How to Achieve Whatever You Want in Life Effectively: I interviewed Robert Greene. Robert Greene is one of the most successful nonfiction authors of our era. If you exclude book politics, I'm not exaggerating when I say he sold millions and millions and millions of copies of his books. His most famous book is called “The 48 Laws of Power,” and that book was so inspiring to the musician. 50 Cent wanted to co-author a book about power, success, and achievement with him, so he sold millions of copies all over the world of many books on power seduction strategy, success, and achievement.
His name is Robert Greene, and in this interview, we talk all about his journey and how he was able to create this amazing, successful life. The exact life that he envisioned for himself is far grander and far beyond that, and we talk about neuroplasticity and how to take control of your mind in an environment of instability that we have in our world right now.
I think it's a really important message for right now in our world. You're going to truly love this interview, so leave a comment down below. Here's one of the most successful nonfiction authors in the world, Robert Greene, explaining his concepts of power, success, and achievement and how you can use them right now in your life.
Millions Of Books By Robert Greene Were Sold
We have Robert Greene, who is someone who has sold many millions of books, largely on the subject of power, and it's great to have you. Thanks for coming on and talking with us. Robert, thanks for having me, Jake. It's my pleasure. So you're known for really these books around laws of power, and they've sold many millions of copies, and I know that's a lot because I've got three books myself to get into the millions. There's a lot you've become fundamentally aware of; I think of you even more than an author; you're really a researcher into this type of idea, and when you look around at the world right now, there are a lot of people losing their jobs. A lot of people are losing their personal power. A lot of people are losing any type of power or control over their future right now, and there are a lot of relationship problems. There are numerous issues to be addressed. Sounds interesting? Check this out too - 8 Things to Remember to Manifest What You Want.
What do you think of all the laws of power that you have studied right now? What do you think is most important to bring back to the surface and have a conversation about? What do you think is most essential right now? Out of all of your laws of power and out of all of your research, what do you think is the most important conversation you've written about in the past that's now important again?
The main thing is that I just taped a podcast yesterday for my own YouTube channel; it's going to sort of go into this. The main problem is that, as you know, we're creatures of habit, and neurologically, if things keep repeating over the course of hours and days, they get kind of written literally into our brains through the neural connections. So what we're going through now is a period of great anxiety and fear, but we're trying to contract inward.
Spend More Time And Think About What's Going On In The World
We have to spend more time by ourselves; we have to think more about what's going on in the world. We can't be as active, and my fear or ability to raise your brain are both limited. Above the moment, think of the longer term. I have a lot of power over that. I plan all the way to the end. I talk in my ward strategy book about the power of that and all the great strategists who are able to do that. I talked a lot about that in my book on mastery, and I have a whole chapter on it in my last book, The Laws of Human Nature, about our short-sightedness, about how what we see right in front of us has a much more powerful impact on what we're thinking. We're creatures of emotion.
What you need to be able to do now, in this period, is to literally raise your brain up above the moment and think longer term, imagining going through this process in one year. Hopefully they will have a vaccine, and we will be past this point as best we can, and we're going to enter a new landscape, a new business landscape, in which what we thought existed before will be devastated; it'll be gone. It's like a tornado that passes through certain businesses, and they are literally gone. Perhaps particularly in the travel industry, entertainment is going through major shifts, but all areas of business, livelihoods, and careers -- even my own -- are going through these major seismic shifts. It's not going to be the same, and it's going to be a new landscape where you want to have a relatively fearless attitude about the world.
There Are Unbelievable Possibilities For New Things To Begin
There's going to be incredible opportunities out there for new things to start and for new kinds of businesses because there'll be space cleared for young people, for instance, to start their own business that nobody's ever thought of before because all these other industries are gone and there'll be places.
People are going to want to invest their money in new kinds of enterprises, so it'll be an incredible opportunity, but your mindset during these weeks, months, etc. of lockdown is going to infect you. They're going to cause you to contract inwardly; they're going to cause you to be afraid; they're going to cause you to wonder about yourself; they're going to maybe cause you to try and reach for some kind of career or job that's safe and easy and that pays you a lot of money. Sounds interesting? Check this out too - How To Manifest What You Want.
In the near future, for the immediate period, which is understandable because you have to pay your bills, etc., you have to be able to think longer term about your career and your future. You want to lay the foundation for something that will last longer. You need to be thinking about this right now; you need to be trying to counteract these fearful, anxious habits that are coming.
“The Last Book Of Laws Of Human Nature” By Robert Greene
I explained in my book, The Last Book of Laws of Human Nature, how you have to develop the habit of questioning your own emotions, so if you're feeling afraid, anxious, and worried about what's going on in the world, sit back and ask yourself, "What exactly am I afraid of?" Is it something real? Is it something concrete? Or is it this overall dread or anxiety where I exaggerate to confront your own anxiety and raise your head above the immediate present and look longer term as to where you want your career to be headed and what are these opportunities that'll be out there in a year? So you're not one of these people because I know, for instance, that my parents -- who are obviously older than you; I'm twice your age -- grew up during the depression.
I saw that they never got over it their whole lives; they were always there, even though my father was middle class. He had a comfortable life, but he was always worried. He lived his entire life with that type of depressive mindset, and if you don't take care, this current recession and depression will leave their mark on you. You're going to have habits that are going to restrict you a year from now, when a whole new world opens. There are a lot of amazing things there, so I'd like to go back to some of the other ways that you might have seen your parents and the way that their circumstances kept them in prison.
How that is carried into your household through their behaviors and subconscious patterns might get passed down to others, but first on our channel. As you were discussing Hebb's law, this is the idea that, as you said, these emotions fire and wire, and we build these neural networks that are equal to our environment. So how do we, as you're saying, break out of that? There are so many people that are stuck, as you said, in this moment right now because there's an overwhelming amount of emotion.
We Humans Are Highly Emotional Creatures
How do we detach to be able to question it to give us the dead time that doesn't create any value for you moving forward? It doesn't enrich your brain. It doesn't enrich your ideas. It doesn't lay down any skills for the future you want to exploit. This time is okay, so now that you're alone and have time, you can work on yourself, and it's not that complicated.
Most of the time, we human beings are very reactive animals; we can't help it. I know I'm the same, and I don't exclude myself from that. If somebody says something that's kind of in my face that makes me angry and that feels like a diss or something like that, I get all emotional, I take it personally, and then I react in a way that maybe isn't very good for me; it's detrimental in the long run. Okay, right now you're experiencing all sorts of emotions. I'm not sure what I'm feeling: fear, anger, hatred, or excitement. You need to do this on a daily basis.
Begin By Looking At Yourself And Questioning Your Emotions
First, you have to begin with baby steps; you can't suddenly transform yourself into a zen master who has that inner space that allows her to look at herself with distance. It requires little movements every day; it's sort of like when you exercise to get yourself in shape; you're aware that you must do little things and slowly your muscles will build. In a month, you'll be laying down patterns of behavior. You'll be a lot stronger, so you begin by first looking at yourself and questioning your own emotions. I talked about that earlier, but it's really not that complicated, so let's say you begin tomorrow. Look at yourself and try to pay attention, particularly to any moment where you're feeling a little bit more emotional than usual. Sounds interesting? Check this out too - How To Attract Wealth And Prosperity.
Maybe you're depressed, or maybe something equally exciting awaits you, or maybe you're afraid—it's all right to step back and ask yourself why I am experiencing this emotion. Is there something real and concrete? Am I depressed because something actually happened, or do I not really know why I'm depressed? Maybe something happened a week ago; maybe there's something unconscious going on with me. I don't understand why I am angry. Is it because that person didn't respond to my emails, or is it because I have this problem where I need people to respond to me right away, and if they don't, I take it personally, which is very common and very human?
Question Yourself And Create Some Inner Peace
So question yourself, and you have to begin slowly. You can't do that the whole day because it'll be irritating to have to go through this process. You have to see the power, and you have to see the facts. So, for instance, I meditate every morning, and I go through those 40 minutes every morning, and I've noticed that in that kind of time I'm definitely going inward. I'm calming myself down over the course of a day. I don't react so much to what people say, or I'm able to step back and go on. They didn't mean to personally, and it's not worth getting upset about needing to have that kind of power, but it comes from beginning to question yourself and randomly creating some inner space where you allow yourself to think about your emotions instead of reacting to them.
Why am I afraid this morning? Am I afraid, literally, because something happened? or is it because of something I read on social media? or is it something I read in the newspaper, saw in the news, or whatever you know? This is a process that, if started slowly, allows you to see the power within. I don't need to react so much, and if you don't react so much, you don't have all this inner drama and all these deep emotions churning inward that give you space for more thinking.
The more space you create, the more space you'll be able to create going forward. Start small, and it will gradually grow as a result of you not having to deal with all the negativity that people constantly throw at you. So that's sort of how I would begin the process. I feel like it has more inner space than just information, so you can use the word that I think. It can't be overstated enough, and that's inner drama.
You Are The Source Of All The Inner Drama
What do you think are the most common inner dramas that we collectively have that stop us from achieving these levels of power that you discuss and optimizing our highest levels of our own human nature and our own human potential? What are some of these, whether it's one, two, or three? What are a couple that you think are the most common inner dramas playing out on the soap opera of our world right now? What can we do about them?
Well, you know, to look at the macro picture up here, the source of all the inner drama is that you tend to take everything people say and do personally. If you can eliminate that one habit, you can get rid of all the other little bits of drama that come up from all different kinds of sources, and I'll go into one in a minute, but that's the main step you have to do, and I repeat this over and over again in all of my books, and I really hit you over the head with it in my last book, the laws of human nature: that people, no matter what they say or do, are not thinking so much about you.
You know that you think that everything people say, do, or hint at is because they're thinking about you and reacting to you personally, but 95 percent of the time it has nothing to do with you. Everything to do with something their spouse or someone in their family said, something that they're carrying from their childhood, or something that a boss did—it's not personal, right?
Something You Did Is The Real Source Of The Drama Or Friction
Sometimes something you did is the real source of the drama or friction. In those cases where, more often than not, it has nothing to do with you, the best thing you can do is, even if it has something to do with you, think that it doesn't have to go through a process where everything is alright.
He is just responding well to my emails. That means he or she is probably going through things right now and they're very busy; maybe I'm not on their radar. It's not about me or my ideas; it's just about the fact that we're all overworked right now and people have to be given a little credit. We have to be a little more indulgent with people. Just go through a process where you mentally reduce the personal element, and that will get rid of so much of your inner drama that you won't be shocked at how free your brain will be.
If you do that, another source of inner drama is the things that other people tell you about yourself. I talk a lot about this in my book Mastery, which is basically a book about how to maximize your individual spirit and how to find the right career path. How to go through an apprenticeship to develop your skills and how to become creative and then a master in your field.
Most People Are Unable To Find Their Life's Purpose
The problem for most people is that they're never able to find that path in life that is their path, like you described it to me. Your path—you know you quit college, you went on a journey, you went to Thailand, then you decided to write books, then you created your powerful podcast audience, etc.—that was your dream. That was meant for you alone, but most people hear this voice in their heads from their parents, their teachers, their friends, and their colleagues on social media. They're trying to infiltrate their tastes and values into your world, which have nothing to do with what makes you interesting or special, and I try to make the point that your source of power lies in exploiting what makes you different from everyone else and hitting on that as much as you can.
So for me, it's been books, but it's been the kind of strange books that I write; they're strange; they're different. I've created my own niche. You have that power yourself, but you're listening to other people. Tell me who you are. You're listening to other people fill you with fear about your career path, like, "Oh, you start your own business." It'll probably fail. If it fails, you won't have any money. Your parents say you've got to go to law school. If you don't go to law school, you'll be nowhere in 10 years. You've got to shut all that crap out of your mouth. I've got to stop listening to people; they're creating too much of that inner drum. They are instilling doubts, fears, and anxieties that do not need to exist but most likely do. One of the main sources of the inner drama that we're talking about is sort of a few ideas right there that are fascinating.
So let me ask you one of the questions that I had already thought of and intended to ask about your success. As an author, for viewers listening to this, I remember reading a statistic when I was 20, which was right when I was finishing my book, and everyone you know thought it was the worst idea of all. The publishers said no, and, you know, I thought at times I was going to get published, but everyone said no, and I remember somebody in my family telling me you should go back to school.
There's a bad idea, and they said it was an article that said that 95 percent of books or authors don't sell 2,500 copies in their lifetime, and I'm not positive if that's 100 percent accurate, but I mean for someone that isn't aware, do the math on 2,500 copies over a lifetime, call it 10 years. You're talking about like 20 or 30 grand over a 10-year period, right? And you've actually become, like, probably one of the highest-grossing authors in the publishing industry, especially for non-fiction that's outside of politics.
There’s Always An Element Of Luck
I've made most of my money by using the internet to attend seminars like those described in books. I probably sold over a hundred thousand between all three combined, but you sold millions. I wonder what made you so successful and have such a lucrative career because you meet millions of people who are like Robert. I want to be just like you, and almost statistically, you probably have a higher probability of winning a local lottery than me.
Do you know what the level of success that you had with books was like? like, how did that happen, and that's amazing first of all too, so congratulations. Well, thank you very much. You have to understand there's always an element of luck involved, and I tell people this all the time. It's good to at least recognize the element of luck because it prevents you from getting a big head, from getting a huge ego, from becoming grandiose, which is something I talked about in my last book and is a very big tendency for people who have success, so I recognize the element of luck in my life.
I was 35 years old, more or less, and had been trying all different kinds of careers. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I tried working in journalism; that didn't work out. I went and I traveled like you did all through Europe for five years, trying to write novels, teaching English, working in construction jobs, working at hotels, etc. That didn't work out. I came back to Los Angeles, where I'm from, and I started to work in the film business; I'd write screenplays, but that didn't work, and I was getting very despondent and very worried about myself, and my parents were getting very worried, and then I was 35 or 36 years old, and here's the element of luck.
I met a man. I'm in Italy for a job; he's a packager of books, and he asked me if I had an idea for a book, and I improvised, and it just sort of spilled out of me like some demon that just came vomiting out of my chest: The idea for the 48 laws, which turned into the 48 laws of power, was so exciting; he said he was Dutch, and I won't imitate his voice; he said, “Robert, I will pay you to live while you write this book.” But there are several lessons here.
First of all, I spent all these years, those wandering years, developing real skill; I wasn't wasting my time in journalism; I knew how to write under a deadline. I knew how to write concisely, how to appeal to an audience, etc. Writing novels, I sort of trained myself to be self-disciplined; I had no boss, and I'd try to talk myself through how to make my writing entertaining and how to tell stories, and then in Hollywood, that was even more accentuated, and I also developed real researching skills in my work in Hollywood, etc., because I also worked as a researcher, so I was able to bring all of this together, and the point is something like this will happen to you.
Someone Will Come Across Your Path With An Idea And Opportunity
In your life, where luck will intervene, you'll meet someone who will cross your path with an idea or a possible opportunity. Are you in a position to exploit it? Are you even in a position to recognize that it is an opportunity? And I'm talking to the people out there where luck will intervene. You'll meet someone who will cross your path with an idea or a possible opportunity. Are you in a position to exploit it? Are you even in a position to recognize that it is an opportunity? And I can honestly tell you that if I met this person 10 years earlier, it wouldn't have worked out because I was too young, I was too impatient, I was too full of myself, and I didn't have the right skills. It came at the right moment, and I was desperate, so I saw this as my opportunity, and I seized it. I gave it to him, and I sucked every little drop of blood I could out of that guy to get that book published, right?
So that moment will happen to you. Are you ready for it? Do you recognize it? Are you fearless enough to take it? And so the other thing was that I knew that this was my one chance to break out of the rut I had been in to write and do something that would, you know, set me up for life, but I wasn't afraid. So I wrote a book that was as if you knew the 48 laws of power; it's very unusual. It's very strange. It has a structure that you've never seen before; I tell a story, I interpret the story, and I then go into sort of the ideas behind it. I have images, quotes, and stories in the margins, all in various formats. You've never seen a book like that, and the publishers were a little worried about it. They were trying to edge me into making something a little more normal for me, and the packager who set me up with Yoast Alfreds told them no, you either accept this weird book or we're walking somewhere else; that's an element of fearlessness that you have to exhibit.
Pay No Attention To Anyone Making Bad DecisionsIf you have an idea and you think it's great and you've kind of tested it and you feel confident about it, you've got to not listen to all the people out there who are going to fill you with their dumb ideas. We're going to try and water down what makes you different, so recognizing the luck, seizing the hell out of it, making sure it was something that would set me up for life, and not being afraid to be different from all the other books out there, I think that's sort of the source of my success.
The final thing I'll say is that when I write a book, I begin from the premise that you know. This book will most likely fail because I am not a high roller. I want to understand the reality of the subject I'm dealing with, whether it's strategy and war, seduction, power, or 50 Cent, who wrote a book about mastery or human nature. This book probably will stink, and people won't like it. I will sell 200 copies of it. I'd better get my act together; I'd better research so deeply and understand so profoundly when I'm studying that. I will avoid that horrifying fate of having hardly anybody interested in my books with that motivation.
I make sure my books are extremely well researched, so I'm hitting upon the truth of reality so that my readers can read it and not just read it to be entertained but read it and have their lives changed, their brains changed, by what I'm saying about recognizing luck and seizing it, not being afraid to be different, being painstaking and disciplined, and making sure that I'm detail-oriented. I'm thinking deeply about my audience. I think those are the keys to what's happened to me, more or less. First of all, that's an amazing story. That is such a good story.
Robert Greene Is One Of The Most Successful Non-fiction Author
So let me ask you; I mean, there are so many things that I want to say out of this just a quick couple word answer in the first year, and how was the first year of publication of that book? How many copies did you see in the first year?
Literally, it was out for 12 months, from December, or, I'm sorry, in September or October of 1998. I don't know off the top of my head that it isn't earth shattering it was maybe a hundred thousand, you know. Now we're approaching three million in the United States alone. So it actually sells more now than it did in the first year, if you can believe it. Is that amazing because it's become like a cold type thing? I mean, around the world, it's sold many more copies than that, but just in the US alone, so, you know, it started slowly and built; you know, word of mouth is how my books basically sell themselves. That's amazing.
For anyone listening who isn't super familiar with Robert, I certainly wasn't overstating when I said that. You know, he's become one of the most successful non-fiction authors of our era, and that isn't writing. If you exclude political books, especially them, that's incredible.
People Really Don't Understand The Process Of Becoming Someone
You said your third point was about discipline and those types of things. One of the things that I think is most common is that people really don't understand the process of becoming someone. As you know, like you said, it's really not an overstatement; you kind of actually wrote like a cult. following book that is read all over the world, whether it's in libraries, executive suites, or prisons. It became popular in jail. 50 Cent loved it so much. You wanted to write a book like it was a wild thing. It almost seems like this really weird overnight hysterical success that is relatable, but you were saying, I think, that you were over. You were somewhere around 40 years old, and you still hadn't really accomplished anything. Your parents were worried about you as a 40 year old and you said discipline.
I know from Ryan how painstakingly detail-oriented you are. But let's talk a little bit about why you like the idea of valuing process over outcome. It's like, as I'm sure you see, most people's problem, especially young people, is that they're overly ambitious about what they can accomplish and then it doesn't happen as quickly as they want; they don't have the discipline to do the things that made you disciplined.
How does that show up in your life, and what's your advice on that subject? It's probably what separates people who are successful from those who aren't successful because, honestly, everybody in the world has ideas. You know, you wake up in the morning and you're in the shower. You think I have a great idea for a screenplay for a business. Everybody has that and goes through that process, but the difference is, are those the people who actually execute those ideas? To execute your ideas, you need a degree of self-confidence. You need to believe that you can pull it off, which isn't easy and a lot of people lack, and then you have to have developed very definite disciplined habits, and so I talk a lot about that in my book, Mastery.
The Key Period In Life Was When We Were Young
The key period in your life was when you were young. When you were in junior high or high school, not to mention college, where did you learn the value of education? If I spend a month trying to do something that's tedious, it pays off in the end, and I get a reward. The reward is that I feel like I'm not so stupid; I feel like I can do this. You know, it builds confidence, and it doesn't have to be difficult. It could be in sports; it could be in academics. It could be working with your hands, but you need to have developed the thought that there is a reward for being disciplined.
If you lack that when you're 20 or 21, it's difficult; it's not impossible, but you have to find a way to develop it, and you have to spend. I consider your 20s to be what I call your apprenticeship phase. That's your period where you're learning the skills that are going to let you climb that staircase up to being creative and being a master, and so those skills are things that you repeat over and over again, right? So you want to get a job or a career that will allow you those kinds of reps. It's all about repetition, right?
Working Hard Gives You Reward
So for me personally, when I was very young, I loved school and studied very hard. I developed the idea that working hard gives me rewards, and those rewards are important. You know about working in the different fields that I told you about. I had to be disciplined; you don't know what it's like to write under a deadline where, by tomorrow, you have to have written a thousand word essay for a newspaper or a magazine. Well, that's going to make you concentrate and be able to do it, you know.
So the other thing is to have some self-initiative. You can't always have people breathing down your neck. You have to be able to do things on your own. Let's say you are 22 and you never really got that reward that I'm talking about when you were younger. You need to be able to develop it on your own. How do you do that? Well, start trying; maybe you have a job. Start trying to learn a foreign language. Start trying to play a musical instrument. Take up a new form of exercise that you haven't done or something where there is a learning curve and go through the process. You're going to start feeling impatient; God forbid, I'm sick; I hate running; I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm just going to go on the treadmill or whatever, etc. No, you force yourself to do it—you force yourself to get that reward or the musical instrument or the foreign language or whatever it is.
There Are Things That Will Help Develop The Pattern In Our Brain
You know that if you're a writer or if you want to be a writer, you have to write every single day; you have to develop the habit; and you have to not worry about whether it's brilliant or not. These are things that will help develop that pattern in your brain that repeats something over and over again. You get better at it, and I don't care. I talked about this in mastery a lot.
Neuroscience demonstrates that we are blessed with brains that are incredibly plastic. You can literally recreate your brain through the habits that you develop. You're developing all kinds of new neural connections that weren't there before. So if it's like a desert where there's very little life and not much going on, that's kind of the brain of somebody who's lazy and doesn't do anything. But you can suddenly make that environment more like a jungle, like the Amazon. full of all kinds of weird plants and tropical things.
You can literally create the environment of your brain by these habits that you develop by learning skills: by learning discipline: by laying down a foundation that you will be able to build on over and over again; by reading books: by absorbing knowledge. The thing is, with the lockdown, but in general, with the internet, you have this insane possibility to learn anything.
You want people on YouTube to teach you the silliest little thing that you ever wanted to learn. You have incredible potential and power to learn things on your computer that you never had 20-30 years ago. You've got to exploit that. You've got to use this. So even if you have a crap job and you want to break out of it, if you want to be able to maybe become a writer or start your own business, you've got to first develop the calmness, the energy, the patience, and the ability to deal with tediousness and the ability to deal with criticism and failure by going slow.
We Live In A Society Where Everything Is Fast And EasyWe live in a world where everything is fast and easy, which is the problem with a lot of young people. I'm not criticizing because I feel guilty about myself with the phone in your hand. You get used to everything that is so fast and simple that you think. Well, anything in life can be like that. You don't really think that, but unconsciously, you do. You do think, "Wow, you know I should be able to have an idea and sell it." Millions of dollars will come in, but you have to slow yourself down. You have to be able to deal with tediousness with difficulty and failure with criticism.
Life is not easy, and you'd have to develop a bit of a tough skin about these things, but if you're in your 20s, this is the time that you're either going to make this happen or it's never going to happen. If you're in your 30s and you never develop that discipline, I'm sorry, but I truly believe it's almost too late. That's fascinating.
So we just had our first baby; she's, I think, 16 days old today, and, oh, I have a really cute, calm, amazing wife. So that energy has definitely been transmitted, as you know. She's been my grandmother; my mother-in-law is here; and she has three children, like seven granddaughters, she said, and she helped you raise all of them, and she said she'd never seen one so calm, so I think we got it; it's really great, and I give my wife the credit for that because she was in my wife's body, and my wife's got like the most calm, amazing personality. My wife says that you seem pretty calm and present yourself well. So maybe it's the two of you. I give her credit for that one, though. Okay, alright, it's looking a little bit, you know, but so far it's been amazing. I bring this up because I'm thinking about my baby. I think about the world that we have today. You just talked about people I hate. The word says that people are brainwashed and have no self-control. The classrooms are too full with all the kids now. You know, at 7 or 8 or 9 years old, they're already addicted to their cell phones.
These are the types of friends that they're growing up with. They don't care; it's just not a good environment, and it's getting worse because there's so much deliberate brainwashing and they know so much about psychology now. They're really manipulating young people's minds, and it's bad. It's not good. It's even worse than that.
Things Were Very Different When You Were A Child
When I was a kid, and I'm only 29 now, it was really different from when you were a kid. I'm like, I don't even know. If I can put my kid in a school and I'm thinking about homeschooling, I think about what I want to teach them, what I want to do the best I can as a dad to help them learn, and all these types of things. Obviously, I view the world in a different way. I'm 29; I dropped out; I built my own successful business, and all these things; but I think about this, what would you do knowing everything you know right?
Now, if you just had a two week old baby or it's 10 years old, and you think about the education you want to give it, I guess the age doesn't really matter; whether they're two weeks old now, 10 years old now, or 14 years old now, what are the most important things you would teach them? How would you teach them? Would you have them go to normal schools? What makes an apprenticeship more important? Like, what would you do right now?
I ask you because I'm so fascinated by how intelligent you are, and then I think about my own daughter, so it's my own selfish question, but I think everybody's asking this question right now. What's her name, by the way? Jada, like Jada Pinkett Smith, is very nice. Yeah, exactly, it's Jada. It's Jada Clark Ducey. Clark Ducey is a very nice name. Well, you know what the thing is, so it also depends on where you live and the schools that are available to you.
There Are Alternative Forms Of Education
You know there are alternative forms of education. You know, like Montessori, for instance, where they approach it differently, but the main problem with schools is that they crush your individual spirit. They try to make you fit into cookie cutter molds, and they sort of force you into this idea that learning is kind of painful and you hate it. You get turned off from learning because you don't want to learn anything because you were forced to learn algebra: you were forced to learn this, and then your whole life you look at books as something like, Oh my god, I don't want to go anywhere near that. So that's the main danger that education poses when you want to look at your child.
I talked a lot about this, and as I said in my book, mastery means that your child has its own unique spirit: it has its own DNA that no other child of that age will ever have. It's sort of amazing. In fact, each person has a DNA that will never be replicated; it's yours and yours alone. She has a spirit that makes her different from all the other kids in the world. Right now, that is coming up all right. Are you going to let that flourish? Are you going to encourage it? Are you going to impose your own values on your own ideas?
So let's say that as she gets older, you have your own particular biases. Let's say she wants to be a teacher or she loves learning, or she loves books and reading, and you cannot talk about yourself personally, but she can pick up on your disappointment when she says, “Oh, I really want her to be, I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be a dancer or something else; whatever it is, you are unconsciously influencing that very special person just by thinking that you never say it. This or that is something you are unconsciously influencing, and you want to drop all of your biases. You want to be able to nourish what makes her different, and if she doesn't want to go learning, go learning.
How to do this particular thing, when she prefers dancing as opposed to, I don't know what to do with learning a musical instrument, then let her do it because children have what I call primal inclinations. They're drawn to something that makes them different, and I explained in my book examples of Steve Jobs walking in front. When he's six years old, he sees a shop window full of electronic gadgets and goes, My god, this is so amazing, and it's sort of that obsession that happened when he was six. Where he's interested in the design element of technology, that stays within the rest of your life.
Encourage Your Kids To Go Through The ProcessSo your child will have those moments as well, and it's not that you don't want them to do anything. They have to choose something, but you want to be able to create that reward situation that I'm talking about when they're four, five, or six years old. They want to learn something; they're excited; they want to learn, I don't know, something with books or something with physical activity, or they want to learn music, etc. Let them do it, encourage it, and make them go through that process, but make it something that their willpower and their emotions are engaged in; you're not forcing them.
You're not imposing your own values on them and letting them discover on their own whether they'd really truly have a love for this thing or not, because you don't learn anything deeply and you never become good at something. Unless you're emotionally engaged, and you never become good at something unless you're in love with it, it is another element of neuroscience, and I discuss a lot about that in my book.
You Will Learn When You Feel The Necessity And DesireYou don't learn something unless you want to learn it because you're not paying attention, and the example I give is learning. I study a lot of foreign languages; it's something that has always interested me. I studied French in college, and then I went to France, where I could barely speak and people were blathering all around me and I couldn't understand anything. They said, "I spent two or three years learning a thing, and then I met a French girl." I really wanted to date her, and I got very excited about it. I started dating her in two weeks.
During my three years of college, I learned more French. I was motivated because I wanted to write. So when you feel the necessity and the desire, you will learn things, and you will move mountains. So you want to create that in your child to get a kind of nourishment—the thing that they love—and get them to go through the process. They discover on their own the rewards that come from repeating something, from doing it over and over again, from being disciplined, all right then if it comes to schooling.
At least now they have a grounding where they maybe won't be so biased by what other people are saying. You know, I don't know much about homeschooling; it depends on who you are and the time that you have. If you can find a school where they have an alternate approach, the main thing that you have to be worried about is that they're going to inculcate in your child the idea that they have to be this. They can't be told that they need to study this, and that's going to turn them off from learning so early on before they get sucked into that brainwashing machine, as you say.
You Have To Develop The Idea That Learning Is Fun
You have to develop the idea in their heads that learning is fun. They're getting better at something that is exciting. It's really good for you, and it's great when they're in school. Maybe they're hearing that thing, then they come home and they practice the piano or they practice basketball or whatever it is. They know that they can tune out all the others that people are giving them. They can develop some inner sense of who they are, what makes them different, and what they truly love. They can tune out all the other stuff that people are throwing at them, so that's sort of cool to me.
The key element, the key component, is: what does the child feel, consciously and unconsciously, from their parents? They have the room to nourish and develop something that they really are attracted to, or can they feel that you're kind of pushing them away from that and trying to channel them into something that may be more lucrative or maybe more what you like? I think that's sort of the key element right there; that's really fascinating.
So do you think the biggest mistake, or one of them, that we make as a society is that we don't do it first of all? So what you're saying is that not even what the kid is doing is learning that pattern of the risk-reward mechanism and sticking to it in this habit that's built in their brain that they can accomplish. That's what you're saying, it's not what they do; it could change over the course of a lifetime, sure, and that skill is so interesting because I learned that in basketball when I was a kid. That's what I learned, and that's what made me drop out and ask if I could put the same idea into this same principled approach to basketball, if I could do this even though I can't get a publisher. I'll eventually become successful at it, and you're saying the right thing. This is the most important thing to remember because it is the foundation of a child's education.Cesar Rodriguez, The Last Fighter Pilot In The U.S.
In my book, Mastery, I have interviews. I have stories of people that I interview to consider them masters, and one of the stories I have is about a man named Cesar Rodriguez, who is the last jet fighter pilot in the United States to be decorated. As I forget the word for "ace," I think it means that he shot down three or four other planes during the first Gulf War in 1991 to 1992. I interviewed him because there's nothing more difficult skill-wise than fighting than flying a jet fighter plane when time is on the line.
How nerve-wracking it is, and he told me that he's this short Hispanic guy who lives in Arizona. He said he wanted to be a fighter pilot in school, like in Alabama, and all the other guys were like what we would call "golden boys." They looked like Tom Cruise, they acted like Tom Cruise, and they were going to be the best fighter pilots, but he scored terribly in the beginning. He was one of the worst in a group of 100. He was like the third worst, and they were all on top, and he went. I don't think I can do this, and then he thought back to when he was younger and how much he loved football.
He played a lot of football even though he was kind of short, and he ended up being the quarterback of his team in high school even though he's only like five foot eight. They played like a wishbone, but he still could pass pretty well, and he said I went back to my time in sports, because we're talking about when he was like 25 or 26 and in jet fighter pilot school. Maybe a little bit younger than I thought back then—you know, when I was 12 or 13 years old, I learned that by lifting weights.
I could make myself stronger than all these other people who were much bigger than I was. I learned that by practicing passing day in and day out. I could develop my arm really well, then, by believing in myself and convincing the coach that I could. I was smart enough to run a complicated offense; in other words, it built confidence in him so that he could go back to that. When he was in school as a jet fighter pilot, he could build on that, and what he did as a kind of parallel was spend a hundred times more time on the simulators than anybody else.
He's just saying, "I'm going to get over all of my fears by sheer repetition." Just like I lifted weights, I was going to go on that simulator 100 hours a week and I was going to master this thing, and it worked. He ended up graduating with the top two students in his school and became the last decorated jet fighter pilot in the Air Force. He could draw upon that experience, but football has nothing to do with being a fighter pilot.
Learning Something Gives You ConfidenceSo, if your young daughter studies dance and later decides to pursue a career as an MBA, on Wall Street she at least learns the value that becoming good at ballet is a reward for being disciplined. There's a reward; it doesn't have to be exactly what the person pursues, as I mentioned, but just laying down that pattern of being disciplined. Learning something gives you confidence, and I titled the story of that fighter pilot.
Trust the process, so if when you're young you learn that the process will reap rewards, you can trust it, and you can apply it to anything as you get older. If you are suddenly 40 years old and you want to learn how to play the piano, you know that you did something earlier, when you were younger. You know that the process will work, and you'll do it. You'll do whatever it is that I do because you trust that discipline and repetition will build true skill. That is so interesting and fascinating. It's like the most profound thing ever, but it's such an easy-to-understand thing that it's big! moment, that's interesting that he had the exact same kind of thought. The problem that I had was that it's amazing that it's so cool. 75% Of People Were Living Paycheck To Paycheck
Do you think that's what's missing most in our culture? I know you're a busy guy, but I guess this is a nice way to kind of go full circle. Do you think, at its core, this is kind of one of the best when you look around? I read some stats like this before the economic shutdown, so it's probably a lot worse now, but it was like 75 percent of people were living paycheck to paycheck. There was that Gallup poll that said something like 80 percent of people are actively disengaging from their jobs, which is the politically correct way of saying they hate this thing, and then they say 9 out of 10 people die with less than ten thousand dollars and virtually no financial assets; almost nobody's prepared for retirement like all these things. It's like we really have a culture all around that's very unhealthy, like we're failing in every department overall.
Do you think, at the core, it's that we don't know? either because we didn't develop that habit or because we were conditioned at an early age to not think for ourselves, so we never find those things, so we get pulled in the direction of society, and then if we find something, we don't have the emotional and mental strength.
Neurological Connections Are Made In Order To Be SuccessfulThe neurological connections are built to succeed at something, so it kind of comes down to those two things. I think that's pretty much it, so, you know, look at it. I mean, we're both Americans looking at what our ancestors were like. I read a lot about the 19th century, the kind of pioneer spirit that Americans had, you know, and kind of what happened after the civil war and the explosion of all the different kinds of Robber Barons, what was going on in business, etc.
People were incredibly energetic and were incredibly tough-minded; they would, you know, have an idea for it. They would build whatever it was they built in this country and make it what it was. I think of my father's generation and World War II, and the incredible sacrifices people had to go through during the war. He would tell me about it. He served in the navy. People are whining and bitching about the lockdown and not being able to go to a bar or a tanning salon now.
People in World War II had to deal with a thousand times worse. We have gotten soft inwardly if you compare ourselves to generations in the past, and I'm not trying to rag on millennials because I think millennials have a lot of great things that are much superior to my generation. I'm kind of caught in between the boomers and generation X.There Are Many Aspects Of Millennials That Are Better
There are a lot of things that are better about millennials, but there is a softness that people have. They're not able to deal with any kind of criticism, failure, or challenge. They just kind of melt, and people seem to whine. They complain because they want to talk about this injustice or because they're not able to stand up for themselves. This applies, you know, to everybody, even people who traditionally don't have much power. You need to build inner strength and inner resources. The ability to endure because life is hard and tough, It's never easy, especially if you grew up with the idea because of your phone, because of other people, or because your parents are coddling you, and then you're 21-22.
When you're thrown out into the real world, you think everything should be easy and everything should come to you. You're so privileged in that sense that you're in for an incredible root shock. You haven't built any of those inner resources; you're just going to melt the first time someone criticizes. This is the first time you've been fired. I was told when I was 25 years old. When I was in a meeting with an editor at a magazine, this guy had just had his second Martini.
My boss said, "Robert, you are not a good writer." You're never going to be a writer; just forget about going to business school or law school. Give it up; you're not disciplined. I've been criticized; I have failed at many things in my life, and sure, it affected me. It just got me depressed, but I picked myself back up again and kept trying. I never gave up.Many People Lack Inner Confidence And Inner StrengthA lot of people lack that kind of inner confidence and inner strength, and it is a cultural thing. It is something that we're going through, and if you compare where we were as Americans just 80 years ago, you don't have to go back that far. It was a very different situation. Things shifted a lot in the 1960s, when a kind of youth culture developed. People have started to get the idea that everything needs to be fun, easy, and pleasurable. If I'm not having fun, I don't want to do it with a whiny attitude. I think that's really when things started to break down, but I'm very worried about it.
You kind of hit your head on it being a cultural phenomenon. It really shouldn't be hard on people. I don't mean to be, because I understand why they're that way. If my parents had cuddled me and told me, "Robert, everything you do is wonderful," I would have believed them. You're such a lovely boy; everything you're going to do is great because you're just who you are, and we love you. I probably wouldn't develop the kind of attitude that I have, which is that I'm not lovely. I'm not good; I actually need to work at it myself to get better constantly, but if I had been called, if I'd been told that, if I had a smartphone in my hand, I wouldn't be here talking to you. You know I wouldn't have had the inner resources, so I don't mean to blame people so much, even if it's a cultural phenomenon.Develop Your Inner Strength And Physical Strength
You can try to develop yourself personally in a way that is independent of this culture by removing yourself from that matrix. You can develop your own inner strength just as you can develop your physical strength by lifting weights, etc. You can develop your own inner strength. Yeah, it's well said, and you're being honest, as this type of psychology is. In my opinion, pushing people, especially younger people, towards socialism is scary to me, but I think when you come back around to this concept, I look at it and I think about some of my friends. I think about some of my friends and people I know with kids, and I notice a common thread, just to kind of wrap up.
I feel like a lot of It comes from, obviously, playing video games all day while on our phones; that's a given. Everyone knows that, and then the other phase of that is that I feel like there are parents dating all the way back to older generations. I can remember some of my friends being like that when I was a kid; their parents were like that—they let their kids quit everything.
Once they get uncomfortable with it, they play soccer for a while, and then they let them stop when the kid is tired. They had two days, and this was their first time doing two days like this, which is hard. I remember that a lot with basketball. There were certainly a lot of kids that were good, but once we got into high school, you started having two practices a day, and then you had a lift in between both practices, and you had to be there.
Each time, everyone just starts dropping off, and it happens earlier too, like when you have a seven-year-old girl. She wants to learn guitar, chess, or singing, but she's not very good, and it takes her longer than she thinks. So she goes on to the next thing, whereas once you help, you're saying, "When that happens, that's when you step in." You can assist them in sticking to a decision, which is important because there is a fine balance between them.
So let's say your daughter chooses to learn ballet because she really is excited by dance, and then she starts going through it. She starts tuning out after about a couple months; she says, "I don't want to do this anymore," and you kind of ask her why. If it's because she says, "I don't really think I like ballet anymore," and you see and discern that she's being honest as opposed to lying about it, then okay.
What is it that you discover that you really want to do right? So she named something else. All right, we're going to do that now. If the same thing happens again, you know you've got a problem here, and now you've got to put your foot down. You have to be able to tell the difference between somebody who honestly discovers that it wasn't something that was really right for them and somebody who can't stick to anything.
You Have To Be A ParentYou have to be a parent. You know that being a parent isn't just coddling and saying, "Oh, Jada, you'll be great at whatever you do." "We're all great." You know that the world is competitive; there are winners and losers; there are grades; there are incomes; it's not all easy, equal, and fair; right, life isn't fair, and you, as a parent, have to be able to make that clear to them. You can do that; you know you need to be parents; you do need to be tough in that sense, but you know that part of the culture now is that nothing should be competitive. Everybody should get a good grade; everybody should get an A; there should be no awards out there; there should never be a first place for this or that; everybody should get an award and hug people who win. You have to learn that you have to be able to be tough and that winning at something is actually a valuable thing. It's actually good to have a sense of excellence in order to be competitive.
Being Competitive And Ambitious Are GreatA competitive spirit is great. Being ambitious is great, and if you're going to absorb the cultural prejudices against ambition and competition, that's even better. You're never going to get very far in life because you're going to be constantly waiting for people to bail you out, so yeah, amazing, and I'm just trying to be respectful of your time. I see that a lot with adults too. We've talked about this from a macro perspective of like a social parents first child type of thing, but I see that a lot with 30 and 40 and 50 year olds.
You know, especially being in the personal development space and being on YouTube, they end up, you know, starting something and then when it doesn't happen as quickly as they want, they say, "I guess it's not meant to be" or "they think god is somehow giving them a sign that they should do something else" and then they just kind of go to the next one.
So I was thinking—I mean, I could go for 10 hours with you if you wanted to be super respectful of your time. I was thinking, "What do you think about this in conclusion?" I was thinking I would like to find some way to be practical. I mean, everything you said is obviously super practical and logical. It should be of incredible value, but there is a specific thing you lead to, like leaving and doing something, and I was one of the problems as well as the reason why we never get to that point of making a decision.We Afraid Of Failure As An AdultAs an adult, it's almost because we're afraid of failure, so it's like an unconscious protective mechanism. So we never decide what we think about proposing to everyone in conclusion as to whether it's a big thing. It's an idea, a business, or a new invention. They've always wanted to do something, but they haven't done it, or it's a small thing, like they've been saying they want to lose 10 pounds. They put it on during quarantine. We make it so we invite everyone to pick one thing, make a firm decision, and see it through on a micro level of what you've been discussing. This amazing theme is to develop the habit of seeing success, big or small, before we make a decision.
What do you think would be a fun way to...? I think it's very important because the main thing you have to learn about the brain is that you learn most from the mistakes that you make. So if you're writing a book, naturally, I think that everything. My writing is really, really great right now, but I'll have somebody else look at it. With their criticism, they say, "Oh, Robert, I don't understand this idea; what are you saying there?" I suddenly learned something to improve myself. I get feedback from people. You know, it's your mistakes and failures that teach you. If you have nobody, if you don't allow yourself to fail, you will never ever learn anything in life.
The Greatest Entrepreneur In American History Was Henry FordI always come back to the stories of entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, who's probably the greatest entrepreneur in American history. He had the idea in the 1890s to start an automobile manufacturing company, and he started it up, and it takes huge amounts of capital to start something like that up. He got an investor, and the business failed after a year. It was a disaster, and everybody said, "Well, that's it for Henry Ford," because you never get a second chance in the automobile industry, but he wouldn't let that bother him. He learned from his study what went wrong, so he got a second investor involved because he was very persuasive, or whatever—we found somebody crazy enough. He tried it again and failed a second time. People were laughing. Get out of here, Mr. Ford; you're never going to succeed. He did it a third time; he failed a third time.
Finally, in all the times he learned, he learned how to make the most perfect factory and how to create the factory system that ended up revolutionizing the world, and then the fourth time—I don't know if it was the third or the fourth time. Don't quote me on that. He created Ford Motor Company, one of the greatest success stories in American history, and he said later that it was only by failing that he learned, so you have much more to lose in life by not trying because, by not trying, you're never going to learn anything, right?
You want to fail, you want to be criticized, and you want to make mistakes because that's precisely what will teach you, and so you can do that tomorrow. If you're putting off learning something that you've always wanted to learn because you're afraid of failing, overcome that fear by telling yourself, You know, I'm 35 years old, and the worst thing in life is to be 55 and to have never tried anything, to suddenly be facing death and retirement in 10 or 20 years, and to have wasted all of your potential. That's what's facing you, just that you're not dealing with reality. You think that you're going to live forever, but you're always going to be healthy, and the money will always be there. Okay, so I think I better do it now.
We Live In An Environment Where Everything Has Been Devastated
This is the best time because we're living in an environment where everything has been devastated. Businesses are our craters left, right, and center. Now is the time to be plotting your new business, your new idea, because there are going to be people who are going to want things. You know, industries are going to change, just to give one example, in the entertainment world or in the travel industry.
People now are going to be oriented because they've been locked up and they've been bored to hell; they're going to want to have experiences, and that's going to be the new future of the service industry in giving people experiences. not just going to a gym but giving them an experience at the gym where it's like this environment in which they're immersed.
These are the places where these points of opportunity are going to be out there in the landscape. Go ahead and do it now; don't wait for five or ten years, because in five or ten years you might be dead or things will be a lot worse than they are now. Learn how to fail and learn from your mistakes. It's the best way to toughen yourself up, and it's the best education in the world. I'm not sure if I'm answering your question, but I think you answered it better than I could. How about that? Okay, I thought that was a great way to end this.
This is the first interview I'm going to end when I finish, and I'm going to listen to it back right after you. I mean, "Oh, great," what you said, and I want to make sure I really grasp everything you're saying. It's amazing; it was a spectacular interview. Anything I mean, how do our books sell themselves? If you want to let anyone know a new book is coming out, or you want any place you'd prefer people buy your book from, like that, or anything else, well, I'm trying to promote my last book, which is selling very well, but I'm always promoting it. It's the laws of human nature; you can find the Amazon very easily.
I have a website called Power Seduction and War, which is spelled out as powerseductionandwar.com. Those are my first three books, and in those you'll find links to all of my blogs, to my podcasts, and to my other three books, including the one I wrote with 50 Cent called The 50th Law Mastery and the Laws of Human Nature, as well as links to my Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and all that stuff.