The Resilient Mind - How To Master Your Life - Robert Greene

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Robert Greene, is an American author of books on strategy, power, and seduction. He has written six international bestsellers: The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, and The Laws of Human Nature.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to How to Master Your Life with Robert Green. Get access to the Mental Mastery Program and other exclusive episodes by becoming a subscriber. Enjoy. Now there's this question that people have been asking famous people and friends for hundreds of years now. And the question is as follows. If you were stranded on a desert island and you could only have one, one book that you could take with you or have with you, what book would that be?

Now some people answer the Bible, which is a great answer. You know, this would be very inspiring and give you a lot of support during probably a very difficult time. Other people who want something maybe a little more entertaining but still inspiring would say Moby Dick or War in Peace, Warren Peace being very long so you can draw it out for a while. Some people with a sense of humor would say Robinson Crusoe. When they asked the writer, the famous English writer, G. K. Chesterton, what book would you take if you were stranded on a desert island? He gave a much different answer. He said that he would take Thomas's Guide to Practical Shipbuilding. Okay? Now, I actually happen to be one of the few

people who's actually seen Thomas's Guide to Practical Shipbuilding. It's from the 19th century, late 19th century. I was in the British Museum. I went to the private collection. I actually saw it. And it's an amazing book. It's got incredible illustrations beautifully. It's something you could spend hours reading. It happens to have a chapter in there that explains how you could build any sea worthy vessel from a few planks of wood, how you can construct it with virtually no tools, how you could make a mast and rigging from plant material, how you could launch this vessel at what time of year to launch it, how to navigate using the stars and the North Star, an amazing book.

So imagine you had this predicament, which book could you take? If you had something like Tolstoy's War and Peace, it would certainly be more entertaining than Thomas' guide to practical shipbuilding. But after you read it one time, two times, three times, you started to get sick of it. And as you're on the island three years and four years and you're getting more and more depressed and suicidal, you probably are going to stop reading it and one night you're going to use it for firewood. Thomas's guide, on the other hand, it might seem like adult.

book. From the day one, you're trapped on this desert island, you're filled with this incredible confidence and hope. You no longer feel like you're trapped on this island. You know that if you use this chapter, you can get yourself off the island. You can start building your own ship. It's going to take months, probably years. But as you're building this little vessel to escape from the island, you're create, you're learning a valuable skill, you're building confidence, you're feeling more and more excited about what's ahead. Then maybe you launch this vessel, then maybe you get to another island or to some port, where now you could read all of the books you ever would want to read,

and then you could write a bestseller about your experiences and sell the movie rides, on and on and on. So to me, this is like the ultimate book. This isn't a book that you read for pleasure. In these circumstances, this book can literally transform your life. life, transform your circumstances, save you from the most miserable despondent condition, and bring you back to civilization. So I naturally, I applaud the spirit of G.K. Chesterton's answer, his practical spirit. It's a practical spirit that informs all of my books. But I can

go even further than that. I would say that my new book, mastery, is my attempt to write Thomas's guide for practical shipbuilding for the everyday world. It's a book that I don't want you to sit there and read for entertainment in some passive sort of sense. It is a book that I want you to use to literally transform your life, transform the circumstances of your life. And I make the case in the book that, in fact, all of us, all of you, are stranded on a metaphor historical desert island. And what I mean by that is in the past 40 years ago, men, mostly men, would have a job like my father where they would essentially work at one position for their whole life.

My father worked for 40 years for Empire Chemical Company. And in that time, you felt not so long ago, you felt that the company that you worked for was there to protect you. There was a loyalty that went in both directions. You felt that they weren't going to fire you for no reason at all. If for some reason you ran into trouble with your career, you had a sense that your family, your community, perhaps even the government, could help you out. If you had a degree, like in law, or you went to medical school, or you got an MBA, that was a way. That was essentially a life-long ticket to lucrative employment. Now, of course, here we are in the 21st century, and that world that my father knew is completely, completely wiped away by the tsunami of the 21st century.

It is gone. It is a dream. None of us are going to work for the same company in our lives for 40 years. The Empire Chemical Companies are dinosaurs. We're going to work for three or four years at this company, at that place. whatever. There's no longer a sense of loyalty going both directions. We don't feel like that company, that place that we work for is necessarily going to protect us from cradle to the grave. We no longer feel the security that if we got into trouble, we really could rely on our family or our community and we certainly can't

rely on the government at all. So in some sense, the only thing that we can really rely on is ourselves. We're thrown back on ourselves. We have to depend on our own resources. We are essentially stranded. And to take this metaphor even further, the world that we all know now is completely different in other ways. It used to be that a company would have four or five competitors that they could identify and that were clear. Now, in this globalized environment, there are hundreds and thousands of competitors, hundreds of thousands of people competing for the same small pieces of power. Even more so, the businesses and the crafts that we practice, they're changing by the day, by the hour. It's very hard to keep on top of all the changes that are going on in our different businesses.

I maintain it's as if we're facing this vast, chaotic ocean, before us. And to navigate this ocean, it's extremely difficult, and it's very easy in our careers to get lost, to lose a sense of where we're actually headed. Well, I designed mastery as a way to help guide you in this journey. I'm telling you in the book that you actually have the resources, the raw material to help you navigate this. environment to get to power and mastery and success and fulfillment. That there actually is a North Star, an inner kind of radar that all of you possess that can help you navigate this new environment. They're there, but you're not

aware of these resources and this inner radar. You're not exploiting them. You're not using them. Just like building a ship on an island, getting to mastery is a step-by-step process, a journey. I take you through that journey. I show you that you need to go through what I call an ideal apprenticeship in which you accumulate skills and you learn how to learn. I show you how you need to identify a mentor and work with a mentor, how to develop social intelligence so you can protect yourself from the manipulative people in your environment. how you can, by staying with this process, how you can awaken that natural creative energy that I believe all people have, how you can push past the 10,000 hours to 20,000 hours to the point where you have what I call high-level intuition,

and you have mastered your field just as much as an Einstein or Steve Jobs. Now, the book is very long, it's very complicated, and I don't have a lot of time this evening. So I want to focus on what I said earlier about these resources that all of you possess, about this inner radar that you actually have. This is the first chapter of mastery, what I call the life's task. It is by far the most important chapter. It is the most important principle in the book. And I maintain that if you don't understand this principle, it is actually very, very difficult to achieve any kind of success or, or long-term power, or mastery in this world.

So please pay attention. Now, when we look at our lives and our career path, it generally goes like this. We're born, I think we can all agree on that. We then enter an education system. And then somewhere around high school, maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later, in the back of our minds,

we become aware of the fact that we actually have to earn a living. And this is a very tough realization for some. Now, some people who find this realization a little too harsh and it fills them with anxiety, they choose what I would call a direct path. They gravitate towards something like law or medicine or go for an MBA or some kind of obvious direct craft

or skill where they feel they can make a lot of money quickly, something lucrative. There might be some interest, I don't mean to deny, that they might not genuinely be interested in medicine or law or business, but if these fields weren't so lucrative, they probably wouldn't choose it. One of the more overriding concerns in choosing a path like that is the money,

and nobody would deny that. But many more of us in life choose what I call an indirect path. So we enter the university system, we figure out a major that we think, corresponds more or less to something that we like. And then suddenly we're thrown out into the real world to fend for ourselves. And we have to choose particular career path

that might suit us. But we can't choose anything that we like. And so a lot of our choice depends on what's out there, where we live, who are the connections that we have, where we can get some money together, or where we can find a position. And so we take that first step, that first important career step.

And then what generally happens after three or four years, perhaps the job is no longer there or we're tired and bored and we have to make an adjustment in our career path and we choose something else, maybe something a little bit related, maybe something not really related. And then every three or four years, another adjustment, on and on and on. And if you were to lift yourself up and look at this career path over 10, 20, 30 years, you would see sort of this zigzagging motion where goes, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, where the person ended up like 30 years later has very little relationship to where they started. Even people who take the direct path in life, the same scenario, I knew, for instance, this lawyer that I met in Los Angeles,

he went into law because he actually thought it was an interesting field, and he intended to become perhaps a criminal prosecutor, a DA, and then get into a career in politics. And for reasons he couldn't really help, mostly because of his wife, etc., He found himself moving to Los Angeles where he had to get a job as an entertainment lawyer, and he ended up in entertainment law. And here he was, like, babying actors with their egos and movie directors, something he had never intended, and he was pretty unhappy. And he was consulting me to help rescue him from that. And I find that scenario over and over and over again in my consulting business.

People who were in their 40s, and they say, I have no idea how I ended up where I am. I'm not unhappy, I'm not completely unsuccessful, but I never really intended to get in this career that I find myself in. It happened by some weird, random chain of events. Now, if you examine this way of people, of how we look at our lives, we can make a few generalizations. A lot of the choices that happen in this career path are from external reasons. Where is the money? Who do we know? we live? What are other people doing? A lot of these choices and this career path that we take

is somewhat passive. It seems to depend on a lot of chance and good luck and opportunities that suddenly appear. And finally, we can say that we never really look at our overall life, at the overall pattern of our life. Instead, we're thinking in terms of blocks of three years or four years, or not even that, maybe months of, I got to get three. route past this obstacle, I gotta get this job, and I'll think about the future later. There's no overall arching sense of a purpose, of a goal to our lives. And I find this problematic. The human being, and I'd explain this in my book, were very unique, very strange creatures.

Animals are basically programmed. They're programmed to respond in a certain way to evend. in their environment. We humans have free will, a wonderful thing. We have consciousness. But with that free will and that consciousness comes a certain element of pain. That freedom can be very painful. Sometimes we don't know how to fill up our days. We don't know how to make a choice. What is it, is this the right choice to take in this particular career path? Could there be something better? There seems to be nothing really truly guiding us in telling us, and telling us how we must work our lives. This lack of purpose that many of us have, this lack of a sense

of a goal, is even worse in the modern world where things are changing so quickly. And I think it's actually the source of a lot of secret frustration and depression that a lot of people have. In the past, that sense of a purpose and a goal was filled. through religion in a very deep and powerful way, and we're missing that in the world. So I maintain in mastery that there is another way of looking at your life, a much different approach, one that I obviously promulgate, and it goes like this. Each human being, each one of you, was born completely, completely unique. DNA never occurred in the past and will never again occur in the future. An incredible thought

if you ever spend time to think about, to ponder that. The same thing could be said about your brain. Your brain is configured in a particular way that has never happened in the past, will never happen in the future. This uniqueness that you're born with is a purpose. There's a purpose. There's a reason behind it. Our culture, who we are, depends on the diversity of people that exist within it. Each person bringing their own personal skills, their own uniqueness to bear it within our culture expressing all of this different skills and ideas, creating this kind of rich soil. It's why we celebrate a period in history like the Renaissance. So this uniqueness that you were born with is your purpose, is your fate, is your destiny. Now, how does this uniqueness that

each one of you have, how does it manifest itself? It manifests itself beginning at the age of three or four years old. You probably can't remember it, but as a child, you were naturally drawn to certain things, to certain activities. You're very young, it's a pre-verbal thing. You're drawn to certain patterns, to certain ways of thinking, to rhythms, to music, perhaps to a physical activity. Albert Einstein, when he was five years old, his father gave him a compass, and he suddenly looked at this compass, and the idea that the needle would move according to this magnetism and the North Pole, it fascinated him that there was this invisible force that existed in the universe. From that moment on, all he could think about.

were these forces that you couldn't see, but that acted upon the physical world. That was his sudden, his uniqueness manifested at the age of five. I have in the book, the great African-American writer, Zora Neal Hurston. She realized at the age of six that she was obsessed with mythology that took her well beyond the black township that she lived in Florida, and she realized at that point that it was words itself in creating this kind of mythic universe that obsessed. That was her manifestation of this uniqueness.

Steve Jobs, when he's six years old, he sees these electronic gadgets in his garage, and he's fascinated with these electronic gadgets and how they work, not just how they work, but the look of them and the design of them. As we get older, as we get seven or eight or nine years old, these differences, these inclinations, I call them primal inclinations, they become a little clearer, they're not so nebulous.

We realize that we were meant to be a real thing were meant to be a writer or to work, do sports. One person I forgot to mention that I love is Tiger Woods. He's 16 months old. He's sitting in the high chair. He can't even walk yet. And he's watching his father hit golf balls in the garage against a net. And he's like, can't wait until he can get on his feet and start imitating his father.

Anyway, as we get older, it becomes a little clearer what these natural inclination are. I liken it to a voice inside our head. It's a metaphor. There's not literally a voice, at least I hope not. But there's like a voice. And it's saying, this is what you should be doing, No, Mon, or whoever it is. This is what you should be drawn to. This is what you were meant to accomplish. When you do it, you feel an ease, a kind of power. If it's playing the piano, it doesn't mean that you don't have to practice. There's still a lot of pain. But in doing it, you feel this kind of natural ease. It works. Whereas if you do something that doesn't fall within this wheelhouse, this, what you were meant to do, you experience

the opposite. You experience a lot of resistance. This voice is telling you this is what you're drawn to. This is what you should be doing. Now what happens with most people, I maintain, is that voice that we have gets fainter and fainter and fainter. The first thing that intervenes is usually the education system. We have to start, we're interested in books and literature, and now we have to start learning algebra, and suddenly this pain in our head, and it means, maybe I don't like learning at all, maybe I don't like education, and then it infects how we naturally love writing itself. The second thing that intervenes is our parents. God bless them, but they sometimes say, you don't want to be a dancer, you don't want to be a writer,

you don't want to be an entrepreneur, you need to go here. And we take it seriously and we listen to them. And then there are peers. They're all interested in this particular field, and we're naturally conformists, and we find that that's something that infects us. More and more down the line to the point where we don't even hear that voice anymore. And we're finishing our graduate work,

or we're finishing the university system, we're about to enter the career world, and we've completely disconnected ourselves from that. And suddenly, when those critical first choices come up that I mentioned before, we take a wrong step. We don't know really what's to guide us in those early moments. And generally what happens, I think, with a lot of people, is if they do take a wrong step,

in your 20s, you can kind of fake it. You're young, you look good, you have a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and you can get by. You don't have to be completely in love with what you do. But as you get into your 30s, it starts to catch up with you, the fact that you're not in love with what you do. You're not really engaged with it. You're not emotionally connected to it. So you start not paying less attention.

You become more interested in your hobbies and in a family and playing golf or whatever. You lose connection to the changes going on in your field. And then all of a sudden in your late 30s and maybe early 40s, the worst thing that can be, happen to you happens. You become replaceable. Somebody younger, better looking, more in touch with trends, and a lot cheaper, they're going to replace you. And now where are you? You're in a lot of troubles where you are. Well, masters, people who are powerful, people who are successful, they hear that voice when they're eight or nine years old. They hear it even more as they get older, enter adolescence. That voice may fade in and may fade out a little bit. It happens to everyone.

It's human nature. But it keeps coming back. It keeps directing them to a particular career, to a particular direction that they're going to take in life. The fact that they feel that they have to make a particular discovery, they have to invent this kind of business, they have or express some idea in a book. This gives them a deep emotional connection to what they're learning, to what they're studying. And we know from the neuroscience of how the brain works that a person who's paying deep attention,

who's focusing, who's really listening, is going to learn much faster than someone who's disengaged, who's bored. So the faster you learn, the more skill you develop, the more skill you develop, the more pleasure you're having in learning and then you enter what I call a cycle of accelerated returns that will lead you to creative energy and to mastery. Being emotionally connected to what you're doing, being personally involved and excited pushes you, gives you this incredible momentum that pushes you past all of the obstacles that usually stop a lot of people. You have the patience and the persistence, persistence

being the most important quality in this world for achieving mastery and success. Because because you have a reason for doing it, a purpose. You can push past the criticisms that you're inevitably going to face. Now, this doesn't mean that there isn't an element of chance involved with people who are masters who are hearing this voice. Of course, there'll be opportunities that come up that they hadn't foreseen. It's within all of their stories. But what they have is they can recognize what a real opportunity is

and exploited from a false path, from a path they shouldn't be taken. A lot of people make choices dependent on money or getting attention. They make the choices from inner reasons. This is something I have to do. This is something that attracts me personally. And because of that, they make all of the right choices. All of these people, and I've interviewed many of them, I interviewed nine contemporary masters in the book.

I've worked, as there's no man said, I did a book with 50 cent, but I consult with a lot. of them, and all of the people that I've researched, they all expressed the sense of destiny or fate. They were destined to do what they ended up doing. They felt it as a child, and they felt it later on in life all the way through. Now, I know this might seem abstract or poetic to you, so I want to give you two examples of this idea in action and how it could affect your life. One, a historical example, one a contemporary one that show two different approaches to the sense of fate or destiny guiding you. And the first one, they're both narrated in my story, by the way. And the first one is a historical example.

It's the scientist Michael Faraday. I don't know how many of you have heard of Michael Faraday. He was born in the 1790s in England. his father was a blacksmith. He had a family of 12. A blacksmith doesn't necessarily, or it's very low on the social class system. He doesn't make a lot of money. But to make matters worse, Michael Faraday's father was continually ill,

so he couldn't work very much. He had 12 children to support. In other words, Michael Faraday came from extreme abject poverty in London, England in the 1790s. And yet he went on. on to become one of the greatest experimental scientists that ever existed. It was his discoveries that led to the electric motor and to the field theories that revolutionized science

and led to the theory of relativity and all of the technological wonders around him. And so you might say, well, this is a story of a man who overcame a lot of adversity. But that doesn't even begin to explain the story of Michael Faraday. To be a scientist in England in the early 19th century, you had to have access to the laboratories. You had to have access to scientific journals, to the work of your peers in science.

The only people who could do that were people who went to a university. You could count the number of universities in one hand that were available in England for that. To get to a university, you had to go to one of the great, they call them public school, what we would call private schools in England, a place like Eaton. To get into Eaton, you had to come from the upper, upper, upper, upper, upper, upper, upper classes. Nobody, nobody, from the background of Michael Faraday, could begin to enter that process. He wasn't facing a glass ceiling, he was facing a concrete wall. It is absolutely impossible that somebody like that could have had a career in science.

So how did it happen? Well, I'll try to explain. He came from a family that was a family that was a family that was a very, was very religious. And part of their religious belief, it was a weird sect called San Dominions, part of their religious belief was that the spirit of God manifested itself in everything around you, in lights, in carpets, in trees and flowers. God was there in everything. And young Michael Faraday, from the age of six, seven years old, was obsessed with this idea, and he looked at everything around him, the clouds in the sky, the plants, and he wondered,

How was God's presence manifested in these things? And he was asking endless questions of his parents and everyone he could find. And one day, this intense, very curious young man wandered into a local bookseller. It was like a bookseller and a bookbinding shop. And this was the first time he had really ever seen books besides the Bible because he did not go to school. He was not educated.

And he was just amazed by the site of these books. And the owner of the book, I'm sorry, of the bookstore, was very charmed by this intense young man. And so they became friends. And young Michael kept returning to the bookshop. And so finally, the bookseller sort of decided he would help him, and he offered young Michael a job as an errand boy. And because they were so poor, he had to accept you,

but he was very excited to be connected to this bookseller. So he worked as an errand boy, and he had such a great work ethic that the owner said, all right, I'm going to offer you a position as an apprentice bookbinder. And this was an amazing coup for him. Now, for seven years, he would serve as an apprentice, and at the end he would have a craft as a bookbinder, and the amount of money he could make as a bookbinder was amazing

compared to where he came from. So he accepted. For the first two years, the owner was absolutely in love with this young boy because he'd never seen anybody with such an incredible work ethic. And so he offered young Michael something that he had never offered. before. He said, look, the books I have in my bookshop, you're never going to find in any library in all of London. I want you to take any book that you want and take it home and read it. You can read any book that we have. And so he took this seriously, and he read everything in the bookshop.

And soon he realized that what he really loved was science, and in particular, electricity and chemistry. What he fascinated him about electricity and chemistry was that there was this sort of unknown thing going, something happened that you couldn't see, just like the effect of God. It was something moving it, and it felt almost spiritual to him. So his love for chemistry and electricity was almost the spiritual thing. So he devoured every book he could on the subject. And then one day when he was about 15 or 16, this book fell into his hands that he had to bind that changed his life. It was called Improvement of the Mind.

It's this remarkable 18th century self-help book that, basically was going to instruct you, if you didn't have all the good luck in life, if you didn't go to a university, this is how you could improve your mind. This is how you could educate yourself. The book advocated being very active. You just didn't read a book. You actually went out and practiced things. You had like experiments. You were interested in science. You conducted experiments. You didn't just learn how to read and write. You learned how to draw. You just didn't read a book. You went to lectures and took notes on these lectures, et cetera. and wanted you to be very active and involved with anything that you learned.

Well, Michael Faraday took this book everywhere. It was literally his second Bible. He devoured it. He applied every single idea in it. He learned how to draw. He did experiments in the back of the bookshop. He went to lectures. And not only did he take notes

on every scientific lecture he went to, he would go home and then he would expand the notes into chapters full of drawings and diagrams of everything that he had seen. on the stage. And after months and months of doing this, he had compiled an encyclopedia of science that was this thick, an extremely impressive encyclopedia. And one day, a man walked into the bookshop, Mr. Dance was his name, who actually belonged to the Royal Institute in England, a institute that promoted the science, is very prestigious. And the owner was very proud of his

book binder and he showed him this encyclopedia that this intense 17-year-old had compiled. And Mr. Dance was astounded and he said, I'm going to offer you something that I normally wouldn't do. And Humphrey Davy, who's the preeminent chemist in England of the time, is giving a series of lectures at the Royal Institute. It's not open to the public, but I'm going to personally invite you to this series of lectures. Michael Faraday was in Paris. This was heaven for him.

He went to these lectures and he took the most copious notes that he had ever taken in his life. He was so excited. But also he was a little bit discouraged. He realized that this man, Humphrey Davy, was a genius. That he thought on a whole different plane. And that by just reading books and going to lectures, Michael Faraday would never, ever be able to enter this sacred world of science. He was closed from it. He could never be Humphrey Davy by just doing what he was.

doing. He needed to have a mentor. He needed to somehow get entree into this secret private world with laboratories and all of that. So he decided he would go on a little campaign. He wrote letters to all the great scientists and he wrote letters to Humphrey Davy himself, offering his services at the most menial position. A few months later, he got a letter from Humphrey Davy himself. Humphrey Davy was blinded in one, temporary blinded by one of his dangerous chemical experiments that he had done. He saw the letter from Michael Faraday and he had heard from Mr. Dance what an intense incredible work ethic this young man had and he offered Michael Faraday to have one week with him as his personal assistant.

Obviously he took up this offer and for that one week he not only did everything that Humphrey Davy asked of him he was so polite and respectful. He made sure that he didn't push himself too much. It wasn't so clear that he was angling for a position. He tried to, he cleaned everything that he could. He just went the extra mile. But unfortunately, there was no position. There was only for one week. So he was back to working in the book shop. Well, his apprenticeship was nearing an end, and he was feeling desperate. Because once his apprenticeship ended, he would have to enter the book binding business. And once he did that, his career, his opportunity for entering science would be completely.

closed. So now he wrote Humphrey Davy again, gently reminding him of things that he had said during that week about experiments that he was maybe considering. He then sent Humphrey Davy as a gift, the book that he had compiled of his lectures with all these beautiful drawings, a very impressive book. Once again, two months later he receives a letter asking him, inviting him to come to the Royal Institute and suddenly he was offered the job of his lifetime to be Humphrey Davies' assistant. That very morning, Humphrey Davies' assistant had gotten into an argument with him, and he was fired for insubordination, and the opportunity of a lifetime opened itself up, and he became his apprentice.

It meant a great sacrifice because he would be cleaning tubes, cleaning out the fireplace. He was going to be the most menial slave, you could imagine, but this was the opportunity he had been dreaming of. Well, the rest is history. After eight years of serving an apprenticeship on Henry Davy and learning all of the secrets and applying himself so diligently, he made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science, basically an experiment I describe in the book

on the nature of electromagnetism, a discovery that led to our first electric motors. It made his career. It got him into the Royal Institute and his career was made. Now, if you look at the story of Michael Faraday from the outside, you might be tempted to say, well, man, this guy had a lot of luck, a lot of good fortune. I mean, first of all, he wanders into the one bookstore.

He gets the one job where he could read books. That's pretty lucky. The guy offers him all of these books he can read. He then gets that improvement of the mind falls into his hands. That's a pretty lucky coup. Then that man, Mr. Dance, wanders into the store. who then can get him to see Humphrey Davy, that's pretty lucky. The fact that the guy got blinded in an experiment and needed an assistant

and then got in an argument on and on and on. This guy, you know, it looked like pretty much good fortune that allowed Michael Faraday to get there. But that's completely ridiculous. It completely ignores the essence of the story. It was that spirit within him, that intensity, that curiosity, that impressed other people. It was that inner radar that I'm talking about,

that sense of fate and destiny that made him wander into that bookstore itself, and that energy that he had that impressed the owner. Any young man who wandered into his store wasn't going to be offered the same job. The same thing with that improvement of the mind that fell into his hands. It could fall into the hands of a thousand people, but nobody would have used the book to the same degree that Michael Faraday used it. Mr. Dance, wandering into the store, was impressed by what he had compiled, by the diligence, the work ethic, and the persistence that this young man demonstrated. It was he himself that created these circumstances by his energy, by his interest, by the love he showed for the work that he was doing.

excuse me. So I maintain that Michael Faraday, hearing this voice within him, was able to make the most critical decisions in his life, and that it was by feeling the sense of destiny early on that he wasn't destined to be the son of a blacksmith, that he wasn't destined to be just a bookbinder working in a bookshop for his whole life, that he was faded from when the fact he first read that book on electricity and chemistry to be a great scientist. That was what pushed him past

all the incredibly impossible obstacles that he faced in life. The other example I want to share with you is of a contemporary example. A woman that I interviewed for the book, a mini Albert Einstein, one of the most brilliant women I've ever met. Her name is Yoki Matsuoka.

Yoki Matsuoka, and her story illustrates a much different way of approaching this sense of destiny, the one I find very relevant to our times. Yoki Matsuoka was born in Japan, grew up there in the 70s. And as a young girl, she realized that she was kind of peculiar. She was interested in sports. She was very good at sports, tennis and swimming.

But what she really liked about sports was how the body could accomplish so many amazing, graceful things, how the mind and the body could work together. She was also really interested in machines and technology, but she was interested almost in what made them tick, what made them work, what made them alive. She was also interested in math and the hard sciences. And as a child, as a young girl, she somehow imagined that she would be able to combine all of these interests. in some career, whatever that would be. But in Japan, you had to specialize from a very early age.

You had to choose something very particular. You couldn't be a generalist like that. And so she made a very critical decision. She found her way to the United States and got admitted to UC Berkeley as an undergrad. In states, she could have much more freedom to choose a broader path. She decided she would major in electrical engineering.

This seemed the perfect sort of opening field for her, because studying electrical engineering, you could design all kinds of machines, but there were many different avenues you could take. One day, she confessed to her professor that her lifelong dream, or the dream that she had when she was a young girl, was to build a robot that could play tennis. That would be how she could combine all those weird interests of her.

And to her surprise, he didn't laugh at her. He said, well, we have a robotics class, here at Berkeley. It's this new field. It's very exciting, and I want to invite you to take the class. She took the robotics class at Berkeley, and suddenly a light bulb went on in her head and said, this is the field for me. This is perfect. She went on to pursue this more deeply and then got herself admitted to the most prestigious robotics laboratory in the world, the robotics lab at MIT. At MIT, they were designing the new state-of-the-art robot, and she volunteered to be the one that would design the hand. This would be her chance to do all those things that she had always wanted to do as a child.

Combine all those weird interests of her. She started going deeper and deeper into the study of the hand and how to build it, and suddenly she realized that this wasn't enough. Her electrical engineering background wasn't enough. She wanted to know what made the hand so human, so alive, how the hand is connected to the brain. So she decided after she got her degree at MIT to get a PhD in neuroscience. at MIT, which she proceeded to do.

With these two degrees, she then went on to design a prosthetic robotic hand that was absolutely astounding. It was incredibly lifelike. It was more human than any hand anybody had ever designed. This was somebody 25. It became the industry standard and it catapulted her to FAPE. She got the MacArthur Genius Grant, on and on and on. She decided to create her own field. own field that she called new robotics. It was a mix of neuroscience and robotics. She would be

on the frontier of designing technology and products that would be more and more lifelike. They would simulate how the human brain actually works. She went on after going into new robotics to then segue into a field that really fascinated her in green technology. She went on to work for a company called Nest Labs, where she is right now in Silicon. Valley. She's the senior vice president in charge of technology. She worked on designing a thermostat for the house that operates almost as your personal assistant. This thermostat learns from your behavior how you need to heat up your house and in the same process able to save a lot of energy, but kind of adapts to who you are and how you watch the television and on and on and on and turns

it on and off according to all this, an amazing device, and she's going to be inventing all sorts of other devices like that. Now, the thing about Yoki Matsuoka that I find fascinating, and where I consider this a more modern example, is that she doesn't know when she's eight or nine or 12 what exactly she should be doing like Michael Faraday did. It was this sort of general idea of a direction that she needed to take in life, which I think is more human and is how a lot of us feel. But feeling this kind of inner radar, this strong sense of what she was meant to do, of the kinds of things that fell within that wheelhouse of power that were comfortable and easy and felt right to her, she was able to make all of the right choices. She was able to find her way to the United

States where she could have the freedom to explore. more, she found her way to what she recognized from the moment she got into the robotics lab that this was the right thing for her. She realized that she was designing it, that she needed to take this further and study neuroscience on and on and on. If she had rebelled against her fate, this sense of destiny, she would have stayed in Japan, or she would have stayed just learning how to be an electrical engineer and design robots. She would not have become a master. by following her fate, by accumulating all of these different incredible skills that I outlined to her, she can essentially write her ticket. She's able to create businesses or products or ideas that completely reflect her uniqueness.

And what you can say about these great masters that I'm talking about, these highly successful people, whether it's Yoki Matsuo, Michael Faraday, Steve Jobs, on and on and on, is that they are unique, they are irreplaceable, they are one-of-a-kind, they are originals. basically because they've followed the path that I've outlined for you tonight. So, in conclusion, I want you to leave here with four basic, maybe slightly counterintuitive ideas that I want you to ponder long after you leave here. The first is, I want you to think of a sense of destiny of fate, actually applying to you and your individual lives.

I want you to think wider than you normally think, as opposed to I want to study this particular field or I need to get this job. I want you to think of the larger arc of your life and the sense that you were born with this uniqueness that I have mentioned and that you were destined or fated to actually create, build, invent, right, do whatever it was. It doesn't have to be on the order of an Albert Einstein or Yoki Matsuoka or a Tiger Woods.

It can be smaller. It could be you were meant to start this simple kind of business. You were meant to express this particular idea in a movie or a film or whatever it is. But that sense that you are connected to your destiny, to a sense of purpose, is so vital and so important. And I want you to think about that in terms of your own lives. The second thing is I want you to... to connect the sense of this uniqueness that I mentioned, these primal inclinations. Now how this might be counterintuitive is often we think of what makes us different or strange,

something that we have to run away from, something that is not good. But in fact, that is the source of your strength, that is the source of any kind of power you're going to have in life. And as you're entering, if you're in your early 20s or you're even older and you're thinking about your career and where you're headed. You have to go through a process. You have to think back to your earliest years, to those fields that excited you in that primal way, like it excited Albert Einstein with a compass. They're there. That information is there. You're just not paying attention to it. You have to look at the kinds of things in the present that excite you

with a curiosity that's beyond normal. I know, for instance, with myself, whenever I look at Open the New York Times and ever there's an article about our earliest ancestors, I have to read that article. I have to devour everything about it. I'm so fascinated with that subject. I don't care if it's about the teeth that they discovered

in the earliest Neanderthal. I just have to read it. I maintain that all of you, there's something like that. in the newspaper on the internet. That's a sign of something of that uniqueness that I'm talking about. There's also the negative side of the coin. There's also the things that you hate that you've discovered

in your career that you don't want to ever have to deal with. One of the people that I interviewed, Paul Graham, one of the contemporary masters, he learned early on that he hates any kind of bureaucracy, any kind of political environment. That's the flip side of these natural primal inclination. that I'm talking about. So I want you to go through this process

and reconnect with this uniqueness that I believe each and every one of you have. The third thing is, I want you to think of your career path, not as this sort of random thing that just sort of happens to you, that you live in the moment, whatever appears you have to take

or this direction or that direction, the usual passive approach that a lot of people have. I want you to think of your career path as actually a work of art. something that you are creating, that you are forging, that you are making, that it's not something that just happens to you. If it's something that direct path, I mentioned, something that you know from early on, that you're going to be the next Michael Jordan, then don't listen to other people and go take that direct path and see where it leads. If you're not Michael Jordan, you're going to probably, you could end up becoming a good, great basketball coach or teacher or whatever, the path that many people

have taken in life. I have the example in the book of Freddie Roach, the great boxing trainer, who basically failed as a boxer, and then realized that he was meant to be a trainer. You take that approach. If it's more of the indirect idea, which I think is true for many of us, you find that first all-important step like Yoki Matsuoka did with electrical and engineering, a path that offers you many branches and many possibilities for you to explore. Your 20s, are what I call your apprenticeship years. It's the years that you should be accumulating as many skills as possible.

We're entering a skill-based economy where the people like Yoki Matsuoka who've accumulated two, three, or four skills, they can write their ticket for the future. You want to be accumulating as many skills as possible. Basically, though, having an active sense of, this is the path that I'm going to forge for my life. It's flexible, you're open to things,

that happen in the moment, but you have that inner radar that I'm talking about where you can recognize a false path from one that's a real opportunity. And finally, I want you to get over this notion that I find so annoying that so many people have, that success and power in life is dependent on something like genetics. Like some people are born with a larger brain, or they have wealthy parents who are able to send them to the right school. Or it's all a matter of luck. What really makes people successful and powerful in life,

and it's not just me saying this, I read hundreds of books on the subject, what makes people successful is their degree of motivation. I could repeat it 100 times, but it's true every time I say it. When you are motivated, when you feel yourself emotionally engaged in the subject, you learn. faster. You learn what could take somebody 10 years to learn. You can learn in two years. When you feel emotionally engaged with something, you're able to push past all the obstacles.

The sense that it's genetics or the size of our brain or our parents' money, you can't control any of that, obviously. And they can become kind of crutches for some people. But the amount of motivation you feel, the emotional connection you have to what you're studying or doing, that is something within your control. That is something you can choose to take. And you're going to find people giving you all kinds of great advice about your careers, about where you should go for your MBA, et cetera. But if there's one piece of advice that I think is more important than that, it is this idea

of following these natural inclinations and creating your own career path and finding a way to engage those deepest motivating parts of your psyche. So thank you very much for listening to all of this. Thank you for tuning into this episode. If you're enjoying the content, you can access exclusive material by becoming a subscriber. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.