The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 440: Robert Greene - The Laws Of Power, Mastery, & Human Nature

Episode Date: October 10, 2021

Text LEARNERS to 44222 for more... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12  https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Robert Greene has written 7 international best-selling books focused on strategy, power, and seduction, including The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, The Laws of Human Nature, and most recently, The Daily Laws. Notes: What matters is not education or money, but your persistence and the intensity of your desire to learn; that failures, mistakes, and conflicts are often the best education of all; and how true creativity and mastery emerge from all this. Adapt your inclinations. Avoid having rigid goals and dreams. Change is the law. Find inspiration from your heroes. Are there people whose work affects you in a powerful way? Analyze this and use them as models. Trust the process. Time is the essential ingredient of mastery. Use it to your advantage. What The mentor needs - Find a master to apprentice under, but instead of thinking about how much they can give you, think about how you can help them with their work. Learn by Doing -- The brain is designed to learn through constant repetition and active, hands-on involvement. Through such practice and persistence, any skill can be mastered. Master your emotional responses - displaying anger and emotion are signs of weakness; you cannot control yourself, so how can you control anything? Always Say Less Than Necessary. When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Avoid the false alliance -- Cultivate real allies. No one can get far in life without allies. The trick is to recognize the difference between false allies and real ones. A false alliance is created out of an immediate emotional need. A real alliance is formed out of mutual self-interest, each side supplying what the other cannot get alone. Despise the Free lunch - Learn to pay and to pay well. -- I find that the best clients don't haggle on price, they pay immediately and they are easy to work with. The clients who want to fight about every last dollar always end up being the most difficult to work with. "There is no cutting corners with excellence. It is often wise to pay full price." Judge people on their behavior, not on their words - What you want is a picture of a person's character over time. Restrain from the natural tendency to judge right away, and let the passage of time reveal more about who people are. Don't mistake extra conviction for truth - When people try to explain their ideas with so much exaggerated energy, or defend themselves with an intent level of denial, that is precisely when you should raise your antennae. Determine the strength of people's character - In gauging strength or weakness, look at how people handle stressful moments and responsibility. Look at their patterns: what have they actually completed or accomplished? Be a source of pleasure - No one wants to hear about your problems and troubles. An energetic presence is more charming than lethargy. Being lighthearted and fun is always more charming than being serious and critical. Leave people with a feeling - Keep your eyes on the aftermath of any encounter. Think more of the feeling you leave people with -- a feeling that might translate into a desire to see more of you. Transform yourself into a deep listener - It will provide you the most invaluable lessons about human psychology. The secret to this: finding other people endlessly fascinating. Do Not let success intoxicate you - after any kind of success, analyze the components. See the element of luck that is inevitably there, as well as the role that other people, including mentors, played in your good fortune. Increase your reaction time - the longer you can resist reacting, the more mental space you have for actual reflection, and the stronger your mind will become. Alive time or dead time - Never waste a minute. Make today your own -- whether you're stuck in traffic, sick in bed, or working long hours. You are renting just about everything in your life. The only thing you own is your time. Make the most of it.

And I've learned over the years that even when I'm feeling like things aren't working, when I'm frustrated, actually unconsciously, things are going on in the brain that you don't realize. And I often tell people that frustration is actually a positive sign out because it means that your mind is so deeply focused on something. It can't figure out what it needs to do, but it will happen. It'll happen the next day or the next week. It's a sign that something is going on below the surface. Imagine how your leadership would transform if you didn't have to worry about reading every email, scheduling every call, and responding to every request. If you had more time, energy, and focus to work on things that move your leadership forward. You know you need to start delegating, but you don't know where to begin. Belay, the incredible organization revolutionizing productivity with their virtual assistant services for growing organizations can help.

delegation is the cost of your sanity and the linchpin to the survival of organizations and leaders everywhere. So get back to doing what only you can do growing your organization and leave the rest to your Belay virtual assistant. Just text Leader to 55123 for your free copy of the CEO of Belay's book, Rise Up and Lead Well Today. That's Trisha Shortino's book, Rise Up and Lead Well Today, leader to 55123. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here.

Text learners to 44222 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me. each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about by new upcoming book, which comes out January 2022, and you'll have the opportunity to read it first. If you text learners to 4422. Now on to tonight's featured leader, the legendary Robert Green, author of seven international bestselling books focused on strategy, power and seduction. Those books include the 48 laws of power, mastery, the laws of

human nature, and most recently the daily laws. During this conversation, we discuss why you should avoid having rigid goals, how to find and keep world-class mentors, why you should value learning above all else, how to master your emotional response to adversity. And we're why you should despise free lunch and how to be a source of pleasure. So much more. This one is so good. I know you're going to love it. It's Robert Green.

Robert Green, man. It's such a pleasure to have you back on the Learning Leader Show. Once again, welcome, man. Thank you for having me again, Ryan. I really appreciate it. It's always a fun experience for me. Well, you're certainly one of my literary heroes, and I know you hear that all the time. it's neat when your heroes somehow exceed your expectations because that can be dangerous.

But you do. And one of the reasons we're talking is I just finished speaking with Ryan Holiday, who has, you are one of his mentors. He apprenticed under you when he was quite young. And he goes, you got to talk to Robert about this new book, The Daily Laws. And I said, well, I heard the book was coming out. So I'd love to. And then so over the past two days, I've just devoured this thing. Man, I know you're supposed to maybe read it one day at a time, but I read the, I read the, I read it. You're not supposed to devour it. Yeah, I guess I did it backwards, but it's, it was, it's because it's one of those books where it's hard to stop turning the page. So what I'd like to do is, is kind of surface some of the daily laws.

And then we can expand on those about some of the key learnings as well as the practical application for obviously for me, but for anyone who's listening. So I'll try my best just to follow my curiosity. That sounds cool. Okay. This sounds great. Yeah. First, before we do that, though, I was curious, what made you want to break down your work into this kind of daily law style of writing? Well, there are several reasons. You know, I've been doing writing books now for 25 years. This will be my seventh book. And in the six books in the past, I'm kind of creating for the reader, if I can see what is common to all of the books, this kind of hardcore realist.

outlook on life. So you see things for what they are, not projecting your own desires and emotions onto people or events. You know, you see power as it is. You see the process of seduction. You see your career and mastery. You see human nature. But it's kind of scattered across these different books and all these sort of different forms. So I wanted to have this one medium where we would pull all of it together and create a unified field force, if you will, that sort of takes the general concept of kind of absorbing you in this new perspective. Because my idea has always been that I don't want to write a book that just sort of stays on the surface that you read and then you put down. I want to kind of change you from the inside out. I want to kind of alter

how you look at the world. And so this is a book designed to do that. So, it's broken down into these quarters, but each day you're kind of focusing and meditating on some aspect about yourself, about people, about your career, about the world at large. And it's kind of making you think and it's kind of maybe getting a little bit under your skin. And as you go day by day by day and going through this process, I'm hoping that it'll have this kind of effect that I'm talking about. It's also a good way, if you've never read any of my books, to be introduced to them. And then you can see, ah, this sounds really interesting. I want to read mastery now or whatever.

But the overall idea is the importance of daily practice and habit and meditation and kind of trying to combine all of the various ideas in my books into one sort of condensed version. And this is written about in some of the laws, but I'll just bring it up because it made me think of this daily practice. Consistency in my mind is not a very, sexy thing to talk about, yet extremely effective if you can consistently show up and do the work. One of the things we talked about prior to recording is about how prolific Ryan Holiday is with his production schedule of basically a book a year for a decade. And that's really hard to do.

But I think the key to that is the consistency. Can you share more, Robert, about what you've learned over your career and why this is a valuable law, I would say for people is just the, the, the art and science of consistently showing up and doing the work? Well, it's sort of how the brain is designed. That's what makes humans so powerful and what makes our form of consciousness so effective. Is that we attack a problem and day by day and hour by hour we think about it. We look at it from different angles.

You know, in the moment when you have an idea or you're thinking about something, you tend to be kind of locked into the problems of the moment, the emotions, things going on. You don't really have perspective. And then you'll often notice that a week later, you do have a little bit more perspective and you can see better what was going on the week before than a month, even a greater focus, a greater perspective. And so time kind of reveals to you what's going on. And so if you look at things on a kind of day by day by day basis, you're going to be

getting, you're going to be looking at a problem from all kinds of different angles. You're getting these different snapshots, different ways of attacking them. And I've learned over the course of the years. So for instance, in writing a book, which is, you know, a major undertaking, at least the kind of books that I try to write. There'll be days where you just have no inspiration, where things are flat, where you don't know where you're going and you're upset. God damn, and I've lost it. This is it. I'm never going to write a book again.

but you keep at it. And I've learned over the years that even when I'm feeling like things aren't working, when I'm frustrated, actually unconsciously, things are going on in the brain that you don't realize. When you fall asleep, when you're in the shower, ideas are actually germinating in there, and you're not really aware of it. But by this kind of daily focus, things are happening below the surface of your awareness. And so I found that there's incredible power in the sort of persistence of attacking a problem, even when you feel frustrated or upset.

And I often tell people that frustration is actually a positive sign. I want you to see frustration as a positive sign because it means that your mind is so deeply focused on something. It can't figure out what it needs to do, but it will happen. It will happen the next day or the next week. It's a sign that something is going on below the surface. So, you know, it's extremely important to me that kind of daily, daily attack. I like to attack things, I think, in war terms. Love it.

It also shows you care, which is obviously important to do prolific work. All right, I'm going to jump to some dates. I'm skipping around, but I really encourage people. January 6th, this happens to be my brother's birthday. I also like it. Adapt your inclinations. avoid having, and I'm going to explain why this is important to me and I want to ask you to share, avoid having rigid goals and dreams.

Change is the law. I want to tell you, like, admit something, Robert, that I think sometimes lets people down when I say this. I don't set goals. I have processes. I have these commitments to myself of what I'm going to do each day in order to produce a podcast that helps people to write books. to be prepared for keynote speeches, but no goals. And sometimes that lets people down. How do you not have goals?

Like, aren't you going to it? I'm like, well, I expect good things to happen. But more along the lines of Bill Walsh's book, the score takes care of itself. If you behave like a champion each day, the score usually takes care of itself. And I don't know if this relates to what you're writing or not. It may, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

But you write about avoid having rigid goals. What do you think about goal setting in general from this entry from January 6th? Well, I mean, I'm a little bit different from you in that I will set a goal. I'm obviously deciding to write a book. You have a goal in mind, which is to finish the damn thing, you know, however long it takes. Right. But the problem is that life should be a bit of an adventure. if you're not feeling kind of an openness to experience,

then you're going to be missing very valuable lessons and missing very valuable opportunities that are coming your way. And so I like to have a mix of things where you're thinking about the future. You do have a goal, I'm afraid to say that, you know, several months or a year down the line where you want to finish this thing or you want to have so many, you know, your podcast or whatever. but you're flexible.

You're willing to adapt as things come along, you know. Probably the greatest strategist who ever lived in least military terms was Napoleon Bonaparte. And his genius was always to have strategies with branches. So he'd have a goal about defeating the enemy, but he would always think of five, six, seven ways he could go about attacking them.

And depending on what happened in the circumstances that showed up, he would choose path A, B, C, D, E, or F, and it made him extremely effective. So sometimes your goals in life set you in and can make you rigid and make you miss things that you would normally. So I like to have a kind of an open, fluid way of looking at the world. So something that might cross my path contradicts what I've thought about for my book or says maybe your goal should be shifted a little bit.

Am I open to that? Am I sensitive to it? Am I picking up the signals that maybe my goal needs to be adapted to circumstances? Life is continual change. Nothing ever stays the same. And that applies to week by week, but it also applies second by second in your body, in your mind, right? And the problem for us humans is the mind stops. It stops in the past.

It stops to what was going on a week ago or a day ago. meanwhile things are changing in your body in the world around you and the people around you and your mind is still locked in the past and to the degree that you can free yourself up and be fluid in the moment you will have this kind of power that comes from you know attuning yourself to the actual circumstances of life i uh had a great mentor once robert who was uh west point graduate was a tank commander and then went to harvard business school. So it kind of on paper was like the perfect leader. And so I would go to them all the time. And one of the very first times I went to him, I was young and really stupid. You know, I had no idea what I was doing. And he said, he said, listen, like one of the biggest things I've seen in the leaders who do well in this business and the ones who don't is they're adaptable. You have to be able to adapt to ever changing situations. And that's the only constant. The only constant is that things are going to change around here. And if you're

You're going to sit there and complain and moan and say, oh, man, I just figured this out. And now it changes. You're going to lose. It is not going to work. You have to almost embrace and be excited about change, be excited about how this is an opportunity for me to adapt as opposed to the ones who complain about the way it used to be. And I've always remembered that from early on, be like, let's be excited. Let's view it as an opportunity when things are changing that, okay, now I get a chance to kind of do my, my thing here, which most people don't like to do. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think if I had to advise a leader on the

single most important quality, it is that kind of mental fluidity and adaptability. Right. And I see it all the time and people I consult with. They're locked in the past. They're tied to a strategy that worked a year ago, but is no longer relevant to the circumstances today. So yeah, I completely agree with it. I mean, it reminds me of the old Mike Tyson quote. Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the face. Yeah. And life is continually hitting you in the face. You know, who expected the pandemic? Who expected their careers to be completely upended in this way, right? So your plans probably got shattered a year and a half ago and you're still having to deal with that. But in those moments, there's incredible opportunity.

So yeah, I agree with you. Next one is February 2nd. What the mentor needs. Find a master to apprentice under. But, and this is a big, big but, but instead of thinking about how much they can give you, think about how you can help them with their work. And I think the question that often comes up is like,

how do I find a great mentor? What can I do? And sometimes a young person will ask, well, I don't have anything to give. I don't know anything. I'm an experience. What do you mean, Ryan? I know you told me to try to add value, but what can I do? And they kind of raise their arms like this. So I thought I thought this is a great law on something that could be very practical and useful for people of all ages, but certainly the younger ones who seem to ask for this question as well as also state, I don't have a lot of life experience or value to bring yet. Can you share how, as a mente, you can think about what you can deliver for them in order to build a mutually beneficial relationship with a mentor. Well, it's a life lesson in general, which is you should always be thinking first about the other person and their self-interest. And I can guarantee you as someone who has been a mentor before, I have definite needs, things that I can't do. I have weaknesses, right? And most people who are in positions of power, who could be your potential mentor, are way,

too busy. They're dealing with too many things, right? Everybody who's complained about that their schedule is jammed, et cetera. So you have to be thinking about their self-interest and what you could add value to. And so you have to think in different ways. So first of all, if I don't have anything to add, well, maybe there's something missing in my resume. Maybe I need to spend several months, learning certain skills and learning certain things that will give me that value so that I can have confidence. But the other thing is, think differently of what you can give people. It's not the cliched thing. So merely being young, merely being 20 years or 30 years younger than this person, you already have something to give. And I can give you a very simple example.

Ryan Holiday was my mentee. I hate that word, but I guess that's right, mentee. And, And, you know, what I needed was I'm this, I'm older than Ryan, I'm, you know, 20, 30 years older. And I don't understand the Internet, at least back in 2006 when I met him. I still don't understand it that well. He was young. He knew it was in his blood. He was only 19 years old. It was all he grew up on.

He had this feel for it. So already just being young, he had something to give me, right? Okay. And the other thing is, so think in terms of your youth, what, that older person doesn't know about the internet, doesn't know about Instagram, doesn't know how they can actually extend their audience, expand their audience, et cetera, for this incredible tool, et cetera. So you have already an advantage there because your younger people,

young people are closer to the trends going on in the world. Right now, I really don't know exactly, believe it or not exactly what's going on. I don't really have a great feel for TikTok, for instance, what it means, et cetera. But a 20-year-old, he or she certainly does, and they can help me a lot. And actually, I have somebody in their 20s who's creating my TikTok account and it's kind of blowing up. Okay. But the second thing is, that person needs you to take things off their desk. They need you to help them save time.

If you can do one thing, if you can think of this one thing, I'm going to save this person time. I don't care how I'm going to do it. I don't care how, you know, what the specifics are. I'm going to take things off his or her desk. I'm going to make it so it's easier for him to get through the day. If you can supply that one thing, believe me, they're going to be, they're going to be in love with you. They're going to definitely want to hire you because we're all way too busy.

So think a little bit differently about what you have to offer. Sometimes it's even, this is something I'd try when I was younger, Robert, that I found to work well. Let's say you have a meeting with them and, and, you know, you come very prepared with your questions and they they they're great they answer them i found sending them a follow-up note with a very very detailed not like a transcription but kind of letting them know like you're documenting their process of what they taught you because sometimes they're so busy they don't ever write it down you've then taken the step of writing it down and i'd always say go ahead and click forward to somebody

else on this email because you probably mentor other people and this way they're they're thinking like Oh, great. He documented my thoughts for me. And I had these two or three other people who need some help. I just click forward and boom, he's become kind of a multiplier. I'm rooting for this guy. When can I meet with them again? And I found that that didn't cost me any money. It just cost me some time and made me think. And I became a better writer because of it because it forced me to get really clear on what they were saying. And as I synthesized their thoughts in my mind and had to reshare that, that became a way. And again, didn't cost any money any time. It just showed them that I was a good. listener and then I was willing to get creative about trying to help other people. There's,

there's always something you could do is what I would say is just you have to really think about what that could be and and don't just stay at the surface. Think about what are other deep ways to help other people. Right, right. I love that. Other one. So I'm going to combine February 4th and 12th and that is value learning above all else, which, you know, this is the learning leader show. So that's natural. But learn by doing. The brain is designed to learn through. constant repetition and active hands-on involvement. Through such practice and persistence, any skill can be mastered. And I found this learned by doing personally, Robert, to be huge. Whether it's playing quarterback, which I did before, or it's writing a book, or it's teaching.

The best way to become a better teacher, the best way to become a better writer is to actually teach a class or write a book. And I think this is a skill that sometimes people, don't implement enough. Yeah, and I have an essay for the month of February, which I talk about incidents experiences in my own life that illustrate this. And what I talk about there is I graduated from the university when I was like 21, and I had learned all of these foreign languages because that was somewhat sort of my major, right? French and German, Italian, you name it.

And so my goal was, after I graduated, I was going to go to Europe. And I was going to kind of show off to all these different countries, all of my great language skills. And so I kind of wandered around, had some fun, had some interesting adventures. And I returned to Paris, where I had visited earlier on. And I said, I really want to stay here. I really like this place. But then it became very clear within a week that the French I had studied for two or three years at the university was basically worthless, right? I couldn't understand how to order a meal.

I didn't know how to ask where the bathroom was. I didn't know how not say simple thing, everyday things, right? It was kind of useless knowledge. And I kind of got a little bit depressed and a little bit inward, and I was sort of staying in my hotel room. And then I decided, no, I'm going to go out, and I'm going to master this goddamn language. I don't care how, so that I can have some fun,

so that I can meet some people. I was super motivated, right? And so every day I made a point of never associating with an American or English. I only met with French people. I only talked French for the entire day. And every time I heard someone say something, I took notes. I learned new words. And at night, I would study those words.

And slowly day by day by day, my French got better. I got a job working in a hotel in which I had to speak French every day. I met a French girl that I wanted to date. And I had to speak French or otherwise we wouldn't be able to communicate. So I was super motivated and day by day in this persistence, as we talked about that earlier, and by sheer motivation, by doing it, by not sitting back and waiting,

and not sitting and learning from some kind of virtual program or from some book. I was talking to people, interacting with them because we're social animals and that eye contact and picking up their gestures and their tone of voice. A foreign language isn't just words. It's also mannerisms.

It's also your intonation. I mastered the language. In several months, I learned more than three years of university French. Because in the university, you're not learning by doing. You're sitting there in a book. You're kind of once a week. You're kind of writing down phrases.

You're kind of memorizing things. There's kind of this disconnection between what you're doing and any kind of results, right? And so, you know, a lot of people think that they can just learn things kind of, you know, through a book or whatever. you need to be actually doing it. You need to, university has its limits, right? You can learn a lot about business going to Harvard and getting your MBA in business,

but you will learn more in one month of starting a business than you will learn two years with the finest professor at Harvard Business School, right? Starting a business is the best education of all, learning by doing. And what will prevent you from learning by doing is your fears. because if you try something day in and day out, if you speak French every day, if you start that

business, you can fail and you don't want to fail. And so you think, I'm going to do it from distance. I'm going to learn this easier way on my ego, right? Because every day I was speaking French, people were actually like going, whoa, laughing at me, laughing in my face. I had to deal with that. I had to deal with continual failure. You learn by doing practice and repetition. That's how the brain is designed, you know. That's how we learned 200,000, 300,000 years ago about how to shape a tool. We watched some master at shaping a stone tool or whatever it was. And then we imitated him and we made that tool.

That's how our brains are designed. So learning by doing is absolutely the most critical thing, I think. The interesting thing, like translating this to the business world, Robert, I remember as a sales manager, one of the things I learned from a mentor that I started implementing, was instead of doing these mock calls with me and the person, I would actually have, and sometimes our whole team would gather, we would have the person make real calls. They would be calling real prospects and we would listen together as they would talk to them. So they were literally doing the job with all of us kind of listening and watching. And then we would do these after action

reviews after they'd made a number of calls to where we could listen to their opening. We could listen as they, there's through the discovery process. We'd listen as they finally get to the, maybe the proposal stage and even to close. And I think that actual, that training seemed to be so much better as we rotated people actually doing the job, not mock, not the mock job, because, you know, mock sales jobs or sales calls aren't, it's not the same, even if you have something really good. And I found that to be super useful. And that was a way to train my team by actually doing the work. Well, the other thing is there are stakes involved. Yeah. So, you know, if you start a business or if you're sitting there speaking French, it's literally, you know, a lot is at stake.

Like your loneliness, your happiness, your success, the money you're going to have. And when you feel that there are stakes involved and that the price for failing is actually going to be a little not so good, you're so much more motivated. You're going to learn so much more. Whereas if in the university, there are no stakes, you know, nobody can, okay, maybe getting an A or a B. but my life doesn't depend on my ability to communicate. Starting that business, your life depends on making it work, which isn't the same as in the Harvard Business School, right?

So yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to go to the next three months. April 8th, master your emotional responses. Displaying anger and emotion are signs of weakness. You cannot control yourself. So how can you control anything?

And I think this is something I've maybe gets better with maturity. I think it has for me, but I wonder what you think about this of mastering your emotional responses and thinking of that buffer and making the buffer bigger from the stimulus and your response. And I feel like especially if it's a time when I'm going to be upset or angry, I really have to try to breathe and create more space before I respond. and regret what I do. This happens in parenting sometimes, you know,

where I think about moments that I messed up because I just was like, stimulus, boom, response. Oh, no, what did I do? Why did they say that? What did I raise my voice? You know what I mean? And I think this is a big part of it as well as mastering your emotional responses. Well, you know, so people in positions of power often think that

displaying their anger or their disappointment in people is kind of powerful. They're kind of intimidating and they're showing who's got who's the boss. But it actually has the opposite effect. I mean, Ryan and I both were for American Power, I was on the board of directors. He was head of marketing for a man, Doug Charny, who is very much like that. He was very much open with his emotions. And he thought it showed power, but it actually showed weakness, right?

Because we are animals that pick up nonverbal cues from other people. And the sense that you can't control your own anger, your own excitement, your own frustration means that you can't control yourself. And if you can't control yourself, how can you control a giant business? How can you control anything, right? So it's a sign of weakness. But as you say, it's very difficult to overcome. So now we have to go back to something we were talking about earlier.

The power of daily practice. So this is how you have to attack this problem. It's on a day by day basis. You find yourself today or tomorrow in an office and a work situation where you feel an emotion coming up. You catch yourself getting angry or disappointed or frustrated, whatever it is. And you take a step back and you don't do anything. You don't write an email. You don't say something.

And then you analyze it and you go, where did that come from? Did that possibly come from something else that it's not related to the immediate circumstances? Was it something my wife or husband said in the morning that kind of triggered me? And then I was already vulnerable to getting angry at someone else. What is the source of this, right? And if you can train yourself on a day by day basis, it's not easy. Don't get me wrong. That you can create that buffer, as you say, where instead of reacting, you take a half step back and you think.

And maybe the first time you only think for a minute and then you get angry or whatever it is. It doesn't really work. Okay, but you took that little baby step, right? And then the next time, maybe hours later or the next day or several days later, you'll be able to take more like two minutes a step back. And you'll see there's some power in this. It's liberating because you're not a slave to your emotions. I have often had the experience where I'm angry because nobody is not responding to me and I write an angry email. Right?

We've all done that. And man, the second I send it, why did I do that? You know, it revealed that I, it revealed my sensitivities, which I don't like revealing to people. It also revealed, you know, and maybe I was wrong. Maybe I'm overreacting. You know, it doesn't show strength to constantly overreact. Damn, I wish I could take it back. So from now on, I've trained myself.

Whenever that email, and I feel that I'd never send it, I put it in the draft folder, and I returned to it a day later, two days later, inevitably I trash it. Wasn't that Abraham Lincoln who did that? He actually would write the letter and put it in a drawer, right? Yeah, and they found that after his death. The drawer was filled with all the letters that he never sent to generals, what he was really angry with. Yeah, that's the equivalent of it, yeah.

And speaking of that, I think April 10th goes, And Hannah, Hannah, this is, so I got to admit something. When I'm a guest on other podcast, and let's say they ask a question, and I don't really know the answer. I'm just like, I'm not really sure. I don't know what to say. What inevitably happens for my answer to that question is a very long, rambling bunch of garbage where I'm trying to find my way to some sort of semi-intelligent answer and rarely does it happen. And so April 10th is always, always say less than necessary. And I actually rewatch these interviews, especially if they're on video like this one is, and watch the look on my face as they're asking the question as I begin the answer and as I'm

trying to find my way there. And I have to remember this law, this rule, always say less than necessary. Can you share more? Because this is one that I definitely mess up. And I know a lot of people do, but about the law of always saying less than necessary. Well, it's extremely important. Go on. Do I make you paranoid? But you're kind of setting up a trap there. No, I do it myself.

But the difference with you, Robert, is you somehow always know the answer. Well, sometimes I get in that situation. I haven't experienced yet. And we've talked for like three, four, five hours. So I don't know. Yeah, but it's happened to me. trust me, it's happened to me particularly.

What it usually happens to me is like on live television, where I suddenly like choke up and get nervous and I can't figure out with the answer. I ramble on. And there you can't even ramble on for 50 minutes. You can only ramble on for like two or three minutes and they cut you off. It's the fact that, you know, we're very verbal, chatty animals by nature, right?

And it goes back to this thing about controlling yourself. And so words are kind of our avenue towards expressing our emotions. We feel something and we talk about it. And that's sort of like what 95% of our conversations and communication is about how we feel, right? And so if you're in a situation like you're in a meeting, you're in an office, or you're on a podcast, you know, and you go on and on and on, first thing is you're probably going to be. revealing things that you don't want to reveal. A, that you don't know the answer in your case, or B, personal information, or the fact that you're actually not so knowledgeable about the subject, et cetera. So you're going to get yourself in trouble. You're probably going to say something you regret it.

And B, you're going to signal to people that you're not very, you're not somebody who would control their emotions. You're not somebody who control themselves. You're always in the moment, right? And if you'll notice, If you've ever been in this situation, I've had bosses like that when I worked in Hollywood and I worked in journalism, particular bosses who spoke little, who didn't say very much, right? It wasn't that they were non-committal, it's just that they were kind of mysterious. They wouldn't reveal exactly how they felt. And man, it was that powerful. It made you feel that they knew things that they weren't even talking about.

It made you feel that there was something. kind of mysterious about them. It's a very powerful effect, that kind of slight, silent treatment where all the people in the room, all the employees, they're nattering away, and blah, blah, and this person's very composed and controlled. And every now and then they say like three words. And they're saying, wow, what did he say? What did that mean? Or she? What did that mean? How can we interpret that? That is real power, right? But it's not easy. So you have to learn, you have to put a little thing in your head. And man, I've seen that so many times where people have been on podcasts, or done interviews, where they said something that was very insensitive about women, about race,

about other things, you know, and it reveal that they unconsciously, they have these thoughts. But they don't have that filter in their head that before you say something, think about it. Maybe what you're about to say is inappropriate. You have to develop that little filter, that little voice in your head that says, Robert, are you about to say something stupid? And you can't have it all the time otherwise your tongue will be tied. It's a matter of a split second. And believe me, I have that filter going on even now as I'm talking to you. Well, one of the questions I ask in those meeting type settings is, because there's that rule, I think I learned it from you, do not speak unless you can approve upon the silence. And I ask myself this, am I about,

to improve upon the silence. And if I can't definitively say that, I'll try to hang tight and wait until I can. And then when I can, I want to aggressively state what I'm thinking, not aggressive. I guess it's the wrong term. I want to make sure it's bold, I guess. Like, this is what I believe and why with facts. Right. So when it's my turn, so that people go, oh, you know, that type of response so that it's not going to respond. and there are going to be things that even me I kind of know or I kind of feel and just let it go. But then there are moments that are really important where it's like, okay, I'm coming into the conversation here with with some, some umph behind it because I believe in this. It's really meaningful. I think that's a, that's a good one. Yeah. God, there's so many here I want to talk about. But okay, April 24th is about alliances. And you write about cultivating real allies because no one can get far in life without allies. And so the trick is.

to recognize the difference between false allies and real ones, a false alliance is created out of an immediate emotional need where a real alliance is formed out of mutual self-interest, each side supplying what the other cannot get alone. And I feel like when I think about how the good things that have happened for me, Robert, is 100% because of the people that I've been fortunate enough to be surrounded by, where we have these gaps we fill for one another and each brings something to the table. And those are real allies. And without them, none of this happens.

And so I just feel like this is a really important one to highlight about cultivating real allies. Well, the essence of that law is that in business or in the work world, you have to separate friendship from business, right? And it's very difficult for us because, you know, life is harsh. people can be difficult, people can be unfriendly, et cetera. So when we're hiring somebody or partnering with someone, our first thing is, oh, I want to have that friend come, you know, I'm going to partner with him or her, right? And it's usually the absolute wrong choice.

Because in business or in work, what really matters is results, not friendship, right? So you want to find a team of people that are going to each kind of supply different needs and different values. and not have this kind of team of people that are all nice and charming and friendly and loving and all these other things that kind of seduce you into hiring them, but actually have real skills. Each one is able to give you something very, very real. That was the power of, I talk in my war book about the great American general, John Marshall, who was the head of the Defense Department in World War II. And he knew that running a giant bureaucracy like that was too much for one man.

So he had to hire lie lie lieutenants in different areas who all kind of covered his weaknesses, right? And some of them were people like Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But he was brilliant at choosing those people, creating a team of people who covered what he wasn't good at and constantly communicating to him. And it made him seem like he was this incredibly powerful person, this giant who could figure out all these different problems. No, he had the best team around him. He chose people for the skills they could offer.

And some of them were kind of brash and kind of rubbed people the wrong way. You know, like maybe Omar Bradley wasn't so good at dealing with people, but he got things done. He got results. And then he had other people like Dwight Eisenhower to kind of cover that Dwight was very good dealing with people. So stop choosing your partners in work based on their resume, based on their charm,

based on their friendliness, based on how much they love you, and choose them on the specific skills that they are bringing and covering up your own weaknesses. I mean, Ryan Holiday covers up a lot of my weaknesses. I can guarantee you that when it comes to my social media and to my marketing skills.

people often say Robert you're really good at marketing they had no idea that I'm actually terrible at marketing but that I have people there who make it seem like I might be good at it I bet I find this to be the case I bet you become friends through that I become friends where we weren't initially friends then we did hard work together we learned together we did we did almost life together through the work we produced really great stuff together and then the friendship happened, which is kind of cool, you know, when it happens that way, as opposed to bringing someone in who you like, but maybe not have the skills. And I really enjoy those types of friendships that have developed over the past few decades.

Yeah, I think that's very true. Yeah. Okay. I despise the free lunch, learn to pay and pay well. The reason I bring this up, Robert, and I'll be curious, depending on how much I don't think you do much client work anymore, probably because you're just focused on writing, but you probably have at times where you consult or you speak. I've found the people who don't haggle on price of your, whatever,

your speaking engagement fee or any of the consulting work. The ones that don't haggle, they ask you, you do it, you come to terms pretty quickly. They're easy to work with. Those ones are so much nicer than the people are trying to nickel and dime and ask for all these discounts because then once you get on site, there's, there's always problems with the ones who need nickel and dime versus the ones who you just tell them your rate. And they're like, yep, done, let's go. Boop, boop, bo, bo, bo. You know what I mean? And I think the same thing is true, like, whether it's your clients. And I want to urge people to like be that client for other people as

well. Like, just pay for excellence. That's what you write in your book, right? There's no cutting corners with excellence. It is often wise to pay full price. So there's no free lunches. Can you talk, can you talk more about that? Well, yeah, I mean, think of money not as what it seems to be, not as these pieces of paper or these things that you're digitally passing into your account that show, you know, that are just numbers. Think of it as psychology. Think of it as representing certain things. So if you're dating a woman and you kind of asking her to pay, you know, for her share of it, which is, you know, fairly common. days, but back in my day, it was like, hmm, I'm not worth it. He's signaling his cheapness. He doesn't

think I'm worth paying for, and it still prevails even today, even in our Me Too era. I'm not worth paying for. So your use of money signals something about you, signal something about your spirit, signal something about your generosity, your openness, your life, how much you like people, etc. It's not just numbers, right? So if somebody is nickel and diming you is trying to get your price down, it's not just a sign that they're trying to save money. It's also a sign of disrespect. It's a sign that they have a closed spirit that they're going to be hard to work for, that they may not pay you down the road, et cetera. So look as money as a sign of a person's character, right? And generosity is an extremely valuable quality. It shows.

more than it appears to show. It shows that you're able to get outside of yourself, that you're able to sacrifice yourself, that you're willing to let go of your money to some degree, and that you believe the other person is worth it, right? So pay the full price. You know, I often find in those moments where I try and like save some money

by talking to someone on the phone or whatever negotiate, I feel kind of bad about myself afterwards. It's like, I'm not really a generous of person. I'm not really as open giving a person as I've thought. But whereas when I'm generous and I give to people, it's not that I'm just losing money, it's that I'm feeling better about myself. I have this image of myself that I am this generous, open, giving person.

And that reward is worth the money, trust me. And also, people will respond to you on a much different level. when you pay them their full price, right? Is it really worth saving $100,000, $10,000 in the end and having an employee or a partner who's kind of pissy and in the end will kind of make you pay for it in other ways? Or is it better to lose that money and have someone who's excited and motivated and wants to be on your team?

And if somebody coming to me, the flip side of this, where they're offering something for nothing, They're offering a service for nothing. I immediate little red flag goes up. This person is probably a con artist, right? They're going to want something out of me further down the road. They're asking for a favor from me that I'm not going to want to give, but now I'm going to feel obligated because they did this work for free.

So also be very wary of people who are trying to give you something for nothing because you can get nothing in life without having to pay for it. So, okay, Robert, let's go to May 22nd. Second, determine the strength of people's character. Engaging strength or weakness. Look at how people handle stressful moments and responsibility. Look at their patterns. What have they actually completed or accomplished?

And the reason I bring this up is because I feel like character is revealed during those moments of adversity and how they chose to respond and how that impacted the outcome. And so that's why I thought this, this is, and I like how you describe it as the strength of somebody's character. So can you share more about this, how people handle stressful moments responsibility as well as what they complete and or accomplish? Well, the word character comes from the ancient Greek. It is a word chiros, which means to edge very deeply. And so the essence of the word is your character is something that's edged so deeply into you. You can't even control it.

It stems from your genetics, stems from your parents, stems from your early years in parenting, et cetera. There are things that are deeply engraved in you, that's the word I was looking for, that you can't even control. You're not even aware of, but it reveals who you are, the essence of who you are. And the problem for us humans is that we don't look at people's character. We don't look deep inside of them. We look at their surface. We look at their charm. look at the pleasing demeanor, the way they smile, the way they dress,

and we ignore the underlying character, which is so much more important, which they will, so when you're interviewing a person, they will try to disguise their own weaknesses, right? But they will come out in moments of stress, right? When the shit hits the fan, suddenly you see qualities of fear of insecurities, which you never even notice before, because stress is a very incredible revealing factor. Another very revealing factor is criticism.

You criticize someone, and suddenly they turn into this sniveling little three-year-old, right? And they get all upset and they cry and they whine and they leave the room or etc. I didn't ever suspect that they were this whiny little person before. What happened? Right. So character you want to measure in a kind of a tensile quality, how they measure metal, right?

So you're looking for kind of an inner strength, but that inner strength isn't rigid. If that kind of metal that goes into airplanes, et cetera, is too rigid, it will crack, right? You want something that's kind of adaptable, a little bit moldable, but that has a certain tenseness to it as well. It won't go past a certain point.

And so you want to find people who have this kind of inner strength. It's sort of the goal that you're looking after, looking for. And what reveals the strength of character is A, the ability to take criticism. It's impossible to work with someone who can't take criticism, right? I don't care how pleasing and charming and loving they are, all right? The second thing you want to get a sense of is how they can handle stress. Now, it's hard to know how people are going to handle stress until they're actually in it, right?

but you can kind of manufacture a little bit of stress in that interview process. And I've told people how they can do that. There's little ways to kind of surprise people and kind of ask them they're not expecting and make them sweat a little bit and see. I mean, it's a little bit unfair, but to see how they respond. Like certain questions you'd ask or like what would you do? Yeah, I'd ask certain questions to kind of put them on the spot. What would that be?

Do you have any? Like, I'm curious. I can't remember what the situation was. Whereas you think you know something, they're very confident on their resume, they've expressed they think they know something. And you ask them something that's kind of designed to reveal that they don't really know it as well, right? Yeah, yeah. How do they take it? Well, you know, you're right, actually.

I'm not totally accurate by what I say. And what I really meant is, okay, that's good. They admitted they were probably wrong. Whereas if they get all defensive and they kind of can't say anything or they blame you, whatever. That's like a defensiveness. It's going to be very, very irritating to work with. The third thing is how these people can work as a team, right? Because the ability to subsume your ego, to be able to work with others,

to not have to have everything be about yourself, reveals another element of a strength of character, right? Insecurity is weakness of character. Security is a sign of strength. and the ability to work as a team and not have it all be about you reveal strength of character. Look at people's resume. Look at their patterns of behavior. Look at their past. Pay much more attention to their past than to their present.

See patterns. If on their resume, they've never stayed at one job more than six months, you know, or they've moved around here and there and there and there. And then they'll always have excuses. Well, my boss, he was this terrible person, you know. the little he abused bubble you know they're going to have all these there's all this drama associated with their past well if their past was all full of drama you can better well believe that the future will be filled with drama as well and you don't want any part of that

drama so pay attention to their patterns as well uh we're going to the next three months july 20th be a source of pleasure no one wants to hear about your problems and troubles and energetic presence is more charming than lethargy. Being lighthearted is and fun is always more charming than being serious and critical. And I feel like this seems so obvious, right? Like, of course, like be a source of pleasure. And yet you go out into the world and you're like, they have not read Roberts books. They have not seen this.

But this is basic and core and fundamental and something I try to think of, obviously fail at it. but try to get better at it. But this simple fact of, and this is the way I, the prompt I say for myself, so maybe this could help other people is, did I leave that person better than I found them? So you walk up and you're going to meet somebody for the first time or you had an interaction and you can test yourself after this talk. Did I leave Robert a little better than I found him? I hope I do.

I hope my preparation and my listening, I hope I leave you better than I found you today. And so if you think about that with every question, every person, I think the chance of you being a source of pleasure goes up. So can you share more about this being a source of pleasure? Well, you're right. It seems sort of very self-evident, but how many people violate that? So the essence of it is the degree to which you get inside the other person, the degree to which you were outer oriented instead of inner oriented. So if your focus is continually on your ego, on your insecurities, on the amount of attention and respect you think you're getting, you're going to be continually defensive and inner oriented when you're dealing with people. And they're going to sense that.

And it's going to be a drag to interact with you on some level, right? But think of yourself, think of your own life. How often are people actually interested in you? how often in a conversation with anyone, even with your intimate with your spouse, how often do you get a sense that they're actually thinking of my world, my troubles, my difficulties, you know, what it is to be me. It is so rare you could probably think of just on one hand

the amount of times that happens in the course of a day. And it coarsens you. It makes you, it ends up having an effect on all of us, right? But if there is a person that you interact with who demonstrates a little bit of the difference, where they're thinking of you, where they're thinking of what it's like to be Robert, what is their spirit like, what are their needs, what will give him pleasure, what are the subjects he likes to talk about, what will excite him. Man, the difference is insane.

You're going to be in love with that person. You're going to want to be their friend for life because it's so fucking rare. don't, we all want more validation and recognition from other people, but we rarely give it. So I'm handing you this golden key that will have everybody eating out of your hands. And how many people out there who are going to ignore it is unbelievable. And you're going to ignore it because you're afraid of, you're inner oriented, you're insecure, you're worried about yourself. Stop worrying about yourself and worry more about the other person.

And in caring and thinking inside the other person's skin, you will, end up losing all of those insecurities and anxieties. It will give you a very pleasurable feeling. So I've just handed you the key. I hope you don't drop it. Well, this goes along with, I love it, with August 27th, which is transform yourself into a deep listener. And the way you end that law is the secret to this, finding other people endlessly fascinating. I feel so fortunate that this is my life. I get to interview people like, Robert Green, because I find you endlessly fascinating and I can ask you questions and get deep inside of who you are. And I think, but that doesn't work if you don't listen and try to,

you know, in my case, prepare. I think that's that that's another thing to, another prompt is going out into the world finding people endlessly fascinating because if you really get into somebody's story, I mean, man, there are some amazing people, I promise anyone listening right around you right now. If you actually ask questions, approach them with curiosity instead of judgment, learning about their upbringing, their life story, where they came from, what they did. You know what I mean? I feel like that's such a big part of this. Yeah. What I tried to say in that, and I've said in my last book, The Laws of Human Nature, is that we hear that a lot about being a better listener. But I don't think that that really works

when you tell people you've got to listen better. Because there's something actually going on underneath that, that if you don't address what's going on underneath, no amount of preaching about being a better listener will ever work. And what is going on underneath is what you just mentioned, that we're more interested in ourselves than in other people. We're more interested in the thoughts in our head with what people said earlier in the day,

with what went on in our childhood, with events and experiences weeks before than what is happening in the head of the other person. And if you find yourself more interesting than the other person, then you're never going to want to listen to them because we're drawn toward things that are interesting. We're drawn towards pleasure. And if our pleasure comes from thinking about ourselves, it's going to be impossible to listen to people. So you need to turn that around and you need to find people fascinating.

That's not necessarily the easiest thing in the world. I know for me it's easy because I'm a writer. And my first thought is what's going on in their world, right? I want to get inside. I want to be them for a moment. I want to get outside of being me, miserable writer, working day and dead on my stupid, you know, boring office. I want to get into their world because it's a release for me from all my tension, right?

So I'm out at the supermarket or I'm at CVS and I see somebody that nobody in the world would ever give a second thought to and I'm going, what does it like to be that person? And I started imagining their home, their childhood, their spouse, what it's like to work at CVS, you know, in this kind of rundown neighborhood, et cetera. And I go through this process because it's fun and it's exciting. Sometimes I'll talk to them and if I talk to them, I'll show through my body language that I'm interested because that's the other thing is you can fake interest in people And all of us know that kind of fake interest and that kind of fake question. But to actually encounter someone who is genuinely interested in your story, it shows up in their tone of voice, it shows up in their eyes, it shows up in their gestures.

So you can't fake it. You need to be genuinely interested in people. Now, you know, you're interested when you go to see a movie, you're able to get outside of yourself often. It's a good movie and get inside other people's character because, you know, Hannibal Lecter. He's kind of weird. I want to understand what's going on in his head. Don Corleone or whatever movie it is, right? Okay. Well, people are like that. People are like characters in a movie. They've got all sorts of weirdness, all kinds of strangers. They have their stories. They have their dramas. They are actors in a movie. So try and get outside of the sense of you're the most interesting person in the world because you're not.

And try and get inside the lives of other people on as deep a level as you can. How much can this be learned, Robert? this one, I think this is so important. This is a critical component to like, I think living a cool life. And it's certainly the people that I want to be around exhibit. It's like how, how much of this can be learned from if you, people are envisioning somebody in their head. And it might be you, by the way, somebody listening, but they're envisioning somebody who they're like, you know, they have to be in my life because of whatever, whether it's family or work or, you know, their friend of a friend that is kind of more self-obsessed and they turn every story back to, oh, yeah, oh, you did that. Well, I was

doing, you know, they did one of those things. Like, what about for like that person, how, how, how, how, what do you think about them changing in a way and evolving and growing? It's pretty difficult. Yeah. It's pretty difficult with people who are that. So there's also, yeah, there's also a self-awareness component to say, wait a second, is that me? Like, just holding the mirror up and asking, I feel like, and maybe obviously that's probably not happening with people. who are more eye-focused. Well, the other problem is, is if you tell them you're too inner focus,

you criticize them, it's going to make them even more insecure and even more inner-oriented. We're animals that are attracted to things that are pleasurable, and we avoid things that are painful by nature, right? So if we find it pleasurable to be engaging with people

and discovering that, just in a single conversation, we're going to want more and more of it, right? But if we find that we find that we're more irritated and it's more painful to get outside of ourselves, no amount of preaching, no amount of learning will ever work. So at some point, you have to realize, and I don't know how I can do that myself,

if I could, I'd be a billionaire. You have to realize that my self-absorption is the source of my misery. It's the source of my not connecting to people. It's the source of my career running aground. It's the sort of my relationships falling apart. Do I want to change that? Am I motivated to get out of that pattern, that habit?

Do I actually want something different in my life? All right, well, maybe I should listen to what Robert and Ryan are saying here. Maybe I should try practicing it. And the practice has to go back to everything we've said before. It has to occur on a daily basis. It has to become a habit. So I tell people, the next time, pretend, that you're a writer, for instance,

pretend that you're me. You go into your supermarket, you go into that horrible Thanksgiving dinner, which is a very irritating uncle who drives you crazy, who keeps talking too much, and you go, I'm going to think of this differently. I'm going to think of Uncle Harry,

who's so irritating and annoying him, talks too much. I'm going to see him as a character in a movie. And I'm going to try and see, well, maybe something's going on in his life. Maybe he's got some problems. or maybe he has some ticks. What is it like to be Uncle Harry, right?

Instead of judging, you made a very good point before. It's our tendency to judge people that kind of makes it impossible to get inside them. I'm not going to judge him. I'm going to think about what goes on in his inner world. And suddenly, that whole Thanksgiving dinner changes as you look at each of the characters at that meal in this sort of new light or which of the people that you encounter in the supermarket or wherever you go. You start practicing on a daily base and you see results.

You see that it's fun and you see that people respond to you differently. And when they respond to you differently, you respond to them differently. It's like magic. But you have to sort of experience it. No matter of preaching and talking is going to change you. You have to experience it from within. Yeah. I think the prompts, at least for me, are helpful in thinking of approaching them with curiosity,

that promises, did I leave them better than I found them? Just like, did I leave this place better than I found it? There's a piece of trash on the ground, pick it up, throw away, right? Did I leave this person better than I found them? And usually a way to do that, like you can judge that based on their body language, how they responded, how much they smiled, their eyes, all of that can show me, did I leave them better than I found them? And usually, you'll leave them better than you found them if you approach them with curiosity.

You ask some questions you get into their story. I found that that seems to help. Rob, do you have time for a few more? I know we're over already over. Do you have time for a couple of sure. Okay, a couple more. Okay, October 5th, do not let success intoxicate you. After any kind of success, analyze the components. See the element of luck that is inevitably there, as well as the role that other people, including mentors, played in your good fortune. I think this is critical, is always be, do a post-mortem no matter what. So if it goes well, do a post-mortem.

If it goes bad, do a post-mortem. The after-action review and really analyze why the thing, whatever the thing was, went well or it didn't. And be honest with yourself, get help from other people. I found that this is a way to not let success intoxicate. What do you think? Yes, I mean, so our tendency will be when we have success is, is, man, I'm great. I really do good job.

I'm really good at what I do. And when we have failure, that other person, they screwed up. It's their fault, you know, they're to blame, right? Okay. You want to turn that around. You want to do the opposite. When you want to have success, you want to look outward and you want to see the factors that played, the outside factors that played a role in your success.

Yeah, some of it comes from you and who you are, But some of it was luck, meeting the right person at the right time. Some of it came from the fact that your parents were able to pay for a very good education and you learned all these things that helped put you in that situation. Some of it has to be the times that you live in and you were in the right place at the right time, et cetera, on and on and on and on, right? There are all kinds of factors that led to your success that aren't really have anything to do with you that happen to be circumstances.

look at them and focus on them. It'll give you a degree of humility. And when there's failure, when there's problems, when there's screw-ups, stop the tendency of looking for scapegoats to blame and look at yourself. So let's say in success, let's just put an arbitrary number. Let's say 40% of it comes from you and 60% of it comes from other people and other circumstances. We'll focus on that 60%. make an actual point and maybe even make it seem a little bit larger.

Okay. And there's value and then I'll get that to in a minute. But when there's failure, maybe only 20% of it comes from you, but focus on that 20% because it will increase your margin of learning. It'll increase your chances of improving yourself. You are always to blame it to some degree for no matter what crap happens in your life. There's always something you could have done differently. There's always an element of you unconsciously fumbling and making a mistake that you're not even aware of.

Step back and analyze it deeply and learn from that, right? So I compare this to like normally we walk through life. Our feet are on the ground, but our opinion of who we are elevates us a couple feet off the ground. We generally think that we're better than we are. Some people have those feet, two feet underground. They're kind of walking like that kind of way. But most of us were above the ground. We think that we're better than we are.

And then we have some success and then it gets higher. Now we're five feet off the ground. And then we have another bit of success. And everyone's telling us we're great. And now we're way up in the sky and we think we're God. And then the next thing we do, because we're so disconnected from reality, is an incredible failure. And man, is it painful to go from success to failure.

It's so emotional that you may never, ever recover from it. And I want you to avoid that. I want you to continually keep your feet more or less on the ground. And you'll do that by going through this process of seeing how your success is connected to other people and how your failures are also connected to you. So you can keep that kind of level ground. And you'll always be a few feet above. But if failure hits, you won't be devastated because you haven't elevated yourself so high.

You'll understand that you probably screwed up in some way. I love it, man. One more. A live time or dead time. Never waste a minute. Make today your own, whether you're stuck in traffic, sick in bed, or working long hours. Talk to me, Robert, about a live time or dead time. Well, you know, I like to think of it in the following way.

There are a lot of things that you really don't own in life, that you really don't possess, that can be taken away from you in an instant. You know, your spouse could leave you tomorrow. You could be fired from your job. Your podcast could be a total failure and no one will fund it anymore. You know, friends will die and things will happen. A lot of stuff, you know, that you can't really control, be taken away from me. So I want you to think that you're borrowing everything in life,

that nothing, you don't really own anything. It can be taken away from you. But there is one thing, one thing that cannot be ever be taken away from you, and that is your time. You are born at a certain moment in life, and you were allotted time as a living organism. That time could be 20 years, it could be 100 years, years, whatever it is, that time is yours. You own it. It is your possession. It is the only

thing that you truly own. And you can give it away. You can give away this only thing you own by working for other people and being miserable. And all the time that passes, you're just angry and upset and frustrated and bitter, et cetera. It can come from wasting your time, wasting your potential. So by the time you're 40, all your dreams of childhood have kind of withered and it's looking pretty hopeless for you. You've wasted that time, et cetera.

Right. So there's one trick to continually making that time alive. Think of things that are alive as being green. And think of things that are dead as kind of being brown and withered. Right. So you want to make things as green as possible. And when you're at that job and you're bitter,

and you're angry or you're procrastinating, you're not getting things done. The time is slowly withering and turning brown and dying, right? But when you, so let's say you've got a terrible job at McDonald's, flipping burgers. I can't think about a worst job. I know they're worse jobs. Being a nurse during COVID, it's probably worse. But let's just say you're flipping burgers in McDonald's. And man, you're unhappy.

And man, you're bitter. And shit, why do I end up in this job? I'm so much better. I hate this job. I hate the people I'm working for. I hate the people that have come in here, et cetera. And so those eight hours that you put in there are pretty awful. Pretty, you know, and that green thing that's inside of you is slowly dying and dying and dying.

But let's say you looked at it from the other angle and you go, all right, this is my time. It's not McDonald's time. It's not my own, my boss's time. It is my time. I'm going to own it. I'm going to make it green. I'm going to make it come. to life. How do I do that? Well, I'm going to think of the customers. I'm going to think of how I can

do what you said and make them feel better about themselves, how I can serve them better, how I can learn from this job. I can learn, man, I hate having a shit job. I'm going to actually go out and learn something every night I'm going to go home and I'm going to learn some new skill. It's motivating me to go to night school. It's motivating me to learn things on the internet, right? It's making me learn how, like, psychology, people working with me, what motivates them for all these weird people who come from other countries, other cultures? What's their world? What's their situation? So you're learning about people's psychology. You're learning about the customer psychology.

You're learning about what you hate and what you love and what you're going to end up trying to do in your other time. And suddenly that eight hours at McDonald's is getting greener and greener and greener. You're learning, you're open, you're expanding your vocabulary, you're learning about human nature. Of course, there are limits and there are going to be days. It is a shit job. I'm not trying to put lipstick on a pig. I understand that there are limits to this. But you can actually expand those limits day by day.

And if in that eight hours, you find two hours like that, those two hours are enough, right? As opposed to eight hours of bitterness, damn, damn, damn, I hate myself. I hate people. I hate my work, et cetera. Right. So that's how I kind of think. Robert, this has brought me back to time. I was in the business world. I had a boss that I did not like.

And I became a complainer. I remember one day vividly, I called my dad. And he probably just let me go for like 10, 15 minutes, just rant, right? Complaining, complaining. And he let me go. Like I said, he kind of calmly responded and said, hey, you are in the, right now, you're in the middle of one of the greatest learning experience. experiences of your life. You're not going to be in this job forever working for this guy.

So don't worry about that. Don't waste this time. Don't waste this time working for a bad boss. Everybody works for a bad boss. You happen to be, you happen to be doing it right now, journal about it, think about it, learn what, learn what not to do, right? And try to figure out why is the guy this way? You know, like you said earlier, that person, the Uncle Harry, right? Why is the other way? And I thought, it completely changed how I thought about it. Did I work for him forever? Of course not.

But the rest of the time, it changed. It almost, and we actually ended up having a pretty good relationship that me and the person that I didn't really particularly like. And it's because of the way I chose to view it, obviously with help from someone far, far wiser than me. And so I think to anybody, because the bad boss question is a big email I get, Robert. like I'm a growth-oriented leader and I want to get better. I want to do all this, which is great, but I work for somebody who's not that way. And so that's how I always harken back to that conversation with my dad when I was complaining like little baby about all the things that this person was doing when he's like, you're right in the middle of it, man, in the middle of a great learning experience,

don't waste it. And that turned that kind of dying brown time into green. And I, and so I'd say I think that's an example that a lot of people can draw from. Robert, you know, I always go along with you because I love you and I'm so grateful for your work and I love the opportunity to talk with you, man. The book, I highly recommend it. This is a galley, I think, but this is what it's going to look like, right? The daily laws. It's so good. Oh, is a different cover than this one. Well, that's the same cover, but it looks a little, looks a little better than that. Yeah. Oh, nice. I gotcha. I highly highly recommend this book, 366 meditations on power, seduction, mastery,

strategy and human nature. It's really good. All the stuff Robert puts out is great. So I highly encourage people to get the book. And Robert, I just got to say once again, thank you so much for coming on. And I'd love to continue our dialogue

as we both progress, man. Yeah, I hope so too. You're always the best interviewer, Ryan. I really enjoy it. You actually exemplify a lot of the things

that we were talking. talking about earlier. I'm not trying to butter you up. It's actually very sincere, but it's a great. I always enjoy it. So, man, it means a lot. Thank you. That means a lot. You're very welcome. I really appreciate it. And until next time, man, whatever the next book comes out, or hopefully let's do it before the next book. I really look forward to it. Yeah. Yeah, next book would probably be three years. So let's do it before then. Let's do it before then. Cool. All right. Thanks so much, Robert. Thanks a lot, Ryan. All right. Take it. As you can tell, I treasure my time spent with the great Robert Green. I admire his curiosity and thoughtfulness and quite frankly how kind he is

and giving. Obviously, he's here to help promote his book, but especially if you watch the video, you can just see how much he seems to enjoy teaching and sharing this knowledge. And I'm grateful that I get to be one of his students. I hope you liked it as much as I did. A few topics from my notes. Determine the strength of people's character. Engaging strength or weakness, look at how people handle stressful moments and responsibility. Look at their patterns. What have they actually completed or accomplished? I like this mentality when determining the strength of people's character, as well as the way Robert defines character. And then adapt your inclinations. Avoid having rigid goals and dreams. Change is the law. I think, as I mentioned from one of my mentors, one of the most important

qualities in a leader is the ability to adapt to the ever-changing world because the only thing that is constant is change. And then transform yourself into a deep listener. It will provide you the most invaluable lessons about human psychology. Be interested in other people. The secret to this is finding other people and the fascinating. Approach people with curiosity instead of approaching them with judgment. This will change your life. Once again, I just want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message, telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode with the great Robert Green. It will help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that,

and because you continue to write reviews and rate the show, hopefully five stars on Apple Podcast, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon.