The Daily Stoic - Robert Greene on Being Effective and Courageous

Episode Date: November 14, 2021

Have you ordered your copy of Ryan's new book? Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave is out everywhere and you can still get the preorder bonuses over at https://dailystoic.com/preorderOn today’s episode of the podcast, Ryan talks to author Robert Greene about how you can become courageous and effective in everyday life for the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge.Get a copy of Robert Greene’s The Daily Laws: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/the-daily-laws-366-meditations-on-power-seduction-mastery-strategy-and-human-natureSign up for the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge: https://dailystoic.com/leadershipchallengeThe Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.Trade Coffee will match you to coffees you’ll love from 400+ craft coffees, and will send you a freshly roasted bag as often as you’d like. Trade is offering your first bag free and $5 off your bundle at checkout. To get yours, go to drinktrade.com/DAILYSTOIC and use promo code DAILYSTOIC. Take the quiz to start your journey to the perfect cup.Competitive Cyclist is THE online specialty retailer of road and mountain bikes, components, apparel, and accessories. Go to competitivecyclist.com/DAILYSTOIC and enter promo code DAILYSTOIC to get fifteen percent off your first full-priced purchase plus FREE SHIPPING on orders of $50 or more. Some exclusions apply.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics. Something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a special extra episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. I have had Robert Green on the podcast more than pretty much any other person because he is my absolute favorite person in the world to talk to. And it's part of the leadership challenge, which we did you might have heard of, which you should

check out. It's still ongoing. You can check that out at dailystoke.com slash leadership challenge. But I interviewed Robert. We talked about a whole bunch of leadership issues, which you can get as part of the course, or for free, if you're a Davis-to-Klifeman member. But there was an excerpt of that that I wanted to bring to you today, because it ties in, one, what's happening in the world,

two, to my new book, Courage is Calling, and three, I think really encapsulate, I think is an interesting personal story from Robert and myself about what it means to try to apply these ideas, how to fall short, what happens when you fall short, how to learn from them and grow. So in today's episode, Robert, Green and I are riffing on the ever important stoic virtue of courage. Robert, of course, is the brilliant author of the 48 Laws of Power, the Art of Seduction, the 33 Shadges of War, the 50th Law of Mastery, the Laws of Humanity, and more

importantly, his new book, The Daily Laws, is out. You can pick that up in the Painted Porch. You can also pick up Courage. He's calling anywhere, books are sold, as well as the Painted Porch. But here in this episode, Robert and I are talking about making courageous decisions, being courageous in your actual life, the importance of courage, which as you know, the Stoics hold above all else you can follow at Robert Green, go to his website, robartgreen.co and enjoy this interview with Robert Green and I on courage. And of course, check out the leadership challenge. Courage is calling in the daily laws.

I was thinking about our joint experience at American Apparel, which featured both a character of this type, but also a lot of sort of real world hard choices because thousands of people's jobs were at stake. There was, you know, we had some influence over this and no influence over that. Now with some distance from American Apparel, where for people who don't know you were on the board of directors for many years and you knew Dove, the founder quite well, you

watched this company go from a tiny little company to a publicly traded company to one of the hottest fashion brands in the world to an unceremonious exit when the board fired Dove and then a whole bunch of drama and chaos and lawsuits to this day. So as you think about that situation, how is it informed your understanding of human nature, power, strategy, and dealing with difficult people? Well, it brought a bit of humility to me. So, you know, I'm not perfect and I misjudged people. So, as I said, it's okay to make mistakes in life and that was a mistake. But first of all, you know, part of it, you have to understand who does, who is a very charming person, very seductive in a way, very charismatic. And it's very easy to get caught up in those, with those kind of people.

I will never let that happen again because I, I learned I was burned by it. And so I kind of identified with him. And I saw that the future of the company was tied in with him, which it was to a large degree. But, you know, certain signals were sent that we should have all picked up earlier on and we let it drag on a little longer and then we ended up firing him. But it's not all bad on my part

because the act of firing him took an incredible amount of, I'm not gonna say courage, but something similar to that because he was a friend, he was close, he trusted me, and I was basically the one along with another person on the board who was pretty much responsible for that.

It was very difficult. I felt like I was a trader, like I was Judas, like I was, this is a man who built the company and I'm gonna destroy him, but it was the right thing to do because he was taking the company down with him. And so, I got my act together. So personally, it was humbling to realize

that I'm as judged people, that I, the writer of the 48 laws of power, et cetera, has an Achilles heel, that when people are charming and seductive and can compliment him, because he loved the 48 laws of power, it drew me in. All right, I learned from that, but I also learned that a time comes when you have to make a decision, and the decision is going to be hard and it's going to be terrible consequences. Consequences that I'm still living with as you know, Ryan to this day.

But I think, you know, at some point you have to like kind of come to terms with your own you know, flaws which I did and then make the right decision. So I mean there were a lot of things that I learned from that. I learned a hell of a lot about why business is so screwed up in America right now. It was an amazing experience, but when it came to dove, those were sort of the two main lessons.

What are the things I think about when I think back to that time and I wonder why it sort of took so long, like, on my own part, like, why did I sort of, I guess I'm saying is why did I feel I was so powerless and I know to a certain degree I was powerless. But there were things I could have said, things I could have done, decisions I could have made, things I could have dug in on and fought harder either for

or against. And in retrospect, you know, what was I afraid of? Maybe I was afraid of losing my job, but that would have happened anyway, and it did happen anyway. And I would have landed on my feet and been a and been prouder of myself if I had. So I guess what I sort of look back

and I wonder why you were saying that it took courage or that it was scary to do. Why are people and maybe why were we so hesitant to make hard decisions sooner? Why do we push them off? Why do we lie to ourselves about them? Why don't we just do the hard thing earlier and sooner? Because it's very painful.

So I can't say about you, but I can say about me that I was a friend that I had violated law number two of the 48 laws of power. I had mixed friendship with business. Now, but to my trust and friends, learn how to use enemies. Exactly. So, but the thing is, people don't understand that business is not just this

game of who's socially, who's virtuous and who's not. It's a numbers game, right? We had 17,000 employees whose future was at stake. And we had a CEO who was unhinged and it was making irrational decisions. But it wasn't black and white about firing him and being a good guy, because what was going to take over, if your main goal was to protect the company and the shareholders, which was my job as a member of the board of directors, it's easy to fire him, but who's going to take over? The person who takes over can make the company even worse and can run it into the ground. That was the only person who understood the brand.

He was brilliant at that. So you bring in some corporate, you know, flat to take over the company. They're going to make it worse in a way, which is what ended up happening when the, you know, I don't regret my decision at all, but ended up a giant billionaire's hedge fund to go over the company. People who had no idea about the fashion industry who were like heads of radio shack, old writers, a good connection between radio shack and American apparel. And they made the worst decisions and they ended up destroying the company. Doug would have destroyed it anyway. But it's not just black, it's not just,

oh, I've got to be brave and make the right decision because there are other people involved in it. So I had to consider all of these other parameters. So in the time when I should, we should have maybe fired him earlier on, I was very wary of what would the alternative be because I looked around at the board and I saw people who knew much more about finance than me,

but who understood nothing about the business itself. And I didn't trust that they were going to make better decisions. So when you look at the news or you read the news, your tendency is to say, this is the villain, this is the hero. But it's never like that, right? There's more at stake than that. There's more to the story than that.

No, I'm really glad you bring that up because there's one very specific thing about American apparel, which I imagine figures into your calculation. It was also about when does the people who want to do the right thing to go or are talking about earlier have the leverage to be able to actually do it. And if I remember correctly, part of why the decision actually happened when it happened was that due to some financial decisions he'd made for the

company, his ownership stake was diluted enough that the board finally had the power to be able to make a decision that if it all things being equal previous may have made sooner but wasn't feasible to do it. That's precisely why I'm so glad you brought that up. I forgot to mention that, yes. The moment it did below 50% to 49.9, that's when we made our decision. Because if we had done that prior to that, he would have fired all of our sorry asses.

He would have stacked the board with his own cronies, which believe me, he would have done in a second a matter of he thought of me as a friend or not. So yeah, we waited till exactly that moment when he had diluted his share of the company to under 50%. No, and then this point about it not being sort of villain or hero, I think about this with Seneca, you know, Seneca being this brilliant philosopher who's then in Neuroscord. And some of the Stoics were part of what they call the sort of Stoic opposition or the Stoic resistance who resisted

Neuro to return, but Senaica was the opposite. Senaica worked in Neuroscord. And he was his tutor. Yeah. And I think about there are some other ones who advised Octavian, Aryan, sorry, Aryus did a mess and Athena Doris. And in retrospect, it seems hypocritical, all the Stokes were Republicans, why did they support the emperor? But they were also very aware of the cost of Rome's prior two civil wars. And they had to make a judgment call of,

you know, is it, we might be morally correct, but the carnage from that moral decision would be immense. And I think when you look at the American apparel situation, the decision was the right one, but it still didn't work out, right? Like the thing that everyone was trying to stave off still happened. And so people who are maybe one of the downsides or upsides of the 40-Laws power, when you have a sense of how history works and you have a full sense of the picture, it makes it much harder to be morally certain about what you're doing because you know that it's

more complicated than that. Yes, I mean, at a certain point, the two kind of collided in an interesting manner. So we always knew that Dove had this other side to him that was very, very questionable. And in the world today, the MeToo movement, he would have never survived, you know, past 2018, even if he had stayed on, right? Okay, but we couldn't fire him because he controlled the company. He would just get rid of us and he would run rough shot over the whole thing.

Okay, and then, but we knew about his character. And so at a certain point when the power game switched and he was in a weaker position, then we could get the moral high ground and fire him. But then as you say, it got complicated because what comes after this, right? So what comes after Nero? I mean, who came after Nero?

Was it Caligula? Or who was he was before? It was, I think like four or five emperors from after Nero. Yes, right. Right. And some of them weren't any better than Nero. And supposedly recent books have been written that Nero wasn't as evil and dark as history

has made out to him. That some evil people claim he was even actually a relatively competent leader. I don't know which side that did, which side to fall on there. But, you know, what were we going to do afterwards? What was the end game? Because it's great to moral grams to say, this man's evil, we've got to get rid of him. But then you have to live with the consequences of that. Now, I subsequently got fired from the board of directors by this hedge fund, right? So it was kind of taken away from me. But for that interim period of a couple of months, I was actually in charge of trying to find who would replace

Doug. So it's never that simple where it's like good versus evil. You can take, this is the main thing in the 48 laws of power in a 33 strategy or you can be the kindest person you can have the best intentions of all. And your decisions create havoc and create the worst kind of evil, unintended consequences, right? We see that play out over and over and over again in history. So, you know, this is an example where it's not just about doing the moral thing in the

simplistic way. It was about what are the consequences, what's the long term picture here? Well, and that goes back to this idea of courage, and I talked about this in the new book a little bit, which is you have to have the courage just to decide and then to own your decision, and the consequences of that decision. And I think that's one of the reasons that people don't do things. They hesitate because they know if they break it, they buy it, if they sign, they, they leaders want to have it both ways. When really courageous leaders know they have to make the decision and then stick to executing the decision with competence, as we said. But then you're going to have to own the fallout, the criticism, you know, the

consequences, you can, you could have made the right decision with the information you had at the time. And it can still go horribly wrong. You can be morally correct and still be look like an immoral person. I mean, I think we're looking at this in Afghanistan right now. Extricating oneself, extricating a country from a war that's gone on for 20 years, it's going to be messy and unpleasant, and it's not going to look good,

and it's going to reveal a lot of things that have predated your decision. And I could very much see why a leader would waver or change their mind under the public pressure that comes from that. But you got the job of being president or leader or CEO or board of directors is making hard decisions and then, you know, shepherding them to completion. years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Kippa bag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bag love. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do.

So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms?

It's only fans, only bad. I wanna know. So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night. But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits.

Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. Well, you know, people very, rarely like to take responsibility anymore for their decisions, right?

So as you say, they want to have both ends. They want to appear like they're doing the right thing, but not really make the tough hard decisions. And, you know, I mean, you wrote a whole book on a brilliant book about that. But, you know, when you take Afghanistan, for instance, yeah, that was a very ballsy thing to put a deadline on and say, look, we're getting out. This is it. We have to do it, right? And that took courage because he's going to pay the consequences for that. But the way that it was done was not very thoughtful,

it was not a lot of forethought into it, the unraveling of it. So here you have the right hard decision, but it's not executed well. So this goes into something about the 40th laws of power and leadership. So making all the way to the point. Yeah. Yeah. So this goes into something about the 40th laws of power and leadership. So making all the way to the point. Yeah. Yeah. So making the hard decision isn't necessarily enough because you have to now think of what are the consequences going to be. And I'm going to have to own those consequences. Now, unfortunately, how Biden has to own the consequences of this kind of hasty withdrawal. I don't want

to play Monday morning quarterback. It was very, I don't know if I would have necessarily done better, but I talk to people I consult with all the time and the weakness that most people have is they never see far enough. They don't game out the possible negative consequences of their great or or heart and their decisions, right? They see only I do this and this will result. Whereas there's this and this and this and all these other possibilities. You have to think of the worst case scenario

when something happens. So when we fired up, what's the worst case scenario? It ended up, what my thought, my worst case scenario, ended up happening, which is it's taken out of our hands, the hedge fund comes in, and they completely mess it up by bringing in people who don't understand the business. So leadership is a much more complicated thing than people think about. I think they tend to simplify things too much. But the art is not just making the right decision, not just making having

the right strategy, but playing the aftermath, what will happen later, what are the consequences can be. You know, you can have period victories, you can win, but you can go too far and end up kind of leaving yourself vulnerable, etc. Yeah, and this goes to the stoke idea of pre-medashium, the law, I'm a premeditation of evils. Think about the worst case scenario. So you're pleasantly surprised if that doesn't happen, as opposed to where the US is right now, which is unpleasantly surprised that it deteriorated faster

and worse and more publicly than it appears that anyone planned for. Yeah, I mean, your actions have rippling consequences. So if you're president, it's not just about getting out of a war and it's not just about gaining popularity among the American public for that action. It's about how the world views us. These things have consequences. So in your strategic decision by doing that, you kind of spoil something about our own reputation as a country that does good or that can help promote democracy. And that hit has real consequences and we're going to pay for it. And you have to think about that.

And so our people are going to trust for it. You have to think about that. People are going to trust us so much in the future. When you're a leader and you're making a hard decision, it's much more complicated than just, I'm right, I'm doing the right thing. There are all sorts of rippling consequences that go beyond you and your company, etc. You have to be, I talk about this a lot in my consulting work. A lot of what being a leader is mastering the things that are not visible. So we're humans are really good at looking at data and figures and trends, et cetera,

and seeing what's visible. But what you're not paying attention to is the negative space, the things that aren't visible in the present, right? And one of those things is you take an action and things that you had never anticipated before are going to happen. So you have to be able to think about that in the present. Otherwise, you're operating blindly and you're going to, you know, you have no idea what's going to ensue. So, when this goes also to the point of being able to understand people or the invisible

force inside people, as you said with character, it seems like the United States was surprised by the collapse of the Afghan leadership and the Afghan army, which I would argue there's probably two faults there. One, it's a misreading, Biden, you know, face to face, or communicating with the leadership, sort of being reassured by assurances that he shouldn't have trusted. But then you might also argue that the chain of command inside the United States isn't surfacing accurate information. This happens politically or inside institutions all the time. And I remember I saw this at American apparel when I spoke to the new leadership and we tried the information

about the true state of things had been blocked either bureaucratically or because different people had different agendas. And so as a leader, you have to figure out, I think you talk about this in your book, the most important thing is truth is reality. Having a firm grasp on reality. And it sounds like the, I would argue the core of the failure here was we did not have a good grasp on the reality of the situation. And that's why we were surprised by it and reality is comprised of people. Yeah. I mean, in the, I mean, a Biden probably foresaw that things were going to unravel and he was willing to take the price, but he didn't think it would happen quite as radically as it did.

Right. In the 33 strategies of war, I talked about Napoleon as kind of the icon here. Now, I know Napoleon wasn't perfect, but he was in some ways a magnificent leader at least for the first half of his career. And what Napoleon did, which was so wise, is he knew that what being a general and a leader depends on the information that you receive from the field.

Where generals go wrong is they're standing back in some tent. They've had their strategy and they're getting information that's happening in real time. And some of it's being filtered in by their lieutenants and it's all being washed to please him. Napoleon had lieutenants and people up and down the chain of command who reported directly to him. Some of them were spies. Some of them were just plain soldiers on the field.

And through this access of like 10 or 20 different channels, he had complete information about the status of his army, the morale, the mindset of the opposing general, what was happening on the field, real information, not just filtered information. So in business you need that you can't cocoon yourself and depend on two or three people giving you the information because the worst thing about a leader is everybody wants to be to give you to please you, right? Everything you do is great, everything you say is wonderful. You're never really hearing their true opinions. You're never getting the actual facts on the ground. People are filtering things for you. You have to bypass this and you have to get information from

as low to the ground as possible from your customers, from the people who are working in your stores, from the lowest tech person in your company. We need to have these channels of information spread throughout. Yeah, where you lose your grasp on reality and you make decisions based on what people have told you or what you want to believe your own biases, which I think you talk a lot about in laws of human nature, and then you end up very surprised by the bad results. Yeah, I mean, we marched into Iraq expecting that they would greet us with flowers and, you know, hairless as conquering heroes and it was exact opposite because we weren't attuned to their culture and how different and how different their mentality is.

So you as a leader have your own mindset, your own, your own likes and dislikes, and you tend to think that everybody else is like you, right? But other people are working for you or your clients or your customers. They don't come from the same cultural background. They're not the same ethnicity, they're not the same gender. They have a totally different mindset than you. And a different set of incentives and a different agenda.

Yeah. So, are you able to get outside of yourself and get inside them and think inside them and drop your own ego and try and understand the people you're dealing with from the inside out? That's not easy. How do you balance the desire to win, to get what you want accomplished, to be driven, to being pragmatic, and one's sort of moral and ethical standards, right? You could argue that Machuveli or the 48 laws of power are good prescriptions for executing

whatever it is that you're doing, but then the sort of layer on top of that is like, well, what am I willing to do? I'm just curious about the sort of balance between pragmatism and real politic and your own personal ethical standards. Well, you have to understand yourself on a deep level. So an idea with that with people, I never would say, and then we would advocate

doing a strategy that you're not comfortable with. Because what will end up happening is if I'm advocating that you crush your enemy totally or that you act as a friend and work like a spy, you know, the evil laws, and you're not comfortable with them, you're going to probably make all kinds of mistakes. Your heart isn't in it. You're not thinking about it in the most realistic manner. It doesn't suit you. So everybody has their own, it's not just their morals,

but it's their character. Some people are more kind of sensitive and empathetic about other people's feelings, and they're not gonna be comfortable, messing with that to any large degree. So I'm always very, very sensitive, and I like to take the measure of people because you're not gonna be effective in your actions in the world,

if it doesn't come from within, if there isn't some kind of inner spirit guiding it. If it's just something you read in a book by Ryan Holl Holiday or Robert Green and you're applying it, but it doesn't have something in your heart or in your spirit, you're going to botch it. It's not going to be real. It's not going to be effective. So I tell people, don't be so black and white in your decisions in life. Be more nuanced. If you read something in a book and it doesn't suit you, then either discard it or find a way to apply it that

meshes more with your spirit, with who you are. But you have to know yourself, you have to know your limits. Now of course, a lot of people, as I said, are too naive, are too nice, and they mistake that for their core values, for their morality, and really what is going on is that they're afraid, they're fearful, they're afraid of making the hard decisions. And being nice is a comfortable front for the fact that they don't want to make hard decisions. So firing people is not fun and it may hurt you inside, but it's the right thing to do when somebody isn't a team player or they're messing you up, and firing a person can be very liberating.

And you're not in your unwillingness to do it, this is because you're nice and kind, it's because you're afraid of making hard decisions in life. So we have to cut to the core and see, is that really about you being such a sweet, nice, lovable, hugable person? Or is it about the fact that you're basically afraid of having anybody judge you?

Are you afraid of making a mistake and failing? Are these the things that are holding you back? Or does it come from real core value that you don't wanna hurt these people that you honestly care about them? And you're thinking about the good of the company in the long term, and taking these actions will actually harm you in the end. But you know, the main thing is you don't understand yourself.

You often think that you're being this certain way when you're not. So a lot of what I go through is a process of trying to cut underneath and see what's really motivating you in these situations. My new book Courage is Calling is now officially a New York Times bestseller. Thank you so much to everyone who supported the book. It was literally and figuratively overwhelming. We signed almost 10,000 copies of the book, which just, you know, it hit me right here.

And I appreciate it so much. If you haven't picked up a copy or you want to pick up a signed copy as a gift, please do. You can get your copy at dailystoic.com slash courage is calling or you can just go to store that daily stoic.com. dailystoward.com. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.

Thanks for watching.