2129: [Part 1] The 9 Surefire Ways to Fail at Anything by James Altucher on Personal Development

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[00:01:00] This is Optimal Work Daily. The 9 Surefire Ways to Fail at Anything. Part 1 by James Altucher of JamesAltucher.com. My resume. I begged the teacher to not give me an F. So, out of kindness, he gave me a D-. Only then did I have the minimum GPA to graduate college. I tried to write several novels, but none of them were published. I pitched several TV shows, but none of them made it to the air.

[00:01:29] After I made some money, I spent too much of it, gambled too much of it, and invested in all of the wrong people with the wrong businesses. I lost my house, my friends, my business. And the second time this happened, and the third, and the fourth, my wife and kids. I started another company and raised a lot of money, but I didn't even know we did. I got kicked out, and the business slid to nothing.

[00:01:52] One time, I forgot to pay the IRS, for the 17th year in a row. I wanted to kill myself when they knocked on my door. I wanted to date the IRS agent, but she knew too much about me. I'm just saying this to establish some credentials. Failure is a deck of cards. You can shuffle and pick out the card you want. Here are the cards, and if you can avoid the 9 ways to fail, there's one way to avoid failure. 9 Ways to Fail 1. Illness

[00:02:22] One time, I was staying out too late. I was around people who weren't my friends. I was always stressed. So, I would get sick or not have enough energy. I was so focused on my stress and anxiety that I could never get enough energy to get out of bed in the morning.

[00:02:36] I was just thinking of one time, but as I wrote this, I started thinking of another time. Anxiety and fear and stress and the wrong people will drain you of energy. When I let a desire for money rule my choices instead of just desire, my choices would drain me of energy. You can't start a successful ex if you're sick in bed or looking out the window wondering what cave everyone's smile crawled out of. 2. Lack of Creativity

[00:03:04] Steve Jobs made a phone. Mark Zuckerberg made a social network. J.K. Rowling wrote a book about wizards. Andy Warhol made a soup can. None of this was original. The iPhone had to be a phone, or else how would it connect to the phone networks? How would it have a microphone? How could it be used to talk to people? And then he twisted it. He turned it into something nobody had ever seen before. A sculpture of a phone.

[00:03:32] And let's listen to music on it and watch TV and play games. Now a phone is a computer with a rarely used phone app on it. And Apple will be the first company to hit a trillion in value. I always say to exercise the idea muscle, write 10 ideas a day. But also see what easy next steps you can make to execute on each idea. Elon Musk wrote down an idea. Build a rocket ship to Mars. Then he hired physicists, read every book on rocket science, and started to build.

[00:04:02] Richard Branson needed a plane, so he got a deal to lease a plane, put up a sign in an airport where he was stuck, and offered to sell tickets. Got enough money to lease the plane and thought to himself, this is an airline. Before that, he was a magazine publisher. Now he started an airline from scratch. One of the first people to ever do that. Write down 10 ideas, every day. Write down the next easy step for each idea. Then throw away the list. It's just practice.

[00:04:31] The creatives, the ones who practice, avoid the failure of the non-creatives. 3. Indecision Should I do something for the money, or should I do something I love? Should I stay at my job that I hate? Or should I find a way to make money on the side? Should I stay in the relationship that's easy and comfortable, or should I, should I, should I, should've? It's a cliche to say we have one life to live. But cliches are easy truths.

[00:04:58] It's easy to try something, decide if it makes you a better person or not, and then either continue or go back to creativity. 4. Carelessness Every book needs a plot, a story, characters, a cover, a design, distribution, marketing. Every business needs sales and follow-up, execution of product, take care of employees and partners, take care of shareholders, and take care of every need of the customers.

[00:05:27] Every TV show needs 10 drafts of each script, directors, editors, permissions for locations, set designers. And one detail off on any of these makes failure. If the customer is not happy, they tell others. If you don't have a good cover, your book won't sell. If you don't get permission from the city to shoot at your location, you failed at making a TV show. If you don't research a guest, your interview podcast will be a disaster.

[00:05:55] If you don't have a punchline and a premise people can relate to, your stand-up act will be met with dead silence or worse. Usually worse. I was bad at follow-up in my first business. I never called the day after a good meeting and said, That was a great meeting. Here's a proposal on next steps. Careless. I had to hire someone to help me with that. Delegate the details if you have to, but the person who takes care of every detail will always beat the person who lets details slip. 5. Laziness

[00:06:25] I wanted to publish another book, but my prior book hadn't done so well, so publishers weren't returning my calls. I wrote the book anyway. Still, no publishers. So then I hired a book designer. Then I got advice about marketing so I could do it myself. I got three different people to edit my book. I wrote 100 drafts of the book. I did all the marketing. The marketing was crazy. I sold the book on Bitcoin only before I officially released it on Amazon. This got me on a bunch of TV shows. Then I ran for Congress.

[00:06:56] Then I quit running for Congress. More TV, more radio, more print news about this. Then I went on 20 or 30 podcasts. Gave talks. This was four years ago. Yesterday I was on a podcast talking about this same book. I market it every single day. 700,000 copies later, Choose Yourself is my most successful book and the publishers are calling me. The book before that, I was lazy. I felt like the publisher should market it, should edit it, should make a great cover.

[00:07:25] They didn't. And I was too lazy to do something about it and not detailed enough to point out to them where they could be better. That book failed. 6. Hear that on tomorrow's episode. You just listened to part one of the post titled, The Nine Surefire Ways to Fail at Anything, by James Altucher of jamesaltucher.com. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome.

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[00:09:08] James has also written a bunch of books, and you can find all of them and much more at jamesaltucher.com. But that's going to do it for me today. Hope you enjoyed part one of the post, and that you'll join me again right here tomorrow for part two. And that is where your optimal life awaits.