JAMES ALTUCHER | How to Skip the Line and Get Ahead Faster
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 14 minutes
Words per Minute
197.14189
Summary
In this episode, Ryan and James Altucher discuss the concept of 10,000 experiments and how to use it in your everyday life to win faster. They discuss why staying in your lane is bad advice, how to become the top 1% in your field, and why we should all set out to become a man of action.
Transcript
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Guys, we've all heard people say you've got to pay your dues or heard the concept of the 10,000
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hour rule, but what if it didn't have to be that way? What if you could skip the line,
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so to speak, and accelerate the results of your life while everyone else stands in line,
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simply waiting for their turn. That's what my guest today, the one and only James Altucher
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and I discuss how to use the concept of 10,000 experiments, not necessarily 10,000 hours.
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We talk about why quote unquote staying in your lane is bad advice, how to become the top 1% in
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your field much more efficiently, how to become an idea generating machine, harnessing the power
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of idea sex as James refers to it as, and how to creatively add value to others so you can win
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faster. You're a man of action. You live life to the fullest, embrace your fears and boldly chart
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your own path. When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time, every time. You are not
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easily deterred, defeated, rugged, resilient, strong. This is your life. This is who you are.
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This is who you will become at the end of the day. And after all is said and done,
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you can call yourself a man. Gentlemen, what is going on? My name is Ryan Mickler. I'm the host and
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the founder of the Order of Man podcast and also this movement, which we launched in March of 2015.
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So for the past six years, we've been going strong. And at this point I've interviewed,
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I believe somewhere around 340 highly, highly successful men from entertainers and athletes
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and business executives. I mean, you name it, we've run the gambit on the men who have joined us.
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Guys like James Altucher, my guest today, Steve Rinella, Andy Frisilla, David Goggins,
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Jocko, Tim Kennedy, you name it. We probably had them on the podcast. And it's my job to continue
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to get great podcast guests for you so we can take their information, break it down,
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learn how to apply it in our own lives and achieve similar results as husbands, fathers,
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leaders in our community, business owners. However, we're showing up as men. So very briefly,
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if you would, please continue to leave the ratings and reviews. We've seen a bump over the past several
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weeks in ratings and reviews because I've asked for those things. And it means a lot to me that
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you take a couple of minutes and do that. It isn't a lot. It's only a couple of minutes,
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just wherever you're listening to the podcast, just go leave that rating and review. But trust me,
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it goes a very, very long way, especially if we have hundreds and thousands of men leaving ratings
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and reviews, because we need to bump this thing up. And it's not about bumping it up in the charts
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necessarily. It's about the men and the families and the people that will reach doing this good work
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of reclaiming and restoring masculinity. So we're going to get into the conversation here in just a
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minute. I do want to make a very quick mention of my friends and show sponsors. They also help this
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but they also have their supplemental lineup called Jocko fuels. Obviously that's partnered up with the one
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out. And when you go to either Jocko feels.com or origin, main.com use the code order O R D E R at
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checkout for an exclusive discount. When you do again, it's Jocko fuels.com or origin, main.com
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use the code order. All right, guys, let me introduce you to James. Uh, this guy's one of
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the most interesting guests I've had on, frankly, again, his name is James Altucher. Now I think I
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stumbled across his podcast originally years ago and have since just been extremely, extremely
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fascinated with this interesting and unique person. And of course his take on life. And I really think
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it's men like James that cause us personally to consider what is possible. Uh, and, and what most
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people would probably consider impossible or unlikely or improbable. So James is a trader. He's an investor.
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Uh, he's had hedge funds. Uh, he's a speaker. He's an author, a podcast host. He's a business owner.
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He's a standup comedian. He's also a chess master. The guy's absolutely amazing. Uh, very,
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very interesting. He's made millions. He's lost millions multiple times over, but he's really using
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his interesting and non-conventional approach to life to create meaning and purpose and interest
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and significance for himself. And of course the millions of others who are inspired by him. So
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gentlemen, enjoy the conversation. James, great to see you. I've been following you for a long time.
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So I'm honored to be able to have this conversation now, Ryan. I'm so excited to be here. I love the
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name of your podcast. Also order of man. What, what, uh, what resonates with you about it? What do you
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like about it? I feel, I feel like the word order of implies not only just a kind of demographic,
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but that there's a code of values that one should live by. And I do think that whether it's traditional
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or evolutionary or psychological, or just something stupid, men and women both live by different codes
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of, of values and ideals. And again, some of that might be commercially focused or focused by parents
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or school or education or bosses, but, or jobs, but it has happened. You can't deny it.
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Right. Yeah. I agree. That's part of the reason you could be. So I want to be the, you know,
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I, I don't necessarily want to, um, follow blindly the code established by 3 billion people,
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but it gives me sort of a sense of, you know, where I'm different and where I'm the same and,
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and, you know, which, which pieces I like and which pieces I don't and so on.
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Yeah. That's a long answer to why I like the name of your podcast.
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I'm always curious. You actually hit on both reasons order, obviously just some sort of
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fraternal organization, a collection of people, right. But then creating order and structure and,
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and having that code that you talked about and, and shared values, but the system is important.
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And I like that you've created a lot of systems in your life for making sure that, uh,
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you're being creative, that you're exercising and flexing that muscle. It's funny because so many
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people think that creativity has to be entirely spontaneous, but the thing I liked about,
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especially with your latest book is that you almost in a way codify it and give us some real
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practical applications for being more creative. Thanks for saying that. Like, and I'm not,
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you know, we could talk about anything. I'm not here to sell the book, but this book was my,
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I still had my usual stories and experiences. And a lot of the experiences of, uh, you know,
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podcast guests or historical anecdotes or whatever, but this was my most practical
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book to date. And I really, you know, and, and by practical, I don't mean what I see in a lot of
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books like, Oh, this scientific research says, if you cross your legs and the other person crosses
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their legs, then you could control the, this is practically in the sense that these were all
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techniques that have worked for me. And some of them are unusual techniques, but they've actually
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really worked over and over and over again. And I feel they would necessarily, they would work for
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others. So, and I've seen them work for others. So, so I was happy to do this book. I, this might
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even be my last like nonfiction book or book in this style, just because it was so practical
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that I felt like, I don't know what else to say. I might do a different type of book, but,
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but not this type of book anymore. Did I, did I hear maybe as I was listening,
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or maybe I've heard something else that you are contemplating writing thrillers? Is that what I
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heard? Yeah. I, I, I wondered if I made that up or really heard that, you know, well, you know,
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when I was younger, I used to really love like beautiful literary fiction and I still do like
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if, if, and there, you know, there's lots of different definitions of literary fiction. I have my
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own, but I really also love books that have no pretensions and are simply page turners. And if I
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learned something in them, that's great, but, but they're just so good at the art of storytelling
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that I love a book like that. Anybody who's pretentious and says, Oh, well, I don't like
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John Grisham. Well, they probably haven't any read any John Grisham books. Cause they're like
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amazing page turners. Now, some people I don't like, cause I think the writing might be a little
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boring or not believable. You still need to be a good writer to write a good thriller, but a thriller
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has its own particular structure. A horror novel has its structure. A mystery has its structure.
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Science fiction novel has its structure. These are all different structures and how you play
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with structure is part of, you know, the challenge of an artist. One of the things that I like about
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fiction that I don't know that I would always say is that it's just intrinsically valuable.
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So for example, you take a skip a line or any sort of self-help type work. It's good. It's practical,
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but you read it for a desired outcome. I want to learn these two or three or five or 10 things so I can
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produce better in my life. But the reason you would read fictional work is to enjoy the book period,
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the end. It's just intrinsically valuable. And I think more people need to do that in their lives
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rather than focusing on some desired result. Yeah. Like even, even books, like let's say that
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are fictional versions of George Washington or, or Abraham, like Brad Meltzer, a very good writer wrote,
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um, a book about the plot against George Washington. And it was based on historical,
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this conspiracy that was going to try to assassinate George Washington, but it was still
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the, the, the, the George Washington stuff we all know about. So it gives a kind of foundation for
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the book that we can all relate to, but ultimately it's gotta be a good work of fiction or I'll read
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a history book instead. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because I made a post the other day and I, and I,
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and I said something about quote unquote, staying in your lane is bad advice. And I think if there's
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anybody who epitomizes the idea of why staying in your lane, isn't always the best route to go,
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it's you from self-help type books to potentially writing a thriller to hedge fund investor and
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everywhere in between. And I love how many different veins and routes and avenues, and it just makes life
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very interesting. And I think it actually gives you a lot of edges in a very sane kind of boring,
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mundane world. I think that's probably a white guys like you stand out quite a bit.
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You know, it's very interesting. I've never thought of it this way, but you're, you're,
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you're right. This staying in the lane. What's, what's a lane? Like, what are you, if you, if you're,
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you know, uh, an orthopedic surgeon, I don't even what's orthopedic. Is that like the back or,
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okay, let's say you're a podiatrist, the foot, should you never give a medical opinion other than if
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it has to do with the foot, even though you went to like eight years of medical school, it's so like
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the lane in, in the past century or the past 70 years, the lane, I'm putting it in quotes for
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people who aren't seeing the video, the lane has gotten more and more narrow and niche.
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It's a very narrow lane and it's very easy to like crash and pull off the lane. Whereas if you're on
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like a 50 lane highway, you're, you're, you're not, you're, you know, you could swerve and go
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around different lanes and you just learn more. Like if I know a lot about physics and I also know
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a lot about, uh, I don't know, uh, writing, well, what's the intersection? I can write a popular
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physics book, which, you know, so you have people like, uh, uh, you know, Stephen Hawking,
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Michio Keku, Brian Green, uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or I can write a popular science fiction novel that
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makes use of physics. So like, like Andy Weir who wrote the Martian, you know, have some knowledge
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of physics and, and so do I mean, so, so the idea that I should only, you know, do one thing makes
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for a very boring person, I think. And also there's another point there too, which skipped the line
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addresses, which is that it's not very difficult to switch lanes to the point where in your,
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you're in the top 1% in the world in many lanes. So whereas Stephen Hawking might be the top,
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you know, when he was alive, he might've been the top physicist in the world. Uh, take someone like
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Neil deGrasse Tyson, and this is with all respect to him. He's been on my pocket several times. I've been
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on his pockets. He's not in the top 10 or even 20 or even a hundred physicists in the world,
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but he's maybe in, he's certainly in the top 1% of physicists in the world, but he, but he's in the
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top one or two of people who combine excellent communication skills with physics. And that's
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what makes him so special is that he didn't stay in his lane. He didn't just try to, uh, work on
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some new twist of black holes and stuff like that. He's, he became a communicator and now he's,
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you know, the, the runs the Hayden planetarium in New York city is very exciting. So I think staying
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in the lane is the, is, is the fastest route to a boring life. And I should add also, as I mentioned
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with Neil deGrasse Tyson, you don't need to be in the top 10 of the world. You could be in the top 1%.
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So what does that mean? Let's take something like chess, which got popular after the Queens
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Gambit TV show on Netflix, which was about, I guess now about eight months ago. Since then,
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there's something like 65 million people signed up for chess.com, which is an online place where you
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could play chess. So if you're in the top 2% of chess players in the world, that means you're in the
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top, you know, 1.3 that you're one of 1.3 million people. And, and you could still know enough that
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if you, particularly if you combine it with other skills, it could propel you to play a meaningful
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role, whether it's as a communicator, as a writer, as a chess player, as a coach, as an instructor,
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as someone who uses chess skills in business. And to be in the top 1% of something doesn't require
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10,000 hours, you know, depending on, on what that category is, it might take what, you know,
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what I call, you know, experiments, like it might take a hundred experiments or, or, you know, less
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than a hundred hours to be in the top 1% of a field. You know, like my, my wife recently had a,
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a parathy, parathyroid ectomy. She had a surgery, which is, it removed the, I never even heard of these
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things called parathyroids. They're next to the thyroid thyroid, which is why they're called
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parathyroids. And she had one that was inflamed and they removed it. And it's not, it's not a
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big surgery. And many people don't know about it, but for me, as soon as she got this diagnosis,
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I read maybe 50 to a hundred different papers on it. I spoke to doctors about it. And it's not like
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I could perform surgery on someone's parathyroid, but I would say I'm in the top 1% or 2% of
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knowledge about this. Like I asked other doctors about parathyroids. They had no clue. So unless
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you're an expert or me, you're probably not in the top 2% of this thing. And it was, you know,
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it took a few weeks, but it was relatively straightforward. Well, and not to mention,
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is, is it going to make life better for you? It's, it's actually going to advance whatever's
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meaningful and significant to you and whatever you're chasing, because you're, you're bringing
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experience and concepts and ideas from this realm and you're bringing it over here into this realm.
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And it's non-traditional. And usually what happens is when somebody from the outside comes into a
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certain place, maybe it's chess. I don't know much about chess. People get thrown off the,
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out of the loop for a minute, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's, what's going on here? And then they have
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to adjust and then they get better and you get better. You talk about this concept. I think
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you use the term idea sex. It actually reminds me a lot of a blue ocean strategy. Did you ever read
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blue ocean strategy? No, I didn't. I know some of the concepts from it though. Yeah. Cause they talk
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about, I think one of the examples they use is Cirque du Soleil and they talk about combining the
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circus with theater to create this entirely new uncontested market space, very similar concept.
00:17:11.820
No, and I'll give you, I'll give you an odd example that just came to mind when you mentioned
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chess and, and whatever there, there's a saying in chess, one way beginners get good. Is there a lot
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of like kind of quotes or sayings that you memorize these nifty little quotes, you could get better at
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chess. So like one is called the threat is stronger than, than the execution. So attacking, you know,
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threatening to take a queen might be much stronger than actually taking the queen. So, so, but here's an
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example in a, in a, in real estate negotiation where the exact, you know, I was doing a real estate
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negotiation recently and the exact quote occurred to me where it was very extremely useful. So I hope
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this doesn't sound too, too wonky in the details of the negotiation, but let's say you're buying a
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house and you, and you want to offer, you know, the house is for sale for 500,000, just making numbers
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up, and you want to offer a little lower. So here's, here's a case where the threat is stronger than the
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execution. And, and me thinking this allowed me to do this. You can offer 400,000, but you could also
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have a clause that says, no matter what other offer you get, I will offer $50,000 higher. And so now
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they're not going to get an offer for a million. So I, I'm, I know my risk is limited, but you know,
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if someone hears that an offer on the table is there's an offer that includes no cap that whatever
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I offer, they're going to offer $50,000 more with no cap on that, that's going to scare away. That's
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a threat. That's going to scare away all the, I could offer 3 million. I don't know if they're
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going to offer 3 million, 50,000, and that's going to scare away anybody else. Meanwhile,
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let's say someone offers 500,000. I could just say, nah, I'm out. Like I didn't sign anything
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that binds me to this. So it's just a negotiation. So that's a case where the, I have all the benefits
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of a bluff, but none of the downside to use a poker analogy, but it really fits the concept of
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the threat is stronger than execution. I'm threatening that I could pay infinite. Nobody knows. And if they
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make an offer that's binding, they'll be stuck if it's too high because they're afraid of me,
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but I take, I take no risk. If someone offers 3 million, I could just say, ah, I'm out.
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Nevermind. That that's interesting. That's, that's one of those things. And this is one of the trends
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that I saw in, in the book you wrote is, uh, that it's almost one of those things you're not quote
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unquote supposed to do. And I, and I think people get afraid of that and it's not so much the result of
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that. I think a lot of the times people won't do these things that are not supposed to do like step
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out of line metaphorically to go with the book, uh, because they're worried about the perception
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from other people, not what actually might happen when you do it, but the perception that you're
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cutting in line or you're being inappropriate, uh, or, or you're an asshole or any number of things
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you think people might think of you when you do this. Yeah. I mean, all the time, you know,
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let's say you decide, Oh, I'm very interested in golf. And let's say you never played golf before,
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but you take lessons and, and you know, you, you, you improve your handicap from a 60 handicap to a
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10 handicap. And then you write an article, like, here's my golf experience. You could be worried
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that all these professional golfers are like, who is this guy? Like he's no, he's, he's nothing.
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He's no good, but, uh, who cares what they think? You know, like when I wrote this book,
00:20:50.660
skip the line, I was writing a lot, not a lot, but you know, I had in 2015, like it was about
00:20:56.240
six years ago, I started doing very actively standup comedy. Like I'd perform five times a
00:21:01.620
week. And when I was writing this, I was writing a little bit about my experiences getting better.
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And I was thinking, Oh, comedians are going to hate this. They're going to think who's,
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who's this guy to be writing about, but who cares? Like that's a group of 50 people that I might be
00:21:16.600
worried about. It's a huge world. These are valuable experiences that, um, inform on all types of
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learning. And, uh, you know, I think, I think the source of much unhappiness is worrying about what
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people think of you now don't get me wrong. I do worry about what people think of me very often,
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but you just have to keep in mind that it's, it's not the most important thing to worry about.
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And that, and that helps dealing with it because we all care a little bit where we're tribal animals.
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We care a little bit what people think of us, but, but having tools for dealing with that and
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understanding what's going on is, is useful. Well, and I think, I don't think it's actually
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bad to worry about what people think of you, but it has to be the right people. And I think what
00:22:00.340
happens is a lot of guys end up focusing on appeasing the wrong people. Like, for example,
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I care about what my wife thinks of me. I care about what my children think of me. I would say
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most people would say that's entirely appropriate. So it isn't about not caring what anybody thinks.
00:22:18.000
It's about caring what the right people think. But I am curious on your standup comedy, you know,
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with that thought, as you were going into it five or six years ago, what was the actual reception
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from your, your peers, those in, in the industry already? Yeah. And by the way, it's interesting.
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There's, you mentioned the wife and the kids, it's almost like there's concentric circles of care.
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So like wife kids might be the most was the tightest circle around you. And then the rest of your
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family is the next circle. So like siblings, parents, cousins, their opinions important to you,
00:22:53.000
but it might not be as important. And if they disagree, if you have too many fights with them,
00:22:58.760
maybe you need to take a break from them, whereas you're not going to take a break from your kids
00:23:01.680
or wife or whatever. And then there's your, your friends, then coworkers, then community,
00:23:09.300
then society, then social media, which is, you know, I separate that from society because it's a
00:23:15.400
little more anonymous and, and, and on and on, who knows what other, you know, what other circles are
00:23:21.200
in between. And even in coworkers, there's different types of coworkers is your boss. And
00:23:25.000
there's people who work in the next building, but you know, there's still coworkers. And, uh, with
00:23:31.180
comedy, first off, uh, my friends thought I was crazy. They're like, Hey, we already know you're
00:23:37.360
funny. Why do you need to go on stage in front of 30 people and tell jokes? And that was an
00:23:42.700
interesting question because what was I satisfying some emotional hole that I had or what was going on?
00:23:50.120
And I had to think about it, but the, my peers, the, the comedians, particularly the ones who had
00:23:55.200
been doing it for, for 20 years, but hadn't really found, uh, they were super funny, but they might not
00:24:01.100
have found huge financial success. Cause that's, there's a luck factor in that in, in things like
00:24:05.980
comedy. And they were very upset. They were like, this guy, literally they were told me, they told
00:24:11.960
me, or what I remember specifically one guy, but many people said this one guy said to me,
00:24:15.960
you can't skip the line. You got to pay your dues. I've been doing this for 20 years.
00:24:20.360
You don't even find your voice until you've been doing this for 10 years. And I'm thinking to myself,
00:24:25.620
I don't want to, I'm, I'm at the time I was like in my mid forties or something. I don't want to wait
00:24:31.200
10 years to find my right. I've been doing writing and public speaking for, for 20 years. I don't need
00:24:37.680
another 10 to find my voice here. And I'm, you know, so meanwhile, he's telling me this 30 seconds
00:24:42.820
before I'm about to go on stage. Uh, so, you know, he had an agenda and you have to just put
00:24:48.880
everything in context. Like he was giving good advice that in general, it's a very difficult skill
00:24:53.880
and respect the skill, but in terms of his own personal timeline, he was projecting that onto me
00:25:00.840
and maybe he cared about me a little bit, but also he was worried. He didn't want me to pass him
00:25:06.540
because he's been doing it for 20 years and he won success and maybe just was jealous that I was
00:25:13.020
going to be able to do it. I'm not saying that in a bad way. Maybe he wasn't jealous or, you know,
00:25:17.160
it's almost a cliche to say, Oh, when someone hates you, they're, they're jealous, but sometimes
00:25:21.400
they truly are. Sure. Yeah. You know, the, the, the concept of the 10,000 hour rule always,
00:25:28.500
I won't say it rubbed me wrong, but it didn't sit quite right with me because what I thought of,
00:25:33.420
and you opened my eyes to some new considerations, which we'll get into. But when I thought of it,
00:25:38.080
I'm like, well, okay, 10,000 hours, but not all 10,000 hours are the same. Like if I was doing 10,000
00:25:44.980
hours of nonsense towards something, it wouldn't be nearly as effective as being, being fully committed
00:25:49.920
heart, mind, soul into the thing and putting everything into each one of those hours. But then
00:25:56.040
you unlocked it even further and said, Hey, forget about the quality of the hours. Like what if we just
00:26:00.520
change it to experiments and we can skip the line and we don't have to wait seven years or whatever
00:26:07.260
that equates to, and we can experience those results a whole lot quicker, which I think everybody
00:26:11.420
wants. Yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, the whole nature of an experiment is you have a theory about
00:26:18.060
something and maybe you don't know the answer, but maybe all of society doesn't know the answer,
00:26:22.120
because if you have a theory about something, in most cases, you could just look it up on Google
00:26:25.380
and find out your answer. So doing an experiment on even a field that millions of people are involved
00:26:32.400
in might improve your understanding of that field in ways that nobody else understands.
00:26:38.120
Do you do enough experiments? You could legitimately claim to be in the top one or 2% of knowledge,
00:26:42.760
or at least ready to have idea sex or, or possibility sex with another field that you're familiar with.
00:26:49.960
And again, the 10,000 hour rule, whether or not is even true, it really refers to, I want to be the
00:26:55.600
best in the world. Like I want to be the, let's say someone wants to be the best tennis player and
00:27:00.480
they're, and they're eight years old. They need to put 10,000 hours and more or less to be, you know,
00:27:06.320
to win Wimbledon. Assuming they have some talent. Now, some people argue there's no such thing as talent,
00:27:11.040
but let's say there is such thing as talent. Assuming they have talent and they put in 10,000 hours of
00:27:15.100
what's called deliberate practice. Maybe they'll win Wimbledon, but to be the kind of tennis player
00:27:20.860
who could beat all your friends, you don't need 10,000 hours. Maybe you experiment with a type of
00:27:27.320
serve that has this weird backspin on it that you master after 12 hours of practice or 50 hours of
00:27:35.520
practice. It's an experiment. If I do this weird backspin that not a single coach in the world would
00:27:40.420
recommend, but it's really hard to get and you mix it up with some other spinning serves,
00:27:45.680
you might be able to beat all your friends at the club and, and that's good enough. And you'll learn
00:27:49.980
enough. And then you read a book, the inner game of tennis, and maybe you experiment on, on your
00:27:55.120
backhand and boom, suddenly you're in the top 1%, which means you're probably one of 10 million people,
00:28:02.420
probably close to a billion people know how to play tennis. And it's good enough to be beat all your
00:28:08.080
friends and family, which, you know, that might be your goal. Yeah. It depends on what your goal is
00:28:12.940
too. That's right. That's the point. It's like, what is it that you want? What are you after?
00:28:16.580
Most people can't really answer that question. You know, I had an experience and I might've
00:28:20.740
written about it in the book, but it kind of really opened my eyes a lot to this idea of being in the
00:28:25.720
top 1% or 2% rather than being in the top 10 of the world. And I was in a taxi cab and, you know,
00:28:34.500
I was just making conversation. Uh, the guy, the driver was from Turkey and I said, Oh, what'd you
00:28:41.040
do in Turkey? And he, and, and he's like, well, I love playing chess. I played chess. And so I know
00:28:47.080
we're talking a lot about chess, but it's something I do. And, uh, I figured, okay, he's like, maybe he
00:28:53.760
knows the rules and he plays for fun or whatever. Uh, but, but he said, yeah, I was the champion of
00:29:00.360
Turkey. I was the national champion of Turkey. And I'm like, Oh, what's your ranking? And he told
00:29:06.120
me his ranking. And it was, you know, it was like a standard deviation above my ranking, meaning he
00:29:11.560
could probably beat me two out of three times if we were to play a match, but, but it took him an
00:29:18.000
extra to get to that level. It would take an extra four or five years of where I am now to reach his
00:29:26.600
level. So he must've put in four or five years of studying at least three to five hours a day, seven
00:29:32.620
days a week. And I'm not saying it's bad that he's driving a cab, but, but chess helped me get into
00:29:39.880
college. It helped me get my first job. It helped me get into graduate school. Uh, it helped me raise
00:29:45.260
money when I was raising money because people associate chess with a certain level of intelligence
00:29:50.420
and discipline and so on. So just reaching the master level of chess, I achieved my goal to,
00:29:56.980
to be success, to help me be successful in business, as opposed to being what's called an
00:30:02.780
international master of chess, which nobody knows the difference and spending an extra four or five
00:30:07.520
years doing that. Well, there's that, uh, that law of diminishing returns, right? If you, if you dabble
00:30:14.040
into things, you're talking about chess. When you say chess, I mean, I'm really hearing jujitsu
00:30:18.200
because that's something I've started to do over the past couple of years. And, and the concept is
00:30:22.280
similar. You know, if, if I go in and I take six months of training or even a year of training,
00:30:27.400
I'm probably going to be capable of defending myself or beating 95% or more of the population.
00:30:34.680
Now, if I want to beat the other 5%, you know, it's going to take me 20 years or longer to get to
00:30:39.760
that point where I can hang with a five, but the 95, yeah, I got covered after a year.
00:30:44.100
Well, let me even give another, um, let's take jujitsu as an example. Um, you know, I don't know
00:30:51.360
what the ranking system's like, or is there, are there color belts? Is that how they system? Yeah,
00:30:55.120
it's a belt system. So, so let's say there's a, uh, an eighth degree black belt and a first degree
00:31:01.100
black belt. I, if I were looking at them fighting equals to them, like if I was looking at the eighth
00:31:08.140
degree black belt fight, the first degree black belt, I could see who's better. But if I'm looking at
00:31:12.260
both these people playing, uh, you know, fighting their equals, I would not be able to tell with my
00:31:18.840
amateur eyes, I would not be able to tell who was better. It would not, they would both look like
00:31:23.800
the best in the world to me. I wouldn't be able to tell if they were in the top five people in the
00:31:28.020
world or in the top 10% in the world, it would mean nothing to me. And like you say, though, it would
00:31:32.360
take an extra X number of years to go from first degree black belt to eighth degree or 10th degree
00:31:37.720
black belt. And so it's not even important in most areas of life to be the best to achieve certain
00:31:45.080
goals. If you said to me, Oh, you're a black belt in jujitsu. I'm equally impressed as if you said
00:31:50.400
you were a 10th degree black belt in jujitsu. Right. And, and again, your goal might not be to
00:31:54.800
impress me, but maybe it's to a, be able to defend yourself against large category of the population.
00:32:00.400
B impress, you know, coworkers, friends, whatever about your, your work and ethic and discipline
00:32:07.320
and your fighting abilities and your, your physical shape. And, you know, why do you have to be in the
00:32:13.140
top 10 in the world? You're getting a lot of play. You can enjoy jujitsu for the rest of your life now
00:32:17.620
without being, you know, the best in the world, which might not be so enjoyable. And, you know,
00:32:23.400
there's a lot of benefits to being in the top 1% of something rather than the top 10 of all people.
00:32:30.400
Well, I think there's another benefit. It's interesting. We're talking about this because
00:32:35.160
I think we're both in this self-development, self-help space in one form or the other. And
00:32:40.380
these aren't conversations you hear a lot, like you don't need to be the best, but I thought about
00:32:44.640
this when I started podcasting about six years ago, I looked at what Joe Rogan was doing and I
00:32:49.520
thought, I want to, I want to have a podcast that's bigger than Joe Rogan's. And that was my
00:32:54.740
naiveness speaking, my ignorance about what it takes speaking at the time. And I started
00:32:59.960
podcasting and doing the things and got a couple of years and a couple hundred podcasts under my belt.
00:33:04.460
And then I realized I actually don't want that because there's other things that I want. I want
00:33:10.740
to be here with my family. I want to go on hunts. I want to participate in this. I want to explore
00:33:15.260
these interests and these activities and these hobbies. And if I want to be the best, I could pursue
00:33:19.200
that, but I'm going to have to sacrifice a lot of other things that I want in order to have that
00:33:24.340
thing I thought at the time I wanted. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a good comment because look,
00:33:30.220
we all, I'm a podcaster. We all look at Joe Rogan as man. First off, he has incredible skills.
00:33:35.720
His interviews aren't interviews. They seem like conversations. I can't tell the difference
00:33:39.660
between an interview and just a great conversation among intelligent friends with him. And he does it
00:33:45.900
like, he does like nine episodes a week, some outrageous number. And he's worked really hard at it
00:33:51.020
for over a dozen years. And on top of that, he's super talented. He's been a TV actor or a comedian,
00:33:56.980
a MMA fighter. So, so, so he's interesting, but here's where, you know, here's where experiments.
00:34:06.260
And again, there's a spectrum of skills and podcasting, like how good is one at having a
00:34:10.500
conversation? How good is one at, you know, keeping the story going and the flow going and so on.
00:34:15.740
And there's some skills, but here's where experiments are interesting. What if I, what if
00:34:21.040
the Joe Rogan arena is too crowded, which it might be, well, okay. Let's think of a different format
00:34:26.620
for a podcast. What if I were to call a random phone number and whoever answers I'm recording it.
00:34:33.600
And I, and my goal is to have one crazy, insane story before the end of the hour, just by calling
00:34:39.280
random bonus. And I'm just making this up. That's an experiment. And if that experiment works,
00:34:44.180
then you might have the most popular podcast in the world from just one experiment. If that
00:34:50.260
experiment doesn't work, who cares? Then you don't do it. And you wasted one day and, and you learn
00:34:56.320
something about a bunch of random people. Plus you learned something about podcasting. Plus you got
00:35:01.440
over kind of maybe fears of calling people cold. You know, you learn so many things, even when you fail
00:35:08.540
at an experiment. And if you see the upside, the downside was zero, no money, very little time.
00:35:14.220
And you learn something. The upside is infinite. Like it's incredible. You could have a podcast at
00:35:20.240
Joe Rogan's level. If that experiment works, man, let me just hit the pause button on our conversation
00:35:26.860
real quick. It's been a little while since I mentioned our free program called 30 days to battle ready.
00:35:32.500
Now, when you sign up for this program, what you're going to do is unlock access to a series of emails
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and challenges and information designed to help you accomplish more in the next 30 days than you
00:35:43.960
potentially have all year. Now there's really two major factors guys. After interviewing over 300
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highly successful men that may make men successful on any front, it's a network and it's a framework.
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Now the network is our exclusive brotherhood, the iron council, but the framework for success
00:36:01.760
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all the information you need to implement in your life to achieve the results that you're after.
00:36:34.480
Again, order of man.com slash battle ready. Do that after the show for now, we'll get back to it with
00:36:39.660
James. Well, I think what doing experiments is, is it giving you permission to just start something?
00:36:48.480
Because one of the common comments and questions that I receive is, you know, I want to start this
00:36:53.120
podcast or I want to do this thing, or I want to grow this business, but I don't know where to start.
00:36:57.780
And as I was listening to you talk about it in the book, I'm like, this is it. This is where you
00:37:02.700
start. You just do little experiments that have tremendous upside potential, limited downside risk,
00:37:09.000
and you just start, you just do something. It doesn't have to be the ideal version.
00:37:14.260
You just test it to see if it's going to work. And if it does, you take one more experiment after that.
00:37:19.160
Yeah. Yeah. I, the other day someone was telling me, oh, I'd like to start
00:37:22.220
doing YouTube videos, but, uh, you know, I need to, you know, I, it's really expensive equipment.
00:37:27.300
I need to price it out, get like production assistant and all that. And I'm like, look,
00:37:31.380
look at your phone, right? The phone is, has a better video camera on it than what Martin Scorsese
00:37:37.480
use or Francis Ford Coppola used to shoot the Godfather. Like that shouldn't be holding you back.
00:37:42.800
And a lot of times, I think a lot of times, yeah, it's an excuse because maybe they're not ready
00:37:48.920
yet, or maybe they're afraid, or maybe, I don't know. I don't know what, you know, sometimes that
00:37:54.920
happens to me. I come up with excuses. It usually means you don't really want to do something. Like
00:37:58.680
if you really want to do something, you just go do it. Right. If I really wanted to write, even like
00:38:03.460
writing a thriller, I say, I want to write a thriller. If I really wanted to write a thriller,
00:38:06.280
I would just sit down today. I'd wake up a half hour early and write the first three pages of it.
00:38:10.760
Yeah. It's, it's, it's definitely true that if you wanted it, you, you would just do it. You
00:38:17.180
would get after it. You'd have no problems. Um, and not use that as an excuse to, to not move forward.
00:38:24.740
You know, I want to go back to something you said earlier, cause it caught me and I didn't,
00:38:28.040
and I, and I wanted to, I thought about it for a second. You said some people don't believe in the
00:38:32.720
idea of talent. I've actually never heard that before. I've never heard that concept. I've never heard
00:38:38.000
anybody say that. I'm really curious where that comes from.
00:38:40.760
Well, uh, so, so the guy who really, so Malcolm Gladwell popularized the concept of the 10,000
00:38:47.300
hour rule in the book outliers, right? But he was really just documenting the research done by this
00:38:54.520
one guy, professor Anders Ericsson, who's a very good guy. He recently, or past few years ago, he
00:39:00.000
passed away, but he used the one who really did all the experiments and research to develop the 10,000
00:39:04.160
hour rule. And his concept was if you spend 10,000 hours, give or take a couple of thousand hours of
00:39:10.200
what's called deliberate learning, which is you, you, you do something, a coach gives you feedback,
00:39:16.400
you do it again. So there's a lot of repetition, a lot of feedback and, uh, you know, from a, from a
00:39:21.740
coach who's better and you know, that's deliberate practice. Uh, and, and you, you 10,000 hours of that,
00:39:29.040
he says, you'll be the best in the world and, or among the best in the world. And he did not
00:39:34.840
believe at all in talent. So for instance, he would train people to win the world or us memory
00:39:41.840
championship. You know, how many numbers in a row can you memorize? And he, you know, the people he
00:39:46.840
taught using his theories broke every world record in memory. And his argument was none of these people
00:39:53.160
had any more talent than anybody else. He took, he picked random people and he taught them to be,
00:39:58.280
to break world records in memory. And he noticed the same patterns occurred, you know, in, in a lot
00:40:04.620
of other fields, although it's hard to really scientifically test many other fields. And so
00:40:10.440
he did not believe in talent at all, unless like, you know, in basketball, if you're only four feet tall,
00:40:16.780
you're probably not going to be an NBA player. There's some like natural limitations.
00:40:20.160
Yeah. But that may not be a talent as much as just a, a, a, a characteristic. It's something
00:40:25.460
different than I imagine a talent would be. Right. For example. And so I think in that,
00:40:30.740
you know, area of, of call it research or whatever they're there, like, what is talent in poker,
00:40:38.440
for instance, you know, some people are incredibly good at poker and some aren't, is there talent in
00:40:45.040
poker or is there a skill, you know, what, you know, and, you know, is there talent in math?
00:40:52.040
Is there a skill in math? Cause you know, some part of poker is being able to calculate statistics
00:40:56.340
really quickly. I mean, if you spend 10,000 hours really focusing on statistics and other skills
00:41:02.880
required for poker, you'd probably be the best in the world of poker. And I don't even know what
00:41:07.060
talent means in poker. Does that mean you have an ability to sense what cards other people have?
00:41:12.400
Like, it turns out that's not really such an important skill in poker. And yet this is,
00:41:16.640
this is a skill set that could make people a lot of money if they're good at it.
00:41:21.100
Yeah. I just, I don't know where I fall on this either.
00:41:23.920
Right. No, I'm, it's just an interesting concept. And as you talk about it, my knee jerk reaction is,
00:41:29.200
well, yes, there's talent. Some people are more talented than others. You can train somebody to beat
00:41:33.940
that talent, but imagine what you could do if you take somebody who's naturally inclined or gifted
00:41:38.600
and then teach them the right skill sets. Would that magnify them more than they could have gone
00:41:45.200
on talent or skill development alone? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's probably,
00:41:51.480
that's the accurate way to think about it. Like if let's say I'll take the area of chessy and let's
00:41:56.620
say you're 11 years old and you're incredibly strong at chess. There's gotta be some talent involved.
00:42:01.980
There's gotta be some part of your brain that is clear enough to see lots of things that other
00:42:07.740
people don't see on, on the board. I mean, it's a very complicated game. It takes decades to be
00:42:13.360
great at it. And, but I know, I know one guy who, when I, when I was younger, I was in my twenties.
00:42:20.980
Uh, my roommate was, uh, uh, my roommate's brother was probably the most talented chess player in world
00:42:28.760
history. Like he was unbelievable. He was 11 years old and he was just crushing every grandmaster
00:42:35.700
at speed chess. Like when you play fast. And when he would explain games to me, it sounded like I was
00:42:40.780
talking to like an, uh, an adult instead of an 11 year old. And, but then he didn't, maybe he didn't
00:42:47.300
get the right training or maybe he couldn't handle losing, um, when he played in actual tournaments.
00:42:53.780
But by the time he was like a teenager, he basically stopped playing and he, and he, he couldn't move
00:43:00.060
beyond a certain level. So, so developing the skill, even though there was talent developing,
00:43:05.300
the skill was a lot more important. Now, what if somebody has no talent? Can they ever develop a
00:43:10.980
skill? I don't know. Maybe you need a little bit of talent. I do know some people who weren't that
00:43:15.700
talented, who became incredibly good by with hard work. I guess it really just depends on if it
00:43:22.220
interests you or not. You know, like there's so many different things to, if this 11 year old,
00:43:27.300
Spanish, you're never going to learn Spanish, right? Or this 11 year old, maybe he's incredibly
00:43:31.780
gifted, talented, whatever you want to call it. And you know, he just doesn't like chess anymore
00:43:36.100
and that's it. So, okay. Find something else. I think when you love something, you, you, you are
00:43:42.660
able to remember the nuances a lot better. So let's say you don't really like golf, but all your coworkers
00:43:50.220
play golf. So you take a few lessons and you, let's say you have a really good coach. So you learn the
00:43:54.820
correct swing. You learn how to hold your feet. You learn how to, um, you know, hold the golf club
00:44:00.760
and you know, which club's good for which situation. But if you lose, if you're not really that interested
00:44:05.960
in it, you're not going to remember, Oh, you know, hold your feet at this angle and, and, you know,
00:44:12.780
you use this club for this. And, and when there's a wind, you know, here's how you, here's how you,
00:44:17.040
you might not remember all the, all the what's called chunks. So every skill is, let's say divided
00:44:25.400
into a hundred thousand chunks. So in poker, you remember if someone raises and then re-raises
00:44:33.860
and you have a pair of aces, you might want to go out. Uh, you might want to just fold. So that's
00:44:39.360
like a chunk, you know, whereas if somebody doesn't know that chunk, they might re-raise again with a
00:44:44.460
pair of aces because they have the best hand or who knows. And I'm making that up. I might have
00:44:49.100
described a bad way to play, but somebody's going to correct us. I'm sure. Yeah. So poker players,
00:44:54.760
they'll, they'll definitely correct. Oh, this guy doesn't know anything, but, uh, uh, you know,
00:44:59.580
so every skill is like almost the language of these nuances. And you just might not, if you're not
00:45:04.720
interested in the, in it, you're not going to remember if you're not interested in math, you might
00:45:08.760
not remember the quadratic equation or whatever, uh, or how to calculate an integral. I don't know.
00:45:16.000
So you have to think a lot of those things. Well, and I think a lot of those things, if you do have
00:45:20.140
a love for it, it would be even hard for you to explain. So people on the outside will look at it
00:45:24.380
and say, for example, Joe Rogan, you know, Joe Rogan, you're so good at this. And you say, well,
00:45:28.200
why are you good at this? And I bet he, if you asked him that question would have a very hard time
00:45:32.700
articulate. What do you mean? Like, isn't everybody, can't everybody just have a conversation? Can't
00:45:37.620
everybody just do it like this? He might have a hard time articulating what makes him so great at
00:45:42.360
it. That's a really good point. Like sometimes people who are the best in the world are maybe
00:45:47.760
the poorest teachers because they, they learned when they were really young and they don't, they
00:45:53.240
don't really, maybe they had a lot of talent, like you say. And so the work that was required for them
00:45:58.280
was different than the kind of work required for someone who like the work required for someone
00:46:02.840
who's 40 and just starting golf compared to the work of someone who's eight and starting golf,
00:46:08.260
that's completely different work. There's a completely different set of skillset. So someone
00:46:12.260
who learned to be a great golf player, but who started at the age of eight might not be good at
00:46:17.280
teaching someone who's 40 and has already built a lot of their physical habits and now needs to
00:46:22.400
unlearn things and learn the correct habits. Like this person's had all these good habits for 32
00:46:27.580
years. You might not understand what the requirements are, but that said, you know,
00:46:33.120
there, you, by dividing a skill, I kind of go through this a little in, in the book, but by dividing
00:46:38.880
a skill into micro skills and, and doing these experiments, you, you could kind of, uh, uh, you know,
00:46:46.280
start figuring out what your learning needs are versus someone who did something at eight. I mean,
00:46:50.600
my book's really focused to someone who's suddenly falls in love with computer programming at the age of
00:46:55.780
28. What do they do? Someone who started at the age of six might not be able to tell them. And,
00:47:02.700
and, you know, I've been a programmer. A lot of programmers are weird. They may not just have the
00:47:06.860
skills of teaching. And so, uh, you know, there's, there's a lot of different nuances in learning,
00:47:12.280
but my book is geared for the adult improver who really wants to be in the top 1% of whatever they
00:47:17.640
love. And it's, it's difficult, but not impossible. The other thing about loving, uh, what you do
00:47:23.380
is who you, every day we start off with a limited amount of energy. That's why at the end of the day,
00:47:31.120
we're tired and we need to sleep to rejuvenate. So when you learn something, you need energy to,
00:47:38.100
to learn and to do the thing. Let's say you want to write a book. You need energy to write the book.
00:47:42.580
Now, if part of the energy you spend is because you, you have to convince yourself to sit down and
00:47:49.460
start typing because you don't really love it as much as John Grisham loves it, then you're not
00:47:54.780
going to be able to beat the people who love it. It's going to be harder for you to be in the top
00:47:58.900
one or 2% of something. Cause you need, cause a good 20% of your energy is going to be spent every
00:48:04.260
day, just convincing yourself to do something you don't love. Yeah. But here's the beauty of this,
00:48:08.340
especially in the world that we live in. You don't have to be a New York times bestselling author
00:48:12.760
to have a large influence, to impact a lot of people, to make a lot of money. You don't have
00:48:19.380
to have this kind of podcast. You don't have to pursue that certain Avenue. There are so there
00:48:24.360
are an infinite number of routes that you can go where you think, you know, I don't want to write
00:48:28.380
a book. Cool. Don't write a book. You can still reach your goals doing it a different way.
00:48:32.920
Yeah. Or like, like take jujitsu as an example. Uh, if you did a podcast where all you did
00:48:38.140
was interview 10th degree black belts in jujitsu, you would have a very loyal, committed audience,
00:48:46.460
like extremely loyal. They would be highly engaged in your podcast. They would join the Facebook group
00:48:51.260
you set up about your podcast. They would discuss the different people you interviewed and what else
00:48:54.800
you could have asked and, and what the people said and how it applies to them. Extremely loyal,
00:49:00.160
but it'd be one, 1000th, the audience of Joe Rogan's podcast, but you wouldn't care because you love it.
00:49:05.120
And you love the people you interview and the audience is engaged with you and you might even
00:49:09.520
make money because you'll have, you know, jujitsu people who make jujitsu products might see how
00:49:16.340
loyal your audience is. And so they'll sponsor your podcast more than if you have like a general
00:49:21.000
podcast, it's trying to compete with Joe Rogan. Right. And I want to write a book, but let's say you do
00:49:26.740
10 episodes interviewing 10th degree black belts. Well, now you have an audio book, just combine them all
00:49:34.320
together, do some basic audio editing, maybe record an intro you do for each thing. And now you just
00:49:39.720
did it. You just quote unquote wrote an audio book. Right. That's, that's an experiment. Another
00:49:45.040
experiment along that line would be having a ghostwriter, take all of those, get them transcribed
00:49:50.700
by some audio equipment for a hundred bucks and then have somebody clean it all up for you. And all of a
00:49:55.440
sudden you have your words in written format. There's an experiment. It didn't cost you a lot of time or
00:50:00.140
money, high upside potential, low downside risk. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but you figure
00:50:05.100
out some things along the way. Right. Absolutely. You'll, you'll learn about the publishing process.
00:50:09.860
You'll, you'll, you'll have your go-to set of people for, uh, doing the editing, doing cover
00:50:14.780
design, uploading it to Amazon. And then at the very least you have your core audience. That's very
00:50:20.560
engaged and loyal to you who will buy the book in some form or other. And it'll, it'll, and then let's
00:50:26.480
say you want to, um, go on another podcast or you want to speak at a Ted talk. Well, if they're
00:50:32.600
choosing between the guy who wrote a book and the guy who didn't write a book, they're going to choose
00:50:36.240
the person who wrote a book. And like you said, like you said, it doesn't, you don't have to
00:50:40.200
actually write it. You, you, you, I mean, James Patterson doesn't even write his books anymore.
00:50:44.140
It's, you always see James Patterson with, and you know, it's, uh, uh, you know, it's a great,
00:50:51.860
You know, where a lot of men get hung up is they think if they, that, that if they pursue
00:50:57.160
one path, they believe they're pigeonholing themselves into this path. And what I like
00:51:03.240
about what you've been talking about the last little while. And in the book is you're almost
00:51:07.720
giving these guys permission. They didn't need it, but in a way, giving them permission to say,
00:51:12.660
look, you can go down this route, just take the first small step. And then you can pivot.
00:51:19.020
You can adjust. You don't have to pigeonhole yourself. Like maybe you did 40, 50, 60,
00:51:23.920
70 years ago when you pursued a career path in the corporate world, it's different now
00:51:29.860
Yeah. And, and, you know, also not every lane or skill or domain is equal. So, so for instance,
00:51:38.440
Jude, I'll, I'll, I'll, because you're into jujitsu, I'll keep using that as an example,
00:51:42.780
but it could apply to anything that might take two decades to, to reach your full potential
00:51:47.640
or 10 years or 15 years, who knows, but let's say you're an accountant. Now accounting is also a
00:51:55.040
skill and it's, it's a reasonably hard skill. Like you, if you love it and you study it,
00:52:00.300
there's lots of nuances in the laws. There's a lot, you have to know 600,000 pages of tax law and,
00:52:06.420
and really get good at it too. A good accountant is significantly better than a bad accountant,
00:52:10.660
but at some point there's a cap to how good you're going to be at accounting. And there's not that many
00:52:16.380
use cases per person. Um, you know, you file taxes once a year and you know, some people get in
00:52:22.720
trouble and some don't, and you have to be able to help them. But now let's say you're also interested
00:52:26.360
in sports. Well, the nuances of how sports figures, they get endorsements, they get, uh, uh, uh, you know,
00:52:36.520
their, their, their salary, maybe they are occasionally get sued for various reasons. And so their,
00:52:44.860
their nuances might be different. So you can combine your interest in sports with your interest
00:52:48.520
in accounting and keep learning as opposed to just going into work, doing the same things every day.
00:52:54.560
And, you know, just kind of giving up except for making a salary. And then maybe you pursue your
00:52:59.020
interest on the weekends. You can always bring your interests into your work. And, and then that makes
00:53:05.020
work something that you love and you learn more and more and, and, and you become among the best at
00:53:11.000
what you're doing because you're in multiple lanes, learning how to combine them, learning the nuances
00:53:16.400
and so on. Well, you also give yourselves more, yourself more opportunity because, uh, well,
00:53:22.740
I think the example you used was Jesse Itzler in, in the book. And you talked about him writing rap
00:53:29.080
songs and wanting to perform, but that wasn't working out. And then he started, uh, if I understand
00:53:34.220
correctly, writing songs for sports teams and, and then he now, now he owns a team, right? So
00:53:40.060
yeah, you can get yourself into a world that you're interested in a non-traditional route.
00:53:45.040
Maybe that route's not working, but you could still be very close to that world.
00:53:49.380
If you're willing to experiment and look at different veins and different avenues to get there.
00:53:53.960
Yeah, absolutely. Uh, uh, Jesse Itzler is a great example. Like he was never going to be
00:53:59.240
a world famous professional rapper, but by being in the top 1% of all rappers and understanding
00:54:08.320
business and sports, he was able to approach football teams, baseball teams, whatever,
00:54:14.460
and say, listen, I run a company that makes nifty hip hop songs, uh, about your team and you could play
00:54:23.660
it and the fans will cheer and you know, they'll have a fun time and they'll buy more tickets and so on.
00:54:28.340
And so he did it for basically every sports team and sold the company for millions. It's like he
00:54:32.880
invented a field that didn't exist before by combining his interest in music and sports and
00:54:38.560
boom. And then like you say, now he, he, you know, he's made enough money and, and his wife has made
00:54:43.760
enough money that, that they, they own the Atlanta Hawks. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's pretty incredible.
00:54:49.740
You know, when, when you talk about all these ideas and these experiments, I know one thing that
00:54:53.760
you do as a daily practice is writing down as many ideas. I think it's 10. I think
00:54:58.240
you said every day that you come up with, my question is, is if you're encouraging other
00:55:03.020
people to do this and they're doing this, how do you know which ideas are worth pursuing and
00:55:08.260
which ones aren't? Because clearly you can't do all of them. So how do you decide to choose one
00:55:14.900
or a handful? Like if you write 10 ideas. So I always think it's important to not stop until you
00:55:19.900
have 10 ideas on the paper. And so people ask me, what kind of ideas are they? Are they ideas for
00:55:24.000
businesses, ideas for books? Maybe it could be ideas for, you know, how Ryan could improve his
00:55:31.500
podcast. It could be ideas for Google. It could be ideas, you know, what are the, what are the
00:55:36.560
TV series from the nineties that, that influenced me the most? That's, those are ideas. Cause that
00:55:43.320
could turn into an, at least an article if I want to. And so, so, so, but then, but, but if you have
00:55:49.640
3,650 ideas a year, what almost all, all of them might be bad. You know, the, the key is to write
00:55:57.440
lots of bad ideas. So it just gets the muscle exercise. Like when you do, um, pushups, there's
00:56:04.500
two things. One is you don't stop when you have one good pushup, you just keep doing it. And not
00:56:10.240
every quality, not the quality of every pushup is, might not be good. You might, none of your pushups
00:56:15.120
might be good at a, you know, from a, a gym coach, a physical trainer's point of view.
00:56:20.900
And you don't even stop when you're tired. That's actually when you keep going, you still need to
00:56:24.720
keep doing it. Right. And it's, it's the same thing with these ideas. Like even now for me,
00:56:29.180
when I'm doing these 10 ideas a day, and I've been doing this for 20 years around idea number seven or
00:56:34.500
eight, like I was doing an idealist this morning and I was churning through it. And I thought I had 10,
00:56:38.940
I counted up, Oh, I only had eight. And it was really hard. Like that's when your brain sweats and
00:56:43.480
really your neurons build in those last two. Otherwise you're, you're not improving the
00:56:48.660
muscle. And, but how do you decide what, what to work on? Well, the next day when you're writing
00:56:53.380
ideas, you might have a slim memory of one of the ideas you wrote the day before. And you might say,
00:56:58.920
huh, that's not, that was a pretty cool idea. Maybe I'll write 10 ways I can execute that idea.
00:57:05.300
Or, you know, let's say, um, you know, I, I have an idea for, let's say the one day I write 10 ideas for
00:57:13.320
thrillers and all the, most of them are bad, but then the next day I think, ah, you know,
00:57:18.020
one of them might be good. Well, maybe I'll write my, on my idea list for that day might be 10 chapter
00:57:23.200
titles for the one idea I liked from the day before. And then I might lose interest in the next
00:57:28.560
day. The idea list is about something completely different. So, I mean, I had, I had, uh, uh,
00:57:34.460
an idea, uh, a week or so ago that I thought was good enough. You know, it was one idea among 10 and it
00:57:42.300
was related to businesses. Uh, and the next day I wrote, it was like a website type of business.
00:57:49.180
And so the next day I wrote, okay, here's the 10 pages and how they would look and what,
00:57:56.080
what they would, uh, you know, how they would look in a database. I'm a programmer at heart. So,
00:58:01.520
so I wrote, and then the next day was 10 ways I can get this done and, and market it and, and,
00:58:09.220
and make money from it. And, you know, you just keep going. Or, or yesterday I was talking to
00:58:13.760
somebody who's has an app, uh, going up in the Apple store. Actually, it just went live yesterday
00:58:19.600
while we were talking. And I was kind of, you know, pushing him a little bit, uh, to come up
00:58:26.780
with more ideas. Like, so he was asking me like, what sort of business model should I, uh, do a free
00:58:31.220
trial or should I charge? And I'm like, well, let's think about it. There's lots of things you could
00:58:35.880
do. You could do a time free trial. You could do a usage free trial. Like if you read three articles,
00:58:41.180
then they have to pay after that. You could do, um, constantly free, but advertising,
00:58:46.960
or you could have people promote themselves. Uh, you know, he had a very specific type of app to
00:58:52.140
help people get more Instagram followers. Well, you could also get Instagram accounts to pay you to
00:58:57.300
show up, uh, on the feeds for all these people who, you know, as complicated as that, but we're just
00:59:03.000
coming up with 10 ideas for, for what sort of business model he could have. My final conclusion
00:59:07.640
will though, was don't even think about business model, just launch, make it free and get as many
00:59:11.980
as users as possible. Then think about business model. So sometimes I'm actually think about too
00:59:16.260
many things in advance. That's what I was going to say. I was going to say, it sounds to me as you're
00:59:20.640
thinking about all these ideas, you're documenting 365 or 3,065, you know, uh, ideas a year.
00:59:27.300
Do people get caught in this idea loop where it's just idea idea. It's like, great. You've got a
00:59:34.740
whole freaking binder of ideas. Like which one of those have you implemented? Oh no. And I'm just
00:59:39.700
thinking about it. Well, okay. Like you got to do something at some point. At some point, if you have,
00:59:44.940
if you have an idea, that's good. Again, you might not have one for years. That's, that's good. Or you
00:59:49.540
might have 10 in one year and you never know what's going to happen. Like I had an idea. I heard a really,
00:59:55.160
um, interesting or an interview on the radio that really, uh, intrigued me. And I thought,
01:00:04.020
oh, the guy who's doing the interview, he did a really good job here. And he said something that
01:00:08.000
really resonated with me. So I wrote him, uh, he, I said, he should take that one thing he said and
01:00:13.920
make it into a book. And my idealist that day was the 10 chapters that would be in that book.
01:00:20.940
And I sent him this list. I don't really know him that well. He was on my podcast once and you know,
01:00:28.180
we don't know each other that well, but I had his email address. So I sent him and I said,
01:00:31.340
specifically, I don't need, if you, if you do this, I don't need to be involved. This is just an idea.
01:00:36.680
You, I said, you should do this for these reasons. And I sent him the outline of the book. And I said,
01:00:41.300
you know, you don't even need to contact me or anything. It's just, this is just my practice of the
01:00:46.060
day. And he wrote back to me instantly. He said, James, this is great. Let the, can you do it with
01:00:51.540
me? And I'm like, no, no, no, let you, this is really for you. Like, this would be great for you.
01:00:57.360
Like it'll, it'll really make your voice in a different arena and, and, and, and so on. But,
01:01:03.000
but we, he said, well, can you at least help me flesh it out a little more? And I said, sure,
01:01:06.840
it's no problem. And so I did that. And then his team got involved and they wanted me to help them
01:01:13.360
pitch it to Amazon and then Amazon bought it. And they wanted me to do the first parts of it.
01:01:19.220
And I, and I said, I'll help you, but my name doesn't need to be involved or anything. I just
01:01:23.300
like helping. And, uh, and ultimately I was doing enough that we had a bestselling audio book,
01:01:30.960
uh, original audibles doing audible originals. We had a bestselling audio audible original that came
01:01:36.860
out in March, uh, uh, because I said, uh, because I made this idea list and sent it to him as an
01:01:43.820
experiment. I send sometimes that never would have happened if I don't write 10 ideas a day down.
01:01:49.580
Well, in the night, what I like about this too, is this is the ultimate measure of adding value to
01:01:55.280
people's lives. Cause I'll have a lot of guys will say, you know, how, how I've been able to get in
01:01:59.000
touch with James and, and Jocko and all these other guys you've had on the podcast. And, and to me,
01:02:03.500
it's just, if I can add value, then I'm going to try to present that value and make it valuable to
01:02:07.940
other people. But so many people say, well, I don't have anything valuable to add. And there's
01:02:13.120
a perfect example of just sending somebody an email saying, here's 10 things that you should do
01:02:17.600
and it turning into something valuable for them. And then also a relationship and opportunity for
01:02:21.960
you as well. Yeah. Like one time, uh, and I do this quite a bit, but one time I sent, um,
01:02:27.740
Amazon in their self-publishing group, I sent them, here's 10, this is like in 2014.
01:02:34.060
Or 2012, I forget what year. And I sent them, here's 10 ideas for how you can improve your,
01:02:39.280
the way you're doing self-publishing. Cause they were just getting into self-publishing then.
01:02:42.840
And they wrote back and it was just kind of an informal note back, you know, the main person
01:02:47.100
wrote back and said, Oh, this is great. Let us know if you're in Seattle at any point. And we'd love to,
01:02:51.980
you know, show you around and show, show you what we're working on. And I wrote back and said,
01:02:55.680
well, it just so happens I'm going to be in Seattle next week. Uh, could I stop by?
01:03:00.100
I had never been to Seattle in my life and I had no plans on going to Seattle,
01:03:04.100
but once Amazon said that the heads of their self-publishing division, I booked a ticket.
01:03:10.240
I'm going to be there. Yeah. And, and, and, and then I got the tour and I got to see
01:03:15.280
all the new products that they hadn't released yet, but they were working on. And then the next
01:03:19.320
time I self-published a book, they were more than happy to help me, you know, figure out how to
01:03:23.260
promote it and all this stuff. So it was all good. Yeah. So many opportunities come from that.
01:03:29.640
And I think that's really what everybody wants is they want the opportunities. And one of the things
01:03:34.600
that really stood out as, as I was listening to your book, uh, was that it's up to you to create
01:03:40.300
the opportunities. It's, it's on you to do it. It's on you to do the exercise. It's on you to take
01:03:46.380
initiative. Nobody's going to think of your ideas for you or even execute on them. You have to do them
01:03:52.240
yourself completely. And you just never know how it's going to help you. You, you never know. And
01:03:59.060
like, again, at the worst cases, it just improves your creativity muscle, which people think, Oh no,
01:04:06.140
I need, I need to be in Paris by the riverbank and in order to paint. Cause that's what inspiration
01:04:12.740
will hit me. No, it won't. You need to just start painting in your closet. And then, then if you get
01:04:19.560
used to, you know, if you practice painting a thousand bad paintings, you'll start to, I mean,
01:04:24.900
Picasso created over 60,000 works of art, but we could maybe, we maybe know three or four of them,
01:04:30.040
like the same thing with Andy Warhol and other great artists or, or Isaac Asimov wrote over 500
01:04:36.840
books. And we know the foundation series and I robot. So you just never, you, you, you, you,
01:04:43.380
it quant, it's a quantity game creativity actually. And you quality builds up as you build the muscle.
01:04:49.320
So one of the things I do, James, is I, cause people will ask me occasionally, you know, Ryan,
01:04:53.760
how do you come up with your podcast topics and the things that you want to address and where do
01:04:57.820
you, your ideas come from? And this is what I do. I think you'd appreciate this. I have just my note
01:05:02.960
pad on my phone and I have all kinds of notes from different taglines to books. I want to read to
01:05:10.580
t-shirt ideas to a group post posts. I want to make in our Facebook group to podcast ideas. Every time I'm,
01:05:18.640
I, I have an idea or maybe something I'm taking notes for this conversation,
01:05:22.680
you'll say something. I'm like, Oh, I actually need to talk about that deeper. And that will
01:05:26.320
become a podcast episode. And I've got thousands and thousands of topics in here. And I probably
01:05:32.360
won't use more than a handful of them, but they're all in there. And I'm never worried about running out
01:05:37.360
of ideas because they're abundant. Well, you know, that's an important thing of never worry about,
01:05:43.140
never worrying about running out of ideas. And a lot of people, a lot of people, like, let's say I tell
01:05:48.880
an idea to a friend of mine and I say, Oh, maybe we should do this. And my friend, let's say my friend
01:05:53.860
says, okay, but don't tell anybody else. We don't want anyone stealing the idea. Like, you know, on the one
01:06:00.560
hand, like they, they might even say this idea is worth millions. Don't tell anybody. So on the one hand,
01:06:06.500
they sound like they have an abundance complex. Like they want to make millions and they think
01:06:10.240
this is a good idea and they're positive enough to want to try it. But actually what they're really
01:06:14.500
expressing is a scarcity complex. They're really saying that they have so few good ideas that when
01:06:20.420
they hear one, don't tell anyone else or people will steal it. Like my philosophy is always to do
01:06:26.620
the exact opposite of that is to share as many ideas as possible. Even tell the ideas I'm working on
01:06:32.120
that I really am spending money and taking seriously because first off, if someone does
01:06:37.960
the idea better than me, power to them. And if someone does the idea equal to me, it forces me to
01:06:43.300
be my best. And chances are anyway, I'm going to not do the idea, even if I talk about it a lot.
01:06:49.860
So I might as well share it. And finally, I know I'm going to have other ideas that are even better
01:06:55.600
in the future because I'm writing ideas all the time. So that's an abundance complex. I know
01:07:02.020
if I need it, I'll always come up with ideas. Now, there was a point recently where I was a
01:07:09.420
little burnt out. And for the first time in like 20 years, I wasn't doing my idea list for a month
01:07:15.180
or two. And it really affected me. My creativity went straight down and it only got back up when I
01:07:22.100
started redoing these idea lists again. And it was very, very important.
01:07:26.820
That's interesting. Well, I know you've been talking about it for a long time and I've heard about it for a
01:07:31.620
long time, but frankly, I've never implemented in my own life outside of, you know, the notes I keep
01:07:35.820
here, but I'm going to start doing that. I'm going to, I'm going to commit to writing out these ideas
01:07:40.900
daily and just see how I feel and see what I can create. I'm really excited about that.
01:07:45.820
Any one of your listeners who writes 10 ideas a day, I would say within two, three weeks, maybe a
01:07:53.180
little more, maybe a little less, they'll actually feel their brain expanding. Like you're literally
01:07:59.380
increasing the connections between neurons in the brain. And then when you start doing what I call
01:08:03.940
idea sex, like, Oh, here's, uh, you know, hip hop and here's sports. What are the 10 ways hip hop and
01:08:12.060
sports can be combined to make a business? Boom. That's idea sex. And you start coming up with ideas
01:08:18.260
like that. One time I did an experiment. I had, uh, I was in a room I had, I was giving a talk. I had
01:08:24.240
everybody write their 10 ideas down and then turn to their neighbor and combine all your ideas with
01:08:31.180
their ideas to come up with a mutual list and idea sex. The ideas were phenomenal that came out of
01:08:36.580
that. I wish I had saved them because now I don't remember really a lot of them, but, uh, they were
01:08:41.480
fascinating. The results. Yeah. I bet they would be. Well, James, I appreciate you. Um, I want to know
01:08:47.860
where we need to direct the guys to learn more about what you're doing, some of these concepts,
01:08:51.320
and of course, pick up the book as well. Yeah. Uh, well the book skipped a line and, uh, if you
01:08:56.680
like it, uh, and I hope you do write a review or, or if you have any questions, you can email me at
01:09:02.660
altucher at gmail.com and hopefully I respond. I'm always terrified when someone tells me, Oh,
01:09:07.880
I emailed you once. Most of the time it's hard for me to respond. I'm not a big emailer, but fortunately
01:09:14.380
every time someone says it to me, they say, Oh, you responded. And I feel really relieved. But, um,
01:09:19.760
what I gathered from the book is that in the next seven years or so, I'll hear back from you on an
01:09:24.740
email I sent seven years earlier. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a good technique too, is I'll go back
01:09:29.440
seven years in my email and I'll respond to somebody as if they had just sent me that email
01:09:34.320
a minute earlier. Like, sure. Let's meet for coffee. How about tomorrow? And they're always like,
01:09:39.760
Whoa, that's the longest response delay I've ever had. So it's always starts off with, you want to,
01:09:46.620
you want to always start things off with a story. Like, so that's like a story. And, you know,
01:09:51.740
I also, I take, I, I write all my notes and idealists on waiter's pads. So when I go to a
01:09:57.160
meeting, people, people are with their moleskin, a, you know, $200 notebooks and their Montblanc pens,
01:10:04.180
and I'll have a pencil and a waiter's pad and someone will, you know, becomes a story. Why do you
01:10:09.800
have a waiter's pad? And it's not like an, it's not like an affectation, like, Oh, I'm gonna,
01:10:16.060
you know, wear, wear glasses or whatever, but it's just enough that it creates a story. And
01:10:21.660
there's legit reasons why I do the things that I do. Well, I think there's a good point there in,
01:10:27.580
in, in the idea of being interesting, right? I think it is important that we learn yes,
01:10:33.380
how to be interested in others, but also how to be interesting. It's much more fulfilling and
01:10:37.740
rewarding and profitable in your life, whether it's romantic relationships or business opportunities,
01:10:43.120
if you're a more well-rounded, interesting person. Well, and I'll, I'll, I'll add to that
01:10:49.260
real quickly. Uh, one final story. I, it's better to be the only than to be the best. So, um, I had
01:10:56.780
one of my daughters applied to all of her favorite colleges a year, a couple of years ago, and she
01:11:03.500
didn't get into them. And I said, okay, why don't you take a year off and do, and I suggested some
01:11:11.400
categories, do some interesting things that you wouldn't be able to do if you had been going to
01:11:15.060
college. So one thing she did was, uh, which we, we set my wife and I, we set her up with this. We
01:11:19.980
called around, we found the right place. We, we, she had race car driving lessons. She got her race car
01:11:25.600
driving license and she participated in an actual professional race. Guess what? She got into every
01:11:31.840
single college she applied to. Oh, wow. And I'm, and I even told her I'm against kids going to
01:11:37.100
college because I think college is a waste of time, but I wanted her to succeed at this thing. She was
01:11:41.960
trying, which is getting into the school she wanted to go to. And she did, but she, same school rejected
01:11:47.820
her the year before every school rejected her the year before. That is a great lesson. That is a really
01:11:53.100
great lesson. Well, James, I appreciate you. Like it started out earlier in the conversation, I've been
01:11:57.740
following you for years and to be able to have this conversation has been a real honor. Um, keep up
01:12:01.800
the great work. I'm excited to get this out to the guys because, uh, people are going to be inspired
01:12:05.500
by what you're doing and it's going to lead them to take action, which is what we want and what they
01:12:09.760
want as well. I hope so, Ryan. And thanks a lot for having me on the podcast. Thanks for thinking
01:12:13.620
of me for this. Thank you, brother. All right, gents, there you go. My conversation with the one and
01:12:19.380
only and very interesting James Altucher. I hope that you enjoyed that conversation and maybe it caused
01:12:24.520
you to think a little differently about, uh, how you are approaching your own life. Are you standing in
01:12:31.060
line? Are you able to skip the line? Are you able to take non-conventional routes? Are you
01:12:35.400
experimenting with what works and what doesn't in order to propel you forward even faster? Uh, I'd
01:12:41.540
highly, highly recommend his new book, skip the line. Uh, I listened to this book and read part of
01:12:46.700
it as I was preparing for this conversation, uh, very practical, uh, book that I think if you apply
01:12:54.260
these little strategies and you do them consistently and you apply them together,
01:12:59.500
you're going to notice some huge acceleration in your life. So, uh, connect with James. I think
01:13:05.500
it's at Altucher, A L T U C H E R at Altucher on Instagram. Of course, connect with me on Instagram
01:13:12.000
as well at Ryan Mickler. That's M I C H L E R. Uh, and somebody had mentioned to me the other day,
01:13:19.060
you actually have the type in the whole thing at Ryan Mickler. It really doesn't show you the result
01:13:23.320
until the last letter, the letter R in my last name. So maybe a bit of a shadow banning going on.
01:13:30.340
I'm not going to use that as an excuse or play the victim game. All I'm saying is that, uh, we need
01:13:35.260
to actually be active and proactive about sharing this information. Cause I think the, the powers that
01:13:41.340
would be don't like us talking about strong, rugged, individualistic masculinity. And that's exactly
01:13:48.600
what we do here. So again, drop James a message on Instagram. Let them know you heard them here
01:13:53.720
on the order of man podcast. Drop me a message. Let me know what you liked, read the book, do all
01:13:58.340
the things, do the battle ready program, check out the iron council, order of man.com slash iron
01:14:02.880
council, and leave those ratings and reviews. You have your marching orders. Gentlemen, we will see
01:14:08.760
you later this week. Until then go out there, take action and become the man you are meant to be.
01:14:14.440
Thank you for listening to the order of man podcast. You're ready to take charge of your life and be
01:14:19.500
more of the man you were meant to be. We invite you to join the order at order of man.com.