Don't Be Better, Be Different.
With Guest James Altucher
Learn new skills faster by skipping the line and embracing the power of experimentation.
The How to Sell More Podcast
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September 3, 2024
In this episode of How To Sell More, host Mark Drager sits down with entrepreneur, investor, and bestselling author James Altucher. Known for his book Skip the Line, James shares his unique take on mastering new skills fast, cutting risks, and standing out in crowded markets. He talks about why experimenting beats the old 10,000-hour rule and how smart, calculated risks can drive huge growth in both your personal and professional life.
"It's not good enough to be better—you have to be different. And you only get to be different if you know completely the history and styles, and then have a unique approach that no one else has ever done." — James Altucher
Listen to The Episode!
Top 3 Reasons to Listen
Learn How to Master Skills Faster: Discover James's strategies for rapidly acquiring new skills without spending decades.
Gain Unconventional Business Insights: Understand how to differentiate yourself in any industry and stand out from the competition.
Transform Your Approach to Risk: Get practical advice on managing risks in business and investing to ensure long-term success.
Follow James Altucher on Social
Website: https://www.jamesaltucher.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/altucher/
X: https://twitter.com/jaltucher
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesaltucher/
More About Today's Guest, James Altucher
Entrepreneur and Investor // Bestselling Author of "Skip the Line" // Host of "The James Altucher Show" Podcast
As a highly influential LinkedIn Top 10 Influencer, prolific author, and accomplished entrepreneur, James Altucher brings a wealth of experience to the table. He is a chess master and venture capitalist, having founded and sold multiple successful companies. Currently, he is actively involved in advising and investing in over 30 companies spanning various sectors, including technology, energy, healthcare, and biotech.
With a passion for helping entrepreneurs and business leaders embrace unconventional strategies, James teaches how to leverage experimentation to achieve success faster and more effectively than traditional methods allow.
Prior to his current ventures, James co-founded 20 companies, several with significant exits, showcasing his ability to navigate and succeed in the competitive business landscape.
Earlier in his career, James authored several Wall Street Journal bestselling books, including "Choose Yourself" and "The Power of No." His book "Choose Yourself" was ranked second among the 12 Best Business Books of All Time by USA Today. He also hosts two highly ranked podcasts, "The James Altucher Show" and "Ask Altucher," which together have been downloaded over 12 million times. His writing has been featured in The Financial Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and The Huffington Post.
Key Topics Discussed
- The Importance of Being Different: James explains why being 10% better isn't enough—you need to offer something unique to truly succeed.
- Mitigating Risk in Business and Life: Insights on how to manage risks effectively by learning from smarter individuals and avoiding common pitfalls.
- The 10,000 Experiment Rule: Introducing a new approach to mastering skills faster through deliberate and varied experimentation.
- Energy Management for Success: Discussing how to allocate your finite energy wisely to focus on activities that yield the highest returns.
- Overcoming the Fear of Failure: James shares personal stories of his own failures and how embracing them led to greater success.
Key Takeaways
- Embrace Experiments Over Hours - Challenge the 10,000-hour rule by conducting experiments that accelerate learning and mastery.
- Stand Out by Being Unique - Don't just aim to be better—strive to offer something different that sets you apart.
- Manage Risks Wisely - Learn to mitigate risks by leveraging the knowledge of others and making informed decisions.
A Transcription of The Talk
Mark Drager: I just, at the end of your book, you actually talk about the lessons that you give your kids. And perhaps they're a collection of things from your past books. But there are a few that stuck out to me. And so in the essence of "Skip the Line," you know, the first one is "always go to the place least crowded." That's your number one. That's your number one out of all of these great lessons at the end of the book. Why is that the thing? And perhaps it's even, again, the essence of "Skip the Line." But why is that the thing that you recommend people do?
James Altucher: Well, if you go... Let's say, this is a very interesting question. I've been thinking a lot even recently about this and thinking of new ideas with it. Look at like the story of Betamax and VHS. So for people who don't know, VHS was a tape that you put in...
Mark Drager: Do we have to describe what a VHS tape is?
James Altucher: I think I do. Because I don't know if my kids... Well, I guess my kids have used the VHS but never...
Mark Drager: My kids used to call them square DVDs. Those black square DVDs. That's what they used to call them.
James Altucher: Yeah, and like, but there was a technology at the time that was better. It was called Betamax. And so I always think about that story because it's not good enough to be better at something. You have to... like, nobody knows the difference between 10% better. Like, let's say... let's say Ernest Hemingway is a 10% better writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald. No matter how you measure it, even though I don't know how you would measure that, let's just say. Or even let's just say something which can be ranked. Let's say somebody is a 10% better tennis player than someone else. And that you can rank, there's a ranking system. So you can see by the ranking system that so-and-so is 10% better. But if I were watching them play against other people, not against each other, where you could tell again, but I would not be able to tell the difference between the number one tennis player in the world and the number 100 tennis player in the world. There will be no way for me as a, let's call it a civilian in tennis, there will be no way for me to determine who is better. And I think that's true for most things. It's not good enough to be 10% better. You have to also be different. And that you could tell if someone has a two-handed forehand and is just winning every game, I'll say, oh, that's unusual and different. Or if someone was a comedian but always raps his jokes, I would say, oh, that's different. And so you have to be different, I think, to succeed. And that's why... and you only get to be different if you... First off, you have to know completely the history and styles, you have to study the mechanics of whatever industry you're in, whether it's business, comedy, or writing or whatever. And then you have to have a unique approach that no one else has ever done. Now you can start off just trying to get good at the basic skills. But eventually, if you want to succeed and be outstanding and be known, you don't have to be 10% better than everyone else. You have to have at least one thing that's very, very different than everyone else. And that's really important.
Mark Drager: You know, when I was... I had this thought a bunch of years ago, but I tell it to younger people now who are starting businesses that when... you know, when you graduate, let's say you graduate high school, or you graduate college, or whatever, you're entering your career, all you want is to be as good as everyone else. Like, when you start something new, you just... and this is what people fall into. They go, "Oh, I'm just as good as them. Why aren't they picking me?" Right? Like, you just desperately want to be seen as good as everyone else. And then you hit a point where you're like, "Oh, I want to be better than everyone else." And then, and then you spend all of this effort trying to make yourself different than everyone else. The advice I give—and I don't know the tools yet, but I think they're in here in the book—is, just to leapfrog that whole idea of trying to be like everyone else. Get the courage to be different right from the start. You're going to make mistakes, you're going to make mistakes anyway. And being like everyone else feels like forward momentum. And yet, all you're doing is just moving yourself into the kind of mediocre middle position. Like, there's no reason to pick you. There's no reason to like you. There's no reason to do anything. You're not different.
James Altucher: Yeah. And like, we'll think about like a writer like Kurt Vonnegut, for instance. Kurt Vonnegut is a great writer. But what really is appealing to him is that he really is different from everyone else. His writing style is extremely different. He's kind of...
Mark Drager: I don't know that writer. What makes him—
James Altucher: Oh, Kurt Vonnegut. He wrote a book "Cat's Cradle." He wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five," all these interesting little books. And he really is like... Yeah, but he says though, his advice to writers is first learn the rules of grammar, and then get different than everyone else. Because first, you have to know the basic skills, like Steve Jobs had to know what a phone was. And then he made a smartphone, right?
And look, the iPhone is... it's very interesting actually using this as an example. And I think about, first of all, the iPhone, 99% of the architecture of an iPhone is a phone. It's just basically, it's a phone. It's not like a new kind of phone, it communicates the exact same way as every other phone on the planet. And then there are some new things in it. Like it's a music player, it's a video player, it's a... you can play games on it now. And so, all of this stuff is important. But what made the iPhone so successful, was, that the first thing was that it was very different. There were a lot of things different about it. And the second thing was, is that Steve Jobs' personality, he had this amazing personality for launching these products, which is... that's even a chapter in the book, you know, it's not good enough to... like a lot of people write books. So, here's how to learn something. It's not good enough to just learn something. Like you said, you have to be different. But also you have to know... you have to know how to present things, you have to know how to persuade people that your idea is interesting and that they should take a chance on you. So there's a lot that goes into success. It's not just learning the skills. It's being part of that ecosystem and learning it and knowing what's needed. And then, of course, having that persuasion ability, having that mystique, having like the Steve Jobs magic. Like, he certainly had sort of, you know, he would describe a product and everybody would be like, ooh, ooh. And then, you think he's done? And then he'd say, but there's one more thing. And that was...
Mark Drager: There's one more thing. Yeah, people would clap towards the end of his life, because they knew something magical was coming.
James Altucher: Yeah. And it always was. I mean, look, I have an iPhone. I didn't for a while, but I finally got one. And it's like, the best thing ever.
Mark Drager: So if I can ask, and I have two references because I won't remember all the words. I usually try to remember these things, but the thought of putting yourself out there and doing things differently and breaking social norms, and, you know, not following the path that all the comedians say, of, you know, first you're gonna start with, you know, this, and then you're gonna do five minutes, and then five minutes becomes eight, and all of this stuff. You want to skip the line. But you reference here, two books that you speak to about risk. The books are "Fooled By Randomness," oh, sorry, I guess there are a few. "The Black Swan," "Antifragile," and "Skin in the Game."
James Altucher: Yeah. And "Fooled By Randomness," also. Yeah.
Mark Drager: What is it about those books? And what is it about risk that, you know, has shaped the way that you approach things? Because you seem like the kind of guy who's pretty comfortable with these things.
James Altucher: Well, that's just it. I don't like risk at all. Everyone says, "Oh, but you're a risk-taker." I hate the... I've gone broke many, many times. Like, my first company, I sold it. I had money for the first time in my life. I mean, I grew up with no money. And I had money for the first time in my life. And I had millions of dollars. And then within a year or two, I was dead, fucking broke. Like I had $143 left to my name.
Mark Drager: And you sold it in the 90s for 15 million, right? Yeah. And then I was—it's a lot of money to move through.
James Altucher: Yeah, I was the worst on the planet. And I got so depressed. And that's a whole other story. But here's the thing is that... and it happened to me again and again. I've gone broke like four times after making money. And I'm like, "What the heck is going on?" And so there were a lot of things going on. But one thing was my attitude towards risk. With anything worth doing, the rewards are there. Like, if you say you want to invest in the stock market, a lot of people have made a lot of money in the stock market. The rewards are there. If you're a writer, the rewards are there. As a writer, there are many successful writers. If you're an entrepreneur, the rewards are there. But most people, they know the rewards are there. They think, "Oh my god, this is my big chance. I'm going to make a lot of money this way." But they don't take into account all the risks. And once you know the rewards are there, that's okay. That's 1% of the path. The other 99% is completely about mitigating risk. That's it—mitigating risk. Yeah, getting rid of all the risk. And the idea is if you can stay in the game, you're gonna win the game. If you're like, "Oh my god, I heard about this stock. I'm gonna put everything I own into it because now it's finally my chance to make it big." If that's your attitude, it almost sounds like you have a better... you're a risk taker, you have an abundance mindset, but actually, it's the opposite. You have a scarcity complex and you think, "This is my only chance to make money, so I gotta put everything into it." And you're not really taking into account the risks. It's not like you're a risk taker; you don't even know what the risks are. So, for instance, with investing, you have to do due diligence before you invest in something. With everything in life, you have to... let's say you're starting a business, why should anybody in the world pay attention to your business and not the 6,000 other successful businesses in this area or whatever it is? So risk is always by far the most important thing you can manage to achieve mastery and get good at something.
Mark Drager: Having had these ups and downs and all of these wildly different experiences, how do you manage risk now?
James Altucher: Well, for instance, I always assume I'm the stupidest person I know, without a doubt. I never make the mistake of thinking I'm smart at what I'm trying to do, whether it's comedy investing or entrepreneurship. So, as an example, since I've started thinking about this in this way, I've been a very successful investor. That's how I make most of my living and money. And here's how I do it: I won't invest in something unless someone smarter than me is investing at the same time as me. I remember my first big deal that I made a lot of money on, I invested in 2007. It was a company that did Facebook marketing for big Fortune 500 companies. I wouldn't have invested, even though I knew the CEO, he was a friend of mine. I wouldn't have invested except for the fact that Peter Thiel, who was the first investor in Facebook, was also investing at the same deal terms as me. So I figured, okay, he knows Facebook better than anyone, this is a Facebook-related company. He must have done his due diligence. He likes this. Worst case, he could probably convince Facebook to buy it. So I'll invest. So every company I invest in, there has to be someone smarter than me who's done a lot more work on the topic than me investing as well. So that's how I mitigate the risk. Like, if Warren Buffett was investing in a company, what am I going to do? Am I going to say, "Warren, you're such an idiot. How could you invest in this company?" No, I don't even need to know what the company does.
Mark Drager: But his risk tolerance might be higher than yours because they just have more cash on hand, or they're willing to do riskier things than you. I mean, you're putting a lot of trust in outsourcing your decision-making.
James Altucher: You're absolutely right. And it's funny, a lot of people don't bring that up, but that is a risk to taking this approach. They don't care if they lose that much money. So you have to get a sense, well, do they care? And why did they like this? Sometimes there are a lot of reasons people might care about it. Sometimes it's just they're doing a favor for a friend. But most of the time, these guys are billionaires because they really care a lot about making money, squeezing every dollar out of everything. But yeah, I have to take that into account. I have to look at if there's a risk in doing this deal because they don't really care. It's all about risk management. The rewards are always there, but you win when you take into account all the risks. That's the important point.
Mark Drager: You know, this is a much smaller example, but I got laser eye surgery a few years ago. And I typically get, I would typically be afraid to do something like that. I went to my sister and said, "Hey, you've looked into this, which organization, what type of laser eye surgery do you recommend?" She said this. Then another person said the same thing and another person said the same thing. So I just booked it and went in. They asked, "Do you have questions?" I said, "No." They asked, "Do you want to know about us?" I said, "No." I asked three people in my life, and all three people said this, so this is what I'm doing. It costs what it costs. When can we book it? They were so confused because rather than worry about it and do all the research, I trust these three people, so I'm just going to do what they say. And it saves a lot of time.
James Altucher: Yeah, it does save a lot of time. And, you know, everything's about energy also. If I'm going to spend a lot of time researching some deal when Peter Thiel is already in it, what am I going to do that he hasn't already done? Or if Warren Buffett's in it, what am I going to do? That's a waste of energy. I could be writing, for instance. I could be improving my life in some way. I could be getting better at things. Everything is about energy. We know for a fact we have a finite amount of it. We begin the day with a limited amount of energy, and when we run out of it, we fall asleep until the next day. To be great at something, to be in the top 1% of the world, you need a lot of energy. So if you spend some of that energy filled with anxiety, arguing with your spouse, or being sick in bed because you haven't been healthy, when it comes time to get good at this incredibly difficult thing, you won't have the energy. Anything worth getting good at is incredibly difficult to do, almost by definition, or else everybody would be doing it. If you spend all your energy on these other things, you won't be as good as the person who is fully ready to devote their energy to getting great at this activity.
The reason you need to be passionate or obsessed with what you want to master is all about energy. I'm never going to get up on a stand-up stage if I don't absolutely love this because it is the worst thing in the world. That's another misconception people have: "Oh, but I love doing it. It makes me happy." No, it doesn't. Anything worth doing will not make you happy. By definition, you'll be miserable most of the time. If you're the US Junior Tennis Champion and you want to get better at tennis, you're going to be very unhappy because you're going to lose while you're getting better. You're going to lose most of your matches or at least 50% because you keep moving up the ladder. First, you move up quickly, and then you reach the level of your strongest competition. Now you start losing and losing is horrible. It's the worst feeling. If you love something, you're obsessed with tennis, and now you're losing. You've got to love what you're doing. You might say to yourself after you lose a match, "I hate this. I'm never going to do it again." But the next morning, you wake up and think, "I know what I did wrong. I'm going to get back on that court today and practice it," because you love it. You don't have to spend energy convincing yourself, "Oh God, I gotta go back to the court again." You don't need that energy. Everybody else who's a loser will need that energy. But you will have the energy to go forward with the things you love. That's why if you love something, you'll be better than the person who doesn't love it and needs to use part of their energy convincing themselves, "I gotta sit down and write a novel. I want to write a novel so girls will like me." That person won't succeed. That might be a good initial motivation, but you need to ultimately love it. And you only learn that by doing it. You can't learn if you love it if you don't do it.
Mark Drager: I love talking to you so much. One of my biggest fears is always, why put in the effort of getting that body that you want when you just know it's going to disappear as you get older? Why put in the effort of hitting X achievement when in the future, you might look back and think, "Hopefully, I've achieved bigger and better," but to know that 23 years ago, I did this. I put four months of effort in, and I think I'm back to where I am. I mean, we could apply that to all kinds of areas of our life.
James Altucher: Oh, yeah. That's why I wrote the book "Skip the Line." Even in chess, the 10,000-hour rule—Malcolm Gladwell popularized it in the book "Outliers." It's this idea that if you really want to master something, you need to spend 10,000 hours of what's called deliberate learning, getting good at it. This was paralyzing me, particularly when it came to comedy because I'm 53 now, and I was 46 years old. How am I going to put 10,000 hours into comedy just to be as good as other people I admire? By the way, I was part of the initial experiments in the early 90s where Anders Ericsson developed the 10,000-hour rule because I was a chess master. He did a lot of studies on the difference between amateurs, masters, and grandmasters. The grandmasters spent 10,000 hours, the masters spent X amount of hours, and the amateurs did nothing. I'm like, "This is crazy. I'm not gonna spend 10,000 hours now. I'm 46 years old. I'm not going to be 80 years old when I finally get good at something." So that's really what led to this book. I started thinking, "What about all the other times I didn't spend 10,000 hours?" And A, I'm not trying to be in the top 10 in the world. I'm just trying to be in the top 1%, which is very different, so it's less hours. But B, I realized this through the use of experiments. For instance, when I started comedy, I felt like my one-liners were not so good. So I did an experiment. I went on a subway car, and at every stop, I did stand-up. I went to a different car in the New York City subway system, and I would do comedy to the audience. It was an experiment in dealing with a hostile audience.
Mark Drager: You were hustled in the New York City Subway?
James Altucher: Yeah, getting off the subway at every stop. So I had to have really tight one-liners. That was an experiment to see if that helped me get better. The great benefit of experiments is, as opposed to waiting for the next time I'm on stage and then taking the risk that I'm going to bomb because I'm practicing one-liners for the first time, so they're never going to book me again. You have to be respectful of the booker and the business. It was a good way to skip the line on one-liners. I got immense practice right away doing one-liners. I don't know what to say if I got good at it at that moment, but I certainly got years and years' worth of effort better because I performed like 20 times to 20 different groups of hostile audiences, just a bunch of one-liners turning over every few stops. By the way, I would make them up on the fly. That was another thing I was practicing. So I did this experiment. People think, "Oh, do you need money to do experiments?" No, that cost me like a buck 25, whatever the cost of a subway token was, and that was it. What was my downside? An experiment is easy to set up, and this was just going to the subway. It's easy to set up. It's cheap. There's little downside. But what was my downside? A bunch of people in a subway would hate me. That's my downside, which I don't care about. That's not so bad. My upside was enormous, which is that I'm going to be amazing at one-liners. Now, neither happened. The experiment didn't fail, but I wasn't really that good at one-liners. But at least it got me better. It got me thinking about it. It put me in a difficult situation where I would learn to be better. That experience, by the way, a great thing about experiments is, it's a story for the rest of your life. That's what I just told you, the story, and it's a great story. People are like, "I can't believe he did that." Experiments are usually interesting stories to tell later. Even if they fail, there's no downside, there's infinite upside. I had such a fun time doing it. I then said, "You know what? This reminds me of a late-night show but on a subway." Whenever you do a cover of a song, if you're a musician and you want to do a cover of a song, you take the entire song and change one element. Let's say I want to do a cover of Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise." What if I do it in a 1920s type of honky-tonk format? That's a legit cover. Or let's say I want to do "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen. Freddie Mercury sings eight different octaves in "Bohemian Rhapsody." What if I have eight different people, eight different women, sing a different octave? When Freddie Mercury sings this octave, I have this one when I tried everything singing this. That's a cover; it changes one thing and does it really well.
James Altucher: I was thinking to myself, "I can make a late-night show where the one thing I change is I'm going to be on a subway." So I found a busker who played garbage cans as drums, and he was my musical guest. Then I had a friend of mine who had just written a book as my guest that I would interview, and there was some audience interaction. I made a whole late-night show episode on the subway. It took me like half a day. Very little downside, easy to set up, no money. I made a whole Late Night Show episode on the subway. I figured, "I'm just going to send this. It doesn't hurt. I'm going to send this to an agent and see what they think." So I did that. He didn't care about it. He didn't... So experiments fail, but you don't. What was the upside? It cost me nothing, and I learned a lot. I produced a show there, learned about late-night shows, and started thinking about making covers of things. I learned a lot more about comedy, of course, because I did the monologue, which was what my one-liners part one was. My upside was, "Oh my gosh, I have a TV show on late-night on NBC." That was my upside. It didn't work out that way, but you always learn something. It's a story, it's fun, and it's experience. Every experience teaches you something about life. That was that.
Mark Drager: Amazing. Last question real quick, because we only have a minute left. What's your favorite part of this book? I know you wrote it a year ago, a little over that, but there's always a fresh thing. So what's your favorite thing out of the book?
James Altucher: Well, I think the overall favorite thing is that it proved to me and it's still proving to me that you can get good at something you thought was impossible to get good at, for whatever reason. Other people told you, "You can't get good at this," or "You can't skip the line." You can get really good at difficult things very fast. And you can not only learn, but you can learn how to monetize it. I've seen people do it. I've seen people use the techniques in this book to do exactly that.
My favorite technique, maybe—well, there's one chapter about persuasion that I really like. That is an important chapter for me. These are all techniques that I've personally used, whether it's persuasion techniques—like I see a lot of bullshit books about persuasion, saying things like, "Oh, if you cross your legs when they cross their legs, they'll start listening to everything you say." I've tried all that; it doesn't work. So these techniques actually work for me, and they're still working for me. Like I said, I apply it to chess, which is an incredibly difficult game, and already I'm as good as I ever was before.
But I like the idea of—my favorite chapter is probably the 10,000 experiment rule. The idea that you can beat out the 10,000-hour rule through this technique of experiments is incredibly valuable to know. I didn't realize that for a long time. I was so stressed, thinking, "I have to spend 10,000 hours to get good at this," and it just wasn't true. Experiments were a much more valuable and correct way to get good at something.
Resources & Go Deeper
"Harness Your Energy: Mastering Calendar Management for Peak Productivity"
This article from Entrepreneur focuses on how entrepreneurs can effectively manage their energy by mastering time management through calendar optimization. It highlights the importance of blocking time for high-priority tasks, limiting distractions, and balancing work with personal time to maintain high levels of productivity throughout the day.
"Don't Be Better Be Different - Barry O'Reilly"
This article discusses the importance of differentiation over merely being "better" in a competitive market. It gives practical examples from companies like T-Mobile and Chipotle, which succeeded by standing out rather than by having superior products. The piece encourages entrepreneurs to focus on addressing unmet needs in unique ways, which often leads to bigger wins.
This article emphasizes the importance of creating your own category rather than competing within existing frameworks. The authors argue that entrepreneurs should design a unique market niche where they become the standard others are compared to, shifting the focus from being "better" to being "different." By standing out, businesses can carve out a unique identity in competitive markets.
