January Your Life's Task Planting the Seeds for Mastery All of us are born unique. This uniqueness is marked genetically in our DNA. We are a one-time phenomenon in the universe-our exact genetic makeup has never occurred before nor will it ever be repeated. For all of us, this uniqueness first expresses itself in childhood through certain primal inclinations. They are forces within us that come from a deeper place than conscious words can express. They draw us to certain experiences and away from others. As these forces move us here or there, they influence the development of our minds in very particular ways. Let us state it in the following way: At your birth a seed is planted. That seed is your uniqueness. It wants to grow, transform itself, and flower to its full potential. It has a natural, assertive energy to it. Your Life's Task is to bring that seed to flower, to express your uniqueness through your work. You have a destiny to fulfill. The stronger you feel and maintain it-as a force, a voice, or in whatever form-the greater your chance for fulfilling this Life's Task and achieving mastery. The month of January is all about discovering and developing your Life's Task, your purpose, what you were put here to do. I had known from a very young age-perhaps the age of eight-that I wanted to become a writer. I had a tremendous love of books and of words. I thought at first, when I was young, that I would be a novelist, but after graduating university, I had to make a living, and I realized being a novelist was too impractical. And so, living in New York, I drifted into journalism as a way to at least make a living. Then one day, after several years of working as a writer and editor, I was having lunch with a man who had just edited an article I had written for a magazine. After downing his third martini, he finally admitted to me why he had asked me to lunch. "You should seriously consider a different career," he told me. "You are not writer material. Your work is too undisciplined. Your style is too bizarre. Your ideas-they're just not relatable to the average reader. Go to law school, Robert. Go to business school. Spare yourself the pain." At first, these words were like a punch in the stomach. But in the months to come, I realized something about myself. I'd entered a career that didn't suit me, and my work reflected this incompatibility. I had to get out of journalism. This realization initiated a period of wandering in my life. I traveled all across Europe. I worked every conceivable job. I did construction work in Greece, taught English in Barcelona, worked as a hotel receptionist in Paris and a tour guide in Dublin, served as a trainee for an English company making television documentaries. I tried writing novels and plays. I wandered back to Los Angeles, California, where I was born and raised. I worked in a detective agency, among other odd jobs. I entered the film business working as an assistant to a director, as a researcher, story developer, and screenwriter. In these long years of wandering, I had totaled some sixty different jobs. By the year 1995, my parents (God bless them) were beginning to get seriously worried about their son. I was thirty-six years old, and I seemed lost and unable to settle into anything. I too had moments of great doubt and even depression, but I did not really feel lost. Something inside kept pushing and guiding me. I was searching and exploring, I was hungry for experiences, and I was continuously writing. That same year, while in Italy for yet another job, I met a man there named Joost Elffers-a packager and producer of books. One day while we were walking along the quais of Venice, Joost asked me if I had any ideas for a book. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, an idea just gushed out of me. I told Joost that I was constantly reading books on history and the stories that I read of Julius Caesar and the Borgias and Louis XIV, these were the exact same stories that I had personally witnessed with my own eyes in all my different jobs, only less bloody. People want power and they want to disguise this wanting of power. And so, they play games. They covertly manipulate and intrigue, all the while presenting a nice even saintly front. I would expose these games. As I was improvising this pitch to him, which would eventually become my first book, The 48 Laws of Power, I felt something click inside me. I felt this tremendous sense of excitement welling up. It felt natural. It felt like destiny. When I saw that he was excited, I became even more excited. He said that he loved the idea and that he would pay me to live while I wrote half the book and then he would try to sell it to a publisher, himself being the packager, designer, and producer of it. When I returned home to Los Angeles and began working on The 48 Laws, I knew that this was my one chance in life, my one avenue of escaping all the years of wandering. So, I went all in. I put every single ounce of energy I had into it, because either I would make this book a success, or I would end up a failure in life. And I poured into this book all the lessons I had learned, all my training as a writer, all the discipline I'd gained from journalism, all the good and bad experiences I had accumulated in my sixty different jobs, all the horrible bosses that I had dealt with. And my pent-up excitement in writing the book could be felt by the reader and, much to my surprise, and beyond anything I'd imagined, the book had tremendous success. Now looking back on all this some twenty-five years later, I realized that that thing that was pushing and guiding me (that I mentioned earlier) was a sense of purpose, a sense of destiny. It was like this voice inside of me whispering, "Don't give up. Keep trying. Keep trying." This voice, which had first appeared to me as a child, was guiding me toward my Life's Task. It took many years, many experiments, many mistakes, and obstacles, but it kept me advancing and oddly hopeful. And now, many books later, I remain dedicated to that task. Like every person, I still need that sense of purpose to guide me, day in and day out. Each book I write has to feel like it's part of that destiny, like it was meant to happen. And this sense of purpose I've had for my whole life that became so much clearer twenty-five years ago is what I believe has guided me through all the hard moments in my life. And I think it could do that for anybody, once you sense it within you, once you search for it. The real lesson here is that it took me a long time to get there, with many twists and turns. And so, it can come even later in life-in your thirties or forties, or beyond. But my existence forever changed the moment I embraced my Life's Task. January 1 Discover Your Calling Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it's the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe You possess a kind of inner force that seeks to guide you toward your Life's Task-what you are meant to accomplish in the time that you have to live. In childhood this force was clear to you. It directed you toward activities and subjects that fit your natural inclinations, that sparked a curiosity that was deep and primal. In the intervening years, the force tends to fade in and out as you listen more to parents and peers, to the daily anxieties that wear away at you. This can be the source of your unhappiness-your lack of connection to who you are and what makes you unique. The first move toward mastery is always inward-learning who you really are and reconnecting with that innate force. Knowing it with clarity, you will find your way to the proper career path and everything else will fall into place. It is never too late to start this process. Daily Law: Mastery is a process and discovering your calling is the starting point. Mastery, I: Discover Your Calling-The Life's Task January 2 Reconnect with Your Childhood Obsession When Marie Curie, the future discoverer of radium, was four years old she wandered into her father's study and stood transfixed before a glass case that contained all kinds of laboratory instruments for chemistry and physics experiments. She would return to that room again and again to stare at the instruments, imagining all sorts of experiments she could conduct with these tubes and measuring devices. Years later, when she entered a real laboratory for the first time and did some experiments herself, she reconnected immediately with her childhood obsession; she knew she had found her vocation. Daily Law: You were obsessed with it as a child for a reason. Reconnect with it. Mastery, I: Discover Your Calling-The Life's Task January 3 The Voice The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within. -Abraham Maslow From the time I was young, I was entranced with words. I can remember in the fourth grade the teacher did this activity where she put up the word carpenter, and she asked us to come up with as many words as we could with just those letters. "Ant," "pet," "car," et cetera. And I just thought, "Wow! You mean you can take letters like this and recombine them into words?" I was entranced. These childhood attractions are hard to put into words. Abraham Maslow called it "impulse voices." He noticed that children know exactly what they like and dislike from a very early age. It is extremely human and powerful. You had those impulse voices too. You hated this kind of activity and you loved that other one. You didn't like math but you were drawn to words. You were exhilarated by certain kinds of books and fell promptly asleep with other kinds. The importance of recognizing these early inclinations is that they are clear indications of an attraction that is not infected by the desires of other people. They are not something embedded in you by your parents, which come with a more superficial connection, something more verbal and conscious. Coming instead from somewhere deeper, these inclinations can only be your own, reflections of your unique chemistry. Daily Law: Do something today that you used to love doing as a kid. Try to reconnect with your impulse voices. Robert Greene in conversation at Live Talks Los Angeles, February 11, 2019 January 4 It Is Already Within You Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this something as a signal calling in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am. -James Hillman As you become more sophisticated, you often lose touch with these signals from your primal core. They can be buried beneath all of the other subjects you have studied. Your power and future can depend on reconnecting with this core and returning to your origins. You must dig for signs of such inclinations in your earliest years. Look for its traces in visceral reactions to something simple; a desire to repeat an activity that you never tired of; a subject that stimulated an unusual degree of curiosity; feelings of power attached to particular actions. It is already there within you. You have nothing to create; you merely need to dig and refine what has been buried inside of you all along. If you reconnect with this core at any age, some element of that primitive attraction will spark back to life, indicating a path that can ultimately become your Life's Task. Daily Law: Ask someone who recalls your childhood what they remember about your interests. Get reacquainted with those early passions. Mastery, I: Discover Your Calling-The Life's Task January 5 Know What You're Drawn to and Immerse Yourself in It The contemporary anthropologist-linguist Daniel Everett grew up on the California-Mexico border, in a cowboy town. From a very early age, he found himself drawn to the Mexican culture around him. Everything about it fascinated him-the sound of the words spoken by the migrant workers, the food, the manners that were so different from the Anglo world. He immersed himself as much as he could in their language and culture. This would transform into a lifelong interest in the Other-the diversity of cultures on the planet and what that means about our evolution. Excerpted from The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature by Robert Greene All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
