The Resilient Mind - Master your life by mastering your mind - Robert Greene

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

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.

Power begins from within. If you're aware of who you are, if you're aware of what you're good at, what you're not good at, if you're able to see how emotions kind of govern your life, if you can learn what your weaknesses are and how to control them, you can't ever get complete control, but awareness is almost enough. Slowly through this process of knowing who you are and understanding other people and how they operate so you don't make stupid mistakes in life,

you can increase that little tiny margin more. tiny margin more and more and more and more and you will be a person of power. Law number one in the 48 laws of power is called Never Outshine the Master. And almost every single person in the world has violated that law, myself included. Basically how it works, you're so eager to impress your boss or whomever in your new job that you try so hard that you make him or her feel insecure. Like maybe you're younger and better than they are. And because of that, you're fired or something bad happens to you and you never know why. Do you think meditation is allowing you to make more interesting connections because of the quiet? Yes, I mean I'm not going to go

too deeply into this. It's a theory of creativity that's not my own but that I use a lot in mastery and basically the idea is that ideas are generated in the unconscious. They're not generated consciously. Your conscious mind is very limited what you can hold in your memory. But unconsciously in your subconscious when you're asleep, when you're dreaming. The mind is filled with thousands upon thousands of ideas and things that are there that are lingering there and connections are being made all of the time and occasionally those connections float up to your conscious mind and you have a brilliant idea about how to do something. One out of ten people are like great

manipulators and there's just takes one person and they can ruin your life. We were born with this natural talent. Every single person is born with this talent for getting inside the minds of other people. It's something that you're not even aware of. How do they need to conceive of that? How, to what end are they using that skill to make their own dreams come true? First thing is you're not aware of this power that you have. You're walking around in life, I'm not critical because I'm the same,

sort of sleepwalking. You're inside hearing your own thoughts day and day out, like a continually, you're you know circling loop in your head and you're not aware of the fact that if you stop that and you look at other people a world opens up to you so what's the first component of that world nonverbal communication 95% of what really matters in communication between people is not through words words are used to deceive you to disguise what people are really thinking what are just a step or two that they can take down that path starting today.

The first thing to understand is the most important, and that it is a skill. If you want to play the piano, you can't just sit down and suddenly play. You've got to practice it. You've got to practice it every day. And if you practice an hour a day, you're going to get better at it.

Why are children able to learn, and an adult can't? The reason is children don't think that they're superior. They don't think that they already understand the world. They're this small. They're weak. They're defenseless. They have to learn or they're going to die. They have to learn how to speak the language.

They have to learn what's going on with their parents. Or they're literally going to die. Do you have tricks that you use for ensuring that genius does not become a young man's game, that your books truly get better and better over time? Basically, every time I begin a book, I'm deathly afraid of failing. I feel like, oh, it's not going to sell

well as the last book. I'm losing it. I gotta go back to square one. Each project, each thing that you do in life, you have to kind of create that feeling in the gut like, oh, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to pull it off. I don't know if I can go 12 rounds with Floyd Mayweather this time.

I don't know it. The secret really to success in life, I have to say, is retaining, I talk about this in mastery, is retaining your child-like qualities. If you're completely a child, that's not going to work. Negative capability is rule number one for being a creative person. And if you don't follow anything else in mastery, that would be enough.

The ability to keep two ideas that contradict each other in your mind without feeling uncomfortable, without having to come to a conclusion. You can think about something without rushing to judgment and conclusion. You can be in the moment. You can say, well, it could be this, it could be that, it could be that. And you don't have to decide whether it's A, B, or C. You're open to adopting three or four different viewpoints. If you love music, don't quit your job and play guitar.

You're going to have a hard time feeding your family. But you have advice for them. What is that advice? Yeah, but people say, you know, live your passion. These are cliches. And nobody changes their life based on a cliche. You know, you've got to do hard work and to do hard work and to do hard work, you have to have a roadmap.

Somebody has to show you step to get there. Working for yourself, starting your own company, doing what you love should be everybody's goal. The process begins by first knowing what you really love. And believe me, I do a lot of consulting. A lot of people have no self-awareness. They don't even really know what it is that they were meant to do in life.

They loved music when they were a kid, but then they got into law or whatever because of their parents. and they don't know who they are anymore. Well, do I really like music? You gotta go through that process first of figuring out what it is that really connects to you in a deep, visceral way, what you loved when you were a kid,

what still excites you. Once you go through that and you understand it and you've got some clarity about it, okay, how do I incorporate that in my life? So if you're 23 years old, it's a little easier. I love music, but I'm not a musician because I've not been practicing and I just love music. But I have a real good sense of business.

I've been studying business and I have an MBA, et cetera. Okay, I've got to now find a way to craft a career that combines my knowledge of business and my love of music. And if I follow that and I do it smart and I plan it out, eventually what starts out with more business than music will end up becoming more creative as I get better and better at it. How do you prepare somebody to survive that initial stage of boredom and pain? Well, pain is great. You've got to embrace pain. Pain is pleasure. You've got to make the connection between the physical and the mental.

Well, you know that when you're exercising. When you're running or you're working out or whatever, it hurts, but it leads to something pleasurable. You have to be able to translate that to mental things. And if you make that switch in your mind, it is mind-blowing what can happen to you. Who are the most messed up people in the world? Spoiled kids.

Kids who are given everything, who have a rich father or mother, and they don't have to work or try. They are the most messed up people you'll ever meet. Each person, I make this point in mastery, is born unique. And it's kind of one of those cliches, but there's science to it.

The science is your DNA, Your DNA will never be repeated. The way your brain is wired will never be repeated. Your experiences in life, you're one of a kind. And it's amazing thought if you think about it. Of all of the billions of humans that have lived and will ever live, there will never be anybody who is wired like you are wired. And the problem in life is as you get older,

you become more and more like other people. other people. You spend a lot of your time thinking about what other people like and you don't, you're not aware of what you like. You go into careers because you listen to other people. If you look at all of the brilliant people who've succeeded in life, if you look at a Steve Jobs, you look at an Elon Musk, et cetera, there's nobody else out there like them. You're never going to be able to pinpoint one other person like them. They are completely unique and those are the people that end up having power in the world. So if you're going to be able to create that website, that blog, that whatever it is,

that startup that is different, that has its own niche and reflects you, something good will happen from it. Control people's perceptions of reality and you control them. It's a great military strategy. Comes from the great Colonel Boyd, who invented what's known as the Uda Loop. And he came up with the Uda Loop, which means... Orientation, observation, decision, action. You have to observe what is happening,

orient yourself into the context of it, decide what you need to do, and act. We want to believe that there are shortcuts to success. We want to believe we can take a drug or we can do something that'll make it quick and easy. But the truth is, it takes grit. It takes persistence. So it's hard to understand what could happen to you

in 10 years in a visceral gut way of what it means to have failed in life. And to me, failure in life is not having money. It's not realizing your potential. You're 60 years old and you said, I could have been this and I never did it. That's like the worst thought I think anybody can have. And you don't think about it in the moment. because your life is okay, but you've got to wake up and understand that there's an urgency here

and that if you're not practicing something now, if you're not aware, if you don't have a path towards something better, you're rotting on the vine and that day of reckoning will come at some point and it will be painful. You're not going to feel that suddenly it'll be slow, but it'll come and it won't be good. Just being aware that you now have a plan is a not. enough to lift you out of that depression. Okay, I'm working at Burger King, but I know I'm going to get to this community college and get a degree here after I save enough money.

Having a goal is like, will change you completely from being depressed or not taking care of yourself to being energized and moving in the right direction.