hello everyone out there my name is Robert Greene the most important thing that you can discover or learn which is what I call your life's task so you're a detective looking in the interior of your childhood of your early years for those kinds of details hello everyone out there my name is Robert Green I'm the author of several books my first one is perhaps the most famous One the 48 Laws of Power I've also written The Art of Seduction the 33 Strategies of War I co-wrote a book with the rapper 50 Cent called the 50th
law I did a book called Mastery and the loss of human nature my most recent book The Daily laws as you can tell my book sort of center around subjects dealing with power and interpersonal relationships I want to talk now about probably the most frequent question that I get from people who email me which has to do with a subject in my fifth book Mastery and in that book I discuss what I think is the most important element in your life the most important thing that you can discover or learn which is what I call
your life's task and the idea is simple you were born as the individual completely unique DNA that comprises who you are has never existed in the millions of years of evolution that will never exist in the future it is completely who you are your experiences as you grow up from one years on is unique in the world nobody ever in the past or future will have exactly your experiences exactly your parents Etc that marks you as an individual completely unique it's like a seed that's planted at your birth right and if you cultivate that seed
if you cultivate that uniqueness you discover your life's task and you have success and power and money will come to you and your life will be fulfilled and if you don't to any degree if you completely fail in that then you're not you're going to have the opposite you're going to have a life of a lot of suffering and unhappiness and dissatisfaction but the question always arises how do I find my life's task Robert I really have no idea the first thing I say is it all depends on the level of your desire which is
true for anything in life if you really really want something if you really love it if it's really important to you you will find the energy you will you will find the answer but if you're only kind of half interested in it if you're only kind of teased by the idea of your treat but it's not enough you'll never have the energy to go through the search of discovering your life's tasks so I tell you you have to love this idea you have to love that unique person in you as if it's like an actual
human being that you love you falling in love with it you want them you want to pursue it it means a lot to you you also have hate because hate and anger is a very powerful emotion you need to be motivated to this what do you hate you hate all the other influences in your life that are distracting you from your life's tasks you hate your parents for telling you this is what you should go into you don't hate your parents but you hate them telling you that this is what you should go into you
need to become a lawyer you become a doctor you don't deserve this get rid of that get out of my life get that out of my head you hate peers who are telling you what's cool what's interesting you hate all the crap on social media it's filling you with what the trends are with what other people are doing what other people are interested that's your enemy the enemy is what people are trying to tell you what you should be interested in so if you're able to generate that kind of love and to see clearly the
enemy then the life's task kind of flow to you in a kind of nice fluid manner now the other thing is as I've told in many other talks before I do a lot of Consulting and the main problem I have with people who come to me with issues and it's not defaulting because we all have this problem is they don't deal with specifics they kind of deal in generalities I don't know how to deal with people I've got this partner and I don't know what's wrong with them I I don't know how to get my
company and my group energized Etc I'm trying to say look I need details I need specifics don't function don't focus on the big picture give me the details give me stories of what people are doing give me stories and details about what you've done and your frustration I want to hear the little grains of sand not the whole ocean of what's going on right people have a very hard time focusing on it well it's the same thing with your life's task it's not going to be Robert Greene wakes up and he's nine years old and
he goes I want to be a writer I'm going to write books it doesn't work like that you're not gonna be able to find that in your past what you want are little details little signs that reveal something essential so if I look back at my own lives I'm chucked I know it sounds a bit narcissistic but it's easy because I know my own experience I don't know yours um when I was about 9 10 years old I was in fourth grade I remember very distinct I remember the day very distinctly my teacher Ms Fiore
she put on this new game for us on the on the Blackboard she wrote on the Blackboard the word Carpenter I still remembered vividly and she said how many words can you spell out of that word Carpenter something went on in my brain going whoa what an exciting fun game you mean you can form words out of other words that is so interesting I remember the word that I first formed to this day it was the word ant wow you could form the word ant out of carpenter weird I also remember I formed the word
crab and I don't think she was very happy about that but anyway I ended up winning the contest because I was so excited about it and what they showed to me was I was fascinated with words with just the look of words the sound of words and I was you know something about it just excited me in a primal way that you can't explain and that I remember that's a very trivial stupid story but it revealed something about my relationship to language I remember I wrote a short story shortly thereafter a or an embarrassing short
story that if ever got published would shame me to death it was about first humans that appeared on the planet and the vultures that are observing them the story was written from the point of view of vultures but here I was like trying to like generate stories from an early age and then I remember I went to Hebrew school as a child preparing for a bar mitzvah and the letters the Hebrew letters there's not those this most beautiful thing I've ever seen they were like poetry you know learning the sounds of it was difficult enough
but the shape of those letters was so beautiful so words the look of words the sound of words the putting them together the stories they fascinated me as did books I often ask people it was the thing that you wanted to do the most on your own if you could get close your door and get away from your parents which all children have that desire for what is it that you would do and for me whenever I and this happened a lot I would close that damn door and I would get out all my books
and I would just read and read and read and read and read these are the little signs that revealed that Robert very young Robert had a love of language the writing was something that would be natural fit for him and then of course I went on an adventure that I discovered described in my TED talk about how I ended up writing the kind of books that I write but that gives you an idea of a little bit of the process it's a book that I love and I highly recommend called the frames of intelligence by
Howard Gardner and basically the idea is there are five forms of intelligence that he kind of signals in his book and he says that everybody has a kind of tendency in their brain towards that kind of intelligence and just very briefly there is words and Linguistics like I mentioned for me there's music and musical pattern which is an obsession with sounds to their own safe and and Melody and Harmony and all these other things there's mathematics and logic which is numbers and The Ordering of things in logical fashion there's spatial intelligence which is something I
failed miserably when I was a child which is actually looking at images and figuring out how to manipulate them in your brain something that Nikolai Tesla was probably the greatest genius at people who end up in engineering or who are visual artists often have that and finally there's kinetic intelligence which is the body which is you know just basically the love of moving your body and having an awareness of it I would add another one which is social intelligence the love of getting along with people of empathizing and understanding their world the idea is that
your brain has a natural inclination just look at it as kind of a going down a hill that your thoughts and ideas inclined in that direction they incline towards words towards sounds and music towards spatial organization towards logical ordering things towards moving your body towards people but there might be even other grades in this or whatever okay and it's not like I want to be a mathematician when you're six years old or I'm going to become a physicist it's these little things that reveal that you have this kind of inclination like I had towards words
and I ask people to kind of dig inside themselves and to find little stories when you're a child of those particular moments that will reveal some kind of excitement that you had in relation to something that might seem trivial there was a story of Steve Jobs when he was six years old his father was taking him through the streets of Sunnyvale California and he passed a store of of equipment of of like cameras and Stereos Etc and his eyes got wide open wow just the beauty of the objects just the metal the components the shininess
how they were designed he just was fascinated with them a very trivial moment in his life something that was kind of just glossed over in his biographies but for me revealed one of these things that I'm talking about so you're a detective looking in the interior of your childhood of your early years for those kinds of details people will say well Robert I don't have anything like that I'm sorry I'm lost I can't remember anything like exist you're looking at you're not you don't have you're not spending the time you don't have that desire for
reaching it you're not writing every day in a notebook about what they could be you're not looking hard enough they are there there are moments where you felt so excited by something you could barely control it and it wasn't and it was a kind of a pleasure in it and so even if let's say it was music that excited you even if you had to practice the piano day by day rather boring tasks you found practice actually kind of fun these are signs of what I call your life's task so that's the process that you
want to go through and in my book Mastery in chapter one I give you more details about how to look for it but once you've discovered it's like gold and everything will open up for you hopefully if you're young if you're not golden range of 18 to 25 and you're kind of searching this will have you will go through this process in a deep way and you will find what that is right if you're older the process is a little different a little more difficult but still very important and the idea is once discovered you
could have some Adventure you're going to explore or I don't want to be a writer okay I want to get into music oh I want to start my own business you're not going to be so tunnel vision and just go into one job into one thing you're going to experiment you're gonna have some fun you're gonna have some Adventures you might travel you might do things but you're always kind of focused in that general direction if you're a writer you're reading books right etc etc if you're an entrepreneur you're starting little businesses here and you're
learning about them you by the time you're 30 you've tried four or five different things and now you're ready for some kind of creative explosion right but this is the key thing in your life and it's once you discover it everything else will open up for you so um just learn the lesson of the most important thing that you can do in your life is to know who you are really to sum this all up in simply to know what makes you different what makes you unique what you love that's different from what other people
love right and I tell people when you're older continually create lists of things you hate and things you love and look through them and analyze them and go is this because what other people are telling me to hate and what other people are telling me to love or does it come truly from within so this process of finding your life's task is not just about your career it's also about your your mental health about discovering who you are what makes you unique so you can become acquainted with your own desires your own impulses and not
so controlled by what other people are doing thinking
