Overstimulation Is Ruining Your Life - Find Purpose & Reinvent Yourself In 2024 | Robert Greene

The worst situation is feeling miserable, unhappy, stuck in what you are doing, but you don't have the energy to change knowing what I know about human nature, my lesson for you is, I see. There are many people in the world who are struggling, they are struggling with their

life

styles. You know they want to make changes and I'm wondering how you think these laws of human nature can help people who are struggling with their lives. It is a very good, very good and important question. I mean, we all have to be very practical, we have to get by, we have to put food on the table, you know, we have to feed our children, we have to do certain basic things to survive. and so, um, but there's another side to that and it's a sense of fullness in our lives and a lot of people, particularly with what they call the great resignation that's happening during the pandemic, they feel that disconnection, and they're working and they're getting money. , but they feel a little empty and something is not happening for them, so the book tries to tell them that we are social animals, that our survival, our happiness, our sense of fulfillment depends on our ability to get along with each other.

Other people are fine and to do that you have to become aware that generally you are in a dream state, of sleeping, you are not really aware of who you are, what makes you an individual, what motivates you, where where

your

thoughts come from, where

your

emotions come from and that lack of disconnection with something essential and vital about what makes you an individual has a very detrimental effect on all the things you do in

life

it also makes you a very poor observer. of people and their nature. It also makes you a very poor observer of the few toxic people you inevitably encounter in your life, the people you know, the great narcissist, the passive aggressive, the people full of envy and because you don't recognize them because you are not paying attention to

yourself

. . and for them you create all kinds of emotional turmoil in your life and this could be as simple as you have a job and your boss is someone you just can't deal with or get along with or you have colleagues and it exhausts you. of so much energy and it makes that job seem almost impossible, so by flipping the switch, learning who you are and the fact that you have a lot of these negative impulses that I talk about in the book, understanding

yourself

on a deeper level , allowing yourself to judge people for who they are and what you think they do not project in them will make your life at work and everything will be much easier, so it will not necessarily make you earn a lot of money or help you know about the most essential and immediate needs in life, but I think it will have a very, very important effect on your overall mental health.

You mentioned awareness of that and awareness of yourself and other people, it's something that I also

find

very lacking these days, sometimes people make changes when their motivation is high and it will last a few weeks, maybe a few months, but they will often regress and in recent years, Robert, I have already been thinking that my patients not only need information, but they are also changing the way they approach the world. I think changing the way they approach the world is actually about understanding themselves better. to themselves. Why they

find

certain things easy to do. Why they fall back into certain patterns when life gets tough, which really speaks to a lot of the things I think you write about. about a lot, a lot, so I mean, and it's not easy, you know, because, the way our brains are wired, the way our physiology is, we don't really do a lot of introspection, it's not easy to look at yourself. , we get distracted easily. by appearances by what is happening in the environment and in reality it will take you time to be alone because you cannot introspect when you are in a crowd or when you are talking to people you have to be alone you have to spend quality time really thinking about their desires, your needs, in some of the patterns of your behavior and, honestly, that's not usually a pleasant process and one thing that happened in writing the laws of human nature, each chapter deals with some kind of negative quality in our nature more or the less you know aggression irrationality grandiosity Envy is conformity, etc., accepting the fact that you share these qualities is not pleasant, it is not easy, it is not fun and I had to go through that when writing the book I had to become.

Aware of the fact that I, the writer of the book, am actually quite self-absorbed. I have narcissistic tendencies, true, but if you can't accept the fact that you are naturally self-absorbed, how can you begin to change it? and be more empathetic and more interested in other people, so I completely agree with what you're saying. I mean, what you're talking about to me is a radical honesty, it's a radical acceptance that look, maybe I don't want to have these traits. or these behaviors I can judge other people by those behaviors but actually if I look in the mirror carefully and rationally I can see some of those traits in myself do you get a lot of reaction from people when they read these things initially?

Look, that's not me. I'm not self-obsessed because you talk about that a lot in various parts of your writing and you actually know that a lot of us are a little self-obsessed and we actually need to learn, as you say, to be more curious about other people than we are about ourselves. ourselves, which I think is a really useful thing to think about, but I don't know what you think about that. Well, I think people who read, for example, the chapter on narcissism and self-absorption, understand what I'm talking about. I'm not saying everyone is a narcissist on the level of, say, Donald Trump or some of the big narcissists we know in our news or in our lives, etc., I'm saying it's a scale right there.

They are what I call deep narcissists whose level of self-absorption never allows them to get out of there. I say that our self-esteem is like an internal thermostat and at a certain point when it gets too low and we become so wrapped up in ourselves we can't rise above a certain level to pay attention to other people we are so absorbed in our own problems our own needs and we use people to get what we want at this moment there are people who have a very low thermostat and we are all like floating and depending on the circumstances that depress us the most in which we become more self-absorbed, we fluctuate, but we are all in that scale, true, yes, some people who reject are the ones who see podcasts and videos where I say this and they turn out well that is not true I know many people in my life who are incredibly narcissistic and I am not like them Etc etc etc etc etc but yes You actually take the time to read the chapter.

I recognize that it is a scale and there are people who fall much deeper on it. You're probably not on that scale, but look in the mirror and recognize human nature for the way our brains are built. By the way, we're self-absorbed, you can't get out of that bind well and, um, you have to understand the fact that you have these Tendencies before you can start to accept the fact that when it comes to a conversation. I'm sitting in a bar or restaurant with someone I recently met. I don't really listen to it. You're half listening to it.

You are absorbed in your own thoughts. Your own ideas. Your own worries. anxieties you are half listening to them and you are projecting onto them your own desires, your own needs and your own desires, yes, if you can't recognize that, if you don't have that degree of self-awareness, I could write 8,000 pages that won't make any difference, but you should at least have that moment that comes to Muhammad's moment where you see that yes, when you're in a conversation you're not really paying deep attention to people because you're not. as interested in them as you are in your own thoughts and concerns and you need to turn that around, yes, it is so important that unless we can be really transparent and honest about where we are now and those tendencies that we have, we will never be able make a significant change and that's why, in my opinion, we stay stuck in all kinds of negative cycles because we're going backwards and you know I once talked to Robert with Matthew McConaughey on this podcast a couple of years ago when his The Autobiography came out and He told me something I've always thought about since that conversation.

I was talking to him about the process he goes through when he goes to play a different role, you know how he gets into character and says something. For the

purpose

s of this, it's not really about getting into character, it's about finding that character within me, it's finding where that lives within me and then really tapping into that and that really surprised me and surprised me at the time. because I thought, I just assume that he says that he is trying to pretend to be someone else and you already know how they would dress, how they would act, what their mannerisms are, but when he said no, I need to find that part inside me, I found it quite deep, in actually good.

That has great application in daily life. I don't remember who said it. I think it was William James, the great psychologist, or someone like that, but if you want to understand another person, you almost have to imitate them. Put yourself not only mentally but even physically and put yourself in their shoes and see the element in them that is also in you and one of the things I try to tell myself that seems so logical and rational is that we all descend from the same Source, although in this world we seem so divided and we all have ethnic classes etc the real truth is our brains are essentially wired the same way we are descended from the same creature if you step back and look at it from a scale of Hundreds of thousands of years those differences that seem so marked at this moment they actually fade, so if we all have the same type of brain and we all come from the same evolutionary Source, we are all going to have the same traits and I.

I will give you an example that is a very important part of the laws of human nature, but that I analyze in many of my books, what is the trait of envy and I say that envy is a quality that we all have, it is deeply rooted in human nature, but it's one thing we never admit to ourselves, you can admit that yes, I can be self-absorbed, yes, I can have a dark side, yes, I can be irrational at times, etc., but very rarely will you admit that you feel envy towards another person who wants what they have and that makes you behave in a certain way, so it is a deep secret and envy is something that is incredibly prevalent on social media.

Social networks are a tool to accelerate all our intentions, if we look at literature and go back to the hunter-gatherer societies that survived until the 19th century and even until the 20th century. Envy plays a very profound role in their cultures, all their rituals, such as gift-giving, are about making sure no one is looking. They are more important or more favored than another person because they know that envy can be deadly and murderous when there are only 40 people living in a group, and they have demonstrated it. Studies have shown that even primates like chimpanzees are envied.

This is deeply ingrained in our nature so stop trying to have this idea that oh I'm different I'm different from other people I'm better than them I don't have these negative qualities Somehow I'm superior I tell it to people, the person you know What they say I'm not a narcissist, I'm different actually reveals how deep their narcissism is, so I try to show how different they are from other people. Yes, you said that envy is a quality that was interesting to me, it is a quality that served the role. then you wonderfully described why that was the case.

I've never heard Envy described like this before. I think Envy, very few of us would call it equality, and as you say, I think one of the reasons we don't admit it is because we feel like people. it will put us down, it's something we don't want to have, even if we have it, I mean, and you mention social media and the online world, I guess in general, but particularly social media, what do you think has done that? to our human nature, human nature is these kind of basic principles that we all have now, from my understanding of your work, you know we can all express, you know, different personality traits, we can have different characteristics, but in essence we have these laws As You call them, these laws exist in all of us, what do you think social networks have done to them?

I guess some of the laws are more necessary now in the age of social media than maybe they might have been 20 or 30 years ago, um, well. Yeah, I like to look at it this way a little bit more macro, so I say human thinking about human nature. I could say in the introduction of the book that it is like a pawn that moves us around our nature and we are not aware of it. and it's moving us around on a chess board and making us behave in ways that we're not even aware of and this goes back hundreds of thousands of years and it's like this power that surrounds the world and it's actuallyinfluencing all our decisions now.

What I mean by this, to specify a little differently, is that when you looked at the beginnings of the Internet, going back to the early 2000s or late 90s, I remembered very well that what we were going to experience was a tremendous sense of freedom and release. being able to communicate with people we can connect with them on a higher level we can say we can eliminate the middlemen we can eliminate the mainstream media how exciting is what nature isWild West and then what happens is little by little, little by little, little by little, drop by drop, human nature begins to intervene and pervert that tool for Liberation and freedom and turns it into the Zone where it is about making people buy things and manipulate our emotions and us. make us hate each other. others and make us feel envious, you know what other people have, etcetera, this happens a lot and people have written about it, the invention of the telephone, which started as this kind of thing for business and just communicating things like that became a major source of gossip.

Etc. Things are created that have this kind of potential to be something fantastic, but our nature intervenes and now we see that the Internet is like this zone where criminals can thrive, etc., and so it happens over and over again throughout the course . of our history and that's why I'm not saying that social media is intrinsically bad, I'm saying that our nature tends to pervert it that way and if we could become aware and see that maybe we could change it and you ask me, are there any particular points? laws that are increasingly relevant to what is happening.

I'll point out two of them, one is envy, which I already mentioned, so when you're on Instagram and believe me, I'm as guilty as anyone. I use Instagram every day. Love. but when you're sitting there day after day and looking at the amazing vacation your friends are taking in Bali and how they're hanging out with the most beautiful, good-looking woman on the planet and how they're just in this amazing car, people don't take pictures of themselves. looking fat and they wake up in the morning, everyone looks slim and beautiful and polished, everyone is on this amazing vacation, they don't take pictures of themselves and you know, shitty, dirty apartments, etc., it makes you think: " Wow, I'm missing something." There is something I want that I don't have and this is having an incredible social impact on these much smarter people than I am writing about the effects. about envy, about politics, about voting in the United States, etc., so I'm sure it's happening all over the world.

The other chapter I talk about is the chapter on the shadow, which was deeply influenced by the great psychologist Carl Jung, who speaks very eloquently about the Shadow and I am trying to say that we have a dark side and it is a dark side that we all have. listening out there you have a shadow you have a dark side and it communicates outwardly in ways that you're not even aware of social media and the internet became this big playground that prevents all of your dark emotions and you never have to pay a consequence. I'm talking about troll behavior or you can be so mean and nasty and say the worst things to people and no one ever gets to know that you've done it, who you are, etc., it becomes like this area where the convent that shot up becomes in a land of shadows, in other words, right, and so you can present yourself as a social justice warrior.

I'm in the cause of justice and brilliance, at the same time you're canceling people, you're making their lives miserable because it makes you feel like you're okay and justified, but it's actually a zone where you can play and vent all those dark impulses. that in normal society they are very discouraged, so the last thing I will say is that we are these incredibly sophisticated amazing technological animals, look what we have created, but the Internet and technology is actually, in some ways, making us reverse and taking us out. highlight some of these more primitive qualities in human nature Yes, it's really fascinating, Roberts.

Over the last few years I've met a lot of people face to face who I first encountered on social media and, to be honest, some people I didn't particularly like. on social media when I met them in real life at a conference or event I thought oh wow you're completely different like I really like you you know we get along well we're interacting and we're having a great conversation and I Do you know I've written too about this and I've thought a lot about this and you know you mentioned narcissism and how we all have narcissistic traits within us?

If we are honest enough to look at ourselves, when it comes to social media, do you feel that in many ways the narcissism that lives within all of us tends to be magnified because that is the nature of the medium? The medium wants you to share what you have done, what you are good at. You have this kind of perfectionist presentation. You know what it's about. Look at me, this is what I've done. I mean, being aware of this is great, but isn't that the nature of the medium? Is there something number one we can do? do about that and then I guess, following on from Robert, there's another big theme in your work that I love is this idea about non-verbal communication.

In fact, you say that there is a second language that we all speak and that is not t with words and I found that really very powerful and of course on social media all the non-verbal communication is gone so how do you think that all do those things play together? It's not that the Internet or social media inherently does that so we can I see a potential here, for example, where and I had this feeling from the beginning, like I said in that first kind of Frontier Days of social media, well, I have access to the lives or desires of all these people around me. the right people in the world are writing to me now that you know that after my books, etc., from Japan, from Brazil, etc., and they are exes, they are opening up and venting and I can like it, I can empathize more deeply now that I can understand. people at a higher level, they are not inherently bad social networks, they could be an incredible tool for exercising empathy because they can actually connect people correctly, but the way they are designed now is designed to manipulate emotions correctly instead of take a step back, in such a manipulative way. emotions make you self absorbed when what you see is always geared towards making you angry or outraged it's all about you you you you it makes you go deeper and deeper into yourself I notice on this site um I don't know if it exists in the UK called Next Door where It says what's going on is about your own neighborhood and I get these emails, every damn email is about a crime, a robbery, someone is being assaulted instead of going, but that's not my neighborhood.

I never see anything like that. they choose those particular posts algorithmically to make you angry, angry and worried that you are going to click on them, it is click bait, it is designed to manipulate your emotions and when you get emotionally angry you are not thinking about other people that you are not thinking. your own neighborhood and what's going on you're worried about yourself you're worried about how other people see you well and then the other thing is and you eloquently point out that you know normally nonverbal communication plays a profound role in our presence right, so someone On the Internet he can roar like a lion, he can seem aggressive and really confident, true, but if you meet him in person like you do at a conference, you will be surprised, that person who seemed like a roaring line is actually like a shy little mouse, Well, it's because you're not seeing any of those signs or signals on social media, you're seeing the front that people present and the front that you want to present is, as I mentioned before, it's always the best you can look like.

The best thing you have to do is that you could never vent on social media all the kind of negative qualities that you hate in people. You are going to present yourself as someone who is for the best causes, is to be confident and strong, and if it were. Upon meeting that person face to face I would realize that they are plagued with insecurities and there is nothing wrong with us all having insecurities. I have them too, but I can't pick them up and the other thing is that we are physical creatures, we are embodied. We are fine, we live in our bodies and being able to physically be in front of people is extremely important for our intelligence and our health.

You can pick up signals about people you're not even aware of. You are reading their body language, their tone of voice, their eyes, the way they smile, how they stand, etc., etc. When you spend all your time in virtual worlds where very little of that is evident, that ability is degrading, you are no longer able to pick up cues because I haven't spent time among people you know when I read 19th century novels like Jane Austen's. I am surprised by his sensitivity to every nuance of people, their faces, their gestures, their behavior. I'm thinking, well, why?

People like that back then and it's not just famous writers, it's because you spend all your time dealing with people person to person, person to person, it's a skill you developed, it's a skill we're slowly losing because we don't socialize enough, yes. You wrote about Milton Erickson, it was really powerful, it was really interesting, it reminded me of a couple of things in my own practice, can you tell us a little bit about Milton Erickson and how that story helps demonstrate things about non-verbal communication? I became interested in real generics many, many years ago in my first book because he was a therapist, he is the inventor or inspired what we know as NLP and he also invented in many ways hypnotherapy, but he was this brilliant, brilliant man, I thought. and He was very strategic in the way he approached his therapeutic options, which I found extremely interesting, but his life is even more interesting, so he lived in Wisconsin somewhere like that and when he was 18 he got polio and there was an outbreak. incredible of a polio plague in the first two decades of the 20th century and he was like 18 years old and he was, you know, you can imagine how active and you know how much energy you have when you're that age, all of a sudden he's completely paralyzed and completely bedridden. , okay, he can't even move his eye muscles to look in any direction, everything is completely paralyzed, but his eyes are open and he is aware of what is like a nightmare, it is like hell and he has this unbelievably. active mind can't read can't do anything can't talk can't interact the only thing he can do the only way he can entertain himself, so to speak, is pay attention to people, so we had these sisters that he was very close to come in to his room and they tried to help him and take care of him, they talked to him, the only thing that mattered at that moment was paying close attention to his body language, it became like a game like a puzzle because it was the only intellectual thing he could do well and sometimes He noticed that when his sister said no, sometimes the tone of voice actually meant a little bit yes, but sometimes he didn't really want to know or if she turned around.

His hair in a certain way revealed a certain type of emotional energy. She seemed interested but his eyes looked a certain way. He knew he was getting bored of being there. Etc. year after year, day after day, year after year, in this intense study made him an absolute master of non-verbal communication, so he ends up miraculously surviving polio and regaining all of his powers to speak. . Etc. He could walk, although he had to walk the rest of his life with a cane. He then went on to study. psychology and then became a therapist in the early days when there weren't many therapists in America and not from the Freudian school etc., he trained primarily in a sort of more physiological approach to psychology and applied this to his could notice the moment they opened the door to enter his office, the way they walked, the way they moved, the way they sat, he could read their minds at a level that was simply amazing and his patients said they would say Mill, it's like you could see right through me and he literally could because he had mastered what I said and you mentioned like the second language that scientists have, you know, it's just a number, but they say roughly between 90 and 95 percent of human communication is non-verbal, it's like you're only learning five percent of English.

You know only a few words. Etc. This language that you are only paying a little attention to is incredibly important and the powers you can gain by mastering this language are unfathomable. it will deeply help you connect with people and understand them on another level, yes it's fascinating, thanks for sharing that story. I think I also read that in his room she put his desk in the corner so she could see. I think I heard, I think I heard you say this in an interview one time when he was watching patients come in to get a lot ofinformation from that, so when I heard that, I thought well, is this something trainable?

Skill is something we could all improve on, obviously Milton had a medical reason for needing to go that route, many of us don't have that big of an urgency or not, I guess we don't think about it. It's an urgent need to do that, but maybe we should see it as urgent and we should do better at Robert. It was the first time we had a conversation together. I have been a doctor for little longer. 21 years ago and when I was reading about Milton in his books, it reminded me a little of the things that I did throughout my practice and that I didn't realize why I was doing it, but you know, hearing that story reframes it. .

This to me would always do certain things in the UK. I would never use the intercom system, but I would always make an effort to go greet my patient in the waiting room and walk with them or walk alongside them or behind them to my consulting room and although I don't think I would have realized at that moment, I honestly feel like I was picking up all kinds of clues about what was going on with that person in their lives. And it's something that I've always felt, in fact, that the human side of medicine is possibly for me the most important part of medicine, I don't particularly talk about if you're in the emergency room or in the emergency room or if you've had a car accident. where you need trauma says you need blood tests you need you know acute medical care I'm talking about the rest what is 90 of medical care these days something like that I think it's that human side if we could embrace it a little more the clues that our patients are giving us.

I am convinced that we would obtain much better results. Sorry for interrupting the conversation. We will be back in a moment to live a long and healthy life. It can be very helpful to understand what is happening. What happens inside your body, people age at different rates and the typical annual blood test doesn't adequately assess your biological age, but the internal tracker does. Air is a truly personalized nutrition and performance system that is designed to extend your health span and slow the aging process. inside tracker uses your test results to give you personalized recommendations on things you can actually control, like dietary supplements, workouts and other lifestyle choices.

For a limited time, you can get 20 off the entire store at top inside tracker. All you have to do is click. on the link in the description box below and use the discount codes to live better yes, there are so many things that you mentioned there, you know, non-verbal communication is not just body language, it is also your behavior, so the The fact that you are getting up and greeting people is an act it is an action that speaks says I am not just this machine working through an intercom through a computer I am a human being I am connecting with you as a doctor on a human level and so on I tell people that not only are you paying attention, don't understand the cliché that it's all about knowing the obvious things about the body, it's also what people do is a language if they can be chronically late for an appointment if their Desks are messy and I'm afraid my desk is very messy right now.

These say things about people, so you are learning a language that is about gestures, behavior, action and about the body itself, but you know, there have been many books written about medicine. problems that technology has created for doctors, who spend a lot of their time evaluating their patients while literally looking at a screen and it's all algorithms and data, and hospitals are huge at accumulating huge amounts of big data on top of that and just funneling it out. in this and here in the states I am dealing with it now with my own health problems. Unfortunately I had a stroke four years ago and the kind of simple approach where you can say this is all about data and information.

It is not personalized, it does not look at me as someone who has suffered a stroke in very different circumstances than other people necessarily had, there is no individual treatment, it is because everything is done through computers, through data, through of algorithms, and in the past doctors were some. of the best people if they were great doctors watching people and listening to them and even diagnosing things through what they saw in the body, yes, through certain stiffness and movements, they would tell you about their muscles, their joints, they might even have an internal problem. that you can detect on their skin, you can, people were masters at diagnosing by simple observation and think about it this way, humans are incredibly gifted with this type of ability, you asked me, is it just a function of having polio, but think about it for a moment go back in time as I did before, hundreds of thousands of years ago, to our ancestors, before the invention of language, human beings are very weak and fragile creatures compared to leopards, tigers and even chimpanzees, the only.

What we can do is run, but we can't run as fast as a leopard, etc., so we live in these social groups and that's what made us very powerful, being a social animal and working together and cooperating, but you lived for hundreds of thousands of years. no wordless language true, there were no words that could be given, etc., etc., but there were no abstract concepts, it all depended on observing people on a deep level of their group mates, their survival depended on it , as did Milton Erickson and I have this belief. and other people have speculated the same thing that our ancestors were almost telepathic in their I don't mean that children could woo that much, but they could almost read what was going on in other people's minds because they were paying so much attention.

It is an ability built into all of us through our mirror neurons, through the way the brain operates when we look at people, how we have Theory of Mind, how we can get under the skin of other people, we all have That potential is simply that we do not use it, we do not pay attention to it because we do not believe it is important enough. I think any mother would say that she can intuitively grasp what is going on with her baby or her young child. I think we all know and have experienced that feeling when we walk into a room and no words are said but we can simply feel that the energy is not particularly attractive, we have all felt it.

The question is: can we feel more sorry for the people who say Robert is fine? I'm with you, I understand that I need to improve on this, where would you advise me to get a good start? I have a chapter on that, yeah, and I describe exercises that you can do, and people have written incredible books about it, people who are experts in it, uh, some of them were working in the criminal system where they had to learn this skill to being able to read criminals and psyches and serial killers, etc. and behavior Patterns of behavior and it was a very important skill, but they are Excellent books written on the subject, but the main thing is the quality of attention that you are giving to other people, so if you could turn this around, you will end up starting to pick up signals and If you're fascinated, you'll start to see the potential here, but if you listen to me now or you listen to yourself now, you'll say, "Oh, that's interesting, but you'll never act right because it seems interesting, but your life doesn't." It seems like you depend on it and then you walk into a room and you have to pay attention and watch people's tone of voice, etc., etc., and the next day you won't do it, you won't take advantage of it. really delve into it and feel the potential within it and become fascinated and hooked on it, so a lot of that is in your attitude in the way you enter a scene, so if you're already deep in thought, if you're Someone who can only think in terms of words, if you could only listen to the same flow of thoughts in your mind, you can't do it, you have to turn it off, you have to be able to be incredibly present, so the first thing you do.

What I have to do is develop this ability to be incredibly present with people and not try to judge them or categorize them through words, but rather feel what they are like, feel what they are going through, what is going on in their minds, feel what they feel. Their moods are, I tell people, non-verbal communication won't be able to teach you how to read people's thoughts, that's essentially impossible, it can teach you how to reach out to pick up their moods, their emotions, what's going on inside. of them and me, capturing people's moods and emotions are more important than their thoughts because thoughts can be very deceptive, we deceive ourselves, etc.

I prefer to be able to understand what a person feels at that moment than what he is thinking because it is more real, it is more direct. more immediate, okay, but you can't get to that point if you're not extremely present in that moment and focused on exactly what you're receiving from this information that you're receiving, you're not getting it because you're not in the moment, so that It's the first thing, yes, and then I do several small exercises that you can do going to a cafe or when you meet a person for the first time, etc., the exercises that I recommend are very detailed but the most important thing is your way of thinking and your attitude and how you approach this a is incredibly important to me B I have to stop thinking with words and language and judging and see that I have to be in the moment and present and then all the other cards It will sort of fit into being present with other people and observe their non-verbal cues.

This would mean that many of us would need to say less, speak less, listen more, listen more to both sets of those languages, not just the words that come out of someone's mouth. and, of course, being silent, being present is something that many would say could be becoming a lost art for many human beings today for a variety of different reasons, including, I suppose, how easy it is to get distracted, You know, in other people's lives. Today I know that you meditate every morning and have done so for many years. I suppose it is a practice that helps cultivate an enormous level of self-awareness.

You have to be present with yourself. Presumably, being present with yourself is a necessary skill to be present with other people I think it's extremely important, yeah, I mean, so when I'm meditating, I've been doing it for 12 years, although I wish it had been more in my entire life. life and I do it every morning. No matter what, even if I'm flying on a plane, I managed to do it every day for 45 minutes and what it does is you're sitting there and if you've ever done it, you know the thoughts immediately come. I don't know where they come from and a lot of them are unpleasant thoughts, things that maybe you're a little ashamed of or that reveal pettiness or anxieties that you really wouldn't want to expose to the world at large and you start picking up on things about yourself and that creates a kind of of humility, whereas you could spend the day thinking wow, I'm so confident, I'm so in control, you know, I have all these great ideas, etc., when you're on those cushions. and you are meditating, it is humiliating because you realize that you are not, you are full of doubts, insecurities, anxieties, stupid, trivial thoughts, etc., etc., it is a real way to see who you are, it is okay and to do it You literally have to be. on those cushions and not have distractions or music.

I don't have any, you know, people like to listen to recordings. No, I forget what they call it some kind of meditation, guided meditation, etc., all meditation is great, but I think the best one is. no distractions, no music, no sounds, no people, no nothing to interfere, so you just have the right to yourself and you dig deep into yourself and eventually you overcome all those little annoying thoughts and those kind of insecurities etc. and you find something deeper about yourself, but you're becoming incredibly sensitive and present to who you are and that allows awareness to allow you to maybe change things, so, for example, I'm aware of how many silly anxieties I have.

I'll be sitting there meditating and I'm trying to focus on I do Zen meditation on this kind of broader Buddhist picture of the environment Etc um, what's going on in Japanese, so it's Ma and then I'm sitting here worrying about, you know, the stupid little one conversation from the previous day. and then I learned through this that I have to let go of these feelings and let them go and alter myself well that same kind of presence and awareness that you develop for yourself a kind of sensitivity to who you are, your mood and what makes you different. to your good and bad qualities is what now makes you able to deal with it with other people that you know on a higher level um because for me I have this idea, I don't know, it's hard for me to verbalize it, but awareness is almost like pimples. of sensitivity, it's almost like a camera when you used to have those cameras that focused and things came into focus every timemore and when it was out of focus you could see all these little pimples when you're sensitive.

It's like it's in focus, it's like you see and catch all the little things that happen in the environment in the image and you're open to things, you're picking up signals, etc., you have to get on your knees and say: I'm insensitive, I'm not. picking up on things I'm not paying attention I'm lost in my own thoughts and my own worries and my own concerns if you can develop those grains of sensitivity then those non-verbal cues that you don't need read a book, you'll naturally find your way to it, yeah, why what did you start meditating?

I've always been interested. I have been interested in Zen Buddhism forever since I was in college. I had a philosophy professor who gave me this great book called Zen Comments on Scam, kind of like the Buddhists in the Bible, and I always wanted to do it. I've been too busy, you know, I couldn't find the time and then writing my books was very stressful, honestly. and I'm going through this right now. I'm thinking deeply. I'm trying to get to the core. I'm working hour after hour. I'm developing terrible health problems and that's probably what partially contributed too.

After my stroke, I could no longer function. It was so intense it was literally going to kill me, so meditation was almost like a way to save my life and it saved me from dulling that intensity and making me feel like slowing down and becoming more present, it said I'm better able to cope. with my anxieties, so I finally got around to it in August of 2010. I can remember the day I marked it on my calendar where I started the process, you know, because I thought that if I didn't do this something terrible was going to happen to me, so the Things got so bad that you thought this thing you had read you wanted to do but you could never find the time to do it.

I thought well, that's it, now I have to make time for this. You also said that you do this every day and never miss a day as someone who has talked to tens of thousands of patients and watched and listened to them report on various things you're trying to do. I find it really very interesting the way you put it and I guess from the day you started it has been constant or it was like an up and down until you realized, wait a minute, I am a better human being when I meditate every day, so I approached meditation like I approached swimming and mountain biking and I wrote books discipline discipline discipline, so at first the only thing that changed was that it was more like 15 or 20 minutes and little by little I increased the minutes as that I was getting better at but, um, I feel like I'm getting to the point where it's an addiction, right?

I didn't meditate for at least a week but then I did it again but I miss it and something is wrong it just feels wrong and I know I'm studying a lot about brain chemistry right now for a chapter. I am saying that there are chemicals that are released in the form of meditation. You know, you could talk about oxytocin or dopamine or whatever and they become physically addictive, but if we are creatures that have addictions, it's not a bad addiction. have I'm afraid so, you know, um, but yes, I do it every time I've been doing it regularly and consistently because it's only in that way that it becomes satisfying, right?

It's a very difficult discipline, no. It's like learning a language or a musical instrument where you can see the progress you have days like this morning I was tired and I can't control my thoughts they are bubbling like crazy and I'm trying to get back to what I'm meditating And true, it's not like I suddenly do master, yes, it is a constant struggle, but you have progress that you reach. I can do 45 minutes now and it feels like 20 minutes to me, it goes back pretty quickly, whereas a few years ago I would. It's been kind of torture, so there are changes, but it's also like an ongoing struggle.

You seem to know what I'm talking about. I know exactly what you're talking about. Now I'm finally at a point where I won again. I don't say 100 every day, but almost every day I would do a form of meditation practice in the morning. If I don't do it in the morning, it just doesn't happen. What I've never done, I never seem to find. Those 10 15 20 minutes, but I was able to find them for other things, but I can't find them for meditating later in the day, so that's something I've had to struggle with. I feel like I'm in a good place with that. but for me, Robert and I, you know, when I think about your work, cultivating this deep level of self-awareness is essential to me, it's a central theme, like are you going to know how to interact with the world around you if you're going to get better? do more with your life change your life whatever it is you have to be honest with yourself you have to know yourself better and I've talked about this on the show before I think everyone needs a daily solitude practice in some way order now you do meditation I do meditation, but there may be other ways to do it, but I feel intentional Loneliness.

Loneliness every day is how we take the pulse of our own lives, for example on those mornings when I just can't calm down and I'm going through my to-do list and everything feels so busy and crazy. I also make a mental note for myself now. Hey, bad, and you're no calmer today when interacting with your wife. When you interact with kids later they will just be aware of that and I think that really speaks to your work. I think that doesn't mean that I'm suddenly not reactive, it just means that I'm intentionally knowing that I may not behave like my optimal self today and knowing that in those moments I can actually go, yeah, I'm not going to choose to react here, I'm going to stay calm, does that make sense?

Oh, that makes incredible sense. I can completely understand what you're talking about and this. It happened all the time, especially in the beginning when I was first entering the most important period of the process, where I would usually find myself reacting, getting angry and angry, and then suddenly the same situation would arise and there would be a step halfway through. . one step back and that half step back was all the difference in the world that made me go oh, I feel what's happening here, I see what's happening in the moment, I'm not going to react right, it gave me that. a little bit of distance, the ability to step back and say, I can control this to a certain extent and it's immensely powerful and immensely liberating and, you know, that doesn't mean you don't get emotional, yeah, right now I'm dealing with a problem with a stroke and this is quite common with patients like this is that your emotions are heightened, yes, and mine was in the right hemisphere of my brain, which is where the brain is most.

I totally want to say that things cross the hemisphere is a bit of a myth, but there is more emotional control in the right hemisphere and people with my type of stroke tend to say that we have less control over our emotions and what that means is that could do it. I am deeply frustrated like I can't tie my shoes. I can't button my shirt. It takes a lot of time and meditation has really helped me. I still get so angry some days. I can't help it, but most of the time I can go with you. you are being silly here it is irrational to behave like this you are alive life goes on the birds are singing the sky is beautiful things are happening there is no need to get so frustrated and just that small step back is what can save you from so much drama and confusion in your life, yes , thanks for sharing that, you've said before that we are deeply irrational as humans and that we are governed by our emotions and of course you just mentioned how you feel, maybe you have become more emotional.

Since your stroke and throughout this conversation we have been talking about non-verbal communication, how much of the way we interact with the people around us is not through words, could you talk to us about brain development? the way you see it? why is that so why do you know that we can't always translate these emotions into our words why is there a conflict there because I think that kind of evolutionary case of how our brain develops is super interesting, particularly because language and emotions are mainly in different parts of the brain sorry since you are UPS, if you are enjoying this content there are many more like it on my channel so take a moment to hit subscribe, hit the notification bell and now get back to the conversation, well, you know I'm I'm not a neuroscientist, but I'm reading a lot about it.

I'm looking into it, so I have to give that caveat, so I hope there aren't neuroscientists out there saying, God, that guy is so stupid, but basically, you know, emotions. They begin simply as a chemical process, I'm afraid to say I'm afraid to demystify, but that's what they are. Your brain reacts to certain stimuli. Chemicals are released or electrical signals are sent, then they are felt somewhere in the body and that is what we choose. up and then, through our thinking, we translate into a word like I'm depressed I'm anxious I'm happy I'm sad Etc. Okay, but the disconnection is deep, so it's not a word that started, it's something in the brain that He caught that.

You don't even have control of what's right, you don't want your own emotions, the limbic system and the temporal lobes that govern emotions are among the oldest parts of your brain, they are things that go back to reptiles, to the most ancient forms. ancient. of the right nervous system and and and the chemical responses the release of adrenaline for the fight and flight response that you have no control that your brain is doing that is releasing these chemicals and these chemicals last in your bloodstream, some people have said that 19 seconds No I know if that's the exact real number that's stuck in my mind, but they're not permanent, they just run through your bloodstream, you pick it up and go.

I have a tightness in my chest. You're not thinking about this. but that tightness in my chest is immediately anxiety. I'm anxious about something, you don't realize it started in your chest or your brain, but you think of it as if I'm anxious about something. Well, if you think about it, you think. About it, you think about it and you turn it into this harsh reality that's not really there. Your emotions are not words, they are not these simple little categories, this continuous flow of moods, so that the moment you feel anxiety with that word anxiety, you also feel other things happening, it is never something static, it is this constant flow of your brain producing chemicals as your body reacts and your mind thinks about them, but you hold on to this word, isolating it in this moment. and give it a reality that just isn't right and then because emotions aren't words, we don't really know how to think about them, we can't, we can't get to the source of it, so you wake up.

You woke up this morning and you're angry right now the first thing you have to do is why am I angry? a reason you have to describe it as something, okay, my wife said something this morning that really bothered me, etc., and then you hold on to that and then it holds you for hours and hours and even into the next. day, but what you don't realize is that the feeling of anger is not what you think it is, first of all, there is a habitual pattern here, you are responding to things that probably go back to your childhood, the chemicals that They free themselves from the emotions that you think about are literally chemicals that you can become addicted to.

You become addicted to the feelings of certain types of pleasure. You actually become addicted. I'm afraid to say that with anxiety you can even become addicted to anxiety. depression unfortunately and you're not even in control of it, so your anchor is not something that you control, which you will, it's because of it, it's because of you, because you're thinking and your thought process isn't actually coming to the core of what triggered the emotion in the first place. It is a tremendous problem, it is a problem that our brains are the way our brains are wired because emotions were not designed for thinking, they were not designed for Consciousness, they were designed for animals to help them survive in their environment, right, but like me?

I'm writing about this right now, oddly enough, in this chapter I'm writing about Consciousness, it doesn't have to be like this, thinking about emotions can be an incredibly positive thing, just like I said about the Internet, you can take your emotions. You could say I'm going to know what the feeling of awe and wonder is because I'm writing a book about the book, feelings of awe and what I call the sublime. I know how it feels. Actually, I'm going to do it. I'll make myself feel this way. I'm going to make myself feel this way so that we have these tremendous powers through our thinking to literally learn to drop our emotions, drop that thing into our bloodstream and say, I'm not going to think about that, so that thought can be. used for really positive

purpose

s instead of negative purposes, yes, very interesting, one of my favorite chapters is chapter six, raise your perspective, the law of myopia and the beginning of thatchapter has a wonderfully concise setup, avoid getting entangled with those who cannot see the consequences of their actions who are in a continuous reactive mode, they will infect you with this energy.

I haven't thought about that since I read it. I think it's really very powerful, of course, this idea that someone else can infect. with their energy that these emotions can be, I suppose, contagious and can rub off on us. I think it's actually very powerful, of course it's not always that easy. Is it possible to avoid this type of reactive people? It could be someone in our family. It could be ours. boss at work could be one of our coworkers. I love this chapter. I love the idea that we can elevate our perspective. I think in many ways, a lot of the work that I've read of yours that Robert talks about, you can take your pick.

The way you look at this, you can actually, you can choose your perspective, although this is one of many laws. I feel that in some ways it is a higher law, but it is a law that has such an application, certainly in the way. I read it about a lot of the other laws, it's fair to say that yes, yes, I mean, the book was written as a kind of interconnected web where they're all woven into each other and they all have aspects that kind of feed into that, I already You know, so the last chapter is about overcoming your fear of death and mortality and the first chapter is about your irrational emotional tendencies.

Well, those two number one and 18 are actually inextricably intertwined, but yes, I think it is fundamental, although the other law is similar to what you are talking about is the law about your attitude towards life, how you look at the world and yes and I say If you alter this attitude, you can literally alter your circumstances and it's the same thing by raising your perspective, the right thing to do is to train yourself to always have a degree of detachment from the events that happen around you and be able to say um, this is what you know. , this is what things will look like in a year, I mean, look at your own life when an event occurs.

It happened, you have this reaction, oh my God, it's so dramatic, it's so important and then a year later you don't even remember it or you have a very different view of it, right? Imagine if you could have that perspective a year later in the present moment. You might say: This isn't going to matter. This doesn't matter for my life in general. This is not something that is a priority for me. Why get involved? Why let myself be absorbed by people's negative energy right now? I could have that elevated focus. I could see it as standing on a mountain looking down a year after this discussion.

I'm thinking how trivial, how insignificant the power is in that, it's immense getting there is the difficult part, right, because we are not trained animals. to raise our perspective we are animals we train to react react react react we follow the appearance of things if things look golden and shiny we grab them without realizing that there are consequences to pay for it so it is almost unnatural to raise your perspective it takes a lot practice and meditation can be extremely important for it, but you know, I know that the people I deal with I tend to have a lot of anxiety, honestly, I've dealt with that my whole life and I've gotten a lot better at it, but when I'm around anxious people, damn it, I can't control it, I can't control it, I'm getting angry, I'm getting upset, they make me feel nervous and their worries become my worries I tend to be too open to other people's emotions, so what do I do well?

If I can, I avoid their presence because I know that just being among them will infect me with that nervous, anxious energy. If I can't avoid them I do all kinds of strategies I like I listen to them but I'm distanced I don't really listen to them I'm thinking about what it will be like in a week I'm also thinking about why they are anxious and angry and how stupid it is and it's stupid that I let myself get wrapped up in it Etc etcetera Etc. I follow these various strategies and many times I am not successful.

I have to admit it, but I know very well that infecting power because it has a tremendous effect on me personally, yes, you write about how affected by the group that we are, by the people around us, you just talked to that and we have talked a lot. There is a lot about self-awareness. Cultivate a deep level of self-awareness. Is there any conflict in the fact that we are social animals? We want to fit in with the people around us. We are influenced by the group and I guess we are too. Influence the group and the people around us.

You talk about culture being more important than the individual as an individual. If the culture around us pushes us in a certain way, it is very, very difficult for us. So how can we really get to know ourselves? You know it's there. even something like an individual when we are so affected by the people around us. I'm trying to get to that point. You know, if we're trying to figure out who we are, we only exist in many ways in relationship to other people. in the world around us, so it seems like there's a bit of tension there as you get to know the group around us and also us finding out who we really are.

I mean, it's very appropriate, it's very appropriate and you're absolutely right, but I. I'd like to think that if things aren't black and white, yeah, I'd like to stop stepping out of the polarity tendencies in our brains to think that things are the individual or the culture, nature or nurture, damn it, It's a combination, life is fluid, it's a combination of things, okay, yes, it turns out that I am thinking correctly in English and no, my thoughts are not really my own thoughts because over hundreds of years ideas have been developed that I then assimilated in my education, the patterns of English that determine my thoughts.

They are not mine, so my Consciousness has its roots in the very sources of language, etc., the correct culture and that is that I am a product of my culture in the time in which I live. I have a chapter in human nature about generations and how you are a product of the time you are living in and the culture you are in. It's okay to deny that quality. It's stupid. On the other hand, you are wrong. You were born with DNA that never happened in the past and will never happen. happens in the future, it marks you as unique, okay, uniqueness is not in banal things, as you know, it is even difficult to express in words, that is, and we can even see this evolutionarily as mutations in nature, people who are different and how. important things are for the evolution of a species and how we need variety and change, etc., so your uniqueness through your DNA marks you as someone, an individual different from everyone else and the great American psychologist Abraham Maslow talked about the impulsive voices and I like it. that because it comes from the idea of ​​I am an individual, I am a self, you know, I am this kind of American creed of the individual, etc., which is kind of like looking at it on a physiological level and so on.

He was noticing, like one- and two-year-old babies, how they are attracted to certain things. Some babies will love potatoes, others will spit them out. Oh, I hate that some two year olds like a certain type of music, others will set their ears on it. right, some love cats, some love dogs, where does that come from? Is genetic? Which makes two brothers exact, almost very similar. The DNA that one likes does this and the other hates it. True, it's what he called impulsive voices. You have these voices that attract you. certain things and you're repulsed by other things and when you're four years old three years old those impulsive voices are very loud and as you get older and older they get weaker, weaker, weaker, until you compare them, um, I started doing some method of action. there, but you can barely hear them, because they are drowned out by your teachers, by your colleagues, by Instagram, by everything that happens in the environment, you are hearing a thousand voices in your head and that little voice when you were four years old. say I like this I don't like that you no longer hear it and that voice was who you are that marks you as someone different and your tastes become part of the culture it becomes part of the group that I remember years ago had given a talk at Microsoft in Seattle or near Seattle and on that campus, wherever you call it, there's like 15,000 employees, right, I was surprised, man, all these people look similar, they all dress similarly, they all have similar mannerisms, okay? ? many differences, etc., but there was a culture that was so strong that it was so evident that it would have infected thousands of people.

I went to Google many years later and had the same impression, but the culture was very different. like playful fun etc, people laugh, smile, but you are infected by the group and lose the sense of who you are, what makes you different, then the game is, since things are not black and white, Is it connected to those impulsive voices? knowing what makes you unique, but also being in tune with culture, society, other people, being empathetic, don't contradict each other, being an individual, highlighting your uniqueness in your career, which is the most important thing you can do. it means you are a but you have to treat people badly it's all about you you can be unique and think very deeply about what makes your own interests and be empathetic at the same time stop this type of polarizing thinking that kills us.

Dance, you can move your feet in two different ways at the same time, you can do this dance, you can both be in tune with what makes you different so that you find a career that matches your desires and you can be empathetic to other people at the same time. time. I love that, so powerful Roberts. I agree that we have to get out of this polarity. It's black or white. It's either this or you've been writing about human behavior for many, many years. Does it still fascinate you? Okay, yes. I mean, you know there are things for you that you can master with some ease because they have a logic and I always like mental challenges, so learning French, for example, playing chess or playing billiards or billiards, etc., you learn the logic of If you get better and better, and better and better at it, people don't have a logic, they're almost so different, every moment is different, there's never a consistency to it, it's almost like mass madness and mastering that is as the ultimate challenge.

It's like that and it really bothers me a lot this idea that economists and people who write algorithms have is that they can detect patterns and behavior that they can predict that people are these rational actors that act a b and c and we can We design our programs to meet the rights to b and c or we economists can predict what will happen a year from now because people buy these products that are nonsense and of course it's all nonsense because economists are the ones who 98 of the time are completely wrong about it . Its predictions are the most absurd profession ever created.

It is because humans are irrational. Each person's logic cannot be deciphered. It operates in a way that is unfathomable in a way, and for me it is the ultimate challenge. It is like the ultimate puzzle to try to solve. understand a little bit of why people have done what they do, you know, and I'm probably wrong most of the time, I'm probably only hitting a small percentage, but that small percentage gives me a greater understanding of reality than if did it. I don't have it, but it's kind of like, I'll be endlessly fascinated by it, yeah, I mean, it's endlessly fascinating, isn't it?

You can never know too much about human behavior and as you say, we are irrational, we must accept that. irrationality and there was a moment in one of your books, Robert, where I think you were talking about the shadow within us and you said something like in ancient cultures, you know, they thought that they would have to deal with this Shadow with some kind from I don't know, chants or some kind of medicine or something like that, whereas now we believe in the myth that oh, something invaded me, it was so powerful, something invaded me, something that invaded me, we've almost lost it. an opportunity like if we blow up at something, we blow up at our partner for some reason or we get really upset at work and we throw up our hands and say oh something took over me as you write in your book, it's a myth, it's a myth and one From your tweets the other day I think it speaks to this, everything that happens to you is a form of instruction if you pay attention.

I completely agree with that, it's something I feel like I've adopted into my own life for about five years. Like everything in life, certainly having something you don't like is an opportunity to self-examine and discover why it might be that way and you can learn so you know in this quest to learn about human behavior. I think that search is to learn about ours. behavior is the best search there is. I don't think I've found a better quest to engage in, but maybe you could explain that, sweet, you know that everything that happens to you is a form of instruction, if you're paying attention, you know it could be that.

You are wrong that things just happen randomly, but the point is that you are going to learn from it and learning from every little experience has incredible value to you, so in what we are trying toThe focus here is whether you are active or passive and that is the dividing line between people who can be healthy and those who cannot if you continue in passive mode oh something happened to me oh it's their fault oh it's because of my parents oh this is what I It happened to me Wow, it's me, I can't do anything about it, that's the world you're going to create for yourself, but if you're active, you go, maybe there's something in me that's partially responsible for this happening now, I do not want to say. never blame a victim, so if you are a victim of something horrible it is not that you are responsible for it, but even from those situations you can learn from it, so you become active, you are learning, you are saying I can avoid it. some of these negative situations, so everything look, everything has a purpose and something that you can learn from and something active that you can really change and learn, so for example, I want to sound like a big narcissist, which I can't help myself. , but I had a stroke, it's just easier to deal with personal examples, yeah, within my own body and I know what it's like, you know, the worst thing that could happen to you, it's not my fault, but maybe it is it was.

I tried too hard maybe I was working too hard maybe I was going to die another way and the stroke was a way to save my life maybe the fact that I can't walk very well is teaching me something about it that I want to write a book about. the sublime. It's a book I've wanted to write for 20 years, but I kept putting it off and my original idea was to fly to Madagascar and hang out with lemurs in the forest. I went to Tierra del Fuego to swim with dolphins and now I'm writing the book and I can't do any of that, all I can do is sit in my office and write, but what it means is that I have to extract the sublime. like a hot B draws honey from everyday things I have to see the sublime in my caps in my wife in what I see outside and I think the little things I can get and it's make a better book because most people don't have the money to fly from Madagascar.

They are in circumstances not like mine, but maybe somewhat similar, they are a little trapped, they are a little imprisoned, so I have to see it, it was a blessing in disguise, it taught me something and when I think that way it is incredible. It's an incredible therapy because it gets me out of my own self-pity and my own misery. It makes me realize that I can learn from anything, especially bad circumstances. Bad things are the best education that could happen to you. I suppose that? We have another choice, Robert, because if we are not, we become victims of life as if life is happening and we are only recipients of what life is giving us.

And you know, I approach Edith, anxious about this. I show before one of the most powerful conversations I've ever had she was in Auschwitz for many years but the Forgiveness The Compassion with which she speaks the things she has learned from that experience and how she is so loving forgiving uh beautiful beautiful 93 94 now I believe that your old lady has taught me a lot. I think if she can learn from that, I can learn from these little things, these relatively small things in my life. It gives us a sense of autonomy and, again, I think that's a big theme in all of your work is to give us that sense of personal autonomy.

Know? If life just happens to you? Are you somehow able to get involved and be responsible for how your life develops? Yes, it is very powerful, I think. of Víctor Franco, yes, who wrote "Man's Search for Meaning", who was in Auschwitz, he was in concentration camps for several years and he, you know, obviously, that is the worst thing that can happen to a human being, You have practically no control over it, it's not your fault. At least, but he observed in those horrible circumstances that some people did better than others and he created a whole philosophy around this, what he called logotherapy and he wrote a book about the people who did better, they were the ones who they had meaning in their lives, they had a purpose I have to go through Auschwitz this horrible experience because I need to write a book I need to create a work of art I need to be there for my children my parents etc etc I have a purpose for living it will make me deal with this terrible circumstance in a better way, and he ended up writing a book about it, so you know, sometimes things happen that you can't control, that's the worst thing, but if you look at it, what is the meaning, what is the purpose behind it.

What can I use to get out of this situation? It is immensely enlightening and therapeutic at the same time. Yes, thanks Robert. I think what you've put out into the world for over two decades is pretty incredible. You've clearly influenced how. many people around the world think about their lives, the actions they take, there is no doubt that you have had a significant influence on many people around the world. I want to recognize him for that and he clearly has that drive to keep writing, to keep researching. keep exploring. I'm really looking forward to reading your next book, which I know you're working hard on right now, so take care of yourself while you're on tour, you know, make sure you take it easy, Robert, this podcast is called feel better.

We live longer when we feel better about ourselves We get more out of our lives For people who are struggling right now For people who feel stuck They want to make a change but don't know where to start Do you have any better words for them? Well the thing is you know change doesn't happen from within unless you're highly motivated so I have a chapter in one of my books that I call the death ground strategy when you feel like your back is against the wall when Everything is against you that you either get out of this or you are going to die, you summon all your energy, all your spirit, you have a sense of urgency, a sense of desperation, when you are in that state of mind that a human being can achieve.

Absolute miracles and history has shown that it's okay, then the worst situation is feeling miserable, unhappy, feeling stuck in what you're doing but you don't have the energy to change yourself, you try different things but you're a bit half-assed about it. you meddle here for a few weeks you consider changing your career maybe you start thinking about some new skills but you're not emotionally deeply invested in what you're trying to change right, you're trying to go both ways, you're trying to have it easy and trying to get something you want, but nothing in life is easy and if it is, you have to have that intense urge of emotional energy welling up from within you to say damn, I don't want to live like that anymore, okay, and you have to work at it. that feeling, I'm afraid, so if you're not satisfied with your job, go through a process and move on, it's if you're 25 or 26, it's easy because you go, oh well, I have time.

Things will change, but leave that and continue for five more years. I'm 30 and I'm not even going to be there. unhappier and maybe you're going to start I'm going to pick up some bad habits I could get addicted you know life will go by fast you have to tell yourself that time is of the essence you have less than you think you could Dying tomorrow won't be easy so You have to have energy, motivation and enthusiasm to make the change, so don't tell yourself, don't give yourself a way out, well, maybe this job maybe I can be okay with it.

I could just you know, I'll figure it out, I'll read some books, I'll go home, I'll get on the Internet, okay, I'll deal with it because I don't want to deal with the alternative that you have. Confront it if you're really unhappy, maybe you're not really unhappy, maybe you're just whining and you think you want something better, but you don't really know what you want, but you have to get to a point where either I do this. change or something bad is going to happen right and then tell yourself I don't have all this time I want to make a career change it's important for me I'm 26 years old but if youth passes very quickly that's fine, what do I need? to do it right instead of wasting time I have to go away and I have to learn a new set of skills I have to go back to school I have to spend all my free time not as much as I can with a plan for how I'm going to escape this corner I'm in and I'm going to get out of it, I'm going to get out of it with energy and motivation and then if you even think about it for one day if you go through the process I'm telling you I don't have time I can't wait a few more years for you This happens I have to make a change I have to like taking steps and you start writing them down, you will make a change within yourself, you will begin to feel the difference, you will begin to feel that the energy arises correctly and I have many examples in my books of people who find themselves in possible situations and come out. of them because they go through that process, um, and then it's your level of desire and energy that's going to get you out of your rut and sometimes you have to feel desperate and urgent to really get the energy you need, so, my, my The lesson for you is that you can't, it just won't happen, you have to create it, sometimes you have to go through a process where you have to think that time is short.

I'll be 40 at some point, where do I want? be when I'm 40. you want to be where I am I don't want to be doing something I love I want to make some money I want to be comfortable I want to be in a relationship I don't want what I have now I have to hurry I have to hurry I have to have that energy that it's for me to know what I know about human nature that's for me the most important lesson I would give people Robert Greene thank you well you're welcome thank you you really enjoyed it if that conversation resonated with you here's another incredibly powerful one that I really think you are going to enjoy give it a click if you really went to the happiness gym several times a week you will really have a The happier life and the happiness gym are very simple, it is a set of skills that you must practice.