Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

Don’t pressure yourself. This is similar to the “burnout” issue from the chapter “How to Choose Yourself.” Sometimes you plant seeds but not every seed takes and grows into a beautiful plant. In fact, very few do. If you pressure yourself to turn every seed into the most amazingly beautiful plant the world has ever seen, then you are going to set yourself up for burnout and disappointment. You’ve consciously done all you can, now you need to let those unseen life forces go to work on the seeds. The best ones will sprout if you let them.

List your childhood passions. When I was six years old, I was passionately interested in both comic books and Greek mythology. In high school and college, I took five years of French and spent some time in France (even had an office there with my first business). Right now I can’t remember a single word of French except for maybe oui. But I remember vividly almost every comic and book I read about Greek myths from when I was six—from the very first comic (the “legion of superheroes” had to go back in time and stay with Clark’s parents in Smallville) to every comic afterward. We only ever remember the things we are passionate about. Ultimately, these become the fields where ideas bloom and are harvested. Everything else dries up inside and dies.

“Touching” someone who has made the impossible possible helps you realize that your ideas are also possible and inspire you to do more. Don’t underestimate the power of being social.

when you exercise your idea muscle, and when you cultivate an ability to surrender to the reality around you, it frees you up so you can become an Idea Machine. Everywhere you go, everything you see, every problem you confront, you will instantly be able to react to every situation that stands in your path.

Klout as currency. Think about it. It makes sense. If I give $5 to a donut shop, that means a lot less than if Barack Obama gives $5 to a donut shop. If Barack Obama buys a donut for $5 then that donut shop is the “Presidential Donut Shop.” B’s $5 is a lot more valuable than my $5. The $5 is just paper after all. It doesn’t matter who holds it. Klout plus currency equals value in today’s world. So it makes complete sense that people with higher Klout should be able to buy more things, because their currency is more valuable than mine.

3-D printing of humans. 3-D printing seems to be the latest tech fad. But whatever. I don’t even know how it works. But here’s what “3D Human Printing” is. Let’s say I can’t make a meeting tomorrow that’s in India, eight thousand miles away. But I really want to go. I get in my suit at home and turn it on. In the conference room in Bangalore, another suit opens up. It opens its eyes. On the video screen in my suit I see what those eyes see. I move my arms and that suit moves its arms. I talk and that suit talks with my voice. Video conferencing can never replace face-to-face meetings. And even though this is sort of like advanced video conferencing, the minds of the other people in the room are basically psychologically fooled into thinking I am right there with them. It’s just like if you take a robot and give it a human body, many people think it’s almost like an actual human even though it’s just a computer. This is one idea I can invent personally. And I have motivation. I don’t like to travel. I like to sit at home and do nothing. With this invention I can travel all over the world. I can even go to Easter Island. This is sort of like Teleportation 101.

Studies show that it’s better to be around positive people than negative people. Positive people uplift you, negative people bring you down. So let’s do this. Everyone wears an earplug that takes constant scans of your brain activity. The brain scans are matched against a database of ten thousand brain scans labeled “happy” or “sad,” and then use standard speech recognition techniques to classify the user brain scan as either “happy” or “sad.” NOW, on my Google Maps on my phone I can see shades all over the map. The brightest colors denote areas where the happiest people seem to be. The darker colors denote areas where negative people are. So if I’m trying to decide today, “Hmmm, uptown or downtown?” I can look at the Happiness Map to see where the happiest areas are and go there. Who cares if my friends are there or not? I’ll make new friends in the happy hotspots!

When nomad tribes got to a new area fifteen thousand years ago they would think, “Where’s the food?” Now, in my nomadic wanderings (i.e., New York City Starbucks locations) I think, “Where is the Wi-Fi?” Wi-Fi has clearly replaced food in our minds.

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Do you really think you are going to change anyone’s mind? I always wonder, who are these people who spend all day on Internet message boards and comments sections getting really angry and trying to prove that their opinion is THE opinion that everyone should have. And yet, we all get sucked in. Some anonymous teenager from Dubai might throw out an opinion that rubs us the wrong way and the next thing we know it’s forty-eight hours later and we are in a drugged-out daze having spent the entire time peeing in a bottle and arguing in vain with this Internet troll. I wish I could say now, “So I went out and interviewed eighty-seven trolls and here is what they are really like.” But I didn’t. Because the trolls disappear. There are 7 billion people on the planet. The guy who disagreed with you is one of them. Good luck finding him. What is the purpose of an opinion? To prove you’re right? You’re wrong. Sometimes I get sucked in. Sometimes I write an article and people start saying the vilest things. I have no idea who they are, or even what their problems are, and yet I feel compelled to respond. I get sucked in. I feel so horrible about what they are saying. And when I finally come up for air, it’s three days later and I think to myself, “what the hell have I just done.”

Opinions are a way of clinging to the past.

I’m always wrong. I have never had a correct opinion. I don’t even know what a correct opinion smells like. When I first wrote in a prior book that zero wars can be justified, someone mentioned some Polynesian war from “Before Christ,” or the Peloponnesian war. I don’t know. Some war from two thousand years ago. I don’t remember; I wasn’t listening to his stupid opinion. See! That’s what happens with opinions. Even I’m guilty of it. Opinions are like money. No matter how much you know, there’s always someone who knows more. And they aren’t afraid to flaunt it. I have no credentials on anything. My education is hopelessly outdated. And my ten-year-old child constantly corrects me. The other day I tried to convince her that the United States was a republic and not a democracy. But she wouldn’t change her opinion (see “A” above) even though I was telling her a FACT. When I give an opinion, I know that opinion works for me, right then. But that’s about it. I don’t always need to fight for the glory.

When I was nine, I was caught shoplifting football cards, which put an end to a successful, yearlong crime spree that included stealing everything from candy to Charlie Brown books to Mad books to baseball cards. My parents were so angry that they cancelled my upcoming birthday party. Then they never let me have one again. I still don’t have birthday parties. Because I stole a football card. I did lots of things. Things much later. Ugh. I can hardly think of it. The things that I would do. I’m like a psychopath or sociopath when I really get down to it. Worst of all, I go to the bathroom. I’ve never seen a more disgusting thing than my own human body going to the bathroom. Ugh.

So what do you do, in our modern day and age? You sit there, you stare at the computer screen, you maybe type some words, but then your brain is distracted. You can’t think. Your cortisol is through the roof and nothing is working it off. That’s really horrible. The cortisol needs to be worked off. Or else. You are royally *******. You can get cancer, heart disease, strokes, Alzheimer’s, the whole works. And if you are like me—if you are like most people—then chances are this is happening to you every day. Here’s what happens. The vagus nerve stretches from your brain to your stomach and hits every organ along the way (almost). It gets inflamed when your cortisol levels are too high for too long. The vagus nerve basically causes every disease known to mankind. High stress inflames it, as does bad food, smoking, etc. You get the drift.

BEING TRUSTED. This is hard. You can’t force people to trust you. And trusting someone doesn’t release oxytocin. But being trusted does. So live your life in such a way that more and more people will trust you. Guess what: you will be viewed in a more charismatic way if people trust you than if people don’t trust you. Why not try this? How can you be more trusted? Oh my god, why so many questions today? My hands are already tired. I’m about 1,497 words already.

LISTENING TO MUSIC. Just lying down and listening to music releases oxytocin. That’s why women in labor are encouraged to listen to soothing music. That’s why people having sex listen to soothing music. I don’t even really know what soothing music means. I keep thinking of the ’90s R&B group PM Dawn. But I’m sure there are better examples (Spandau Ballet?).

FOOD. Here is my oxytocin-rich meal: eggs, mixed with bananas and pepper. Each ingredient is known to release high levels of oxytocin. So why not eat them all together: something sweet, something savory, something spicy, a fruit, and some protein; it’s all good. Eat a big plate of...

Forget all self-help. It’s all garbage. It’s all about this one silly chemical. The news lately is all about the Higgs-Boson, the “god particle.” Well, oxytocin is the “god hormone.” That said, I’ll do all of the above. I need my body functioning. I need to get rid of mental waste and physical waste and emotional waste. Why not? But at the end of the day, it’s spiritual waste that I’m after. And how do you get that? How do you get to that peculiar desire of trying to have no desires? Because when you expect nothing, you have the immense satisfaction of getting everything you want.

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How do you get there? It’s not oxytocin. I won’t be fooled into believing it. But if it makes me shit out my mental and emotional waste better then sign me up. Being happy is a good start. But oxytocin is just the flower. And you can’t see the flower without the light. The goal is to be the light.

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In between the time I wrote the last sentence and the time I wrote this one, I played (and lost) a game of chess. My king and my queen got forked by a knight. But hey, that happens. Fork me once, shame on me, etc.

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The best ideas are when you take two older ideas that have nothing to do with each other, make them have sex with each other, and then build a business around the bastard, ugly child that results. The child who was so ugly nobody else wanted to touch it. Look at Facebook: combine the Internet with stalking. Amazing!

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And, by the way, it was about the fifth attempt at such a social network. Twitter: combine Internet with antiquated SMS protocols. Ugly! But it works.

POOR JUDGE OF PEOPLE. The mediocre entrepreneur doesn’t “Blink” in the Malcolm Gladwell sense. In Gladwell’s book, he often talks about people who can form snap, correct judgments in two or three seconds. My initial judgment when I meet or even see people is this: I hate you. And then I veer from that to too trusting. Finally, after I bounce back and forth, and through much trial and error, I end up somewhere in the middle. I also tend to drop people I can’t trust very quickly. I think the great entrepreneur can make snap judgments and be very successful with it. But that doesn’t work for most people.