Transcription
Robert Green just sat down with me to share the tools you need to master yourself, seduce anyone, and build unshakable confidence. If you want to have confidence in life, it has to be built on something real. Most people feel stuck, trapped by fear, self-doubt, or a system that conditions them to play small. The problem is nobody teaches this. Nobody gives it to you. So, our school system is completely ass backwards.
In this episode, you'll learn how to transform anxiety into confidence and become a powerful individual that commands respect. We'll cover five fundamental steps. Firstly, how to master yourself. Secondly, how to understand human nature. Thirdly, how to build confidence. Fourth, learning by doing. And finally, how to reinvent yourself.
So, the first and most important step is mastering yourself before anything else. But the problem in mastering yourself is a lot of it has to do with gaining discipline. If you just go out in the world without any sense of what other people are like, of what their needs are, you're just going to say stupid things, you're going to offend people. So you have to understand the social game and how to master your appearance and how to make people like you in some way. Right? But the other thing is you want to gain a sense of discipline, self-discipline. It's no good if people tell you to do things. If people tell you to work, if they force you to do this A, B, and C, it has to come from within. That's you have to have initiative. You have to be motivated to do things. And what I've learned over the course of writing my seven books and through the course of my whole life is that you master yourself through learning, through learning something that you love, that interests you, that's how you develop discipline.
So if you're studying things, if you're entering a career that doesn't suit you, that you don't really love, that isn't isn't really your dream, then it's going to be very hard for you to master yourself. It's going to be very hard to gain that discipline. You're going to be tuning out. You're going to be distracted. You're going to be on your phone too much. you're not going to be focusing deeply, which is how you master yourself. To me, the key to life, the key to everything, the key to success is figuring out what you love. You know, you got to first figure out, I call it your life's task, what you were born to create in this world. Everybody is born as an individual. There's something very unique about you. And I mean every single person out there, I don't just mean people who have special talents. Everybody has this power within them. Everybody is unique in some way in their DNA and how they were raised in their early encounters in life. And the trick in life is bringing out your uniqueness. Bringing out what makes you weird, what makes you strange, what makes you different, and leaning into it and creating a business, writing a book, going into some field that reflects that uniqueness. If you discover what that is when you're hopefully when you're in your early 20s more or less, then you're going to learn at a much faster rate than if you parents tell you to go to law school and you go to law school, but it doesn't really connect with you and you're tuning it out and you're not really learning. But if you find something that you love, you're going to learn at a very fast rate. And as you learn, as you develop skills, as things improve in your brain, you're going to be gaining discipline, you're going to be mastering yourself. Because I believe that you master yourself in what you actually make and what you create. I only became who I am through writing my books. It's writing my books that changed me. It has made me a different person. Your work is going to make you a different person. If it's something that you love, if it's something that excites you. So the key to everything in life is making that choice early on in your early 20s about what you were destined to create, what really suits you, what fits, what meshes with your uniqueness. Once you discover that, the whole game kind of opens up to you and everything will start to make sense.
Now, of course, the main question is that people ask me is, "How do I find that?" Exactly. I think a lot of young people today are sometimes afraid to be different, especially in school. You're not encouraged to be different. If you stand out, you get teased. I mean, you know, people like maybe dress differently and stuff, but truly being unique in your work, in your ideas, in your thinking, in what you love is something that people a lot of people are afraid of. And if you look at anybody who's successful in music, for instance, they're all unique. There's nobody else like them. I mean, back in my day, I was a big David Bowie fan. There's nobody like David Bowie, right? These are people that understood their uniqueness. They weren't afraid of it. They embraced it and they used it. Okay? So you've got to that's extremely important.
So the question is that I get asked a lot is Robert. I don't know what my life's task is. I like A B CDE E F. I'm like at a supermarket and I can just choose all these different goodies and candies and things but I can't figure out what's the one thing that I'm really made to create in this world. And the problem is because this has goes back to mastering yourself first is you're impatient. People today, everybody who's young, I was like this when I was young. You're impatient. You want things right now. You want an answer. You want Robert Green to tell you, "This is what you were meant to do. This is how you find your life's task. ABC. I give you these clues and you're just going to find it like on an Easter egg hunt or something." Doesn't work like that. You have to be patient in this world. Figuring out who I am, figuring out what I love, figuring out what I was meant to do, it's going to take months. It could take years. You have to be patient. You have to be open and willing. It's an adventure. It's a journey that you're on. So I say, "All right, let's just first start on that thing that I'm not going to give you an an answer right away. You have to be patient." And then it's a matter of going into yourself and being introspective, which is an incredibly important skill to have in life to be able to withdraw from from the group, withdraw from your phone, withdraw from your friends, be alone, listen to yourself, and write things down in a journal and go, "This these are my thoughts. These are what I like. This is what I love. This is what I hate." When I was 5 years old, I really really loved this activity, this this endeavor. And then I kind of lost this track of that and I forgot about it. You're going to be going deeply, deeply, deeply into yourself. Not listening to what all your friends are saying, not listening to what people on Instagram are saying. Just yourself, your voice. You have a voice inside your head that speaks to you about what you love, but you're hearing all these other voices from other people. Get rid of all those voices and listen to yourself. And when you go through that, something will happen. A click will happen. You'll go, hm, I actually am really attracted to to science. You know, I was forced to go in this other direction, but I'm really interested in I have a kind of a logical brain. This is what I was meant to do. Could be anything. I don't know what it is. And I tell people often when you were very young, when you were eight or seven, you actually knew it, but you lost it. And so it's a process. It's like ar it's like archa. It's like a dig. We're digging in the ground and we're going back into your childhood and we're figuring out what it is that makes you unique and what you were meant to accomplish in life.
Well, I think to follow your point, like a lot of people aren't asking themselves what their factory setting is and they're not saying to themselves, what is it I enjoy doing? And then maybe get really good at that. To your point, mastery, right? Yeah. I mean, u the problem is nobody teaches this. Nobody gives it to you. You know, when you go to school, when you're young, they force you to do algebra, math, sciences, English. Doesn't suit you. You get turned off by learning, right? And then that that haunts you the rest of your life. But I can tell you learning is actually the most exciting thing in the world. It's almost as exciting as sex. I know you don't believe that, but it is. Wow. Big statement. That's a big statement. But I I you know, I love business so much. I know. Exactly. Learning how to do business. I love it so much. I know that learning feeling is like nothing like it. But why aren't people tapping into this? I think because in school it's all just it's just like a buffet. You just have to learn all these different things. you're not focusing on that one thing that really excites you. And school isn't geared towards finding those things, right? Why is it like that? Like they if you get a D in something, they make you do it more. Because people are stupid. Because people are illogical. Because our education system is a bureaucracy. It's an organization. It's the madness of groups. When groups organ build something, it's inevitably irrational and stupid. So our school system is completely ass backwards. If you're never encouraged to go in the direction that excites you, then for the rest of your life, you're going to be haunted by this feeling of, "Oh, learning is boring. Learning is tedious. I'd rather do a video game. I'd rather watch online porn. That's much more fun."
You know, let me tell you a story here. My parents um wanted me to be very successful. They were very ambitious, right? And they were kind of pushing me to go to law school, to medical school. And I was I was a a literature person, right? I was just into books and learning and reading and novels and I wanted to be a writer and I wandered through life my 20s I as I've told in many interviews I had 50 different jobs by the time I'm like in my mid30s you could definitely say that Robert Green was kind of a loser I never made money really good money I went from job to job to job to job you know I wasn't a complete failure but I had not figured anything out my parents were really getting worried about me cuz they they didn't force me to do these things and then I discovered what I love I found writing this these kinds of books that I wrote. I was never interested in money. I was interested in doing what I loved. And now I've made more money than my father ever made in his entire life. I mean I made more money than I've ever would have made if I had gone to law school or med school because I pursued what genuinely excited and fascinated delayed gratification you're partly talking about there aren't you? Like so you just followed the dream and then eventually all the wealth comes whatever wealth is these days anyway you know.
So what do we need to know about human nature? People are tricky. People are not easy. Learning a a a math problem or coding, that's kind of easy and simple and linear. People are not linear. People are weird. They're difficult. They never say what they really think about you. Robert, I love your book. It's wonderful. But really, they're thinking, "God, what a sellout. I don't really know." You never know what they're thinking. You never know what they're up to. It's tricky. It's deceptive. And it can drive you crazy. And if you enter the world 22, 23, they never teach you these things. and you enter the work world and it's all political and people have their egos and they're all trying to get this or that or you can take it personally and get very upset and you can get emotional. It can ruin your life. So I want you to think of understanding people as a skill as necessary as learning business, as learning coding, as learning algorithms, learning anything in life. And the only way you're going to learn about people is by interacting with them. If you're too virtual, if you're doing everything on your phone, you're not interacting with people, you're not going out and meeting them, you're not being social, that skill will will atrophy that it's like a muscle you have to develop. And so, you have to get to this point where I really I want to understand people. I want to read them. I want to be able to know what's going on and not be so lost. So, the first thing is to realize to get down on your hands and knees and go, I don't understand people. They're mystery to me. They caused me problems. Now you can take the next step. And the next step is you have to observe people. And the problem that most of us face is quite honestly we're more interested in ourselves than we are in other people. I make the point in my book human nature laws of human nature that we are all self-centered. We are all narcissists to some extent. We want to hear about ourselves. We love it when people talk about us. Other people we don't think they're as interesting as us. But actually other people are much more interesting than you are. Your thoughts are going round and round in circles. The same boring ideas. People are weird. They're strange. They have different experiences than you. They come from different cultures. Feel like you want to get inside people. You want to understand their stories. You're interested in them. And then use your imagination. And then be very attentive to people's nonverbal cues. But the most important thing about understanding human nature is that appearances don't matter. People create the appearance that they want you to see. So don't take the appearance people present to you at face value. Look behind the mask.
I think it's such an underrated point that people don't understand how like I ask people in the street what their dream is. The answers blow my mind. Like I just find it so fascinating as well what's going on behind the eyes, you know? Like there's so much more. And people do judge not by how people look, but the jobs that they're doing. So we asked this guy who was in the bin like what his dream is and he had this most amazing he was in the bin taking something out the bin to eat. He's like homeless. I don't we couldn't tell what he was actually doing but he was in the bin and you would normally walk past this person maybe with a little bit of fear and then we actually asked him what his dream was and his dream was incredible you know like back to your point I think we do judge a book by its cover but a lot of people would be listening to this thinking well you know okay so again back to themselves right I can I can go ask people you know what they're about and I can copy Simon what's your dream but how do I know you know how do I how does that help me how do you think that helps people
Well, jeez I mean, you know, as I said, you're a social animal so at some point, however old you are, you're going to be you're going to get a job and you're going to be dealing with five, 6, 20, 100, 200 strangers, right? And if you don't understand them, if you're not interested in them, if you don't know what's really going on in their mind, you're going to be doing stupid things. You're going to be making mistakes. You don't realize that everyone has an ego and that you're going to be stepping on their toes and making them upset. You're life is going to be miserable if you don't take the time to try and understand people on a deeper level. And once you do try and understand them when you once you understand that people present a front that's not reality. Then you you kick into another gear and you go I'm going to try and figure them out. Now you can't always figure people out. They're complex. I don't really know what's going on in your mind right now. I can't read it. But I can sense your mood. I can sense how you feel. I don't know your thoughts. But I can sense if you're kind of hostile, if you're open and interested. So you want to develop this interest in other people. You want to see it as a skill and you want to observe them. And in my book, Laws of Human Nature, I explain 18 kind of facets, traits that have humans have had for thousands of years. And I kind of take you through it step by step just to give you one example. So I don't want to take up all the time here. I have a chapter on envy. Envy is an incredibly important thing to understand. Everybody feels it. I feel it. Even Elon Musk feels it. The most powerful people in the world feel it. It's so ingrained in human nature. And what it is is we're constantly comparing ourselves to other people. That's how our brains work. Our brains work by comparing things. So if I'm on social media and I see people are traveling to Tahiti, they've got these wonderful families. They're married to this beautiful woman. I'm feeling envy. Damn it. Even I I'll feel envy, right? I feel it. You know Ryan Holidayiday. You know Ryan Holiday, my former mentee. He's far more successful than I am. I can feel envy for Ryan. You know, we're all prone to it. And I want to show you where it comes from, how you feel it, how you can overcome that feeling and turn it into something productive. So, understanding human nature is also about understanding and identifying toxic people before they you let them into your life and they ruin you. One of the things I talk in the book about how to use your envy is if there are people who have things that you wish you had but don't have then use that as a spur as something to stimulate you to to get what they have to become successful. I think positive envy I think envy a bit like ego and it can be powerful if it's a positive thing. Yeah. One aspect of envy is this thing called shoden frea which means we feel joy when other people have a bad experience. Right. It's an ugly emotion, but a lot of people have it. I'm sure I've had it in my life. I'm sure you've had it. I can't think I have, actually. I don't And I'm being genuine. I don't I can't think of a moment where I've enjoyed someone else's misery. But I say that I used to have an agency. I just remember I just remember and we beat a big company that said they were going to squash us and we beat them. So that's but it was more like a competition type. Okay. Well, the other side of that, the opposite of Shan Frea would be, I'm using German words, so excuse me please, but mitroa, which means having pleasure with other people. So when other people have success, feel joy about them. Force yourself to feel good about them. Force yourself to say, "That's great. I'm so happy for you." You won't realize how wonderful that feeling is because it's not natural. It's not natural if your friends suddenly sell something great. your first instinct is well why not why not me instead go said drop yourself and just go I'm really truly happy for that other person it's a very wonderful emotion
There's two kinds of confidence there's the confidence that's just pure where you're just kind of presenting a competent front and then there's the confidence that's a quiet confidence that's based on the fact that you know what you're talking about that you have skill that you've had success in life so you don't need to brag you don't need to kind of create the show the performance of confidence. I can very quickly tell the difference when I meet people. What's the diff, you know, who has the the real one, who has the fake one. But the main thing you want is if you want to have confidence in life, it has to be built on something real. If let's say in in the in the realm of seduction, which is one of my books, the art of seduction, you know, uh being confident when you meet a man or a woman um is very important, right? that sense of confidence carries over. They feel it and it's very seductive. It's a very powerful co, you know, quality. It's like charisma. If it's just you're you're trying so hard to feel confident, particularly women, they can re see right through it, right? They can see the fakeness in that. But if it's built on the sense of I feel comfortable. I've been successful before with other relationships with seductions if you want. It's based on something real. It feels real. Take it out of that. If it's like in your business world world, you're not going to have confidence until you actually create something, but it can come in small pieces like in the first three months of of of this process, you find yourself learning skills. Okay, I'm going to start a business, right? I have a business in my mind. It's been my dream, right? Okay, I can't start right now because I don't have the funds. I don't have the money. Although you always do have the funds. You should start tomorrow anyway. but say, "I don't I'm going to spend the next few months learning the first steps of the process." That already will build confidence that you're doing something that you're not just living in your dreams and imagining it. So, okay, I'm going to learn. I'm going to go online or I'm going to take a class. I'm going to learn what I need to do to get the funding to start my business. Already in those three months, you have a slight little foundation of competence, right? It's based on something real. how you go out and you do something. You try and get that funding. Okay, you fail. You don't get what you want. You're a little bit frustrated. Okay, something didn't go right. I need to learn some more. And you don't give up. Giving up is will screw all this whole process up. Yeah. Never give up. I think that's an important point. Okay. All right. So, it didn't work. I'm going to try again. All right. So, you go back to square one. You you read more. You think about it. And then you try again. And now you get it. Whoa. your confidence level is starting to rise, right? You don't want it to go from here to here because that's grandiosity. That's not going to go anywhere. Confidence must be built step by step by action by success by success by success. Right? So, you're here, now you're here. Wow, I got the funding. Now, you're starting business. Starting business is hell. It's so complicated, so difficult. It's not going to be as easy as you thought. Right? Okay. So, you don't give up. You keep trying. And as you get any kind of success, you move on to that next level on and on and on. you build it. Then of course, inevitably in life, you're going to have failure. You're going to fall down, right? Your confidence is going to waver. But in the back of your mind, you will always have that memory of how you pushed past it, how you didn't give up, how you learned, how you how you got past the first failure. And it'll still give you a level of confidence that you can always fall back on. But the main point is it has to be built slowly on things that are real, on things that you do. And if you do, it's confidence that will last you through your whole life.
I think it's the best explanation I've ever heard of like it's good to fail because if you fail, you learn something. Go again and again till you learn something and then you get the confidence because you fail so many times. You've got all the knowledge now to not fail.
Well, um failure is the entrepreneurs school where you learn. I have the story in mastery of Henry Ford. We started Ford Motor Company. You think your business is hard to start? Try starting an automobile company in the 1890s. Okay. The amount of capital necessary for starting it was insane. Right. He didn't even have the trademark, did he, for the car at the time? No. Yeah. So, so we had an idea about how he was going to do it, but his first company failed completely. He's going to start his second company. And everybody in the business goes, "Henry Ford's a failure. We're not going to give you money. Once you fail in this business, you're gone." He somehow coned somebody into giving him money. Tried a second time. It was a disaster. It's even worse, an even bigger failure. right now he's totally ruined. No one will ever go near him. He found some some kind of naive Scottish investor. He got the money from this guy and now he understood exactly what he needed to do. He understood why he failed. He understood he had to create a factory system that had a certain kind of scale to it. He understood what the customer want. He learned so many lessons that his third one was a huge set became Ford Motor Company and came the factory system. He said, "I only learn how to make be so successful through all of my failures." It's hard to learn things when everything's just an idea, when it's just abstract. We're concrete people. We're animals. We live in our bodies, right? And so, if you're only in your head, it's really hard to learn. But if you're doing it, you learn so much faster. So, if you want to start a business, you could spend five years putting around. Oh, I've got to get better at this. I've got to go to business school. I've got to read this book. You don't start the damn thing. You know, this business school stuff drives me absolutely crazy to be honest cuz there's kids getting into serious debt, spending four years learning business. Just start a business. You'll learn sales quite quickly because you've got no choice.
So, so what's happened? How can people do to kind of fight back? Because they'll be people be listening to this and they'll be saying, "Right, for example, we're helping a lady who wants to be a graphic designer. Yeah. She was going to go to UCLA for four years costing her $60,000 US a year. She's going to get into UCLA. Is that expensive? Yeah. Well, she's out of state, so out of state. Okay. Plus her cost of accommodation. So, it's going to cost her 60,000 US a year. So, 240,000 and four years of her life to learn graphic design by doing it. Surely that's logical. I put this video up about this. People telling me no, she should go and learn she go to she should go to UCLA. And what's happened that that's the default everyone believes is the way to do things. One of the people that I interviewed in mastery is a man named um named just suddenly Paul Graham. Sorry. You know who Paul Why combination? Yes. Big fan. Yeah. In the 70s he was into he was a hacker early on the computer era. He learned hacking when he was very young. He went and studied AI at like MIT some university like that. And then he decided that he wanted to be a painter and he left school and he went to Italy and he studied to become a painter. Then one day he was in New York in a loft trying to paint. He had no money. And he heard an ad on the uh radio that the internet, which was just starting out, would be where people would buy things. But nobody thought of that. He goes, "With my skill in h in in in coding and my design skills, I'm going to create that." He created it. He sold it to Yahoo for 5 million. Then he went on from there. He started Y Combinator. Y Combinator is like a a school for entrepreneurs, right? And the idea is we'll teach you how to start your business and then we'll own a share of it. Okay? But because he understood the process of learning by doing, he created his own business by just simply doing it by hearing an ad on the radio and just having the coahonus to go out there and do it. And so his his school, his incubator school was based on the idea that you're going to come to um Mountain View or wherever it was, PaloAlto, and you're going to build your business right there in the school. You know, you're not going to study any kind of books or anything. You're going to build your business. We're going to watch you build it, and then it'll if it's good, then, you know, we'll we'll fund it for you and everything like that. So, he understood learning by doing, right? and he would get because it was so successful and and it started so many businesses that way. Well, Airbnb was started in that incubator for those that don't know. So, it's a very Sam Alman who we all heard of. He he he came from that. He was running white connected for a while. He was running it, but he also came through it. Yeah. He would get 5,000 applications every year for people who wanted to be in in the incubator school. And as soon as he got the sheet and it said Yale University, he threw it in the trash. Die got said, "I went to, you know, this business school." He threw it in the trash. Then there would be somebody who just was a kid somewhere who had like done his own kind of computer work on his own. He'd put that in the possible pile. People who went to these schools, he thought they were totally useless. They had no ambition. They were not selfarters. You want to be a self-starter. You want to learn in life to start things to do it on your own. Not to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait to just go out there and start it. Because if you start your business, you will learn more in 2 months than in 20 years of business schooling, right? And you'll probably fail, but your failure will teach you. So stop waiting and just go out and start it.
I went to university. There's nothing wrong with university. There's nothing wrong with learning. But learning as as a way of delaying actually building something is wrong. You can do and learn at the same time. That's the beauty of Y Combinator. I built a competitor called Nest to Y Combinator in Asia and we didn't do it as well as then. I was just like to say one thing I noticed, we used to get about 3,000 applicants per accelerator program and we can only bring eight companies in. I always felt bad we left thousands of people behind. But what I loved about the model apart from leaving people behind which is why I do this way instead of that way now is that the whole model is you're doing but oh ever so often as you're doing maybe someone knows something you don't know that can allow you to do the doing better. And that's what the apprenticeships were about. You can if you're making something with a carving something if someone who's carved before says just you know that area there be a little careful that wood brilliant so guidance I guess is where mentorship comes comes you know you had a mentor right I had a mentee mentee oh mentee oh sorry mentee right holiday he I was his mentor and now he's more successful than me but that's because of your good work perhaps but but but there's not enough of that now by the way in the world there's not enough of that um supporting someone through your experience.
Why did you decide to mentor him? He was 19 years old. Uh he was just this kid at at University of California, Riverside. He was a big fan of of 48 laws. I needed somebody to help me and I had really bad luck. People are are really lazy. They don't take instructions. If you criticize them, they wilt. They like, you know, they don't It's really hard to criticize people. But when you're serious in writing a book, you have to criticize people. Yeah. So, I thought I'll give this 19-year-old kid a try. He seems very sincere. He was fantastic. I could criticize him. He didn't wilt. He didn't like become this little shrinking person. He he understood it. He improved and he was very smart and he understood my thinking process. And so, I can't take credit for him because he he he's very motivated, very ambitious, and he's extremely smart. But I helped him. I helped him along the way. I taught him I got him a job at American Apparel where I was on the board of directors which gave him the idea for his first book. So I can take credit for that. But I also taught him kind of the bread and butter of how to write a book, how to organize it, how to create notes, how to research. So I helped him in that sense. And now he's he's a global phenomenon. people are listening and they they I think learning by doing is quite quite an obvious thing but people are scared to go and do it on their own. Just again ask the same question kind of but like how if people want to get a mentor what do you think the way is to get someone to help you with the doing? Do you think there's any way about well um not to promote myself but I have a whole chapter on it in mastery. Oh okay. It's you know about about mentorship and why it's so important. Exactly what you said that people can watch you. can see that you're doing it this way, but you should do it that way. And giving you that instruction can save you like years of of not getting it correct. So, it's can be very valuable.
Adapt relentlessly and reinvent yourself. You know, the world changes at a very rapid rate. And so, a lot of problems that people have like they come to me is I got into this career. These are older people. And it was really great. I mean, you don't know how many people here in Los Angeles in the film business had a little niche job that was really comfortable making a lot of money and suddenly streaming came on, they lost it. Suddenly AI come on, they lost it. Horrible. It's a horrifying horrifying experience. And so this world is ruthless like that. The pace of change has never been like this in the history of of humanity. You can't let yourself get trapped in a career that's going to be like that, right? You have to be flexible. The gold in this world now in the in this economy is having a variety of skills. Not not like all over the map, but within a certain framework, you you've learned four different ways you can go. And then when that change happens, you're able to adapt. But you always have to keep in the back of your mind that this whole thing could blow up. You're relying on social media. Your Tik Tok, Tik Tok could be gone tomorrow. Suddenly the social media world is completely different. Well, I'm not saying it's going to happen, but you have to be aware of that that this could happen. Where would I go from there? You have to be fluid in life. You can't be stuck and think this is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of our life cuz it's the world doesn't look operate that way. I know writing books. When I began in the late 90s, there was no internet really for books. It was all mainstream media, magazines, newspapers. It was hell. I hated it. um you know and uh then the internet started coming about and when I did the book with 50 cents suddenly you had to kind of market yourself on the internet then that completely changed by the time my next book each time my book comes out the landscape is completely different you know nothing is the same and I can't rely on what I did before so I have to adapt to each new change that's going on if you're rigid if you think that I've I've figured it out I've got I've got it you know in pocket I know exactly I've got the perfect career you're you're you're going to be a dinosaur at some point. You're going to be extinct. The world will move on and you'll be left behind. So, be open and willing to adapt and be aware of what's going on in the world and how the industries are changing. And reinvent yourself is um it's actually you want to think of it as something exciting. In 48 Laws of Power, I have the metaphor that we're all actors. That part of being a social animal is to act. And people who are really successful are actually really good actors. They know how to perform in front of their the people they who work for them in front of the public. They're not being exactly who they are. They're not being completely authentic. They have a they they're playing a role and they're good at it. So, you're an actor. Take control of that and realize people are going to judge by how you appear. Reinventing yourself is like becoming someone else. It's like fun. It's like I'm going to be someone else. It's a new role I'm going to play. My own way of doing that is each time I write a book I do something very different from the last book. So 48 laws of power I go to art of seduction. Then I go to writing a book about war and strategy. That's quite different from seduction but not really. And then I go and write a book with 50 cents completely different. And then I write a book on mastery which is something I've never done before. And now I'm writing a book on the sublime. I want to keep challenging myself. I want to be somebody different. I want to be able to perform differently. So each book I have to talk about it in a different way and it kind of excites me because I am a bit of an actor. I have kind of a ham side to me. It's exciting to feel like you have control over your identity about how people see you and that sometimes you like to mix it up. You know, uh rock stars are really good at that. You know, Michael Jackson was kind of the master of it. He was never quite the same person. He was always changing. I like the idea of never staying still, of always moving, adapting, and becoming a different person. If people get to know you too well, if they know exactly who you are, and this is like later in your career and you're in your 40s, they tune you out because they're too familiar. They know who you are, they're bored with you, and they're going to move on to somebody else. I've been in marriage for 23 years. I think it's cuz I keep reinventing myself. So, she hears a new person with a new story of why she would have left me long ago. I totally agree with it. Yeah. You know, you want to keep the public on their toes. Like they don't have they haven't quite figured out Simon Squib. He's suddenly coming out with this other idea, this other I don't know what that would be. Well, we didn't know who he was. How interesting. As opposed to, oh god, I'm so tired of that guy. I've been looking at him for months. Let's move on to somebody else. I think people do have that to be that last one. I think people like not Simon on our for you page again. But I think reinventing yourself as well. I think a lot of people listening, I mean there's innovators dilemma as well, right? Where sometimes people have something that's working. I see this a lot in middle class lifestyle. People have a house, they have a car, they have a job. Yeah. They can't suddenly not be a lawyer anymore. Yeah. You know, so so how do you make sure you reinvent? Is is there a hack there that people maybe is a how do you reset yourself?
The world is working against you. um it wants you to settle down. It wants you to have an identity. People want to know exactly who you are, but you're going to reach a point where life loses its its kind of flavor, its excitement to you, right? People have midlife crisis, I guess. Yeah. And you want to anticipate that. You want to be fluid in life. You want to be my last chapter of the 48 laws of power is called assume formlessness. It's a military idea. It comes from Suns Soo. But the idea of being formless in life, of being fluid and moving with things is actually a much more enriching way to experience this world because circumstances are constantly changing. So you want to develop this fluidity when you're young. You want to be open and you want to hold that openness and that spirit of adventure. And so if you're going into law and you're in your mid20s, just look ahead and just look at the people who who are in their 40s and how unhappy they are and how stuck they feel and go, I'm not going to be like that. So what am I going to do? I'm going to think of a second career I can use channeling off my law skills because lawyer skills are actually very valuable skills for other things, for other endeavors because you understand the law, therefore you can, you know, be very helpful. Let's say that you love wish you'd been a musician. You can become an agent or something like that because you know law, right? So, keep in your mind that at some point you're going to branch off from this one direction you're going in and have a plan and be fluid and be excited. Don't want to have any regrets either, do you? You don't want to make sure. Do you have any regrets? Is there anything you think? My only regret is that I'm not 23 anymore or 22. But, uh, I can't sure that technology is coming. No. So, no, I don't have any regrets because everything worked out for the best. In in Buddhism, there's the dharma wheel and it turns everything. Everything kind of happens according to this the dharma which is law. So, here the dharma wheel has spun and now I'm talking to you. That's just the way it was meant to be. So, I'm h I'm happy. I have no regrets.
Finally, just ask reinventing yourself. I think the big thing right now is AI. Do what's your take on that world? What do you think's going to happen there? I'm not a personally a lover of AI. um I think it has a positive aspect which is it could invent uh cures for terrible illnesses and things like that. Great. Who would be against that? In mastery I talk about how the human brain works and how we have to be disciplined and we have to be willing to deal with tedium. We have to learn and learning is is something that you you have to enjoy and be excited about. And I think a lot of young people are getting too goddamn lazy. From what I hear from people in universities, they don't want to read a whole book anymore. They just read summaries. They just get on AI. The AI kind of helps them with their essays. You think you're being clever. You think that, man, I don't have to write an essay. I can just get AI to help me. But you're you're hurting your brain. Doesn't sharpen up. No. M so one example is learning a foreign language has so many benefits right first of all it's disciplining your mind it's each language has a different logic French has a different logic than English German does each time you enter that language your brain is learning a different logic you're enriching your brain with that probably firing up new parts of your brain even some for sure it's also making you so you can go to a place and interact with people who are different in their own language anguage and speaking another language makes you into a different person. People tell me that when I'm in Spain, I lived in Spain. I became Spanish. I was much more kind of aggressive and masculine and my hands were going all over the place. You know, it changes you. But now with AI, people are just going to their goddamn phones and they're getting like translations for everything. They go sit to a restaurant and they go, "How do I order this?" And gives them the whole thing and they spit it out in a really bad accent. You're cheating yourself. Use it as a tool. It's a tool. It's not don't become a slave to technology. Be the master of it. I use AI when I'm needing a research problem that I can't I try and I try I can't get it. So I ask uh chat GBT and sometimes it gives me a good answer and I use it but it's I select it. We fetishize technology so much but we really should fetishize is the human brain. The human brain is if you think about it 50,000 years ago we didn't have language. Through these homminid creatures, through the development of our brain, we created language which no other animal has and our brains just exploded and they became scientists have said it is the most complex organ thing in the whole entire universe. The number of neurons in your brain that can connect is astronomical. It can't even be computed. Your brain is a wonder which is something is sublime. It it you were gifted with this at your birth. this insane instrument that no other animal my cats are really clever but they don't have that power they can't they can't you know invent things they guess the future as far as I know yeah they probably can they're keeping quiet they're smarter than that yeah but um yeah AI is great we invented it our brains invented it but let's celebrate the brain that invented it not the actual tool
Robert thank you so much for taking time out to share your knowledge with us today I feel honored