How To Turn Your Flaws Into Assets | Robert Greene

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0:36Confront your dark side and make it work for you as opposed to repressing it. So everybody has a dark side. I don't care if you're Mahatma Gandhi or whomever. You have a dark side, right? It comes out in ways that you're not even aware of. And I explain in the book where our dark side originates from. And, you know, as a child, we had a lot of powerful emotions that we couldn't control. We'd be kind of mean and aggressive, but also we'd be very loving, which is true as well. We'd be a full range of things. And then you learn as you get older, Robert, you can't hit people in school. Stop that. Don't be like that.

1:15Don't play those practical jokes. It's bad. People don't like it. And you get older and older and you start repressing those kind of feelings that are very natural to you, right? Because we all have aggressive impulses. We love our parents, but there's also a side of us that doesn't like them. We resent them. It's natural. But we have to repress all that because we have to be good social animals. We have to be good little kids. We have to be little angels at school. We have to be angels at work. I've got to repress all that. I've got to be this perfect person. I have to be someone who pleases, who's very nice, blah, blah, blah.

1:49And then when you're 28, you start becoming addicted to alcohol and you don't know why. you start getting really angry, you have anger issues you yell at people, you don't know why you're like a 45 year old person with a very steady profession you leave your wife and you run off with a 19 year old, you know destroying everything that you've built the dark side has come out because you've repressed it instead of dealing with it the idea was you need to understand your dark side confront it and make it work for you and I have a dark side what is my dark side? And, you know, I had to analyze it and deal with it and think about it and think about how any success I've had in life is because I managed to use those dark emotions in my work and channel them because they have tremendous energy to them.

2:42They power you forward. So I had anger coming out of working in Hollywood. I kind of hated the environment. I hated people's hypocrisy. I hated all the sycophancy and all that. I was really angry, but I didn't let the anger turn inward. I channeled it into the 48 laws of power. So I used my dark side. And I really liked that law because it showed me that I'm a victim of this, but I also unconsciously learned how to use what I'm writing about. So I kind of drew on my own experience. Yeah. Do you think anger, resentment, frustration is a greater power to create over love? or if we came from a place of love, could it be that much more powerful, our creation?

3:27Well, that's a great question and it really depends on who you are. Sometimes those dark energies have more kind of power behind them. They impel you. They do. And love, it just kind of melts. Love doesn't necessarily make you want to write a book, although it can. But for me personally, I'm speaking from personal experience, it wasn't love that made me want to write a book. It was anger and bitterness. And the reason why that happens is people in our day-to-day life are so repressed. We have to be so politically correct. We have to be so pleasant and smiling, etc. That when your work expresses anger or expresses pain, people love it.

4:16They're drawn to it because finally someone's expressing what I'm feeling, but no one else is talking about. You know, the person that I think a lot about in the dark side is Kobe Bryant. I was going to talk to him about it if I could have. He confessed this. He had a lot of dark energy. He had a lot of anger. And he was so competitive. He wanted to crush you on the basketball court. And he spoke of it in those terms. It wasn't like a friendly little basketball game. This was war. But like Michael Jordan, he transmitted, he channeled this energy into being a good teammate and to just defeating the other team, working as a good player, a colleague with his teammates.

4:59But he learned to channel it. Early on, it kind of destroyed him a little bit. It kind of ruined his relationship with Shaq in a way. But then he learned that that dark, that anger, etc., was the source of his power. and how you use that dark energy and transform it into something positive.

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6:13Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

6:29Thank you.