transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:30] If you like it, go follow the show.

Speaker 2:
[00:33] New episodes are being released every week. The link is in the description.

Speaker 3:
[00:40] You're just not listening to yourself. You've lost touch with who you are, the core of your being. You're on social media too much. You're listening to what other people are telling you. You're listening to what your parents told you you should be doing in life. You're listening to what your friends think is cool. You're listening to what the culture is all about, you know, the entertainment industry, et cetera. You got to cut all that shit out. You got to listen to yourself. You got to be a bit bold. You have to embrace what makes you different. What makes you different, what makes you particularly strange, if you want to use another word, is your strength is your source of power. You've lost touch with it. Let's go back and try and find it. And that's the whole problem here. How do you find it? Well, it's a process. You have to be patient. It's not going to come like a light bulb in your head. Ah, I was meant to do this. That's not how it works. It takes time to do anything in life. It takes time and hours and patience and work. And so what the game of life involves is knowing your uniqueness, is knowing who you are, is knowing what makes you weird and what makes you odd. And the problem is, is that we're social animals and the pressure continually on us is to fit into a group, is to be like other people, to have their ideas, to have their values, to have their tastes, to dress like them. But look at all the powerful people in this world. They're one of a kind. They're different. They stand out for something that's truly different. You know, even Albert Einstein, there's nobody else like Einstein, there's nobody like Da Vinci. That's where your power lies. Know who you are, know what you're, you know, deep down in your core, what you love, what you hate, and what you were destined to create in this world. That's like the most important process you can go through. The whole thing has to start from you. It can't start from the world, it can't start from what other people are doing, it can't start from what's sexy. It has to come from within. If it doesn't come from within, then you're going to be floundering for years and years and years. You have this quality, you can't really control it. It's who you are. So make it work for you. Find the way that it's a strength and see it as a strength and use it and don't have second thoughts about it, use it for power. If everything is easy in life, if everyone loves what you're going to do and you have no enemies, you have no opposition, nothing to resist, you're just going to be mush. You're not going to amount to anything. You're not going to be able to push yourself. You're not going to be able to change, evolve. Muhammad Ali said, if I didn't have Joe Frazier around, I would not have become the great boxer that I am. I mean, he would have been a great boxer anyway, but a nemesis like Joe Frazier put me on a much higher level.

Speaker 2:
[03:39] Is there not a line in Batman where the joker says, no, you, you complete me? But it is the truth that without the joker, what's the Batman?

Speaker 3:
[03:51] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[03:52] I love the idea you should relish the chance to prove yourself. Pressure is a privilege in that way.

Speaker 3:
[04:02] And because the harshness of your circumstances often transforms you. People who have it easy in life never have to work on themselves, right? But people who have the worst circumstances in them, they're either crushed by it or they use it to develop themselves. And it brought out the best in me. It made me do things that I had never done before. It built up my self-confidence. So it's the equivalent of somebody doubting you because there were a lot of doubters around. And a lot of people thinking, well, Robert's kind of finished here. We thought he was this, but he's not really. And so having that kind of pressure, like we talked about deadlines and having people doubt you, it can crush you, but it can also make you a lot stronger. It can make you a better fighter. You know, when you focus on something, the world just kind of opens up, but you have to be focusing on the right thing. At so many turning points in my life, I could have been discouraged. You know, I had somebody say, Robert, you're never going to be a good writer in life. My parents tried to funnel me this way or that way. I was stubborn and I was rebellious, and I did my own thing. Because of that, I have a different voice from other people, right? I'm searching for that voice, for that voice of somebody who's different, who has something different to say, who speaks in a different tone of voice, that has their blood and their personality in their writing. I don't find it often, but when I do, it's a great thing. And so to me, success in life, it's a process of becoming who you actually are and realizing what it is.

Speaker 1:
[05:46] And is there a strategy that young people, or really anybody that feels lost or aimless in their life, should and is able to deploy to find their purpose, to find the direction, the thing they should be aiming at?

Speaker 3:
[06:00] You have to go inward. So you have to resist the pull that our culture gives you. You have to also really want this. That's probably what it really comes down to. Are you unhappy? Are you frustrated? Are you hitting kind of rock bottom? Is this a turning point in your life where you realize, if I keep going this way in five years, it's gonna be really serious? Okay, it has to be important to you, and you have to have a sense of urgency. And with that sense of urgency, you have to make some decisions. And one of the decisions that's absolutely essential is to pay less attention to what other people are doing, to pay less attention to what other people are saying, to pay less attention to what people are telling you you should be doing, and to go inward and think about yourself, and think about what you love and what your interests are. They have nothing to do with what people are doing on social media, the things that grab you, that excite you deeply inside, in a way that's almost irresistible. The people out there, you have that, there's something like that. You had it when you were a child, you had it when you were two, three, four years old, five years old, and you've lost it because you're listening too much to other people. So, it's kind of like archaeology would be the metaphor. You have to dig and dig and dig and find those bones and those relics and those artifacts from your past, the things that really excite you, as well as the things that you hate. There's a lesson for people, right? But it all begins from a sense of urgency. I can't go on this way. I have to find something that I love. When you're 20 or 21, maybe you don't feel that urgency because you're so young. But you have to be careful because time passes really quickly. Those years in your 20s, they go by faster than you think. You don't learn anything if you're not excited by it. So you have to have a sense of fun and adventure about this. So discovering what your life's task can't be this dreary, boring thing that Robert's advocating to you. I will have to spend time with myself. I have to look to a journal, blah, blah, blah. No, it's fun. It's an adventure. Trying different things that fit into this general shape of what you were destined for. It's a blast. So I don't want your life to be boring. I want you to learn. I want you to have adventures. But you have to have a sense of direction, a sense of purpose to guide that kind of different adventures that you go on. Don't be too hard on yourself and be patient. And it's a kind of a mix that you have to go through a bit of a dance. So on the one hand, you want to be serious about life. Life doesn't go on forever. Your youth will be over in 10, 12 years. You better believe it goes faster than you can imagine, right? So take it seriously. You want to realize what your life's task is. You want to develop those skills that will make it so when you're in your 30s, things will come together as they fortunately did for me. It's a common story that 31, 32 is that year where things turn around for people, right? But on the other hand, you don't want to be so damn serious, so damn linear in your thinking, I've got to head down this path to make this amount of money, etc. You're young. Have some fun, have some adventure, have some excitement. But at the same time, also have that sense of discipline, that sense of purpose. You can do both things at the same time. We are born into a very, very strange and mysterious and wondrous world. You take everything for granted, but you don't realize that to be alive, the odds are absolutely astronomical. To be around with all this technology, where we were as humans 20,000 years ago, something you can't even begin to fathom. And when you're a child, you ask these questions. You know, Albert Einstein said the same thing, you know. Genius is able to keep questioning, to be that child, to keep wondering about things, right? So your ability to wonder, to ask questions, to not feel like you know all the answers, isn't a beautiful thing. It's not just to make you more intelligent. It also makes you happier. The cynics start from a place where they know everything. The world is just so rotten. Everyone's out for power. Everyone's got like an ulterior motive. It's all just about these, you're really not interested in other people, Robert. You're interested in making money, right? Cynicism reduces everything to this one level. It has nothing to do with reality because reality is much richer and weirder and more mysterious than that. When you're a cynic, you're missing the beauty of life. But also people don't like to be around cynics because, yeah, people like maybe some sarcasm, I don't deny that. But people want to feel that sense of innocence, they want to feel excited, they want to feel enthusiastic. If you're a Debbie Downer, if everything is like, that's what's really going on or you're not really blah, blah, blah. But eventually, they're going to push you aside because they don't want to hear that stuff. Particularly young people today, I mean, maybe it's always been that way, but they're so afraid of being different. They're so afraid of being odd. You have that potential. It's just you're not putting the effort in. You are lazy. You want to fit into the group. You want to conform because it's easy. But your oddness, what makes you weird, what makes you different, that little strange quirk in how you want to dress yourself, that little strange quirk in your musical tastes, that little quirk in the food that you like to eat, that is who you are. Those are signs from deep within, from your core, from your soul, that this is who you are. And if you lose that, not only are you not gonna be successful in life, you will also lose yourself and you will be unhappy, you'll be unfeeling. You'll be alienated from who you are. And you can get away with that when you're young because you're happy, you look good, you've got energy, things are going right. You get into your thirties and you're like everybody else. You don't know who you are and you don't know what you like anymore. You're just following the trends. You start to get depressed and you start going down this rabbit hole and things can turn really ugly. So you need a bit of courage in life. You need to go, okay, I am weird. I am strange. You know, lean into it. When I had the 48 laws of power, when I first wrote the book, it was a very strange looking book and it reflects my own strangeness. Things on the margins, stories, everything broken up, images, quotes here and there. It's kind of how my brain is a hodgepodge, kind of a mess really. And the publishers, they bought the book, but then they came back to us and they said, Robert, can you kind of maybe make this more like other books? Can you get rid of all those sections and everything? And I said, no, take it or leave it. This is the book as it is. It's odd. It's strange. They didn't like that because if it doesn't fit into all the other books that have had successful, it's too big of a risk. If this movie isn't like the movies that were made last year, who knows we'll go see it. People are so conservative. But because it was odd, it stood out and it was successful. If I had succumbed and I compromised and made it more like other books, I wouldn't be here talking to you. So sometimes you need a little bit of cojones, you need a little bit of courage, you need to stand up and say, I'm okay being different.

Speaker 2:
[13:50] It's fascinating that lots of people, maybe most people want to be extraordinary in some way, but also don't want to stand out in a way that allows them to be mocked. But the latter is the price of the former. You can't behave the way that everybody else does and expect to not get the results that everybody else gets.

Speaker 3:
[14:09] You know, you have to get out of this way of thinking that so many people have, which everything has to be simple and linear, and I'm headed in this direction, there's got to be a solution, like I'm hacking my way to the truth. Life doesn't work that way. Life is very complex. So, 50, he did his first album called Power of the Dollar, and it's absolutely fantastic, but right before it was to be launched, he got shot, and the producers dropped him on the product, dropped the album, they didn't release it, and they dropped him from Columbia Records. It's too dangerous. And so he was thinking, you know, that failure, instead of it had been a big hit, would have gone to his head, he'd, you know, who knows what would have happened to him. Here he was, like, completely back to square zero, in fact, worse. He had nothing. He'd done all this work, and he had this price on his head, and nobody would come near him. And he wanted to learn what the lesson was from this, from this failure. Well, the lesson is, I can't be dependent on a record label. They're too conservative. They're too cautious. I'm somebody who lives on the edge. I'm not going to put out a record. I'm going to do mixtapes, and I'm going to sell them on the streets of Queens and then Brooklyn and then Manhattan. He learned from that. He learned not to take success for granted, and he built on that. And so he's not a one hit wonder. So sometimes success, when you're in your 20s, is the worst thing that can happen to you because you have no discipline, you have no perspective, you think it's just going to keep going the way it is, you're not aware of all the dangers out there, you don't have life experience enough to realize how things can turn on you very quickly. I had had so much failure until I was essentially 39 years old, pushing 40. That I had perspective, that I know what it's like to fail. And so when I had success, I wasn't like, wow, I'm the greatest thing that ever happened. I can just live off this forever. My next book is going to be fantastic. No, I have a little voice in me, it says, Robert, you failed so many times, you're probably going to fail again, right? You've seen so many people who started off hot and bombed. I had experience to know that I can't take this for granted. I have to be careful, I have to be strategic. I have to build on it and not let the success go to my head. You want to keep your feet on the ground, you want to know that failure is nipping at your buds, that keeps you on the edge and you don't take your success for granted.