Treat Your Life As An Experiment - James Altucher - #138

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is James Altucher. Part one of this conversation was earlier in the week, but if you're just tuning in to this, it will make sense, stands on its own merits as well. Today, we are talking about how to conduct experiments in your own life. Me and James kind of got on to how he deploys the ideas that he has on a very regular basis, and he just kind of jumps in feet first. So we talk about him practicing stand up comedy on the subway train in New York. We talk about how Ryan Holiday managed to become one of the biggest writers on the planet by essentially helping Robert Greene to write books. I just love the way that James comes across with such a fearlessness to do things in life. He really overcomes that inertia and that natural laziness that we all have. Loads to take away from today. The first ever two-parter for Modern Wisdom, which is my version of a little life experiment this week. James, you're a legend man. Thanks so much for coming on. Please welcome the wise and wonderful James Altucher.
Right, so we're talking about date night, we're talking about ideas. What did I have in my head? That was it, that was it, cool. One of the things that I was talking about recently was with an ex-Marines officer from the UK, and he was talking about his time over in Afghanistan, and he was a Somalia pirate hunter. Somali pirate hunter was like his second sort of career after he left work in Afghanistan. And he was talking about just how different life is out there, and he said he was talking about singing the praises of travel and new experiences. And what you've suggested to there about the idea generation and how important it is, is you kind of don't really know what you like until you try to do something. And our sample size, the sample size of experiences that we're working with is such a fraction of the total potential number of experiences that you could have as a human, right? Like unless you try something, how do you know whether you do or don't like it?

**James Altucher** (2:23)
Right, like people often think to themselves that they could think, they can think their way to their passion. There's no way to figure out what your passion is with just your brain. You have to do things. There's no thinking. You have to actually do in order to know. And that's critical. That's why travel is interesting. If you're the sort of person who benefits a lot from travel or if you enjoy traveling, travel to as many places as possible to see where you like, what you like to do, what you like to do in each place. For me, I like to experiment with these different ideas because again, I'm not going to know until I do something. I'm not going to know what it's like to write. I could think of a great plot in my head for a novel, but I'm not going to know what it's like to write a novel unless I sit down and write it.
By the way, I'm sorry to interrupt but this is a very important distinction because it's the difference between learning something in school and the real world. because in school, no matter what you do, the thing you're most learning is, the thing you're most learning in a classroom are classroom skills. You can only learn real world skills in the real world. There's no other way.

**Chris Williamson** (3:39)
One of the things I've been thinking about recently, we're at the start of the year, new year, new decades, new year's goals. How do I relate my 25-year vision to my five-year epoch, to my one-year medium-term goals, to my daily habits and routines and blah, blah, blah. I've been swimming in the masturbatory world of personal development for the last little while, just because I do quite like to look at that stuff. I speak to a lot of the guys on this podcast.
And certainly one of the things that it appears to be there is quite a top-down approach to how you should experiment with your life, that getting distracted by shiny things and pivoting, as it's called, that's the Silicon Valley term for it, right? It's like you can pivot with your particular brand direction or your particular goals. It should only be done at the end of particular review periods because you don't know whether or not you've squeezed everything out of the lemon in the interim. But the problem with that is a lot of passions are emergent, not dictated. You know, like your passions in life aren't, I thought of this thing and then I'll think about how to do the plan and the this, that and the other. I could think it would be fucking great to do a podcast, which I did two years ago, but it wasn't until I did the podcast that I was like, oh, this is actually really, really cool. Get to talk to loads of interesting people. This is the sort of thing I want to do. And then stupidly at the start of last year, decided to lynchpin myself to a twice a week publishing schedule, but now I want to do that. And now I'm like, oh, could I do three? Should I start doing YouTube videos? Should I start doing short form content and blah, blah, blah? But I don't know until I do that. And I do think a lot of the time we consider, I certainly know that I do and the listeners might do as well. I consider the barriers, not necessarily the barriers to entry, but kind of like the skill set that I need or the amount of planning and understanding that I need in order to be able to get an idea moving. It's like, oh, well, you know, like you, the Trump thing, right, the Trump's card thing, right? Well, if I sit down, if I knock the back end of this week off and I don't go away this weekend, I could maybe sit down and begin to do a plan about what the brand name might be. And then once I've done it, it's so pedestrian and so slow, whereas it seems like you're just pants off, gear out, jump into the pool feet first. Here I am. This is what we're doing.