Watch These 39 Minutes To Turn Anxiety Into Unshakable Confidence

0:00This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook. Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look.

0:44Try it, style it, make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Crocs store today. Robert Green just sat down with me to share the tools you need to master yourself, seduce anyone, and build unshakable confidence. If you want to have confidence in life, it has to be built on something real. Most people feel stuck, trapped by fear, self-doubt, or a system that conditions them to play small. The problem is nobody teaches this, nobody gives it to you. So our school system is completely ass-backwards.

1:22In this episode, you'll learn how to transform anxiety into confidence and become a powerful individual that commands respect. We'll cover five fundamental steps. Firstly, how to master yourself. Secondly, how to understand human nature. Thirdly, how to build confidence. Fourth, learning by doing. And finally, how to reinvent yourself. So the first and most important step is mastering yourself before anything else. But the problem in mastering yourself is a lot of it has to do with gaining discipline. If you just go out in the world without any sense of what other people are like, of what their needs are, Are you just going to say stupid things?

1:56You're going to offend people. So you have to understand the social game and how to master your appearance and how to make people like you in some way. Right. But the other thing is you want to gain a sense of discipline, self-discipline. It's no good if people tell you to do things, if people tell you to work, if they force you to do this A, B and C. It has to come from within. You have to have initiative. You have to be motivated to do things. And what I've learned over the course of writing my seven books and through the course of my whole life is that you master yourself through learning, through learning something that you love that interests you.

2:32That's how you develop discipline. So if you're studying things, if you're entering a career that doesn't suit you, that you don't really love, that isn't really your dream, then it's going to be very hard for you to master yourself. It's going to be very hard to gain that discipline. You're going to be tuning out. You're going to be distracted. You're going to be on your phone too much. You're not going to be focusing deeply, which is how you master yourself. To me, the key to life, the key to everything, the key to success is figuring out what you love. You know, you got to first figure out, I call it your life's task, what you were born to create in this world.

3:05Everybody is born as an individual. There's something very unique about you. And I mean every single person out there. I don't just mean people who have special talents. Everybody has this power within them. Everybody is unique in some way in their DNA and how they were raised in their early encounters in life. And the trick in life is bringing out your uniqueness, bringing out what makes you weird, what makes you strange, what makes you different. And leaning into it and creating a business, writing a book, going into some field that reflects that uniqueness. If you discover what that is, when you're hopefully, when you're in your early 20s, more or less, then you're going to learn at a much faster rate than if you parents tell you to go to law school and you go to law school, but it doesn't really connect with you and you're tuning it out and you're not really learning.

3:54But if you find something that you love, you're going to learn at a very fast rate. And as you learn, as you develop skills, as things improve in your brain, you're going to be gaining discipline. You're going to be mastering yourself because I believe that you master yourself in what you actually make and what you create. I only became who I am through writing my books. It's writing my books that changed me. It has made me a different person. Your work is going to make you a different person. If it's something that you love, if it's something that excites you. So the key to everything in life is making that choice early on in your early twenties about what you were destined to create, what really suits you, what fits, what meshes with your uniqueness.

4:34Once you discover that, the whole game kind of opens up to you and everything will start to make sense. Now, of course, the main question is that people ask me is, how do I find that? I think a lot of young people today are sometimes afraid to be different. Especially in school, you're not encouraged to be different. If you stand out, you get teased. I mean, you know, people like maybe dress differently and stuff, but truly being unique in your work, in your ideas, in your thinking, in what you love, is something that a lot of people are afraid of. And if you look at anybody who's successful in music, for instance, they're all unique.

5:10There's nobody else like them. I mean, back in my day, I was a big David Bowie fan. There's nobody like David Bowie, right? These are people that understood their uniqueness. They weren't afraid of it. They embraced it and they used it. Okay, so that's extremely important. So the question is that I get asked a lot is, Robert, I don't know what my life's task is. I like A, B, C, D, E, F. I'm like at a supermarket and I can just choose all these different goodies and candies and things, but I can't figure out what's the one thing that I really made to create in this world. And the problem is, because this goes back to mastering yourself first, is you're impatient.

5:47People today, everybody who's young, I was like this when I was young. You're impatient. You want things right now. You want an answer. You want Robert Greene to tell you, this is what you were meant to do. This is how you find your life's task. ABC, I give you these clues and you're just going to find it like on an Easter egg hunt or something. It doesn't work like that. You have to be patient in this world. Figuring out who I am, figuring out what I love, figuring out what I was meant to do, it's going to take months. It could take years. You have to be patient. You have to be open and willing.

6:16It's an adventure. It's a journey that you're on. So I say, all right, let's just first start on that thing that I'm not going to give you an answer right away. You have to be patient. And then it's a matter of going into yourself and being introspective, which is an incredibly important skill to have in life, to be able to withdraw from the group, withdraw from your phone, withdraw from your friends, be alone, listen to yourself and write things down in a journal and go, these are my thoughts. These are what I like. This is what I love. This is what I hate. when I was five years old. I really, really loved this activity, this endeavor.

6:53And then I kind of lost track of that and I forgot about it. You're going to be going deeply, deeply, deeply into yourself, not listening to what all your friends are saying, not listening to what people on Instagram are saying, just yourself, your voice. You have a voice inside your head that speaks to you about what you love, but you're hearing all these other voices from other people. Get rid of all those voices and listen to yourself. And when you go through that, something will happen. A click will happen. You'll go, hmm, I actually am really attracted to science. You know, I was forced to go in this other direction, but I'm really interested in this.

7:28I have a kind of a logical brain. This is what I was meant to do. It could be anything. I don't know what it is. And I tell people often when you were very young, when you were eight or seven, you actually knew it, but you lost it. And so it's a process. It's like, it's like, it's like a dig. We're digging in the ground and we're going back into your childhood and we're figuring out what it is that makes you unique and what you were meant to accomplish. I think to follow your point, like a lot of people aren't asking themselves what their factory setting is. And they're not saying to themselves, what is it I enjoy doing?

7:55And then maybe get really good at that. Your point, mastery, right? I mean, the problem is nobody teaches this. Nobody gives it to you. You know, when you go to school, when you're young they force you to do algebra math sciences english doesn't suit you you get turned off by learning right yeah and then that that haunts you the rest of your life yeah but i can tell you learning is actually the most exciting thing in the world it's almost as exciting as sex i know you don't believe that but it is wow big statement that's a big statement well i love business so much i know exactly learning how to do business i love it so much i know that learning feeling is nothing like it but why aren't people tapping into this i think because in school it's all just it's just like a buffet you just have to learn all these different things you're not focusing on that one thing that really excites you and school isn't geared towards finding those things right is it like that like if you get a d in something they make you do it more because people are stupid because people are illogical because our education system is a bureaucracy it's an organization it's the madness of groups when groups organ build something it's inevitably irrational and stupid.

9:00So our school system is completely ass backwards. If you're never encouraged to go in the direction that excites you, then for the rest of your life, you're going to be haunted by this feeling of, oh, learning is boring. Learning is tedious. I'd rather do a video game. I'd rather watch online porn. That's much more fun. Let me tell you a story here. My parents wanted me to be very successful. They were very ambitious, right? And they were kind of pushed me to go to law school, to medical school. And I was a literature person, right? I was just into books and learning and reading and novels. And I wanted to be a writer.

9:33And I wandered through life, my 20s. As I've told him many interviews, I had 50 different jobs. By the time I'm in my mid-30s, you could definitely say that Robert Greene was kind of a loser. I never made money, really good money. I went from job to job to job to job. You know, I wasn't a complete failure, but I had not figured anything out. My parents were really getting worried about me. Because they didn't force me to do these things. And then I discovered what I love. I found writing these kinds of books that I wrote. I was never interested in money. I was interested in doing what I loved.

10:05And now I've made more money than my father ever made in his entire life. I made more money than I ever would have made if I had gone to law school or med school. Because I pursued what genuinely excited and fascinated me. Delayed gratification you're partly talking about there, aren't you? So you just followed the dream. And then eventually all the wealth comes, whatever wealth is these days anyway. So what do we need to know about human nature? People are tricky. People are not easy. Learning a math problem or coding, that's kind of easy and simple and linear. People are not linear. People are weird.

10:36They're difficult. They never say what they really think about you. Robert, I love your book. It's wonderful. But really, they're thinking, God, what a sellout. I don't really know. You never know what they're thinking. You never know what they're up to. It's tricky. It's deceptive. And it can drive you crazy. And if you enter the world 22, 23, they never teach you these things. And you enter the work world and it's all political and people have their egos and they're all trying to get this or that. Or you can take it personally and get very upset and you can get emotional and it can ruin your life.

11:04So I want you to think of understanding people as a skill as necessary as learning business, as learning coding, as learning algorithms, learning anything in life. And the only way you're going to learn about people is by interacting. with them. If you're too virtual, if you're doing everything on your phone, you're not interacting with people, you're not going out and meeting them, you're not being social, that skill will atrophy. It's like a muscle you have to develop. And so you have to get to this point where I really want to understand people. I want to read them. I want to be able to know what's going on and not be so lost.

11:42So the first thing is to realize, to get down on your hands and knees and go, I don't understand people. They're mystery to me. They cause me problems. Now you can take the next step. And the next step is you have to observe people. And the problem that most of us face is, quite honestly, we're more interested in ourselves than we are in other people. I make the point in my book, Human Nature, Laws of Human Nature, that we are all self-centered. We are all narcissists to some extent. We want to hear about ourselves. We love it when people talk about us. Other people, we don't think they're as interesting as us, but actually other people are much more interesting than you are.

12:20Your thoughts are going round and round in a circle, the same boring idea. People are weird. They're strange. They have different experiences. They come from different cultures. Feel like you want to get inside people. You want to understand their stories. You're interested in them. And then use your imagination. And then be very attentive to people's nonverbal cues. But the most important thing about understanding human nature is that appearances don't matter. People create the appearance that they want you to see. So don't take the appearance people present to you at face value. Look behind the mask.

12:54I think it's such an underrated point that people don't understand how... I ask people in the street what their dream is. The answers blow my mind. Like, I just find it so fascinating as well what's going on behind the eyes, you know? Like, there's so much more. and people do judge, not by how people look, but by the jobs that they're doing. So we asked this guy who was in the bin what his dream is and he had this most amazing dream. What do you mean in the bin? He was in the bin taking something out of the bin to eat. He was like homeless. We couldn't tell what he was actually doing but he was in the bin and you would normally walk past this person maybe with a little bit of fear and then we actually asked him what his dream was and his dream was incredible.

13:26Back to your point, I think we do judge a book by its cover. But a lot of people will be listening to this thinking, well, okay, so again, back to themselves. Right, I can go ask people what they're about and I can copy Simon's What's your dream? But how do I know, you know, how do I help? How does that help me? How do you think that helps people? Well, geez, I mean, you know, as I said, you're a social animal. So at some point, however old you are, you're going to be, you're going to get a job. You're going to be dealing with five, six, 20, 100, 200 strangers, right? And if you don't understand them, if you're not interested in them, if you don't know what's really going on in their mind, you're going to be doing stupid things.

14:00You're going to be making mistakes. You don't realize that everyone has an ego and that you're going to be stepping on their toes and making them upset. Your life is going to be miserable if you don't take the time to try and understand people on a deeper level. And once you do try and understand them, once you understand that people present a front that's not reality, then you kick into another gear and you go, I'm going to try and figure them out. Now, you can't always figure people out. They're complex. I don't really know what's going on in your mind right now. I can't read it. But I can sense your mood.

14:31I can sense how you feel. I don't know your thoughts, but I can sense if you're kind of hostile, if you're open and interested. So you want to develop this interest in other people. You want to see it as a skill and you want to observe them. And in my book, Laws of Human Nature, I explain 18 kind of facets, traits that humans have had for thousands of years. And I kind of take you through it step by step just to give you one example. So I want to take up all the time here. I have a chapter on envy. Envy is an incredibly important thing to understand. Everybody feels it. I feel it. Even Elon Musk feels it.

15:11The most powerful people in the world feel it. It's so ingrained in human nature. What it is, is we're constantly comparing ourselves to other people. That's how our brains work. Our brains work by comparing things. So if I'm on social media and I see people are traveling to Tahiti, they've got these wonderful families, they're married to this beautiful woman. I'm feeling envy, damn it. Even I, I'll feel envy, right? I feel it. You know, Ryan Holiday, you know, Ryan Holiday, my former mentee, he's far more successful than I am. I can feel envy for Ryan. You know, we're all prone to it. And I want to show you where it comes from, how you feel it, how you can overcome that feeling and turn it into something productive.

15:51So understanding human nature is also about understanding and identifying toxic people before you let them into your life and they ruin you. One of the things I talk in the book about how to use your envy is if there are people who have things that you wish you had but don't have, then use that as a spur, as something to stimulate you to get what they have, to become successful. I think positive envy, I think envy, a bit like ego, can be powerful if it's a positive thing. Yeah. One aspect of envy is this thing called schadenfreude which means we feel joy when other people have a bad experience right it's an ugly emotion but a lot of people have it yeah i'm sure i've had it in my life i'm sure you've had it i can't think i have actually and i'm being genuine i've done i can't think of a moment where i've enjoyed someone else's misery well i say that i used to have an agency yeah okay i just remember i just remember we go and we beat a big company that said they were going to squash us and we beat them so that's but but it was more like a competition okay well the other side of that, the opposite of schadenfreude would be, I'm using German words, so excuse me, please, but mitfreude, which means having pleasure with other people.

16:58So when other people have success, feel joy about them, force yourself to feel good about them, force yourself to say, that's great, I'm so happy for you. You won't realize how wonderful that feeling is, because it's not natural. It's not natural. If your friends suddenly sell something great, your first instinct is, well why not why not me instead go so drop yourself and just go i'm really truly happy for that other person it's a very wonderful emotion there's two kinds of confidence there's the confidence that's just pure bullshit where you're just kind of presenting a confident front and then there's the confidence that's a quiet confidence that's based on the fact that you know what you're talking about that you have skill that you've had success in life so you don't need to brag.

17:45You don't need to kind of create the show, the performance of confidence. I can very quickly tell the difference when I meet people, what's the difference, you know, who has the real one, who has the fake one. But the main thing that you want is if you want to have confidence in life, it has to be built on something real. If let's say in the realm of seduction, which is one of my books, The Art of Seduction, you know, being confident when you meet a man or a woman is very important, right? That sense of confidence carries over. They feel it and it's very seductive. It's a very powerful, you know, quality.

18:22It's like charisma. If it's just you're trying so hard to feel confident, particularly women, they can see right through it, right? They can see the fakeness in that. But if it's built on the sense of, I feel comfortable, I've been successful before with other relationships, with seductions, if you want, it's based on something real. It feels real. Take it out of that if it's like in your business world, you're not going to have confidence until you actually create something. But it can come in small pieces. Like in the first three months of this process, you find yourself learning skills. Okay, I'm going to start a business, right?

19:01I have a business in my mind. It's been my dream, right? Okay. I can't start right now because I don't have the funds. I don't have the money. Although you always do have the funds. You should start tomorrow anyway. But say I don't. I'm going to spend the next few months learning the first steps of the process. That already will build confidence that you're doing something, that you're not just living in your dreams and imagining it. So, okay, I'm going to learn. I'm going to go online or I'm going to take a class. I'm going to learn what I need to do to get the funding to start my business. Already in those three months, you have a slight little foundation of confidence, right?

19:35It's based on something real. How you go out and you do something. You try and get that funding, okay? You fail. You don't get what you want. You're a little bit frustrated. Okay. Something didn't go right. I need to learn some more. You don't give up. Giving up will screw all this whole process up. Yeah, never give up. I think that's an important point. Okay. All right. So it didn't work. I'm going to try again. All right. So you go back to square one. You read more. You think about it. And then you try again. And now you get it. Whoa, your confidence level is starting to rise, right? You don't want it to go from here to here because that's grandiosity.

20:11That's not going to go anywhere. Confidence must be built step by step, by action, by success, by success, by success. So you're here. Now you're here. Wow, I got the funding. Now you're starting a business. Starting a business is hell. It's so complicated. It's so difficult. It's not going to be as easy as you thought. So you don't give up. You keep trying. And as you get any kind of success, you move on to that next level. On and on and on, you build it. Then, of course, inevitably in life, you're going to have failure. You're going to fall down, right? Your confidence is going to waver. But in the back of your mind, you will always have that memory of how you pushed past it, how you didn't give up, how you learned, how you got past the first failure.

20:50And it'll still give you a level of confidence that you can always fall back on. But the main point is it has to be built slowly on things that are real, on things that you do. And if you do, it's confidence that will last you through your whole life. I think it's the best explanation I've ever heard of like, it's good to fail. Because if you fail, you learn something. You go again and again until you learn something. And then you get the confidence because you fail so many times. You've got all the knowledge now to not fail. Well, failure is the entrepreneur's school where you learn. I have the story in Mastery of Henry Ford, who started Ford Motor Company.

21:24You think your business is hard to start? Try starting an automobile company in the 1890s. The amount of capital necessary for starting it was insane. He didn't even have the trademark for the car at the time. No. So we had an idea about how he was going to do it, but his first company failed completely. He's going to start his second company. And everybody in the business goes, Henry Ford's a failure. We're not going to give you money. Once you fail in this business, you're gone. He somehow conned somebody into giving him money. He tried a second time. It was a disaster. It was even worse, an even bigger failure.

21:57right now he's totally ruined no one will ever go near him he found some some kind of naive scottish investor he got the money from this guy and now he understood exactly what he needed to do he understood why he failed he understood he had to create a factory system that had a certain kind of scale to it he understood what the customer was he learned so many lessons that his third one was a huge, he said, became Ford Motor Company and became the factory system. He said, I only learned how to be so successful through all of my failures. It's hard to learn things when everything's just an idea, when it's just abstract.

22:34We're concrete people, we're animals, we live in our bodies, right? And so if you're always in your head, it's really hard to learn. But if you're doing it, you learn so much faster. So if you want to start a business, you can spend five years putzing around oh i've got to get better at this i've got to go to business school i've got to read this book you don't start the damn thing you know this business school stuff drives me absolutely crazy to be honest because there's kids getting into serious debt spending four years learning business yeah just start a business you'll learn sales quite quickly because you've got no choice yeah so so what's happened and what can people do to kind of fight back because they'll be people be listening to this and they'll be saying right for example we're helping a lady who wants to be graphic designer.

23:16She was going to go to UCLA for four years, costing us US$60 ,000 a year. She's going to get into... UCLA? Is that expensive? Yeah. Well, she's out of state. So out of state, plus her cost of accommodation. So it's going to cost her US$60 ,000 a year. So US$240 ,000 and four years of her life to learn graphic design. By doing it, surely that's logical. I put this video up about this. People tell me, no, she should go and learn. She should go to UCLA. you know what's happened that that's the default everyone believes is the way to do things one of the people that i interviewed in mastery is a man named uh named just suddenly paul graham sorry you know why combination yes yeah big fan yeah in the 70s he was into he was a hacker early on the computer era he learned hacking when he was very young he went and studied ai at like mit some university like that and then he decided that he wanted to be a painter and he left school and he went to Italy and he studied to become a painter.

24:13And then one day he was in New York in the loft trying to paint. He had no money. And he heard an ad on the radio that the internet, which was just starting out, would be where people would buy things. But nobody thought of that. He goes, with my skill in coding and my design skills, I'm going to create that. He created it. He sold it to Yahoo for 5 million. And he went on from there. He started Y Combinator. And Y Combinator is like a school for entrepreneurs, right? And the idea is we'll teach you how to start your business and then we'll own a share of it. Okay. But because he understood the process of learning by doing, he created his own business by just simply doing it by hearing an ad on the radio and just having the cojones to go out there and do it.

25:01And so his, his school, his incubator school was based on the idea that you're going to come to Mountain View or wherever it was, Palo Alto, and you're going to build your business right there in the school. You know, you're not going to study any kind of books or anything. You're going to build your business. We're going to watch you build it. And if it's good, then, you know, we'll fund it for you and everything like that. So he understood learning by doing, right? And he would get, because it was so successful and and it started so many businesses that way airbnb was started in that incubator for those that don't know so it's a very sam altman who we all heard of he he came from that he was running my coordinator for he was running it but he also came through it yeah he would get 5 000 applications every year for people who wanted to be in in the incubator school and as soon as he got the sheet and said at yale university threw it in the trash as he got one and said i went to you know this business school he threw it in the trash then there would be somebody who just was a kid somewhere who had like done his own kind of computer work on his own.