Great poetry terrifies the herd. I want you to think about that one. Great poetry terrifies the herd. Now you’re saying, “Robin, what the heck does that one mean?” Well, one of my favorite cities on the planet is Barcelona. And I remember one day I was walking through the Bourne District, just sort of, I love getting lost in different cities. It’s a great education to travel our tiny planet. So I was walking through the Bourne District and I was just looking around and being inspired by the architecture and looking at the people and just fully present in the moment. And I stumbled upon this amazing Picasso Museum. So I walk in and I start looking at Picasso’s art, and I’m a great fan of art. And I look at the art and I study the art and I make notes about the art, and I’m provoked by the art. And towards the end of my visit through the Picasso Museum, I see this plaque on the wall, and here’s what it said, people were disturbed by the genius of Picasso. And that insight has remained with me as an artist for so many years. Great poetry, when you do anything disruptive, anything original, it’s going to be laughed at. It’s going to scare people, it’s going to threaten people because the majority, the status quo, the herd, they are standing on the foundations of the truths they believe are true. And so anything that disrupts it, whether it’s a new business, whether it’s new art, whether it’s a book that challenges people, it’s much easier to shoot the messenger than to embrace the message. When The 5AM Club first came out, it was such a disruptive book, the models,like the 10 Rituals of Daily Genius and the Twin Cycles of Elite Performance, which actually suggests rest is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. The whole 5AM protocol that I teach in the book, The 20/20/20 Formula, the whole idea of getting up before the sun so that you bulletproof your interior life based on theSpartan Warrior saying, “Sweat more in training and you’ll bleed less in war,” was a scary thought to people who don’t want to change. And some of the early readers of the book went on to social media and started knocking down the book until something really interesting happened, enough people read The 5AM Club to sort of rewrite the whole perception. And I reached a critical mass where people started saying, “Here’s the results I’m getting. Here’s how I feel. Here’s what it’s doing for me productively, creatively in my business, in my life, or even for my spirituality.” And then the tide completely changed. The larger point for you is to simply remember, bring your magic and originality to the world, but when you do just understand that it’s going to terrify people. If you look at the great visionaries, Nikola Tesla, Shakespeare, and NelsonMandela, you look at some of the great musical artists, whether it was Madonna or Lady Gaga, or look at some of the great artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, or Rembrandt, or Monet, these people were all misunderstood.I remember watching a movie, Willem Dafoe stars in it, and the movie’s called, The Gates of Eternity, or something like that. And it’s the story of van Gogh’s life. And did you know, Van Gogh did not sell one painting while he was alive? And I remember one scene in particular in this film, van Gogh is committed to an insane asylum. And the person who’s running this insane asylum pulls van Gogh out of the crowd and has a one-on-one conversation with him. And the person who’s running the insane asylum has a bunch of van Gogh’s drawings and he shows the drawings to van Gogh, and he says, “Vincent, do you really think this is art?” And van Gogh says, “Yes, Ithink it’s art. And I think it’s very beautiful.” And the person who was running the insane asylum says,” Do you really think this is art?” Because he thought it was garbage. And van Gogh, because he was so invested in his truth, he said, “Yes, this is art.” And interestingly enough, van Gogh only became van Gogh after he was dead. I mean, often great art only is revered decades after the artist has gone.
