Kind: captions
Language: en
there's lots of things you could be
interested in
but it all boils down to
not am i going to do this today but if i
really want to be good at it am i
willing to put in the one thousand three
thousand ten thousand hours it will take
to get to that level
[Music]
hey everybody welcome to impact theory
our goal with this show and company is
to introduce you to the people and ideas
that will help you actually execute on
your dreams all right today's guest is
one of the most fascinating
entrepreneurs and podcasters in the
world a multi-hyphenate in the extreme
he's also a best-selling author whose
book choose yourself was named by
businessweek as one of the top 12
business books of all time not too
surprising given that the book is chock
full of wisdom gleaned from one of the
most expansive and volatile careers ever
he's been an investor running venture
capital funds hedge funds and angel
funds he's been a board member sitting
on the boards of a diverse array of
companies but most importantly he's also
founded 20 companies of his own
several of them notable successes and
most useful to all of us several of them
spectacular failures he's made multiple
fortunes and squandered a couple as well
but through it all he's taken us along
for the ride with absolute transparency
even during the times when he was
considering suicide he's penned nearly
20 books written countless articles and
conducted some of the most revealing
interviews ever captured he's
interviewed such luminaries as mark
cuban peter thiel and tony robbins and
written for some of the most prestigious
publications on the planet including the
financial times the wall street journal
and techcrunch his gripping style of
total candor and unflinching willingness
to rake himself over the coals for the
reader's benefit has placed him firmly
in the pantheon of truly great writers
and earned him a fan base on his own
blog that rings in at over 25 million
people and counting
so please
help me in welcoming the ranked chess
master stand up comic and the michael
jordan of self-reinvention himself james
altucher
[Applause]
how you doing i'm doing so good it is so
good to have you here i wish every time
i walked into a room somebody would do
an intro like that for me we can work on
that we can make that happen like if i'm
walking into like a board meeting say
someone just say that hey everybody
quiet down like you've you've seen him
on his podcast he's written 20 books he
said i want that intro everywhere i go i
dig it i can respect that and let me ask
you a question yeah and then we'll the
usual way to start an interview i like
it
okay this is just like a naive question
yeah but like
i get the bro hug thing right but it
wasn't around when i was a kid men
didn't do the bro hug right and nothing
there's anything wrong with it but i'm
confused like i'm a shy person and so
sometimes people do the fist bump
which just it feels a little weird like
you're about to like punch somebody and
then it turns into a handshake
and then no like for me handshake is a
handshake that's how i am used to it and
then the bro hug sort of evolved
and we had a podcast guest on as it was
a basketball player i won't name my name
who was he was seven foot two i'm going
in for the handshake he's then going for
the bro hog i i don't know when to
switch and i and he's seven foot two so
i end up kissing his elbow
and
i just sometimes don't know what to do
that's amazing so there are rare people
that i meet in life that are this
truly beautiful and fascinating
combination of a few traits
and you have this um
self-awareness that is so palpable and
the ability to explain
what you're going through and have been
through
but you also have this volatility to the
way that you've lived your life where
it's like you'll you make the fortune
and then you spend the fortune but the
part that fascinates me is that you're
then able to walk us through
exactly what was going on i think it's
because i lacked self-awareness or lack
it still who knows and uh
that's the problem is that
i would make all this money
and i would think
uh
that's it i finished i'm done with
being you know everything i had to do to
be a good human
and now i could just do whatever i want
and
of course then you crash and burn very
quickly
and i think it was because i i lacked
self-awareness i thought
money was
the goal and not just the means towards
other goals and
you know when when things crashed and
burned it would be very painful and i
wouldn't unders and then i would ask
myself like oh like
how could this happen to me again like
it's like it didn't just happen once it
happen twice and a third time and it
would be so depressing like
why
i think i'm
smart what am i doing wrong and then i
had to really kind of analyze
what was going right on the way up what
was i doing wrong on the way down
is it possible to start over again and i
was getting older and older each time
and i had kids to raise
you know and of course i would analyze
like every possibility
and some possibilities weren't pleasant
some were a little bit more hopeful but
you know it's a scary thing to get to
that point where you're either going to
you know keep on failing miserably
or
you know try again like that's scary too
so you get stressed every time you get
stressed cortisol of course spikes in
your brain you know this stress hormone
and there's two ways to resolve it you
could give up
because that solves all your problems
just you know blaming somebody like just
giving up in some ways one way to
resolve the stress and the other way to
resolve the stress is to kind of go
through it and
try to succeed again and push through it
and figure out what went wrong and and
realize okay it might take me another
two three five years to really work at
it to get to that level again
financially or or
in career or whatever
but
you know both
those are the only two ways to relieve
stress and fortunately for me most of
the time i took that persistent side you
know where i'm going to learn what i did
wrong i'm going to try to figure this
out
and hope for the best because the other
side giving up you know it's hard when
you have kids to raise
and when giving up might mean you know
thinking about suicide or thinking about
i don't know getting a job at burger
king or whatever i don't know
so nothing wrong with getting a job at
burger king by the way but i didn't want
to work there that's interesting first
the writing about the time where you
were contemplating suicide the
difficulty emotionally of dealing with
the money loss and all that was that a
hopeful act did you did you want other
people to learn something
you were just so raw and so candid and i
want to understand what motivated that
the suicidal ideation no talking about
it oh taught writing about it it's funny
because i started writing about it in
2009 or 2010
and all you know previously i'd written
about
you know other things i've been i've
been a writer for since like 1991 and
but
and i've been professionally writing
about let's say
the economy or
companies or whatever i was wrote for
the wall street journal i had a column
for the financial times but then
suddenly
um i just stopped all that and i started
writing this more raw
honest stuff because i got
i mean it's a whole story but people
would call me up and say
are you do you have cancer or something
is everything okay are you about to die
like now you're just these are con final
confessions like
friends would take me out to lunch or
dinner like are you okay everyone was
calling me like are you okay and i'm
like i'm better than ever but it was
funny just the reaction from friends how
surprised they were at someone being
honest but i would get tons of emails
uh from people saying oh i'm like going
through the same thing what should i do
and i didn't know what they should do
i'm not a therapist or anything i would
just say this is my story
and
if you can
get something out of my story that is
helpful to you that's great uh but i
can't i never
give
advice in my writing i just say what's
worked for me and then if it's worked
for others that's great
so i will um
i'll i'll be bold in a way that either
you
can't for yourself or don't want to be
but um
choose yourself is extraordinary in the
advice that it gives which red is advice
to me and maybe that wasn't your
intention but
it's so powerful so if people read it as
advice their life will be better because
of it that's the ultimate barometer by
which i'll judge books
if you take somebody's advice will your
life be better and unquestionably that's
true and i want to get to some of those
specifics but before i do that i really
want to understand
the act of writing in such a candid way
is it an act of hope for you or is it
meaning i hope that in my pain someone
will get something powerful and
positive and that makes having gone
through it worth it or is it um
that the more sort of mechanical of i
know that i'll earn my credibility
just by
being truthful because you've said that
writing your blog specifically
you don't make money off of it but you
earn your reputation
well also writing
is difficult it's a skill
you know you're communicating some
story and image that is clear in your
head and you're trying to teleport that
image into the heads of all these maybe
thousands of strangers you don't know
and
uh the
the way humans have done it for
you know seventy thousand years you know
you know yuval harare and sapiens
obviously uh is through stories not
through lectures not through here's the
ten steps to do this let's say i'm
writing about public speaking i won't
say here's the 10 ways to be better at
public speaking i'll say
here's a couple of times where i was
scared out of my mind to go on stage and
you know i literally i was about to go
up on stage and i left the building and
i was just gonna take a plane home and
not ever return any phone calls again
from these people who invited me to
speak at their conference and here's how
i went i solved the problem for myself
and so that could be construed as advice
but it's really just how i solved it for
me it's like uh
you know i had an ordinary person sold a
business lost everything so now there's
a call to action and
i meet
people who could help me once i was
aware of what was happening and i had
bigger and bigger problems to solve to
to
try to get success or happiness again
and
uh and then i returned to tell the story
and it's like the you know traditional
mythology you know the the
you know joseph campbell calls it the
hero's journey but i could call it also
the the losers journey you know and then
and it's the same thing
yeah it's uh it's
very fascinating to hear you tell that
retelling and to see your own story as a
hero's journey the fact that you share
it and allow other people to learn from
it is um from my perspective it's like a
i don't know an act of salvation somehow
i'll say this
for me to
not try to be cool to own up to people
that i don't know things or that i
consider myself average it was an act of
of salvation for myself
um
it it removed fear out of the equation i
didn't have to worry about um whether i
won or lost at something because i
wasn't faking anything and i was just
telling people that this is really how i
see myself and so the reason that i
wanted to put such a fine point on that
is
i want people to understand that the
life that you've built at least in this
act of your life has been based on the
credibility you've earned by writing
just the really raw truth about who you
are
and that the fact that you write like
that is precisely why i listen to your
podcast it's why i wanted to have you on
the show there's so much
um wisdom when somebody's not posturing
and so
reading choose yourself i i was
literally i started feeling badly about
myself because your advice was so
[ __ ] good it's the awesome advice of
the person that had to climb that hill
themselves and i want people to
understand that first because i think
that
the the main premise of a lot of your
writing is a lot of people want to die
and
like that really scares me in a way that
i can't tell you and it drives me in a
way that i can tell you so when i
started all of all of this being impact
theory it never once occurred to me that
one of the top questions i would get
asked is
a
easier variation than the very direct
question people are asking you which is
i want to die and what do i do about
that
and
that was the biggest surprise of doing
impact theory and i've never seen
anybody address that concern as
profoundly as you have yeah and and
thank you for saying that by the way and
thank you for saying all these things
about about choose yourself i value your
opinion highly and
you know the thing about
failing whether it's
you fail at a career thing or you fail
at a relationship thing or you fail at
you know you lose money and you feel
like oh my god i was set and now i'm not
i bought
literally probably one of the biggest
apartments in new york city i was just
stupid almost every single day i would
invest i actually thought i was
at the poverty line at 10 million
previously i would have been like oh
give me a hundred dollars and i'll be
happy but then suddenly as soon as i
there was something wrong with my brain
as soon as i had like 10 million
and this is just a
stupid way to think but i had like a
disease like i would think i need a
hundred million so how do you get 100
million from 10 you have to invest
huge ridiculous amounts of money in
potentially stupid companies and turns
out all of my companies i invested in
were stupid and i lost everything
you know
was forced out of my home i couldn't
afford you know the mortgage or anything
and
you know i remember thinking that
okay my kids
are young enough they won't remember me
like i am i you know i had a zero year
old and a three-year-old i don't
remember being three so i figured okay
this is the exact right time i had a
four million dollar life insurance
policy which should be enough to set
them up this is the exact right time
to kill myself if i want them to be okay
because i'm never going to be smart
enough to make this money again
and so i would start
alta vista in because people weren't
googling then they were all there was
alta vista was researching how do you do
this without the life insurance company
knowing and i couldn't figure out how to
do it so
the only other alternative was to start
figuring out how to make my life better
it wasn't like just one day suicide the
next day
oh everything's great a lot of things
happened along the way like you try lots
of things to figure out what will work
some work and some don't and it's not
it's not easy
how in the depths of your despair did
you become okay with
trying something that you knew might
fail like how did you build yourself
back up you know the the daily practice
was that the the answer like you in your
book choose yourself you do this
extraordinary walkthrough of a kid
reaches out to you and he's like at that
place where he's just on the floor
there's no getting up there's there's
even you said even asking him to floss a
single tooth would have been asking too
much
and how do you build
back from that how did you build back
from that yeah so i mean it's happened
more
than once to me sometimes i would do
things right and i'd get back up and i'd
be disciplined and and
you know i would find opportunities and
some success again and then lose it
again lose everything to zero
after making millions again
and i remember one time
i had
built and sold a second company or maybe
this was the third company and
i was
lying in a hammock and i realized i just
had lost everything again and the
hammock was in between these two houses
i had bought on this nice piece of
property overlooking the hudson river
and it was raining and i just didn't
feel like getting up it was just where
was i going to go i had no nothing to do
nothing
going on nothing to hope for and i was
just like what why did this happen again
and uh i started to just
bit by bit piece it together like where
did i feel pleasure on the way up in
such a way that oh if i keep
doing this if i keep hitting the
accelerator on this activity good things
will happen and that's what i call in
the introduce yourself i call it this
daily practice that now just every day i
make sure i i factor in
these four things i'll say the four
things but then i'll say how from the
beginning you can do it so the four
things that i started doing and again
this is just me i mean my work for
others might not
am i
getting a little better in terms of
physical health now
as you age your physical health changes
is different but i'm at least attempting
to
understand and
essentially eat move sleep better every
day
um
emotional health
you know so many times i thought i have
a business opportunity with this guy
not such a great person i could see
there's some toxicity around him but
this opportunity seems really huge so i
better ignore the bad sides of this
person and focus on the opportunity that
those situations never ever like zero of
those situations worked out and
so so
you know i every day do i think am i
eliminating
toxic people from my life and focusing
on positive people who
i love and want to support and they love
and want to support me and then
every day you could tweak that like a
bonsai tree there's always people moving
in and out of your life and you could
always tweak it and
so that's emotional health then creative
or mental health
i call it creative health now because
mental health means something else but
this is really critical
you know people have ideas all the time
or they want to escape the traps that
they've set for themselves all the time
but they don't know how
and
it's difficult because your mind
your only
every moment in your life has only added
up to where you are right now so if you
don't feel like you're a success
everything you've done before has added
up to right here so you've got to do
something a little different but you
don't know what to do different because
you've never done it before so i always
this this started happening for me in
bought 100 waiters pads because they're
10 cents a pad
and i would write down 10 ideas a day
and then sometimes i would say oh i'm
going to write down 10 ideas for tom
bilyeu today
on how maybe impact theory i think could
be
even bigger than it is
and
i might you know or maybe i'll write
down 10 ways to um
you know be 10 ideas for books i could
write or 10 ideas for articles that i
could write 10 ideas for amazon
and so on i write 10 ideas every day not
to have good ideas
but to exercise
this idea muscle you know if you if you
get into let's say a bicycle accident
and you can't
walk for two weeks this happened to
stephen king in his book on writing he
talks about this after a few weeks your
leg muscles have atrophied so quickly
you can't walk you need physical therapy
to walk again so it's the same thing
most people are walking around or
working in their jobs and and they never
they haven't been exercising their idea
muscle so if you exercise your idea
muscle every day within six months
it's literally you've rewired your brain
and i've seen it happen to me like
suddenly you can come up with ideas for
people
all the time and for yourself and you
suddenly start to realize okay i've just
and you get used to having bad ideas but
you'll never come up with a good idea if
you haven't you'll never be able to like
power lift 300 pounds if you haven't
like built up you know
for me 10 pounds and then 30 pounds and
50 pounds and whatever you have to build
up so you have to build up your idea
muscle and then people say
ideas are a dime a dozen and they finish
with execution is everything
execution is execution ideas are just a
subset of ideas so if i come up with a
good idea is a good idea the next day
i'll write
here's 10 ways i can execute on this
idea here's 10 more ways how i can
execute on this idea the next day and
then and then you start
executing if you've and then you find
out very quickly if that was a good idea
or not but i think that
really is such an important thing like
to get a good strong
creative idea muscle going and as a
result
i've just sometimes i just send my ideas
to people so i visited i sent my ideas
to amazon i visited amazon they invited
me to visit sent my ideas to linkedin i
visited linkedin
you know uh
i started writing for different
magazines because i sent 10 ideas of
articles i could write for them
i bet you get this
hey tom i really love your podcast
can i be your intern i'll do whatever
you need help in and you know you want
to respond because this person is being
sincere they want to help you but they
just gave you a homework assignment like
now you have to come up with a way for
them to help you that's now the the onus
is on you to come up with an idea for
them to help you i always say to people
if you really want to help me come up
with an
idea i haven't thought of that will help
me and then how you're then figure out
how you're going to do it then you could
be my intern or whatever um
and
uh
the fourth thing is spiritual health
and really spiritual health is not about
praying to god or
medi or meditating or
you know bowing down to allah or all
those things are fine really it all it
means is
acknowledging
that
for me it meant acknowledging that i'm
pretty much an idiot about everything
there's nothing i can control in my
world and i can do the best i can and
let the world take care of itself and if
i'm doing the best i can then things
will be fine so that's what i mean by
spiritual health so just those four
things a day
so do you remember the kid that you
featured in the book that was basically
i you know i can't i don't know how to
get started i just feel completely
dejected something horrible had happened
i forget exactly what and then you walk
him through
the power of having a daily practice and
you said to just start with one thing
instead of all four right so
so this is extremely important so i i do
remember that and i called it this
simple daily practice just to give it a
name to give it a people respond to
something that's like branded almost so
there's a daily practice and then
there's the simple daily practice just
do one thing and ask yourself at the end
of the day did i do that one thing it's
like if you need to get better at
you know
shooting a target with a bow and arrow
you don't start shooting a target that's
100 yards away i could hit a bullseye if
the target is one yard away and then
okay i'll get good at that then three
yards away and then five yards away so
then maybe 100 yards away a year from
now or or a hundred years from now i
don't know but
you know physically let's say you focus
on or let's say you focus on the
creative don't come up with 10 ideas a
day come up with just one idea a day and
pick something
pick a category it's easy what's one
book i can write like those are pretty
cool sneakers how how do you identify
i'm going to write a book how do i
identify
what a cool sneaker is to is to buy okay
that's a bad idea that's a horrible idea
nobody will buy that book but at least
you just started with something and you
don't have to judge whether it's a good
idea or not and you just you know
or let's say emotionally um okay there's
toxic people in your life maybe maybe
you know you have a sibling that is
always putting you down
okay
don't
don't think about
what am i going to respond
to the sibling the next time i talk to
him or her just don't call him that day
and you've just eliminated that toxic
person from your life for that day uh
you know whether it you know
spiritually
like what's one thing you're always
trying to control whether it's you know
how a kid is acting or how
a spouse is treating you or how a boss
is treating you you can't control that
they're going through their own
hardships and hard times in life i can't
control how someone treats me and i'm
just going to focus on what i can do to
improve myself
so tru everything is just practice
that's why i'd say that's why i call it
a daily practice it's not like a daily
uh habit it's a daily practice because
it's practice
for how you live your entire life not
it's not like this the cure it's just
practice so you could be open to the
cures in life so make it as simple as
possible you're just practicing and you
make the practice better and better
i think the the a to z examples that you
gave to people like you said to him okay
here are some potential things that you
can do and it was literally a to z
um
they're worth the price of admission for
that book alone i thought they were so
powerful i don't know how many you
remember of them but some that really
jumped out at me one was reply to an
email from 10 years ago
another was
call somebody up that really influenced
you doesn't matter who they are and tell
them that you're grateful for them and
why you're grateful for them and there
was just something like as you went
through and you were going through all
these relatively simple things but they
would put you in a certain mindset was
that the idea like to to get people
practicing something that sort of
yes and because it's fun
so
all those things a to z i did so
for instance one time i thought to
myself
um
you know i i didn't own james
altoshure.com because i was i was
writing for all these other publications
who's going to come to my
website and so
one time a reader of mine in 2004
wrote me and said hey
uh
i know it's your birthday i bought you
jamesalter.com
just send me an email and i'll send it
i'll tell you how to you know i'll send
it over to you and i never replied to
him and in 2009
i looked back
at that email i was just going through
all my old emails and i hit reply and i
said okay thanks and that's it and then
he wrote back right away he's like whoa
no one's ever taken like five years to
respond to an email before and and i
made it seem as if i was just responding
instantly to him and he still
fortunately kept re-registering
jamesobisher.com he still had it and he
sent it over to me and we're still
friends like nine years later and and so
this
why that's on this list is because the
last part is because we're still friends
so this was a way to reach out to
somebody who had reached out to me with
a nice gesture and say okay i'll reach
out back and if he's still you know if
he's a good person
you know maybe
this person now has been a friend for
nine years so again that's on the
emotional side of this daily practice
it's like a back door away into the
emotional side of this daily practice
and also to forgive and forget like
let's say someone
wronged me five years ago and i find
some email they sent
you know hey you want to grab a cup of
coffee that i never responded to and i'm
like okay how about tomorrow at 9 00 am
and you know it's a way to test the
waters to see if emotionally things are
different and uh
what was the other one you said
gratitude gratitude yeah uh
i i it's funny enough i uh
did this podcast recently with aj jacobs
uh who wrote a book about gratitude and
in the middle of the podcast we live
called the professor who threw me out of
graduate school in 1991. i basically
failed every course in graduate school
and this person was the dean and he sent
me a letter form a letter saying look
you're gonna you're not mature enough to
be in graduate school we're gonna have
to ask you to leave if at some point you
want to come back we can have a
conversation
but you have to pack up your stuff and
leave now and
we called him up live in the podcast and
now he's like the dean at georgia tech
or whatever and we had this great
conversation where i thanked him for
throwing me out of graduate school in
and everything that's happened since you
know and that's again part of this a
back door into the emotional and also
the spiritual side of things because you
re you realize what you think might be a
bad event a soul-crushing event might
actually be the best thing that ever
happened to you you have no control over
the future you have no idea what these
events might mean to your later life if
you kind of make the best of it
you talked about forgiving and
forgetting a minute ago one of the most
powerful stories that i took away from
your writing is
um your father passing well you guys
were in the middle of a fight and that
just in terms of somebody that has i
think some pretty unique insights into
that how did that impact you what did
you take away from that how would you
suggest somebody that's in that same
situation and the temptation is to get
locked in that moment forever and not be
able to find a way out of that grief
how do you help them process through
that yeah and so so
so what happened was
uh
i i feel like i start off every other
paragraph so i lost all my money and
then
so i had this
apartment in new york city but i was
losing it and uh i i called up my
parents
and i had two kids and like i don't even
know if i could get diapers this is how
clueless i was about money even though i
had 143 dollars i thought maybe diapers
would cost more than 143
so i said to my parents i didn't know i
don't know if i can afford to live the
weekend can i drive down to where you
are pick up
you know a couple hundred dollars i
think i said a thousand dollars and they
started saying just no you know we they
gave their reasons whatever and i was
really
frantic about how little money i had i
was gonna support feeding my kids for
the weekend so i hung up the phone
and they tried calling me back i
wouldn't pick up
i didn't and i decided okay i need to
just deal with getting my life back
together and they
were not
good for me but uh uh
i stopped talking to them and my dad
would reach out a couple of times and i
was building back up again i was i was
starting to write i started to make
small little pieces of income from
different places and
my dad would reach out oh i saw you on
cnbc but i wouldn't respond and then
suddenly he had a stroke and he passed
away and uh and so i had never talked to
him after that time when i hung up on
him and of course the first thing i
would think was oh if i had the money
still i would have been able to find all
sorts of you know
procedures innovative technologies to
kind of help him and you know after he
had a stroke i was pretty sure he was
still
there but just not moving but the
doctors didn't agree i felt like if i
had the money i could have proven it so
i felt bad about that
felt i felt like i missed him because of
course because he was very different
from me in a lot of ways and i missed
his advice and and his love for me and
all that but at the end of the day
you can't you can't be a victim all the
time like i had to i had to move forward
or else i was gonna
be a victim and and always dwell on
victimhood instead of
okay how can i physically be better how
can i be emotionally better so this
doesn't happen again how can i be
creatively better how can i be
spiritually better that's interesting
you have a
pretty powerful rule that i will be
immediately employing which is don't ask
why
explain to people what you mean by that
and what you get from that
let's say you're friends with somebody
and
they suddenly stop talking to you
and you call them they don't pick up you
email they don't respond
you start to wonder did i do something
you know
they're wrong did i
they think they probably think i did
this but i know that they're
they're they're they're they're wrong i
want to tell them that they're wrong
you you don't know what's going on in
their life you've sent the message that
you're there you've kind of sent the
smoke signal out you can't ask why
they're not responding
it's hard enough to figure out why
you're doing the things you're doing let
alone figure out what
people who are
bad to you or why they're doing what
they're doing
that's too complicated life's hard
enough uh
so that's a simple example another
example might be
you had a partner who
you suddenly realized you had committed
a crime say and now the business is
going out of business you can't really
ask why did they commit that crime
uh you have you have to more ask
about yourself
okay how am i going to recognize in the
future not to partner with people who
are
not
who i should have
recognized in some way were they were
not emotionally all there that they were
going to be able to do this so i don't
get myself in that situation again this
is a business way of looking at it or
you know there's thousands of ways to
look at it but you can never ask why
about why someone else is doing
something to you
like they're not really doing it to you
they're doing it about themselves and
then you have to decide it's your choice
completely how you're going to react and
that's why i say this daily practice is
practice for those moments when you're
starting to ask why
like because you've been doing this
daily practice or because i was doing
this daily practice i'm able to survive
that moment not ask why and just move on
just flesh that out for people what
difficult gratitude is yeah i always
find people say oh yeah be grateful
every day which is great advice you
should be grateful every day but
it's almost a little too easy like oh
when you wake up in the morning be
grateful for the sun be grateful you
have another day to live your life be
grateful you you know your kids are
healthy and whatever those are that's
easy um
you know what about when things are are
hard what can you be grateful for can
you be grateful for losing you know
nine like all your money in a day can
you be grateful for
um
okay
my you know my father died when i
didn't speak to him for six months maybe
i should you know
not that that is anything to be grateful
for but maybe it teaches me a lesson
that if there's someone i love this
could be the last time i speak to them
and i should remember that and and this
taught me this valuable lesson not that
i wanted that lesson taught that way but
i have to
reframe the narrative a little bit or
let's take something simpler let's let's
say i'm driving into new york city and i
have a very important meeting with
people who are funding a company or
whatever but there's traffic so i'm
going to be late and i could be thinking
to myself oh why does this always happen
to me
i've got this traffic or i could think
to myself
wow i live
in
the busiest most amazing entrepreneurial
city on the planet
and that's why everybody else wants to
get into this city so i'm grateful i
live near here to have this opportunity
and then i can call them up and say
sorry there's traffic
and if they're good people to work with
anyway they'll be fine with it
yeah it's interesting how just reframing
that will puts you in just a different
enough mindset
um that you're able to see something
that you might not otherwise see
researching you listening to you the
image that keeps popping into my head is
that of an intellectual no not at all
it's uh an intellectual
um adventurer like of days of old like
you've been wealthy you've been poor
you've built companies you've um written
books and articles you've been a
minimalist uh even if you don't fit the
tradition i mean just like there's so
many extraordinary stories that you have
in all of this and the question that i
want to know is do you have a purpose
and do you think that that's important
that people have a purpose in life
do you do you have a purpose
yes what's your purpose to pull people
out of the matrix by giving them an
empowering mindset
okay i like that purpose
um no no problems with that one uh
in general you have like a set of values
and your values are
is part of your values is is that most
of life
so i'm i'm unpacking your purpose
so correct me for a moment part of your
part of your values are is that
um we live in some story that is
partly or almost entirely fictional that
most people are irrationally um playing
out their role in this story you know
college job you know
white picket fence promotion promotion
promotion retirement
happiness and and that is a largely
fictional story taught to us by parents
colleagues friends bosses colleges
professors teachers and so on and
uh
and
your purpose you're saying is to
show people that there are other
narratives that they can live their life
by maybe narratives that are actually
more meaningful to them because they
were told that story but you but one
alternative is for them to construct
their own narrative about what life is
about and and they'll be happier and
more successful and have more well-being
if they live in that narrative
that's a long way of unpacking what you
succinctly said in one sentence
and
one laughter from the
crowd there
better
his laughter is because it's better with
the way you said it in one sentence and
i'm just unpacking it for for myself um
and
i sort of feel like i
don't know how to tell people
that they're living in a fictional story
like if like if we're truly living let's
say i'm gonna take it to an extreme
let's say we are living in a virtual
reality now neo in the matrix had the
benefit of someone literally pulling him
out of it and putting him in the real
world there's nobody
really like in that science fiction way
doing that so all i can do is for myself
understand that
i need to choose the narrative i'm gonna
live my life by like let's say i write a
book and let's say
every publisher says nope this is a bad
book we're not going to publish it okay
there's a narrative
that says all right if i'm rational
these are the smartest people in the
publishing world i guess my book is no
good or i could be disappointed a little
bit because i think it's good but like
they're the experts and if they say no
they're the gatekeepers to
the outer world of publishing
fine i'll i'll follow the narrative i've
been taught and agreed to to the with
the gatekeepers
or i can say
i'm gonna i think it's good i'm gonna
choose myself to publish my own book and
i will
upload it to amazon i will make my own
little publishing company i will say to
amazon look this is a book
and amazon will we'll put it up amazon's
where most books are are bought and i've
just
changed the narrative a little bit for
myself and then i can document what i've
done and people could say hey
that
i could do that too i just let all these
publishers reject me i could do what he
did and publish my book whether it's
good or not and let the market decide
whether it's good uh and so
i guess it's it's a similar to what
you're saying but i just i just what i
do is i
where is my compass pointing me today to
sort of choose my own narrative and then
i document it so that other people could
decide if they like my narrative or if
they want to just stick to kind of the
traditional they want to sign up for the
narrative that everyone else has signed
up for
i.e the matrix
and so i sort of feel like my purpose is
to live
the life i want to live and not the life
anybody else wants me to live which is a
different way of saying something
similar
and where kind of intersex is like and
then i'm gonna document it and maybe
that helps people or maybe it doesn't i
don't i don't know because i can't
change how someone else thinks i could
only write what i did and how i chose
myself
so it's similar like interesting there's
an overlap in what you're saying but i
but i don't really
think of that as my purpose it's just
what i enjoy
doing and i don't like gatekeepers
telling me no
so
and whenever someone tells me no i
figure out a back door to to get what i
want
very swiss maybe is
selfish of me too i don't know
before i ask my last question tell these
guys where they can find you online well
two ways one is i have a podcast that
i'm very proud of in part because i
tom bill you wanted and other people
like you it's the james altuzher show
you could also find me at
jamesofthechurch.com because i bought it
from that guy and who bought it for me
in 2004.
the other thing is you could this is
true story you could google
put it in quotes so you get the exact
phrase you could google i want to die
and depending on how our google search
history is i'm either the number two the
number three or the number four result
there's 44 million results and i'm
either number two number three or number
four for you for the listener of this
podcast if you google i want to die and
that will take you to my blog
or on my website all right my last
question what's the impact that you want
to have on the world
you know impact's a strange thing
because
what what's the world does that mean
the future because let's say
you know are your gra your grandchildren
will probably remember who you are are
your great are your great-grandchildren
gonna remember maybe in the modern world
they can look at your instagram and they
can say oh my one of my eight
great-grandparents had this cool
instagram but so did this other one so
i'm gonna look ahead and i'm gonna look
at
hers and then i'm never gonna look at
them again and then your
great-great-great-great-grandchildren
will just have no clue and no interest
and
they only care about their own in insta
vrs or whatever they're selfie vrs and
uh
so it's so it's hard to define what
impact
means um so you can say okay i want to
have impact on people living today
and i i don't know whether i do or not
it's nice i'm sure you get this oh
if you get in walking around in the
street tom i've seen your podcast you've
changed my life that one episode with so
and so changed my life i'm so thankful
so i like it when that happens my ego
likes it when that happens and i feel
like okay this is a good thing to do um
but i really just i like it when i when
things that are in my five things that i
really enjoy passionately
love doing i love it when those things
have immediate impact on people they say
it's good and it's
you know either made them laugh or they
took some
insight from it that i didn't even think
about they they they just thought that
the the the outcome or the process of
what i did was something that they
thought was was interesting so i could
only think about that like what am i
doing what i enjoy doing am i
doing my daily practice
am i following my own core values
because if i am then the ancillary
effect of that is that i'll probably
have some impact as opposed to when i
wasn't doing those things and i would
just lose all my money and i didn't
nobody cared and i didn't really care
about anyone else and
you know my life was completely
different then so i just i just try to
do again live live the life i've been
you know sticking with discipline to
this daily practice
and
then following wherever my compass that
day tells me to go
i don't know if that's impact or not but
it's worked so far
i love that james thank you so much
thanks so much thank you for having me
on i really appreciate it my pleasure
all right guys truly this is one of the
most fascinating intellectual explorers
i've ever met in my life i've been
following him now for years and i think
that the amount of content that he puts
out there there is a sincerity to it
that is unrivaled and the fact that you
can get to his blog by typing in i want
to die is
bizarre and somehow beautiful because
once you start reading the way that he
talks about these things and you
understand that he is giving people
incredibly real
tactical advice that they can use that
reads like an instruction manual on how
to get out of those situations and how
to make your life better and the irony
is he doesn't even see it as advice
which is maybe the genesis of all of its
beauty is it is just somebody who is
talking so raw and completely real about
what they went through that you almost
can't believe that somebody is
able to be that raw and that they can
see themselves that well even if it's
only in hindsight
it's it is
one of the most extraordinarily brave
and generous acts from my perspective
that i've ever seen in my life that's
the only way that i can perceive him and
seeing the way that he brings these
extraordinary people onto his show and
takes them to new places and asks him
interesting and intriguing questions and
pushes them and sometimes argues back
with them on his own show it's really
really astonishing and there's so much
value to be taken i've never seen
anybody talk as eloquently about how to
build your life back
as him and i think even if that were the
only gift that he had given that it
would be profound enough uh to warrant
such an extraordinary life but there's
so much more than that and i hope that
you guys will dive in you will be richly
rewarded if you do all right if you
haven't already be sure to subscribe and
until next time my friends be legendary
take care
james thank you my friend hey everybody
thank you so much for watching and being
a part of this community if you haven't
already be sure to subscribe you're
going to get weekly videos on building a
growth mindset cultivating grit and
unlocking your full potential