Jon Morrow: The Man Who Changed the Rules [From the Archive]

23:49I actually got job offers. When I graduated college, so I went to UNC Charlotte. What did you major in? I majored in English literature. When I graduated, I had actually 12 job offers. From where? From different places. Everywhere from the Food Lion, which is a grocery store chain. They wanted me to be a manager to a radio station because I managed a radio station in college to two top real estate firms because my father was a real estate developer and he taught me a lot about real estate. So they offered me jobs. And my father also offered me a job. And I couldn't accept any of them. And some of the jobs from the real estate firms, they were six-figure job offers right out of college.

24:41James Altucher:Why do you feel you couldn't accept any of them? Because if I did, I would lose all of my medical benefits. Unless you wrote the check. Unless I wrote the check. And it wasn't quite enough money to be able to pay for everything myself. And at the time, I couldn't get insurance. This was before Obamacare. So, you know, it's a pre-existing condition. If I went and asked for insurance, they would just laugh at me, you know. So, yeah, I was trapped and frustrated. So what I started doing was writing articles for free for different blogs on the web. What would you write about? What were some of your first blogs?

25:22I was writing about, at first I started with personal finance because my father taught me a lot. And I even worked for my father for two years totally free of charge. The deal that we made was he would basically pay all of my bills and everything. And I would come work for him. so it was a way to get around the problem.

25:45James Altucher:What did you do for him? I raised money for him. So he's a real estate developer, and he needed investors. And one of the things that I learned, so being in a wheelchair has certain advantages, okay, that most people never exploit. But I do. So, I mean, you really shouldn't feel sorry for people in wheelchairs. I mean, when I go to the DMV, they let me to the front of the line. People give me discounts on things all the time, even though I don't ask for them. And one of the other things I learned growing up was that if I tried to ask people for something, they almost never said no. So let's say your dad was, he had an idea to develop some land into a shopping complex or whatever, and needed investors.

26:38James Altucher:you would make the appointment and you would go to the person's office. Okay, someone would help you presumably. You get to the person's office and you're there and you're pitching the dream. And what would their reactions be? So I would cold call on different investors. I'd show up at their office. Number one, they're not going to throw you out. You're in a wheelchair. People would feel terrible about that. I would sit there and talk to the secretaries until they could find a moment to squeeze me in. I would go in and I would talk to them about whatever their development was. And the only thing I would ask them to do is if they were interested just to go see it.

27:24I wouldn't ask them for money. I would just say, you know, do you want to take a trip out to the site? and going in there and talking to them like that, I had almost a 100 % close rate. Almost nobody said no.

27:40James Altucher:No to the visit or no to eventual money? No to the visit. And we ended up constructing the visits to where we would bring 10 people out at a time and my father would get like the mayor to show up and talk to them about it, do this whole show and we would spend time with them it was all really impressive we would show them all the numbers and literally to those meetings too we never had anyone leave without writing a check take a quick break if you like this episode I'd really really appreciate it it means so much to me please share it with your friends subscribe to the podcast email me at altitra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed.

28:30James Altucher:Thanks.

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30:06James Altucher:Run me through the economics of what a real estate project looks like. So let's say it's a shopping complex or I don't know, what kind of complex would it be? So the main thing he did was he would buy farmland from families and then he would get it rezoned and he would put in the utilities, you know, electricity, plumbing, all of those things. And then he would sell the land to other developers that would then build whatever he had zoned for. So it could be shopping centers, it could be neighborhoods, it could be whatever. But all he handled was basically the land part of the deal. I kind of feel like this is a clean business to go into.

30:47James Altucher:You don't have to deal with construction companies and all the architectural approvals and all this stuff, you kind of have to, you have incentivized sellers, like let's say families that are no longer into farming for various reasons. You buy their land, not cheap, but relative to what it is. Rezoning it involves building a relationship with the mayor and the town council. Like, hey, we're going to bring in more taxes. We're going to build out a suburb and it's going to bring in more money for the town. And then you simply flip. Exactly. That seems like a very good business model. It is. And my father made a ton of money.

31:22I mean, over the years, he's made millions and millions of dollars to win this. Because typically when you rezone the land, it doubles or triples in value immediately. And what he would do, and it's very clean, he would even get contracts with the other developers who were going to buy the land, and he would get the contracts contingent upon rezoning.

31:45James Altucher:Because their model is to build and then to make X amount more. they don't want to deal with the farmland and buying the initial land and dealing with the rezoning. So everybody's doing their kind of part of the, almost like the supply chain from farmland to office complex. Exactly. So, and what my father would do is he would get an option on the property where, so he would pay them, he would say, okay, I'll give you a hundred thousand but I'm going to go in and get your land rezoned. And if it's rezoned, I'll buy it for X price. If it doesn't get rezoned, I'll walk away, but you keep the$100 ,000.

32:25James Altucher:So it was win-win for everyone. Yeah, so he would do that. And then once it got rezoned, he would have to pull together the money to buy the land, but he would already have contracts from developers who were agreeing to buy it. So I would go to investors, here's the contract from the developer who's going to buy it, here's the rezoning plan, here's the mayor, everything they think. I feel like writing a new check right now. How could anybody not write a check for that? The money was baked in. Yeah, so I would do that. And over two years, I raised$50 million for different land deals that we did.

33:05and it ended up becoming a pretty big company. And then the real estate crash happened and all of the developers couldn't get financing to fulfill their contracts on the properties. So literally every contract on every property fell through in 2010. My father lost$50 million. He lost everything.

33:37James Altucher:How did he react? Did you see him cry? What was his worst moment in this? He was very, very, very depressed. I would say borderline suicidal over it because he went from a man who, they treated him like a king in these little towns where he'd go buy the land. And he's spending millions and millions of dollars. and he went from that to fixing up cars in the garage and trying to flip them. And he would even clean out office buildings at night because he didn't want anyone to see him. So it's like a classic story of like real estate mogul to janitor. Yep, he lost everything. And in the process of losing everything, he also couldn't support me anymore.

34:33So I was on Medicaid and my father had been paying my rent, all of those things. I was on Medicaid. I couldn't make any money. The real estate was just in shambles in 2010. I needed to find another career. So for the past two years, I've been surrounded by millionaires raising money for all of these deals. And I learned a ton about personal finance. so I started blogging and within two months I got nominated for it was like a Webby Award for the best new personal finance blog in the world I started getting all this traffic and I started getting offers from other big blogs to write for them so I started saying yes and some of them even offered to pay me and I and I said well you can't pay me but I'll tell you what if you like the article, one day I'm going to ask you for a favor.

35:33And you can't say no. And so I started writing articles for these sites. I became one of the most, if not the most popular writer on most of the sites that I was writing for.

35:46James Altucher:What would be like a typical topic that would get really popular? Like what would be a typical article that would get really popular? So most of the things I was writing about for these different sites was marketing, blogging, writing. I'd always been a pretty good writer. so I wrote articles about how to be a better writer too and some of them went mildly viral you know a few thousand shares and then I started writing ones in 2009 and 2010 that went majorly viral that I mean over a million page views viral and like what's one of them? so one of them was a story that I told about my mother it's called On Dying Mothers and Fighting for Your Ideas I wrote it for Copyblogger.

36:31And that one went insanely viral. About a year later, I wrote one for the biggest blogging site at the time. It was ProBlogger. It called, kind of quit your job, move to paradise, and get paid to change the world. And that was after I'd moved to Mexico. That one went insanely viral.

36:51James Altucher:So let's focus on that one. So you went to Mexico go to reduce your healthcare costs and kind of, this was your loophole of getting around the Medicaid thing. This was my escape. So Medicaid was even, they were having a budget crisis. They were talking about reducing the amount of support they would give me. And my mother lost her job, got laid off all at the same time. During the recession, you know, everyone was having trouble. How did you, like, were you getting depressed? Have you ever like, like, so your mom and dad now were depressed. And was this a weird situation where you kind of almost had to uplift them?

37:27So I ended up having to for a few years. Yeah, I mean, I had to, I bought, like, when I finally got going in Mexico, I bought my father a car. You know, I did all different kinds of things.

37:43James Altucher:That must have felt good. It was to go from a guy who was on Medicaid, who couldn't support himself, to supporting myself, both of my parents, and everyone around me. Yeah. I mean, when I bought him the car, I cried. And he cried. And it was a beautiful thing. And I mean, you know, he ended up turning everything around. He's doing fine now, all of that. But for several years there during the recession, it was really hard. And what I did was, so I was writing all of these articles for free. And I finally decided, all right, health care is cheaper in Mexico. I can get everything I need for$1 ,500 a month, get round-the-clock care from registered nurses, all of these things down in Mexico.

38:33So when my mother got laid off, we packed our minivan that's sitting outside your studio here with everything that we could fit into the minivan. We had my hospital bed. on top of the van. And it was so loaded down, I mean, it was like almost scraping the ground. And we drove over 2 ,000 miles from Charlotte, North Carolina, down to Mazatlan, Mexico. I'd managed to get a contract for at least four or six months on this beautiful home and resort. What I did was, this is another little trick for everyone, if you want to rent a condo, in a nice building. One thing you can do, I've done this multiple times, is I called every owner in the building and asked them, so it was like over 50 different owners that I called or emailed and asked them if they wanted to rent to me for a year.

39:38And like eight of them said yes. And I basically told them, whoever gives me the lowest price, I'll rent your condo.

39:48James Altucher:How did you get their numbers by the way? Because that's usually it's not necessarily available information. So they had like a homeowner's association. I found their homeowner's association directory online with all of their contact information. And so yeah I reached out to all of them and ended up getting a condo for way below market price. Because there's like this reverse auction essentially so they underbid each other. So I mean they started out at like So this is the nicest resort in Mazatlan, Mexico. It's a place where doctors can't afford to live, that live there. It starts at about$2 ,200 a month for a two-bedroom condo right on the ocean.

40:30I mean, you could throw a rock into the waves. It was so close. Private resort, private restaurant, full-time concierge, private grocery store where you could buy stuff. Just this amazing, I've never seen anything like it in the U.S. Traveled all over the U.S., nothing was as good as that resort that I lived in down in Mexico. And I negotiated it down from$2 ,200 a month to$1 ,500 a month. And I went down there, and as soon as I arrived, I sent emails to all of the different sites and said, all right, now I'm going to cash in all of my favors that I've earned. and for a lot of them, I'd written the most popular articles on their site.

41:15I got into consular traffic and I said, I want to start doing consulting with different people. And in particular, Brian Clark over at Copyblogger, I'd written a bunch of articles for them. I'd even edited articles for other people. I'd worked for Copyblogger over 40 hours a week for free for a couple of years. and he knew that one day I would ask for something. So I said, I want you to send an email to all of the copy blogger readers and tell them that I'm accepting consulting clients.

41:51James Altucher:So I want to unpack that for one second because I think people underestimate the power of free. So a lot of people say, well, I've got to work my full-time job and then go home and raise my kids. I can't be doing work for free. But A, free is kind of how you build your skills without having to worry about deliverables in some sense because it's free. And B, obviously you know this, you can always just point to you as an example. No matter what they say, you could say it also. Yep. So yeah, I mean, at Copyblogger, I've become the most popular writer on the site. I was editing other people, and I trusted Brian to one day repay that to me.

42:44And he did. I mean, a hundred times over. So as soon as... He put out an article saying, you know, John's open for a business.

42:53James Altucher:This is the kind of consulting. What kind of consulting did you offer? At first, I was offering, I'll critique your blog for 99 bucks. So I did that. And he put it out there, and I got 300 people within 24 hours. Wow. Who wanted me to do it. So that's like$30 ,000. Yep. So I started doing those consultations. People loved it so much. They said, can I pay you for another consultation next month? And people started asking me that. So I went over to PayPal, and I set up a recurring thing to where they could pay me$99 a month to come take a look at their blog. So I ended up getting, I think, 30 people who did that.

43:36So that was an immediate$3 ,000 a month on autopilot. And the critique only took about 30 minutes that I would do.

43:44James Altucher:But still, 30 people times 30 minutes. All right, that's a 15-hour work week. Yep. And that was$3 ,000 a month. And over time, my reputation started expanding. I started getting more and more bigger companies starting to come to me. And I raised my rates up to$500 an hour. And this is all in the span of two or three months. After about three months, I was making over$100 ,000 a year in consulting revenue. And I was also building out my own product on the side where I would teach people how to write guest posts for these other blogs. So in the how to write guest posts, so it's a course, it's not only how to write and what topics are interesting and how to find topics and how to write about them, but also how to maybe pitch a guest post, what are the best blogs to pitch to.

44:41Yeah, I even gave them, you know, here are the 100 best blogs that you should go to, here are their email addresses, all of those things, how to pitch them, how to write your posts, what to do after your posts, all of those types of things and I called in another favor from different people and asked them to promote it

45:01James Altucher:which was good for them because they wanted good guest posts exactly so I asked those different blogs to do it several did it without anything in return I put it on sale it's like$35 ,000 in 24 hours wow how much was the chorus cost? at the time it was $200 or$300 I ended up raising the price over time to$600. And PayPal froze my account because I'd made so much money in 24 hours. Right, they flagged you. It was unusual behavior in your account. Yep, and it ended up taking me six months to get all of that money unlocked. But I finally did. Then I started selling the course more and more. and then I finally launched my own site and it's called Smart Blogger now, smartblogger.com.

45:55At the time, the first domain name was Boost Blog Traffic, which I was sort of known for a guy that can get a lot of traffic. So I taught other people how to do that. And so I launched that site. I put up an opt-in page just for a pre-launch where people could put in their email address if they wanted to be emailed when the site opened. And within two months, just thanks to all of the people that I'd got to know by writing free articles for different things, I had 13 ,000 people on the pre-launch list just within two months. And so I started the site, I started writing articles, and I started creating more courses.

46:39And within nine months, I'd made like half a million dollars.

46:44James Altucher:and what was the biggest was it the courses that was selling the most? the courses also created a high end coaching program where I would coach someone for an entire year for$10 ,000 per person I sold that out several times I started selling more and more of the courses and it just grew and the traffic grew and I mean now it's a seven figure revenue business. Smartblogger.com Yeah, smartblogger.com. The combination of courses coaching and are there other revenue items? Now it's mostly courses. I mean over time we've had 23 ,000 students go through our different courses. Has it worked for them?

47:32James Altucher:Like out of those 23 ,000 like how are they doing? We've had quite a few success stories. So like Danny Inney, which is he's built a very large business, very large blog called Miracy. Jennifer Gresham from Everyday Bright. And there are even people. So like before we started the interview, Ryan Dice was talking about, you know, Russ Canterbury. He was that runs all of their editorial for their company. Tommy Walker, who runs content marketing for Shopify. so yeah I mean there are a lot of different people who have gone through the courses and gone on to do really really big things and that feels amazing we actually catalog we have a file that we call love letters and every time we get a love letter from a student about all of the results they've gotten we put it in that file and it's become thousands of different love letters that we've gotten from people That's incredible.

48:32James Altucher:And so do you also now still write every day? So that's one of the things I'm just starting to get back to. So one of the things I ended up getting, the business grew, and I found myself switching morning tour into a managerial role because I hired all of these other people. And before I knew it, I wasn't writing anymore. Well, and also the high-end coaching, they're calling you and they expect$10 ,000 worth. Yep. That's a drag. It was. I ended up canceling. So I did three coaching groups like that. And I ended up just deciding it's not worth the$10 ,000. It takes too much of my time and attention.

49:16I got people spectacular results. But when I looked at it, I was actually earning less per hour on that than the company paid me in salary.

49:29James Altucher:Let me ask you a question. What if you charged a million dollars a year for coaching? And if you only got one client, that's good. Yeah, I could. But the thing is, I ended up deciding about six months ago or a year ago that what was most important to me is to write every day. and that was actually more important to me than money. And so I started reorganizing the business around that. And it's taken me a while. I just moved someone into a chief operating officer role, promoted my editorial director into that role. So he's now taken over basically managing the company. And instead of having seven people report to me, I have one person report to me that I thought to.

50:24Everyone else reports to him now. That's freed up a lot of my time.

50:30James Altucher:What do you like to write about now? So now I'm writing mostly for Unstoppable.me. Which is basically about, I mean, this is where I heard of you. Somebody, a good friend of mine sent me your article, and I actually forget which good friend now sent it to me. I know it was a good friend because normally I don't read anything sent to me. but I read your article and I'm like, this guy is amazing. I have to speak to him. So are you mostly right about your own kind of story? Yep. So what I'm trying to do right now is most of the personal development community is what I call, I mean, pretty light and fluffy.

51:10James Altucher:I agree. And I think it's getting inundated and I don't know why. I don't really know why either. but I never identified with most of it because for me, getting to where I am has been an immense struggle with extraordinary pain. And it's been just like this fight to break out of poverty, to contribute something of value. Poverty and the prison of not being able to be as mobile as others. and you know we've been glossing over some of the story but you were in a major car accident at one point where you were like in and out of hospitals for how long? Like what happened? I was in and out of hospitals for about a year.

51:58James Altucher:I mean the wheelchair was like on top of you, you were on the road. Yeah. It was like horrible the way you described it. It was awful. Yeah, I was drunk. So I have a minivan, I sit in the passenger seat or I sit where the passenger seat would be in my wheelchair. We have it tied down. And I had a seatbelt and also even a metal bar across my lap. And a guy was late to work at Wendy's, and he decided to speed through an intersection going 80 miles an hour. And we were the first car he hit. He ended up totaling five cars before he came to a stop. But he came through, and he pretty much ripped off the whole front end of the van.

52:43when he hit it. And all I remember is lifting into the air and feeling my head hit something and just blacking out. And my head actually had gone through the window. And the metal bar, the seatbelt snapped. The metal bar snapped. That was across my legs. I mean, it like broke a steel bar. I came out of the chair so fast. And it broke my leg too, my femur on my leg when that happened. And yeah, I woke up underneath the chair. With the chair laying on my legs, my legs were broken in a total of 17 places. My head was all cut up. I mean, I had blood pouring down my face because my head had gone through the window.

53:35James Altucher:Who was driving? My long-term caregiver. Okay. It called him Sarge. He was a guy. He was relatively okay. He was shaken up, bruised. When I woke up, I called him Sarge. His name was Ron Sargent. And I said, you know, Sarge. And he looked down and he saw me. And when he saw me, that's when he looked up and the whole front end of the van caught on fire. Oh my gosh. And the fire, I looked up and all I could see through the blood, the fire was coming through the air conditioning. vents that were in the front of the car. And he ran around and there was a guy from a gas station that ran over. They pried the door open and they pulled me out of the car, out from underneath the chair.

54:28He got burned on his head when he was pulling me out of the car. But he got me out before the fire got to me. And I was just laying there on the sidewalk. And my feet were turned around backwards. My legs were just shattered. And I couldn't feel anything yet, though. I guess I was in shock or something. But I could look down at them and just realized, this is really, really bad. And the first ambulance arrived, and he actually said, I can't take you. Because the second person, he was going so fast, he went through the front end of our car, plowed into another lady directly in the passenger door, pushed the passenger door all the way to the driver's side, amputated her right leg.

55:23And she was bleeding out in the car. And so the first ambulance had to take her. Finally, another ambulance came and took me. About 30 minutes later, the pain started. And so, yeah, I mean, I went to the hospital. At first, I stayed a month in the hospital. They couldn't do surgery. Normally, they would do surgery and put cans and metal plates and all of these things in. But because I've never walked, my bones weren't strong enough to support that. so they had to just do the best they could setting the bones they had to reset the bones twice all 17 breaks while I was there which is the most horrific experience of my life but for I don't know what reason they didn't put me into sleep so I'm sitting there while they're resetting didn't you beg them to put you to sleep?

56:19I did, I begged them I yelled at them I said everything imaginable

56:24James Altucher:I get pulled to sleep if they want to pull a tooth out I say bring in the anesthesiologist I'm going under I don't know if it was because I was on Medicaid maybe they were worried about my lung capacity if they put me to sleep I don't know what the reason was but I went through that twice awake which was I didn't even know it was possible to hurt that much so I had to go through that for a month I had internal bleeding too and so they had to manage that and eventually I have a question about the legs. Like, given that you weren't going to walk, why did they bother fixing the legs? Does that sound like a stupid question?

57:05No, it was actually discussed. They talked about amputating one of my feet. It was actually considered. I mean, I didn't really need my legs. They could have just cut them off. And it probably would have accelerated my recovery if they had. I mean, ultimately, we decided that they thought they could keep them. It did cause me a lot more pain to keep them, but they ended up fixing me up relatively well. Even today, though, when they take x-rays, they can see all of the places where the bones were broken, where it wasn't totally healed. So even today, I have to wear braces on my legs to support the bones because they'll never heal all the way.

57:50James Altucher:Do you think there'll ever be, and I'm sure there will be at some point, So the question is, in our lifetime, do you think there'll ever be like almost six million dollar man bionic legs where like from your brain you could kind of control what your legs are doing and you would be able to walk around? Yeah, it's already been invented. Dr. Nicolaylis at Duke University kicked off the World Cup two years ago with a guy that he'd built a brain machine interface where he'd created bionic legs for a guy that was paralyzed. And he kicked the soccer ball to begin the World Cup. So those types of things are coming.

58:28The major thing right now that's holding it back is they have to do brain surgery to install chips in your brain to be able to do that.

58:38James Altucher:Why can't, like, if I'm just conceiving this as an engineer, I would think, like, you know, kind of like how that lip mouse works. Why don't we first do something which is externally controlled before we start fiddling around with brain surgery? So if you're going to do a thought interface, I mean, they can do these things where they put these things on your head, but apparently because it's not enough direct contact with the brain that you can't control it as well. And like, what if I could just go like, move my head to the left, and that means take a step with the left leg. Move my head to the right, it means take a step with the right leg.

59:11Yeah, there are those kinds of things.

59:13James Altucher:And I'm even saying now, like no amputation required. We're going to fit these like bionic or extra skeletal legs around your legs, and that's how you do it. Yep, it could be done. It could be done. I mean, in my case, it would still probably just the weight of gravity of standing up would probably break the bones in my body again. So you don't want to do that? No. For someone who is paralyzed, though, who has relatively normal bones, something like that could definitely work. The reason why those things don't happen is for the most part, people in those conditions don't have the money to experiment with them.

59:57For me, the most likely outcome for something like that, I mean, I think it's, there's no question eventually I'll have a brain chip. And what will probably happen is I'll have mechanical arms attached to the wheelchair that I'll be able to move purely by thought. and so I'll basically be a guy with these extra arms that are attached.

1:00:24James Altucher:Seems like this is a topic you could also write about. You could be a futurist around these ideas. Yeah, I'll probably talk some about that. Because you know a lot about it. I do and I constantly research it and I've even talked to them about going on trials and being a test subject and all of that on those things. They don't have FDA approval yet to do those on a lot of people just because of the brain surgery that they have to do. And originally, they've taken a big step forward here recently. Originally, they had to put the chip in and still have a wire coming out of your head. So you actually had this thing that looked like this huge electrical socket in your head.

1:01:04And they had to keep it open constantly.

1:01:06James Altucher:Because I guess they have to be able to turn it off just in case something bad happens. So yeah, there was a huge risk of infection. Now what they've done is figured out how to make the chips wireless to where they can put it in your brain. And then they can control everything wirelessly. See, John, I knew none of this. This is like a hot topic. Like you should be writing about this too. Yeah, I probably will. I mean, the reality is, I guess the big takeaway for people is I believe any limitation can be overcome. It's not always easy. So what would you say to someone? And I'm sorry to interrupt because I know I just interrupted a valuable thought, so I really feel bad there.

1:01:47James Altucher:but someone sitting and listening to this and saying, well, I just can't. I love to do X, but I can't. What's the first kind of ways or steps they should get out of that feeling? Yeah, so the article I'm publishing is about this. It's called How to Accomplish Big Things Even When You Feel Small. And the first step is actually getting yourself to believe it's not only possible, but that it's normal. and what you have to do is, I mean, what I call it is reconstructive reality. What I did before I launched my business is I was listening to keep myself from going crazy and also because I was surrounded just by, I mean, my father was losing all of his money, my mother lost her job.

1:02:38I was surrounded by all of these horrible things. I started listening to audio books and podcasts four to eight hours a day. Wow. And the reason why, and it was all, I mean, so I listened to things like, I mean, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Christopher Reeve. I listened to things of people who had dealt with disabilities that had accomplished incredible things. And I found any podcast with inspirational stories. And my goal was to spend more time listening to those things than I spent actually in my own life.

1:03:18James Altucher:Why is that? Why was that your goal? The reason why that was my goal is I think that if you spend the majority of your time in worlds where people are accomplishing incredible things, all of a sudden, that started to seem normal to me because I'd spent more time listening to people who had done incredible things than in my current life where it looked impossible. And it trained my brain to believe that it wasn't difficult because there were all of these other people who had already done it. And I spent so much time listening to it that it became normal. Did you actually feel like your thought patterns changed?

1:04:06James Altucher:Like once the word can't came up, you would instantly deflect into, well, there was Frank and Delano Roosevelt became president. Yeah, yeah. So, and it even became, I started to hold myself to their standards rather than the standards that a caseworker at Medicaid might hold me to, right? And their lives became so real to me that, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, you marinate a piece of meat I was marinating my mind in incredibly inspirational stuff. And I mean, there weren't as many podcasts in 2010. Now there are so many amazing podcasts like yours. So even the listeners listening to your podcast, if you're going through an extremely difficult time, try to spend more time listening to inspirational stories than you do dealing with negative stuff.

1:05:07And even if you're working, like when you're going to work, when you're at lunch, have earphones in your ears and be listening. Don't spend any time with negative people. Just sort of marinate your mind in these amazing things. And when you do that, your perspective will shift. And you will start to believe that you can do some of those things. and I believe that's the first step to sort of getting yourself into the position to where then you can take those steps because if you don't believe it's possible for you, you'll never do it, right? So what I deliberately did when I got started is I brainwashed myself into believing that these things were normal, everyday, commonplace.

1:06:01James Altucher:What's the second step? So the second step is then to find out what the price is of what you want. So this is the other big thing that I realized. When I went and started a business, I also listened to biographies of successful business people. And I mean, at the time, I mean, it was like Michael Dell, Richard Branson, people like that in 2010. And when I listened to their biographies, I wasn't interested in their business strategies. What I was interested in is what was the price that they had to pay to get to where they are. It's interesting that you think in that way, right? So most people would be interested in their business strategies and they wouldn't.

1:06:45James Altucher:It's sort of an unusual thing to think of, well, what was Michael Dell's price? Nobody would even care about that. But you did. Why did you care about that? Because what I realized is, and I don't know where I learned this, but I learned it early on, that you can achieve anything you want, but there's always some sort of a price. And it's not always money. Usually it's some sort of sacrifice of your time. I mean, at the very least, you know, like starting a business, you're sacrificing years of your life, investing it in this business. I mean, you're also, I mean, you're an entrepreneur too. What else are the sacrifices?

1:07:24I mean, a lot of people kind of call you a fool. A lot of the times they don't believe in you. Right, you get a lot of hate. You get a lot of hate. You also deal with, you know, especially when you start hiring employees, worrying about what happens if the business goes under, feeling responsible for everyone and everything all the time. Most entrepreneurs don't really sleep very well. So there are all of these sacrifices. And what I did in advance is I made a list of all of the sacrifices that I could see that they were making. and I ask myself, am I willing to go through that?

1:08:00James Altucher:When you do that, are you giving yourself or are you giving the listener an easy out? So automatically by default, when you start a business or when you start doing a side business while you still have your job because you have to make a transition and it takes time, you're going to be sacrificing family and relationships a little bit, tiny bit maybe or a lot. So that's an easy excuse for someone to say, well, that's one non-negotiable for me is any family time. So what you have to do then is find a goal that doesn't require you to sacrifice your family time. You have to find a business that doesn't require you to sacrifice your family time.

1:08:35James Altucher:But there's always going to be a little bit of family time to sacrifice. There is. I mean, so that's the reason why people don't achieve anything is they're not willing to make the sacrifice. But maybe you could say, okay, I'm sacrificing a little bit of family time, but I can make up for it in other ways. I can find something else to sacrifice more. Yep. But, I mean, so one of the things you could do is say, I'm not willing to sacrifice family time, but I'm willing to sacrifice sleep. I had a friend that did that. I don't know if that's a wise choice. It's certainly a healthy thing that's not so healthy.

1:09:06Yeah, but that was the choice that he made, is he was still going to spend time with his family, but he was going to sacrifice sleep. But the point is, a lot of people are under the assumption that they can get whatever they want without trading something that they have. And that's just not the case. And I think whatever you want to achieve, and this can be business or anything else, look at what you have to trade to get there. Decide in your mind, I'm willing to make that sacrifice. And there are even no guarantees. You could make that sacrifice and not get what you want, okay? You have to realize that too.

1:09:48You may struggle and fail. A lot of people do. but to go into that realizing what the having a total completely realistic picture of what you're getting into so i mean when i started my own business i knew that if i wanted to grow it rapidly i was gonna have to dedicate myself to it heart mind and soul i knew that i probably wasn't going to sleep well i knew that i was going to have a ton of stress and i accepted that and i was willing to pay that price. And so that's what allowed me to move forward without hesitation.

1:10:25James Altucher:And what would you say is step number three? So step number three is to put a gun to your head. And this is the most difficult one. So one of my favorite scenes of any movie of all time was Fight Club, where Brad Pitt, who was playing Tyler Durden, got a guy out of a convenience store, put a gun to his head, said, what do you want to be in life? Says, veterinarian. He said, well, that requires a lot of schooling, right? He says, yeah, too much school. I couldn't do it. And he takes out his driver's license. Said, all right, I have your driver's license. I have your address. I'm going to come back in six weeks.

1:11:14if you're not going forward to become a veterinarian, you'll be dead. I'll kill you. And he says, all right, so run away. So the guy ran away. And he said, tomorrow will be the best day of his life. And I think it's true. Now, it's a very extreme example. I'm not suggesting anyone put any guns to anyone's heads or threaten anyone's life. but one of the things that I'm a huge fan of once you've decided what the price is set up negative reinforcement to get yourself to do it

1:11:55James Altucher:like what? like for example for me the reason why I was able to achieve everything I achieved if I failed I was going into a nursing home that was the scariest thing imaginable to me that was the gun to your head that was the gun to my head I had to do it I didn't have a choice. So for many people, they could say, well, I could decide tomorrow, but they could do that for 40 years. But they could sort of, the gun to their head in this case is, if I wait till tomorrow, I'm going to get on that slippery slope that lasts 40 years, and that's my life. Yep. So, I mean, there are simple ways for things.

1:12:31So, like, one of the things I've heard of people doing, and this requires a lot of courage, and it sounds crazy, But I had a friend who took naked pictures of herself when she was trying to lose weight, gave them to a friend and said, if I don't lose 20 pounds within the next six months, I want you to post all of these naked photos of me where I'm fat on Facebook.

1:12:57James Altucher:That kind of almost sounds like a business idea. Send us your fat naked photos with a timeline. There's a business called Stick. I think it is. I can't recall if it's S-T-I-K-K.com, something like that. That is their business, is they called you accountable with these things. I mean, there are other ideas like write an email resigning from your job and give it to a service that will automatically send it to your boss in six months. I mean, there are things like that that will, it's terrifying, okay, those types of things. but it will give you more energy and motivation than anything in the world.

1:13:37So for me, I mean, people ask, you know, how did you do this? How did you start this business? I was absolutely, totally terrified of ending up in a nursing home someday and that gave me endless energy and motivation. I was able to work harder. I mean, I worked like literally, when I moved down to Mexico, I didn't go down to the beach even though I lived on the beach for six months. I just stayed in the condo and I was working. Nobody even knew I lived there. I just stayed in the condo and I was working 16, 18, 20 hours a day.

1:14:17James Altucher:And what's your end goal? Would you like to sell the business? Nowadays, I mean, the type of business I run, it's so tied to my personality. it would be very difficult to sell. More than likely, I'll just continue growing it. I mean, it's already relatively, if I wanted to, I could quit today and it would still generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in income to me personally. I want to, my goal right now is less about money and more about helping as many people as I can. Well, and the site smartblogger.com has so many great articles, just free also about blogging and so on. And there's their courses and so on.

1:15:06James Altucher:Plus your unstoppable.me site. I really appreciate you. You came here to the studio and joined me on this podcast. I'm sure it's inspirational to so many people. Your story was inspirational to me, which is why I reached out to you. Well, John Morrow, smartblogger.com. Thank you so much for sharing your story. And I hope people listen to this and go to your site and apply your advice and learn from it. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

1:16:02The Matrix Trilogy

1:16:10James Altucher:Shut up! Titanic! I'm the king of the world! And so much more. For Showtime's, press nothing. They're free, 24-7. That is so fetch. On Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never.