Interview: Mastery with Robert Greene

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson.

More wisdom in Less Time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Robert Greene, who, among many other things, wrote the incredible book Mastery that we're going to talk about today. He's a New York Times bestselling author of the 48 Laws of the Art of Seduction, the 33 Strategies of War, and the 50th Law. In mastery, he basically unpacks the paths that extraordinary human beings from Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin, Mozart, Martha Graham, the Wright brothers. What did they do to attain their levels of greatness? And I am thrilled to chat today. Robert, I appreciate you taking the time.

Thanks for having me, Brian. My pleasure.

All right, so mastery. Let's start at the very kind of high level. I'm actually curious to know both how you define and describe mastery and also what inspired you to study it and to dedicate as much energy as you did in sharing this wisdom.

Well, mastery is something that is basically a function of going very deep into a subject, a field in which you've studied it, you've practiced it, you have experience in it for such a long period of time that you have this form of knowledge that's almost like instinctive or intuitive. Your mind is filled with so many possible connections between ideas that things just start coming to you. You almost don't have to think. You can see it in great chess players who suddenly become extremely creative. A Bobby Fischer who can see 80 moves ahead, great musicians who no longer are not thinking of the keyboard when they're playing the piano, they're able to go into another realm. Scientists like an Einstein who, after so many hours, years of thinking about the problem of relativity, suddenly the most brilliant idea comes to him. And I try to make the point that it transcends your field, that mastery is the same whether it's Einstein in physics or whether it's Michael Jordan in basketball. The brain is the same in all cases. A lot of people talk about the proverbial 10,000 hours, which I think most people have heard about. Now, basically, it's been demonstrated that after 10,000 hours of serious, intense practice in the field, not ranging over 50 years, but over 10, 20 years, the mind goes to a different level. Suddenly we see chess players playing at a higher level. Well, mastery is almost what happens to the brain at 15,000 or 20,000 hours. I've been fascinated through my whole life because I think it's a form of knowledge that people don't talk about. At all. Because it's something you can't really quantify. You can't put all your big data there and sort of say this is exactly what mastery is. People like an Einstein or Darwin or Steve Jobs or a member, they all talk about this phenomenon where they don't know where it comes from. It's at their fingertips. It's almost like it's unconscious. In their dreams, ideas come to them or when they're. At least when they just wake up or something like that. So there's this phenomenon of how the brain operates at this high level, but nobody talks about it in a practical, detail, realistic way. I wanted to debunk, to say it's, oh, it's all mumbo jumbo. It's all this mysterious stuff happening. It's some kind of spiritual phenomenon. No, it's a very real phenomenon that we can talk about. We can dissect, we can analyze, and we can show you, the reader, how you can get there. I create a kind of a roadmap for getting there. Now, not all of us are going to end up being Einstein's, and that's perfectly fine. But there's a middle level where you reach something close to mastery, where you awaken your creative powers. And I think that's something that's eminently reachable by everyone. And I wanted to show you how to do it.

Yeah, it's amazing. And the book is really a guidebook on that. And you talk about how it starts from the very lowest levels and you kind of walk us through to the highest. And you also mentioned that the first step is always inward, so I'd like to start there. And the phrase that you use is your life's task and. And that we have a destiny to fulfill. Can you talk to us about that?

Well, it's a complicated concept. It's something you would really. I try and go into, devote an entire chapter to it, essentially. The idea is that when you're a unique person, each one of you out there, your DNA will never be replicated in the history of the world, the universe. Your experiences as you get older is a unique combination of experiences. So there's something that we can say about everyone, that there is a unique quality to you. And your task in life is to understand at the earliest possible age. Now, it can happen to people in their 20s and 30s. It really didn't happen to me until my 30s. But the earlier the better is to discover what that uniqueness is and what you were meant to do. It can be specialized. It can be, oh, I was meant to be a teacher, I was meant to play basketball, or it can be a little more general. It means I was intended to be an entrepreneur or I'm good with people, so I was intended to manage them in some way. There are all different varieties of it. But the problem that people have is they're not self aware. They don't understand what it is about them that makes them unique. I go through in the book and I show you how there are signs early in your life, I call them primal inclinations. I give you example after example of Albert Einstein, of other people I also interviewed for this book, some contemporary masters. And I have examples of them where at 4, 5, 6 years old, they feel a attraction, a deep attraction to, to mathematics, to musical patterns, to physical movement, whatever it is, you have that at some point. And the problem is that you lose touch with what makes you unique. You start listening to your parents who start drumming into you this idea that you should be a doctor, a lawyer, or whatever it is they think you should be. You listen to others, your friends who are saying, oh, it's cool to play a guitar and be a rock musician or no, it's cool to make a lot of money, or you start paying attention to things in the culture about what's hot, what's not, etc. And you lose touch with who you are. I compare it to a voice in your head that when you're five years old, it's saying, you know, little Brian, you should be interested in. You're naturally drawn to this. And that voice gets drowned out by all the other things like your parents, your friends, your teachers who are criticizing you, the culture, and you're not hearing it anymore. So your task in life is to discover what that is. Now it depends on how old you are. If you're 18, you're at a good ripe age for uncovering it, for thinking about it, heading into college with a general direction and then, etc. If you're 40, it's a little different. It's not like you're suddenly going to quit your job as an accountant and find that, you know, golden little dream you were supposed to do. Your time frame is different. It's more a question of adapting your career path to something that is more suitable. So it depends on where you are at life and how self aware you are. But if you're not listening to yourself, if you're not able to tune out all the other influences and look inside and know what, get in touch with your own likes and dislikes and it's going to be very hard to reach the level of mastery, because mastery requires a great deal of focus and attention and concentration if you want to be good. Let's just imagine it's basketball. For a simple metaphor, if you want to be really, really supreme at it, you have to be able to make outside shots. If you're not, if you're a guard, well, that's going to take hour after hour after hour of shooting. And if it's not something that connects with you emotionally, if you don't feel love for basketball, you'll never, ever get the energy and the drive to push through the boredom that sometimes is required to push past in order to become a proficient outside shooter. Well, the same thing pertains to whatever field you're into. So the choice of your career is the most critical one, and it must align with what I'm saying, are your natural inclinations amazing.

And it takes a significant amount of effort just throughout the process. And obviously that's one of the things we're going to talk about today. Tenacious effort is one of the phrases, as you used a number of times, which was incredibly inspiring, and we need to have a love for it. I mean, I was actually interviewing Idan Ravine, who's known as the hoops whisperer, to use the basketball metaphor, and he coaches LeBron James and Chris Paul and Kevin Durant, and he's saying exactly the same thing. There needs to be a deep, burning love for this and a fierce, intense commitment to be the absolute best you can be at this and be willing to put in the effort that you talk about in your book, that unfortunately, our society, you call it a counterforce. Right. The conditioning from parents and peers. But then it's society at large that for some reason demonizes the whole idea of tenacious effort. Right. Things should be easy. And all the extrinsic glitz and all that good stuff, that can take us off the path. Right?

Yeah. And just to add one thing to that, very briefly, people will say, well, let's say I love basketball, but I'm 5ft 5 and I'm not very good at it. What does that mean? And then I say, well, look at Jeff Van Gundy, who is the coach of the New York Knicks. There's a place where you just channel that into another area, which is you become a great coach. So it's not. It's not necessarily. You could. You could have a dream. I wished I was great at basketball, but I never had the talent, the skills. But there are other ways you can channel it. If you don't have that particular talent, you might be brilliant at coaching shooters like this man that you, that you just mentioned. Or you might be, Phil Jackson was a good player at basketball, but he's a supreme coach and that's probably really what he was meant to accomplish in life. So there are ways where you, you may not have the talent for doing exactly what you would want, but there are other ways to express it. You may love music, but you're not gifted musically. You're tone deaf. I happen to be tone deaf. Well, you can become a lawyer or someone who manages musicians. You find a way to make it happen, but it has to be somehow connected to something deep within you.

Yeah. And then connected to something both deep within you and bigger than you. Right. You talk a lot about, look, we need you to do this. The world needs us to come alive and quit just consuming and start creating in powerful ways and unplug from all the distractions so we can actually do the work. And I think you really kind of shining a light on the fact that there is a seed within us and even cultivating the belief that we can do that which we aspire to do if we're willing to put in the effort, starting with this self discovery phase and then moving on through the different phases we'll talk about. Right?

Yeah. I mean, the seed is an actual metaphor that I use. It's planted at your birth. This is what you were meant to accomplish. You could say that it was born, it was with Charles Darwin at his birth that he was meant to discover evolution and he realized his potential. He made that seed grow into what it became. A lot of people don't cultivate it and it's a complete waste of their energy and their potential. And I say in the book, the worst feeling I think, in the world is to reach the age of 50 or 60 and say, damn, I could have done this, I could have been that, and I didn't do it. And most people will blame society or my wife or husband or whomever, but really, you yourself are to blame. You didn't pay attention to what I'm talking about here. But the seed is there for each person. And to make it clear in the book, I have an example of a modern master, Temple Grandin, who was born with autism. People will say, well, you know, you're either born at Einstein or you're born this way. That's just not true. Temple Grandin was born with autism, was going to be institutionalized her whole life, and she transformed herself into a brilliant, brilliant scientist. So if someone like that can do it, there's nothing holding any of us back.

Super inspiring. Let's talk about moving from the discovery phase to the apprentice phase. Can you talk to us about the importance of the apprentice phase? And then I have some ideas I want to make sure we talk about. Can you just talk to us about the apprentice phase?

Yeah, it's the most important phase of them all. And it's interesting because, you know, we see the great geniuses in life and we only see their brilliance. We see their discoveries, their theory, the great theories, or the products they invent or the books they write. But in fact, often in their twenties, because the apprenticeship phase is most intense in the twenties. These people were just like you and me. They, they made, they were failures or they had, you know, their books weren't sold, their ideas weren't good. But you know, we don't focus, though, on those years before they became famous, when they were training, when they were apprenticing. And I really wanted to take my book and focus on those formative years where no one had heard of this person. Where Charles Darwin is in South America on his trip around the world, and he's a nobody, and he's just a ship's botanist and a ship's, you know, there to collect specimens. And he sort of trains himself to be this master, master observer of nature. And I go through all sorts of examples. And the key to the apprenticeship phase is to develop skill, to really work at those 10,000 hours, to become proficient in whatever it is that you love. If that was the basketball analogy, it's where you've developed, you know, the various skills are going to make you a great player. And it doesn't. It can be something specialized or it can be several fields. I talk about many people who don't like to specialize, who feel like they're restless and they're interested in biology, neuroscience, physiology, etc. And they go and they study these different fields and they become proficient in them. And then later in life they're going to combine all of their ideas into some amazing new field or amazing new product or idea. It depends on who you are. But if you're not spending your 20s seriously garnering skills, and first of all, you figured out where, in general, the direction that you should be heading in life. If you're not garnering skills, you're not going to make it to the next phase in life. Because our real creative years as a human being, knowing how the brain function is really in our 30s. There are very creative people in their 40s and 50s, don't get me wrong. But the real, real solid foundation is laid by the time you're in your late 20s and early 30s. And when you're younger, your brain is more active, it's more fluid. You're not weighed down by all of these ideas and bad experiences in life, and. And you're going to come up with much better ideas. Most of the great scientific discoveries are made by people who are in their 30s. So you want to lay this foundation, and if you're not doing it, you're going to be in deep trouble. It doesn't mean that you can't wander, that you can't try different things. I have in the book the example of Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, which is an amazing, amazing business, et cetera. He didn't really know what he wanted to do. He tried computer science, he tried AI, he tried painting and art. But he developed real skill in all three or four of these different fields. And by the time he turned 30, he knew, all right, this is what I want to do. And he had all of these different talents to draw upon. So that's. That's sort of the apprenticeship phase, as I see it.

That's amazing, and it echoes. I talked to Scott Adams, who created Dilbert this morning, in fact, and he was describing something very similar where he was just mastering different, not even mastering. He was getting very good at different skills, not knowing exactly how they would come together. But then he's a cartoonist who has an MBA, who had worked in corporate America for 16 years, and all these things came together in unforeseen ways, but he was doing very well in each of these different domains and taking advantage of that time. So much we can talk about there, but I want to highlight one of the distinctions that I got a lot out of in your discussion of the apprenticeship phase, which is the important reminder that it's not about money, it's not about fame, it's not about all these things. It's about skill acquisition and transforming yourself. And you make the point that the first thing we need to master is ourselves, right? Just who we are and how we show up as disciplined, focused human beings. Can you talk to us about the importance of that?

Well, yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of people when you're young, you think that you're just really hot and you're great and everyone's going to love you and you've got the best ideas, and then you're in for a really rude Awakening when you're around 23 or 24, that just isn't the case. The world really doesn't care anything about you. Your boss doesn't really like or love you. And you have to develop yourself. You have to transform yourself into someone who tends to be self absorbed, like we all are when we're in adolescence or just coming out of college, to someone who's really observant of people, who really understands the social game, that understands the political game in the office that is patient. You know, when you're 23 years old, you're not naturally patient. Humans are not naturally patient. You have to develop it. It's a skill. You have to learn how to handle boredom, the tedium of repeating things over and over and over again. You have to learn how to deal with failure and criticism, which is inevitable. You have to toughen up a bit. These are things that are not taught in graduate school. When you go for your mba, there's no real book on it. You have to kind of do it yourself. And in the process, yes, you transform yourself. I forget what was the first part of what you were saying though, because I had an interesting idea about that.

I would reference Scott Adams who created dil, and then you were talking about skill acquisition and then mastering ourselves as one of the things I wanted to highlight in the apprenticeship phase. And also that we didn't want to seek money or fame.

Oh yes, that's right. Yeah, that's an extremely important idea. And the thing is, the gold that you want in this phase is learning is learning is skills, not money. So let's say you're at that crossroads in life. You're relatively young and you're offered two jobs. One is at a large, relatively prestigious firm with a nice five, six figure salary. But you're not going to have as much leeway to express yourself or learn things. But boy, it's going to look good on your resume. Or a job with that startup, which is half the salary with only 10 people there, it's kind of messy and it's not going to necessarily just look brilliant on your resume. But you are going to learn. You're going to learn so much more. You're going to get hands on experience, you're going to be able to do things that you couldn't do at that larger firm, take the other job, take the smaller paying job each and every time. Because learning skills, hands on experience is the gold, is what you're after, particularly in this new world that we're entering.

So to have the clarity, the long Term vision and the, the commitment to cultivating that seed and the patience and the humility to go apprentice yourself, which again, runs up against that counterforce of society and conditioning and why we need so much courage to actually do this. Can we step back for a moment? I've been meaning to ask you about. You mentioned very much in passing that you discovered your kind of destiny, if you will, in your 30s. Are you open to sharing a little bit about that process for us so we can bring it home a little bit more?

Yeah, I did a TED talk about it, but it's a little bit similar to the, the Dilbert story that you mentioned in that I knew I wanted to be a writer and I pursued it very seriously. And I went into journalism and I tried television and Hollywood and I tried writing novels and I couldn't quite figure out what it was that I was meant to write. But on that path I learned a lot. I gained very valuable experience. In journalism. You learn how to write to a deadline, how to make things concise, how to interest the reader right away. Television, you learn how to make things dramatic. Hollywood, maybe another skill level there. And then by the time that I was 35, 36, I was frustrated because I hadn't found my niche. And I met a man who was a book packager and he said, robert, do you have any ideas for a book? Suddenly a light bulb clicked on my brain and that this was what I was meant to do. I was meant to write nonfiction books. And all of my experience in writing and also all of my reading of history, which is something else I've been doing, I forgot to mention, it just all funneled together. It was almost like destiny in the writing of the 48 laws of power. But I would have never ever been able to exploit that opportunity if I hadn't spent those valuable early years trying my hand at every form of writing and honing some skills, which is such.

A good story and I think very hope giving, if you will. Right. For everyone in the process who may not have that flash of insight of, oh yeah, when I was a kid, I had this. And as I was reading your book personally, I dropped out of law school up at Berkeley. And the only thing I knew I wanted to do at that time, having come from a blue collar conservative background, was I literally wrote down in my journal, I would be an evangelist if I only had a religion in which I believed passionate about life. But I had none of these skills, none of this idea. But that seed was there and it had been choked. Whole long conversation by counter forces. When I challenged my father, raised in a Catholic family, literally, I got up from the kitchen table at dinner, got the Bible, and tried to explain to him that Jesus was Jewish. And he was arguing with me about it. And I said, look, this much of the Bible is Judaism. This much is Christianity. And he called me, I quote, an educated a hole. So this counter force of it's not okay to try to synthesize this wisdom or describe different points is just a fascinating thing to see. And I was feeling this with more clarity as I read your book. And I'm sharing the story because I think other readers will get a lot out of the same process.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry.

Yeah.

And then for me, it was entrepreneurial. I built and sold two businesses, and in between them, I spent full time philosopher studying mode. And those skills have now come back full circle of, okay, how do I scale synthesizing wisdom? And that's what I've done over the last 15, 20 years. But it was full engagement with a commitment to mastery in each of those, not knowing the precise destination. But those zigzag lines, as Emerson says, straightening themselves out with a long enough arc. Right.

Yeah. That's extremely well put. I couldn't have said it better.

Got me excited there. Well, and again, I shared the story because Robert does a great job of integrating all the things that he just described, the drama of these historical biographies and the different phases that all these great people we admire, who we see the majesty of their work, but we don't see the toil and the challenges and the turmoil. So I got a lot personally and just really deepening my clarity in my path, and I'm sure that others will. Good stuff. Okay, so we've talked about your life's task. We've talked about the apprentice phase, rather than can kind of go through the phases per se. What I'd like to do is talk about a few of the other kind of most salient ideas jumped out at me. You let's go to the 20,000 hours. There are a number of ways we can go here, but you talk about 20,000 hours and you talk about tenacious effort. And I'm combining a few ideas here. But you also talk about intensity. I often say to our community that when I read a book, there's often one word the author comes back to more than any other. The word that I found in this book that jumped off the page for me was intensity. The intensity with which these individuals you studied lived their lives. Can you talk about intensity? Tenacious Effort and the willingness to kind of engage all in.

Well, it comes back to that, you know, everything comes back to that first chapter, to the starting point of the life's task. And I repeated in all of my talks that nothing, you'll never proceed, you'll never really succeed in life unless you've come to terms with this business of the life's task. Because you can't have that intensity if you're not doing what you love. You can go to law school and you can be really high on the money, but by the time you get in your 30s, you're not really paying attention, you're losing that intensity, and things will start unraveling. So it really, really is a function of pursuing something that you really love. The person that I got a lot of this from was Leonardo da Vinci, who's sort of the icon of the book because the guy mastered 20 different fields to the point where he was inventing things hundreds of years ahead of its time. An uncanny form of intelligence. And his motto was, in Italian, ostinato rigore, which is rigorous persistence. And we think of da Vinci as just this natural genius, but in fact, he was somebody who just simply tried something over and over and over and over again, repeatedly, repeatedly. He wouldn't let go until he solved this particular problem. And he would write sketch after sketch after sketch until he figured it out and came up with what he thought was a solution. You could say the same thing about Einstein. That man spent 10,000 hours, literally, it's been demonstrated, working on the two theories of relativity, the special theory and the general theory, on a thought experiment. I mean, what could seem more boring? And literally, when he's walking across a bridge in Zurich, he's thinking about the problem, he's going to sleep thinking about relativity. He could have that intensity because the problem he was trying to solve consumed him, fascinated him. You can look at Edison, the proverbial inventor of the light bulb, and the thousands of hours that he. That he was willing to spend on this one problem. I have many, many examples in the book. And the point is, your sheer persistence can overcome almost anything. I mean, I could multiply. Researching my latest book, I can multiply the examples by 20,000 in history of people like this, where you may not have been born with the most amazing talent or skill, but through sheer persistence at working at something, ideas and solutions will come to you inevitably. So it's almost more important than talent. And I talk in the book about Bill Bradley, the basketball player, who all he really had was that he was tall he couldn't really jump. He wasn't very coordinated. He certainly wasn't quick. He trained himself because he loved basketball and compensated for all of his weaknesses by sheer persistence in practice to become what many consider basically a magician on the basketball court. So this is a theme that's repeated over and over again. And when you reach that point where you're pushing past all the boredom and tedium and trying and trying, things start coming to you. Ideas that nobody else had thought of start opening themselves up to you. It's like the 10,000 hour idea. It's the brain literally changes shape inside after so many hours of trying to work on something. So it's, you know, I could go on forever, but I'll stop.

Please do. This is amazing. And this is again is a dominant theme of the book is that is miraculous. You talk about how we want to think that our geniuses are just born, but to reframe it and say that's miraculous. You again, you say it in so many different ways. But the rigorous persistence of Da Vinci, the tenacious effort. Another phrase that I loved was supreme tenacity. When you talked about Paul Graham and what he looks for in his entrepreneurs is that fluidity, the willingness to test and experiment, which I was going to get to on the Wright brothers with iterating. But then the supreme tenacity, the rigorous persistence, what's in your life worth investing that much energy into? Where it's the work and play dichotomy dissolves, as Maslow describes. Right?

Yeah.

And you're just engaged passionately and the other things are distractions. Right.

One really good example for me that I forgot to mention is in the book is Cesar Rodriguez, one of the masters I interviewed who was probably one of the great fighter pilots of a modern era. Our last true ace and he went to fighter pilot school. He was basically short and not very gifted at it. Not that you have to be tall to be a fighter pilot, but physically he wasn't the right specimen. And there are these phenomenon of like the hotshot. I forget what the term is. People who are naturally gifted at flying a jet at those high speeds and he wasn't one of them. He in the beginning of the class was well towards the bottom and he was about to give up because he just really didn't have. He didn't think he had the skill level and he decided not to basically because he realized when he was younger he played football and he was also played quarterback and also was the same thing where he wasn't really built to play the position. But through practice, he learned that he can overcome any of his deficiencies. And I call it trusting the process. If you understand how the brain works, if you understand how skills are developed, if you understand that repetition and intensity and focus will literally alter the brain, if you trust that, you will eventually reach this point and something great will happen. And he transformed himself into number one fighter pilot in his class and went on to have an amazing career.

So good. Reminds me of George St. Pierre. His coach has become a new friend and we've profiled his book. I haven't talked to him directly yet, but his number one thing that he is most proud of is his dedication. Just that willingness to do whatever it takes for however long it takes. And as you were describing that, the word confidence came to mind, that Latin root confidere. With trust, we know that if we're willing to put in the effort, we can achieve the outcomes we want to see. Right?

Exactly. Exactly.

This is good. What have we not talked about? Obviously we didn't talk about a lot, but what have we not covered that you think would be important to highlight?

I mean, the only other thing as I talk about the importance of a mentor in your life, because people are. The problem with a lot of people, particularly young people. I don't mean to rag on young people because young people are brilliant and I wish I were young again, is in the culture today is a lack of patience. You sort of want everything quick and easy. And a lot of books are written about how you can hack your way to genius in a couple of years or only a few hours a day. You can become this, that, and the other. And there's a culture that's created of, well, I can get it quicker, I need to get it quicker. And there is no shortcut, really. It's sad, but it's true. But it's also a great thing. This is the way the brain was developed. The brain wasn't something invented 50 years ago, like, you know, like technology. It was invented millions of years ago. It has a really deep history. And you're not going to be able to rewire your brain in a few years. You have to go with the grain of how it's developed. But that said, there is one. There is one shortcut in life, and that is finding a really great one on one, if possible, mentor. And the only reason I say that is a mentor, if it's the right person, can streamline things, can show you, this is a path I followed. These are the mistakes I made. Avoid these mistakes here's how I evaluate you now at this point. Here are your strengths and weaknesses. You need to work on this. You get real time feedback and instead of 10 years of toil, maybe with a really good mentor, you can do the same thing in seven or eight years. It's a very. And it's also a great relationship. I try to make the point in mastery that it's not all about technical skill. You also need people skills, you need social skills. You can't just be a nerd. You have to know how to distinguish, read people, know that there are sharks out there. There are malicious, malevolent, manipulative people out there who are going to steal your idea or, or try and sabotage you. If you can't read people, if you can't understand them, you could be Einstein himself, but your career will go nowhere because you keep getting in trouble. Paul Graham himself had that problem and he recognizes that he's not great with people and he came up with a unique solution, which is his wife. He married a woman who's brilliant at it and he just relies on her to be his eyes and ears in social situations. But generally you need to depend on yourself. So those are the two things that we maybe didn't cover, that the social side of mastery is almost as important as the technical.

That's so great. And Ryan Holiday, who I know was blessed to have you as a mentor in his life, is who connected us. So he's great work, he's doing great things. There's no question that you can find your trace in his work and influence in his work. So that's amazing. Well, I like to conclude these chats with one final question, which is if you could only share one piece of wisdom with someone who's passionate about optimizing their lives, what would that one piece of wisdom be? And it might be something we've discussed, might be something outside of that, but what would that one piece of wisdom be?

Well, the thing is, you know, not to be afraid of what makes you different. A lot of people, particularly in our social media age, tend to be a little bit wary of what the qualities about themselves that make them different, weird, unique. And if you look at everybody who's really truly successful, they're kind of, they're one of a kind. There's nobody else really out there. You mentioned one of my books, the 50th Law, which was co written with 50 Cent. 50 is a really interesting man, great entrepreneur. There's nobody else like him. There's nobody else like Steve Jobs. We could go on and on down the list. And these are people that embrace, I call him basically embracing your weirdness, embracing what makes you different and unique. And sometimes it's painful, particularly if you're in high school and college and people are making fun of you. But if there's something about you that's different, if there's a field or an idea that you love but you're afraid about it because it's not what other people are thinking of or your teacher isn't necessarily recommending it, you got to learn to kind of follow that voice and not get skittish and not be afraid. It's best to try out your idea, to work it out, to see if it has any legs to. To actually try and do that startup or whatever it is your idea is, or write that book and not sit there and worry, oh, will people think this about me? Or et cetera. That kind of wisdom will come eventually where you're going to connect to your audience, where you're going to know and not just be on your island thinking about yourself, but in the beginning, you have to not be afraid to be truly, truly different in this world, because that's. That's where true success and power lies. And fortunately, we live in a time where you can do that. You can take all of the incredible knowledge on the Internet, etc. And you can combine skills. You can learn things that nobody could have learned 50 years ago, and you can create a product or an idea that's never been thought of before. But you're only going to do that if you're listening to yourself and if you're kind of, as I say, embracing your weirdness. So that'd be like the last thing I'd say.

That's so good. I love it, Robert, thank you. I appreciate your mastery and your commitment to your path and the work that you've shared with the world. And I'm looking forward to your next and future books. So we talked about mastery today. Get the book and then all of Robert's other books. Where's the best place for them to connect with you deeper and just kind of follow what you're up to?

Damn, I keep forgetting to remember the address. I mean, there's a Mastery website, but if you go to my older website, it funnels into it. And the older website is powerseductionandwar.com the and is spelled out powerseductionandwar.com it'll direct you to the Mastery website.

So good. So I'm going to repeat that. Power, seduction and a n d war.com and it reminds me of another one of your great points, which is at the end it will be craftsmanship, not marketing that helps you win.

Yeah.

So thank you for dedicating your life to craftsmanship.

Thank you Brian. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up? Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book Into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes to use episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101 business 101 meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.