3: Talking Mastery and Social Intelligence

of your research and work and books. You've in The forty eight Walls of Power, The Artist Seduction, the Third Three Strategies of War, the fiftieth Wall with fifty cent, and your most recent book is Mastery. I wanted to start off by asking you if you feel like there's

any common thread or theme that runs through all those books. Well, they're really all about power, and the first book had more of the social political side of power, because I had noticed a phenomenon in my life as a working in many different jobs that people, oftentimes people with the most talent didn't get very far in life or as far as their talent would merit, because they were really bad at the political side. And so I felt like that's a key element in the game of power. So

my first three books were really largely about that. But the Mastery I came to the conclusion that too many people are particularly young people, I feel I got hung up with just that political part of power. And really the key in the world today is if you are are brilliant at what you do, if you know your feel insight and out, if you reached that level of creativity that I described in Mastery, that really is the ultimate form of power. You can really sort of write

your own ticket. You'll always land on your feet when there's an economic downturn or you're out of a job, or your industry changes. And I included in that book of chapter about the social political side to sort of balance it out. But all my books are about sort of the pragmatic path towards power. Yeah, that's really interesting that you conceive of a mastery as one of the highest forms of power that we can have in our society. I thought maybe we could back up for a second.

You can tell me a little bit what mastery is. How do I know if I'm to become a master? You know it? You know it by an experience. And I start off my book Mastery in the introduction giving you a taste of that feeling that you might have had, You might have had a fore taste of it in your life, and that is that moment when you've been working very hard on a project of any kind, putting in intense hours, ten, twelve, fifteen hours, and suddenly you

feel like after several weeks you're on another level. Ideas are just coming to you. You could never backtrack and follow the chain of where that idea that came to you in the shower, where it came from or when you woke up or in your dream. You could never discover the source of it. It just came to you. And that kind of feeling where you know what you're doing or what you're thinking about so well that you don't have to put even you don't even have to

think anymore. That's the kind of feeling that you have generally when you've mastered your field. So you probably tasted it when you had a paper to write or a project to do, but this is something on a much higher level. You know, if you're a great pianist, you're no longer thinking about the music that you're playing. It's into your fingertips. You're thinking on a higher level. A chess player like a Bobby Fisher would describe seeing the field of force on the chessboard itself. He's not even

seeing the chessboard. He's seeing something other people don't visualize. On and on and on. I could go through Einstein to Steve Jobs to Da Vinci, the same experience people are describing where they're not having to think, they actually literally feel the subject that they're trying to express. Is this intuition? Well, I try and make the point that it's a mix. That's what chapter six is called. It's

a mix of intuition and rationality. Now, these are just words that we're using to define something that isn't verbal. So it's difficult. But let's put it this way. You're never going to get to this what I call high level intuition. We have low level intuitions. Every day we feel like somebody is looking at us, and they turn around and sure enough they're looking at us, or something

might happen. We have a daily low level intuition. Talking about high level intuition, where you know, a great creative idea suddenly comes to you, and my book is full of them, You're never going to get to that high level point without years and years of discipline and rational studies. So the basis of that great intuition that creativity is very very much rational. But then if you're purely rational, these incredibly creative ideas are never going to come to you.

And I'm talking you know, Einstein before both of his great discoveries, talks about a dream, a vision coming to him and the solution appears in that way. And we see that in science and arts, etc. That's the other key component of mastery. And what happens with great masters is they have this intuition and then they have to go back and rationalize it. They have to think about it, is that really something worthwhile? I need to test it and verify it in the laboratory. I need to write

that idea out in my book. Ah, it was a brilliant intuition, something great or No, it was just a feeling that didn't pan out into anything that's concrete. So you're constantly cycling back and forth between the intuitive and the rational. If you cut that cycling thing off, then you're never going to reach you know, you're never going to have the great discovery or whatever it is you're

looking for. Yeah, so it looks like your talk about creativity and then you also talk about some other cognitive prophecies. I was hoping maybe you could help me unpack something. This is a debate in our own psychological literature. You know, there's this whole research literature on deliberate practice. Yeah, and the expertise view, and which I was grounded in as an undergrad. I was Subert Simon's last research assistant. Who was oh Erickson was his post doc. I think, yeah,

so I come from that tradition. And if I only studied that tradition and I never studied any other perspective, I'm not convinced I ever would have understood what creativity is. So it seems to me like acquire ring it might be a necessary but not sufficient condition the intuitive in the rational for creativity, or maybe not. I'd love to hear what you think. Can you be a master or not be particularly creative or can you be creative and not have to have mastered Well, okay, it's a great question.

So you have examples of prodigies of I don't think children are ever really truly creative on a high level. Children are very creative in associating ideas and creating games and things like that, but nothing that we would call great art or scientific discovery. But we do have examples of great adolescents and teenagers and people who are very young who are highly creative. I like to think of the great French poet Rambau, who is writing amazing poetry

at the age of fourteen fifteen. He clearly hadn't put in the proverbial ten thousand hours. There is something there, and we could say that there is. That's maybe an example of creativity without mastering. But it's interesting that a lot of these really young prodigies who we could say that they never really amount to anything later on in life. It's like a spark that happens. Rambau finished writing at the age of twenty and he never wrote anything anymore.

Oftentimes you have people who have that spark, and of course it doesn't come from nowhere. They've been practicing and doing something for a while, but they're not at that level of mastery. Now, can you be a master without being creative? No, I don't think so, because by the nature of it, I'm talking about ten to twenty thousand hours. Now. The difference between somebody who is just an expert and a master. An expert is someone who knows their field,

who's been studying it for many, many years. It's just a word I'm using expert, but I make that distinction here. An expert could study their particular field and put in thousands of hours, but they never move beyond it. Their thinking is very conventional. They've absorbed basic patterns when they were younger, in university or whatever, and they never moved past it. So they could be an example of somebody who has years of practice and study in something but

never reaches the level of creativity and mastery. There is a looseness in your thinking that masters have. They are able to return to that youthful kind of energy that I call original mind and kind of fuse it with all of their experience to what I call the dimensional mind. So by my definition, it's just purely my definition, you are not a master if you are stuck at that

conventional level. And the problem is, just to briefly put it, the paradox of mastery is in a lot of people are trapped by the hours of study that you put in. You've absorbed so many conventions and so many ways of doing things that that becomes sort of a dead end. You're never able to go beyond that, ever, able to loosen up the thought process to reach that level of mastery like a pasteor did or whomever. When you're an expert,

you're saying, yeah, well you just solved it. You solve the puzzle for me, And you're not talking about experts. You're telling you so masters is a specific thing that makes complete sense because the Simon Tin has shown these are just labels, right geniuses, Yes, have an enterprise ideas or a network of ideas. So what their main characteristic is that they know a lot about a lot or they have their hands in a lot of pots. Okay, and they fail a lot. So wee quads role. I'm

sure you're familiar with. You know that the more you fail, the higher the chances you'll succeed. It is in a nutshell that really helped you clarify it for me. Then you're not just talking about expertise, but you know you talk about prodigies. This is something that I've studied, prodigies, tovants, and the whole idea of talent is very interesting trying to what is talent? What is inborn? In your book, you talk about an inner passion that is reflect of

your uniqueness. In my book and Gifted, I define talent as a passionate proclivity for mastering the roles of a domain, and it seems like your conceptualization of talent is very much along those lines. If I very much understand it, Yeah, yes, I mean I'm treading on once again on ground that's hard to verbalize, but I do believe there is a genetic component to mastery, to creativity, to excellence in any field, and that component is you're born with a proclivity as

you call it, I call it an inclination. There's something about you that's very unique, obviously in the way your brain's wired, your DNA, your experiences as you get older, even at the age of two or three, you've had a series of experiences with your parents, etc. That no one else has had or will ever have. And so there's something extremely different about you. Unique. And the people who discover what that is, who have a high level of self awareness and who understand this is what I'm

drawn to. They're the ones who are going to be able to push past all of the obstacles that life presents in achieving mastery. I want to make the point that it's not easy. Okay, so you're going to fail a lot. You're going to be criticized, a lot of people are You're going to be lonely. People are going to say your nuts, your idea, your business is going to fail, and you have to have It's going to

be tough. It's kind of like salmon swimming upstream. There'll be millions of them and only four will make it. Will you be one of the four that make it? So it's not easy, and in order to get pushed past all those obstacles that life presents you, you have to have this sort of self awareness and confidence and

love of what you're doing. So if you're aware of that unique quality of what you were meant to do in life, and you're able to sort of immerse yourself in learning, as you say, in learning the rule within that domain, that's sort of like the key to unlocking the mystery of mastery. You can have that awareness at the age of five or three with Mozart and you never leaves you, or you could have that awareness at

the age of twenty three. In my case, I would say at the age of thirty six, when I decided to write my first book. It comes to different periods of your life, but it will not ever come unless you have that high degree of clarity about what it is that makes you unique. I'm really glad that you mentioned that fact that your first book was at the age of thirty six, because, if I understand correctly, your

whole life experience is up to that point. I mean, you didn't know it going through, but looking back it's almost as obvious. It's so many of these things fed into all the ideas in your first book. Do you think there's a great lesson to be learned there for everyone for moving forward in our lives, that a lot of our experiences that we don't think are going to be relevant whatsoever to anything. I mean, there is a lesson and there isn't. I mean, I gave a Ted

talk on that subject. I encourage people if you want to as a TEDx talk and my only Ted talk about that very thing on the show notes Okay, And basically in that talk I mentioned that I had probably fifty different jobs after graduating college to the point where I was hired or I was asked to write the forty eight Laws of Power. I failed many, many times. I kept trying to become a writer. I knew from an early early age that I wanted to be a writer.

I had that much clarity, but I couldn't figure out what I wanted to write. It was novels, plays, theater, television, film journalism. I tried everything, and then finally I met a man who is a book packager and asked me if I had an idea for a book. And, as you say, all of my previous experience with all of these horrible jobs and dealing with all sorts of different people, they just funneled into writing The forty eight Loss of Power.

I had given myself the absolute perfect apprenticeship for writing this book. But if I didn't have that lucky encounter with this man, I don't know what would have happened. What I tell people is that you have to have a sense of what it is that you want to do. I at least knew that I wanted to write, So you have to have some kind of framework. Is it science,

is it technology? Is it business? If you're wandering all over the place, it's going to be hard later in your life to connect the dots into something that puts it all together. I was able to put all of my writing experience together in creating this book. You can try different fields, and I talk in the book about a woman Yoki Matsuoka. I consider a contemporary master who tries eight different forms of science and now she's this

incredible master who's able to create links between them. But she didn't go in into poetry and physics and music and pottery at something you know that was all related to it. So you have to have a sense of the direction that you want to head in in life, and within that framework, you're willing to experiment and to fail and to try anything out. The point of it all is your most creative years, and it's been demonstrated again and again, are in your thirties, your late twenties

on through your thirties. That's when the greatest discoveries inventions are made. There aren't some exceptions, but that is that's the optimal years of a person's creativity. You want to have prepared yourself in your twenties, learning all sorts of things, experiences that enrich your soil, so that by the time you're thirty one or thirty two, you can create some business, or write a book or do something in which you

draw upon all of that amazing experience. I'm not sure if I've answered your question, have a you know, what is this PRA free form? You answered a lot of question, you asked questions unasked. Okay, what was the last thing you said? I actually had a question follow Christen. I'm saying that your most creative time is why do you think that is the case? People are trying to account for that finding in all sorts of ways. One hypothesis is there are fluid reasoning declines are IQ you know,

and that we can't handle cognitive complexity as well. There could be so many other factors. Do you have any inclination of why. I think it's to me, it's pretty simple. Before you're in your thirties, you don't have enough experience to come up with something that's based on a lot of practice and learning from your mistakes. You're too young, you're too untested. So anything that you make or write or create isn't something to build upon because it's not

founded on lots of experience. But if you get to the age of four thirty, the mind tends to get rigid, just like the body gets rigid. You think you know exactly how things our questions are answered, and you become a prisoner of all of these conventions. So at that age of thirty, everything is perfect. You suddenly have years of failing, of hardship, criticism, of toughness, you developed a

tough skin. You've had experience, but you're not yet gotten to that point where your mind is tightened up and you think you know everything and you just keep steve jobs. Compared it to the grooves on a record, where your mind just goes around and round in the same groups. And that's usually what happens to people when they stay in one field and become really good at proficient at the age by the age of forty thirty, is that perfect storm of fluidity and experience, That's how I would answer.

Can we modify that to thirty five? Well, yeah, well, I mean your thirties, because as I said, I'm not to say I'm the master, but for me it was thirty six. There are and there are people who maintain their fluidity into their forties and fifties and sixties, and I talk about that. It's another phenomenon. But yeah, we enlarge it to thirty five, don't worry, Well, let's see what sort of qualitative differences do you feel from your first book to now you're working another book? I think, right,

And do you notice any differences? Well, I think there are things I've lost and things I've gained. It's never a pure assent into perfection. I've lost some of that fluidity. I know. When I was writing my first book, words and phrases would just flow out of me with an ease, and so the writing had more of a flare to it. Now it's more of a slog I have to beat myself like a horse to get to the point where I can kind of maybe create that. But what I've

gained is kind of more experience. I think I understand things better so what I'm writing about. Since I published the already Laws of Power, I've not only written four other books beside that, but I've worked rather intensely as a consultant to people in business, in politics, and entertainment, very intense situations, and I've learned an incredible amount about people, about leadership, what it takes to be successful. So I have greater levels of experience to draw upon than I

did when I wrote my first book. So it's a trade off between those two things. But I mean, I still believe you probably still believe that your best book is probably not even written yet, or it's possible you could still have I always believe that my best book is what I'm writing right now, and I actually I'm hoping my the what I'm working on now is my magnum opus at all. Yeah, No, I'm fine. I'm very

open about it. In Mastery, I talk about social intelligence chapter four, and the idea is something we alluded to earlier. You know, MASTERI is really about being begining a proficiency in your field that leads to this creative and intuitive apex that you reach. But it's not just technical proficiency, because we're a social animal and you have to be good at dealing with people. So you have to learn various skills in your apprenticeship period that I call your twenties.

You have to learn how to observe, how to learn, but you also have to learn how to deal with people, difficult people, egotistical people, psychotic people, and you have to learn how to work with others. So I had a chapter on that, and I had a lot of response from people from that chapter. They found it very interesting, helpful, but they said they wish there was more. I decided I would expanded into a book. And essentially the idea

is that we are this pre eminent social animal. We're continually dealing with people on a day to day basis in our work and in our personal lives, and so much of the time we're in the dark. We really have no idea what's going on in the mind of that person who has hired us, or who's our colleague, etc. And we think we have an idea, but we're merely projecting onto them, usually our own fears, our own desires, and because of that we make terrible mistakes in life.

And at the same time, we're gifted with incredible empathic powers for understanding other people by our nature as this insanely proficient social animal, but we don't know how to utilize this natural empathy that we have. We're blocked in using it by all of our self absorption. So this is,

to me my book. I'm trying to make it the ultimate primer on being able to decipher people's obscure, their mass, what's really going on behind the mask, And what I'm talking about are these sort of laws of human nature that I believe go back thousands of years that are embedded in our brain, in our DNA, and that are the cause most of human behavior, are behind a lot

of the things that puzzle us about other people. And I'm going to immerse you in the study of human nature so that and give you many, many clues on how to decipher the signs that people are continually giving out in their body language, in the words they say, in their tone of voice, in their past actions, so that you can reach a much higher level in this social intelligence realm. That sounds really awesome. Is there a

publication date? Well, it's technically twenty sixteen, the fall twenty sixteen. I'm behind trying to catch up, so if it's not, then it'll be shortly thereout by every writer ever. That really does sound I can't wait to read it, you know, I can't help but notice I read so many I think of read all your books and over and over again. I noticed this common theme of actions reality reality, reality reality.

You frame things that you frame it in a different way, and it really makes me think the ways that in our psychological literature we don't frame these things. So like social intelligence. You tie social intelligence to reality right in your book, and I thought that was really really interesting. There's one point in your book used a phrase, and maybe this is what you expand more in your new book, but you say that everything in this world is a hologram.

I was wondering if you could elaborate on what that means a little bit for my audience. I think I used that in a couple of chapters. But I talked about that in Creativity. Can you remind me of where it was in Social Intelligence? Oh? Boy, I don't remember the exact placement of it. I think it was right too. We live in the world, two worlds of outer appearances and how things actually function, how their parts work together from the whole. How can people access a hidden world?

It might not have been in a Social Intelligence chapter, but it was somewhere in the book. You talk about a hologram. Well, I guess if I were to talk about the hologram in terms of a person, I mean, if I can think about this is the parts that they reveal to you tell you something of the whole person. So a person is a whole thing. They're not little bits of behavior here and there. They're a whole being

that has an essence. If you want, and every little detail is a part of that and reveals something of the whole, which is sort of, I guess, like the hologram type thing. So this is a trivial example. But let's say that a person that you deal with is perennially late in an appointment, et cetera. That is not a trivial detail. That's just sort of something that they do. That is an indication of something deep within them, probably

a form of passive aggressiveness. It has a purpose behind it, It's a strategy that they've used, and that being late is part of an entire character, a whole picture. And I want you to look at these details as being extremely eloquent as to what that whole person is. That might be a little bit of what I mean there and the reality part that you bring. I'm not the kind of a duelist that thinks there's subjectivity and that there's a hardcore reality out there. Because we humans live

in a world of convention and language. Our reality is different from a bat's reality. And there's an amazing essay I forget the man's name who describes what a bat reality would be like L's book, it's an essay I encourage everyone, maybe put the link there. It's only thirteen pages long, and he tries to describe what a reality would be to a bat that lives through sonar. So we don't live literally in reality because we live in a world of conventions. But there are degrees of objectivity.

You have to admit that when you first meet a person, you don't really have any idea who they are. And if you marry them and you're with them for twenty years, after twenty years, you have a sense of who they are, and that's closer to the reality. That's really what I'm talking about. Yeah, but is there benefit to fooling yourself or having overconfidence that is greater than the reality of the matter, or perhaps daydreaming and fantasy. Is there ever

value to that? Oh, most definitely there's a value to day dreaming and fantasy. In the Creative chapter, I talk about this kind of cycle I call the current that the mind goes through where you see something and then you speculate on what it could mean, which could be fantasizing about it or it's going and introspecting on it, and then returning to the reality and doing an experiment or trying to work with it, back and forth between speculation, imagination,

and what the world presents you. If you're simply daydreaming and fantasizing, you're going to cut yourself off from the social reality, that's the real reality of who we are, and you're going to end up with some very bizarre things.

And then the forty eight laws of power. I have a story of a man, a great Renaissance painter, who was determined to create the ultimate frescoes, and he holds himself up in these rooms and he never went out, and he spent four years of such isolation that the frescoes that he created are like of a mad man, and they're kind of all they're frightening, and nobody looks at them. So that's what happens when you isolate yourself and you're so totally in your head. But fantasizing and

daydreaming and speculating certainly has a very important role in creativity. Excellent. I'm glad you said that, and I know that you do say that in the book. I was trying to set you up for this. Oh okay, this notion of social intelligence. Per second, it just dawned on me reading it that it seemed like a very rational approach to something that in this ecology literature, emotional or social intelligence is usually related more to like an automatic like empathetic feeling.

So you refer to social intelligence as like seeing emotions inside. Other people are being aware of this, And it just had me thinking, for those who are naturally high in social intelligence, doesn't their compassion, empathy, and perspective TA can come more automatically to them, whereas some other people might need to earn these skills, but they can still learn

these skills. Maybe there's different individual differences in this. Well, certainly there's a spectrum people with autism mora asprospergers have a default when it comes to this sort of natural empathy. And then in the Mastery, I talked to you know, interview Temple Grant and who was autistic, and she describes very eloquently what it means to lack this basic empathy that we humans are born with, and it's very interesting.

So there is a spectrum of people who may not be autistic, but are more veering towards that and have less of it and then need to develop this more as a practice. But in general, for most people we are born with a natural empathic skill, and there have been remarkable studies recently about the relationship of infants to

the mother. Newborns. The incredible high level of empathy a two day old baby will demonstrate in relating to the smile of the mother, something that monkeys, no other primates have. It is unbelievable. We can demonstrate an incredible empathic relationship between the mother and the infant. That's to say that we are born with this, with this power. That it

is not just a baby is born with it. It's in relationship to the mother, back and forth, relating to her smile, to her looks, to her expressions when she's not in the room, etc. We're born with it, but we lose it as we get older, as we become increasingly self absorbed, we fail to pay attention to people.

I'm currently as I'm writing the book, I'm doing these raised experiments on myself in my social relationships to see what it is that kind of blocks us from accessing that empathy, from looking at the other person and trying to imagine their world, their feelings, getting inside in that kind of pretty verbal sense. Because the end, there's no way you can actually verbalize what empathy is. It's a feeling. And you know, I have reasons things that I think

are blocking us. One of them is our incessant little voice inside of us that's comparing ourselves to other people. The other person says something, we go, my god, are they inferring that I'm not? Maybe I'm not as good at this as they are. And we're kind of constantly relating what they say to ourselves and our experience in

a comparing way. Are we inferior? Are we superior? And it just draws us inward and we miss all of these signals that people emit through their tone of voice, through what they say, etc. So we have the natural powers to really understand people on a high level, but we have these major blocks that come through years of becoming increasingly self absorbed. There's an amazing study from the University of Michigan where they started they were able to

kind of quantify levels of empathy in college students. They have a test, they started giving it in nineteen seventy nine, and they've noticed that these empathy levels are going down and down and down with each successive generation onto the millennials, who are showing the lowest levels of empathy that they've ever seen, largely as the effect of technology. People are not interacting with other people on a day to day level often enough so that that's another reason why these

levels are while we're more and more increasingly blocked. I mean, you really hit the nail on the head there, and it's focusing attention outward instead of inward. And when you bring attention to something that is not usually a discussed and relationship to emotional social intelligence. All these business books about emotional intelligence, right, they don't frame it in quite that way, but I think it's very valuable to do

so this idea. It's tied to me your notion and a lot of what you talk about is very much tied to mindfulness. Yeah, do you practice mindfulness meditation at all? Because I think that might help people who lack in social intelligence. Maybe that could be something to help me in such a dificual stove. Well, very much so. I've been doing meditation for over four years now. I did it prior to that, but religiously to the point where I do it an hour every day for over four years.

And that is in the benefits of that are beyond social intelligence. They also benefit my work and my stress levels and what I hope my creativity, but on the level of dealing with people very much so being able to be in the moment and not hearing that voice inside of your head, because a lot of that meditation that you're doing is cutting off that voice and just sort of experiencing things in the moment. So that could

be extremely helpful. I mean, there are other things that I'm going to talk about in the book that are kind of strategies that you can employ, but that would be an overall larger strategy that would be very helpful. The book Mastery are they're going to be talking about in your future book, in my new book, Okay, yeah, I mean, it really is a game change or thinking

of this. I can notice it. It's striking. I mean even right now, right, I have these notes on the other side of my screen, and it's taking me away from you. Right, I'm not seeing every and so I'm trying to actually force myself to be in the moment and just see what it is. Right. It really is a different perception, it really is. It's like a neckro cube. It's actually really interesting. I try to practice this. I try to listen to people without any judgment or any

inner voice at all. Just listen and look at them. And when you actually do that, you see something different. At least for me, I actually see something different than when I'm thinking, you know, like in my own head, like or this I'm trying to like do predictive text, you know, what their emotions are saying everything, and I just let it. I just watch and observe it. It really is a game changer, really is. Yeah. And then, as I said, I said this in Mastery, but I

will just go into it more in the book. It's not like you're just in the moment, because you're also a rational creature, so you want to go back and reflect on it. And what I often do is I'll have an encounter with the person. I'm in the moment, I'm using all that empathy. I'm really trying to absorb myself, and then when I go home, I'll take some notes on it. I'll write about it. What did that really mean?

What is it that I'm picking up? Or you just think about it in some level, because if you're only in the moment, you're never going to build on that experience. You're never going to be able to kind of figure out what all these signs mean. So that's you know, that's another area, another component. I was going to ask you if you had some tips for people to increase their social intelligence. But I feel like we just we covered so many things implicitly without explicitly asking that question.

Would you agree yes? And I would? I would, I would. I would advise them to read my next book. I'm happy to promote that when that comes out. You know, we're almost done. I just wanted to have to come work questions because this is a this is a really good opportunity for me to discuss some of these issues with you, trying to make linkages to what I study in my own field. What is supreme acceptance and why is that important for mastery? Are you talking about in

the apprenticeship phase? The kind of radically a context here. I admit I really liked the phrase and I wrote it down. I'm sorry, I don't remember where it came from. Well, I mean I have. I talked about it in the fiftieth Law, and I also talked about it in Mastery. I think the contexts are a little different. In mastery. What I'm talking about is you're in your twenties or you've finished university, and I want you to accept the fact that you're basically an ignoramus. You've entered the world

now and you don't really know anything. You think you know everything because you're a hot shot and you went to Yale and you've got a degree, but in fact, you don't understand anything about people, politics, social situations. And you really have no technical expertise because you're just filled with lots of books knowledge but no practical knowledge. That's your reality, and you're starting from zero, and you're there

to absorb everything around you. You're there to learn the rules of the game, the social and political rules in that office that you now join in your first job. You're there to learn all the technical rules that go into proficiency in your field. You're there to learn who has power, who doesn't have power, what's going on in the larger context of your field. That all represents this reality that you have to absorb and that you know nothing about when you enter your apprenticeship, and you just

have to accept it. You have to accept it in a really deep way because when you look at a three year old, three year olds learn at a rate that's far beyond anything that happens later in life because there are sponges they're absorbing. They feel inferior. They feel so inferior to their parent and the people around them that they have to hurry up and learn what it's going on in the world. That sense of inferiority where you don't know anything. There's a world out there, it's

slightly threatening. You have to get ahead. Feeling that way is going to make you learn at a much faster rate. But if you think you know everything, you're divorcing yourself

from the reality of the picture. In the fiftieth law, I'm talking about something a little deeper, and it's more about a Zen Buddhist type thing where you really never completely in control of circumstances that are out there in the world, and there's so much you have to learn and accept about all the givens that are out there. And from that position of kind of radical reality where you understand this is what the world is, you then actually have greater power to change it in the direction

that you want. That's a little bit different, though, So I didn't know you were that was the next one answer. It was in mastery, Okay. I just really like that expression. I told mean that there's a whole literature. Are you familiar with the dark Triad? Wow? No? What is it? I mean, I feel like this is the literature that you have that Robert Green has to know about. It's it's maca alianism, psychopathy, and narcissism, and psychologists are starting.

It's a whole emerging literature. I'm going to bring out a book and see if this is what you're talking about. Is it like like this emotionally moral? Uh? No, okay, I mean it's a whole You know, past ten years there's been hundreds and hundreds of journal articles about us trying to understand the dark triad in the general population, so not the clinical, not psychopathy in the clinical setting, but people who are very manipulative in macavail and it's

called maladav alianism. Yeah, psychopathy and arcisism, and when they have all three of those traits, try and understand those traits and what they're correlated with. And research does show that people who have those traits do have higher social intelligence as you define it, but they don't have empathy,

so we'll use it to manipulate others. They have empathy, you know, with the word that you want to use because they're able to understand the weaknesses of other people or what's going on in their mind, but they don't have emotional connection to them, and they use that knowledge to exploit people. And that's not the definition of empathy. Well, so I go by the definition. Very famous psychologists Samed

Heinz Cohut are you familiar with code? He is one of the first psychologists that actually used and described and defined empathy. And it's not necessarily an emotional thing. It actually has a heavy intellectual component, and it's the ability that I have to put myself in the place of

the other person. Now after I do that, that can either make me feel that I like this person, that I have compassion for them, that I understand them on a deeper level and I want to help them, or it can mean I now know how I can screw with them and I will use that knowledge to do so. But the first step was actually moving inside that other person and trying to figure out what their reality is like. And very manipulative people or con artists have high levels

of that. Yeah, and there are people who are on the borderline, and they're the ones that fascinate me. So for instance Lyndon Johnson, who is probably our most fascinating president if you read the Caro four volume biographies. But I'm one of my major sources for my next book is Master of the Senate by Carol the third volume, believable book. Johnson had an insane level of empathy. He could get inside you like no other person couldn't. He

describes it and get anything. He used it both to manipulate on the highest levels, because that's who he was. He was a master manipulator, but he also used it to feel what was going on inside of you. Had made him be right. You know, he's involved in the first civil rights building. He basically that weren't for him, would have never been passed. He had great levels of

empathy that he used for both of those. And I find that a lot of very successful people live on that border line where they have both sides of that psychop what you call psychopathy, and also an emotional attachment power that makes them be actually very successful. Absolutely agreed.

So what's the biggest killer of the creative force? Well, I have like seven or eight of them in Mastery that I list that are liketional blocks that you have that you develop generally as you get as you get older, you know, the sense that you lose a sense of wonder, You become very skeptically. You think you know everything, you have all the answers, just basic conventional thinking. And I encounter it so much every day that I just absolutely startling.

But you know, like, just as a banal example, we're going to be doing hopefully a version of the forty eight Laws of Power for the History Channel, kind of a documentary version. And the producers they go, they hear from the people at the History Channel that one time they were really impressed with a proposal for a series because these people had an ending, a surprise ending, a twist at the end of their little real that they

put together. And so now we have to scramble to figure out how we can have a surprise twist at the end of our story that's going to sell them on doing the forty hours part. What a bunch of stupid nonsense, Like you have to repeat the last thing that was successful, Like there's this formula. What you know, history doesn't come with little twists and ribbons at the end.

And people aren't that stupid that they need that for every single story that they hear, you know, and maybe you can be a little more interesting with Okay, maybe do put a twist at the end, but it's not like the other one. And you encounter that in politics, in business, in how people respond to the bolo epidemic and whatever you want to call it, again and again and again repeating what was done a year ago or the last person who was successful and getting out of

that is what I wrote my whole book about. I love that. Well, let's end on that note, because I think that's perfect. Thank you so much for having me on. Thanks for listening to The Psychology the Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as informative and thought provoking as I did. If you don't like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com.