Robert Greene

Robert Greene
Robert Greenewas an English author popular in his day, and now best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him, Greenes, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance, widely believed to contain an attack on William Shakespeare. He is said to have been born in Norwich. He attended Cambridge, receiving a BA in 1580, and an M.A. in 1583 before moving to London, where he arguably became the first professional author in England. Greene was prolific and published...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth11 July 1558
Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.
Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.
Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.
Life goes by very fast. And the worst thing in life that you can have is a job that you hate, that you have no energy in, that you're not creative with and you're not thinking of the future. To me, might as well be dead.
The big difference is, as a man, I can go to a bar at two in the morning and people will be like "He's just a fun guy! That's cool that he can balance all these things." But if you see a person that you know who has two young kids and is a mom, there's no way those perceptions are the same. It's like "Oh, there must be a problem." That's usually what women face.
You can die from someone else's misery — emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.
Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education. They tell you about your own inadequacies.
Boldness makes even the smallest animal dangerous
We started filming [with Brandy Burre ]and didn't really know, at first, what we were doing. Eventually, the thing just grabbed a hold of both of us and became what it is. But, yeah, we were very close before and we're even closer now.
I have an argument that to master any field, it's simple: it's a function of time. How much you devote yourself to the process, how much experience you get, how much you're willing to expand your limits, how willing you are to develop your own style. If you're willing to put 10,000 hours, something amazing is going to happen.
Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.
If you view everything through the lens of fear, then you tend to stay in retreat mode. You can just as easily see a crises or problem as a challenge, an opportunity to prove your mettle, the chance to strengthen and toughen yourself, or a call to collective action. By seeing it as a challenge, you will have converted this negative into a positive purely by a mental process that will result in positive action as well.
It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.
Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity.