Google+ Hangout with Robert Greene | How to Achieve Mastery | Big Think Mentor

This is part of Big Think's lifelong learning channel on YouTube. I'm Jason Gotts. I'm an editor and curriculum developer here at Big Think. And today we have the pleasure of talking with Robert Greene, the author of multiple international best-selling books including The 48 Laws of Power. His most recent book, Mastery, and his Big Think Mentor Workshop on How to Achieve Mastery teaches strategy for finding your life's work and then a mentor who can help you master it.

Welcome, Robert.

Thank you for having me, Jason, my pleasure. And I would also like to welcome our mentor members, members of our mentor community, Leah Artis and Pollius Gedrikis.

Gedrikis.

Gedrikis, yes. Okay, sorry. Okay, so I'd like to begin with Leah. She had some questions for Robert about the videos on Mentor.

Well, first of all thanks guys for hosting this. This is super awesome. I've been a fan of yours for quite some time, Robert. So it's great to be able to dive into your most recent work with you via Big Think. So thank you, Jason, as well. The first question I kind of want to kick off with starts really at the beginning of the process, figuring out your passion. And you speak to really tapping into whatever you were passionate about as a child. And I think it's interesting because when you're an adult I think it's almost hard to remember who you were as a child depending on what you gravitated towards or whatever. So I wanted to see if there were any other indicators as an adult, say that if you can't remember what your initial passions were, that can help you figure out what you should be, you know, really exploring for what you want to master?

Well, it's a great question. The thing is it's always really important to be able to tap into your childhood even if it seems difficult. The problem people have nowadays is we're so instant oriented that the idea that it could take a few weeks or months of using a journal or a therapist or talking with someone just seems outrageous. Like I have to know this instantly who I was when I was six years old or this inclination but it's a process. And it's a hugely important process because as you move through life you constantly need to return to that sense of who you are so you can judge, okay, this crisis that I'm facing, is it really important? Does it really impinge upon who I am? Do I need to take this sort of possible crap job or this job that offers a lot of money but isn't necessarily who I am? Knowing who you are is such an important skill in life. Nobody really talks about it like a skill. So I would not try to bypass that process of going into your childhood and figuring out who you are.

When I do consulting with people now and then, I'm doing a bit less of it these days, we spend several days to weeks trying to go back and remember certain things. There's traces there, it's not completely buried. But then there's also signs of stuff in the present. So there's going to be subjects and activities that still elicit that kind of childlike excitement in you. If you aren't experiencing that with any subject, then that's kind of sad or a little bit troubling. But there are people like that, but there's still going to be things where you open the newspaper, you get online, people bring up a conversation and your eyes light up and you want to hear about it, you want to read about it. I know for instance for me there are certain subjects that really get me going, particularly about early humans. When I look in the newspaper and I see an article like that, there's going to be something the same for you.

Also, you want to look at things that you hate, that repulse you about the world or jobs that you really disliked. You want to think about what is it that I disliked about it. You want to get in touch with who you are, that's why I'm telling you to go into the childhood thing. Because who you are a lot of the time is a reflection -- you think you know it but it's actually a reflection of what other people have told you. Your parents, your friends, you don't really know who you are. But when you were young, when you were six, seven, eight years old, the fact that you were naturally drawn to music, to sound, to dancing, to physical activity, it's before anybody infected you with their ideas about who you should be. And that's why it's so important to go back into that process.

Awesome, thanks.

You're welcome.

Okay. Leah, did you have other questions that she wanted to ask Robert?

I thought we would just continue through each person's questions and then...

Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's an interesting trend, especially in America, kind of happening with the way the workforce is shifting, especially kind of in the younger generations with more people gravitating towards entrepreneurship. I think that might almost be a rejection, perhaps, so to speak, of those jobs that people don't necessarily love to be in, as we were just kind of speaking to. But I think there's an interesting thought that kind of mastery your work, you most recently done, especially the book. It's potentially a strong genesis for debate and the question is, do you think that everyone is truly destined for mastery? You know, because you can just jump in, yeah.

Well, I address that question in a talk recently because a lot of journalists will ask me that. And when they ask me that, there's a hint in there that maybe I'm being cynical, that I really don't believe it. That maybe I'm just doing it to sell books, but I really actually sincerely believe it. I believe very deeply -- it's not a belief; it's a fact that everybody is born with that uniqueness that I talk about in the book. It's a biological neurological fact. And it gets obscured over the years as you start listening to other people and you go through this alienating process, but deep down inside there's something extremely unique about you.

There is a famous psychologist from the '60s; he's not so popular anymore, named Abraham Maslow. And he had a pyramid of values, and he maintained that the ultimate value for a human being is to feel that they're fulfilling themselves, that they have creative potential, and they're able to realize that potential. So who am I or who is anybody else to say that there are only some people who are destined for mastery? You can't go inside their heads; you can see who they are. There's the great example in the book I have I love of Martha Graham, who was one of the greatest masters of all time. Started a whole new genre of dance and she said, "You should never ever tell somebody that they're not talented. Talent is a completely irrelevant factor for success in life. It's how much you love what you're doing and how much energy you put into it and then the talent will come. You have natural gifts that can be developed."

So she's saying that, I think she said it because when she was younger people were putting her down and thought that she had no potential as a dancer. And here she became one of the greatest dancers ever. I think it's ridiculous for anybody to be able to say, oh only a few people, these people here, they're the ones destined for mastery. And I deliberately chose Temple Grandin to profile in Mastery, for those who don't know her, she's a woman born with autism who basically at the age of two or three was going to be hospitalized for the rest of her life. She couldn't learn language, etc. And she's become that incredible scientist on animal behavior and on the subject of autism itself. If someone born with autism can become a master, then I think we can say everybody is destined for it.

Awesome.

Yeah, the point I was going to make from a lot of the pushback perhaps that even a journalist give you is if you look at societal roles and the way our government and economic systems and whatnot are structured. Everybody can be a master in their own way, but we need people to help do the jobs that aren't necessarily glamorous and take a lot of love and time and insight. So I think that's partially what's interesting, I think.

Yes. Technology is replacing a lot of those extremely unglamorous jobs. Some of that's good, some of that's bad. But then who are you going to say, oh this person growing up in this bad neighborhood should be one of those people doing those terrible jobs? Why can't you say that everybody should explore this process? There will always be people in a culture who don't want to go through the process for whatever reason. They don't feel that drive, they don't feel the need for it, or they want a comfortable paycheck. There will always be people who do that. I just don't want to be the one to say who you are. That's your own personal choice in life.

Absolutely. A bit of a personal question for you is your journey as an author and kind of along those subject lines that you've really pursued and have been known for started from your own kind of rejection of corporate roles or the alienating work world. Where do you or what do you think that you have mastered along the way? Or where do you think that you have tapped into who you are meant to be and what do you think that is besides an author?

Well, besides an author I don't think I've mastered anything really. I don't even know if I mastered writing, but if I didn't have writing -- I gave a talk recently, a TED talk in London a couple of weeks ago; it will be online soon. And I explained I don't usually talk about myself in that way but I explained my own weird journey where basically up to the age of 36 I had nothing really. I had tried 50 different jobs, more than actually. But the point of my story that I told to the TED audience was during those years, the wandering trying all different jobs, journalism, Hollywood, construction work, working in a hotel, teaching English, etc., I kept writing, I kept searching, I kept saying I want to try this. It didn't work. All right, I'll write a novel; that didn't work; I'm going to write a play; that didn't work. I tried jobs where I would have weird experiences in life. I worked in a detective agency and that gave me ideas about people but didn't lead to the novel I thought it would lead to.

And then when I got the opportunity to write a book suddenly everything that I have done in the past now had value. So all of those terrible crap jobs that I had done in my life had exposed me to so many different kinds of people in so many different cultures that I had, I think, an understanding of psychology that I wouldn't have had if I just spent my whole life working at Time Magazine. All of the research that I have done for television to Hollywood taught me how to find the stories in libraries that I could use for the book. All of my reading of history gave me the storehouse of stories I could use for The 48 Laws of Power. So, I can't say that I've mastered anything besides writing. But the fact that I love writing and I never gave up and I tried ten different ways of approaching it gave me all of these different skills that I can use to write a book.

And I tell people, I'm not trying to use myself as a paradigm, but I tell people that that's sort of where the future lies. You try different things out knowing more or less who you are and what you want to explore. And in doing that and listening to who you are and saying I don't like this, I do like that, you're going to develop a series of five or six or seven real important skills that you'll be able to combine in a business, in an art form, in science that will make you, you know, a master. It will make you have a unique set of skills that will make you irreplaceable. You won't be that person who's 38 years old who will then be downsized because they can get rid of you and replace you with someone cheaper and younger. You'll have something extremely unique and creative and you can't be replaced.

So I don't remember your question anymore. I hope I answered it.

Absolutely.

Okay. And that was wonderful. And I think at this point we'll move on to Pollius's questions just in the interest of time. So go ahead, Pollius.

Okay. And really interesting response. I found it much similar in my own path, for example. So I was wondering, in the workshop you talked a lot about finding a niche, you know, a place where you can become a master of it. So I wanted to know, for example, how do you find such a niche? When do you know that it's time to move on to another one? Are there any indications that it's going well or that it's not going well or something like that?

Well, every person is different and it's more of a feeling. That's why I talked about sort of getting in touch with yourself. I know it sounds kind of new agey but it's actually really important. So I know for instance I was working in journalism for three or four years, that's probably the longest I've ever tried at one particular job. And I just didn't feel right. I felt like I was writing articles and I liked writing but they were only -- people would read it for a week and then it disappeared. And the impermanence of it bugged me. I wanted to write something that people would read for weeks or months or years. And that feeling meant I had to look to the future and say can I do this for the next five or ten years? That's the kind of process I have to go through. Can you imagine yourself working at this very narrow position all the way up till the future? You want to have like possibilities. Possibilities are the greatest thing in life.

So by the time that man, I met that man who offered me the idea of the possibility of writing a book, I now had all of this experience that I could create something interesting. You want to have that possibility; if an opportunity comes to you in this direction over here, over here, that you can take it and you have skills to exploit it. If you stay at that one little funnel job for three, four, five, six years you're not going to have that richness of possibilities as you get older. You're not going to be 25 or 26 your whole life; you're going to be 40 at some point. And maybe thinking ahead how I feel at 40 still doing this job as a writer on a very narrow field? Those are kind of the thoughts that you go through.

As well as there's a difference. There are people out there who are just restless and nothing satisfies them. So every six months they feel compelled to try something new. That's a problem; that's a psychological problem. I'm not talking about changing jobs just for the sake of it. It has to come from somewhere deep where you know that you're meant to do something interesting and this isn't it. As opposed to, I'm bored; let's try something new. So there's a difference there. I hope you can see what I'm talking about.

Right, right.

The key is having a sense of self-awareness to know that this is a position that's just not suited to me, as opposed to I'm just somebody that can't devote my energy to one particular thing. And I have a lot of stories in the book of people like myself who wandered through life, like Paul Graham, like Yoky Matsuoka. They try different things and they see, or even Ramachandran the neuroscientist. And they see this isn't working. But suddenly an opportunity comes to them where they realize, oh this is a direction I should head in that seems really promising.

And the difference between a master and someone who isn't is they're willing to experiment and try this new direction and see if it works. So truly it sounds like the advice is to make sure that something that resonates from within yourself? And to be willing to explore, to have an adventurous spirit.

So a lot of people are so addicted to the paycheck that if an opportunity comes to try something different in an avenue that's more entrepreneurial or it's a little more of a risk and they will take it because they're afraid. So it's a matter of knowing who you are and being a little bit bold. When you're younger you can afford to be bolder because you don't necessarily have a family to support and all these other things going on. So I'm really advocating having a kind of an adventurous spirit and to try different things and to see what resonates with you and what doesn't.

Yeah. I mean if you never try you'll never discover.

And then my second question was, you know, we were talking about the whole road to mastery. But then once you achieve mastery I was curious, are there any physiological changes happening in the body maybe in the brain? Because we heard a lot about rewiring for example and things like this.

No.

No?

Well, I'm not a -- you see the thing with the 10,000 hour study, which is brilliant, is that they could demonstrate statistically a change in behavior at 10,000 hours. Now that's not based on anything where you can go inside the brain and literally map the brain and see the change because we haven't got to that point yet. It was just based on the evidence of how many people at 10,000 hours reached this higher level.

Now subsequently people have gone back and theorized what happens to the brain after all of those hours of practice. I'm saying at 20,000 hours, imagine what happened to the brain at 20,000 hours, which is a level that Einstein reached by the time he came to his general theory of relativity. Or Glenn Gould reached by the age in his 20s after he'd been playing the piano for so many years, or Mozart, or all these different people. I can't, I don't have a study. It would be a hard study to do because the number of people who reach that level of 20,000 hours, there's not a huge number. But I'm speculating that something does happen to the brain.

And I describe in Chapter 6 what I think happens to the brain at that point. You look at like a chess master, like a Bobby Fischer or I have the boxing trainer Freddie Roach, you've internalized so many moves, there's so many different patterns in the boxing ring, you've seen so much that you've internalized the game itself and you're now like feeling it. It's like at your fingertips. You have an instant in real time; you're sort of seeing the whole dynamic of the game itself or the battle or the warfare or whatever it is. And it's because so many parts of the brain have become interconnected that you no longer have to think about something, it's there in an instant. I have no study data to prove it. The proof is the power that certain people in history have demonstrated when he reached that 20,000 and let's say even 30,000 hour point.

Yeah. It becomes like second nature basically.

Yeah. I wanted -- so there were two other Mentor subscribers who wanted to join this conversation, and for technical reasons weren't able to. I think I'll ask just one question from each. So Brett Carney wondered can you achieve mastery in more than one field? Or did you encounter examples of people who did that? Or is that simply at odds with the concept of mastery as you intended?

No.

No. Definitely you can achieve mastery in more than one field. What would be interesting to say is could a musician also master baseball? I mean take two things that are totally disconnected. I don't have an example offhand of something like that, which would be pretty remarkable. Normally what you see are people mastering two fields that are somewhat related. A great example from the book is Paul Graham, who has the company Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. It's basically an incubator system for training people how to create a tech startup. And Paul gets a percentage; if their idea turns into a business he gets a percentage of it.

Now he's fabulously wealthy because he's been a hugely successful system. Well, Paul started off as a computer programmer. He was an absolute master of programming. He was a hacker very early on in life. And because of his programming skills he became, he started what became the first Viaweb, which was the first online store application for starting a business online. It was huge in 1995; he made $50 million on that one thing because he was so brilliant at computer engineering. He got bored with it and he went to writing. And he decided to write essays, really incredible essays that build up a huge following for him. Essays about wealth, about entrepreneurship, about philosophy and art, etc., and then finally he fell into this thing called Y Combinator where people kept saying, "Well you're so good at starting this one business can you help us start a business?" And so he decided to create this thing called Y Combinator based on the computer model, which is the more times you try, I'm giving a really bad definition of it, but the more times you try something the greater your chances of finding success at it, finding the right path.

So his model was to bring in, not just as an angel investor ten people a year like most people do, he would try and invest in 300, he would bring in three or four or 500 young people every year in his system. And through doing this with so many different people, he would gain an intensity of knowledge that would make him a master of figuring out what is a solid technology idea in three or four years. So he's a master at business, and entrepreneurship, at computer engineering, perhaps writing, I don't know, but they're all kind of related. He took the model of computer engineering and hacking and applied it to business and entrepreneurship. There are many other examples but what I would be curious, and to answer this person's question would be to find somebody who has mastered two things that -- Howard Gardner has this book on the five frames of intelligence. There's spatial, mechanical, kinetic, etc. To find somebody who has intelligence in different frames, different types of intelligence master that would be an incredible thing.

Maybe like a da Vinci would be the one that come closest to it as someone who's a great artist and is also a great scientist. I don't know, maybe something like that.

Yeah. I'm thinking of the people we call polymaths. And David Foster Wallace, the late David Foster Wallace popped into my mind as someone who is a pretty advanced tennis player and then also quite a brilliant writer and also a fairly accomplished mathematician, I believe also. I don't know whether it would count as mastery in all of those.

I bow to you. I bow to you. You got the perfect example.

Yeah, polymastery... I'm just a fanboy of David Foster Wallace, that's all. He's amazing. I didn't know about the tennis. I mean you're right; somebody like a Benjamin Franklin. Polymaths are a great thing with Benjamin Franklin is a great writer, but he was also a great scientist. He was also a great politician. So yeah, there you go.

Thank you. David Husband was also wanting to join us. And he asks, do you have any suggestions for how a young apprentice can best approach a potential mentor? Or maybe examples from the book of how an apprentice can break the ice with a mentor who's popular, intimidating, somewhat inaccessible?

Well, what I say in the book is mentors aren't as inaccessible as you might think; they have a weak spot. Generally, if you're really high up in your field, there's a loneliness factor where you don't have as many peers and friends and people that you can trust and that you can interact with. So first of all, you should never think that they're as intimidating as they appear because they're not. Most everybody finds the idea of having a mentor, of having a mentee as something potentially deeply satisfying. So you shouldn't be intimidated. Or you should be less intimidated than you imagine.

The second thing is people aren't going to just become your mentor because they love you or because you're good-looking or you got a friendly manner. They're going to go into that relationship because you have something to offer. Now granted, being charming can help, etc., but you have real skills. So I tell people, don't start searching for that important mentor until you have something you feel like you can offer. Because you're going to be really intimidated when you try to talk to them because you know deep down inside you're not ready for this position.

So I have in the book the greatest story of them all is Michael Faraday, the experimental scientist in the 19th century and how he got Humphry Davy to become his mentor, which basically made his career. He had spent eight years teaching himself everything about science to the point where he was so prepared and Humphrey Davy could recognize it that he could now serve as a really valuable mentee or protégé. So be prepared, be ready. If you have your eye set on this person, be ready to take a year or two developing the kind of skills that will interest them in using you.

The third thing is you want to choose a mentor for the right reasons. So just because someone is popular or famous or has a lot of followers on Twitter, that doesn't make them the best choice for you as a mentor. It's almost like it's using your second parent. And you're not going to choose a parent just because they're liked or popular or famous. It has to be an emotional fit. The mentor relationship is an emotional relationship. They see you almost as the child or the son or daughter they never had. You see them as a parent figure that maybe you never had. Because of that emotional connection, you open yourself up to their instruction and they open themselves up to sharing their secrets with you.

So you want to make a choice based on someone who has the right spirit. For instance, in five or ten years, I would like to be like that person. I would like to have that kind of skill set. It's not I want to be that popular, I want to be famous; it's I want to be doing their kind of work. That's the key there. So sometimes you make the wrong choice just because that person who may not be so famous who is in the same field but has an interesting set of skills that match what you're thinking of, that's the better mentor. And I have in the book the example of Yoky Matsuoka who chose Rodney Brooks as her mentor at MIT at the robotics lab because he was a rebel and she's a rebel and she liked his anti-authoritarian attitude and she could identify with it. So here she found the perfect anti-authoritarian mentor to teach her. That's the kind of thing you're looking out for.

So those would be the three main points I would tell him.

Great. So we're coming to the end of our time here. I want to thank Leah for joining us and Pollius and give an extra special thanks to Robert Greene for being with us today.

Thank you.

Thank you guys. And to the audience out there, you've been watching a Big Think Mentor Google Hang Out with Robert Greene. He's the author of Mastery. And you can visit YouTube.com/user/bigthinkmentor, one word, to view Robert's popular video workshop on How to Achieve Mastery in your Life and Work. Thank you so much everyone for being with us today. Thank you. Thank you, Leah, and thank you, Pollius. Great questions, thanks.

Thanks, Robert.

Thanks, Robert.

You're very welcome.