Robert Greene: How to use the 48 Laws of Power to get what you want in business

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
One of the best parts about this is there's so many levels to this. So when I tweeted this quote out, Dharmesh, who's the co-founder of a $20, $30 billion company, retweeted and says, this is exactly what I needed to hear today.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
I am so excited to talk to you. I've read all your books, and I have always thought that instead of whatever they're teaching at universities, I wish I could just do a four-year degree on four or six of these Robert Greene books, because they're amazing. In particular, Mastery, it absolutely changed my life. I read that when I was 22 years old, about 12 years ago, 11 years ago. It totally changed my life. It changed my life because I thought that being a generalist was the way to go. But according to the book Mastery, it was not.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:54)
Yeah. Well, we live in these fantastic times with so much technological power. It's just almost incredible. Yesterday, I was working on my new book and I had a question, and I just did an AI search, and it's just insane what it can do for you. But the problem is the human brain is what it is. It isn't a piece of technology that somebody developed recently. It's something that has hundreds of thousands of years of development, and it has a certain way that it operates and a certain grain to it. You want to go with that grain, and you want to be excited by learning, and you want to make connections in the brain between different things, and you want to be able to focus so deeply on something. I like to think of the brain as this kind of landscape, and it can be rich, and it can be one where all these different plants are emerging, or it can be like a wasteland. If you learn different things and you focus very deeply, and you're excited by what you're learning, then all of these connections will start happening in the brain. And so if you go through that apprenticeship, focused and developing real skills and whatever that is, by the time you finish your apprenticeship, let's say you're 30 years old, you'll be set, you'll be able to create your own business, you'll be very creative, you will laid the groundwork for something really important to happen. But if you're distracted, if you're focusing on 100 different things, that's not how the human brain functions. We function when we go deep into something, when we bore deep, deep, deep, deep, deep into a subject. I know when I'm writing a book, which I'm doing right now, the first attempt that I make at something is very superficial. It's not interesting. You wouldn't believe how bad my writing is on the first go. But I go deep, deep, deep into what I'm thinking. I cross it out, I do something else, I edit it. By the 10th time I go into it, something interesting is happening. When you focus deeply on something, ideas will come to you and sometimes those ideas will be brilliant.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:03)
How many books do you read to write one book? For mastery, how many books did you consume to write that one or 48 Laws of Power?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:11)
It's hard to estimate, but it's somewhere around 300 Some could be upwards of that.
Sometimes if a book is bad and believe me, I read a lot of bad books, I skim them. This passage is really sucks or this chapter is meaningless. I'll float through it. But if a book is really good and there are some books that are incredible, I'd say maybe about a fifth of them reach that level. I'll focus very deep. I'll even reread it several times. It's probably why my health suffered and why I had a stroke is because I read too many books. I do too much research. But I want to get at the reality of what I'm writing about. I don't want to be superficial because so many books out there, at least for me, don't really go deep enough into the subject. They're skimming along the surfaces.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:09)
Sam was talking about mastery and you have this concept of people finding their life task, their life's task. I think that's great. But I know a lot of people who are maybe in their 30s or 40s, who don't know that that is and maybe they feel like it's too late, or they're stuck, or don't know where to start. What's the sort of pocketbook guidance you have for somebody like that who's trying to figure out what that is? What are the tools they could use to figure out that life's task?