The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 365: James Altucher - How To Become An Idea Machine (The 10,000 Experiment Rule)

Episode Date: May 17, 2020

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk For more details text LEARNERS to 44222 Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com #365: James Altucher - How To Become An Idea Machine "Vulnerability equals freedom." "You need to say something interesting. You need to step outside of your comfort zone." James started writing in 1990 after a girl he liked chose to date a writer instead of him. He wrote 3,000 words a day and yet didn't publish anything for 12 years. Why write about your flaws? Watch the movie 8 mile... "Eminem shares all of the negative aspects of himself. He left his competition with nothing to say about him. He beat him to the punch." "I don't hit publish unless I'm worried. Am I afraid? If yes, then publish." "All good writing has to have a story." Commonalities of people who sustain excellence: Physically healthy - They are in shape Emotionally healthy - They have good relationships They are extremely curious - "Ken Langone came in my comedy club and asked tons of questions. He's so curious." They are very creative They have a "ready, fire, aim" approach - Sara Blakely started Spanx and got a $300K order and hadn't figured out how to manufacture her product yet. Creativity/Idea generation is a muscle - If you don't work it, it atrophies. Write 10 ideas a day. Quantity is more important than quality. "He who has the most ideas wins." You'll have a lot of bad ideas. You have to get through those to get to the good ones. Quantity is important. "Writing 10 ideas a day changed my life. I wasn't depressed anymore." Write ideas for companies and share with them... They might call you. Being an "intrapreneur" within your company - Think of ideas that can help your company and share with the CEO. "Success is always on the other side of can't." Great entrepreneurs focus on reducing risk How to speak to powerful people? Realize they are just people Humor is key. "Laughter is the way to level the playing field." Developing a skill - Deliberate practice The "10,000 Experiment" rule The key to getting good is to experiment Be in the top 1% of doing experiments Work your idea muscle every single day - The neurons will be re-wired Share your ideas to help other companies Over-promise AND over-deliver. Do both. Everyone else under-promise with the hope to over-deliver. Don't do that. Overpromise upfront and over-deliver.

The key to getting good at any skill I realize is not necessarily studying it for 10,000 hours, but to experiment. So figure out something that you haven't done and that makes you uncomfortable and figure out how to experiment with it. So an experiment is something that has little to no downside and huge upside if it works. But even if the experiment fails, you still learn. So there's no real downside other than time or money, but there's upside in terms of knowledge and huge upside if the experiment is a success. HR people say it again and again, getting employees to use any learning tools a battle. But then they mention LinkedIn learning. They say LinkedIn learning is different because their employees actually use it.

Learning and Development Pros at 78 of the Fortune 100 companies choose LinkedIn Learning. It uses LinkedIn Insights to publish 60 new courses a week and makes personalized recommendations to every employee. Visit LinkedInlearning.com slash leader and sign up for a demo today. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Brixie and Meyer. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text, learners to 44222. In order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world,

receive mindful Monday updates what I'm reading, writing, watching, thinking about. Also give you more details about how my book, Welcome to Management, can help you become a more effective leader. Text, learners to 44222. Now, On the night's featured leader, it's the great James Altasher, entrepreneur, angel investor, chessmaster, and prolific writer. He's also started and run more than 20 companies and is currently invested in over 30. The author of 18 books, including bestsellers, The Power of Know, Choose Yourself, and Reinvent Yourself. And the cool part about this one is I invited members of the Learning Leader Academy,

as well as members of my learning leader circle to be a part of this one live. It was fantastic. A few of the key takeaways, the importance of exercising your idea muscle every single day and why quantity is more important than quality. Then how to be an effective entrepreneur within your company. And then why we all need to. develop a mindset of experimentation if we desire to grow. Ladies and gentlemen, it's fascinating one with James Altasher.

All right, James. It's really good to have you here on the Learning Leader show as well as we have some of our friends from my Learning Leader circle as well as the learning leader Academy. And I thought I would open it up to a smaller group today to have some fun, have a conversation, probably tell some jokes given your background, James, and do our best to learn from some of the wisdom you've acquired over the year. So I just want to say welcome.

Thanks for being. You can also learn from the lack of wisdom. But I just want to say, Ryan, I'm a fan, and I really appreciate you inviting me on. I know we've discussed this for a long time. And I'm very thankful and appreciate it. Well, so the first time we met was in Ohio, California. We were walking away from one of the breakout sessions at Mastermind Talks, the event that Jason Gainard runs,

and you play a prominent role at Mastermind Talks. And that particular one, you interviewed Tony Hawk for all of us, which was pretty cool. But I've read about that that time period in your life was interesting the fact that you were struggling, and I believe you're giving away your possessions, you had sold any type of place to live,

as well as you were bouncing around to Airbnb's with a trash bag and a computer, if I'm not mistaken. What was your mindset at that time? And what was going on? Why was that so rough? I mean, the week we met was actually very pivotal for me because I had left New York to go to Ohio. And in that week, my lease on the, two apartments that I was renting, one in New York and one upstate near my children. They were both running out.

And I said to a friend of mine, take your family, whatever you need to do. I want you to clear out my apartments. Like you don't realize how much garbage you collect over the decades. You think you're only keeping around few things here and there. But then when you settle down in a place, you get all your stuff out of storage. It all fills up in your apartment. And so I said to my friend, Lisa, I said, why don't you come?

It'll take you just a day or two. Just throw out all my stuff or give it away or sell it or keep it. Whatever you want to do. If you sell it, you could keep the money. and she ended up taking her husband, her kids, her cousins with a big truck that they had to rent for eight straight days to clear out all my garbage. And then when I came back, all I had left was my carry-on bag, the exact carry-on bag, I brought to Mastermind Talks. And for the next two and a half years after that, I just lived out of that carry-on bag moving from Airbnb to Airbnb. So it was like I was living almost someone else's life.

I went through this transformation where I really had no address. I lived anywhere. And I kept the discipline. If it didn't fit in the carry-on bag, if I bought something, I had to eliminate something from the carry-on bag. If it didn't fit in the carry-on bag, I couldn't buy it. And, you know, I really was going through something. I was going through a horrible breakup that was caused for unfortunate reasons.

And I've never really talked about this. But basically, the person I was with was having a mental breakdown and left the country with a moment's notice. And, you know, there was all sorts of problems related to that. Like, I felt, I felt like in danger in a variety of ways. And so I just didn't really, and I was running a business. And so I just, I didn't really know how to deal with what was going on in my life. And so I just kind of gave up on everything that was complicated.

And one thing that's complicated is renting or owning a place. And particularly with my leases running out. And so, but yeah, I went to that mastermind. And it was great because sometimes these conferences where you know people, you know, like we met and so on, it's just a good, it's like almost like comfort food. Like I felt at home there in Ohio. And I realized, you know what? I can feel at home anywhere.

So I made it a point in every new place I moved every three days for the next two years. I'm going to feel at home here. And you know that feeling of excitement you get when you move to a new place and you wake up the very first morning and you walk outside? You're going to explore. Here's the new place where I'm going to have breakfast. Here's the new place I'm going to go to the bookstore. And here's the new views I'm going to see. And I would feel that excitement every few days.

And I would feel that curiosity and that sense of exploring. and it really was a nice feeling for me, you know, for a while until I got, until I got tired of it. You can't do it forever. It's hard to do it forever. One of the aspects of your writing and speaking, and you've already done this during our talk today, James, is you're really critical of yourself. In fact, I was reading the chapter when you talked about your conversation with Chris Voss, another guy I've had on the show as well. and you said, you know, I'm the worst at negotiating. I've lost companies. I've lost millions.

I've lost time. I've gotten depressed all due to being a bad negotiator. And that's just one example. You do that with a lot of things in your writing. And I'm wondering, that's different for someone who has, you know, done the things you've done, written 17 books, built companies, exited for multi-millions, all the things that you've done impacted millions of people through the. written word and help them, made them better. So there's, there's, there's an amazing amount of

impact you've had on so many people that you don't even fully realize yet you're always really critical of yourself. And I wonder what, why is that? Why is that? It seems to be the default mode of how you operate. Well, I think, first off, I don't think something is, is, I, I've been writing since 1990. And I've been writing almost every day between one and three thousand words since 1990. And the reason was I was in college and I really, this is going to sound whatever, but I really liked this one girl, Marie, and she really liked writers. She liked this one friend of mine who kept quoting James Joyce and said he was going to be right. He never was a writer, but he just loved Ulysses and Thomas Pynchins, Gravity's, Rainbow, and all these other pretentious novels.

And so I figured, okay, look, I'm going to be a writer then. And I started writing, and I just loved it. And I really made a study of it. I didn't publish a single thing for the next 12 years, but I did work on this skill, a very difficult skill, and I wanted to be good at it. And if you write something that is comfortable, like, oh, I'm going to write 10 reasons you should be grateful. That's just everyone already is going to agree. You're not really saying anything interesting. You know, maybe it's a reminder to some people, but it's not valuable writing.

In order to do, in order to say something that is relevant, you need to step out of your comfort zone. Because if you step out of your comfort zone, that's a big indicator. that what you're saying is unique and given your life experience and if you've developed a unique perspective or not, you'll write something that could be not only relevant to you, but relevant to others and relatable to others. So if I say, listen, I had a horrible breakup. And even though I was, you know, a 48-year-old man, you know, sometimes you feel lost and confused and scared and lonely. And I don't know how to deal with. And I don't know how to deal with the basic paperwork of life often, particularly when I'm in these high stress situations.

And I had a business to run with employees and I felt responsible for them and customers. And I felt responsible for them. And it's okay to admit that because that everyone says, you know what? I thought everybody's when they're running a business and they have so many responsibilities, I thought they've already gotten past. I thought they have a grip on things. And now James is telling me he doesn't. that gives me permission to, hey, not everything has to be perfect in my life before I can go out there and try to achieve something.

And, you know, another thing I notice is that vulnerability equals freedom. So if I say to you, hey, you know, maybe you should invest in my business, you might say, listen, I kind of think your personal life is in shambles right now. And I would be like, yeah, I've already said that a million times and you still recommended having the meeting. I'm happy to talk about it. But like, you see what I mean? Like, because I would already admit things, nobody could gotcha me. Like, oh, gotcha. You went broke twice before.

You know, gotcha. Your life's a mess. All right, yeah. So what? I already talked about it. And here I am. And you still see the other things in my life, which is that I'm still running. your business or I'm still raising my children. I'm still taking care of my responsibilities.

And so there's nothing you can say. Like you remember in the movie Eight Mile? It's Eminem's kind of somewhat autobiographical movie. At the end of it, he's having, throughout the whole movie, he's having a hard time in these rap battles. But at the end of it, he wins the final rap battle and he wins it by admitting in the rap that he's doing all of his flaws. He's like, you're right. There's nothing you can say about me. I am. Wait, you guys did beat me up.

I do live in a trailer park. Like, he just admits everything. And then the other guy has nothing left to say. And Eminem was free at that point. He even quits the rap battles. He just walks out and he's free. And I think you'll find that any type of voter, vulnerability does for you up. Even, and I make this a point too, and this is related,

I don't hit publish on something I write unless I'm worried about what people will think of me. Now, I'm not trying to write something that will make people feel, think poorly of me, but always is the last step before I hit publish. I ask myself, am I afraid? And if I'm not afraid, that means I'm probably not saying anything new or interesting. You're only afraid when you're saying something new. For instance, right now with this coronavirus and the life, if I say everybody needs to wear masks, all right, well, everyone's going to agree with that and everyone's going to find that to be, you know, to confirm their own beliefs. But if I say, hey, maybe we should wear masks, but 100% of people should go back to work. Well, now there's going to be,

if that's truly what I believe, there's also going to be some tension there. Some people don't quite believe that. It's going to be uncomfortable. I'm out of the comfort zone. And then there's a discussion. Then more people might be interested in reading, well,

why is he saying this? What's the evidence? What's the story? And so on. And then you have to have a story, by the way. All good writing has a story with it. I can't just lecture because I have to prove

that I'm capable of saying what I'm saying. That's a long answer to your question. No, no, I like it. I'm curious. So, you know, one of the cool things is you started interviewing people as a little kid and you have never really stopped. I know you acted like you worked in a newspaper and tried to interview presidents. You've worked hard to kind of get in front of powerful people and interview them. And since then, you know, you have a podcast that I really enjoy.

And there's a lot to talk about there. But I'm curious from your perspective, given the fact that you've interviewed and talked. to powerful people who have sustained excellence over many many years, James. If you had to distill that down to a few of the common behaviors and actions or attributes of people who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time, what are a few of those that you've pulled out from hundreds and hundreds of conversations? Right. So there's two levels. There's kind of a foundational level, which is important for everybody. And then there's kind of these let's say, you know, these attributes, what makes them particularly special, if you want to call them special?

And I'm not just saying rich people. I'm not just saying presidents, but it could be a good writer, it could be a good athlete, it could be a good scientist, whatever. So first off, and this is going to sound almost too foundational, almost too cliche, but it's important to mention, first off, they're all physically healthy. Now, I'm not saying they're all ripped and jacked and working out every day, but I've actually never interviewed anyone who was sick. And that's because you can't, if you're just sick in bed all the time, you're not going to be creative. You're not going to start businesses. You're not going to flourish in your relationships.

And that's okay. You're sick. You need help while you're sick. And I'm not saying it's bad to be sick. I'm just saying these people would make sure they slept eight hours a day. a lot of them had a focus on their diet and they ate healthy. They would do some exercise, not exercise every day, but the average person I interviewed would say, oh yeah, two times a week, do 15, 20 minutes of exercise, just anything.

They all seem to be, or most of them seem to be emotionally healthy, like they had good, successful relationships happening. And they were all creative. They had a big focus on curiosity, exploration, creativity. I remember one time Ken Langone, the founder of Home Depot and also a very big philanthropist. He's funded. I think he's paying for the tuitions of every medical student in New York City right now. Anyway, I'm interviewing Ken Langone.

At the beginning of the interview, we were interviewing it in this comedy club slash bar that I owned. We were doing the podcast there. And he said, you own this place? And I said, yeah. And he's like, okay, well, tell me about it. How much do the waitresses make? How much does the alcohol cost? What do you pay the comedians?

What do you pay the bartender? What's the rent on this place? And I didn't know the answer to any of it. And he's like, you're the worst bar owner I've ever met, which is true. I don't really, I don't really, I'm not actively involved in management at all. It's kind of more like it's not a good, it's not a investment I planned on making money from. It's a horrible investment. But it's this kind of curiosity.

And it was really intense. He was like squinting and he was bulleting the questions out to me. And this curiosity is a key part of creativity because then you start coming up with solutions too. Curiosity is always paired with solutions. Like if you're curious about a problem, you come up with a solution too. So that's one quality. It's this insane curiosity. But then another important quality that I would say distinguishes a lot of these people is what I'm going to call a ready fire aim approach.

So a lot of people do ready aim fire. like, oh, you have an idea. Now let's raise the money. Let's develop the idea into a product. And then we start selling it to customers. That's not how these people would operate. So a typical case might be they're ready. They have the idea and so on.

But now they start selling before they even figured out how to make the product. So this is one example. So let's take Sarah Blakely. She's the founder of Spanx as a type of ladies undergarment. It's very, very unique. She invented it without having any experience at all in fashion. So that's another thing. She doesn't wait to have experience before she does something.

She just fires. So then she sold a huge order to, I believe it was Neiman Marcus. Yep. I got a $300,000 order. And they said, can you deliver it in a month? And she said, and I'm exaggerating. I don't know if it was a month, maybe it was two months. She said, yes.

So she had no product. She had no inventory. She didn't even have a manufacturer to make the product. And she said yes. She fired. And then she had to go find the manufacturer and convince, you know, it's not an easy thing to find someone to manufacture $300,000 worth of product when you're a nobody. Like she was selling fax machines door to door as her job at that moment. And so she said, yeah, I'll get you $300,000.

$300,000 worth of product. She found the manufacturer, fortunately. One person believed in her. She 20 didn't, and she delivered the product. But you'll see similar stories from Richard Branson when he started Virgin Air, Damon John, when he started Fubu. It's a common, common characteristic, this ready fire aim characteristic. It comes from practicing that creativity muscle, knowing that if you practice creativity

creativity every day that you can say yes if you're your creativity and ideas are a muscle and if you know if you have confidence that you've been exercising that muscle then you could say yes to a lot more things knowing that you will have the creativity and the ingenuity to figure it out as you as you go along and and one of the ways to execute on that thought james that you've written about is is your idea of writing down 10 ideas a day. Can you share more about why you do that? And I feel like that's like you're, that's like you working out.

Yeah. That muscle, that creativity and idea muscle. Like instead of going to gym and lifting weights, which you probably do too. But in addition to that, you work out the idea muscle within your mind. I'm glad you think I,

by looking at me, I work out and lift weights on a regular area. I actually did start with a trainer about six months ago. And then, of course, this coronavirus happened. But so I was lifting weights for a little bit. But I do more card. I like to play games. So exercise like ping pong, which is surprisingly cardio. Like I'm tired after two hours of ping pong playing and stuff. Anyway. But in 2002, I had sold a business in 1998, I had made millions of dollars. And then I didn't, I had no idea what I was doing. I, I basically realized later, I just had won the lottery. I sold an internet business during an

internet boom. And I had no idea about business. But once you have money, you have this tendency to think you're a genius at everything. So I quickly just lost that money, all of it. Like, I went from generational wealth, wealth for my kids and their kids. And I cashed out. It wasn't just on paper. I cashed out. It was in my checking account. And then I remember the summer of 2002, I looked at my checking account and I was already

knew it was going to happen, but I was so depressed. I had $143 left in my checking account after having millions there. I was losing my home. You know, I lived right next to the World Trade Center when 9-11 happened. I couldn't sell my home. And I was just depressed. You know, lots of bad things happened around that time for. people so I can't complain, but I was just, I was suicidally depressed. And one day, I don't know why

it happened. I just walked into this restaurant supply store and I loved just the design of waiters pads. Like here's my waiters pad today. I just loved the design. It was, it could fit into my pocket and it was, there was lines on it. And you can only, you can't write a novel on a waiter's pad. You can only write bullet points. So it's not like you can go too deep. Sometimes when you're trying to be creative, people say focus, but actually breath is often more important than depth. So if you have lots of ideas, it's often better than going deep down one idea because that one idea you're going deep down might be a bad idea. But it's just better to practice coming up with lots of ideas. So you have lots of possibilities, lots of choices in life.

And so I started writing down ideas. And I quickly realized the first thing that happened after just a few weeks was I realized that I wasn't as depressed. And this is after two years of massive depression. No medication was able to help me. No therapy was able to help me. I could barely get out of my bed every morning. And I was just really depressed over how I felt I had ruined my life, my family's life, lost my home. Everybody hated me.

I lost all my friends. When people say, oh, when you go from rich to poor, you find out who your friends are, I found out I had no friends. So that's what I found out. And so I started writing these ideas down and this longer story to it, but within like three or four months, it was like amazing. I literally felt like my brain was being rewired and I could come up with ideas constantly. But out of those first few sets of ideas, it changed my life. Like I started coming out with sometimes good ideas, sometimes bad ideas, mostly bad ideas, but every now and then a good idea. and I would start sharing these ideas with others,

and it would literally change my life. People would offer me opportunity after opportunity after opportunity. I remember one of my first lists was a list of bad ideas. It was, here's 10 people or 20 people, actually. I would love to meet. So I made this list, and I wrote to all of them, and I said, hey, I'll buy you a cup of coffee if I could just pick your brain for five minutes.

I got zero responses, because it's not like, you know, something like Warren Buffett is waiting around, and then he gets my email, and he's like, oh, my gosh, James, somebody I don't know, James Alpenter is going to buy me a 60 cent cup of coffee. I'm the richest man in the world, but I should drop everything and meet this guy. I got no responses at all. And then I came up with approach, okay, with each person, I'm going to come up with 10 ideas to help that person's business.

And I sent them all out. And I didn't say meet me for coffee. I just said, here's 10 ideas for you. You never have to contact me again. Keep these ideas. I don't care if you use them or not. And three out of the 20 people responded. And it actually started me on a whole new careers.

And since then, just every business idea I've ever had, every opportunity I've ever had with other businesses, all started off from this list of 10 ideas. I'll give you an example from just yesterday. This is a true story from just yesterday. I heard through the grapevine that Disney, you know, all the production companies right now are having trouble with their shows next season because production is all shut down

because of these quarantines. So I heard Disney was looking for unscripted shows, you know, reality shows that would cater to nine-year-olds. So I came over the list of reality shows that would cater to nine-year-olds. and I literally sent them to Disney. These are just one line per show, and I sent them to Disney. And some, I didn't know the person in charge of reality,

but this person sent me an email back and said, these are great, when can we meet? Can you get on the phone? And he gave me a bunch of dates next week. So we literally have a meeting early next week to discuss my ideas for reality shows to Disney. So who knows what happens? Maybe I'll create a new reality show out of a simple list of ideas I met it. I made yesterday. Wow. James, so there was a time when you worked within a company, HBO, among others, and I know you've been critical of yourself when you

worked there, but you also did some good things. There are a lot of people watching and listening who are not entrepreneurs. They're working within a business. And either they're in some sort leadership position or strive to be. And so maybe I'm curious about your advice for the person in that position of maybe their desire to be some sort of intrapropreneur do good work within their, they don't have a desire to leave their business. They like their business. They like the company they work for. But perhaps they want to get promoted or they want to advance, you know, they want more significance within what they do on a day-to-day basis. What are some of pieces of advice you could take maybe from the entrepreneur world and inject that into the space of

being an intrapreneur within a company. Right. So that's a great question because a lot of people assume you're either an entrepreneur or you're not an entrepreneur. And people who are entrepreneurs often say, oh, having a job is the worst. But you know what? Being an entrepreneur is a job. And it's only a single source of income. And by the way, being an entrepreneur is not fun. Like you have to deal with employees and they're not fun. You have to deal with, if you're an entrepreneur, you have a boss, which is your investors, your customers, your employees, your partners. They're all your bosses.

And so, and you have to constantly pander to your customers and make sure they're happy, pander to your employees and make sure they're happy. It's just so much pandering. I actually don't really enjoy entrepreneurship. And I don't consider myself an entrepreneur. I consider myself some sort of hybrid. But I like the term entrepreneur. I also call it an entrepreneur.

You can very much be entrepreneurial at work. And I'll just say from my own story, my title at HBO was junior programmer analyst. So I was a programmer working on the lowest, just most grunt stuff at HBO. I love the network. And one time I had an idea. And so I start walking to the CEO's office. And the CEO of HBO was my boss's bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses. And so I'm walking to his office without consulting any of my, those bosses.

And I run into somebody and she's like, where are you going? And I said, I'm going to visit Jeff, the CEO. And she's like, you can't just go into the CEO's office. And so first piece of advice is whenever you try to break out of the normal hierarchy, which is strictly imposed on companies, everyone is going to tell you, you can't do this. You've got to act first and ask for forgiveness later. Like success is always on the other side of can't. People will have good intentions. They don't, they'll say they don't want you to get in trouble, blah, blah, blah. And they might have good intentions, but they also don't want you to get. ahead. They also don't want you to be different than who you are. They like who you are. They don't want you to be different.

So there's a lot of reasons why someone says you can't do that. And you have to know that success is always on the other side of camp. But anyway, I still went to the CEO's office and I said, listen, HBO is known for original TV shows. You're the best in the world at this. Why don't we make original shows on this brand new entertainment medium called the World Wide Web. This is 1995. And he said, I don't care. Do whatever you want. And so I go back to my boss and I said, look, the CEO of HBO just told me I have to do this.

And so I start making a web show for HBO called 3am. And it was very HBO like it was me. So here I am, this software guy. But now part of my job was every Tuesday night at 3 in the morning, me and a camera guy would go out at 3 in the morning in New York City and interview whoever was out, prostitutes, drug dealers, pimps, Wall Street bankers. And, you know, we would do all sorts of crazy things like Rikers Island, the jail next to New York City has a bus that runs 24 hours a day. We would take that bus to Rikers Island. And there was only one stop. It was a stop in Queens where all these drug dealers and pimps would hang.

out because their customers were getting off the bus. And I did this for two and a half years every Tuesday or Wednesday night. So suddenly I was known as this 3 AM guy throughout HBO. So I started building connections with, again, I was this bottom of the totem pole in the IT department. And suddenly I'm hanging out with people from who were producing real shows. And they even gave me money to do a pilot to make 3 a.m. into a TV show. And I started meeting people in the market.

I learned from every department of HBO. And HBO is a fantastically, or at least it was then, a fantastically run company. So I learned so much by being an entrepreneur within the company and creating my own job within the company. And then I was able to use that to on the side launch my own company. I started making websites for other entertainment companies because they all saw what I was doing in HBO. And they said, can you do that for us as well?

And so I started my own company on the side, but I was so risk averse, which is, by the way, another important quality of entrepreneurs is you don't take on more risk, you actually focus on reducing risk. Entrepreneurs are risk takers because they reduce risk. That's their job. And so in my goal of reducing risk while I was starting this new company on the side, I stayed at my HBO job for an entire 18 months after I started doing websites on the side for unlawful. other entertainment companies. It was a year and a half. I had 20 employees. I had office space. I had everything. Finally, I quit my job at HBO to run my company full time. But I hated being an entrepreneur so much that I was determined to sell the business. I sold it one year to the day after I left my job at HBO. I've never worked at a job since. But I loved working at HBO and I

loved the company and I loved what I was doing there. But you can't make enough money working at a job unless you're really at the top, and then you can make enough money. One of the key parts of that story, James, is a topic that was brought up to me. I was a little surprised. I was in New York City interviewing Brian Coppulman, who is a mutual friend of ours. Yeah, but first of all, I just want to mention I was the advisor on season three of billions. Ryan's the quote on the top of my book, ReInvend Yourself. Great writer.

I just rewatched Rounders, his first movie, great movie. me. Sorry. Yeah, no, I love him. He's great. I've loved his work since Rounders and Billions, my favorite show, which I know you've worked on. So we get done recording and we're in his office and we leave the podcasting kind of place and then we walk over into his office where he has all like the whiteboards and stuff. And he had a football and we were actually passing a football back and forth in his office. And he goes, hey, man, where did you learn to talk to powerful people? how do you how did you develop that skill to not have fear to kind of walk in here early and do this and obviously i was flattered i liked it and i never thought about that before until he said that

and this is something i think you you've also developed a skill since you were a kid and i and for me the answer i told him at that time was i think it comes from repetition i think it comes from doing this so much that i feel i've met so many people that i realize like i'm going to treat the writer of my favorite TV show the exact same as I treat the person who just took the trash out I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna ask questions and be curious and thoughtful and try to get to know them genuinely and and I guess in that manner that's how he viewed that as I had learned to talk to powerful people and have really good conversations and I'm curious what do you think when I ask you that because I feel like

you've you've you've got this figured out pretty well and it doesn't seem like there's any fear and maybe there is and you hide it I don't know but I'm curious yeah and there's other people I think watching listening who this is a skill to develop and it could be a very useful skill in building their career of how to speak to powerful people well and and i'll confess often i am very very nervous when i meet someone for a podcast particularly if i've never met them before like i don't know i was interviewing sonia sona mayor the supreme court justice the only time of supreme court justice has ever been on a podcast and i was when i was sitting in Supreme Court Chambers waiting for her, I was super nervous. When I was waiting for Henry Winkler,

who was the Fonz when I was growing up on the TV show Happy Days, I was really nervous. When I was a kid, I was a very strong chess master for a kid. I was New Jersey junior chess champion, which is nothing in the scope of things. But I had to interview Gary Kasparov for a podcast recently or a couple of years ago. And Gary's gone on to become one of my closest friends now, but he's the best chess player in world history. And I was scared out of my mind. Like, you shouldn't meet your heroes as the saying.

And it's true. Like, I was, you know, 40, whatever, or 50 years old and terrified. And, you know, I think, and sometimes I never break through. You know, sometimes I'm scared. And it just, the whole interview. you, I'm scared. But the key, I think, is to realize, like you were saying, I think that's a good visualization, realize they're the same as the person who picks up the garbage and you treat them the same way, which means you treat them like shit, probably. No, I'm just kidding. But I think

the key for me is humor. Like, if I can make them laugh, particularly in the beginning, then that lightens the mood. And laughter is kind of a way of leveling the playing field. Because when they first come in, they don't really know who I am. You know, let's say 50% do, 50% don't. They don't know if I'm a journalist or a random guy with a microphone or whatever. And so they don't know. And often they don't care.

And they know they have status over me. And humor is a great way. of leveling status. If I could make fun of them in a very, not in a nasty way, but it's just a very fun, good, humored, lighthearted way that often works. I was talking to, I was talking to Ray J. yesterday, the singer and actor and he's now got this electronic motor scooter

that he's been successful with. And I had never spoke to him before, but I, I, I, I, again, I used humor to lighten things up, make fun a little bit. And then he lightens up and we're just enjoying having a conversation. The flip side is a few weeks ago, I had on Jim McHelby. He's a billionaire founder of Square. He's also the deputy chairman of the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

And, you know, particularly with everything that's going on, I'm able to make fun of, you know, what's going on at the Federal Reserve. and he laughs and, you know, again, it always opens things up and it allows for you to just be, you know, you, you think of, you laugh with your friends. And so we're suddenly more friendly, as opposed to just having an interview, we're having a conversation as opposed to an interview when I can make them laugh. But I am usually really scared, though, when I talk to people, it's, you know, when I was doing this 3 a.m. thing and I had to talk to random people at 3 in the morning, it was terrifying to walk up to somebody and say, hey, what, you up to at 3 a.m. Or, you know, I think I had more confidence when I was 12 years old doing it than

I do now. Is that part of why you got into stand-up comedy? Yeah, I mean, I always was a fan of stand-up comedy when I was at HBO. Again, because I was doing these entrepreneur techniques, here I was was a software guy, but I also went to, HBO was probably the premier channel at the time for comedy. In fact, they actually owned half of Comedy Central, plus they had, you know, if you wanted a comedy special, HBO was the place to go. And this was in the 90s. And so I went to HBO comedy. I said, you guys need to do websites for all the comedians that are kind of HBO comedians. And so I did them for HBO comedy. But I started going to all the comedy clubs. I started hanging out with people from HBO comedy, looking at all the up-and-coming shows. And I went to the Aspen Comedy

festival every year. So I was a huge fan, but I was terrified of actually going on stage and doing comedy. And at some point, a comedy club owner said, hey, why don't you, you know, he had heard me do a podcast. He thought it was funny. He said, why don't you go on stage? So I did it. And I just got obsessed. I felt this is a very hard scale. It was much, I always thought it was funny, but to actually go on stage and make a bunch of tourists from Norway, from Norway laugh is impossible. And it was, it was the hardest skill I've ever had to learn. And I'm still learning. But it's five years later, you know, up until this pandemic, I was performing up to five nights a week. I was performing all around the world. I was getting good. I was, I was skipping the line. All the people who

told me, you can't do this in just five years. I skipped over them. And I was touring all around the world. The day before the travel locked down, I had just gotten back from eight days in the Netherlands where I'd performed in five different cities in the Netherlands with another great, someone who was legitimately a great comedian, Tony Woods. And it became a huge part of my life. That whole subculture and culture, I ended up buying a comedy club. And I've had, you know, dozens of comedians on my podcast. I've been on dozens of comedy podcasts. I know all the comedians. It's a real pleasure when you not only start to learn a skill, but you become part of that subculture, and it's different from your usual subculture. And yes, it's terrifying. Every single

time I go on stage, and I've been on stage now well over a thousand times for comedy, it's terrifying each time. In fact, I get nervous if I'm not nervous before going on stage. Yeah, I think you seem to do it. And I found that to be a commonality of people who have sustained excellence to James, is they are more than. than willing to regularly push the edges of their zone of comfort. And I think stand up is one way you do that. Another. And I want to mention on that.

I developed, and this is coming out in my next book, but I kind of, I was really trying to figure out when developing this skill, what's the relationship between developing a skill and the 10,000 hour rule, which is the, you know, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, but really developed by this professor, Anders Erickson, and he has a book called Peek about it, and Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, describes the 10,000 hour role. And it's this idea that if you do something for 10,000 hours with deliberate practice, you'll be among the best in the world. And it just, a lot of skills don't work like that.

Like, a lot of skills aren't just repetition over and over. And I corresponded with, so Anders Erickson, the professor, he's a friend of mine. In fact, in the 90s, I was part of some of the original experiments about the 10,000 hour rule because of my chess expertise. And I was writing back and forth about comedy. And he was even trying to figure this out. Well, how do you, what's the metric for success? And there's no easy answer to that.

It's, there's no one answer. And so I realized, you know what? And this was after talking to maybe a hundred different experts on this. I realize it's not about 10,000 hours. It's what I'm going to call the 10,000 experiment rule, but it's actually even fewer experiments than that. So the key to getting good at any skill, I realize, is not necessarily studying it for 10,000 hours, but to experiment.

So figure out something that you haven't done, and that makes you uncomfortable, and figure out how to experiment with it. So an experiment is something that has little to no downside, and huge upside if it works. But even if the experiment fails, you still learn. So there's no real downside other than time or money, but there's upside in terms of knowledge and huge upside

if the experiment is a success. So an example might be Sarah Blakely develops this, you know, ladies' underwear, very little downside. She knew how it works. She was able to describe it. She made one product of it. And the upside. was a billion-dollar business, and the worst upside is that she would learn all about the fashion

industry and have fun being creative and so on. That was her worst-case scenario, her best-case scenario, which is what happened, makes her billions. So if you can do as many experiments as possible, you will succeed. And it probably is not 10,000, it's probably more like 100 experiments. And what I realized is that you don't have to be the best in the world at something, but you can very quickly be in the top 1% in the world by doing calculated experiments. So unlike most other stand-up comedians, I wouldn't just go on stage and do, oh, here's a premise and punchline about dating or about airplanes or whatever. Those are kind of like the everyday stand-up mediocre jokes. But I would go on a subway and do stand-up for every stop.

on a subway where I had an unfriendly audience. So that was an experiment. I remember one time I went on stage and rather than doing like a standard act, I did what I called the air piano to the song, Great Balls of Fire, because there's a lot of hand movements in the piano and great balls of fire.

And I would just do it exactly to all the, I would play the song and do all the piano movements. And you know what? That experiment failed. Nobody laughed or everybody was like, what the hell is this guy doing? but I thought it was funny and it was an experiment and so I did it and doing lots of experiments like that and comedy allowed me to have my own unique perspective and style which which catapults

you to the front of the line love it uh I want to open it up um for some questions let's go to david first uh Dave you ready to uh to go yeah sounds good thank you yeah um hey david hi james uh so like it actually I guess it kind of flows a little bit to what you were just speaking of as far as kind of current things or actual things. But I was curious while acknowledging that with, you know, the COVID pandemic, how much of the work life economy is going to change. And so much has already been discussed around kind of the technological and cultural shifts that remote work's going to have, how it's going to affect that kind of real estate markets,

the way we interact socially, international trade is kind of some of the major topics that are continually being discussed in the media. I'm really curious to hear if there's any particular skills, industries, or specific ideas that you've spent a lot of time recently thinking about or working on that you believe could hopefully put you in a position to continue to thrive, say, one to three years from now and whatever that new normal you believe might be when we get there. Yeah, it's such an interesting question because, I mean, you answered, the typical question, which is, what's the new normal going to look like? And, you know, some of

these things like we know remote work is going to be a big deal. Like Twitter just announced no employees at work. You know, every employee is going to be able to work at home. Google's exploring this. Lots of companies are exploring this. Every CEO I speak to is actually concerned about liability. If you have workers going to an office. And obviously then that has effects on, you know, all the things you mentioned, commercial real estate, there's going to be more automation, blah, blah, blah. So all those things have been discussed. We also know, you know, remote learning is going to be a big deal. And we know that every trend that was going to happen within the next 10 years is going to accelerate. It's going to happen within the next one year. So automation is not 10 years away,

it's one year away. And so, you know, remote learning is not 10 years away. It's one year away. And so I'm repeating what you just said. But I think there is a skill. There are a couple of skills that are very important. One skill that's extremely important, which I already talked about, is you've got to exercise the idea muscle. This is the time to start. And you can't just say, oh, I'm the type of person where inspiration hits me like lightning. No, it doesn't. If that muscle is not exercise, you're not going to be creative.

You're not going to, and you're not even going to know how to execute on ideas. Execution is a subset of ideas. Execution ideas are a subset of ideas. Execution is a subset of creativity. You have to exercise that idea muscle. But also, you have to be very good at leaning into uncertainty. Because although you said many things that are probably going to happen in the so-called new normal, we really don't know. Like, I can ask 100 people, will movie theaters be crowded?

And actually, most of them will say, no, movie theaters are going to die. And that might be true, but we don't really know. We don't know. We're all like drug addicts in rehab right now. So two months ago, it was like we were drug addicts. Now we've been two months in rehab. Guess what? None of us are using drugs anymore, and we're all swearing to God that we're never going to use drugs again.

Then once we get out of rehab, like every other drug addict, if we start hanging out with our friends and go to our normal places, we're going to start using drugs again. So no matter what we think is the new normal will be like, once things reopen, give it a month or two, we might all just be spitting on each other at restaurants again. Like, who knows? So that said, there's going to be a lot of uncertainty, but chances are there's going to be a lot of economic uncertainty. My back of the envelope math suggests to me that unemployment's going to settle down around 8 to 9 percent for a good long time. maybe a year, two years, three years. It's going to be a good four or five years before we could even consider being at full employment again for many reasons if we ever reached full employment again. Obviously related to things you were saying, AI, big data, you know, these are skill,

particularly big data is a skill that's going to be important to learn. So, you know, also there's going to be new business models. So what's the number one search product on Amazon? It's all related to medical, like surgical math, sanitizers, and so on. So here's one new business model that's going to start, which is every company that reopens is now going to need coronavirus compliance. So is your supply chain safe from infection?

Is your office spaces safe from infection? Are you doing the right kind of testing and tracing and so on? So there's an entire new industry that I haven't heard anyone talk about that's going to develop around compliance issues. It's kind of a boring industry, but it will be a multi-billion dollar industry. But here's other ideas. Like, given that we know restaurants might have a problem, and even walking around New York City, 20% of restaurants already are not just closed, but are out of business.

Like, I see it. Their storefronts are not just closed. They're for rent. And that means double that or triple that is actually going to go out of business. So what is a restaurant? When you think of a restaurant, you think of a place with tables and chairs and a kitchen and chefs and waiters and so on and a hostess and so on. But what is a restaurant really? A restaurant in its barest form is a kitchen and a menu and some food on the menu. And so what does that mean? It means I could rent space in a virtual kitchen. and I could create a menu, upload that menu to Grubhub and Uber Eats, and now I have a restaurant. That's my restaurant because people will only interact with my restaurant by ordering delivery. So I can say, oh, I'm going to create James's Kus Kus Kus Kemporeum.

So I'm going to have Kuskous Kus sandwiches, kuskouz with sugar as dessert, kuskouskous with, here's a Kus Rito, cuss-coose and a burrito with guacamole on it, and I'm going to make an entire cuss-couce menu. And guess what? I'm also going to make another restaurant. I'm going to call it, I don't know, let's make it up, like big cones. And so I'm going to take a commonly favorite food item, ice cream cones, and I'm going to make ice cream cones that are like a gallon of ice cream in a huge cone. And that's going to be the only item on my menu.

And now I'm going to upload that menu too, big cones to Grubhub. Now I have, I'm renting part of one legal kitchen. It's called a commissary kitchen. It's a regulated kitchen. I'm going to rent a tiny portion of a regulated kitchen. I'm going to create two menus. I'm going to upload them both, both those menus to Grubhub and Uber Eats and Seamless and whatever and DoorDash.

And now I have two restaurants. And I can start to see, oh, people are ordering, nobody's ordering the cuscus sandwiches, but people are ordering nonstop, these big vanilla ice cream cones. So now I can try out different restaurant ideas and do these experiments and double down on the restaurants that work. And it's a new way of thinking. Nobody thinks of restaurants as being as virtual. And no one thinks of the fact that one person can create 20 restaurants. You think, oh, no, I need 20 locations then.

Nah, you just need 20 menus. And, you know, so that's another business model that could get big, but also just thinking in these ways that it's no longer the standard routine. It's no longer, oh, I got to get an alcohol license, I got to get a kitchen license, I got to get health inspectors. It's everything's going to be different now. Every business model that's out there, oh, you're going to write a book? Well, okay, make your 10-page book, self-pubbushed on Amazon.

But you know what? Also, I've never seen anybody sell a book through an online course. Create an online course on Teachable Highbrow Coursera and price it double the price of your book. And the first lesson is, hey, here's the book and read it. Second lesson is answering questions about the book. And third lesson might be, you know, extra video material. revolving around the contents of that book. So I've never said, when people always ask, well, how do you market your book on Amazon?

Well, I've never heard anyone say, why do you make a teachable course where the main lesson is your book? And boom. So having new ways of thinking about business models is going to be important. There's going to be money in the economy, but that money is going to go in odd places that we can't predict and because of these weird stimulus packages. And since there's so much that's unpredictable, you have to reinforce your, you're ability to creatively think about things and also to enjoy uncertainty, which is something humans

don't really enjoy from an evolutionary perspective. Let's go to Jessica. I think yours and Matt's question have some similarities. So Jessica, how about you a fire away? Yeah, thanks, Ryan. So nice to meet you. Thanks much for everything you've shared so far. So I have for a while now struggled with creativity in general, thinking outside of the box, coming up with creative solutions. From the example you just gave, just rattling off restaurant ideas that I literally want to order from Grubhubb right now, and I'm planning on making bruscoos for lunch, you're clearly so creative. And I wonder, is that something that you were just born with? You're just a creative person, or is it something that you have certain practices or

habits that help you work on your creativity? Yeah. So we discussed a little bit earlier that, I mean, I don't think anyone is born creative or we're born with a little bit of creative, creativity, like kids are creative and curious and explore. But then we kind of lose it. We lose it when we have, you know, that regular job. We lose it when we go to school, by the way. So if you're just busy all day long going from, you know, history to biology to calculus to gym to six other classes. And then all night long you have homework, you're not going to be creative.

Creativity, as I said earlier, is a muscle. And any routine will deplete that muscle. It's just like walking. If I'm stuck in bed because of, let's say, a bicycle accident, if I'm stuck in bed for two weeks, my leg muscles will atrophy so fast I'll need physical therapy to walk again. And now it's the same thing with the idea muscle, with the creativity muscle. If you don't use it for a week or two, it will atrophy really, really quickly.

And I would say that's the case with 99.9% of the population. And it's not their fault. It's the way society, it's the way schooling is set up. It's the way jobs are set up where you're giving these rote tasks and it's hard to be creative. You're often punished for creativity. And you've got to explicitly practice writing 10 ideas a day down, 10 ideas every day. And the number 10 is important. So if I write down, I mentioned a list I did earlier of 10 ideas for Disney reality shows that would cater to nine-year-olds.

So it's easy for me to come up with the first one, the second one, the third one. But around idea number seven, I feel like my brain is just sweating. And I keep counting, like have I reached 10 yet? Like I'll count every 30 seconds, not realizing I just count of 30 seconds. of only seven, only eight. And then you really have to push yourself and you can't let yourself off the hook. You can't have an easy idea.

You can't say, oh, we're going to just do a show about all the world zoos. That's like an easy idea for nine-year-olds. No good for this list. So eight, nine, and ten, that's where you're building the idea muscle on those ideas. And if you do that every day, again, within three months,

you will literally feel as if your brain, the neurons in your brain have been rewired, and you will be set up to be more creative. But again, you have to do it every day, or it doesn't work, or the muscles atrophy, and you lose it, and then you have to start over again.

So, for instance, today, my idealist has been, and by the way, it doesn't have to be business ideas, it could be book ideas, it could be ideas for other companies. So, and by the way, don't be scarce about your ideas either.

So whenever I come up with ideas for other companies, I try to share them with the other companies. So I'll come up with 10 ideas for Amazon. I'll find someone at Amazon to email them to. I'll email the ideas. I've done this for every company. And as a result, I've actually visited the offices and gotten tours and the executives at Amazon, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Airbnb, other companies. Because I'll just say, oh, here's 10 ideas for Quora. Boom.

And the head of business development of Cora wants to talk to me about it. Airbnb. Oh, boom. I get asked to speak at the Airbnb open. Google. Get asked to do a Google talk. Amazon. I gave them 10 ideas for self-publishing.

I got a tour of all their self-publishing stuff, and they asked my opinion on ideas they were thinking about and on and on and on. So, but anyway, my ideas for today, but not business ideas at all. They're just like 10 ideas how the U.S. can afford another $2 trillion in stimulus. And so, yeah, I had to be creative. I had to look up stuff. I learned things I didn't know and came up with 10 unusual ways that probably won't work. But if I ever was president, I would try these ways to fund the stimulus.

I'm never going to be president. So it's not a big deal. James, I have one more question I want to hit before we take off. So I really appreciate your time investment today. A phrase that you've kind of flipped on its head has really impacted me and changed how I've behaved. And that phrase, the phrase that is common to be said is you should under promise and over deliver. Yet following your idea around this, I've changed how I behave because your thought process is over promise and over deliver. Can you explain more what it means to you to both over promise and over deliver?

Right. So let's say it works on every level. So let's say you and I were competing against each other to get a client. We're going to do whatever, build a website, whatever you want to, whatever business we're in. And I over promise and you under promise. So at a very basic level, you say, well, we're going to have a great website for you, and I'll get it done in two months for $20,000. And I'm going to overpromise. I'm going to say two months.

That's ridiculous. I'll get it done for you in two weeks. And now, of course, they're going to pick me because I'm promising that I'm a better result than you. So I win the client, first off. And your point is, well, you could also lose the client pretty quickly if you don't have to look. in two weeks. I'll deliver it in one week because, by the way, the reason you're saying two months is because you're busy with other clients and in your logistics schedule. You could fit them in a month and you could do it in a week. Website's not that hard, but you say two months to

give yourself, you're underpromising so that you know you can deliver on time. And so once I've overpomised and overdelivered, I delivered, I overpomise by two weeks and I over deliver it by delivering in one week. That's a client now for life. And they're thinking themselves, man, I could have gone with Ryan and I would have gotten it two months. This guy, James, he delivered it in a week and it was great. Now, let's say I fail and I don't deliver it in a week. I deliver it in three weeks. Okay, they're disappointed and I might not have the client anymore, but that's the way it goes. I'm going to get more clients to begin with so I can afford to lose more clients. And I still delivered a great product in three weeks that I got paid for and they could decide then whether

to use me or not. But if I always succeed in overpromising and over delivering, I'm going to have many more clients to choose from and many more opportunities to succeed to get not just a client for the next job, but a client for life. Not only that, underpromising is, by definition, lying. You know you can get it done in a month, but you're saying two months, you're lying so that so you can play it safe. Well, you know, A, you're lying. B, business is not about playing it safe. Business is about, you know, delivering a great product that's beyond the expectations of the client. And look, that's how I've built every single business. It's how I've built and sold every single business that I've ever built and sold is overpromise. And then even after a company buys my

company, I make sure that the first day, the day after the deal closes where now my company is within their company, I launch a new product that day so that immediately, because I could have launched that before and charged more for the business. So it shows that immediately I'm a team player and immediately they don't have buyers remorse and regret by my company. So, you know, I find it to be a technique. It's very successful. Well, even in writing a book.

Like I had a deadline to write a book. I always deliver before, I always deliver more pages and before the deadline so that they know. And then when they have their first set of edits and revisions, I always say, this is great. Love it. I'm going to work on each one of these. And I do. And then they know this is an author. They can have a relationship with.

It's not just a one-off author who they're going to dread working with. Yeah, I remember that process with my editor at McGraw-Hill, and she gave me, you know, I had a deadline to turn it in. And I said, I promise I'll turn in at least a month early and just create a new deadline. And it was because of that over-promise, over-deliver mentality, James, then turned it in about two months early. And because she said, don't say that. Everyone thinks they can do that. And then they always end up turn it in two months late. And I was like, well, that's just not going to be me. I feel like that's lying too. So I think it's a great way to live in general, but you do have to back it up. I think it's important. You've got to back it up because then your word and your integrity is in the line and that's everything.

So James, hey man, I can talk to you all day. I really appreciate, again, you investing more an hour with us today. Where would you send our viewers and the listeners to learn more about you online? Yeah. You can find me at James Altucher on TikTok. It's the latest social media platform I'm trying to get good at. So that's what you define me.

Do dance? No, no, I did do that once and I got criticism. And I realized, you know what? It was kind of, by the way, I was a professional break dancer as a kid. So I was able to do it. But it's not what people were going. Now I focus TikTok on the same way I focused my writing on something that's maybe storytelling. quasi-inspirational, interesting facts, something a little funny.

So I'm trying to find my voice on TikTok. It's a new creative medium that I'm trying to understand. I'm not sure going on podcasts is hitting the TikTok target demo, unless we're going to our kids' phones, maybe, and seeing the TikTok. There's more and more adults, though, going on TikTok. No, no. And I find it actually kind of entertaining. And I always thought, I'm never going to look at that.

But then you start and you get, it's like the YouTube rabbit hole. it can happen quickly on TikTok. Well, thanks again, James, man. It's always great catching up. Thanks for doing this, man. I look forward to the next one. Wow, James certainly is a fascinating and interesting guy. Thank you to those members of the Learning Leader Academy and my Learning Leader Circle for joining and being there live.

It made it a lot of fun. A few of the key takeaways that I picked up from James. vulnerability equals freedom and he said I don't hit publish unless I'm worried or I'm scared and I thought that is an interesting way to view your work have the willingness the guts and the confidence to be vulnerable that also builds trust then success is always on the other side of can't I love that quote I have not heard him say that before and to me that means being relentless and action-oriented. And sometimes you can't listen to the crowd

because success is always on the other side of can't. And then over-promise and over-deliver. Under-promising is lying. Think about how you can over-promise and over-deliver. Once again, thank you so much for continuing to spread the word and tell a friend or two about the learning leader show. Because you continue to do that, you give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. That us have fascinating conversations with really interesting people like James Altisher and then share them with the world. Because you do that,

I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk with you soon. Can we?