How to Find your Calling | Robert Greene & Ryan Holiday

things were homo favor nor used to be with your hands but now it's with your what is the thing that only you can do and then who is a person who can teach you how to do that thing my next two guests need no introduction the new york times should probably just put a hold on the best seller list for both of them we made the new york times bestseller list again oh my god how wonderful they're prolific authors modern day philosophers and they practice what they preach i'm talking of course about ryan holliday and robert

greene robert greene wrote the 48 laws of power which has sold 1.2 million copies worldwide the book is so powerful that it's been banned by various prisons in the u.s for someone to take like dense ideas and make them accessible to like people in jail and people who haven't read a book since high school to me that's just like tom brady level dominance of a profession he's been heralded as a second coming of machiavelli but since then he's written books like mastery the laws of human

nature and the daily laws ryan actually got his start doing research for robert ryan was like 19 like my books wanted to know if i needed any help ryan is the maestro of controversial marketing a college dropout he became the director of marketing at american apparel when it was the fastest growing clothing brand in the us he then went on to write trust me i'm lying about mainstream media malfeasance and bad incentives he's written various other hits like the obstacle is the way ego is the enemy and most recently courage is calling but

perhaps one of the greatest services ryan has performed for modern society is making the stoics people like seneca epictetus and marcus aurelius accessible for the average person before you move on in this video it is a stoic principle that you often must take up front pain in order to gain long-term pleasure in this case rip the band-aid off hit the subscribe button and forever enjoy the intellectual fruits of american alchemy in this wide-ranging interview we talk about everything from creativity and where ideas come from to virtue and

fortuna the machiavellian concepts of skill and chance to the underrated silver linings of a global pandemic namely that it caused a lot of people to have hard conversations with themselves about what they actually want in life without further ado from bastrop texas please enjoy this winding philosophical conversation with this week's amazing american alchemists ryan holiday and robert greene different parts of the brain have

maybe you should interview me didn't have much success i was 36. and so i met this man there yost elfers and one day we're walking in venice italy it's a beautiful sunny day and he's asking me if i have an idea for a and i'm kind of happy and i improvise what turns into the 48 laws of power now there's a set of circumstances there

that could have easily never have happened i could have easily not gone to italy for this job that my friend was offering me was a bit of a risk we might not have taken that walk in venice in which i improvised an idea that just suddenly came to me i was slightly suicidal i had to write a book so yeah i if it happened when i was 25 i wouldn't have worked out yeah so the circumstances were right but there was something almost fateful about me meeting him well you know i feel you needed all those years of getting kicked that exactly i did exactly and so it

almost is if i've had this since since i was a kid and it's probably going to sound ugly or stupid but almost a sense of destiny yes like things at what certain moments you feel despairing but in the back of your mind you know that there's something working out in there and it's going to happen for a reason and you're going to make it work for you i believe that as well i i love uh plato's dialogue with meena where he says all knowledge is recollection yeah yeah and i think there's something too when you're writing do you ever feel

this right you like sit down and it just sort of comes out like where does that come from there is kind of an other worldliness to the creative process well totally the 48 laws was like that to this day i can't understand how it came out of me it was like a baby that just went like that and you described all of this at the beginning of the daily laws and it almost what it reminded me of when i was reading it was like it was like a gerardian uh revelation or something where a lot of the you know people great authors in fact have revelations before their their great works and you were at

a low point and yeah there was some sort of hierophany that occurred or something yeah but like the weirdness of the like where did i come up with that from i don't know what it's just something it is like the gods investing me with an idea i don't really know where it came from i think it comes a little bit from like the torah and from the iching or something i don't know but that weird structure well the you know the etymology of the word genius in its original latin is a tendent spirit yeah and so okay here's a

crazy idea and you tell me if you know i'm wildly off here it's very speculative a little woo-woo but so this is sort of a this would be like a platonic idea but he says that the birthing process is a traumatic sort of forgetting process and that we do have immortal souls and and so your your body is sort of almost a limited prism of what is in a default state of omniscience and so your ego is is somehow blocking the default state of omniscience you engage

in some sort of process that subdues the ego and you become a more porous sort of for the thing that's supposed to hit you the the default state or whatever the the idea that some that the creative process is really about removing the blocks or almost like in in buddhism they talk about willful will like it's about removing the trying and the intention and then it whatever it is takes over that i think there's very much something to

what do you think well yeah it's a lot of what i'm talking about in the sublime the process of of technology and science and our evolution is to become more to live in that kind of castle or citadel where we're protected within our ego from the outside world and protected from any kind of outside influences and that there's a great danger in that and that we've lost something very elemental the idea of as he said when you kind of let down the defenses and you stop trying so hard

that some kind of your best ideas come to you and in mastery i actually tried to explain some of the neuroscience behind that oh interesting what is the neuroscience behind well you're working really really hard on something you're evolving creating all this all this information and and in your brain all these neural pathways are connecting and that's unconsciously but consciously nothing is happening and you're getting frustrated you've almost learned too much you've almost thought too deeply into it and you're kind of

blocked right and then you step away from it for a day or something and you let go and all of those connections that are happening unconsciously now reach the conscious mind and you become aware of of the perfect idea that had been there the whole time but you were blocking it by being too intense and too focused on one way of doing it right frustration is a good sign frustration is a sign that you're going to be turning the corner at some point

if you give up then that that's the worst thing can happen to you yeah how did 50th law come about 50 cent was just this massive fan of 48 laws of power and well the book had a big um impact in the hip-hop world initially which i didn't really know until a couple years later tons of hip-hop artists love you yeah i know and it's very weird you know just a middle-class jewish kid from l.a i think that's every middle class jewish guy from l.a dreams

the first time i heard about it was an interview in playboy magazine in like 2000 2001 where jay-z was interviewed he quoted the 48 laws of power room whoa you know i was so much happier about that than hearing about wall street people being interested in the book because that's really more my style so anyway 50 had been introduced to it by his manager and he was a huge fan early on and he he claimed that it really kind of helped rescue his music career after he got and so

it was like 2005 and a guy named mark gerald who's 50s literary agent contacted me phone call out of the blue saying 50 cent wants to meet you whoa okay whoa you know sure why not yeah and it was like something out of the godfather because it was in the back room and 50 had its whole entourage there and i was like the one kind of nerdy white guy amongst all these people and i was kind of mesmerized by his bling he had the most insane bracelet

yeah this diamond bracelet that just was like god damn what is that and then we started talking and you know i just felt very comfortable around him he's a very easy-going guy he's very down-to-earth you know he wasn't thuggish or mean or manipulative or anything he was very sweet and we were talking about war and strategy he was dealing with all these beefs with like the game and we were kind of going back and forth and i could see that he was he was really quite quite a good strategist i think they were angling for a book

i think mastery is actually just a great through line in general for for this interview because it was kind of the blueprint for for for you ryan for what you did with with robert where he sort of was your mentor and i think you learned a lot through osmosis and then you kind of came in into your own so one one analogy is uh you know verrocchio and da vinci is is ryan going to be your da vinci is he is he going to surpass you how is your relationship he's already surpassed you know the whole thing in mastery is

to the master goes the knife right it's the spanish expression so you learn bull fighting or sword fighting so well that at some point you're gonna stab the master and kill him yeah and you're gonna take over his position robert is like the gold standard for what it's pot like i think people will be reading the 48 laws of power and mastery like a hundred years from now not just if i not surpassed him but he keeps moving the goal post further and further yeah like we were talking about the laws of human nature that book is sold what like a

half a million copies like over half what's so amazing to me about it is that tells people what they don't want to hear like when you read about the secret or something you mentioned it's like well of course the secret sells 20 million copies it's like you don't have to do any work you just have to tap into the right energy and you'll get what you want right like so for someone to take like dense ideas or like stories about people whose names no one can pronounce and be able to not just make them

to like powerful people but also people in jail and people who haven't read a book since high school to me that's just like that's like tom brady level like dominance of a profession the goal posts feels like you have progressively cut out bs in your life you know you've moved to austin uh you could be in la new york kind of lost in the sauce if you wanted to be and i feel like you focused more and more on

writing as opposed to other sort of you know public speaking and that sort of thing yeah i mean the pandemic was definitely illustrated for me i don't know if you found this robert but it was like when life stripped a bunch of stuff away like i thought i was productive i thought i was pretty focused but you're really it's like you know like sometimes your computer freezes and then you realize like all this stuff was running in the background that you didn't realize was slowing it down it's a great announcement 2020 was like a hard reboot and then you're like wow like is way faster like i like when

i was writing courage it was the in some ways the easiest book i ever wrote and it was like i was the most connected and sort of like in a state as optionality comes back in the thing will be like how do you actually keep it out that's why nobody's going back to work you see all the you know uh but he moved or they've moved because they're like i could live wherever and i don't have to you know slave away in some cubicle and you know i can i can kind of start my own thing so that that is i think an underratedly really good thing about covet as

horrible as it is you know i was reading about some people that just got another job during the pandemic like they they were like my job was so inefficient day to day yeah that i could actually do another like if you let me do it the way i want to do it i can do two full-time jobs right and i think people are waking up to the fact that they're you know a lot of these jobs are bs you know there's a great book actually by a guy named david graber who recently passed away called [ __ ] jobs and it's like 99 of people if you poll them say that their jobs are bs he

talks about i think like a clerk that like dies at his desk and nobody finds him for like seven days like really sad but also you know very you know reflect of the reality excuse me i think people are waking up to like you know maybe they do have a greater a greater calling or also it's like oh life is way too short to live in a place that i hate or like a house that i hate like people this the kitchen in our house makes me unhappy like this is this is why we argue you're buying me by the stake

you have to design your life to be conducive to what you're trying to do you can't just be kind of reactive in some sense it's a it's a luxury to say a lot of this stuff and if if you're a young person in this country now what would you tell them to do i mean is is the apprenticeship model the best model now college to me feels like kind of a racket well i think the first two sections in mastery are like i think very timeless and but also work especially now which is like what is your life's task like what are you

actually meant to do what is the thing that like only you can do and then who is a person who is doing that thing or can teach you how to do those things if you get those two things right like everything else you can you can get a lot wrong after you do those two things and be really successful but if you don't get those two things right then you're kind of [ __ ] and i feel like millennials specifically have this sort of endless optionality thing that like makes it

it's very hard even like i think about my own life and like i worked for charlie rose i worked for jon stewart now i'm interviewing people and like i probably just should have started interviewing people after that you know but then i ended up in all these sort of it was like honestly a prestige trap or and uh and then i i had some calls actually over the pandemic with you robert you were incredibly helpful and yeah exactly what's written in mastery like what did you do as a kid and and what are you straight towards sort of naturally so well it's it's what

i tell people is you have to have an overall framework for what interests you i knew what since i was eight years old that i wanted to be a writer so i had the overall framework and so i'm 22 21 and i have to go out into the wide world so i go into journalism and i hate it and then i quit and i decide i'm going to be a novelist and i'm wandering around europe writing these novels that i never finished that never really amounted to something although i've reread them recently they're actually not so bad and i come to hollywood i'm writing screenplays i'm

writing treatments for other people i'm continually writing and continually learning so i had an overall framework that made me do all these different things that gave me all these disparate skills right but what happens with a lot of people is they don't have that framework and that's what's so goddamn depressing about them you know and so we have to kind of go through this investigative process like i did with you you were you you had a pretty relatively clear idea but the sense of you have no connection to yourself to what maslow calls your

impulse voices those voices inside saying i'm drawn to this this is what i was like as a kid yeah i'm naturally attracted to this subject to have no antennae that kind of beeps off and tells you what that is yeah is to be very very depressing with social media kind and you're so involved with other people telling you what's interesting it's even harder to connect with who you are and what makes you different from all the other people social media does have this crazy

infinite mirror almost homogenization effect but i think it's also like people get distracted by like outcomes so like they're attracted to like the fame yes that a person has or the reputation a person has right even though those things are the byproduct of the craft that they mastered right you've said the excrement of the oh yeah no that's a bruce that's a bruce dickinson quote fame is the excrement of he's like it's the the sludgy byproduct

that comes out of the other side exhaust but i think what social media has done is made fame itself seemingly a goal right or that that it's it's just it's separated it out because there are people who are famous for not doing anything and and people always say life isn't fair but almost on the flip side of that when you do do the introspection and you do follow that inner voice i feel like at least anecdotally over long time horizons when i see somebody do that things kind of work out like more than

you would expect like there are definitely edge cases and like you know chance sort of things that happen but things work out more often than not if somebody does that hard work yeah i mean and like it's also pleasurable to pursue the thing that you love doing and are good at right so it's like you get the guaranteed win of like enjoying it then you get the pretty predictable outcome of like if you do it long enough and try long enough you'll be successful at it but but people want to have done the thing i'm sure you hear from people like this all the time you real they're

like talking about this book project and then you realize like oh you don't want to write a book you want to have a book right like right you don't actually like doing it you just want whatever you think comes from having done it i see that with entrepreneurs it's like you just want to show up to summit series and say you're the ceo of blah blah blah but you want to have a successful company you don't have an idea for a company you definitely don't want to be running a company and having it is like so empty you get there and it just what do you what do you have so i try and tell

people you have to change your id your concept of pleasure people only have the sense of pleasure particularly now that it has to be immediate that they have to get quick gratification they need quick hits like in video games or whatever they've been programmed but the easier and the quicker they can get that pleasurable hit the better it is but i'm trying to say to take those three years and to write a book like ryan does gives you a much deeper thrill a much more important sense of pleasure what i

would call fulfillment yes than just having that empty i'm suddenly the ceo of a company and i'm famous and i'm on instagram it's so empty it doesn't lead anything it's just gonna make you more depressed in the end but the sense that you've actually built something yourself leads to the deepest pleasure that a human can have i'm sorry to say that the sense of accomplishment of creating something from nothing from building something is to me the highest pleasure that a human can have because we are animals that are that are born to make things yeah we're homo favor we're

the animal that makes things it produces that creates that's why we're the species that we are nor used to be with your hands but now it's with your what's always struck me as interesting about you in general is the 48 laws of power if i were to like guess the person who had written that i'd think that they're super cold and and calculating and not almost mystical in their sense of reality but we've had conversations gurjev or uspensky or rudolph steiner

these sort of esoteric weird philosophers that if you read on the face of them especially in our current kind of modern materialist reductionist paradigm you know most people think they're they're absolutely crazy and have alternative versions of history and reality that don't make any sense so how do you square those two things well i'm i've always been interested in outsiders i'm reading a biography right now with philip k dick oh yeah you know totally schizo fascinating but fast yeah

this woman comes to his door one day he's already kind of nuts because of all the amphetamines he's taken and she's wearing a fish necklace you know christian thing and he has this revelation that completely changes his life that he's now like a prophet just by seeing this one piece of jewelry yeah he's totally nuts but but i'm fascinated by people whose brains are wired differently and the question about that different wiring is are you seeing the super normal or the paranormal so are you widening the doors

of perception to quote huxley or who i guess was quoting william blake um and seeing things that are in reality but are outside our kind of narrow myopic scope or are you just hallucinating yeah is this some mystical connection you have or are you [ __ ] delusional take kanye west like how confusing and difficult must it be for him not to know what is the bipolar mania yeah and what is the creative genius well harry and something never actually freed the

slaves jesus had the slaves don't work for other white people yeah we leave it right now and they're even social feedback shouldn't mean a whole lot in many like you have you know like bach or something posthumously discovered like you can do great things that are completely decried well you know while you're alive it's actually kind of a sad statement that so many entrepreneurs are on the spectrum not because it's it's great for them but the point is oh everyone else is so conventional that they can't see these opportunities that were in

retrospect pretty obvious yes the only people who feel free or empowered to do that stuff are people coming from either the outsider thing or from this more unhealthy place um because they're they're not as chained up renee girard has this concept he talks about the scapegoat the archetypal scapegoat is an insider outsider so they're perceived as an insider by uh people who who think they're in the out group or marginalized and they sort of want to scapegoat uh

that person but they themselves are they're sort of an outsider they themselves have been marginalized they have maybe some sort of shamanic connection uh to to knowledge well i think um something that culture definitely needs are outsiders yeah so for many centuries jews in europe played that role because they were kept outside of all of the major you know professions so how come all of some of the most creative writers composers all of those came from the

from being from literally that outside position yeah they were able to look at society from a different point of view so really genius and creativity is being able to look at something from different angle than most people look at it you're seeing the same thing but you're seeing it differently yes that's truly what genius is so people who have their brains wired differently are often seeing the same thing but they're able to look at it in a different way well churchill talks about how he's like um every he's like every great person has to come from humanity yeah but then he says every

prophet also has to go out into the wilderness yes meaning like for him this is like the ten years he spends outside of power this is also like the spirit quest or the sort of the 40 days and 40 nights like this is you have to there has to be some experience or event that changes how you see things that sort of shakes i think some of those conventions right totally yeah you need you need to vertically integrated more than you're horizontally integrated and that just

takes being uh sort of the wilderness the wilderness yeah do you do you feel like you've had that ryan and courage is calling you open with hercules and you know he either go has to go the way of is it kakia or areta is that am i botching the pressure yeah so the choice of hercules is sort of historically the choice between like virtue or vice you're right but it's also like the easy way or the hard way yeah right and you've you've chosen the hard way i think pretty consistently you choose the hard way yeah you have to you i don't think you get good stuff choosing the

easy way what's interesting is i look at your life and in many ways you're leading what used to be the american dream like you have like a nice family you have a house you're you know and like i think about like most millennials i know and that's why so many of them are unhappy and untethered from reality because they they have like they rent an apartment they travel they're not they they're sort of their relationships are all sort of single serve or ephemeral and they have unlimited options

the whole point is you have to like choose some of the things and invest in them and so they have this kind of tenuous connection not just to reality but they also have like a tenuous connection to like society do you know what i mean like like they don't own anything they don't uh they're not committed to anything or anyone and so they're kind of just like adrift yeah you know well it's almost it's almost as if they inherited the boomer sort of like crazy optimism that the boomers got from the fact that they had all these like

economic tailwinds and so that was like a real optimism um but without the economic tailwinds and so it's like their features don't really make sense but they still have this like weird indefinite optimism of like my life's great i can do whatever i want and then you wake up and you're like 40 and you're single and you're in your apartment you're on tinder and ordering from postmates yeah like just so depressing no it's it's just it's like it's almost like meaning comes from scarcity or commitment in some way yeah and so like if you don't do that you're kind of

just like floating on the surface yeah which is nice in some sense but it also means you're very uh exposed to like strong winds or you know like you're not yes you're not you're not rooted we were talking earlier about like pain preceding you know real fulfillment or some aristotelian eudaimonia or whatever young people now or just invest in you know this crypto like shiba inu coin or something and they become multi-millionaires overnight and think

about what that does to your brain it's super dangerous right it's weird yeah no it's uh it's fantasy world there is something going on with with technology and computers it's kind of changing people in ways that can be very scary so i've read scenarios i'm not completely of like where where we're headed in 40 years if things continue with people like this with their phones you know there's this could be some reckoning down the road here you know

but the thing that i think about intellectuals it's almost become like a dirty word or something there's this like divorce in american intellectuals and and practical daily so like i read books from academics on the sublime which should be the most personal exciting book and they managed to transform it into some kind of garbly jargon with this kind of laconian speak that has i can't

begin to parse out how can that you know you're talking about the thing that's like the most transformative experience and you're turning it into something and so much of our academic intellectual culture has so little relevance to what life is actually like on the street and it just wasn't always that way there used to be so many intellectuals in american life etc i just read a biography of william james i mean that's that's a hundred years ago but we used to have people like that in our culture you know intellectuals who were still

very much rooted in people's day-to-day lives and i feel this like it's almost like schizophrenia where people are so divorced from reality yeah in their little in their little zones that they live in you know i'm a professor of this i i'm a journalist who only studies this they each have this like the the blind man and the elephant yeah they each have their they're usually like tugging at the tail or the toe and that's what they see is their reality and so few people are actually looking at the whole picture we're actually grounded in the

basic reality of what life is like now and i find that very frightening kind of schizo yeah well we're lucky to have vigilante academics like like youtube uh and uh yeah we really appreciate you both both doing this this is awesome hopefully this video was just the tip of the iceberg and was a good primer for you to dive more deeply into their work clearly these two guys have had a big impact on me my thinking in my career who knows maybe they'll have an impact on you too if you haven't yet please hit subscribe and leave a comment on what

you thought was the best part of this video until next time my name is jesse michaels and this is american alchemy