Full text of renowned author James Altucher’s talk titled “Choose Yourself” at TEDxSanDiego conference. In this talk, he reveals how at one point failure led him to consider suicide, and how he turned his life around by following five key practices.
Notable quote from this talk:
“If you don’t make the choices in your own life, then someone else is going to end up making them for you, and it won’t be good.”
Listen to the MP3 Audio here:
TRANSCRIPT:
James Altucher – Author & Serial entrepreneur
Oh, My gosh. This has been such a great day for so many reasons, but first, I just want you to know I’m the last speaker and after me is the ballet.
So let’s give it up for all the speakers all day long. What a great, great group. I’ve learned so much from them.
So a few weeks ago, I think I made a huge mistake, which is kind of normal for me, but I didn’t know it was going to be a mistake. I want to always; I’m like one of those fathers who likes to brag to his 12 year old daughter.
So I let my 12 year old daughter read a book I wrote, which was a big mistake, because then she comes to me a few days later. She’s a quick reader. I’m proud of her. I’m bragging about her now.
So she comes to me a few days later and she says, “Daddy, I hated this book.”
And I’m like, “Molly, why did you hate this book? It’s my favorite thing I’ve ever written in my entire life.”
And she said, “Throughout the entire book you’re always crying, you’re going to kill yourself and you’re crying on the floor, what’s wrong with you?”
And I said, you know, because I want to be a good example to my children.
I said, “Well, honey, I want to tell the truth. And at that time, I was feeling that that down; that low.”
And in particular, she was… Well, first, she said… after I said that, she said, “But Daddy, that’s really mean.”
And I thought about it. And I’m glad she said that actually, because at the time that she was referring to was a really for me a difficult time.
I had built and sold a business I had been proud of. And literally, in one summer, I was like a drunken rock star on steroids. Like, I went from $15 million in the bank to $46 in my ATM machine, like I had nothing left.
I was getting… my house was being lost. I was losing my marriage, losing my family. I was so ashamed I couldn’t talk to any friends. So I lost all my friends. I even couldn’t deal with my parents. I couldn’t deal with anything.
I was depressed and I really thought it would be better for my children — my two little girls at the time — for my children to have a $4 million life insurance policy than to have a father.
You ever get into that situation where you start off, you have a wide funnel at the top of choices and ideas and so on. But then you get a little depressed and it starts to spiral down lower and lower, until you feel like there’s only one way out.
And that’s how I felt.
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But I really wanted to have other choices. I had two kids. I really needed to have another choice. I went to a therapist and he said, “What can I do for you that will help you feel a little better?”
And I said to him, “The only thing you can do is write me a check for a million dollars.”
And he said, “Trust me, that won’t help you.”
And he was right. And what I decided to do…And look, we all the time have many choices in life. And a great and wise man once said, if you don’t make the choices in your own life, then someone else is going to end up making them for you. And it won’t be good.
So it might be a boss. Might be a professor. Might be your parents. It might be colleagues. Someone else… might be a company. Someone else is going to start making choices for you. And they’re not going to be as good as the choices you can make yourself.
Of course, the great and wise man was myself… being very humble here.
But, I had failed and succeeded, and I started over 20 businesses, 17 of them failed. And we unfortunately live now in this culture that almost glorifies failure, like we’re supposed to be so happy who fails fast. It’s like this failure pornography almost that we just like… we just worship people who fail and then somehow succeed.
But I could tell you, like, failure is really unpleasant and it’s much better to view it as like an experiment… like Thomas Edison even failed 10000 times when he was making an electric light bulb. He just experimented and then he made an electric light bulb.
We don’t consider that the guy was lying on the street about to kill himself on the very first try. He tried ten thousand times.
So I decided to look back as an experiment and say: well, what was going right, every time I was going up. And what was going wrong, every time I was going wrong.
And I decided that there were four distinct things that were working for me. And I’m going to add a fifth at the end of this talk.
But there were four distinct things that were working for me, every time I was on the way up and four things that were failing for me, every time I was on the way down.
So the first thing was, was physical.
Physical Health
Number one, physical. When I was lying on the floor feeling the worst, I was overweight, I was drinking. I was just very unhealthy. I was sick all the time.
If you’re sick, you can’t… you’re not.
If you’re having pneumonia all the time or if you’re stuck in bed all the time, you’re not going to go out and save the world. You have to sleep well. You have to eat well. You have to exercise well.
And that doesn’t mean drive two miles to the gym and then walk two miles on a treadmill and then drive two miles home.
It means just again, you know, the average professional violinist turns out little trivia tidbit sleeps 8.6 hours a day. So I’m going to do that, too. So I decided every day I was going to try to 1 percent improve how I was acting physically.
I was going to walk more. I was going to eat a little better. I was going to sleep a little better. I was going to stop staring at computer screens as much. I was going to start to laugh a little bit more.
You know, the average kid laughs 300 times a day.
And I could see that, like when I go to one of my kid’s performances, the adults are all standing around… like there’s an intermission always, because who wants to go to watch the performance of a bunch of 13 year olds, like it’s the most boring thing in the world.
So the adults are all like standing outside intermission, like the kids are running around chasing, laughing. So the average kid laughs 300 times a day.
The average adult laughs, guess how many times a day? Five times a day.
What the heck happened? What did we do to ourselves?
And the problem in part is because of all these responsibilities and all these choices that other people have made for us. But the first thing is keeping physically healthy.
Emotional Health
The next thing, number two is emotional health. And this was very important for me.
I was basically doing all my business and all my friendships, were with people, I didn’t necessarily love and trust.
So I have to basically… I made it a commitment every day I was going to one percent improve on being around people I loved and trusted; and people who loved and trusted me.
And it started off very difficult. I didn’t know what to do. I was on the ground. When you’re on the ground, you can’t just suddenly jump up and say, hey, life is great. You’re on the ground.
And so here’s the first thing I tried to do, my first experiment in being around people who loved me. I of course, it always starts with an ad on Craigslist.
And I put an ad on Craigslist which said I had a head injury. And after the head injury was over, I found out I was psychic. And anybody could write to me and ask me any question they want. So I got hundreds of e-mails that day.
And of course, I threw out all the emails from men and only answered emails from women. And you may ask… like a lot of people I tell the story, and the first thing they ask is, well, did you end up going out with any of the women?
And I’m like, look at me. Of course, I didn’t go out with any of the women. But I did end up being friends with some of them, though, I have to say. But very important for me to always be around now, people I love and trust.
And the difference in my life has been remarkable. Just having that waking up, thinking I’m going to be around people who love me and who I love.
Sounds easy, but it’s not always easy. One time somebody wrote me an e-mail and said, James, I love all your ideas. I’m trying them coming up with business ideas left and right. And he said, “But one problem I have is every Friday night I go out drinking with my friends and they just trash all my ideas. What should I do?’
And I said, “Very simple. Stay home on Friday night.”
I never heard from him again because it’s actually hard to do these simple ideas.
Spiritual Health
Number three, spiritual. And I don’t like using the word spiritual because it means something different for each person. So I’m going to call creative gratitude. And this is not easy gratitude.
I got always grateful for my kids and for my wife and for everything. But that’s almost like emotional sugar. It’s like a little too easy.
So think of the phrase complaining is draining. How many people just today have at least complained once and I know I have. So raise your hand if you complained at least once. I can’t see a guy there being in the audience.
I don’t know if anybody is actually complaining. So, but just saying, like, maybe you’re in traffic on the way here and you’re like, “how do you just miss the ramp? We’re going to miss James Altucher’s talk.”
Ramps by the way, you just get rid of them because you miss one ramp. And it’s like a tractor beam of Tijuana, which is just bad news. So the key is, though, this is an opportunity to solve difficult gratitude problems, I call them.
Like you could say to yourself in this example, wow, I live in such a great and innovative city that everyone wants to be here. And that’s why there’s traffic. So I’m here and everyone else is here because it’s such a great city.
So anytime there’s a problem, where you feel like the seeds of complaint coming up, think of how to turn it into gratitude, because I guarantee you it’s always there. And again, don’t change overnight. I’m just talking about one percent better every night.
Capture your brilliance
And then finally, the fourth thing is and I have my one prop of the evening. This is a waiter’s pad. Because I’m going to take your orders afterwards.
No. What I do is every day I write down 10 ideas. Why do I do this?
Think about your leg muscles. If you got into a bike accident and you were laid up in a hospital bed for two weeks, you would actually need physical therapy to walk again. That’s how fast the leg muscles atrophy.
It’s the same thing with the idea muscle. If you write down 10 ideas a day, I guarantee you within six months you’ll be an idea machine. A year, that’s 3650 ideas.
Give yourself permission to have plenty of bad ideas, because you’re going to have many bad ideas. But you will be an idea machine. And again, this has changed my life.
And this is not advice because we’re all smart and intelligent and talented people. But this is what I did and my life has completely changed every six months, almost 100 percent. It’s been remarkable.
Give your ideas away
But I’m going to add a fifth thing. That’s really the most important thing. And that’s give ideas to X, come up with 10 ideas for X, come up with 10 ideas for 10 different companies or 10 different people and start sharing those ideas with no expectation of them sharing back with you.
Because when you have no expectations, it’s amazing how easy you get to exceed those expectations.
And what happens is 1 out of 50, 1 out of 100, and 1 out of 20 will want to get back to you. Did get back to me. This is how… so much has changed in terms of financial, health, relationships, my networking, and my opportunities for the future just by creating this chain reaction of spreading ideas as the new currency of this new century. And it’s been very exciting.
Finally, the universe has left us really with only one gift. And that’s the gift of this one moment we’re all sharing together. And I’m so grateful.
For instance, I haven’t peed in my pants during this moment that we are sharing together.
But the key is with this one moment, what do you do? You have to make art with it and then you have to share it.
And I’m really thankful that we’ve all been able to share this moment together. So thank you for letting me speak.
