Interviews with the Masters: A Companion to Robert Greene's Mastery

“When you turn your back on someone, they come running after you.”

“Remember: the greatest danger you face in the world today is that you are replaceable. As you get older, people who are younger, cheaper and more in tune with trends are rising up and threatening your position. Your only salvation is to mine your uniqueness, to combine various skills that set you apart. No one can do what you do. That is your endgame.”

“You see, you keep learning. People are always looking for a single magic turning point. There isn't one. It’s much more of a gradual getting better and better and better and better.”

“Van Gogh didn't paint for money either. He only sold two paintings in his whole lifetime. Robert:”

“Whistleblowers get fired and shot or crack up. You have to decide what you want to do. Do you want a career, or do you want to be an advocate? And where I’ve been an advocate, I do it not in my backyard. If I’m going to fight, I don't do it in the backyard. In other words, I can get more done by not doing it in the backyard. I can train my students in the right way to do things.”

“But I don't consider history to be a field. It’s just all the stuff that’s happened so far. You have to call it a field so people who study what happened in the past can get a job teaching blank. But it doesn't seem to me that it’s a subject.”

“So I'd gotten rid of that negativity and I'd show, “Well, here’s something done right. Here’s the mistake, but here’s how to fix the mistake.”

“I got very good on the telephone tricks too. Like calling up a company and find out that the plant was going to building a new addition and getting hold of the engineering office and getting the secretary to give me the direct extension.”

“One thing I designed, I’ve done a lot of work on improving kosher slaughter. They need to make a head holding device that would go on the end of the conveyer. A normal kosher head holding device, the thing is like a cradle that lifts up the head. If I have it on the end of a conveyer, how do I make this work?”

“The problem is, when things go verbal, you drop out the detail.”

“So after that I had a new rule. If I’m hired by the plant engineer, I only go over his head if I’m in project failure mode. If the project is going to fail, then I'll go over his head. But as long as the project is going to come out, I never go over his head. Now, that’s a rule I still follow today.”

“Not just pain, but bullshit. Avoiding bullshit.”

“So I went down to their office and I said, “Well, I'll write a column for you.” So the first year I didn't get paid anything, but I wrote a little column every month”

“So my approach to troubleshooting is I go into the plant. The first thing I do before we change anything on the equipment is make the people operate it correctly. Stop screaming, stop poking all the animals with electric prods, bring up smaller groups. And then I see how it works. Then I go, “Okay. He’s balking at seeing a lady standing there writing down cattle IDs. All right, get a big piece of cardboard, I'll cover her up. He’ll balking at the restrainer. I'll turn a light on the restrainer entrance. 'So I just do a lot of little things, a lot of modifications with lights and cardboard to see if I can get it to work. And then after I’ve done that I go, “Well this is hopeless. You're going to have to build a new system, or we can fix it with these changes.” There’s an awful lot of systems where it’s certainly not a system I would want to copy, but I can make it work. The plant can live with it.”

“I deliberately ignored these things because I knew they weren't interesting. You can do a lot by avoiding bad as opposed to seeking good.”