Skip The Line with James Altucher: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Success Story Podcast. Today, we're pulling a timeless EO Fire episode from the archives, so the giveaway may not be active, and we'll be breaking down how to skip the line. To drop these value bombs, I brought James Altucher and EO Fire Studios. James has started and ran more than 20 companies and is currently an investor and an advisor to over 30. James realized today's standard view of success comes with conditions and that the only effective way to be successful is to choose yourself.

0:41So today, at Financial, we're going to be talking about experimenting with anything in life. If you do 100 experiments in the area you love, you will be successful and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to James and our sponsors. The Hustle Daily Show, hosted by Juliet Bennett-Ryla, Rob Leters, Ben Berkley, and Mark Dent, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Hustle Daily Show brings you a healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat, informative takes on business and tech news, like a recent episode on hackers versus casinos, where the hosts talk about MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment and the devastating potential of cyber attacks.

1:19Listen to The Hustle Daily wherever you get your podcasts. is now your time. Visit Thrivetimeshow.com to see testimonials of how Clay Clark's business coaching has helped over 2000 entrepreneurs to dramatically increase profitability. It's month to month and less money than an average minimum wage employee. Schedule your free consultation today at Thrivetimeshow.com. James, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? First off, Fire Nation, glad to be back. I'm a member of the Fire Nation. So glad to say hello to my compadres also in the nation.

2:00And yeah, so something I believe that a lot of people don't, I think it's not as important as people think to be the best at something, whether it's a skill or a product that you are making or a concept that you're working on, it's not as important to be the best or even better than average in order to make a ton of money at that very product or business or concept or whatever. So it's more important to be unique than to be better. Well, speaking of unique, Fire Nation, James is unique. He's always been a unique individual. He's always carved his own path. Although at the same time, as he's mentioned, like he's also all about learning from others.

2:48That's why he's been part of Podcasters Paradise for all these years and part of Fire Nation. So he's always learning. He's always curious and he's always doing new, unique things as well. And you have a new book, James, we're going to kind of be focusing on here today, which is called Skip the Line. So you're, you know, one of your most successful books was called Choose Yourself. And that kind of has a self-explanatory title in with it. But I feel like skip the line can mean a whole lot of different things. So what is skip the line? Well, you know, when you're at McDonald's and there's a long line, but you really want French fries, it's kind of a way to just shove everybody aside and be first in line.

3:28So you get those French fries really fast. Yummy. I just wish that French fries were on my diet because they are fantastic, but unfortunately they're not. So you just made me hungry, James, but whatever. That was my intention. And yes, to the audience, I was kidding. That's not what the book's about. But seriously, what the book is about is that I've switched for better or for worse. I've, as John knows, I've made money and gone broke several times, several frustrating, painful, depressing times. And for many times, I've switched careers five or six times. And when I say switched careers, it's not like I went from, you know, being a newspaper reporter to being an editor or being a, you know, personal injury lawyer to being, uh, another kind of lawyer.

4:11I went from being like a computer programmer to working in the entertainment industry, to starting a hedge fund, to writing finance books, to building, uh, websites and on and on. I've, uh, and every single time I've switched careers, first off, it was always something I was really passionate about and obsessed with. Second, every single time. And John, I'm curious if you've ever experienced this, people would always tell me, James, you just, you just can't do that. Like you can't, you can't just run a hedge fund. You have to get, you're, you're, you're, you're 32 years old. You have to get like a, an MBA and then work at Goldman Sachs and pay your dues.

4:49And maybe in 20 years you'll be good. Or, or when I switched to doing standup comedy, comedians would tell me, you can't, you can't just, you have, You have to earn this. You have to like first you do open mics and then you do smaller clubs and you have to hang around and it's the 10 ,000 hour rule and blah, blah. Every single time people told me I couldn't skip the line and it would be frustrating to me. And it wasn't like I was arrogantly trying to say, oh, no, you're wrong. I'm going to do this. No, it was just that I was obsessed with wanting to be good at something. And it's not good enough to just be good.

5:24but you also have to monetize it so that you can continue to do the things you love. And again, I always say for better or for worse, but my passions would switch or a career would end for me and industry would end for me and I'd have to switch again. And there's a lot of reasons I would have to start from the bottom. And I always had to figure out how do I actually avoid the 10 years everyone's telling me about? How do I just start a hedge fund and be successful at it or go straight to the top of performing all over the world at stand-up comedy or, you know, go straight to the top of, you know, being an entrepreneur in an industry that was already crowded.

6:07So these are key things. And again, it all starts with, I was passionate about something and I needed to develop the skills, not to be the best, but to monetize enough skills to monetize, but I also need to understand the skills of monetization, which is a different skill set completely. And so this book, Skip the Line, is about how do you be not the best in the world at something, but okay, maybe in the top 1%, which is a very much larger group than being the best at something. And then how do you also monetize whatever it is you're interested in? If you're interested in gardening, how do you monetize it?

6:43If you're interested in making, if you're interested in the sports, how do you monetize it? If you're interested in comedy or podcasting or writing or finance, how do you monetize it? It's not so easy. And so I wanted to write a book that covered both lanes as opposed to one or the other. 100 % James. I mean, listen, it's oftentimes Fire Nation, the gatekeepers too. They're the ones that are kind of poo-pooing and being like, oh, you can't do that. Like, no, there's a process you have to go through. Like, no, you just got to get in the back of the line. And I heard that over and over again, when I was deciding to start my first daily podcast, interviewing entrepreneurs.

7:22And these were from the OGs. These are from the gatekeepers. This is from Cliff Ravenscraft, the podcast mastermind. This is even from our, our dear friend, Jamie Masters, who was my one-on-one mentor. Guess what? They wanted the best for me and they gave me 99 % brilliant advice that I did follow, but they were both adamant that John, you cannot do a daily podcast interviewing entrepreneurs. You will fail. Just do what everybody else is doing. Get in the back of the line, do a once a week show. That's what everybody does. That's what you need to do as well. So get in the back of the line and just put in your reps.

7:54And over time, hey, maybe it's going to happen. But I said to myself, does anybody get good at something doing it once a week or four times a month? Like I got to put in the reps. I'm a bad interviewer. I'm a bad podcast host right now. I've never done it before. let me put in those reps. And I had the passion. I combined it with skills over time because I was doing it every single day, which as James said, gave me the potential to make some money, the potential for that monetization. So you've developed a methodology behind skipping the line, James. Let's talk about that. I look back not only through my own life, like every time I I switched interests.

8:33What did I do to get in that top 1 %? And again, as John, you and I have had conversations about, and you discuss this even in your book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, it's not good enough to be the top 10 in the world. It's important to be good and to have skills. And let's just call it the top 1%, the top 2%. But that's a big audience if it's a very popular area. But it's also important to be unique. And that segues into monetization. But let's just talk about going from scratch to being in the top 1%, which I've had to do many times. Like I had to learn how to invest in order to be a professional hedge fund manager.

9:12I had to learn about writing in order to work at HBO. I had to learn about comedy. It's very hard to be a good standoff comedian, as any comedian knows, or anyone who's even tried to get up on stage and make people laugh knows. or being a podcaster, John, as you know, it's not, we, you and I both know many podcasters who should just pack it up and never do a podcast again. Cause they didn't, they didn't know what skills they needed to learn. They didn't really hone their, their craft and so on. And, and again, I'll get to this in a second, but it's not a lot of books. There's a lot of books about learning, but nothing about how to monetize and learn at the same time.

9:55But I'll get to that in a second, but just learning there's this thing called the 10 ,000 hour rule, which is like, Oh, 10 ,000 hours of dedicated practice. And you'll be the best in the world. This is just BS. And I hate it because I'm right now I'm 53 years old. What if I switch interests again? I'm going to be 70 by the time I'm good. They tell me. So I realized looking back through my own experiences, plus the stories of many others that I always literally skip the line by experimenting. So what do I mean by that? Like, let's say, well, I'll give you an example from comedy and I'll give you an example from investing.

10:37So in comedy, everyone was telling me, you can't do this. You need lots of like hours and hours of stage time. You need to know this, this, this, this. Yes. So, uh, and when you starting out, you can't get a lot of stage time because no, none of the comedy clubs know who you are. So what I did was an experiment and X, and by the way, an experiment should start with a theory. Like, Hmm, if I do this, will I learn something? Will I get better? Uh, and if I do X, Y, and Z and other qualities of an experiment, it should be super cheap because you're going to be doing lots of them. And it should be real easy to set up and not take that much time.

11:14And it should have very little downside. In fact, no downside, but it should have enormous upside. So as an example, I did lots of experiments when I was trying to get good very quickly at standup comedy, which is a very difficult skill. And I went one time I went on a subway and I videotaped the whole thing so I could watch myself later and learn from it. But so I had someone come with me and I remember going on a subway and saying I was going to do standup comedy on the subway car because you can't find a more hostile audience than a New York City subway at rush hour. Everyone's returning home.

11:48They're miserable. They do not want to hear you telling jokes on the way to like Coney Island, you know, all the way from Manhattan. And so I went on the subway and I told my friend who was videotaping me, you know what, forget it. There's zero chance I'm going to do this because it seemed really scary and everyone looked kind of mean. And, but then I asked my friend to turn on the video camera and let's just see what happens. And then I just started doing standup. and every stop I would switch to a different subway car. So I had lots of different audiences. In a sense, I had a lot of, I got a lot of stage time extremely quickly.

12:22I learned how to deal with hostile audience. You know, I did this more than once. I, you know, learned how to get very quickly to the laugh because people are constantly, you know, you don't have that much time to get their attention. So you have to get to the laugh as quickly as possible, like a good comedian should. But I wasn't doing, I wasn't able to do it that time, you know, at least in clubs. So I learned on the subway and, you know, so there was no, what's the downside to that? It was, it was free or the price of a subway token. It didn't take that much time. I, that first time I did it for about two hours.

12:55And the worst case scenario is a bunch of strangers heckled me or whatever, right? Who cares? But I was scared anyway. And then the upside actually was enormous because while I was doing it, I was thinking to myself, you know what, this is almost like this, this is almost like a weird monologue for a late night TV show. So the next time I went down to the subway, I brought a friend of mine. You might know AJ Jacobs. He had just, he had just written a book. So I interviewed him on the subway and we interacted with the other people on the subway. I interviewed him about his book. I had a musical guest, which was someone banging on garbage cans, like they were drums in the subway station.

13:33And I created a whole like late night TV show format out of a subway, which I then pitched to an agent. So that was a second experiment that came out of that. The agent said, no, this is not for me, but there could have been, which is, that was my worst case scenario. Um, but there was huge upside there as well, which is, I could have been a late night TV show on a subway. So these experiments are kind of fun. They, they taught me a lot. They have huge upside, but most of them, like all experiments, most fail, which means you get the downside, which is still not bad. And at least I get a story out of it.

14:08Another, I'm always in the middle of maybe five to 10 experiments at every, at any given point. Well, James, let's hold on for a second. I want to, I want to get into another experiment because I think that these are super critical because people can actually now picture themselves doing these experiments in different places where, again, I want to go through these things. You need to do experiments, Fire Nation, that are super cheap, that have little downside, but potentially even no downside, but enormous upside, like enormous, because you're actually getting skills that you could leverage and scale in the future.

14:40Because what is really the downside of some random subway car in New York City going to Coney Island just being like, this guy's not funny, like nothing. Of course, maybe you aren't funny, because you're still putting in the reps. You're still doing the thing. Like it's super cheap, little to no downside with enormous upside. And Fire Nation, we have another one of James' experiments, plus some other amazing things you don't want to miss when we get back from thanking our sponsors. The fourth quarter is here. It's time to hit your revenue targets, finish strong, and win the quarter. But before you can win Q4, you have to close deals.

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17:35That means no messing around with buying ingredients you might only use once and no repeat visits to the grocery store for forgotten items. Oh, and did I mention that HelloFresh is America's number one meal kit? Go to HelloFresh.com slash 50EOF and use code 50EOF for 50 % off plus free shipping. That's 50 % off plus free shipping when you visit HelloFresh.com slash 50EOF and use code 50EOF. So James, I loved your first experiment example. It was just fantastic. I was literally picturing you doing that in the subway with the garbage cans banging. I mean, it was just like I love how you painted that visual and just letting people realize that this is literally where you can start.

18:24Not only where you can start, where you should start. And I interrupted you when you were about to share another experiment. So take that away. I started writing for thestreet.com back in 2002. They're a popular website about investing in finance and stocks. and I wanted to do an experiment. So I wanted to basically, there were a lot of bloggers out there, random bloggers with no traffic who would blog about stocks and investing. And some of them were good, some of them weren't. But every morning I wanted to just, I called it the daily blog watch and I would basically link, here are my 10 favorite blog posts from this morning.

19:04And I would maybe put one or two sentences of why it was my favorite and I would link to them. And so why is this an experiment? Well, first the street.com was very nervous about linking out. Many websites were like this. We're very nervous about, they were about linking outside of their site where they lose their traffic. And my argument was no, if people like the first link, they'll come back to the street.com to see the second link and so on. And then they'll come back every day to see the daily blog, watch what, what they missed. So that was experiment number one with that. And it was good for me because it took 10 minutes to write this article as opposed to many articles.

19:37So it became the most popular article every day on the street.com. So that was experiment number one. And it allowed me to experiment with, you know, get better at what this was my first professional writing job. So it allowed me to get better professionally at, you know, having ideas that could work and formats that could work for writing. And so I went on to do this for the wall street journal, the financial times and other sites. Second, there was an experiment here as well, which is that I didn't realize how much traffic I would be driving to all of these bloggers. And so I built this really nice community of bloggers that knew me really well because they could always tell when I linked to them because the traffic would shoot up to their blog.

20:20So when I several years later, when I started a business in this, my own kind of financial media internet business, it was called stock picker. Uh, I wrote to all of these bloggers that I had been linking to for years. And what, and I just said, Hey, check out my new site. Well, of course they then blogged about it and blogged about it favorably. Uh, because for years I'd been building in this relationship by driving traffic to them. So that was the experiment worked years later when I, cause I built up this huge network and the experiment of asking them to then asking all these bloggers to go to my brand new website.

20:56I had a million, um, subscribers the first month that I released. So in that business sold very, very quickly. So that was an example of another experiment or, you know, let's say, you know, a friend of mine, um, he'd really love to quit his job and maybe start a restaurant. Uh, cause he's an amazing cook. He's really good with making any kind of like pork or sausage product. And, and his goal maybe is to own a restaurant. And, but that's not an experiment. Like owning a restaurant is a big commitment. So I was like, why don't you, you know, why don't you upload a menu of like with one item on it, like some kind of pork sandwich or whatever, and upload it to Uber Eats and allow people to order delivery for a day or two and work out of a, you know, a cloud kitchen, like a commercial kitchen.

21:50And we know, you know, you have friends in the restaurant business who asked to use their kitchen for a day. and you know, lo and behold, he gets, it's just an experiment. It takes one day. He would be cooking anyway. No downside. Maybe the worst case is nobody orders and he got a ton of orders and people loved it. So now he's actually considering the path to leaving his job and becoming a restaurant owner or starting a restaurant, or maybe just starting a delivery business or a food truck business. The world is open to him because he knows people love the product. And So you can do it. And by the way, it doesn't have to just be about business.

22:26It could be sometimes I'll do a blog post just to experiment to see, is this getting more interaction than, or I'll do an article or something. Is this getting more interaction than my usual post? That might be a topic for a book. So if I'm thinking of pitching a book, I might do a mini version of the book as an article and then demonstrate, oh, when publishers ask me, I could demonstrate, say, this got five times as much, as many page views as my typical article. So I know people are interested in this. That was an experiment. So you can experiment in anything in life, really. I once wanted to learn about Kickstarter.

23:03So as an experiment, this is when Trump was tweeting, he wants to buy Greenland. So I didn't know anything about Kickstarter at all. So I figured, okay, let's, I'm going to do an experiment. I'm going to start a Kickstarter project where I'm going to, I need to raise$100 million to buy Greenland. and it also, the experiment also allowed me to research Greenland. I didn't know why a president of the United States would want to buy Greenland. Now I do know. And it allowed me to experiment with writing because instead of just writing a typical article, like here's why, you know, Trump wants to buy Greenland.

23:37I did it in the format of a Kickstarter project while also learning about Kickstarter. And it was successful enough. I don't want to say it was successful, like yours, Kickstarter project with the Freedom Journal, but people started, I was up to several thousand dollars before Kickstarter shut me down because they realized I was not serious about it. And they didn't want to have be they didn't want to get the chargeback fees on the credit cards. But so that was my downside of the experiment. My upside was I learned Kickstarter. I learned about Greenland and I expanded my repertoire of, you know, writing techniques.

24:10So and writing formats that are interesting. So these are you could do experiments with anything in life, whether it's relationships or products or books or businesses. I mean, I do experiments that have nothing to do with business, but have to do with skills. So like if I want to get better at chess, okay, let's experiment playing with this random, you know, opening that, that is very rare. And let's see what happens. Do people, uh, uh, know it, will this improve my chess? Well, will I win games? It's just an experiment. So these are all types of experiments, not just for business, but to get better at skills.

24:44And so I call it, in the book, I call it the 10 ,000 experiment rule. But if you do a hundred experiments in the area you love, you will be super successful in that area. I know this for a fact. I've done it over and over and over again. And then I have other concepts too, like break down a skill into micro skills. Like John, you know this more than anybody. Podcasting is not just about, you know, oh, uploading an audio file to the right, you know, to Apple and now you have a podcast to be a good podcast. There's no such skill as podcasting. There's a podcasting is like a basket of micro skills.