“My spouse is a narcissist.”
“ABC is a sociopath.”
I hear this all the time.
In society we’ve gotten into the habit of using terms casually that actually have a much more serious meaning. So I asked Lori Gottlieb to break down the what “narcissist” and “sociopath” actually mean. Check out the video below for her answer:
The post What Are Narcissists and Sociopaths? appeared first on James Altucher.
I plagiarized.
I stole from another text, word for word, and I did not give credit.
The article I wrote was shared everywhere and got millions of page views.
I did this several times. Many times. I still do it.
Nobody notices.
I was writing for TechCrunch, a blog about entrepreneurship.
I wrote about the nine ways entrepreneurs fail.
The first one was sickness. Because if you don’t take care of your health, you’ll have no energy to succeed.
There was also laziness, doubts, inertia and six more items in the article.
For each item I took stories from my own life as an entrepreneur or I wrote about the stories of others.
Readers shared the article thousands of times. Commenters told their own stories. Everyone related.
I knew in advance it would be popular. Because of my plagiarism trick.
I used data from a massive focus group. A focus group that took place with millions of people over a period of 1,700 years.
I took the results of that focus group and, word for word, put it in the article.
—
The Yoga Sutras is a poem written around 300 AD but really is a collection of ideas orally transmitted for perhaps thousands of years.
It’s 196 lines, completely describing the purpose of yoga, the methods of yoga, the philosophy of yoga.
I don’t do yoga.
In Chapter 1, line 30 of The Yoga Sutras, there is a line about the obstacles one will encounter on the way to meditation.
“The obstacles are distractions caused by disease, dullness, doubt, carelessness, laziness, craving, delusion, non-attainment of desired objective and unsteadiness.”
I took that line, word for word, and applied it to entrepreneurship.
If I wanted to write an article about filing your taxes, cooking, playing golf, etc., I could use this line.
Why?
Because out of the thousands of documents written over the past 5,000 years, this document has survived. Thousands didn’t.
Religions and philosophies sprung from it. Millions worshipped it.
The text is somehow primal to our experience as humans.
I don’t care that I plagiarized and didn’t give credit. It worked.
—
Just about everyone. But I’m picking a specific category: people who use religious texts from centuries ago and apply it to modern areas of life.
Or even a novel. This was more indirect because the author, like me, didn’t mention his original source.
Golf + The Bhagavad Gita = The Legend of Bagger Vance (by Steven Pressfield)
He admits it in his book, The Authentic Swing.
I ran into Tim Armstrong once, the ex-CEO of AOL. He told me, “I can always tell the weekends you are writing for TechCrunch, because the page views spike so much.”
“Thanks,” he said.
Thank The Yoga Sutras! Or Jesus. Depending on the article that week.
And yes, writing is a competition. You are competing with a million other books, and billions of TikTok videos, for people’s attention.
If Jesus or Confucius can help me, I’ll take it.
—
A) PICK A TOPIC: One that you care about, are expert in or would like to learn more about.
I.e.., parenting, relationships, habits, investing, entrepreneurship, writing, happiness, success, negotiation, comedy, pingpong, podcasting, etc.
B) PICK AN ANCIENT TEXT: One that millions of people have loved and even worshipped.
That means HISTORY HAS FOCUS-GROUPED THAT BOOK. It will definitely be popular.
For instance, pick any of the ones mentioned below.
Or find something more obscure.
For instance: Visuddhimagga from the Pali Cannon of Buddhism.
Or Jiang Ziya’s Six Secret Teachings (a book contemporary with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War).
C) ANALOGY
Do a 1-1 mapping between the points made in that text and stories from the topic you are interested in.
For instance, let’s look at chapter six of The Art of War: “Weak Points and Strong Points”.
Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic in part by analyzing the weak points of his competitor, British Airways.
Boeing wanted British Airways to have a competitor so it could have more control over pricing planes. They wanted British Airways to be nervous.
Richard Branson used that knowledge to convince Boeing to lend him a plane so he could start a competitor. They GAVE him a plane basically for free.
The strong point of British Airways?
It was intertwined with the government. Richard Branson had to make use of that knowledge to get public support against the idea of a monopoly.
D) MAKE IT EASY
Write one small chapter a day. Maybe even a tiny chapter!
For instance, my story above about Richard Branson could be the entire chapter for that day, combined chapter six of The Art of War.
Maybe I could even come up with one example from my own life and one more historical example. BOOM! Chapter written.
E) FINISH IN A MONTH
Write 30 chapters. Or less!
If I was using a 1-1 analogy with The Art of War, I would have 18 chapters. But maybe I would have sub-chapters to fill out the skeleton.
The book doesn’t have to be big. Zen in the Art of Archery is 60 pages.
Upload it to Amazon for Kindle and paperback. Upload the audiobook to Audible.
Now you have a book. Charge $3.99.
The best way to market your first book? Write your next book.
The post I Plagiarized and You Can, Too! appeared first on James Altucher.
“Why don’t you ever talk about climate change on your podcast?”
It was Christmas night. Full house at the club. I just had done a standup set for 60 minutes and did a little Q&A afterwards.
At first I was thinking of a real reason.
I was thinking how my wife hides the plastic straws because my kids only want metal straws. Kids are obsessed with plastic straws.
One flush = 100 plastic straws in terms of carbon footprint.
And one metal straw takes up the same resources as making 10,000 plastic straws!
Too complicated!
“Because I don’t give a s***,” I said.
We were in a comedy club. Why not?
—
On January 7, when he was accepting the Mark Twain Award, Dave Chappelle’s first “thank you” was to the man who mentored him many years ago, comedian Tony Woods.
Tony himself asked me to feature (do the 20–30-minute set right before him) for his four headlining shows at Carolines on Broadway this past weekend, the biggest club in NYC.
It was the funnest weekend ever.
Just watching Tony Woods was a master class in comedy. A class I had been attending for 23 years.
In 1996, I interviewed a young Dave Chappelle at the Aspen Comedy Festival. As well as George Carlin, Rodney Dangerfield, and others.
I asked Dangerfield about the craziest thing that ever happened to him at 3 a.m. A half second later he said, “Her husband came home!”
I would go to standup shows whenever I could.
Every Monday night was the Luna Lounge, where Marc Maron was often MC-ing. Amy Poehler would perform with her improv group, the Upright Citizens Brigade. Louis CK would perform. Many others.
I started public speaking a few years later. I was always scared to speak in front of others and be judged. But I always had two goals when I spoke:
I’ve been writing every day for 29 years.
My one goal when I write: never hit “publish” unless I am afraid of what people will think of me when they read it.
Better to be free than locked in an opinion ghetto. People are only your friends in opinion ghettos as long as you agree with them.
Thank you, Chet, for reminding me of this when I said, “Not a single war can be justified,” and after 20 years of friendship you stopped returning my calls.
Standup comedy is the new voice. People now argue over a Ricky Gervais speech. Or a Dave Chappelle special.
Everyone else is partisan and the comedians are the last holdouts.
—
I’m over 50 years old. When you start something new in life, people always say, “You have to wait in line.” Or, “You have to pay your dues!”
No I don’t. There are no dues. I’m done with dues. And I like to skip the line.
I started a hedge fund without any finance background at all. I started a business with zero entrepreneurship skills. I wrote my first book with no writing background at all.
And yeah, I also went broke, had businesses fail, and wrote some horrible books. And failure sucks.
The “line” exists for people who are afraid to skip it.
It’s OK to sleep in the comfort zone. But life is outside the comfort zone.
A few months ago, I wanted to start a new podcast. Everyone said, “You can’t do that. There are already two million podcasts!”
So what? Stay tuned for the launch next month.
I wanted to make a new card game that my teenagers can play.
Someone said, “You can’t do that!” and they listed the various laws I might be breaking when I described the game.
So what? Game in production right now.
I won’t know if it’s fun until I play it.
—
I want to write the “10 things I learned from Tony Woods” because I learned a lot. But I don’t want to give away spoilers on his act.
I’ve done five shows with him, plus seen him many other times.
So here’s a brief summary that applies also to most areas of my life.
—
(Not in that order all the time.)
Those 10 things already occupy all the space in my brain. I can’t fit anymore.
I’m not saying one thing or the other about climate change.
But these 10 things keep me busy and are more important to me.
Everything else can wait.
The post I Don’t Give a S*** appeared first on James Altucher.
I haven’t written in 24 hours.
I feel sick now. Like my brain is empty. Like maybe my brain has decided it will never write again. Like maybe I’m a failure now. All I’ve wanted to do for the past 30 years is write every day and now it’s finished.
I can’t even feed my kids until I write.
I’ve written every day for the past 20 years. I’ve written 22 books and thousands of articles.
I’m always afraid the flow is going to stop. And often it does.
But that’s when a person has to be a pro. The ideas have to flow again.
[See Also, 33 Unusual Ways to Be a Better Writer.]
I’m just being honest. Who knows if coffee is good for you or bad for you? But I start writing on my third cup of coffee for the day.
I don’t know why it works. But it starts my head spinning.
I always read before I write. I tend to read “dirty realism.” Short stories or autobiographical essays that are mostly true and written by quality writers.
For each person, this might be a different set of writers. I like Raymond Carver, Miranda July, Denis Johnson, Cheryl Strayed, Bukowski, James Frey, etc.
When I read them it’s like I click into their thought process and often get my own “dirty realist” story about my life to write about.
Or, I might get keyed into the writer’s voice and, thinking in that voice, I might get ideas to write about.
I often can’t start without reading first. But reading has given me hundreds and hundreds of ideas for things to write AND ways to write.
As an example, the other day I was reading Tim O’Brien’s short story, “What We Carried,” about the physical items he and his fellow soldiers carried into the jungles of Vietnam and how they also carried emotional and mental baggage.
This made me think about starting a business. All the emotional baggage that goes into it. Fear of failure or shame of failing. Worries about my family. Fear of clients. Fear of money.
So I wrote about what I carry during my day. Did I copy him? Yes. But premises are fair game.
If I wake up at 4:30, I’m done with reading and coffee by 6, I’m sitting in front of the computer trying to write. Your brain is your slave, not your master.
I don’t always believe that you have to do the same time every day. Sometimes I miss that time. But it helps.
This is the No. 1 technique to start something.
Let’s say I’m writing about marriage. Should I start with the first time I met my first wife? Should I start with my first date ever? Should I start with the first time I considered getting married?
I don’t know. Too many choices.
So I started in the middle:
“And then I got a divorce.”
The reader is put off guard. It’s a risk that the writer takes (risks, well done, will drive the reader forward).
It’s almost as if the reader is being invited into the story mid-conversation. The reader is eavesdropping on a very gossipy story. What will happen next? Why did he get a divorce?
From there, the next few lines and paragraphs are usually straightforward. Basically, I’m digging myself out of the hole I created for myself on that first sentence.
If it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead.
I was writing about my first ever-customer as an entrepreneur the other day.
My first sentence was:
“If you repeat this conversation, I will kill you,” Shlomo told me.
If I am doing my job as a writer, that sentence should lead the reader to wonder: what is the conversation? Is this person serious?
The next few sentences, maybe even the entire story, will flow from that first line.
Another time I was writing about seeing a therapist when I was having nonstop anxiety attacks about money.
First sentence:
“The only thing that will help me is if you write me a check for $1 million right now,” I said to the psychiatrist on my first appointment with him.
When a piece of writing is still inside of you its like a baby that’s growing.
The baby is feeding off of your vitality, your brain, your emotional strength, and over time it grows. If you talk about it, then you’ve given birth.
The energy of the words spills out into the air, leaving no imprint, disappearing.
Don’t give birth prematurely.
Give birth on the written page first. Then you can talk about her as she matures.
Sometimes I get hard-core writer’s block. I did my reading , my coffee, my analysis of my big past failures, etc. and I can’t figure out something to write today. I do several things then to look for inspiration:
If I’m writing about the time I was incredibly in love with someone, I can write, “I broke up with her with a text message to her phone.”
Or if you are writing about how to make money, you can start with, “The worst thing I ever did was steal money from my parents.”
Nobody wants to read a story from the movie star about how great he is. People have flaws. Be honest. Be transparent.
If readers can’t handle it then they shouldn’t be reading.
Make sure you’re not trying to protect yourself. Protecting others is important. Do no harm.
But if you’re going to tell a story, a blog post doesn’t have to make you the hero.
For instance one of my more popular early posts was “How I Screwed Yasser Arafat Out of $2 million.” Right off I said I needed $100 million. Nobody needs $100 million.
Then I described what I would do with $100 million, everything I did to try and get that hundred million, and ultimately what Yasser Arafat had to do with it.
The story told itself. But I was arrogant, foolish, a bad guy, and at least at that time, had no idea what I was doing.
If I tried to protect myself in the writing then there would’ve been no story. So always do an honesty check. Are you saying something because it’s true or because you are trying to protect yourself.
If I have a problem like “I’m angry,” then I have at least two delicious courses that will make a full meal.
Two of my daughters are applying to college this year.
It made me think of all the problems I had in college. It made me think of all the problems I see from people I know who cant’ get jobs (despite a college degree) and are struggling with student loan debt.
It made me think of the huge salaries college presidents are getting. It made me think how in the classroom, you only learn classroom skills. You only learn real world skills in the real world.
And then I got a letter from the college another daughter is attending, which made me angry. They were asking me for $16.92 because of a broken microwave in my daughter’s dormitory and everyone was sharing equally.
Which reminded me of the day before when that same college called and asked for a donation.
And it doesn’t have to be pure anger.
The other day I was watching a video where a bunch of investors were talking about the “five best investors in history.”
But they were getting facts, history, biographies all wrong. I felt if they were calling themselves experts, they should know more.
So I wrote my own version.
—
The above 10 techniques have basically produced every article I’ve ever done.
I probably have writer’s block every day. And it honestly makes me feel sick.
My kids know not to get near me when I have writer’s block.
Fortunately, today, I just wrote.
Addendum: These are my go-to writers I often read before writing. Note: This list could be different for everyone. And the list is not strict. I read many other writers besides these but these seem to be consistently the ones who get me out of writer’s block.
The post Top 10 Ways to Overcome Writer’s Block appeared first on James Altucher.
Kamal went missing. Again.
Kamal and I have been friends for over 10 years now. It’s one of the greatest things about the internet for me.
No matter what the criticisms, the internet has given me a family, close friends, great business partners. And, with Kamal, all of the above.
But he was gone. I couldn’t get ahold of him. I called Brandon. “Have you seen him?” Nothing.
I called Steve. Nothing.
I sent a bunch of messages. I didn’t know how to find him.
—
This happened once before.
In 2011, I was meeting Kamal Ravikant for the first time. I was in San Francisco.
I went to a party his brother, Naval, was holding. Kamal was supposed to be there.
“I see he’s at home,” Naval said. He and Kamal tracked the locations of each other’s phones. “He’s been sick lately so we put these trackers on each other’s phones. I can see where he is. He’s probably asleep.”
At 4 in the afternoon? Naval shrugged. Kamal never showed up.
Two days later we met at my hotel right before I was going to the airport. “I’m so glad to meet,” he said and he was smiling. We spoke for awhile and then I left.
A few weeks later he told me he had been sick. “I was so sick, most days I couldn’t move.”
“What happened? How did you get better?”
He said, “I’ll tell you but it might not sound real. One day I could barely move. I was sick. I thought this is it. There’s noting to live for. I could barely get out of bed. But I crawled up to the mirror in my bathroom and I said to myself, ‘I love you.’
“And I kept repeating it. And repeating it. And the next day I did the same. And the next day.
“And I realized all the ways I hadn’t been loving myself. And I realized how important it was to say it out loud.
“How important it was to mean it. How I had to rewire my brain to love myself.
“And every day I got better. And better. And then even better than I was before I started this. I made a complete recovery.
“I was better.”
—
I started to think selfishly. Kamal doesn’t seem to remember this part. “Can I write this down in a blog post?”
“Hmm,” he said, “I think maybe I should write it down.”
Damn!
So he did. Later, he credited me for helping him come up with the idea of writing a book.
And I always tell him, “You did it! I wanted to just interview you.” But he doesn’t believe me. He says, “I never would have done this without you.”
Man, I had him fooled.
But he wrote the book. “Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It.”
It has a simple message: If you sincerely focus on loving yourself, all of your flaws, all of your imperfections, all of your problems, life will be better.
And you can rewire your brain by constantly practicing, like you would exercise any muscle, to love yourself.
He wrote the book. He self-published it on Amazon. About a year before I wrote “Choose Yourself”.
“Love Yourself” was 8,000 words, about 1/8 the size of a book you would find in a bookstore. That’s the great thing about self-publishing. There are no rules. No word limits.
But it was beautiful. Many people were buying it. Many people were being helped. He told me his numbers. He was making a significant amount of money every month. I was jealous. But he did a great job. It was a great book.
As of today, it’s brand new.
—
Here’s what happens when you self-publish a book that starts to have a lot of sales. Other publishers call and ask to publish the book.
“But,” one publisher told me who wanted to republish “Choose Yourself,” “you have to unpublish your version of the book and then a year later we’ll publish your book.”
“But why should I do that?” I said. “That doesn’t make sense. Let people buy the book so demand keeps building from word of mouth.”
Some people have a scarcity complex.
These publishers would think: If someone buys it now, then who will buy it later? But good books keep getting bought.
“Love Yourself” by Kamal, was that type of book. He was getting the offers from publishers but he kept saying no.
Until he went missing again.
Until something happened to him that would throw him off balance.
People don’t get this. Everyone has problems. Everyone has difficulties. You solve one problem, and life has a way of testing you again and again and again. It never stops.
And the practices that worked for you before might begin to fail you. Maybe you have to learn new ways of doing things. Maybe you just have to get back to the basics and relearn how to do what worked.
Kamal had been hit. Hit by new tragedies almost 10 years later.
So the next time a mainstream publisher approached him he said OK. He had something new to write about.
He took “Love Yourself Like You Life Depends on It” and wrote his new story. Wrote about the disease that inflicts all of us.
The constant battle against the world that tries to take whatever we have and bury it and hide it. Try to take whatever we earned and leave us with nothing. Left Kamal, for awhile, emotionally empty.
He had to re-find his practice. The practice that had worked for of all these years. If you don’t exercise a muscle, it goes away quickly. He had to find the practice that created the book, “Love Yourself.”
So he did it. And did it. And survived. And kept doing it. And he rewrote completely “Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It.”
He had always been worried that publishers wanted him to add fluff. But this time he had something to say. He added 50,000 words of his experiences over the prior years since the book originally came out.
It’s a completely new book.
He had been depressed, even suicidal. And he had to rebuild from scratch his practice. Because it’s so important that we never give up the practice that saves us and gives us life each day.
When Kamal’s first book came out many years ago, I wrote a post about it on the very day it came out. The first line was, “Kamal was missing.”
Now, having learned so many things over the years from my friend, having read this book and saw all the changes and saw how he dealt with his own ups and downs and transformed it into a new life for himself and how it’s content evolved into something so much better but still the same but so much much better and new, I get to write another post on the same day “Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It” comes out.
Today. “Love Yourself Like Your Depends on It,” comes out and. It’s great. It’s new. Fresh.
Kamal was missing. And then he was found.
The post Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It appeared first on James Altucher.
I was 26 and I felt like I was faking being a real person who could smile and talk and connect.
My job (HBO) was close to firing me because I hadn’t done anything there yet, and I owed some $70,000 for my education. I thought every day I would die and I was kind of OK with it.
I was playing chess at the Village Chess Shop on Thompson St. New Year’s Eve.
A girl who I thought was very pretty came in and sat to watch my game. She drew my picture on a napkin. “Five dollars,” she said to me, “and I’ll sell you this picture.”
I gave her the $5 simply because nobody had ever drawn a picture of me before.
She signed it Elena Van Gogh. “I’m descended from Vincent Van Gogh,” she said, and then she left.
The guy I was playing chess with laughed. “That girl is crazy!” he said.
Nine years later I ran into him on the street on the other side of town. “We played chess on New Year’s Eve, 1994.”
“How the hell do you remember that?” he said, “I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast this morning.”
I remember. Bacon.
—
Later that night, New Year’s Eve, 1994, I was walking toward the Lower East Side.
Elias, my roommate (and I mean ROOMmate — the place was about 8×8) had a “friend” over. I couldn’t go home for awhile. So I was just walking.
I saw Elena crossing the street. “Hey,” I said.
“HEY!” She was excited. “Lets hang out!” I had nothing else to do.
That was my New Year’s resolution. To do things different. Every day. Do different. DO. DIFFERENT. I thought maybe 1995 would be THE YEAR.
The year for what? The year of magic!
Say yes to life!
The first thing she wanted to do was get some crack.
—
I don’t smoke, drink, do anything. “Do you have $10?” she said. So we went to a donut shop on 14th and Second Avenue.
I waited in the cab while she went in. The cabdriver turned around to take a closer look at me. “Just don’t f*** her,” he said.
She ran out and slammed the car door. “GO ASSHOLE!” she yelled at the cab driver. We were driving toward the Soho Motel, as far east on Grand Avenue that you can possibly go.
On the FDR drive she yelled, “That guy just looked at me.” She crouched low into the back seat. She pointed to the car next to us. “Those guys are killers.”
We got to the motel and I checked us in. $70,000 in college debt but I could get into hotels.
That’s why America is great.
We get up to the room. DO. DIFFERENT.
—
“F****!” she said when she opened up the paper bag and pulled out this white nugget and a pipe. “I can’t do this without heroin also.” She turned on the TV.
“You have to get out for a second!” she screamed at me. “My brother is on the TV screen and he’s crazy! Get out! Walk up and down the hallway. Just GET OUT! COME BACK IN 10 MINUTES!”
I walked outside the room and up and down the hallway, like I was told. I had only recently moved to NYC. I didn’t know all the rules. I wanted to learn.
Other people in the hallway were mumbling and looking at me. This sucks, I thought.
I saw a staircase. Went downstairs and walked out of the building. I took a cab back to where I lived. Elias was there by himself.
When I told him what had happened he sniffed my breath. Like maybe he thought I had crack breath or something. Now he’s a fisherman in Rhode Island.
God, thank god I survived being younger.
The next day. New Year’s Day, 1995.
It was so cold. In Port Authority at 7 a.m., old men were lying randomly on the floor like they were bullets that missed the target at a firing range.
I took the bus to New Jersey and my dad picked me up at the stop.
He shook my hand like we were in business together and had just concluded a very successful deal. “Hello,” he said. He was always so awkward. Like I am now. “Hello.”
I had dinner with my parents. “This next year is going to be a great year for you,” my mom said to me.
And she was right.
The post The Last Time I Made a New Year’s Resolution appeared first on James Altucher.
“I will kill you if you repeat this conversation,” Shlomo told me. “I think this web thing is going to be big.” This was 1995.
“I want to undercut all of the stores on the street and sell diamonds direct to people at cheaper prices.”
Shlomo was the wholesaler to all the retail shops in NYC’s diamond district. “But my name can’t be anywhere on the site at all or else these guys here,” and he waved his hand around his head, “will kill me.”
I had $0 in the bank. I knew nothing about diamonds.
He showed me the “4 Cs.” He showed me what a GIA certificate was. He showed me his spreadsheet of all the diamonds he had.
I told him we could make a website where people could search on price, any of the 4 Cs, and then I would generate a GIA certificate that would look like the diamond and people would be able to buy directly.
I would also make the content explaining the 4 Cs and why each was important.
“How long will it take?”
“About a month,” I said. But I had no clue. I had no idea how I was going to do this. If I did this in C or C++ it would take me too much time.
At the time there were no tools for making websites. No WordPress. No Python. No MySQL. Nothing.
Everything had to be created from scratch.
And I had no idea how to generate graphics, like the certificate, on the fly.
But I had been living in New York for over a year and I was living on a foam futon in Astoria, Queens with no other belongings and I wanted to make some money.
He was going to pay me $17,500 cash. I would be rich.
When I got to NYC I had an undergrad degree in computer science and had spent two years in grad school for computer science.
After I got kicked out of grad school (another story), I then spent three years as a programmer.
I had put in my 10,000 hours of programming.
I thought I was good.
When I got a job offer at HBO to work as a “junior analyst programmer” for $40,000 a year, I took it! I was so happy.
HBO felt like the real world. New York City felt like the real world. I bought a suit. I wanted my coworkers to like me so I would go down and talk when they took their cigarette breaks.
But I was awful at my job. I couldn’t do anything. It was so much harder than an academic environment.
Whenever I asked, “How can I do this?” my boss would say, “If you want to work here you have to learn how to figure things out without asking.”
One time, only about a week after I started, he came into my cubicle. I had an 8×8 cubicle. He breathed loudly and took up the entire cubicle.
My boss, Ken, spoke loudly enough so that everyone could hear. I turned red almost instantly. I was hoping he would quiet down.
He said, “You are not doing well. But we want to give you a chance. We want you to take a month or two of remedial programming classes.” He gave me a pamphlet and told me to sign up.
Everyone in the cubicles around me had all quieted down. Nobody was moving. I knew everyone was listening.
I could’ve reached over right then and grabbed Ken’s neck and twisted it until he died. I thought about doing it while he was talking.
If I were in prison I’d have an 10×10 cell and my own toilet. Here I was stuck in my 8×8 cubicle and I was being punished.
I took the remedial classes. I got up to speed.
But when I wanted to take this side job to build this website, I felt a bit overwhelmed.
I was afraid to fail. I didn’t really know how to do it when I said, “I’ll do it!”
But I wanted that $17,500. It was more money than I had ever seen before.
I called Chet. Chet was the best programmer I knew. He worked at IBM but we had been in school together.
One time, from his apartment, he networked all of IBM’s computers together so they would have the bandwidth to stream the Olympics live on the web. I think it was the first video streaming.
Chet and I would hang out and he told me about the projects he was working on.
I told him all of that was BS. “Just learn the internet,” I said.
And he did. He ended his career 23 years later at Google as a very rich man.
Chet’s latest:
One time he did me a favor that saved a business I had started. But that was a long time later. In 2008.
I offered to give him a piece of the company in return for what he did.
“No,” he said.
“Please Chet, I owe you.”
“Consider the debt repaid that I owe you.”
“What debt?”
“You told me to switch to the internet. Thanks.”
But that was 12 years later.
Now I was stuck. How could I quickly program this diamond dealer’s website? I didn’t want to use C to go through his Excel spreadsheet and I wasn’t sure how to make the graphics on the fly.
He said, “No, no, no, no. What are you doing? Use PERL.”
“What’s that?” I was lying down on my foam mattress. I had a phone and a 3-inch black and white TV in the apartment that didn’t work.
Every night, if I got up to go to the bathroom, I had to jump up and down before opening the door. That would make all the cockroaches disappear before I opened the door.
“Just trust me. Get O’Reilly’s book on mastering PERL. Get it right now. Call me later.”
I got the PERL book. About eight hours later I called Chet.
“You were right,” I told him. “PERL was the way to do it.”
“Did you read the book?”
“I’m done with the whole project. The website is finished.”
Many years later Chet stopped talking to me. I wrote an article saying no war could be justified. He didn’t agree with me. He unfriended me and we never spoke again.
I remember one time he stayed with me in grad school. I gave him a novel to read. “Cockpit” by Jerzy Kosinski.
I’m remembering this because I’m rereading the book today. We were once close friends.
I took the PERL book and here’s what I did and here’s how I learn every programming language I’ve ever learned since 1984.
It’s sort of how I learn everything I’ve had to learn ever since then.
The key for any learning is: Make it easy as possible, then get more difficult.
That’s it. That’s the way I’ve learned every programming language before or since. And the same technique applies to learning everything.
PERL turned out to be perfect for what I needed to do.
I set up my environment. Started playing with some simple programs.
When I made mistakes I used the book as a reference. Eventually I modified the programs enough to make Shlomo’s website.
Years later I wrote software to make predictions in the stock market. It used a new language I had never used before.
I took a sample program that looked for certain patterns in stock prices.
Without knowing the language at all, I changed the patterns. Whenever I made an error I would look up the specifics of the language until I didn’t make errors.
The more I modified programs, the more I learned about the language.
These programs became the basis of my first hedge fund.
This is the key:
Tony Robbins once told me how he taught Marines how to shoot guns better.
“I was in my early 20s and they asked me to teach these elite Marines how to shoot better. I had never even shot a gun,” he said.
“But I watched them for awhile and then I had an idea. I put the target very close to each of the shooters. Maybe three feet away. They all shot bullseyes. Then I moved the targets another foot away. They all shot bullseyes. And so on. I kept moving the target further away until it was all the way on the other side of the room. They told me they had never seen a class of Marines learn how to shoot faster than in that class.”
He looked at me and pounded the table to emphasize.
“Always bring the target as close as possible. Start with that whenever you have to learn something. Then after you master it at that distance, move it slowly further away.”
(From my slideshare: “Ten things I learned from Tony Robbins”)
I delivered the website.
Shlomo was very happy. “So fast?” He was almost suspicious. But everything worked.
He launched the website a few days later. It still exists (although has since been rewritten I think): diamondcutters.com.
He gave me the $17,500, in cash, in a paper bag.
I took it immediately to the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street and paid a year in advance to live there.
Shlomo was my first client. I started a business making websites. It changed my life.
It began a period that was the worst decade of my life. Life was stress-free and simple before I started being an entrepreneur.
Many years later, Shlomo died in a plane accident over Namibia. He was looking for uncut diamonds and crashed.
Shlomo had a secretary that I had a crush on.
She had a big, red, wine stain birthmark that stretched from the corner of her eye, across the landscape of her cheek, and touched the end of her smile.
I would stare at it when she spoke to me. I would try to make her laugh. To see that wine-stained smile.
I wanted to lick the mark right off of her face.
The post How I Made My First $1,000 (Or… How to Learn Anything Super Fast) appeared first on James Altucher.
YangGang is intoxicating.
I posted a video once jokingly making a connection between “The Addams Family” TV show and my interest in Andrew. It got over 100,000 views.
People loved it. People loved ME!
I really like Andrew.
He seems like you and me. Someone we could hang out with in the living room and just talk about life and occasionally veer into issues.
He has a sense of humor. He plays in the same sandboxes that I do. That we all do.
And when I started making the smallest of hints that I might like him as a presidential candidate, I got inundated with validation from the YangGang.
His supporters love him. LOVE HIM.
I got thousands of new followers on every platform. People welcoming with virtual hugs and love. It was like coming home to a home I never knew was waiting for me.
I even texted with him. He texted back! “We’re on the same team!” he said.
I read his two books. He is super smart. He is classically persuasive. Brings up fear, scarcity, provides concrete solutions, offers hope, and handles all objections.
I am blown away by his creative approach every time I listen to him. I want to support him. And I have never supported any candidate ever (well… Bruce Babbitt in 1988 maybe).
BUT….
Then I got disappointed. CRUSHED even. I really wanted to like him. I wanted the YangGang to like me. I don’t want to disappoint the YangGang.
And I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. I’ve spent months researching him and his issues. And this is a short summary.
[Note: My wife asks why I don’t write this about other candidates. Answer: Because Yang is the only one who disappointed me.]
1) FEAR-MONGERING
Every candidate fear mongers. J.F.K. warned of Russia’s nuclear superiority. Thomas Jefferson warned that John Adams was a pseudo-monarch. Theodore Roosevelt warned of an oligopoly. Every candidate. Every election.
But Yang’s fear mongering on automation is wrong. Although I think the solutions are worth talking about.
I just don’t like fear mongering for the sake of winning votes. Particularly when the candidate is smart enough to suspect he is wrong.
[Andrew: Happy to discuss at 203-512-2161.]
His main point: Automation will cause a loss of middle class jobs, which will cause mass social upheaval.
By “middle class,” he is not including blue collar workers who have already lost jobs.
He is referring to everyone from truck drivers to radiologists — all people making good incomes that cannot easily switch to new jobs.
This is, of course, rough, but it’s his elevator pitch.
He (and his supporters) say this time it’s different, because it’s the middle class and it’s harder for them to find new jobs, so they will be out of the workplace, and they have more power to cause trouble.
His solution is universal basic income (UBI), which he offers innovative ways to pay for.
However, he is not right about automation.
His biggest example is truck drivers. His estimate is 3 million out of 3.5 million truck drivers could lose their jobs. These are the WRONG sort of people you want starting social upheaval.
He is totally FEAR MONGERING, and I hope he is only doing it accidentally.
A) The truck driving industry is about 30% short of total employment.
They NEED more truck drivers. If automation can fill some of that gap, then great.
Source: Many if you Google, but one quote from trucking.org (which doesn’t have incentive to create competition for their members) says, “The shortage of truck drivers is at an all-time high.”
B) Automation is good for highways. Not city driving.
Let’s say automation takes 4 out of 5 highway truck driving jobs (even after shortage is handled).
More trucks will then be on the road, servicing the delivery of more products.
Which means more trucks will be needed in the city to do the last-mile delivery.
So quite possibly, the result of automation in truck driving will BOOST the economy, resulting in many more trucks on the road, resulting in MANY more truck-related jobs in the city.
Andrew Yang’s prediction is ONLY one scenario out of many and happens to be the worst case and perhaps the least likely.
Another example he uses is radiology. That AI offers better diagnoses than human radiologists.
This is true. BUT nobody will lose jobs so fast. Only an MD can legally make a diagnosis. And even if this diagnosis is faster (resulting in fewer jobs), prices will go down, more people will get tested, more diagnoses will result, more jobs needed. More procedures needed (perhaps), more doctors , equipment, healthcare jobs needed, etc.
I can go on, but those two examples suffice and are the ones Yang brings up the most.
C) Decline in workforce participation
Although we are at record-low unemployment, Yang says this is not good since tens of millions of people are dropping out of the workforce.
This is a great way to combat the idea that the economy is doing well.
BUT… much of the workforce decline is simply a record number of baby boomers getting older and deciding to retire.
2) RAISE YOUR HAND, ANDREW!
Yang is always saying MSNBC and other outlets don’t cover him, deliberately ignore him, don’t give him debate time, etc.
I believed him and I wondered, like the rest of the YangGang, why this was.
In the last debate, #LetYangSpeak was trending on Twitter almost the entire debate.
And yet… ANDREW! RAISE YOUR HAND.
In the last debate, Bernie Sanders was asked about his plan to excuse all student loan debt.
Andrew Yang has THE PERFECT answer for this question. This was a layup for Andrew.
He answers it in his book, “The War on Normal People.” He answered it on “The Joe Rogan Show.” Rogan specifically asked about Sanders’ plan and Yang’s response to it was what got me to read his books.
Sanders tried to answer. Then Biden interrupted. Then Warren interrupted. And it was a free for all.
I was shouting at the screen, “Andrew, interrupt! Andrew, raise your hand at least! Show you have an answer!”
He could have demolished Sanders right there and shown that he was a better hero for the progressives than THE hero of the Progressives (although Yang’s somewhat of a closet Libertarian).
Not only that, he would’ve contested AOC’s narrative that his solution was regressive and Sanders’ was progressive when it’s actually the reverse.
BUT… he didn’t move. His arms tightly grasped the podium.
Maybe he wants his narrative to be, “Nobody lets me speak.”
But what is he going to do at meetings with Russia, North Korea, or China, when nobody lets him speak?
A president of the United States doesn’t have to be polite all the time. Particularly when the country is at stake.
He has to speak about the issues that are important.
Andrew Yang had his chance here and he didn’t take it and I don’t know why.
[Andrew: Happy to discuss at 203-512-2161.]
Yang is smart. He clearly has the charisma to gain passionate followers (as opposed to Biden, etc).
In some polls, he’s the No. 2 choice for most Americans behind whoever their No. 1 choice is. (In other words, he is No. 1 when asked, “Who is your No. 2 choice?”)
But I really hate fear mongering. Since Malthus, the world was going to die from overpopulation. In 1905, the economy was going to die because of cars stealing horse jobs.
ATMs were going to cause chaos due to thousands of bank tellers being jobless (and now there are more tellers than ever because of the massive profits of ATMs led to a bank office on every corner).
Overpopulation was predicted in 1970 to lead to U.K. people dying of starvation by 1980.
And in every decade, it was predicted that automation was going to cause massive job loss.
It’s not different this time and I wish Andrew Yang had a better way to show his unique perspective and provoke interesting discussions around his solutions.
But part of this has to start with him simply raising his hand.
[Andrew: Happy to discuss at 203-512-2161.]
The post The Case Against Andrew Yang appeared first on James Altucher.
