I Failed To Prevent My Kid From Going to College

I failed.

I dropped off my kid at college the other day. I didn’t want her to go to college.

In 2005 or 2006 I wrote a column in The Financial Times that nobody should go to college anymore. I then wrote a book, “40 Alternatives to College”.

For a long time that book was the #1 seller on Amazon in the category of…”College”.

A lot of people were upset at me about this. Everyone had an argument why college was a good thing and that kids should go.

Then people said to me, “Well you went to college so now you are trying to keep people beneath you by not having them go to college.”

And one person threatened to kill me. When I tracked him down it turned out he was a senior at Brown University. HIgher education.

And other people who had spent a lot of money on college stopped returning my calls because I was calling into question the decisions they had made for themselves their entire life.

One friend, who got a really great job at a top magazine wrote me, “I never would have gotten this job if I didn’t go to college” and that was the last I heard from her even though we had been good friends.

I don’t know why I feel strongly about this. Maybe I feel it’s an important four years. Why spend it doing homework and learning nothing and getting in debt?

I was the worst student in college. And began the first of many bad relationships. And got into debt. Ugh.

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A few weeks before she left, I told Josie, “I will just GIVE you the money I would have spent on your college.

“All you have to do is watch one movie a day with me and then we can talk about it and then you can do whatever you want for the rest of the day.

“Work a job, go on auditions, hang out with friends, heck, I’ll even hire you to help me with my podcast.”

She said no.

So last week we dropped her off.

I’m a little sad about this. Why wouldn’t she want to watch a movie with me every day?

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I will try to summarize all the reasons people give me for going to college and what my response is:

“You have four years to learn the liberal arts: literature, history, soft sciences, etc.”

My response: Reading is free. It doesn’t have to cost money.

I didn’t fall in love with reading until I was about 22. After college. I read and I wrote every day and I haven’t stopped since.

Because I wanted to be a better writer, I’d read books by great writers and then usually go to the library and try to find the literary criticism on each book. I didn’t take a class.

I read what I wanted, when I wanted. And I still love it.

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“Well, what if someone never likes to read. College is the last chance for them to learn these things.”

Answer: No. If you don’t like something, you will NEVER learn simply from reading about it.

Maybe it’s just me. But I have never learned about anything I wasn’t interested in. I can only learn when I am passionately interested in something.

Even now, when I read a book, I only remember about 1-2% of it a month or so afterwards. Imagine if I wasn’t interested in the book. I’d remember 0%. Or worse, I’d start to hate the topic.

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“But isn’t college a way to learn what you are interested in?”

I’m not sure why this would be the case. You’re forced to take 4-5 classes a semester for 8 semesters (at least). Then you are overwhelmed with homework.

There’s no real time to say, “Oh my god! I’m so interested in this.”

I majored in Computer Science. But I didn’t get interested from class. I got interested because while a Freshman at college I started a business on the side that forced me to learn how to program.

By DOING something that it turned out I was good at and I saw the immediate results how it helped people…only then did I figure out what I was interested in.

Am I still interested in programming a computer every day like I was then?

Heck no!

My passionate interests have changed 30 times since I graduated college.

I went from programming to interviewing prostitutes in the streets to building a business to poker to investing and on and on and on.

Maybe I’ve been too much of a dilettante. Some people do the same thing for 30 years and still love it and become great at it. I am envious of that. But I wasn’t one of those people.

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“I want to have a safety net so I can get a job.”

This is what my daughter said to me. Where did she learn the phrase “Safety net”?

Fewer companies are asking for a degree.

if you spend those four years starting a company, or obsessively learning a craft, or working with a charity that helps people, etc, this is far more important for most jobs that are meaningful.

Heck, spend it painting in a garage. Spend it as a waitress. You will still learn more discipline and more about life than college.

Sometimes I hire people to help me. I have never once asked for a degree. Or a GPA.

I want to know what SKILLS someone had that could help me. And then what real experience do they have that proves they can use those skills.

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“Doesn’t College teach those skills?”

I majored in Computer Science at college. I programmed every day. I went to graduate school for computer science. I programmed every day.

My first job: I was a computer programmer at HBO.

I was so bad that they had to send me to REMEDIAL school for two months to learn enough about computer programming to be as good as their WORST programmer.

Why didn’t college, after all that money spent, teach me how to be program correctly? I’ll never know.

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“People who go to college get higher incomes over their lifetimes.”

This statistic is true if you went to college in the 1970s. When tuitions were much lower and debt was much lower.

Now employers know you are desperate. Trust me on this. I worked with a billion revenue staffing company. They know that college graduates are desperate to pay debt.

Incomes for people age 18-35 have gone down since 1992 at the same time inflation has gone up.

And the situation is worse than ever. Incomes are at a low for that age group, while student loan debt is at an all time high.

In fact, student loan debt has gone up every year since 1977 faster than inflation has gone up. It’s gone up at a rate 10 times faster than inflation.

The only other major expense that comes close is healthcare. Another side effect of a scam industry. Healthcare has gone up 3 times faster than inflation in the past 40 years.

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We’re graduating a generation of little children that have more debt than any generation before them.

Because it has never happened before we can only guess if the outcome is good or bad.

They will have to take jobs rather than be innovators or artists.

The government has made student loan debt the only debt you can’t escape without confiscation.

Our children will become puppets of the machine rather than the future creators of the machines to come.

I don’t know. I really don’t. I told Josie: spend four years figuring out what you want to do before you spend this kind of money.

It’s not mandatory to spend this money to determine what you want to do. And your interests will change anyway.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

She said that because she loves me. Or because she didn’t want to argue about it. Too much already, Daddy. Too much!

---

I wanted to see her her first day of college.

My parents didn’t go with me on my first day. I just took a plane, unpacked my bags and walked around by myself and watched all the kids with parents.

I felt lonely and I missed home.

Josie told me, “I’m scared I won’t make friends. I’m scared I won’t get good grades.”

I told her, “Don’t worry about grades. Not a single person ever will ask you about your grades. Just learn to be a kind person. And make friends with good people.”

“What if I don’t?” she said.

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After her room was unpacked we walked around the campus. We had a coffee. And then there was a meeting for parents.

“How to make the most out of college for your child.”

It was titled something like that. Maybe my memory is bad since that seems oddly worded.

I didn’t want to go to the seminar. So I told Josie it was time for me to go.

We hugged. I love her. And I miss her. She kept hugging me. Like it was the last time I would hug her while she was still, in my eyes, a child.

Maybe the thing about college is that a child is not yet ready to be an adult.

It’s the last time they will ever hang out with people their own age. My closest friends are not my age. In college though, they were.

It’s scary to be an adult. To survive. It’s a jungle. College is still a walled safe city for kids just like you.

I would pay a lot to be a child again. To not make the mistakes of adulthood. To not have those fears.

So maybe that’s what the college tuition is. The cost to extend childhood.

And the cost of childhood is going up.

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One time I was getting home from work. It was 2003. I got off the train and there’s a long path to walk down.

She was all the way at the end of the path and she saw me. She was five years old.

She ran. She started yelling, “Daddy!”

She ran and ran and other people who got off the train kept looking because they didn’t know what she was running towards.

“Daddy!”

She was running towards me.

I lifted her up and hugged her and kissed her. She was my little five year old.

No more.

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The Nine Surefire Ways To Fail At Anything

My resume: I begged the teacher to not give me an F so, out of kindness, he gave me a D-. Only then did I have the minimum GPA to graduate college.

I tried to write several novels but none of them were published. I pitched several TV shows but none of them made it to the air.

After I made some money I spent too much of it, gambled too much of it, bought too much with it, and invested in all of the wrong people with the wrong businesses.

I lost my house, my friends, my business, and the second time this happened (and the third and the fourth), my wife and kids.

I started another company and raised a lot of money but I didn’t even know we did. I got kicked out and the business slid to nothing.

One time I forgot to pay the IRS. For the 17th year in a row. I wanted to kill myself when they knocked on my door. I wanted to date the IRS agent but she knew too much about me.

I’m just saying this to establish some credentials. Failure is a deck of cards. You can shuffle and pick out the card you want.

Here are the cards. And if you can avoid the nine ways to fail, there’s one way to avoid failure.

9 WAYS TO FAIL

ILLNESS
One time I was staying out too late. I was around people who weren’t my friends. I was always stressed.

So I would get sick, or not have enough energy. I was so focused on my stress and anxiety that I could never get enough energy to get out of bed in the morning.

I was just thinking of one time but as I wrote this I started thinking of another time. Anxiety and fear and stress and the wrong people will drain you of energy.

When I let a desire for money rule my choices instead of just desire, my choices would drain me of energy.

You can’t start a successful X if you are sick in bed. Or looking out the window, wondering what cave everyone’s smile crawled out of.

LACK OF CREATIVITY
Steve Jobs made…a phone.

Mark Zuckerberg made…a social network.

JK Rowling wrote…a book about wizards.

Andy Warhol made…a soup can.

None of this was original. The iPhone had to be a phone. Else how would it connect to the phone networks. How would it have a microphone. How could it be used to talk to people.

And then he twisted it. He turned it into something nobody had ever seen before. A sculpture of a phone. And let’s listen to music on it. And watch TV. And play games.

Now a phone is a computer with a rarely used phone app on it. And Apple will be the first company to hit a trillion in value.

I always say, to exercise the idea muscle, write ten ideas a day.

But also see, what’s easy next steps can you make to execute on each idea.

Elon Musk wrote down an idea: build a rocket ship to Mars. Then he hired physicists, read every book on rocket science, and started to build.

Richard Branson needed a plane. So he got a deal to lease a plane, put up a sign in an airport where he was stuck and offered to sell tickets, got enough money to lease the plane, and thought to himself: this is an airline.

Before that he was a magazine publisher. Now he started an airline from scratch. One of the first people to ever do that.

Write down ten ideas. Every day. Write down the next EASY step for each idea.

Then throw away the list.

It’s just practice.

The creatives, the ones who practice, avoid the failure of the non-creatives.

INDECISION

Should I do something for the money. Or should I do something I love?

Should I stay at my job that I hate? Or should I find a way to make money on the side?

Should I stay in the relationship that is easy and comfortable or should I should I should I should’ve.

It’s a cliche to say “we have one life to live”. But cliches are easy truths.

It’s easy to try something. Decide if it makes you a better person or not. And then either continue or go back to “Creativity”.

CARELESSNESS

Every book needs a plot, a story, characters, a cover, a design, distribution, marketing.

Every business needs sales, follow up, execution of product, take care of employees and partners, take care of shareholders, and take care of every need of the customers.

Every TV show needs ten drafts of each script, directors, editors, permissions for locations, set designers.

And one detail off on any of these makes failure. If the customer is not happy, they tell others.

If you don’t have a good cover, your book won’t sell.

If you don’t get permission from the city to shoot at your location, you failed at making a TV show.

If you don’t research a guest, your interview podcast will be a disaster.

If you don’t have a punchline, and a premise people can relate to, your standup act will be met with dead silence or worse (usually worse).

I was bad at follow up in my first business. I never called the day after a good meeting and said, “That was a great meeting, here’s a proposal on next steps”. Careless! I had to hire someone to help me with that.

Delegate the details if you have to. But the person who takes care of every detail will always beat the person who lets details slip.

LAZINESS

I wanted to publish another book. But my prior book hadn’t done so well so publishers weren’t returning my calls.

I wrote the book anyway. Still no publishers. So then I hired a book designer. Then I got advice about marketing so I could do it myself.

I got three different people to edit my book. I wrote 100 drafts of the book.

I did all the marketing. The marketing was crazy. I sold the book on Bitcoin only before I officially released it on Amazon. This got me on a bunch of TV shows.

Then I ran for Congress. Then I quit running for Congress. More TV. More radio. More print news about this.

Then I went on 20–30 podcasts. Gave talks. This was four years ago.

Yesterday I was on a podcast talking about this same book. I market it every single day. 700,000 copies later “Choose Yourself” is my most successful book and the publishers are calling me.

The book before that, I was lazy. I felt like the publisher should market it. Should edit it. Should make a great cover.

They didn’t and I was too lazy to do something about it. And not detailed enough to point out to them where they could be better.

That book failed.

LACK OF FOCUS

One time I had several things going on. I wanted to start a tea company. I wanted to start a record label. I wanted to have a TV show. I wanted to write a novel. And I wanted my business to be success.

Sometimes “lack of focus” is good. But only if you can connect the dots. If the TV show would promote the business then that connects the dots.

If you are a writer but want to learn how to play poker then write a book about learning to play poker.

If you want to make a phone and make a music player, make a phone that plays music.

Focus is not about doing one thing. It’s about doing many things that connect and combine in ways nobody ever thought of before.

Focus is about connecting the dots so that one vision emerges.

It’s not about falling down a rabbit hole where nobody sees you again.

BAD KNOWLEDGE

One time I wanted to learn to be an investor. I saw some people were day trading and making money so I figured I’d try.

It was a disaster. I was just following others and I thought I was smart.

So I reversed that. I said, “I’m stupid” and I said, “Don’t follow other people”.

So I read everything I could about every investment strategy. I worked for some of the best people in the business ever. I tried with small amounts of money (because I was too stupid for big amounts) every strategy to prove to myself I really understood it.

I started to write about it. Because to get knowledge you need PLUS, EQUAL, MINUS: people to learn from, people to bounce ideas off of, people to teach so you can keep beginner’s mind and learn more.

And every day I read. If I didn’t know a strategy, I read more about it. I read about accounting. I read about the law. I read about the products of each company. I read the biographies and writings of the greatest investors.

Every day for fifteen years I increased my knowledge about money. Money is hard! And I guess I’m still increasing it.

BAD RELATIONSHIPS

They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Actually I did refuse it. But then they put out a press release saying I was an investor.

I helped them out. The company grew. It was a great company, great clients, good employees.

But one shareholder was a criminal.

And the people who introduced me to this company were also no good. Drugs, prostitutes, bad businesses – I should have stayed away.

But I got involved with them. And then with the company. And then the criminal was caught and the company went to zero.

All that time wasted. A ton of money lost.

I got a story out of it.

INABILITY TO SHIFT

Every year since 2003 I’ve written a book. This year is the first year I have no desirer to write a book (although the year is not over yet).

Instead I saw that more people were listening to my podcast than reading my books. And the number of people listening to my podcast was going up huge each month.

So I doubled down, and about to quadruple down, on doing my podcast.

Is it a different business? Is it lack of focus? No. I’m connecting the dots. I’m writing about each podcast. I’m exploring my interesting in each podcast. Often I’m making new partners and friends and future partners with each podcast guest.

Shifting…reinventing myself…I have to do every day. It’s not one day. It’s not “This day!” It’s every day. Looking around. Reinvention is hidden in the cracks of every day life that most people ignore.

The person who is reinventing walks into a room and says, “what is weird about this?” The people who can’t reinvent tries to control every situation in life and asks, “why are things going wrong?”

The world is mentally ill. The wrong question to ask someone who is mentally ill is “why?”

Instead, shift and reinvent. Every day.

There’s an easy way to avoid the nine ways to fail.

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Take any area of your life. Improve it 1%.

That’s the “secret” of not failing.

If you do this every day, and it compounds, then you improve 3800% a year.

3800%. 38 times.

You’re only competing against the person you were yesterday.

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But the people who don’t do that ultimately fall into one of the nine above. If you don’t try to get healthier, you get sick as you age.

If you don’t improve your relationships, you start serving their time in the prison of this lifetime instead of serving your own time.

If you don’t improve your creativity, you end up arguing politics on Facebook and disappear into the normalcy of that life.

If you don’t improve your ability to reinvent, you get stuck in traffic in the same lane everyone else is in.

There was that one path, the secret path, that you could’ve taken. But you didn’t notice it.

My very first client in business was a diamond dealer. Very successful. I made his website. He was the first person to pay me to build a website.

I took the money he gave me and finally moved to Manhattan. I moved to the Chelsea Hotel where I lived for many years and I met many friends and got many stories.

The diamond dealer explained everything about diamonds to me. The entire industry. The crookedness of it. But also the beauty of it.

He had a secretary. She had a giant scar on her cheek. But I thought she was beautiful.

And she seemed very kind. Maybe the scar had showed her what it was like to be less fortunate than others.

I was always too shy to talk to her. I wanted to make her laugh.

I made his website and started my first business. But would it have been so bad if I just connected the dots and licked the scar right off of her face?

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Ep. 244: Wally Green – Do Something You Love, To Build A Life Worth Loving

“I was shot twice by the time I was 13,” Wally told me. “I owned six guns. Everyone I grew up with then is dead,” he said.

He then walked back to his side of the ping pong table. He took out his iPhone. Using his iPhone as the racket, he served the ball.

He beat me 11-0.

“Ok,” he said, “everything you are doing is wrong.”

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The way I held the racket was wrong.

The way I stood with my legs was wrong.

The way I hit the ball and then the way I followed through after the hit was all wrong.

The angle of my wrist was wrong as I waited for the ball to come to my side was wrong.

The way I held the racket at a slight angle to the table was wrong.

My backhand was all wrong.

The way I had grown up and lived my life was mostly wrong.

He kept streaming shots at me non-stop.

“No, no, no,” he said. “No! Go up!…No!…Close the racket…No!…Use the other foot to shift weight…No! No!”

So we stopped.

He came over to my side of the table. He was looking down. I was afraid he was thinking, “why am I doing this?”

He stood behind me and grabbed my arm and moved it up as if I were hitting the ball.

“See!,” he said. “Like this. Like this.”

I wanted to be friends.

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I’ve been playing ping pong for 40 years.

I had a table as a kid. My dad and I would play every night. We would play for hours. And during the day, my friend Jonathan and I would play matches up to 100 every day.

I thought I was good.

Now, after taking lessons for several months, I realized that 100% of what I had been doing for 40 years was wrong. Everything.

I was good enough to beat people who grew up with a ping pong table. But I was really bad.

“When I went to North Korea,” Wally told me and then he started laughing, “those players were scary good.”

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Wally started playing ping pong. Someone saw his skill, and, as these things go, sent him away.

In order to come back you have to go away.

He went to Germany to study ping pong with pros. Pretty soon he was the best.

“I’ve played every sport,” he told me. “Wrestling, basketball, boxing, tennis, paddle tennis. Ping pong is the hardest.

“You have to think of everything. For instance, there’s 1000s of ways to serve. And there’s so many things to think about when you return the ball. You have to think several moves ahead.”

Wally has seen me play chess.

“It’s EXACTLY like chess. But also physical.”

We were having a three hour lesson that day. It ended with me doing a backhand-backhand-forehand-forehand, then forehand at the other end of the table – then random.

Then start over. He shot 100 balls at me one after the other.

“Again! Again! Good! No! No! No! Close the racket! You’re crossing over when you follow through. Just go up!”

Ugh. I had too many bad habits. I kept doing them. How do I stop the bad habits? 40 years of bad habits are hard to get rid of.

It’s like being afraid to say “no” after 40 years of telling everyone “yes”.

We took a break.

“Why did you go to North Korea?”

“I like to do things that are BIG. Every year I want to make sure I do something really big. Really special.

“I saw the North Koreans were listing a tournament so I applied and I got in! I was the only non-Asian there.

“Once I got there they took my phone. I had no way of getting in touch with the outside world for ten days. Couldn’t call my wife. If something happened there was no proof I was even there.

“So I just played ping pong. And they were GOOD!”

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“Not only were the better than me,” he said, “but the entire crowd was cheering for them and booing constantly at me.

“So I decided, forget this. Let’s have fun with this. Let’s make crazy shots. Let’s jump up and down after every point. Let’s get the crowd laughing and jumping with me. I focused on the crowd.

“At first they were surprised. And then they started laughing with me. They were cheering me. I was losing but it didn’t matter. We were all having fun.

“Even the other North Korean players, they didn’t know what to do. They were afraid to talk to me but by the end they were hugging me.

“That was my big thing that year.”

“What about this year?” I asked

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Wally made a movie.

“The Tables” about the ping pong tables at Bryant Park.

“No matter what is going on in your life,” Wally told me, “You could be homeless, an office worker, a ping pong champ, it doesn’t matter…everyone has a home at the tables in Bryant Park. It’s home there.”

I watched the documentary. It’s good. “It’s winning awards everywhere,” Wally said, “I have to go to LA this weekend because it’s winning at a festival there.”

One year Wally and some friends threw a weekly party, “Naked Ping Pong”. They invited everyone they knew to a friend’s apartment in Tribeca that was big enough to fit a ping pong table and the few people they thought would show up.

It got mobbed.

So they pitched the idea of a ping pong club to Susan Sarandon and other investors. And the club, “Spin” was born. That’s where Wally has been giving me the lessons. Now Spin has locations all over the country.

After one three hour lesson I was exhausted. I didn’t think ping pong could be so tiring. We went upstairs.

“I’m going to Israel next week because one of my students is in a big tournament there.”

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It’s a cliche to say, “Life is short”. It’s a cliche to say, “You only have one life.”

But if you take one chance a year, something unexpected, something you love, you build a life worth loving.

So many times I’ve spent years just struggling for money, thinking it will buy happiness. What a waste!

We scheduled our next lesson. Then Wally showed me his unicycle Segway. I think it’s called a Ninebot.

“I have to head off to the tables,” he told me. “I always like to play there every day.”

He stood on the Ninebot and he started weaving in and out of the crowd as he cruised down the sidewalk on his robotic unicycle. Then he was gone.

I was exhausted, I went down into the subway to practice doing standup comedy again with an unfriendly crowd.

I want to do my special thing each year. I want my life to compound into wonder.

I went into the subway. I opened my mouth and started…

Links and Resources:

 

• Wally is the co-founder of the ping-pong club “SPiN,” which is where I play

 

• Wally’s documentary “The Tables”
• Follow Wally on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
• Visit his website whoiswallygreen.com
• Follow SPiN on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram
• Visit their website at wearespin.com

Also Mentioned:

• Palm Springs Film Festival
• Walla Walla Film Festival in Washington State
• Wally was telling me which leagues he practiced and trained with. They were called “bundesliga,” which in German means “premier league”
• Wally said there’s one good movie about ping pong called Ping Pong. It’s made in Japan and it shows you how hard ping pong can be but he also says it’s really funny. 

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Ep 243: Shawn Stevenson – The 9 Rules of Health to Make it to 99

Shawn Stevenson, host of The Model Health podcast said, “In the lab, they found anti-depressants in the New York City water system.”

Anti-depressants!

Ok, no problem. I’ll drink tap water. Save on therapy costs. In NYC everyone has to go to therapy. It’s a requirement. “This week my therapist said…”

“There’s also these other chemicals in water..” and he was about to list them for me.

“No no no,” I said. “Shhhh!” I put my hands on my ears. “I’m good. Don’t need to know more.”

Shawn is obsessed with health. Every week he interviews the best people in the world on health. He’s interviewed hundreds.

And now I get to ask him for this BEST advice. Don’t abuse what he tells you, James!

Shawn was 200lbs overweight. He could barely get from room to room before collapsing with exhaustion and pain.

He was diagnosed with an incurable spinal condition called degenerative disc disease.

His spine was deteriorating to nothing. The way an old person leans over and over until they collapse dead.

“You have the spine of an 80 year old,” the doctor told him.

“The doctors told me to wear a back brace. I kept getting worse. The doctors kept telling me nothing could be done. I was losing hope. Losing the will to live.”

So he chose himself. He CHOSE his health.

He studied every aspect of health. He created the #1 podcast on health, The Model Health Show.

He read everything he could. He changed his diet. His doctors told him don’t bother. He exercised. His doctors said it won’t help.

“You’re going to die of this.”

---

When he came on my podcast, he looked like a man in perfect health. He was muscular, glowed with health, had energy. He was something maybe I will never say.

“I’m feeling great every day,” he told me.

And then he started dropping the most amazing health tips on me. I felt overwhelmed. Do I have the discipline to do all of this?

I’ve had many health experts on my podcast. If you don’t have physical health, it’s 1000 times harder to be a success.

The body feeds the mind and the heart. The body reduces stress. The body contains the basics for everything you want to do in life.

You are alive in your whole body. Not just your brain. Not just in your bank account. The entire body has to be nourished and loved.

For some strange reason he asked me to be on his show as well. I was really grateful he wanted to talk to me about how my own lifestyle improved my health.

But more importantly, he came on my show and I was able to drill HIM with questions.

Not that all doctors are bad. But I couldn’t believe some of the things Shawn had to tell me.

I list some of them on this infographic. I already thought I knew things about sleep, water, movement, exercise.

I thought I already knew things about how health worked. About how health led to success.

But he broke it down one step further.

I needed that. I now live by it (we actually recorded this podcast about two months ago) and the results have given me enough energy to create new opportunities in my life that I would not have been able to do before.

I have a formula now: 1% more health equals 100 more possible opportunities.

Shawn! I’m grateful you broke your stupid hip when you were 20 and got Spinal Degenerative Whatever and gained 5000 pounds.

I’m grateful the doctors told you you were going to rot and die. I’m so happy you collapsed, half dead, under the weight of your own bloated body.

I’m really happy you almost died.

Just don’t do it again.

---

Links and Resources:

• Listen to his podcast the Model Health Show
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• The Model Health Show Podcast Facebook
• Read his book Sleep Smarter: 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to a Better Body, Better Health and Bigger Success

Also Mentioned:

• We talked about drinking water and how to find the freshest, uncontaminated water and Shawn said you can find a natural spring near you at findaspring.com
• BPA Free Mountain Spring water (that’s what Shawn was drinking while we did the podcast). He says the minimum requirement is to drink half of your bodyweight in water
• Sleep is more important than food and movement combined. Shawn has the research to back it up. He told me about a study done at the University of Chicago. They took people and put them on a calorie restricted diet. They monitored their fat loss. The first phase of the study they allow them all to get 8 hours of sleep. The next phase is when they start sleep depriving them. At the end of the study they lost 55% more body fat when they were well rested.   
• Shawn told me about his insomnia. It turned out it was caused by the medication he was prescribed for his back pain (celebrex). It was causing him restless leg syndrome
• Shawn recommends using a shower filter to remove toxins and heavy metals. “Your skin consumes more than your drinking,” he said.
• Shawn mentions Tabata, which is a Japanese high-interval workwork. Shawn writes about it here.
• One of Shawn’s top recommendations for using your phone at night (although he recommends you stop using technology at least 30 minutes before bed) is the “night shift” tool. He showed me his iPhone (I have an android). He said if you just swipe up, it’s there. “It pulls out the most troublesome streams of light from your screen. Harvard researchers have confirmed that bluelight from our devices suppresses melatonin and elevates cortisol. Those two things screw up our sleep,” he said. You can also use sunglasses that block blue light. 

 

The post Ep 243: Shawn Stevenson – The 9 Rules of Health to Make it to 99 appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

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DOING IT: How I Made My Daughter A Movie Star In Just One Week

The IRS had stapled signs all over my house. My wife at the time and I were getting divorced. I was losing access to my kids.

And I was sick and sad.

I had no job. No opportunity. Again! I was DOING nothing.

It felt like a rat slowly nibbling on the rope that holds everything together.

My dad had gone broke when I was a kid and then he had a mental breakdown as a result.

And what next? He lost everything. And in the middle of an argument about money, he had a stroke and never came out of the coma.

Did he write the rough draft of my autobiography?

I’ll know when I don’t know anymore. I guess.

There’s two ways to get rid of this stress. ONLY two ways.

A) DO SOMETHING.

What to do? I don’t know. Do anything. One time it was coming up with helpful ideas for 20 other businesses until 2 responded to me.

Another time it was to try that one last business idea after the first nine had failed miserably.

Another time it was to start blogging my guts out without any hope of anything. No money at all.

Bleeding to death. Both on the page and in my bank account. My entire set of friends then thought I was insane.

I have a new set of friends now.

B) EXCUSE IT.

As in, “excuse me, please, can I walk around you while I make my way over to the couch.”

Nothing wrong with that either. Mmmm, the couch. With excuses stuffing my pillows. And Netflix. I love Netflix. “Excuses” literally buy me time to watch Netflix.

These are the two choices. Nothing wrong with either. 98% of people do the latter.

Maybe they do it because of fear (I certainly have often). Or maybe they just don’t know the first “next step”.

Writing 10 ideas a day every day builds the muscle to help me come up with the first next step. Sometimes it even works.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

Which is a cliche but I’ll take it.

---

My daughter was on the couch. Watching Netflix.

For a year I had been sending her auditioning opportunities. She’s acted in every school production since she was five years old. She loves acting.

I hated every moment of it.

I’m an adult. A reasonable adult doesn’t wake up and say, “I’m going to drive 60 miles today to watch a bunch of prepubescent girls put on a theater production of “Pride and Prejudice” for three hours. What a great day!”

That’s not what a sane person says. But I said that about 200 times.

So now I wanted payback.

“Have you ever once looked at any of the audition opportunities I’ve sent you,” I said. ‘How I Met Your Mother’ was on the TV screen.

“Ahhhhgngna,” is what I think she said. I was standing between her and the screen.

“Tell me.”

“I don’t have a head shot,” she said, “You have to upload a head shot.”

“Why haven’t you arranged one?”

“I’ve been really busy. High school. Plays. Everything.”

“Ok,” I said, “Stand against the wall.” FLASH! Headshot done.

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“Upload it,” I said.

“Casting directors just need to know what you look like. They need to check boxes like “girl” or “brown eyes”. They aren’t hiring you off this. And get a better one later if you don’t like it.”

“Well,” she said, “I still can’t do anything. I don’t have a reel of myself.”

“Didn’t your theater director make a reel?”

“Yeah, but it’s all high school stuff.”

“You’re 18. You don’t need Schindler’s List here. They just need to see you have basic skills. Upload it.”

So she uploaded it.

“Ok,” I said, “Now you can apply for auditions. Am I right?”

Then she pulled out the best excuse. I give her credit. It’s like she prepared.

There’s always a good reason and a real reason.

“I need acting lessons,” she said, “It’s not enough that I was the lead in high school plays.”

Ugh. This is a good excuse. It’s not the real reason but I have to break through it. The real reason is still fear of DOING.

I don’t know what she’s afraid of. I’m not psychic. Maybe fear of failure. Maybe fear of how much time it would take to really succeed at something.

Maybe fear it will take her away from friends. Maybe fear it will be harder than she thought and she (like me) prides our nap times.

Napping is the best!

“Look at that waiter on the show,” I said and pointed at some guy talking. “That guy is the worst actor I have ever seen. There are 10,000 new shows on TV. 99% of the people on them can’t act.

“What you need is to audition. You need to get good at auditions before you get good at acting.

“If you go on 100 auditions you might be decent at auditions and if you get a part you can get acting lessons.”

“Ahahgnanga,” she said when I again stood in between the couch and Netflix.

“Listen: the only way you can act is if you audition 1000 times and get rejected 995 times. That is the ONLY thing to do.

“Nothing else. Right now, that is all you have to DO. You don’t have to act. You don’t even have to think.”

“What if I don’t really like it,” she said. Ugh! Another potential good reason.

“Whenever I tell you I have to ‘perform’ at something you get excited. I know this is the thing that lights you up. You love talking to me about performing.”

“Ahaganahanahan,” she said.

“Now you have your headshot and reel uploaded. You have to apply,” I said.

“Give you me your hand,” I said. She didn’t look at me but she gave me her hand. So I knew she was IN but I had to solidify.

“Swear to me that if you don’t apply for acting jobs THIS NEXT WEEK that your grandma is going to die by Friday,” I said.

She pulled her hand away quickly at that but then gave me her hand back.

“Which grandma,” she said.

“Your mother’s mother,” I said. “Leave my mom out of it.

“And I know you love both but your grandma WILL DIE on Friday if you don’t apply for jobs and go out and try to audition. That’s the only way to save her.”

“I swear”.

You can think, you can dream, you can write, you can hope, you can wish, you can prepare, you can study, you can talk, you can read, you can get mentors and peers and take classes.

But you can’t DONE until you DO.

---

Yesterday she was an extra in a new Al Pacino movie. They were shooting all day.

The day before she was in a student film at NYU.

She DID. She DONE. She is DO-ing.

A car can’t get across the country if you don’t turn on the ignition.

She turned on the ignition. And now she is starting to drive. I hope she continues. Even though if she is like me she will make countless wrong turns.

This generation has to DO because nobody will do it for them. Heck, my generation has to DO. Nobody did it for me.

No fake hustle. No “busy hustle”. This is the real hustle. The kind that moves you. That makes you sweat. Where things break. And they don’t always get fixed but you keep going.

And people get sad and scared and lost and fail and “lean in” and hurt themselves and hurt others.

At least….I did all of the above. I hurt myself most of all.

When I lost family. When I lost two houses.

Why I am one of the top ranking results if you search “I Want to Die” on Google. (Try and see).

There’s such a good reason I’m on Google there. I remember it. In my fingers. In my stomach. Always there in my head. Always there. Never gone. Go. Go.

No.

---

The title of this article might seem like an exaggeration. She’s not a movie star. It’s been one week and she’s been an extra in a movie with Al Pacino.

And she loved it.

Nor do I get credit. She DONE DID DO DOES. I didn’t do anything. She was finally ready.

DONE DID DO DOES.

We’re all just trying to be a little better off today than yesterday in the things that give us pleasure “up here”. All it takes is doing one thing you know will move you forward.

When we DO we can have some tiny faith that our hopes can intersect with our future.

The goal is not to be a star. But to always look towards the stars.

The post DOING IT: How I Made My Daughter A Movie Star In Just One Week appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

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The ABC’S of Bitcoin and Everything You Need To Know About “Forks”

99% of Cryptocurrencies are total scams. And, yes, Cryptocurrencies are in a bubble.

BUT…the opportunity is NEVER going away and generational wealth will be made. So you have to know the basics, why this opportunity even exists and what to watch out for.

Here’s the problem. There’s around 900 different cryptocurrencies that exist, with new ones being created every week.

I can tell you for sure: 95% of the cryptocurrencies are scams or Ponzi schemes. And I get questions every day: “Is XYZ currency a scam?” And nobody listens to the answer.

Everyone is convinced they are right. That’s a bad sign. I always tell myself I’m the dumbest person in the room. Then I call the smarter people and ask them lots of questions. And then I read everything I can. And in this case, I read the code.

But the opportunity is immense. Think, “Internet 1994”. Right before the “right before”.

BC will stand for “Before Crypto” and AC will stand for “After Crypto”. We are in AC right now and the world is about to change.

---

I’ve never written about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies before. But there’s a reason I want to start now.

We’re in a hype bubble.

It doesn’t mean cryptos or bad. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy. It just means….there’s a lot of hype and scammers out there. We’ve seen this story at least twice before in past 20 years and many people have gotten hurt.

I’ve been actively involved in investing in Cryptocurrencies since 2013 (I sold my book, “Choose Yourself” in a Bitcoin-only store I created a month before I released it on Amazon). And for the past 18 months I’ve participated in various ICOs (Internet Coin Offerings) that are all doing well.

I say this just to establish some credentials. I will be writing more frequently about cryptocurrencies simply because I see so many people I know starting to be hurt when, in fact, there’s opportunities to make a lot of money in the space.

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Big picture: 

A simple cryptocurrency transaction looks like this:

A) James wants to send Joe 10 bitcoin.

B) James has 100 bitcoins that he has gotten from 500 people who, in turn, got from 10,000 people, and on and on back to the very first bitcoin transaction.

C) James puts together a “transaction” (technically complicated but simply described as a “transaction”) and sends it out onto the block chain.

D) A “block” is a list of transactions.

E) enough “miners” confirm that the transactions in a block are legit (all of the inputs are legit and all of the outputs are legit. The merchant (in this case, “Joe” ) can decide how much validation he needs.

F) the bitcoins get transferred

Every step above is much more complicated, but for a reason.

---

Pros and Cons: 

THE GOOD:

A) a standardized and neutral confirmation policy backed by software that has no human agendas.

What does this mean?

Imagine I want to send Joe dollars to buy his house. I need to trust all of the middlemen between Joe and me: local bank, central bank, lawyers, governments, Joe’s bank, etc to approve of this transaction if I do it in dollars.

This is ok but at each step someone can be untrustworthy. They are all humans, even the government (humans subtly influence the price of the dollar and also share details of the transaction with unfriendly parties (the IRS)).

Also, each step in the above has a transaction cost. So inflation is built into the system.

If this were a bitcoin transaction, enough miners need to approve that this transaction is valid. So even if a few miners are not trustworthy, the bulk of them will be and we can trust that the transaction between me and Joe is legit.

[This process is complicated. Suffice to say, it works on Bitcoin and any other “legit” cryptocurrency.]

This is the ENTIRE reason for cryptocurrency: avoid governments, borders, middlemen, extra transaction costs. As well as have high security and avoid forgery. 

(there is another reason for cryptocurrency, which is to do more complicated transactions that we can call “contracts” without lawyers, etc. This reason is sometimes the basis for legit ICOs).

Imagine the history of money. Money is used as a store of value OR as a way to transact without having to use a barter system.

Store of Value

First it was the land you owned and the resources you developed on that land (wheat, grains, etc).

Then it was metals. Gold, silver, etc. You traveled with it by fashioning it into jewelry. Too much gold = harder to travel.

Paper currency. Backed first by gold but then…faith in God (“in God we trust”) or government. (Or a pyramid…with an eye in it????)

Electronic currency. Easily transportable. But transaction fees all over the system. Zero privacy.

And the next generation is Cryptocurrency. Easily transportable, little to zero transaction fees, no human intervention between payor and payee, high anonymity, and even functionality.

Money evolves, like anything else, and the natural evolution of money is always as a store of value that is easier to move, more secure, and more private.

Transactions

Transactions have the same history. And the same issues. How can you transact across a far geographic area with less fees, less costs, less chance for human error, higher security and privacy.

A natural evolution leads go crypto-currency.

THE BIGGEST TREND: 

Theism ==> Humanism ==> Data-ism

Think about every industry in human history:

WAR:

Theism: A country planning on going to war would make sacrifices to their gods. Would pray. And would surrender to the fact that whosever god was stronger would win.

Humanism: More people, more bullets, more human intelligence, equals the winner in a war.

Data-ism: This is the war being fought every day right now. We saw tiny snapshot of it with the election but it’s only a snapshot in a ten year long movie.

The war is on every single day. It’s fought in every country. It’s fought with data and hacking and piracy.

MEDICINE:

Theism: Shamans and priests would pray for health or do rituals to enhance health.

Humanism: The doctor knocks your knee, puts hand on head, take two aspiring and call me in the morning

Data-ism: Bloodwork, DNA work, robotic surgeries, fMRIs, Catscans. Statistical matching with massive database of similar scans to do diagnosis. All medicine is starting to be outsourced to data.

CURRENCY:

Theism: “In God We Trust”

Humanism: Let’s throw a President on there. Let’s get the signature of the Secretary of Treasury up there. “Don’t worry, we’re good for it.” While we print a few trillion without telling anyone.

Data-ism: The natural evolution: Cryptocurrency.

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Does this mean Bitcoin is “The winner”. Buy bitcoin?

No. It just means the natural evolution of currency is arriving and nothing will stop it.

The basic philosophy is:

– Decentralized. So no one government entity can quietly mint money for their own purposes and have access to your transactions, accounts, etc.

– Security. So nobody can forge or steal your money.

– Privacy. Your transactions can’t be seen and reported to other entitles.

– Functionality. This is the more technical parts of the blockchain in Cryptocurrencies but suffice to say some of the “intrinsic value” of a coin is the functionality and computational power used to “mine” that functionality.

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There’s not going to be ONE winner.

Just like there is not one paper currency (or metal currency). There’s dollars, Euros, pesos.

The difference is: those currencies have geographic borders.

Cryptocurrencies have “use” borders. ZCash might be used by people requiring higher anonymity. Filecoin might be used by people requiring decentralized storage. Dash might be used be people requiring faster transactions.

The borders are created when more problems are solved. Which is a true innovation for currency.

As opposed to borders (and supply) being created by geographic boundaries, central banks with secret control, or a gold mine down the block.

THE BAD:

With Bitcoin, a list of transactions is sent out to the network in the form of a “block”. Miners, who are slowly paid in more bitcoin up to a maximum of 21,000,000 validate a transaction.

If a transaction doesn’t make it into a block (on Bitcoin) it waits a certain period of time to get into the next block.

This means it might take more time (a problem).

Another problem is that everyone can “see” the transaction on what is called the blockchain. They can’t see who it was but they can see the size and other details. (a problem).

Sometimes software can provide a solution (a coffee shop can say, I’ll verify the transaction anyway and trust that in ten minutes I’ll know for sure and there’s not a lot of risk in this).

But a software layer involves humans and human error and human “evil”. Hence there are scammers and Ponzi scheme and theft (just like with paper currencies).

The good news is these are problems that can be eliminated.

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Just like Internet software since 1991 solved (although always improving) the problems of speed, security, transactions, privacy, more functionality, etc think of cryptocurrencies as the “Internet of Money”.

These problems are being solved.

Either with new currencies (examples: Ether, Dash, filecoin, etc) some of which may be scam currencies, others may be legit. Time and research will tell (just like with the Internet in 1995)…OR with “forks” in currencies, like what is happening today with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

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SO WHAT IS BITCOIN CASH AND WHAT SHOULD I DO? 

Bitcoin Cash tries to solve the problem of how can I buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin without using the software layer of Bitcoin.

Remember, if a transaction doesn’t make it onto a block that is then sent out into the network to be validated, it has to wait.

Bitcoin Cash is simply the same as Bitcoin, except it increases the size of a block from 1MB to 8MB. Hence, faster transactions.

The reason that many exchanges are nervous about this “hard fork” is:

A) it’s never happened before. So there could be the possibility that smart developers can find a flaw in the process and steal money.

B) A “fork” is similar to a human election. We had a choice between Clinton and Trump and forked to Trump (not an exact analogy but rough).

Bitcoin is designed to limit human involvement as much as possible because all humans have different agendas.

For instance, perhaps China is greatly in favor of Bitcoin Cash because they currently have a huge edge on mining and they will be able to amass a large amount of Bitcoin Cash before others can.

So the fallout of Bitcoin Cash, while probably correct philosophically and from a software point of view, is still unclear from a human point of view.

Same for the development of any new cryptocurrency (although all new currencies need scrutiny on the software side as well). But this fork is a bit more intense because Bitcoin is so big and it’s the first time this has happened.

This leads immediately to some logical conclusions:

What to do right now about Bitcoin Cash and August 1:

A) remove your bitcoin wallet from exchanges and store it in cold storage. If you google “cold storage” you can see step by step how to do that.

B) If Bitcoin crashes 20% over the next few days because of this fork, I’d be a buyer. The philosophy of Bitcoin remains the same, it’s still the biggest, and volatility only creates opportunity.

C) If Bitcoin Cash goes up too much, I’d sell or sell short, only because we don’t really know how people should value it.

Cryptocurrencies are going to be volatile for awhile. So in addition to the basic opportunity (Cryptocurrencies taking over all currencies) there is many additional trading opportunities due to the volatility.

First, back to the basics:

Why does volatility create opportunity? 

Because it’s rare that intrinsic value changes very quickly from day to day.

Example: We know everything there is to know about McDonalds and 1000s of analysts research the company.

The intrinsic value of McDonald’s will almost certainly never go down 20% in a day. But if the stock went down 20% in a day (example: a 9/11 event occurs causing a mass fear selloff across all stocks), then MCD becomes a value buy because the volatility exceeded the normal change in value.

If you can identify the Cryptocurrencies that are legitimate and not scams, then you can make a lot of money playing in volatile situations in Cryptocurrencies.

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Conclusion: 

A) Cryptocurrency philosophy is valid and not going anywhere and is a natural evolution in:

a. the history of money from bartering to coins to paper money to data money

b. the history of every industry from theism to humanism to data-ism.

B) Volatility is huge as people determine what coins are real and what aren’t.

These are the basics.

I wrote these basics around the circumstances of the event happening today: The bitcoin fork.

But I also want to begin helping the many people who are being scammed by all sorts of schemes and layers of schemes that are trying to dupe people into buying or trading cryptocurrencies that can be potentially worse than giant Madoff schemes.

The evolution of money, and the evolution of every industry, strongly imply that Cryptocurrencies, probably in many forms, will be in our future. And will dominate the money supply at some point.

And how we get from “here” to “there” will be paved with many lucrative opportunities.

But I was burned plenty this type of opportunity in the 90s and in the 00s and I don’t plan on doing so again. The solution is research, diversification, building a network of intelligence people who understand all the relevant issues, and then making smart allocation decisions.

If you like this article and would like more on Cryptocurrencies you can let me know in the comments.

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