Name: "What Makes You Different Is What Makes You Powerful" | Robert Greene on Purpose
Uploaded: 2024-06-10T16:29:13.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video '"What Makes You Different Is What Makes You Powerful" | Robert Greene on Purpose' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-06-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video '"What Makes You Different Is What Makes You Powerful" | Robert Greene on Purpose' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-06-10. Transcript available.

And a lot of what we talk about on this show for a lot of young men and women
is purpose,
you know, and what it means to have purpose and how to find purpose.
And you talk a lot about that in Mastery, about purpose.
Do you think that everyone has purpose?
Well, it's a difficult question to answer.
I mean, I believe that everyone, the way I look at it is you, Theo, were born
with a DNA that will never be replicated in the past or in the future.
It's a unique marker of you, right?
So genetically, there is something different about you.
Weird, odd, gray, however you want to put it, okay?
And it's like something that's planted at your birth.
It's what makes you different from everybody else.
It's even what makes you different from your parents, right?
I mean, you do inherit their genetics, but it's always different, okay?
And so that's like a seed at your birth.
If you cultivate that seed, if you cultivate your uniqueness, it gives you a
purpose in life.
It's why you are unique.
You can look at it as if somebody or just nature intended it to be this way,
but it's what makes you, you.
It's your energy.
It's your character.
It's your weirdness.
It's your sense of humor.
It's what draws you to certain things, what you hate about certain things.
It's you.
If you listen to that, it's like a voice inside of your head.
Instead of listening to all the other bullshit that's around you,
what your parents are saying, what your teachers are saying, what your friends
are saying,
if you listen to that voice clearly, it directs you.
It gives you a purpose.
Now, I'm saying everybody has that potential.
I see.
But quite clearly, not everybody.
In fact, few people actually go that far.
So if you see somebody out there in the public eye, yourself or others,
reached a level of fame and success, you can say that there's nobody else like
them out there.
They're unique.
They're one of a kind, right?
You can say that about a Steve Jobs.
You can say that about Elon Musk.
You can say that about political figures, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah.
Richard Simmons, Mr. T.
Yeah.
Okay.
50 Cent, somebody I've worked with.
There's only one person like them.
That's because they found their uniqueness and they brought it out and they
cultivated it.
They're not afraid of it.
And that's what gives them their purpose.
A lot of people are afraid of being different.
That's one of the worst things that can happen to you.
Yeah.
Because it's what makes you different that is what makes you powerful.
So to answer your question in my long-winded way,
everybody has a purpose, but not everybody follows it.
Not everybody connects to it.
Yeah, I guess there's a lot of fear in it, huh?
Because you're going to be different.
You're going to have to choose to...
People are going to look at you.
The eyes of the tribe are going to turn towards you.
Yeah.
If you try to step out into a different march than the group.
Yeah.
You know, sometimes I would see like...
Yeah.
Sometimes I...
You ever be like on a floor somewhere and you just see one ant by itself?
Yeah.
And you're like, this guy is a gangster.
Well, they're called scout ants.
I mean, I wish they were gangsters, but what they're doing is they're looking
for food or
something and they're signaling to the army, hey guys, here's where it's
happening.
Let's follow me.
Oh, damn.
Yeah.
I thought they were dudes that were like, you know what?
I'm going to do something different.
Well, that would be the more interesting interpretation.
So then are there some...
So it's not that some people don't have a purpose.
It's just that some people are able to hear a voice inside of them that directs
them more
towards their purpose.
Yeah.
I mean, so what is it?
I call it in mastery, I call it a primal inclination.
So we see that in certain people.
So at a very, very young age, and I maintain it happens to everybody, but you
forget about
it.
So you look at like Albert Einstein.
He was like four years old and his father gave him a compass.
And he was like mesmerized by it because it meant that there was some kind of
force out
there that was moving the needle of the compass, an invisible force.
And for a child, that was an overwhelming thought that there's something out
there in the universe
that is moving something, but you can't see it.
It had a lasting influence on his whole way of science and wanting to discover
these unseen
forces.
Tiger Woods, when he was like two years old, his father would be hitting golf
balls in the
garage and he would be going, the little baby tiger would be going crazy.
He's like, I got to do this.
He was so enamored with just the physicality of it.
He had to do it.
I could go on and on and on with athletes, with dancers, with writers.
I mean, I'm not putting myself on their level, but I had a relationship when I
was six years
older, so to words, words just mesmerized me.
I couldn't believe that there was a word that meant something.
I was entranced by the sound of it, by the look of it, et cetera.
Oh, yeah.
Well, even just to think that a bunch of letters would get together and party
like that.
Yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah, because I remember like first they taught us letters and I was like, okay.
But then the word showed up and I was like, oh, okay.
They're in gangs.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, there's some real turf wars out here.
That's right.
Well, you talk a lot about how unique humans are, you know, and just how rare,
like how unique
is it that a person exists?
How unique is an individual?
Well, it's something I'm going into in my new book.
And I'm trying to tell you how you must realize how strange it is for you to be
alive at this
moment.
I don't know if that's quite what your question is.
No, I think it is kind of.
How rare is it?
Like how, like sometimes I want to be able to remember how rare I am and not
just me.
I just, I mean that as a voice of a human.
I want to be, I want to remind myself more often that I am, I am one of one and
not me,
but every person.
Yeah.
Well, the way I try to describe it in my, in my new book, I'm not going to go
into the
full thing because it'll take hours.
But first of all, the idea that our planet has life on it is incredibly strange
and weird.
It was like an accident, totally fortuitous.
We know billions of other planets that have no life, right?
So something snapped 3 billion years ago, 4 billion years ago that we don't
understand.
Wow.
All right.
From that point on, life evolved in this weird fashion.
And there was this moment about 600 million years ago called the, God, the word
escapes
me.
It's a period in history.
Mesoloic?
No, no, no.
It's, it's before that.
It'll, it'll, it'll come to me later.
It's 600 million years ago.
600 million years ago.
Suddenly life became complex.
It'll come to me at some point.
Maybe it's the Cretaceous period.
Spring or something?
Cretaceous.
Cretaceous.
Cretaceous.
So, um, some suddenly complex life evolved.
Cambrian explosion.
Cambrian explosion.
Thank you, sir.
Sorry, not to cut you off.
But 600 million years ago, the earth experienced an evolutionary event, which
has never been
repeated.
The Cambrian explosion.
Thank you.
So a huge increase in new life forms.
Many of which lay the foundations for the body plans of all subsequent animal
life.
Wow.
I've never even heard of that.
So, yeah.
So there's this guy, Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a book about the Cambrian
explosion and
how there were these forms of life, and he has pictures in his book, of these
really grotesque
looking creatures that lived in the ocean, because all life was in water then.
And if only one plan survived, which is the plan that all bodies basically have,
right, with
a head, et cetera, et cetera.
But if that hadn't happened, and it almost didn't, the most, the strangest,
most weird
looking forms of life would be walking around this planet.
You have to see these pictures to believe it, right?
Anyway, um, that happened.
Okay.
Then we go on and on and on.
Then there were the dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs disappeared because of, we now
know, because
of a, a meteor, uh, um, what do you call it, uh, uh, heat or something?
No, no, no.
A meteor hit, hit the planet.
Oh, a big bang.
Yeah.
Or like, uh, a meteor wiped everything out.
Yeah.
It shook the whole thing, huh?
About 60 million years ago, right?
It ended up to the extinction of dinosaurs.
Damn.
But that, but that meteor could have easily missed planet Earth.
If it had shifted just a slight degree, it could have hit somewhere else, but
it landed
in exactly the spot in the Yucatan Peninsula that caused the greatest amount of
damage.
If that hadn't happened, dinosaurs would still be roaming the planet.
And then we wouldn't.
We wouldn't.
Humans, about 80,000 years ago, nearly went extinct.
There were only about 8,000 of us.
We'd been decimated by various illnesses, et cetera.
We very nearly went extinct as a species, okay?
So humans surviving all of that, surviving that life evolves, surviving that
life evolved
in the way that it did, that dinosaurs disappeared, that mammals came on, is
extremely unlikely.
And then add on to this, Theo, the fact that your parents met and there was a
chance that
they, the chance that they met was probably a bit unlikely.
It could have easily been somebody else who was your father, right?
And then you would still be you, but you wouldn't be you exactly.
It'd be different.
Multiply that by 70,000 generations going back to the earliest humans.
Wow.
If they hadn't met in a certain way, if they hadn't met each other, you would
be completely,
you wouldn't be you at all, right?
So the fact that you were here, the odds against it are so astronomical that
you, I say in the
book, you must have to sit down on your knees and it's like, almost like a
religion.
You must think it is so strange.
It is so miraculous that I'm so grateful that I am who I am.
It is incredible.
There's a reason for that, you know?
Yeah, I think that's something, yeah, that we all should, yeah, it's like that
you were
here, like you were, there was, there is purpose in you.
There was some, the universe chose this.
Yeah.
Whoever you are, the universe chose you.
Whatever pain, whatever prosperity, whatever this walk is right now, that you
were chosen
for it, it's like, I feel like it just gives, I don't know if it helps me have
some ownership
when I'm thinking of myself or I don't know what it does for me, but I think it's
important
to hear that because I think more than ever now, it feels like that individuality
is getting
lost for how rare we are to exist.
Like no, we only, only some of us have the same fingerprint.
None of us have same fingerprints, right?
Right.
That's crazy, bro.
Yeah.
You know?
And I think also is this, I think I read that this, everybody has a same,
nobody has the
same sphincter either, which is, yeah, the 11th fingerprint.
Never thought of it that way.
Yeah.
So that's crazy just to think that it, you know, at the, at both ends, they
really got
you sealed off, you know, very rare, you know, uniquely.
Thank you.