“People do not want to hear that your power comes from years of effort or discipline. They prefer to think that it comes from your personality, your character, something you were born with.”
Robert Greene – The Art of Seduction
In The Art of Seduction, Robert Greene discusses a series of strategies for gaining mastery over someone. That person could be a love interest or it could be someone you’re trying to sell something to. Interestingly, this idea of achieving power comes up several times in Greene’s books.
In The 48 Laws of Power, he said: “People are not interested in the truth about change. They do not want to hear that it has come from hard work, or from anything as banal as exhaustion, boredom, or depression; they are dying to believe in something romantic, otherworldly. They want to hear of angles and out-of-body experiences. Indulge them.”
That said, this is such an important idea for the author that it came up again in Mastery where he said: “Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything feeling bored or restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive.”
Robert Greene stands out in the non-fiction space because his books are both entertaining and educational. More importantly, his books never feel trite and repetitive. Nevertheless, the idea that achieving mastery requires time and effort is a sentiment that comes up repeatedly in his work. I think Bruce Lee said it best when he said: “I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.” That’s the power of mastery.
As Greene explains, there’s nothing mystic or dreamy about hard work, so people don’t want to hear about it. Your job, in your pursuit to acquire power, should be to dye your words with spiritual or unearthly qualities so that people buy into this idea. In reality, hard work is the result of patience and persistence. It involves working on the same thing for thousands of hours. Greene wrote the book Mastery to demystify the idea that hard work is something you’re born with. People like Darwin, Mozart, or da Vinci weren’t geniuses. They focused intensely on the same discipline for hours on end, and like them, you can also become a Master.