Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan - The KEY To Skipping the Line By WORKING Your Idea Muscles with James Altucher Episode 115

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

What is the secret to a good idea? How do you know what to pursue and what not to? Wouldn’t you like to live in an abundance of good ideas? Well, my guest this week, James Altucher, is an idea generator and he can teach you how to be one too! James is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and best-selling author. He’s here to let you know it’s time to stop listening to the “cant's” and start chasing your own success! Skip the line, follow your creativity, and stop asking for permission! It’s time to DO.    About The Guest: James Altucher is a successful entrepreneur, angel investor, chess master and prolific writer. He has started and run more than 20 companies and is currently invested in over 30. He is the author of 18 books, including WSJ best-sellers: “The Power of No” and “Choose Yourself”. His latest book, "Skip the Line”, released earlier this year.    His writing has appeared in major media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Observer, Techcrunch , The Financial Times, Yahoo Finance and others. His blog, JamesAltucher.com, has attracted more than 20 million readers since its launch in 2010.   Finding James Altucher: Website: https://jamesaltucher.com/  Read his book: Skip the Line: The 10,000 Experiments Rule and Other Surprising Advice for Reaching Your Goals Listen to his podcast: The James Altucher Show Watch his show: Choose Yourself: The James Altucher Story  Twitter: @Jaltucher Instagram: @altucher    To inquire about my coaching program opportunity visit https://mentorship.heathermonahan.com/    Review this podcast on Apple Podcast using this LINK and when you DM me the screen shot, I buy you my $299 video course as a thank you!    My book Confidence Creator is available now! get it right HERE   If you are looking for more tips you can download my free E-book at my website and thank you! https://heathermonahan.com    *If you'd like to ask a question and be featured during the wrap up segment of Creating Confidence, contact Heather Monahan directly through her website and don’t forget to subscribe to the mailing list so you don’t skip a beat to all things Confidence Creating!     See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When there's a penalty on the field, referees are there to sort it out. When there's an accident on the road, Sergeant Lindros, I'm glad you're okay. That's where USAA steps in. We help make the claims process easy, so drivers can get back on the road fast. Making the right calls, that's what we're made for. USAA

Membership eligibility and product restrictions apply in our subject to change. USAA means United Services Automobile Association and its affiliates, San Antonio, Texas. A lot of people feel their ideas are very precious, and so if they have an idea that's good, they hold on to it. This is my idea. I don't want anybody to steal it. And in a weird way, even though they think they have a good idea that can make them a lot of money, for instance, it's a very scarcity way to think. It's not an abundant way to think. The abundant way to think is I have a good idea, but that's

because I always have good ideas. Not all my ideas good, most of them are bad, but if I keep practicing writing down ideas, I will have more and more good ideas. I don't care if anyone steals my ideas. If someone steals my idea and does it power to them, they're not the sort of person I want to deal with, but at least I know, and they were probably better suited to the idea than me anyway, because they did it faster than I did it. I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals. We've come at diversity and set you up for better tomorrow. After no sleep, I'm so excited today. Our guest is an entrepreneur and angel investor. He's achieved the rank of chess master, which is insane. And he's the author of Wall Street

Journal's bestselling book, Choose Yourself. He started 20 companies, 17 of which have failed. But he's learned a lot along the way and lucky for us. He's included it all and skip the line. His new book, James Alton turn. Thank you so much for being here today. Heather, thanks for inviting me on your podcast. This is great. Oh my gosh. It's so exciting to have you back.

So the first thing I have to say to you, you've written 20 freaking books. You have books that have achieved the pinnacle of success. Why in the world did you do this to yourself and write another book? Well, first up, I've been writing every single day since 1990. And I would always, even back then, I was in graduate school for computer science. I got thrown out of graduate school because all I would do was write. And back then, I wanted to write fiction. I wrote all these novels that never got published, but that was sort

of paying the price a little bit. And then I started writing professionally about 10 or 12 years later. And I've never stopped. And basically every time I get an idea for a book, I write it. It's amazing. So another way of putting it, those I've only had like 20 ideas for books. You should probably have a lot more. those I've only had like 20 ideas for books, you should probably have a lot more, but I mean, Isaac Asma wrote 570 books. That's sort of an aggressive expectation to hold in my humble opinion. I'm very impressed. And I'll tell you, first of all, James, your storytelling ability in my opinion is beautiful in this book. And it made it so enjoyable. And I'm so curious

from a reader perspective, that's what really draws me into books is the author's ability to storytell yours is masterful in this book. But one of the things that I like that you do is it's not linear. And I find linear can be boring. But I like that, you know, when you open the book, you take us right into an incident in the halls of HBO and then suddenly we're bouncing forward to New York City when you're struggling finding it. I just, I love that there's so much happening in the book that it keeps me engaged. It's very hard to put down. Was that done deliberately? Well, I think, you know, ultimately the best books, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, whether it's science or history or totally academic, like a book about some research and chemistry,

it should always tell a story and an overarching story that unites the entire book. And then each chapter should also be a story. And you pick the story that best fits the concepts or chapter, you know, you're trying to present. For fiction, you know, when you make a decision to do it non-chronological, that also has to structurally be part of the story. So for instance, have you ever seen the movie Arrival? This linguist has to communicate with these aliens. And one of all sorts of words sorts of awards, I guess a couple years ago. Anyway, the structure of the movie itself, there was a lot of stuff that was out of chronological order, but that aspect was deliberately part of the story, the fact that we were viewing it

out of chronological order. So I don't like to play structurally unless it's part of the structure of the book. So with this book, I took stories out of order because sometimes the concepts, the best stories to describe those concepts wouldn't necessarily be in chronological order. You ever see Lawrence of Arabia, the movie Lawrence of Arabia? Yes.

So the desert, some people say that movie's boring, but I love the fact that parts of the movie are boring because walking across the desert is boring and they would just show Lawrence and his buddies just dredging across the desert slowly in the hot sun. And you really feel it because it's so slow. And in that, and today's day and age and that would be considered boring,

but I love the fact that it was structurally part of the, part of the intent of the movie because the desert itself is boring. But I love the fact that it was structurally part of the, part of the intent of the movie because the desert itself is boring. That's a long answer to your thing. But I love the, when writing takes chances and if it does so for, you have to understand what the reason is.

Well, skip the line is not boring. I'd like to come in hot and just say that right away. Thank you. It's really, it's so engaging. And I'm not an avid reader, right? So I'm definitely someone who skims more, but again, I'll just go back to the stories are so powerful here. And then when I was a couple chapters in, the lessons that you start teaching, here's the thing, you open the book around the concept that really we're all everyone universally is in this situation

where we're longing for some kind of certainty. We're longing for some kind of normalcy and when there's so many people out looking for a job, skip the line is really in my opinion the tactics,, and strategies that you personally have used and fine-tuned to help you create success from moments when you were out of work or looking constantly for certainty. Yeah, like I always hate those books that, like here's my 10-seps system for being rich and famous and successful and happy. And you don't know if they had to go through this.

I like to know that the author has also had the problems he's trying to solve in the book. Because if you have those problems, it means you put a lot of time and energy into figuring out how to solve your own problems. And too many books are like, oh, this academic research says that if you cross your legs at the same time as this other person, you'll be able to persuade them

of, okay, and none of that stuff's ever worked for me. So, I wanted to figure out, I've changed interests many times in my life, as I'm sure you have as well. I've changed careers, at least six or seven times. I've completely changed careers. Even in the beginning of this podcast, I said, I was going to graduate school and computer science, and then I started writing every day. And I can't help it. Like when I change interest, I like to do,

money is not a factor at first. I like to do what I love doing. And then, of course, you have to monetize it so that you can do this all the time, instead of working by day as an accountant, but then doing what you love on the weekends if you have time. And so I've done this so many times and every single time people have told me, James, you can't do that. You've already put so much time into this or you haven't paid your dues yet

or you haven't, you know, I wanted to be a professional investor at one point. Someone said, I asked a guy who worked at a bank, you think I could work as a traitor or a day tray. He said, he looked at me sort of felt sorry for me. And he was like, maybe you should get an MBA. Then you start off working at a bank and then you start working at a hedge fund, a small hedge fund. Then maybe a bigger hedge fund. And then when I started doing stand-up comedy, all the comedians were like, hey, if you don't, you know, don't think if there's anything easy here. And it wasn't easy. I should add, but this one guy said, don't think you can skip the line. Like you have to pay your dues, gotta go to open mics and then you go to

the smaller clubs and you become friendly with the bookers. And maybe after 10 years, 12 years, you could, you know, start finding your voice. And I'm like, finding my voice. I'm 50 over 50 years old. Like I'm not going to, or at the time, I was about 47, but I'm like finding my voice. I'm 50 over 50 years old. I'm not going to, or at the time, I was about 47, but I'm not going to spend 20 years trying to figure this out. Since then, I've toured all over the world. This is just in the past few years. So, you know, people will always tell you you can't do it, but the goal of skip the line was that the book is, I'm going to write all the stories of how I got good at each different scale that I switched to, and then what techniques

I used to then monetize so that I could make a living doing what I love doing. And I had to think back, like every single time I had changed interest, I did go through kind of the same set of procedures. It's just, I never wrote it down before. I never put labels to these techniques. And doing that really allowed me to see what I did. And now I'm kind of learning other skills using the skip the line techniques. The techniques are so solid. I love how you

open the book though, where you're running down the hall at HBO to walk into your bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses office, the CEO to share an idea and you're told right away you can't do that. Yeah, I ran into this woman from the marketing department. I worked in the IT department, which is the computer department, which was so low on the my title was junior systems analyst something like that. I was the lowest person on the on the toilet on poll you could possibly be and nobody cared about the IT department. We're the only department in another building than the rest of HBO. So I'm going to the HBO building. I run it into someone from the marketing department and she's like, where are you going? And I said, I'm going to see, I'm going to the CEO,

Jeff, to tell him this idea I have. And she was like, you can't do that. You got to go to your boss. And you can't just go over his head. And Jeff Lucas, who was the CEO of HBO, then he became a really great CEO of Time Warner for just CEO of Time Warner for over 20 years. And so, but that was the office I was going to. So I acknowledge that I'm not supposed to be doing that, but I didn't think my boss and the IT department

would give me approval for the idea that I had. So I went to Jeff's office. I sort of snuck past the secretary and he looks at me. He's like, who are you? And I said, listen, I'm building the HBO website. Just like HBO has original TV shows, maybe we could be the first to have original web shows, which was 1995. And he's like, just do do whatever, man. It's your it's your thing. It's your generation. And so I went back to my boss and the IT department. I said, Jeff

Lucas said, I should do this. And then I created original web shows for the HBO website and even shot an idea as they gave me money, HBO documentaries, gave me money to shoot it as a pilot, which I did. So that's how you change your life is when you do these experiments. And there's nothing really you can't do. I mean, yes, you can't fly or turn invisible. But in terms of things like that, like I can't see another human being and tell them my idea, of course I could do that. If they were to fire me for that, like, wouldn't be the right job for me. And with everything, with every single topic someone's always told me you can't do that. wouldn't be the right job for me. And with everything, with every single topic, someone's always told me you can't do that.

So two things I want to highlight that you did, one, you didn't ask for permission from someone who couldn't tell you yes, because we know that your boss could have told you know very easily, but he actually couldn't green light it. He'd have to get approval from higher up on the food chain. And that's really smart. And if he said no, and then I did it, then I might have been fired. At least I could claim ignorance if someone got upset, but why would anyone get upset? That's the thing. But if I asked for permission

and he said, no, and then I did it, then he would have been upset that I didn't listen to him. And then you should listen to your boss, you know, who's you're being paid to listen to him. So, you know, and then the idea never order happened. What ended up happening was other companies loved the websites I was doing, and they really stood out because they had this original content on it. And other companies started asking me, hey, can you do our website?

And so I started doing, in my free time, I started doing other companies' websites. During this time, I did AmericanExpress.com. You remember nobody had websites then. So I did the first AmericanExpress.com, I did TimeWarner.com, Con Edison.com, which was the big utility company in that area. And then I started a company that was doing websites and I sold it a few years later and made a lot of money, but then went broke two years after that. You highlight the struggle. The struggle part in your book is so real and I really identify it when you speak about

you, you specifically say, I had to provide for my family, the panic, the sheer panic that you went through in those moments when you have lost everything again. How did you fight through that fear and how can other people fight through that fear? Look, last year, 55 million people filed for unemployment insurance. That's a really big number. There's a little over 120 million people working. It's almost 50% of America of the United States filed for unemployment insurance. There was a lot of suffering last year on top of the horrible pandemic and all that.

And nobody likes to go to bed at night, not knowing how they're going to support their family. I would wake up in the middle of the night. And I just wouldn't be, it might, there would be a thousand thoughts in my head. I would be adding up numbers, attracting them, like, how am I going to survive this month, the next six months, the next year. Got these two little babies. And I didn't know what to do. I could have done anything. And I'm glad I didn't do the worst things you could do. And a lot of things sort of held it. I was depressed for a while, but one time, I don't know why I did this.

I went into a restaurant supply store, just kind of wandered in. I took lots of walks at the time, because there's nothing else to do. And I bought a box of waiter's pads, a hundred waiter Waders Pads for $10.10 a pad. And I started taking it with me every morning, a Waders Pad, and I would write down 10 ideas a day. And it's sort of like the ideas, the creativity is sort of like a muscle. And if you don't exercise a muscle, what happens? It atrophies.

Like if you don't walk for two or three weeks, you'll have trouble walking. You'll need physical therapy to walk perhaps. And it's the same thing with creativity. A lot of people think, oh, when I have ideas, they hit me like lightning. It's like inspirational. But that's not how creativity works. Creativity have to be kind of like,

your antenna has to be constantly tuned to pick up the stuff that's going around. And the way I did that was by exercising the creativity muscle. I would write down 10 ideas a day. Could be ideas about anything. 10 ideas for books to write. 10 ideas of businesses to start. 10 ideas that Google should do.

You know, 10 ideas that would have made Star Wars better. I don't know. It could be anything. It could be nonsense. 10, the 10 musical instruments that demonstrate the history of the world could be just random ideas. And the point is that they're not good ideas because you can't have 3650 good ideas a year, but to do this every day, after just a few weeks, you will actually feel different. Like for me,

I'll tell you how I felt. After about three weeks, I felt happier for the first time in like a year and a half. I felt like I could smile and laugh at things again. And then I started having what I consider some good ideas. And I would say these ideas changed my life. Like every time my life has drastically changed, it's because of one idea out of maybe hundreds or thousands that I wrote down on my idea of head. So 100% of the time, every big change in my life has happened because of head. It's all 100% of the time. Every big change in my life has happened because of that.

And every small change, by the way. So I love the idea. You had actually taught me about this before you wrote the book. I remember when we were in New York, you shared that idea with me, which does work because it is a discipline, it is a habit, and a routine you need to get into. But finding out which idea to pursue and how to conspire to make it

a reality is something you talk about in the book. I'd love to share a little bit about that. Yeah, so this is where Skip the Line kicks in, which is that a lot of times you might like to do something, but first you need the skills to do it, and you don't need to be the best in the world at a skill to make money from it, to make a lot of money from it. There's that kind of theory that, oh, if you practice something for 10,000 hours, you'll be in the best in the world at it. I don't know if that theory is true, but to make money at something, you just need to be, you need to be in the top one or two percent, which is a much bigger number than you think, because let's say you're trying to be the good at tennis. Well, to be number one in the world is really hard

But there's maybe 30 million people who play tennis So you just have to be in the top 300,000 and you're good enough to make money at tennis I'm just I just pick the random example. I don't play tennis, but You know, it's also another interesting thing is people think oh no, it's only good if I'm the best or in the top 10 or whatever. If you think about it, it's really hard to tell. You can't tell even which products are better than which other products. Like people always ask me, how is this restaurant? How is this restaurant?

Most restaurants are just the same as each other. To me, I can't tell which restaurants better. If you watch two people playing tennis, let's say one of them was the number one tennis player in the world. And let's say the other match was being played by two people who were in the top who were number ranked 200th in the world, 200th and 201. You would not be able to tell which of those four people were in the two tennis courts were the best tennis players, even though one is clearly number one, the other's number 200. People just can't tell the difference between people, but better to be the only than the better. So if you have some

features that stand out that make you unique, whether it's as a writer or a businessman or a product or an investor, that is what people could tell. If you apply for college and the admissions counselor, everybody just has a four point O GPA, did charity work, did some clubs, did some sports. I can't tell who's who's better or not. They all have the same SAT scores or roughly the same. You can't tell who's better. One person has a higher SAT score. The other person has more extracurriculars. Who could tell? So as an example, so with my daughter a year ago or more than a year ago, she applied to a bunch of schools, but it was really hard getting into schools. Everybody from the New York City area was applying to every single

school. So I suggested why not take a gap year and let's try different unique things to see what you're interested in. So one of the things is we enrolled her in race car driving school and she got her race car driving license and she even conducted a real car race. She's going like over 200 miles an hour. And now she's the only. So she applied to, she got into every college she applied to this, this year, because this was what her essay was about. And this is what her application was about. So, so it's always good to be the only at something.

I just, I throw this in there as advice when you want to switch passions, figure out. I have a chapter called, who are you? Why are you? Why now? Why would you be good at whatever it is you're interested in? You know, what do you believe in life? What do you want to accomplish in life? What are your values?

They don't have to stay the same. They could be different, but you need to figure out how your passion fits in with your values and your code of living. And then why now? Why is now the best time to do this skill, to provide some service, to provide some product? Like when I was interested in investing, I had to ask this because I had never invested before.

In fact, I had gone broke investing. And so I had to get good at it, which was difficult. And I had to then figure out how to monetize it. So investing, even if you make money investing, you still have to either work for someone or run a hedge fund or whatever to make real significant money. And who was I?

I was someone who was very good at games and computers and math. And so I already had built a business. So I understood business and I liked the game like aspect of investing. Why am I? Well, I liked to educate people. and I knew that if I was a good investor, I would write books about it, which is what I ended up doing. And why now? Well, I was writing software to model, this is how I got good after I lost everything. I wrote software to take every

piece of market data since World War II and create patterns for me that were statistically significant and I would trade along to those patterns. So it took my emotions out of the game and that's how I got better at investing. That was my skip the line on investing. And it was unique then, not a lot of people were doing that. So that was my why now. So that was an example of investing. National security experts are warning.

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The example that I love that you use in the story was the Dick Fosbury mediocre high jumper and how he decided to do things a little differently. Yeah, so this guy, he literally was like a mediocre high jumper and how he decided to do things a little differently. Yeah, so this guy, he literally was like a mediocre high jumper. So the high jump is when you run and jump over this bar, it's an Olympic sport. And I don't even know if he was the best guy on his high school team. And he shows his coach, hey, I'm going to try, I have a problem. My legs are really long. And when I run and jump, I put shoot the legs forward and try to go the legs go over the bar first, which is how everybody did it then. But my legs would always hit the

bar. This is what he's saying to his coach. And the coach is like, yeah, that's what's proven over the past 100 years to work the best. I can't help you. Maybe you need a different sport. So he said, let me, I'm just going to try something. And so he did an experiment. And I really encourage people in this book to try experiments. So they learn something unique about the field that they're in. So they learned something unique about the field that they're in. So he tried flipping backwards over the bar. Well, something like two years later, he won the gold in the Olympics doing this. Like that one thing allowed him to be the best high jumper in the world up to that point. And people still do the jump that he suggested in the 60s.

So there's tons of stories like that, but the point is you have to have a passion to find the things that are unique. You have to experiment so that you have a unique voice. Like if you write a book and it's exactly like 50 shades of gray, no one's going to read your book. They're going to just read 50 shades of gray instead. So you need to have something that makes your product or book or yourself, your voice unique in whatever it is you do, and you need to learn all the micro skills. So everybody thinks investing is a skill. It's not.

Investing is like a basket of a bunch of micro skills. There's value investing, growth investing, there's the psychology of investing, there's money management skills, which is very difficult. There's understanding how to read earnings reports, there's understanding computer stuff. So with comedy, the microskills are, there's one liners, there's humor, there's storytelling, there's likability,

there's crowd work, there's stage work, and on and on. So everything that's worthwhile learning is really just a collection of microskills. So you start off skipping the line by figuring out which micro skills will help you the most at first. So, you know, these are parts of the inspirations for the book. Now that you brought up comedy and I first

followed your stand-up comedy career, I like that you include in the book, how you tried and tested, experimented as you talk about with a different angle for your standup comedy. Yeah, so you can't go on stage when you're first starting out. It is hard to go on stage every night because nobody knows who you are. Not only did I want to get time to practice in front of an audience, I wanted time to practice in front of a hostile audience because the audience loves you, standup comedy is easy. But when the audience doesn't know you or is worse, doesn't like you, you've got to win them over.

So I went on a new, and I did this a couple times, but this was an experiment. I wanted to see if this would work. I went on a New York City subway at rush hour. And every stop I switched cars and then I would start doing stand up. And believe me, that is a hostile audience. Like people just go in home on the New York City subway doing rush hour. They're nice people, but they're not nice to me. If I'm just standing in front of them telling bad jokes. But I did it, and it was a lot of fun. And I practiced my one-liners.

I practiced dealing with a hostile audience. I feel I did win them over in many of the subway cars. And you know, and I got to practice just doing it and stuff like that is insanely valuable. Now the components of an experiment are you have a theory about something that you want to see if it'll make you better at a certain skill. And it should have very little downside. It should be cheap. It should be very easy to do.

And it should have enormous upside. And this first off, it was the price of a subway token. It was really easy to just do, although I was scared to death. I wasn't going to do it. When I got in the subway, I told my friend who was videotaping it, forget it, I'm not going to do it. But then as soon as she turned on the video camera, I started doing it.

So that's what convinced me to do it. And the upside was enormous in that I got better at comedy. And then I had an idea. This was on my idealist the next day. It felt like the monologue, it felt like doing the monologue of a late night TV show. So what are the other components of a late night TV show? Well, it has a musical guest and some celebrity guests. So I found a musical guest by finding some guy in the subway who, you know, plays the garbage cans like drums. And I videotape that. And then I had a friend of mine who had just written a book, come on the subway with me.

And I interviewed him on the subway and then we interacted with the audience. And I put together a little like pretend late and I'd show on the subway, sent it to an agent who said, nah, not good for me. And that's fine. But my upside was that could have been something. And I still, I still could pitch it around.

I really didn't give it much of a shot, but not that obsessed with the idea. But the upside could be enormous on all these things. And there's, again, no downside. And you get at the very least, you get a good story out of it. I like that you just brought up that you weren't that obsessed with that idea.

So you let it go after one, no. And that reminds me of the story in the book. I don't remember the specifics, I'm sure you will. But when you were suggesting to a friend of yours, okay, this is a low-cost way for you to experiment and test this idea and the person ended up not moving forward and even doing it, they lost interest. Yeah, so my friend had an idea for a software product

for a business. Now, she is a videographer, She produces a lot of TV commercials. And so she had a, it was a video-based idea where the software would help create the video in very specific situations. And so I'm not revealing her. My idea is I always reveal, but her idea won't reveal. But she wanted to raise $2 million.

And I said, what do you need $2 million for it? She said, well, it's probably gonna cost a million dollars to hire all the software people. And then it's gonna take six months to a year to make the product. And then I'll have to do marketing and sales. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. It seems to me that this idea, it could be a good idea, but maybe it's not.

We don't know yet. But you could do this manually at first. Call up four of your friends who are going through this specific situation that her business was about. And see if you could do this manual. You do it for free. And that's an experiment. And while doing it, you'll figure out nuances that maybe you didn't think of, which are good to know before you start paying someone to do the software for it. And you'll see how excited your friends are when the final product, if they get, if they're willing to give you a great

testimonial and they love it and everybody's raving about it, then you know, you've got a good idea. If they don't talk about it or don't even like it or don't think about it, then you probably don't have a good idea. Well, she probably didn't have a good idea. And so she moved on to something else, but that's, that's an example. It's good to experiment with anything just to kind of test the waters a little bit just to see to validate an idea. And the ways that you laid out in the book, they're so simplistic and manageable. Like you said, it's not high investment. It's low risk ways to exercise and experiment the idea as some type of a test.

You know, also, I want to say I say that I was not obsessed with the idea. A lot of people feel their ideas are very precious. And so if they have an idea that's good, they hold on to it. This is my idea. I don't want anybody to steal it. And in a weird way, even though they think they have a good idea that can make them a lot of money,

for instance, it's a very scarcity way to think. It's not an abundant way to think. The abundant way to think is I have a good idea, that's because I always have good ideas. Not all my ideas good, most of them are bad, but if I keep practicing writing down ideas, I will have more and more good ideas. I don't care if anyone steals my ideas. If someone steals my idea and does it power to them, they're not the sort of person I want

to deal with, but at least I know, and they were probably better suited to the idea than me anyway, because they did it faster than I did it. And I'm abundant with ideas anyway. Maybe they aren't. And so being able to share ideas and not worry about whether people are stealing it is an abundant way to think. And it's very important to have that abundance mindset because that creates opportunities. I'll give you an example.

I heard this interview being done by the radio host, Charlotte Maynard God, and he's like a music radio host. Maybe he's got five to 10 million listeners a day. And, you know, this was during the Black Lives Matter protest when they first started last May. And he was interviewing Joe Biden. And he wasn't quite satisfied with all the answers. And he said to Biden, we have questions. So I, so that got me thinking that that title, we have questions. So I wrote down 10 questions. He, Charlemagne could have asked Joe Biden. And I said, you, I, so I sent him the ideas, the questions. And I said, you should write a book called We Have Questions. And ask these

questions and find out the answers. Because these are questions I have. Like, I don't know the answers to these questions. And he's like, you wrote back right away. He says, James, this is great. Can you work on it with me? And I said, no, no, this is all for you. You do this book. It should be great if you did this book. And gradually though, I was helping him enough and we were fleshing out the questions and the outline. Charlemagne and I just released actually an audiobook, an audiobook only called We Got Answers. And it's one of the top-selling audiobooks on Audible right now. Oh my gosh, that's an all stem from you giving,

you sharing your idea. Yeah, share, and the questions I asked as well. So I did a lot of research for each question. But that was just for me, for exercising my idea muscle. And then I just wanted him to either write it or not write it. It was up to him. Like another time I wrote to Amazon

and I kind of just cold wrote. I just wrote to whoever was in charge of the self publishing division. And this was a really long time ago, like maybe somewhere between 2012 and 2014. And I had 10 ideas for how Amazon can improve their self publishing. Because at the time I was experimenting

with self publishing some books. Skip the line was mainstream published, but choose yourself, for instance, was self published and very successfully. And so I had ideas for Amazon and I sent it randomly to Amazon. They wrote back and said, this is great. Let us know if you're ever in Seattle. We'd love to show you what we're working on. And I wrote back and said, well, it just so happens. I'm going to be in Seattle next week. Can I stop by? And they said, of course, like, we'll spend the whole day. We'll show you each of the groups. We'll show you what they're working on. And we'd love your feedback. I had never been in Seattle in my life. And I was never planning on going to Seattle.

But when they said that, of course, I bought a ticket to Amazon and I flew out to Seattle. And I had a great day with Amazon, which has helped me in many future endeavors, like when I have problems with my books on Amazon, for instance. You should know what that means already. That's the best kind of notification. That's the sound of another sale on Shopify, and the moment another business dream becomes a reality. Shopify is a commerce platform,

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I want to share a scarcity mindset that I employed in my life that was a loss to your point, instead of sharing ideas and coming from a place of abundance, people had said to me with my first book, this should be a movie. And I got so obsessed with the idea that I didn't want anyone else. I wanted to hold it and protect it and meet with lawyers and talk to lawyers and only put out bits of ideas to people but not share the whole concept and idea with the feedback I've been hearing from people and it went nowhere and nothing ever happened and inevitably I just moved on and and began working on other projects. But as I'm listening to you speak and especially the idea with Charlene, you know, had I instead handed it to somebody and said, I love this idea. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. Is there a way we collaboratively work on something like this? We can be having a very different

conversation right now. Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny. You said that story because a few weeks ago, I had an idea and I was telling some people about it. And they thought it was a really good idea and they were excited to help me with it. And they're like, okay, what do we do first? We get a trademark. Should we get, we got a copyright everything and copyright the idea. And I'm like, what? We don't even know. Let's just start it. Let's just start doing it. And we'll see. We will see. There are some companies I've built and then sold where I didn't even incorporate until like the day before I sold the company. Now, anybody who knows anything about finance would know that's probably

not a good idea. I'm not really that good at personal finance. I was just collecting the money in my own account. And then before I sold the company, though, I had to legally make a company. So some things you can wait till the last minute. And the most important thing is just being able to validate and test out and experiment with the idea to try things.

Also, your idea for a movie, I've had ideas for TV shows. I just tell people with the ideas or try things. Also, like your idea for a movie, like I've had ideas for TV shows, I just tell people what the ideas are, and then if somebody likes it, they're not gonna steal it. Sometimes they will steal it, by the way. But my best idea is I want one time, I sent a really good idea to an agent.

He was like the main reality TV agent in Hollywood. He loved the idea, and good thing I shared it with him, because it was a very very simple idea you could have given it to anyone else and they they could have done it and we ended up pitching it to about nine different networks and by the way all the networks rejected it but I learned a lot from a guy who was a world expert at something. And I'm now using the exact same idea, but doing it more in like a podcast type format. It's such a win. I'm completely embracing this concept now. Will you share a little bit around, there's a big strategy around idea calculus, and if you could give us some insight into how that works. So this came about because a lot of ideas are fine, but they work best when combined with other ideas. So for instance, I'll take a very simple example, which is simple to me, it's a stand-up comedy.

I know this guy who's a very young community, he's in his 20s, which is too young to be kind of famous from comedy, but ever since he was a little kid, not only did he love comedy, but he loved rap. So he got so good at what's called freestyle rapping that anybody could just give him a bunch of words. Within seconds, he will come up with this ridiculously good, very smart rap that includes all the words that everybody just said, no matter what they were. So when he was doing my podcast, for instance, we all threw out words like we threw out the volcanoes on Mars, the Brazilian rainforest, you know, some obscure thing from the Philippines, the James Altershow

show, and maybe one or two other words. And he thought about it for about three seconds and he said, okay, turn on the beat, the beat started. And he wrapped everything. And he wrapped so many details. It's almost like he was like a jeopardy contestant. Like he knew all the trivia about everything. And so that was what I call idea sex or a netchevator's idea edition where you combine two ideas with each other or maybe that one was multiple idea, multiplication. But the main word phrase I use for that is idea sex. Now, idea, multiplication might be, okay, let's say I'm Amazon and I'm Jeff Bezos. My first idea is to make a bookstore and online bookstore, e-commerce. And then let's say it works. Okay, idea addition is, let's just add to the idea, or I mean, I don't know, I'm getting addition to multiplication confused. But-

No, multiplication is the Amazon books example that's exactly the right. Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, so that's the Amazon you're exactly right. So okay, now I have my bookstore now I'm gonna do the electronics store and the clothing store and the food store and the baby toy store and on and on So that's idea multiplication now. What if Jeff Bezos then says to himself? Hmm, I've got this great infrastructure where I'm just making store, store after store after store, and now it's super cheap for me to make stores. What about if I sell that service to people? So this is idea exponentials where you kind of go meta on the idea.

So now he's selling the infrastructure to make a store. And so that's why there's the Amazon sellers program. Anyone can set up a store on Amazon. And then he went, he did idea, exponentials again. He's like, well, we're using tons of computers to store everyone's products and data and logistics and all the customers data and so on. So how about I just offer our entire infrastructure

to every corporation? So now, Amazon Web Services is the most, it's like 20% of Amazon's profits now is that kind of meta meta idea. So that's idea, exponentials and on and on is and it helps to always think in terms of these different types of ideas, whether it's idea sex or idea multiplication or idea division, for instance, you and I have podcasts and we've had podcasts for a while. But when people are starting podcasts right now, I tell them to use a form of idea division. What do you want to do the podcast about?

Is it business? Okay. Now, let's divide once. What niche in business? Okay, it's going to be about marketing. Okay, let's divide again. What niche within marketing? Okay, it's going to be about digital marketing.

You're going to interview all the best digital marketers and use case studies of really great digital marketing campaigns and give specific techniques about what will work. That's a podcast. So you idea divide twice to find the right niche for your podcast because there's so many out there, you have to niche down twice. Be something special to be the only. So that's an example of idea division. So I want to highlight the idea sex.

I know everybody heard it, but I don't know if they really grasp it. And I like the example that you use with the cell phone emerging with an iPad. Yeah, the iPhone is basically, when Steve Jobs released the iPhone, it's 99.9% a phone, that's what it is. It has all the same types of chips

and technical specifications of any phone on the planet. But he combined that with, basically, he was at the time selling the iPod, which was the music, and you could watch shows on it, but you could listen to, you know, millions of songs. He combined the iPod and the phone to create the iPhone. That was a great example of IDSEX. And a lot of people thought it was a bad idea. I remember talking to one guy who was a Wall Street guy who said, that he's gonna sell none of these nobody wants this and of course he's

told you know it's billions i don't know how many he's told but uh or even you know think about star wars star wars is the genre of a western combined with some aspects of science fiction combined with the story of Jesus really like like it's almost a biblical story. So there's lots of ideas, X, that goes into almost every product we know about. What's Facebook? It is the Facebook of Harvard, which was a physical book where they had the pictures

and profile of every student, combined with a dating service. I mean, basically Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook because initially he wanted to find girls to date. So Facebook was a product of IDSX. Let's get to a little bit around the monetization strategies that you share in this book because I feel like it's a really powerful and important part of the book.

And I specifically like the real and spoke portion. Yeah, the spoken wheel thing is very important. And it's really important when you're looking to monetize something, A, you don't want to do it too quickly because you want to first master the skills and master the domain that you're working in, like really understand what is the field. There's the skills and then there's the domain.

So I might have a skill to be a good writer, but if I don't also master the domain, I'll get nowhere. So the domain is who are the publishers, who are the agents? How does a book get published? How does a book get edited? What's the process of this whole thing? Who gets a big advance, who gets a small advance, what genres do? So that's the domain. And you have to understand all of that as well. Same thing with every skill. But then it's very important to ask, well, a lot of people are fixed to only one, they could only make money in one way. So I was talking to somebody recently about restaurants. He had been, you know, waiter and he'd worked in the kitchen, he'd been a host and he had

all these great ideas of how to improve almost every restaurant out there. And they were fascinating. Like, since speaking to him, every restaurant I go into, I could see very quickly what's going right and what's going wrong. And of course, I own part of a restaurant in New York City. So this is a topic that interests me. And then I said, so what are you gonna do

with all this information? Like, you have a great, great ideas about restaurants. And he's like, oh, well, I guess, I don't know. What do you do? Yeah, I have to own a restaurant one day. And I'm like, no, no, I guess, I don't know what do you do. Yeah, I have to own a restaurant one day. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, you can own a restaurant one day. If that's what you really want, let's just say restaurants are the wheel in this case. What are all the spokes?

So owning a restaurant is one spoke, of course, being a general manager of a restaurant is a spoke, but maybe doing a podcast where you, where you interview restaurant owners, this is a spoke or maybe you set up a newsletter, newsletter of all the latest technologies in the restaurant business that restaurant owners need to be aware of. That's a spoke, or maybe you set up coaching to restaurant owners like, hey, 2021

is gonna be a different year for everybody. Here's what you need to know to make sure you have the maximum output from your maximum revenues and profits from your restaurant. So we figured out about a dozen or more different spokes of the wheel, and then I suggested, and he's like, well, how can I do all of these? I can only focus on one at a time.

And I'm like, no, no, and then I explain experimenting to him. So now he's experimenting with about four of these different ideas manually. Like, for instance, there's ideas like, what if you can combine the ordering system with the reservation system? So let's say, how do you go to a a restaurant regularly and they notice the next time you reserve, oh, last five times she was here, she ordered a dessert wine. Let's give her the same waiter

and have him upsell her a slightly more expensive dessert wine. Like, oh, we've got this special here today, I have dessert wines and they already know you like dessert wines so you're likely to purchase the special. And there's research on this, people who like to purchase the specials. But this was an example, a powder experiment rather than automate right away, rather than writing software

to put the order system and the reservation system together, you can manually do it by keeping track of the orders for a few weeks and keeping track of the reservations for you a few weeks. And then, oh, you see someone come in, let's see if I can have him order a higher ticket amount than last time. So how important is it when you go through this exercise?

Because I did this exercise for my business, for myself, on my own, how important is it to elicit a conversation to do it with someone else the way you did it with your friend? It's not important at all. Like normally, I would never do it in a conversation to do it with someone else the way you did it with your friend. It's not important at all. Like normally, I would never do it in a conversation because I always like to just work on my ideas. And then if other ideas could sort of pollute the well, since you're passionate about something and you have the skills, they might not have the skills and they might not be, yes, skillful with ideas.

But in this case, this was someone I was sort of helping out and I'm doing a little experiment. You could say with Skip the Line, which is I picked a bunch of random people and my goal is to make them all millionaires within a year if they listen to my advice very specifically. And this is one of the people who I'm working with and it's working out very well so far. We've all, I've just started this all,

but I've already had three or four meetings with four different people that I've been working with. Do you know Jay Samett? The name sounds familiar. Did he write for the street.com at one point? I'm not sure, but he, his new book, I just interviewed him a couple weeks ago. He is so similar to what you're doing right now.

It's unbelievable. The same kind of a test concept with trying to get people to follow a model that was successful for him and track their revenue. Very, very similar. That's so exciting to hear. Oh, yeah. I see who he is. He's pretty big in the accounting industry, actually.

He made the video disc, the first interactive video disc arcade game. I think I remember that game. I forget what it was called. It was, uh, all right. So before we end, I want to wrap up with one concept and story that I really like the story of borrowing hours and the story that you shared around Paley and the book was really powerful. Yeah. So Paley is known as, and he probably is the best soccer player of all time. He would call it soccer here. And in Brazil, when he was growing up, he grew up very poor. And, you know, he lived in these buildings. It was all cement where he lived. It wasn't really a place to play soccer. So he and his friends played something called not football, but

it's, I don't know how it's pronounced, but it's pronounced a little like football. I don't know how to pronounce it, but it spelled F-U-T-B-O-L. And what it is is it's in very close quarters in bare feet and the ball is much smaller and tougher. So he got really good at maneuvering in very, you know, everybody's like crunched in on the field,

very close to each other. And he got very good at maneuvering around people and with his feet maneuvering the ball and doing all sorts of, you know, things with the ball so that he can manipulate it in different ways. And that skill, let's say he put 5,000 hours into that growing up. Well, he was able to borrow those 5,000 hours when he started playing soccer. Oh, it was like a luxury for him. It was the bigger field, his skills at manipulating the ball and passing and shooting were much enhanced in this luxuriously large field compared to football.

So that's how he borrowed hours from the earlier game that he used later to become the best player of all time in soccer. If you are good at starting businesses, you bring those skills from one business into the next. Like, okay, here's what we do. We don't file the trademark first. We do this, this, this first.

Or with public speaking, I thought getting good at public speaking would help me with stand-up comedy. I would borrow the hours from public speaking. And it did a little bit. But when I borrow hours from stand-up comedy now to do public speaking, it's like a game changer. It's unbelievable. The more I go on stage to do comedy,

the better public speaker I become. I'm sure, and certain that is the case. And that makes you unique and different. It's almost like a contrarian kind of way of looking at things. Something that, for example, with Paley, oh, he doesn't actually have soccer experience. This is a reason why he's not going to be good, but the fact that he did something differently

and could apply it and borrow the hours, like you said, is what made him the best, unique and so different. Yeah, he was very different, very unique. No one really, I mean, maybe people are better now, but I don't know. He's always considered the best of them all the time. James, everyone's got to get the book, skip the line.

Not only is it such a phenomenal story that keeps you really engaged, but the tactics, the strategies that you share that I am now applying to my business, they're priceless for people and right now who doesn't want to find ways to go ahead and skip the line? How can everyone find the book and get the book? Skip the line on Amazon.com. Well, that made it pretty easy. And how does everybody find you in your podcast? The James Altersher show everywhere you get podcasts. And I also have a TV series on Amazon called Choose Yourself.

James, thank you so much for making time. I'm so proud of this book. Thank you. I love, love the book and I'm so grateful that you put it out into the world. Until next time, my friend, more success to you. Thank you so much, Heather. I really appreciate this. I love my girl over here.

I decided to change that tiny and rough. And the life they're around. I couldn't be more excited for what you're getting here. Start learning and growing. And inevitably something will happen. You know what? 16 to 11. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You couldn't miss it. I'm on this journey with me. This episode is brought to you by the YAP Media Podcast Network.

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