurant. And I figured that if I just walk with a certain conviction, the staff will like let me pass. They'll assume maybe I'm sat here. And I ended up walking through a conference.

It was like a conference hall in this hotel where they're checking people's badges. Just because I was the way I was walking, nobody checked mine. Right. And there's a metaphor here for life, and you kind of allude to it in your book about, like, the bolder you are, the better. Some of these subheadings I find really cool. Lion's Circle, the hesitant prey. Boldness strikes fear, and fear creates authority. Going halfway with half a heart digs the deeper grave.

Yeah. Hesitation creates gaps. Boldness obliterates them. Yeah. And audacity separates you from the herd. Yeah, yeah. I want, if one thing, if I have one, legacy if I create more bold people in this world I will be happy because we've got too many

timid hairs out there we need more bold lions yeah something start your business write that book do it just do it please and then write me afterwards and either blame me or thank me and to be able to create something and know how to master a subject and to you know build something that can last. That's really important. And I'm feeling like because young people, this is back in 2010 imagine now, have this idea that everything comes quick and easy because you can click, click, click, and things come to you, that everything in life should be that way, that we're becoming alienated from the human brain, how the human brain operates, because the human brain requires time. If you know how the human brain operates, we have what are called neural pathways.

and every time you repeat something, a neural pathway is created and strengthened and strengthened and strengthened. It's why we get addicted to things, but it's also why we develop skill. So if I'm sitting there shooting free throws day in a day out and day up, my brain is wiring it, it's learning it, it's learning that motor skill, that hand mind thing, and it's getting better and better and better at it.

It takes time, it takes repetition to build those pathways. And I explain in mastery, that you reach the proverbial 10,000 hours, which some people dispute nowadays, so it's just a number. It's not a fact. You've ever spent so long learning something that there's so many pathways.

It's like this amazing inner landscape with all these connections going on in your brain. And now you can be creative. Now you can come up with things that nobody's ever thought of. You can play chess on a higher level. You can be Pelle and soccer or line. messy making passes that no one had ever seen before because you're not having to think right you don't have to think anymore your body just does does what it wants imagine 20,000 hours which is

possible people sometimes attain in certain fields you're almost like a genius you're almost like superhuman right if you're someone who's so locked into the internet to getting things instantly you can't get past 100 hours let alone 10,000 you're never going to develop skill and you're find life really, really difficult for you. So I wrote the book because I was actually deeply worried that we were losing a part of how the human brain operates as something elemental part of our wisdom. The interesting through line between that and the subject matter we've discussed in power and seduction is that by learning to master something you build that sense of self-esteem and confidence that we're looking for to be good at the former topics mentioned. But

On the topic of mastery, the first chapter in this book, and really the first question a lot of people ask is this question about finding your passion. And I've always had a difficult relationship with this question because it sometimes assumes that there's one of them and that you have to go in search of it somewhere. In the first chapter of your book, you talk about discovering your life task. Why is it important? Is it the same thing? Is finding your passion and finding your life task the same thing? No, I just recorded this yesterday on my own. podcast. I went on a rant about how it's not about passion. It's not about finding your passion.

I actually don't like that word passion. It kind of makes me cringe. Because if you think about it, passion, to succeed at anything requires time and effort and boredom and tedium. So let's just say a simple example. You're learning to play the piano. When you first sit down at the piano, you have to play these really insipid tunes. It's so boring. You have to learn, you know, what they call it a finger exercises and scales on any instrument you have to learn scales etc it's tedious man if you think it's got to be passion forget it you're never going to get far the thrill comes after a year of playing the piano and you get better at it better and better and now it starts coming fun than 10 years it's more fun than 20 years it's fantastic you know i'm not i'm not trying to name

drop here but the other night i had dinner with stevie wonder It was the most amazing thing I ever seen. He's absolutely, I wish I had interviewed him from my book. Speaking of genius, you know, and he's blind, obviously. Everybody knows. But I was watching him, he performed for us. We were there with a couple of friends at his recording studio. I was watching him play the piano and he's blind, right?

And he's improvising. And it's just absolutely brilliant and amazing. And as I'm seeing this, I'm thinking, I could see the thousands of hours. been putting in just touching these keyboards and knowing where the where the where the keys are you know it was just mind-blowing how amazing it was that is the power that the human brain naturally has through hours and hours and hours of effort that's how it works so you know he didn't get there because it was passion he got there because he was a child prodigy at age of 11 he was signed to a contract with

Motown Records, right? He was playing that as he was a kid, hour after hour, after hour, after hour. He had a love for the piano, but it wasn't like every time he sat down, it had to be passionate about it. He had the patience to put up with all of the boring stuff, okay? So, you want to discover what you were meant to, what you have a connection to, what you have a love for, right? When you're a child, hopefully, or when you're 18 or 19 or 20, or 20, you're, That's the best time to discover it. All right. You decide, and it doesn't have to be something highfalutin

or worth, you know, like intellectual. You could be great with your hands. You could be great with your body. You could be great with images and visuals. You could be great with words. You could be great in many different areas. Okay? They're all equal.

They're all great. You as a child are naturally... So there's a book I always recommend for people called The Five Framework. of mind by Howard Gardner, in which he talks about the five forms of intelligence that humans have. Each brain biogenetically is wired in one direction or the other. You want to know that you want to feel it inside of you. It's like a feeling. It's not an intellectual thing. You feel when you're doing sports that it's good. It's a natural thing. It's what I'm meant for. When you're involved

with words like I was when I was eight years old, it felt right. felt like a natural fit. I have to follow this path. When you're three or four years old and it's music like Stevie Wonder and you're hearing this in your head. Wow, that's it for me, right? Okay. You feel it. You feel this connection. Right. Now you fast forward to when you're 18 or 19 years old and you're having to make a career choice. Okay, so I call that your 20s, the most important phase of your life. That's going to make or break you in some way. If you spend your 20s trying to learn skill in something that connects to you deeply, right, then things are going to happen to you by the time you reach 30.

You've discovered your life's task. It may not be something so specific. For me, it was writing and words, but I didn't know what to write. I tried novels. I tried journalism. I tried theater. I tried screenwriting. But you know it.

It gives you a direction and you try and you try and try. And you know, that's what you were meant for, that's what you were destined for. You feel connected to it, you feel a love for it. And so when it comes time to do the tedious stuff, you're able to do it because you know, in the end, it'll pay rewards. You'll get better and better at it. And the connection is so deep that to not do it would be miserable.