Editor's note: Regular readers of the S&A Digest have heard a lot about James Altucher over the last couple weeks. James is a managing partner at Formula Capital, an alternative-asset management firm. He writes a weekly column for the Financial Times, blogs on his website at www.jamesaltucher.com, and has written several books – including his latest, Choose Yourself.
After reading Choose Yourself, Porter named it "the best book I've ever read on how to start a new business." In a recent Digest, he said anyone who reads it and follows its advice will become vastly more successful.
Choose Yourself is more than just a guide to building your own business. In it, Altucher also shows you how to manage your health and spirit while you're going through the rigors of entrepreneurship.
In today's edition of our weekend Masters Series, we bring you an excerpt from Choose Yourself. We believe it will become an instant classic…
The Simple Daily Practice (or Why Do So Many People Want to Die)
By James Altucher, author Choose Yourself
A lot of people want to die. And I don't blame them. The most dreadful thing in life is not dying. It's being born. Once you are born, you're screwed. Now you have to actually survive. You have to grow from someone who craps their pants, can't speak to anyone without crying, and can't walk or feed themselves, to a full-grown adult who can barely do all of that while also juggling a mortgage, a marriage, kids, career, whatever, to finally being an old man who can't do any of those baby-like things again.
Then you die. No worries after that.
How do I know a lot of people want to die? Because Google tells me. The search phrase that is most likely to take people to my blog is, "I want to die." The number-two search phrase is "I hope to die." Number three is "How can I disappear," which is a little more hopeful than dying but expresses no less similar a sentiment. (It's sort of like saying "How can I kill this life I have and start another?") My e-mail is slightly more uplifting. The most popular question I get via e-mail is, "I'm stuck. How can I move forward in life?"
Each of those last people is not quite at the "I want to die" point, but somehow their lives have stalled. The reason they're stalled is because the axis of the world has changed. We can't rely on the job, the marriage, the relationship, the house with the white-picket fence, the college degree, the anything external for that matter. Nothing counts. Everything we dreamed for was an illusion.
So people find themselves on the floor. Without "a life," as they put it. They obviously have a life. They are breathing. But they don't know how to choose life for themselves. The masses rely on others to do it for them. They have given up their Life to live a smaller "life," ruled by others.
I get that. It's happened to me over and over again.
But this reliance on others has to come to an end. It was always a myth. Everything we hoped for. The society that we were told would be here, waiting for us, is completely gone and is never coming back. You can either take the blue pill (become depressed about an artificial reality that is never going to return) or take the red pill (fully enter the Choose Yourself era and take advantage of its opportunities).
And it's not as if our bosses will help us. They hate us. No matter how nice they are to you, they actually hate you. The head of a major news organization asked me to breakfast a few months ago. He wanted advice on how to build up the traffic for his company's website. When I say a major news organization, I mean MAJOR. You read his newspaper every day.
We started off with his version of idle chitchat. "I'm having a problem with my reporters. They all get Twitter accounts and then the ones with a lot of followers suddenly want raises and promotions."
"Why is that a problem?" I said. "Don't you want your reporters to be widely liked and respected?"
He gave the typical BS response. "We're about the news. Nobody is a star."
That's the problem. A corporation wants identity to go away. He wanted his best and his brightest to be mediocre so that the corporation, not the individuals inside of it, would burn bright. What's going to happen is that his company will lose, and all of his "stars" will go supernova on their own.
Why do I put so much emphasis on the Daily Practice? Am I trying to sell a religion or something?
No, I put emphasis on it because it's the only thing that's ever worked for me. Following that practice is the only thing that "unstuck" me, pulled me off the floor, saved my life, and actually propelled me to success.
And since I've been writing about it, I've seen it with thousands of others who have written me e-mails about it. I've collected testimonials, some of which you'll find at the back of the book. Those weren't tweets or e-mails I got over a period of a year. Those were tweets and e-mails I got over a period of the past hour as I wrote this.
I'm not selling anything (well, this book in your hands, but if you know someone who can't afford it, then please let me know and I will send it to them for free). In fact, I encourage people to not believe me. All of the people who are stuck or frustrated or scared or anxious or filled with regret, please try these ideas so you can see for yourself.
This is how we form a better society. First we become better as individuals. You can't help others if you look in the mirror and hate what you see. And it's very easy to hate what is there. We live most of our lives hating the mirror. Heck, I'm pretty gruesome to look at in the morning. It's a daily challenge!
Many people say, "The Daily Practice is too much work for me. I can't do it all every day."
No problem. Let's first define the "Simple Daily Practice," then we can go into more of the subtleties.
Why the need for a simple daily practice?
I went to a talk given by my friend Ramit Sethi who wrote the bestselling book I Will Teach You to Be Rich. Ramit and I have gone to each other's talks several times and we've also done a few videos together. He takes a behavioral psychology approach to personal finance that I think is unique. It's not the simple "save an extra $1,000 a month and you will be rich." In fact, he took a survey of personal finance authors who recommend that people keep budgets, and he found that none of them actually kept budgets themselves.
In his talk he made a point that was near and dear to me. Claudia, my wife, had been trying to get me to floss my teeth. I get lazy and I try it for a few days but then get tired of trying to dig into all the little areas in between my teeth. It's like a half-hour process, so after a while I stop and then after a few days I give up. When Ramit started talking about flossing, I saw Claudia's ears practically twitch.
He said the way you get people to floss is to just ask them to floss one tooth. That's it.
Suddenly, they are "flossing." Their brains say, "I'm the type of person who likes to floss." Maybe after a day or two they start flossing two teeth. "And why stop there?" Ramit said. "After a few weeks, they're flossing all of their teeth because their brain sees it wasn't as hard a habit as they thought."
The Simple Daily Practice is the same. All you really need to do to get off the floor is acknowledge that it's not your external life that needs to change (you have little control over that), but that external changes flow from the inside.
External changes in your life are like the final ripples of the ocean that lap onto distant shores. A promotion, a raise, a new job offer, a new relationship. These are the final ripples. The ocean is inside you. Becoming aware of that infinite presence doesn't require meditation in a cave for fifty years. It involves simply being healthy. Healthy not just physically but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
For now, the Simple Daily Practice means doing ONE thing every day.
Try any one of these things each day:
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Anyway, this isn't advice for the one-hundred-thousand-plus people this past year who typed "I want to die" into Google and ended up on my blog. Some of them probably need real help from a therapist or doctor.
But this is what I did when I wanted to die. Every one of these things. At least one item a day. And here I am. I am still alive.
Editor's note: James Altucher's new book Choose Yourself is a manual for how to handle pressure, stress, failure, and success. Porter says he's personally using it as a guidebook for life and happiness. He was so influenced by this book, he bought thousands of copies. And he wants to share them with you. To find out how you can purchase your own copy of Choose Yourself – and access some of our other favorite examples of James' work for free – click here.