The key to transforming yourself -- Robert Greene at TEDxBrixton

Transcriber: Marta Palacio Reviewer: Denise RQ After the publication of my first book "The 48 Laws of Power", I began to receive requests for advice from people in every profession imaginable and at all levels of experience. Over the years, I have personally consulted with over 100 different people. In many cases, the following scenario would play out. They came to me with a specific problem, a hellish boss, a business relationship that had turned ugly, a promotion that never came. It would slowly divert their attention from the boss and work and instead make them look within themselves and try to find the emotional root of their discontent.

Often, as we talked about it, they realized that deep down they felt deeply frustrated: their creativity was not being realized, their careers had somehow taken a wrong turn; what they really wanted was something bigger; a real and substantial change in their careers and lives. It would be at this point that I would tell you a story about myself, about my own peculiar path to change and transformation from a highly unsuccessful writer, eking out a living in a small one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica, at best. ...selling author apparently, overnight. I have never told this story publicly before, but for this special occasion, my first TEDx talk, I thought I would share it with you because it is actually very relevant to the topic of change.

The story is this: from a very early age I knew I wanted to be a writer. I just couldn't figure out what I wanted to write. Perhaps they were novels, essays or plays. After college, I went into journalism, as a way to at least make a living writing. Then one day, after several years of working as a writer and editor, I was having lunch with a man who had just edited an article I had written for a magazine. After drinking his third martini, this editor, an older man, finally admitted to me why he had invited me to lunch: "You should seriously consider a different career," he told me. "You are not writer's material.

Your work is too undisciplined, your style is too strange, your ideas are simply not identifiable to the average reader. Go to law school, Robert, go to business school, save

yourself

the pain" . At first, these words were like a punch to the gut, but in the months that followed I realized something about myself. I had entered a career that didn't really suit me, primarily as a way to make a living, and my work reflected this incompatibility. I had to leave journalism. This realization began a period of wandering in my life. I traveled all over Europe, worked every job imaginable, worked in construction in Greece, taught English in Barcelona, ​​worked as a hotel receptionist in Paris, as a tour guide in Dublin, worked as an apprentice for an English company, doing Television documentaries. , who lives not far from here in Brixton.

During all this time, I wrote several novels that never exceeded 100 pages, and dozens of essays that I tore up and plays that were never produced. I returned to Los Angeles, California, where I was born and raised. I worked in a detective agency, among other jobs. I entered the film business, working as an assistant director, researcher, story developer and screenwriter. In these long years of wandering, he had totaled more than 50 different jobs. By 1995, my parents - God bless them! - They were beginning to seriously worry about me. I was 36 years old and seemed lost and unable to adapt to anything.

I also had moments of doubt, but I didn't feel lost. I was searching and exploring, I was hungry for experiences and I wrote continuously. That same year, while in Italy on other work, I met a man there named Joost Elffers, a book packager and producer. One day, while we were walking along the docks in Venice, Joost asked me if he had any ideas for a book. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, an idea came to me. It was about power. I told Joost that I was constantly reading books on history, and that the stories I read about Julius Caesar, the Borgias, and Louis XIV were exactly the same stories I had personally witnessed with my own eyes in all my different jobs. only less bloody. (Laughs) People want power and they want to disguise that lack of power to play.

They covertly manipulate and intrigue, all the while putting up a pleasant, even saintly front. I would expose these games. I gave him numerous examples of what I meant and he became more and more excited. He said that he should write a treatment and that, if it was good enough, he would pay me to live while he wrote half the book, enough to sell it to a publisher. Suddenly, as I wrote what would become "The 48 Laws of Power," everything in my disjointed past seemed to fall into place, like magic, like fate. All those diverse writing experiences (journalism, television, theater, film) had given me the skills to tell stories and organize my thoughts;

All that reading of history had given me a vast storehouse of ideas I could draw on; and my work as a researcher had taught me how to find the perfect anecdote. Even those different, seemingly random jobs had exposed me to all kinds of psychology and the dark corners of the human psyche. Even the languages ​​I learned while traveling taught me patience and discipline. All of these experiences added up to rich layers of knowledge and practice that altered me from the inside out. In my own very strange and intuitive way, it had given me the perfect education to write "The 48 Laws of Power." The book came out in 1998 and was a success.

The course of my life changed forever. The moral of this story, as I told the people who came to me for advice, and as I tell them now, is this. We humans tend to focus on what we can see with our eyes. It is the most animal part of our nature. When we look at the changes and transformations in other people's lives, we see the good luck someone had in meeting a person like Joost, with all the right connections and funding. We see the book or project that attracts the money and attention. In other words, we see visible signs of opportunity and success. -- changes in our own lives, but we cling to an illusion.

What really enables such dramatic changes are the things that happen inside a person and are completely invisible: the slow accumulation of knowledge and skills, incremental improvements in work habits, and the ability to withstand criticism. Any change in people's fortunes is simply the visible manifestation of all that deep preparation over time. By essentially ignoring this internal, invisible aspect, we fail to change anything fundamental within ourselves. And so, within a few years, we reach our limits again, we become frustrated, we crave change, we cling to something quick and superficial, and we remain forever prisoners of these recurring patterns in our lives.

The answer, the key to the ability to transform ourselves, is actually incredibly simple: reverse this perspective. Stop obsessing about what other people say and do; in money, connections, the outward appearance of things. Instead, look inward and focus on the smaller internal changes that lay the foundation for a much larger change of fortune. It's the difference between clinging to an illusion and immersing

yourself

in reality. Reality is what will free you and transform you. Here's how this would work in your own life. Consider the fact that each and every one of you is fundamentally unique, one of a kind; your DNA, the particular configuration of your brain, your life experiences.

In early childhood, this uniqueness manifested itself in the fact that one was particularly attracted to certain subjects and activities, what in my book I call "mastery", primary inclinations. You can't rationally explain why you felt so drawn to words, music, certain questions about the world around you, or social dynamics. As we age, we often lose touch with these inclinations. You listen to parents urging you to pursue a particular career path. You listen to teachers and editors of alcohol magazines telling you what you're good at and what you're bad at. You listen to your friends who tell you what is right and what is not.

At a certain point, you can almost become a stranger to yourself and therefore enter career paths that do not suit you emotionally and intellectually. The task of your life, as I call it, is to return to those inclinations and that uniqueness that marked each and every one of you at birth. Whatever age you are at, you should reflect on those first inclinations. You must look at those topics of the present that continued to awaken that intense childlike curiosity in you. You should focus on those topics and activities that you have been forced to do in recent years and that repel you, that have no emotional resonance.

Based on these reflections, you determine the direction you should take: writing, music, a particular branch of science, a form of business or public service. You now have a broad framework that you can explore and find the angles and positions that best suit your needs. You listen carefully to yourself, to your internal radar. Some parts of that framework, for me. journalism and Hollywood- I don't feel well. So you keep going, slowly narrowing your path, while accumulating skills. Most people want simple, direct, straight-line paths to the perfect position and success, but instead, you must accept wrong turns and mistakes.

They make you aware of your defects, broaden your experiences, harden you. If you undertake this process at a later age, you must cultivate a new set of skills that adapt to this change in direction you are taking and find a way to combine them with your previous skills. Nothing is ever wasted in this process. In any case, the gold you seek is learning and skill acquisition, not a fat paycheck. Watch what happens to you as you adopt this very different internally driven mindset. Because you are heading in a direction that resonates with you emotionally and personally, the hours of practice and study don't seem as onerous.

You will be able to maintain your attention and interest for much longer periods of time. What excites you is the learning process itself, overcoming obstacles, increasing your skill level. You are immersed in the present instead of constantly obsessing about the future, so you pay more attention to the work itself and the people around you, developing patience and social intelligence. Without forcing the issue, you reach a point where you are completely prepared from within. The slightest opportunity that comes your way, you will now take advantage of. In fact, you will attract opportunities because people will feel how prepared you are, which is, I think, what happened to me with Joost.

Some of this may sound a little mystical, but the results of this process I'm talking about have been corroborated by recent scientific research. In particular, the 1995 study by Anders Ericsson that came up with the famous 10,000 hour rule. By tracking people who had dedicated years of their lives to learning chess or music, Ericsson found that somewhere around that magic 10,000 hours of practice mark, these people's minds suddenly became much more creative and fluid. The structures of their brains had been altered by all those hours of practice, and at that 10,000-hour mark, we could see a visible transformation in their performance and creativity.

That is a level you will reach naturally and organically if you follow this process long enough. Finally, what I propose to you now is actually, I think, quite radical: that is, the way to transform yourself is through your work. I know this goes against our prevailing cultural biases; The work is too ugly, too boring, too banal. We believe that self-transformation occurs through a spiritual journey, therapy, a guru telling us what to do, intense group experiences, social experiences, and drugs. But most of them are ways to escape from ourselves and relieve our chronic boredom. They are not connected to the process, so the changes that occur do not last.

Instead, through our work, we can connect with who we are, instead of running away. By entering into that slow, organic process, we can change ourselves from the inside out in a very real and lasting way. This process involves a journey of self-discovery that can be considered quite spiritual, if you will. At the end of this process, we contribute something unique and meaningful to our culture through our work, which is not ugly, boring or banal. Thank you so much. (Applause)