1329: How to Quit Your Job by James Altucher on Finding Your Purpose & Personal Transformation

[00:00:00] This is Optimal Work Daily Episode 1329, How to Quit Your Job by James Altucher of JamesAltucher.com.

[00:00:08] And I'm Dan, I am your host and narrator, and today we're going to hear about a situation that is probably pretty universal.

[00:00:14] All of us at one time or another have wanted to get the heck out of a job that we're in.

[00:00:17] So let's hear from James Altucher about how to quit your job as we optimize your life.

[00:00:27] How to Quit Your Job by JamesAltucherofJamesAltucher.com

[00:00:32] I wanted to quit my job. I hated my boss. He always yelled at me. I hated my coworkers. They always yelled at me.

[00:00:40] I was addicted to playing chess online. One time, my girlfriend called at 6 p.m. and said,

[00:00:44] Don't forget we have guests coming over for dinner in a half hour.

[00:00:48] I said, Just going to play one more game and then I'll be home.

[00:00:51] At midnight, my girlfriend was banging on my office door, but it was locked and I was in the middle of a set of 100 straight games in a row and couldn't answer her.

[00:00:59] Finally, at 5 in the morning, I stumbled home. When I walked through the door, she threw a backpack of books at me.

[00:01:05] So something was wrong in my life. Something was making me unhappy.

[00:01:09] Here's what I tried. I tried writing novels. I wrote four novels, but nobody wanted to publish them.

[00:01:15] I tried writing a comic book. I wrote a script for one that I thought would be very good.

[00:01:20] I sent it to DC Comics, but they never wrote back.

[00:01:23] I went to the venture capital arm of PNC Bank and tried to get a job, and they laughed in my face because I didn't have an MBA.

[00:01:30] There was this new thing called the World Wide Web. There were maybe 100 websites in existence.

[00:01:35] I wrote to every publisher and said, Ultimately, all of your books are going to be in digital form.

[00:01:40] I can make that happen for you. Not a single one responded.

[00:01:44] One night while I was playing online chess all night, I went to the bathroom. Another guy was there.

[00:01:49] What are you doing here so late?

[00:01:51] Although I thought I knew the answer. He had three kids or so. Why wouldn't he be here?

[00:01:56] He said, quote, I'm trying to write some software that takes random web pages, figures out what they're about and catalogs them.

[00:02:03] I'm thinking the government might fund this project, end quote.

[00:02:07] I was thinking to myself, good luck with that, and smirking on the inside while I went back to play another eight hour marathon of chess.

[00:02:14] The name of that guy's computer was Lycos.cs.cmu.edu, and eventually he started Lycos and made 200 million dollars for himself.

[00:02:23] Finally, I wrote to HBO and said, You guys should work on virtual reality projects. I can help with it.

[00:02:28] They wrote back and invited me to visit. I took a few days from work. My parents were really excited.

[00:02:34] My dad took me to his suit man and got me a suit. I went to the interview for different interviews.

[00:02:40] I was so excited. Someone named Winnie Ho worked there.

[00:02:44] I wanted to work at a place that had employees named Winnie Ho, and I bombed every interview.

[00:02:50] Do you know Macintosh programming? No.

[00:02:52] Do you know how to do networking programming? No.

[00:02:56] Do you know how to configure an Internet server? No, no, no, no.

[00:03:01] After the interview, I called my girlfriend and said, I don't think I got the job.

[00:03:05] She was relieved. She didn't want me to move.

[00:03:08] I was depressed. I sat down and played chess in Bryant Park with the chess players that still gathered there 20 years later.

[00:03:14] I was going to cry.

[00:03:16] I looked up at one point, and there was the boss of the boss of the boss of the first guy who interviewed me.

[00:03:22] It turned out he was into chess.

[00:03:23] We took a walk around the park and talked about chess and music and programming and virtual reality.

[00:03:29] I went home to Pittsburgh and applied for a job at a comic book store.

[00:03:32] They didn't hire me.

[00:03:34] Then two weeks later, Rob, the chess playing boss, called me and offered me $40,000 a year to work at HBO.

[00:03:41] I was making $27,000 at the time, but had lied and told him I was making $38,000.

[00:03:46] He offered me a job. He offered me a job.

[00:03:49] A week later, my boss yelled at me about some random thing I did.

[00:03:53] He yelled at me in front of everyone.

[00:03:55] He yelled, Did you really just tell me you blah, blah, blah?

[00:03:58] And I said, Yes.

[00:04:00] And he yelled again in front of the team.

[00:04:03] I don't think I heard you. Is anyone that stupid?

[00:04:05] For the entire prior eight months, I had diversified my possible outcomes.

[00:04:09] Every day, I had tried every possible way to get a job.

[00:04:13] And everybody rejected me for everything.

[00:04:15] I probably tried 20 different ways to create the job of my dreams.

[00:04:19] Finally, one thing worked. One thing got me lucky.

[00:04:23] I bonded on some random thing with a decision maker.

[00:04:26] But in chess, there's a saying, only the good players get lucky.

[00:04:30] So when my boss wanted to humiliate me and he yelled at me that second time in front of everyone,

[00:04:35] I finally had a perfect response.

[00:04:37] I quit.

[00:04:42] You just listened to the post titled, How to Quit Your Job, by James Altucher of jamesaltucher.com.

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[00:05:49] And thank you so much to James for sharing this post today and for sharing his work regularly here on the show.

[00:05:54] James is an entrepreneur, a writer, investor, trader and podcaster.

[00:05:59] You could call him a jack of all trades, which many entrepreneurs are and maybe you can relate to that.

[00:06:04] And he has a podcast of his own where he's interviewed a bunch of talented people like Tony Robbins, Tony Hawk, Mark Cuban and many more.

[00:06:11] That podcast is called The James Altucher Show and you can always find it in the top charts in the business category of Apple podcasts for very good reason.

[00:06:19] He's also written a bunch of books and you can find all of them at jamesalticher.com.

[00:06:23] That's A-L-T-U-C-H-E-R.

[00:06:27] But that's it for this episode of Optimal Work Daily.

[00:06:29] I hope you enjoyed it and that you'll join me again tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.