The School of Greatness - 750 6 Years of Greatness

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

THE SCHOOL OF GREATNESS IS TURNING SIX. I’ve been hosting The School of Greatness for six years. We’ve done 750 episodes. That’s 750 conversations with inspiring people like Kobe Bryant, Scooter Braun, Maria Sharapova, Tony Robbins, Sarah Blakely, Maria Shriver and more. When I started, I hoped it would reach millions of people. Now the podcast has over 90 million downloads. My life has changed for the better because of The School of Greatness. I hope yours has, too. Anniversaries are a great time to reflect back on how far you’ve come. That’s why, for this Five Minute Friday, I bringing back a conversation with Robert Greene from my first podcast episode ever. Robert Greene is a best-selling author known for talking about strategy, power, and seduction. His books include The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law (with rapper 50 Cent), Mastery, and The Laws of Human Nature. You can hear the sound quality was different back then. That’s because I started out recording episodes on my iPhone! I now have an entire team that supports me and my business. Robert discusses the idea of having the discipline to achieve mastery after finding something you’re passionate about. Interestingly enough, that’s why I started this podcast and why I continue to do it. Thank you for listening and joining me in the pursuit of greatness. Learn about the concept of mastery and see where it all started in Episode 750. In This Episode You Will Learn: What powerful people have in common (3:05) Why Robert Greene wrote a book with 50 Cent (4:35) The secret to 50 Cent’s success (5:52)

This is 5-Minute Friday! Welcome to 5-Minute Friday. This is episode number 750, and also today is the six-year anniversary of the School of Greatness podcast. Guys, we are doing this together. We are living our lives fully. We are taking on our dreams. We are learning lessons from the challenges we go through, and we are one huge family. And I'm so grateful for all of your support over the years. to share this with you. It's when I did it on my iPhone and the audio recording was bad.

Just to show you that it doesn't matter where you're at now. You can always improve any area of your life, your health, your relationships, your business, and take things to another level. So without further ado, let's dive into this five-minute Friday. Thanks so much for coming on the show robert hello thank you very much for having me i'm excited i'm very excited now what first off before we actually get into some of the content why did you decide to cover this topic of mastering well prior to this book i had been working for let's say 13 years or so researching power in all of its different forms, from great political figures to seducers to artists, etc. And then I had the opportunity to actually interact with a living power figure of 50 cent and I noticed that all these people sort of shared something that there was something that a quality that they all had it wasn't anything physical it was something about how their minds

operated and I just thought if I could figure out what it is that these people shared it would be like the ultimate, it would be like the ultimate book. It would be like the ultimate secret to power itself. I could reduce it to something relatively simple, a process that these people went through to, I say, attain sort of a superior level of intelligence. And once you have this intelligence, basically the world is yours to conquer. If you have setbacks as they're inevitable in life, you'll know how to get back on your feet. It's just like the key to everything. So I wanted to share this knowledge that I had from so much research with my readers.

It's amazing. Now, can you tell a little bit more about your interaction with 50 Cent? I think that's pretty cool that you actually wrote a book with him. And how much time did you get to spend with him, and what did you really learn about how he got to where he is? Well, he contacted me. The 48 Laws of Power is really big in the hip-hop community. He was just curious to meet me, and we met in the back room of a steakhouse in New York City back in 2006, I think it was. Wow.

It was kind of intimidating because I was the only sort of white guy there. You had a huge entourage. We had a huge entourage. It was kind of like something out of The Godfather. But it ended up we hit it off really well. You wouldn't think of looking at us because, you know, we don't look similar or anything. But we got along really well. We shared a kind of interest in strategy and warfare we like to talk about sports and power maneuvers

and what people are really up to and in the music business what this executive is doing and why you know it fits in with the 48 laws but we connected really well on that wow and so we decided to do a book together i spent about for six for six months, I was pretty much hanging out with him. Really? I'd go back and forth back to LA, but I was in New York a lot. I would hang out with him in all his meetings. I went to his house and hung out at his strange mansion in Connecticut that he bought from Mike Tyson. And then I went to Vegas a lot with him, partied with him. Neither of us are like real party animals, but so we got a lot. We got to know each other pretty well, you know.

Wow. And being around him, you know, I was sort of considering, I never got to be around Napoleon Bonaparte. I'm not that old. And I thought this is my chance to be around a real kind of, I call him the Napoleon Bonaparte of hip hop, to really see in real time, you real time what a power figure is like. Wow. And he was amazing. And I deduced from that time that the secret to 50 is his fearlessness,

and that's what the 50th Law is about.