How To Turn Your Flaws Into Assets | Robert Greene EP 255

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10I firmly believe that taking charge of your mindset allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life and unlock your potential. And that's why I'm thrilled to share that my new book is out right now. It's called The Greatness Mindset. In it, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It's everything I've learned in the last decade with the research and the science to help you unlock your mind. Make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 2023mindset to pick up your copy of my book, The Greatest Mindset, today.

0:52Confront 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. 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 don't play those practical jokes it's bad people don't like it and you get older and older and you start repressing that those kind of feelings that are very natural to you right because we all have aggressive impulses we 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 school you 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 and 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 of destroying everything that you've built, the dark side has come out because you've repressed it instead of dealing with it.

2:30The 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. They 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.

3:15I 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? Well, 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.

4:00Love 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. Right. 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. They'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.

4:43and 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 transmuted. 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, but 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.

5:23But then he learned that that dark and that anger, etc., was the source of his power and how you use that dark energy and transform it into something positive. it.

5:40Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of the daily motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description that will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the school of greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple podcast and Spotify and and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

6:30Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.