Robert Greene: A Process for Finding & Achieving Your Unique Purpose

When you find that sense of purpose, when you find what I call your life's task, everything has a direction. Everything has a purpose. Your energy is concentrated. It's not like just going down a single narrow pathway ... It's actually the most exciting thing that can ever happen to you because you never have that lost feeling...

When you're in your 20s or your 30s or your 40s, you want to be paying attention to yourself. And the problem with people in the world today is you're not paying attention to yourself. You're not inside your own head. You don't hear those voices. You don't hear what you love, what you like anymore, because, as I said, there's so many of these other distractions going on.

You are one of a kind. So, that is your source of power. To waste that is just the worst thing you can do in your life. And what the power is is finding that uniqueness—what makes you you and how you can mine that and how you can go deep into it and use that to create a career path.

If you want to move people, if you want them to follow your ideas, if you want them to be more aligned with your politics or your ideas, you have to be subtle. You have to learn psychology. You have to learn certain aspects of how to almost move people without them realizing it in certain directions.

When you find that thing that really connects to you, you're paying deep attention, your emotions are engaged, you're learning at a much faster rate.

The real sublime, you don't have that feeling. It's transformative. Once you feel it, it lasts for you for the rest of your life. It's what Maslow, again, called a peak experience.

Being vulnerable is actually a positive trait. I think a lot of people now in the world today, because things are so harsh and invasive, that people have become too invulnerable. They don't want to let anything in.

You have to learn the art of what to ignore and what not to pay attention and understand that you're wired to see those kind of red alert buttons on Facebook or on Nextdoor, wherever they are. It's negative. It's like a candy rush, and you have to avoid it.

I'm concerned about young people in particular with hookup culture, with pornography, etc., etc. It's kind of rewiring the human brain.