James Altucher and John Assaraf - Choose Yourself!

Hey everybody, this is John Assraf, CEO of Praxis now and New York Times best selling author. And with me is my friend James Altucher and he is the author of an amazing awesome book called Choose Yourself, Be Happy, Make Millions, Live the Dream. And that's what it's all about, is living your dream life. And when I got a hold of his book, he was introduced to me by another friend of mine who is just an absolutely magical person, Kamal. And, and he and I talked for about an hour and Choose Yourself is all about you choosing yourself to have an amazing life and really having it all, which is what it's all about. And so James is an author, he's a philosopher, he's an entrepreneur, he's a dad, he's a husband. He's got so many things that he's done. We're going to get into those today and we're going to talk about a few of the things that are in the book. And I wrote down some notes so you may see me just looking over here to the right. But he's got some simple daily practices he calls them, that are really magical when you apply them. And as you know, it's not a matter of gaining more information, it's about taking the information you gain and applying a little bit every single day and that yields consistent, amazing results in your life. So without further ado, James, great to have you with me.

John, I'm really excited to be here. I'm a big fan of all of your stuff, so this is really an honor. I was really actually surprised to hear from you and it's a pleasure to be on the show.

Well, it's great to be on with you and I love to meet amazing people who've got big huge hearts or making a difference in the world. And you're one of those people. So it's great to introduce you to the audience that follows some of the work that I do and I'm sure that they'll hop onto jamesaltature.com and follow yours. You've got some great content there also. So James, tell me about the book. And specifically you've had some major successes in business. You're an investor in some major companies right now. I know one of them is doing a billion in revenue. And so it's not like you've got to work and help people and be cavalier about it all. You're pretty down to earth and practical, pragmatic. And so tell me about Choose Yourself and how you came upon writing that book and really making a Difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands, not millions of people.

Sure. Well, it's a long story. Like any, you know, overnight thing, there's a 20 year backstory. But essentially I got into this rhythm of building and selling businesses and making a lot of money and then losing all the money. And like, not. I can't even brag and say, oh, I had like $10 million. Because I would go from $10 million to zero so quickly that it would be not even like a drunken rock star, you know, could claim 10, have the speed at which I would lose all my money and I would go bankrupt. I would lose my home, I would lost my family. And this wouldn't happen just once. It happened a couple of times. And so finally, I mean, I got to this point where I would even consider, you know, I would look at people, would say, oh, play with your kids. Your kids will always make you feel better. And I'm like, no, that doesn't work for me. Like, actually, maybe my kids would benefit more from my life insurance policy than they would benefit from me. And I would really consider killing myself because I wanted my kids to have a good life. And so finally I got to a point where, you know, I've got to figure out what is working for me when things are going up and what is not working for me when things are going down.

I love it.

Let's just start sticking to the things that I know work for me. And so that's when I started what I call the daily practice, which is, and it's just very simple, just every day, check the box. Am I physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually healthy?

One more time. So am I spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically happy?

Right? Happy or healthy?

Happy or healthy.

And I want to explain what that means because it's not like you should go to the gym and bench press £300, or you should be the most loving person in the world, like the Dalai Lama or whatever. You know, these are very hard things to do. So you're not going to. But the combination of all these things is extremely important. So what is physical health? It simply means being able to sleep eight hours a day because most of us are permanent insomniacs in every way. You know, we're stressed. We have email apnea, it's called where you're addicted to your screen. We're not really, as a society, used to sleeping eight hours a day. But this is incredibly important for energy and for focus. It also means take a walk, do some exercise. Whether it's yoga or whatever, your Preferred exercise is emotionally healthy. Be around people who love you and respect you. Too often we spend too much time with people who are negative, who argue with us, who put us down, who drain us. Mentally healthy. This means exercise the idea muscle. Every day, I write down 10 to 20 ideas. Not business ideas. It could be ideas about anything. The idea is not to come up with the most important business idea of the century, but to just exercise that muscle. If you don't exercise your leg muscles, for instance, for two weeks, you actually need physical therapy to walk again. And it's the same thing with the idea muscle. If you don't exercise it every day, after a few weeks, you'll need idea muscle therapy to have ideas again. And so I recommend this. And within six months, you'll see, you'll be like an idea machine. Your ideas will be flowing. No matter what situation you're in, a personal situation, a professional one, you'll become an idea machine. And spiritually healthy. People shy away from the word spiritual. So I almost don't like using that word. It's like a funky sort of word. But all it really means is every day, wake up and figure out five to 10 things you're grateful for. Learn to be grateful, to look around and be grateful for the things that are around you, and different things every day so. So that you exercise that muscle, and that's spiritually healthy. And really, if you do that, you're going to have so much energy. And I can tell you this just from my own experience, my life changes completely, 100% every six months. And I know now, having written about this, I first wrote about the daily practice about four or five years ago. I've gotten thousands of letters since then. I'm not selling anything here. I'm not selling the daily practice that I just described. You don't even have to buy my book. I just gave it all away. So I know from thousands of letters it's worked for other people and it's really made their lives better.

I love it. I wrote something down as you were talking about exercising your idea muscle, and it just brought me back. Many years ago, after we took one of my companies public, I retired for three years. And when I got back into business, I felt like I didn't trust myself. I didn't feel like I was sharp enough. I felt like it was a strain to think about ideas and strategies and tactics and what I needed. And when you said that, I was like, holy mackerel, you're so right. So walk me through if you can, and walk the people that are watching this right now. A Day in the Life of James Altucher. And so you're like, what would your. How much time would you invest on a little physical exercise and some emotional work and mental and spiritual. Because there's a lot of people I know are thinking, oh my God, I don't have enough time to do the things that I want to do and have to do. Now there's some new daily practices that James is saying, well, add this onto your plate.

And I really don't want to add anything to anybody's plate. Part of the idea is if they're too busy, it means that. And I think people will acknowledge this because this happens to me. If you're too busy, it means there's probably some leak in your life where something that you're doing which is probably not the most positive. I remember one time a few years ago I was out with some friends that I hadn't seen in years. So I was really grateful to have dinner with them and they were going on and on about how they were too busy to write their novels. And the next thing I knew, it turned from like a one hour dinner to a six hour dinner. We closed down the restaurant and I'm thinking to myself, no wonder you've never finished your novels. Like you've both been drinking the entire night. So you're going to wake up tired tomorrow. This is an extra six hours out of your life. Like we could have just said hello and updated in an hour. And you know, how do you get things done? I don't know, you're too busy. So a lot of times people.

No, go ahead. What I'm hearing is often you have.

To take a step. Sorry, repeat that.

Go ahead. We're having just a short delay.

Oh, so often I advise people, take a step back, do this daily practice. You're going to start to find the times in your life when you'll have more energy and you'll be able to do things. But worst comes to worst, I have something I call the simple daily practice, which just means take one thing. Maybe it means be grateful for five minutes a day, or maybe it means sleep for eight hours a day. Just do one thing and you'll find that it's like a spider web that builds out other parts of the daily practice. You'll suddenly find more energy and more time for it. It's going to be a very natural process because this is the most natural thing of all to be healthy and energetic and thriving human beings. There's nothing more natural than this. Everything else is unnatural. So just start off simply pick one thing you want to do that you can work with and do that for as little time as you want.

I totally agree with that. And one of the things that I'd like to add to that is one of the best ways to make room for one of these new things or two of these new things is just take out something that isn't as productive and doesn't give you the same rate of return on your investment of time. So pull something out and put in a better habit and make that one of your keystone habits. Is what these are. These are keystone habits. One of the things that I wrote down that I think is really, really fascinating is in your book choose yourself and you talk about be happy, make millions, and live the dream. You haven't yet. We've been on for about 15 minutes. You haven't once yet said, focus your day on making more money.

Right, because money becomes a natural outcome of the other things I've said. So if you do this, it's like I said, once I started doing this daily practice, I no longer thought about money. And it was maybe the first time in my life I was not thinking about money in my bank account every single day. And yet from that moment on, I've made more money than I've ever made before. And it's because suddenly you have the energy to devote to these other areas of your life, to coming up with ideas, to being with people who actually love you and respect you and want to help you, to be with people who bring you upwards, to suddenly have this energy. You're going to come up with business ideas. You're going to come up with ideas to help other people make money. You know, the ways in which I've made money, none of them have been actually with coming up with a business. A lot of it's been introducing to other people. And then I get something in the middle or help giving advice to somebody, and then they give me a piece of their company or whatever. So all of these things have worked out very well for me. And it's just a matter of every single day doing what I can to be healthy myself and to again, generate ideas. So you ask, what's a day in the life like? I wake up, I start, I read for a while just to kind of get my mental juices flowing. I write down my ideas, then I write usually an article or a blog post. I enjoy writing, so that's like my creative outlet. And then from there I'll exercise my wife's a yoga teacher. So usually I'll do either some yoga or I'll take a walk around the block or again, very simple. Doesn't have to be going to the gym and lifting huge weights and running on a treadmill for an hour. And then I'll do my business activities and that could take a few hours and then I'm done for the day. Then I'm relaxed and I'll just do relaxing things for the rest of the day. I do that on purpose because I know I want to sleep eight hours. I'm an insomniac by nature, so if I'm on the computer answering emails at 8 o' clock at night, I'm not going to get eight hours of sleep.

I love it. One of the things that I'm getting a visual on is you're really treating your vessel, the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual vessel, in an optimal way so that it could perform better for you in all of the other areas of your life. And so without having that balance, I could see how you could be frazzled. Not just you, but everybody could be frazzled. But this is almost like a grounding practice every day for you that allows you to exponentially achieve better results because you're taking time to slow down, to think, to be versus do, do, do, do, do.

Right? Because think about the body. Your body is dependent on your heart beating your, you know, 80 times a minute or 100 times a minute. And if something's blocking the blood, you're going to have a heart attack and die. So it's the same with all of these other bodies, you know, emotional, mental, spiritual, that if they're not working and humming in a healthy way, then there's going to be a blockage and you're going to get sick and die. So it'll be in emotionally damaging relationships that will then translate to physical illness or spiritual illness or mental illness or whatever. So it's very important to do this grounding because A, you want to live and then B, you want to thrive. So if you're sick, you can't, you can't do anything on the day that you're sick. So you want to do the things to avoid being sick. But it's not just physical, it's all these other areas. People are just focused on chasing the horizon. There's money over there at the horizon, so they run and run forever, but there's still a horizon. They never catch it. You have to find what you need right here in your area, right here. Because you have everything you need right Inside of you. And that's what you should focus on first. It's very important.

I love that. Well, it's very, very sound principles. And just in the title of Choose Yourself, I'm sitting here thinking, when was the last time? And this is for the people that are watching right now and listening. When was the last time you made a conscious effort to choose yourself, to really put yourself first and take care of you?

Well, it's interesting you ask that because often when you write something, and I'm sure you've seen this in your own writings, it's because you need. Literally, and I'm making a joke here, but you need the answer. So I needed to figure out how to choose myself because I was always dependent on, oh, am I going to get into a good school? Or am I going to get a good job? Or will this person like me? Or will this publishing company publish me? I was always letting the gatekeepers, other people choose me. Will this person buy my company? Will this person invest in my company? And I was always stressed out. Will all these people like me? You know, Ugh. Like so many people, I was dependent on liking me that it was driving me crazy. So to some extent, this daily practice was a way for me to get out of that addiction, almost that cycle of depending on other people choosing me. Because if you're not choosing yourself, if you're letting other people choose you, it's never going to be as good as if you choose you. So I make that conscious effort every single day. And that's why I have to do this daily practice or I'll die again. Like, I'll fall apart, I'll get sick, I'll go broke, whatever. Like, I'm reliant on keeping myself healthy. I have to consciously do it every day.

So I love that. This is like a life support system for you that is expansive and allows you to grow versus be a detractive system, which is everybody else being first. I love that.

Yeah, it's extremely important for me because I don't know. If I don't do it, I know I'm gonna start to wonder, oh, did I get what's my Amazon rank? Or once, am I getting these Twitter followers? Or is this person investing in this company that I'm invested in? I get too anxious instead of seeing the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is about having a peaceful and free life where I can make choices and I could choose myself or whatever it is I want to do. That should be the goal for everybody.

I love that. Now, let me ask you a question. There's a little voice that came in my head right now that says, well, isn't that selfish, you know, to choose yourself? You know, you've talked about your wife, and isn't it selfish if I choose myself? Because a lot of people don't know how to choose themselves. They've learned so much, help everybody else, be good to everybody else, but they really haven't learned how to choose themselves. And so when people think that, well, that's selfish, if I choose myself, where do you take them?

Well, a. It's incredibly selfish, and I'm an incredibly selfish person. But I will say that the best analogy to that is when the airplane is crashing and the oxygen and you have a little baby next to you and the oxygen masks come down. What's the advice that they always give you?

Yeah, put it on yourself first, then put it on the baby.

Right. So you're actually gonna let a little baby, potentially, your little baby potentially die because the airline is telling you first, put the oxygen mask on your own face. Because that's actually, it turns out in this contradictory way, that's actually the best way to save the life of your baby. Nothing is more important than your baby. You're biologically bound. Keep this baby alive. Like it's a gut instinct. And yet that's why the airline has to tell you, no, don't put the mask on your baby. Put it on yourself first. Otherwise your baby might die if you don't save yourself first. So it's the same thing. You have to become the beacon. You don't know all the ships that are coming to shore right now. It's a foggy night, and you don't know all the ships that are trying desperately to come to shore in the storm. And. But you have to clean your windows and make your lights shine bright, and then you know you're doing the best thing for all the ships that are out there, and that's incredibly important. So choosing yourself is the absolute most important way to help millions of people. And I know this from, again, from my own experience, and I've seen it happen with others. It's really amazing. For me, it's been really, actually personally amazing to see it happen with. With others. I've seen so many people, their lives changed, and in the lives of the people around them changed. It's a ripple effect. It's your law of resonance, you know that where what happens inside of you, it just ripples out like something dropping in the middle of the ocean and hitting every shore. But you have to have the power or else the ripple dies out and doesn't hit every shore. So that's. So, yes, it's selfish. Just like that ripple wants to go to every shore, and you have to want to go to every shore.

Oh, I love that. That was. That's as good of an analogy as I have heard in a very, very long time. You have to be the beacon. You gotta, you know, you've got to be selfish. And in being selfish, you're actually being that light, that brightness, that ripple that can go further and touch many, many more people's lives. And so I absolutely love that. If people want to pick up your book, choose yourself. When you and I talked earlier and you told me you've got, you know, you're selling the book right now to get into the hands of millions of people for 99 cents, I almost said, are you nuts? But you really want to help as many people as possible, don't you?

Sure. I mean, the first three months that the book was out, now the book's been out eight months. But I was. Even if people were, I didn't want to give the book away for free because I knew that people don't value things that they get for free. So initially I had this offer. If you could prove to me, and that meant just showing me the receipt and a photograph of yourself reading the book. If you could prove to me that you actually are reading the book, and I'll trust you on that, on that photograph, then I was even willing to send people their money back. And I sent quite a significant amount of money back. And I also gave people the option to donate it to charity. And I support Women for Women International. I had to let that offer expire, else for the rest of my life.

I'd be sending texts.

But right now, for your viewers, it's 99 cents on Amazon and the Kindle. I really hope people read it and benefit from it and tell me their stories afterwards because I selfishly like to hear how it's helped people. And that's my goal with it.

I love it. All right, everybody, if you've been watching, then your heart's probably beating a little bit faster. You've got a bunch of pearls and gems, and you are now ready to be the beacon in your own life so that you hit all the shores where with your amazing ripple. Go to Amazon.com right now. Go to Kindle. Pick up Choose Yourself by James Altucher for 99 cents. You're crazy if you don't. It's chock full with amazing pearls of wisdom. Don't even ask about it. Go to Amazon and pick it up right now. James, thank you so much for agreeing to do this. I know you're busy.

Thank you, James.

Absolutely Great pearls of wisdom.

I'm too busy for you.

Thank you, buddy. You have an amazing, amazing day.

You, too.

Everybody go pick it up on Amazon right now. Choose yourself.