0 (2s):
Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like being boss to drop these value bombs. I brought James Altucher on the mic. He has started in ran more than 20 companies and is currently an investor and advisor to over 30. But at one point, James lost everything in a matter of months, his account drained from 15 million to $143 depressed. And on the floor, James realized today's the interview of success comes with conditions. And the only effective way to be successful is to choose yourself. Now, James Altucher is a successful entrepreneur angel investor, chess master, and the wall street journal best-selling author of "Choose Yourself".

0 (46s):
You can find his best and most controversial advice in The Altucher Report, which provides you with James' personal research and business finance and entrepreneurship. James also has a new book, Skip The Line, which we'll be talking about today. Fire Nation, the methodology behind skipping the line, the 10,000 hour experimental rules, and just the whole concept in general of you, a Fire Nation, skipping the line and so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors from tools that help with automating your emails, increasing sales gamification in more, it's never been easier to create an online course than with the Thinkific app store. Learn more and sign up for a free trial of Thinkific at Thinkific.com/firefree.

0 (1m 29s):
That's THINKIFIC.com/firefree customers want more from brands delivering more means owning the customer experience, taking control over data acquisition analysis, creative and delivery, Klaviyo calls, this owned marketing, and they believe it's the best path to growth for more visit Klaviyo.com/fire. That's KLAVIYO.com/fire. James say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. First off

1 (2s):
Fire Nation, glad to be back. I'm a member of the Fire Nation.

1 (2m 5s):
So glad to say hello to my compadres also in the nation. And 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, 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, 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.

1 (2m 47s):
Well, speaking of unique

0 (2s):
Fire Nation, James is unique. He's always been a unique individual.

0 (2m 51s):
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. That's why he's been part of Podcaster's 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, and 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 and with that, but I feel like skip the line can mean a whole lot of different things. So what is skip the line?

0 (3m 31s):
Well, you know, when

1 (3m 32s):
You're, we're at McDonald's and there's a long line, but you really want a french fries. It's kind of a way to just shove everybody aside and be first in line. So you get those french fries really? Mmm, yummy.

0 (3m 43s):
I just wished that French fries were on my diet because they are fantastic. But unfortunately they're not. So you just made me hungry, Jamie. Well, that was

1 (3m 51s):
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, 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 a, another kind of lawyer. I went from being like a computer programmer to working in the entertainment industry, to starting a hedge fund, to writing finance books, to building websites and on and on I, and every single time I've switched careers.

1 (4m 39s):
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. And 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 gotta, you have to, you have to earn this. You have to, 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.

1 (5m 20s):
And well, 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 or you also have to monetize it so that you can continue to do the things you love. And again, I always say for better, 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, how do I actually avoid the 10 years?

1 (6m 1s):
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, of performing all over the world at stand comedy or, you know, ghost go straight to the top of, you know, being an entrepreneur in, in an industry that was already crowded. So 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 skillset completely. And so this book skip the line is about how do you be not the best in the world at something, but okay.

1 (6m 44s):
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? If you're interested in making, if you're just in sports, how do you monetize it? If you're, if you're interested in comedy or podcasting or writing or, 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%

0 (7m 16s):
James. I mean, listen, this oftentimes Fire Nation, the gatekeepers too. They're the ones that are kind of, poo-pooing it 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 into 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. And these were from the OGs. These are from the gatekeepers 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 can not do a daily podcast interviewing entrepreneurs. You will fail, just do whatever everybody else is doing.

0 (7m 58s):
Get in the back of the line, do a once a week show. And that's what everybody does. That's what you need to do as well. So get in the back of the line and just putting in your reps and 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 wraps, I'm a bad interviewer. I'm a bad podcast host right now. I'd never done it before. Let me put in those wraps. And I had the passion. I combined it with skills over time was I was doing it every single day, which is 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.

0 (8m 39s):
James, let's talk about that. I look

1 (8m 41s):
Back not only through my own life, like every time I switched interests, what did I do to get in that top 1%? And again, as, as John, you and I have had conversations about, and, and you discussed this even in your, in your book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, it's not good enough to be the top 10 in the world. It's, 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, that's a big audience if it's a very popular area, but it's also important to be unique. And that's how 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.

1 (9m 24s):
I had to learn about writing in order to work at HBO, I had to learn about, you know, comment. It's very hard to be a good stand-up comedian as, as any comedian knows or anyone who's even tried to get up on stage and make people laugh knows, or being a podcast or John is, you know, it's not, we, you and I both know many pod-casters 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 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.

1 (10m 7s):
But 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 right now I'm 53 years old. What if I switched interest 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, of many others that I always literally skipped the line by experimenting. So what do I mean by that? Like let's say, well, I'll, I'll, I'll give you an example from, from comedy and I'll give you an example from investing.

1 (10m 49s):
So in comedy, everyone was telling me, you can't do this. You need, you need lots of like hours and hours of stage time. You need to know this, this, this, this. So, and when you starting out, you can't get a lot of stage time cause 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? Well, I get better. 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. And it should have very little downside, in fact, no downside, but it should have enormous upside.

1 (11m 32s):
So as an example, I did lots of experiments when I was trying to get good, very quickly at stand up comedy, which is a very difficult skill. And I w 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 up 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. They're miserable. They do not want to hear you telling jokes on the way to like Coney island all the way from Manhattan. And so I went on a subway and I told my friend who was videotaping me. You know what, forget it.

1 (12m 12s):
There's no, 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 up 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. I learned how to deal with hustle audience. You know, I did this more than once. I, you know, learn how to get very quickly to the left because people are constantly, you know, you're, you don't have that much time to get their attention. So you have to get to the lab as quickly as possible, like a good comedian should, but I wasn't doing, I wasn't able to do at that time, you know, at least in clubs.

1 (12m 55s):
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 and the worst case scenario is a bunch of strangers heckle me or whatever, like who cares, but I was scared anyway. And then the upside w 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 re he had just written a book. So I interviewed him on the subway and we interacted with the other people on the subway.

1 (13m 38s):
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. And I created a whole like late night TV show format out of a subway, which I then pitch 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, 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 taught me a lot. They have huge upside, but most of them like all experiments, most are fail, which means you get the downside, which is still not bad.

1 (14m 19s):
And at least I get a story out of it. Another I'm always in the middle of maybe five to 10 experiments at every, at any given point.

0 (14m 27s):
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, because what is really the downside of, of some random subway car in New York city going to Coney island is being like this. Guy's not funny, like nothing. Oh, of course you, maybe you, aren't funny. Cause 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.

0 (15m 11s):
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, are you working around the clock to build the business? You always imagined. Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but also in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how companies you admire the ones that redefined their categories, do it companies like living proof and Chubbies they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customer's needs change, these companies connect quickly with the customers, collect their information and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire a rapid purchase.

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If you're looking for an easy to set up platform, that's built for entrepreneurs that gives you the ability to create an online course that will look and feel like part of your brand. And that gives you an experience where you can pick and choose the right apps for you and your business. As you scale, then look no further than the Thinkific app store. The course creation options are nearly limitless, create certificates, coupons, live lessons, private courses, and more and Fire Nation. You're invited to try it out for free for 30 days right now, visit Thinkific.com/firefree to sign up and get started on your online course today. That's THINKIFIC.com/firefree. So James, I loved your first experiment example.

0 (17m 17s):
It was just fantastic. I was literally picturing you doing that in the subway with a garbage cans banging. And then, 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, not only where you can start, where you should start. And I interrupted you when you were about to share a, another experiment. So take that away. I started

1 (17m 38s):
Writing for the street.com back in 2002. So they're a popular website about investing in finance and stocks, and I wanted to do an experiment. So I wanted to base it. 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, would basically link here are my 10 favorite blog posts from, from this morning. And 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.

1 (18m 21s):
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. So 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 it was, 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.

1 (19m 4s):
And so I went on to do this for the wall street journal, the financial times and, 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. So 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. I wrote to all of these bloggers that I'd been linking to for years and what I just said, Hey, check out my new site. Well, of course they then blogged about it.

1 (19m 45s):
And while was about a favorably, because for years I've been building this relationship by driving traffic to them. So that was the experiment work liers 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, I had a million 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 he'd really love to quit his job and maybe start a restaurant. Cause he's an amazing cook. He's really good with making any kind of like pork or sausage product.

1 (20m 28s):
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 see 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. And we know your friends in the restaurant business. So asked to use their kitchen for a day and you know, lo and bold, he gets, it's just an experiment. It takes one day he would be cooking anyway, no downside.

1 (21m 8s):
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, or the world is open to him because he knows people love the product. And that was just an experiment. So you can do it. And by the way, it doesn't have to just be about business. It could be sometimes I'll do a blog post just to experiment to see, is this getting more interaction then? Or, you know, I'll do an article or something. It's just getting more interaction than my usual posts. 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 asked me, I could demonstrate, Hey, this got five times as much as many page views as my typical article.

1 (21m 59s):
So I know people are interested in this. That was an experiment. So you can experiment in, in anything in life. Really. I once wanted to learn about Kickstarter. So as an experiment, this was when Trump was tweeting, he wants to buy Greenland. So I, 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 agreement. 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.

1 (22m 43s):
I 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. Cause they realized I was not serious about it. And they didn't want to have be, they didn't want to get the charge back 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. So, 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.

1 (23m 26s):
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 to people. No way will this improve? My chest will, 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. And so I call it, I, in the book, I call it the 10,000 experiment rule, but you don't F if you do a hundred experiments in the area you love, you will be super successful in that area. That I know this for a fact, I've done it over and over and over again. And then I have other concepts to like break down a skill into micro skills.

1 (24m 10s):
Like John, you you're, 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 pod to be a good podcast. There's no such skill as podcasting. There's a podcast. Things like a basket of microskills there's interviewing, there's getting guests, there's monetizing and you know, getting, you know, advertisers or affiliates, there's, you know, getting cut, getting audience, building audience. How do you build an audience? There's you know, the four, do you have any kind of consistency in the format? Like there's, there's kind of developing a good format or entrepreneurship.

1 (24m 52s):
There's no skills entrepreneurship. There's a bunch of micro skills, sales, negotiating management, marketing ideation, execution, leadership, and so on. So if you divide a skill into the micro skills, you might not be able to learn all the micro skills, but you will be able to learn enough of them sufficiently to be in the top 1% for the overall intersection of those micro skills, which is entrepreneurship, for example, or, or chess or comedy or writing or whatever. So comedy again, there's one liners. There's crowd work. There's stage work. There's absurdity, there's storytelling. There's Mike work.

1 (25m 32s):
There's try building and the audience there's dealing with hecklers. So again, it's important to identify the micro skills and then there's something that's related to what you talk about in your book. You have a chapter on finding a mentor. Well, I call this the plus minus equal role find a plus, which might be a mentor or a virtual mentor find equals people who challenge you or who are interested in the same thing you are her or around the same level. Like when I started podcasting John, and you were, you had been doing it for a year. We started to know each other. And you, me, pat, pat Flynn, a few others, we were challenging each other, but also exchanging ideas about best practices we were, that was the equals level.

1 (26m 16s):
And then there's minus, which is almost the most important. Einstein said, if you can't explain something simply then you don't really understand it. So I always make sure I'm a, I'm a teacher as well as a learner. And so I can teach what I learned and that helps me to understand it better. So for instance, whenever I want to get better at chess, not only do I find my plus someone to give me lessons, who's a great player, or not only do I find my equals, which are people my level to play, but I also start giving chess lessons. So I, I, I drill into myself the fundamentals and make sure I'm teaching well, because that makes me understand better. So plus minus equals is another important skill.

1 (26m 57s):
And I have, I list like 20 skills like this that are important for really quickly getting to the top when no matter what you love getting to the top 1% in that area. And then the book also gives various techniques on monetizing. Like you have to know certain persuasion skills. You have to know how to think about businesses and entrepreneurship and so on. So I D I, I have one chapter, for instance, I called the spoken wheel approach, which is, and John, you did this very well. Podcasting is the wheel podcasting, but entrepreneurship is the wheel. And then look at all of those different spokes. Obviously you have the podcasts, but then you have courses about podcasting. You have the podcast, paradise community affiliates, journals books, so many things.

1 (27m 42s):
Those are all the spokes. And, you know, even the IRS says the average multimillionaire has seven different sources of income. If you just relied on your podcast, advertising income, that's only one source. And that wouldn't be enough to really build wealth. And when you're breaking out on your own to do a skill in such a unique way, you need to basically be self-sufficient and you need multiple sources of income to do that. So that's, that's the, that's the essence of the book. And then all altogether, I have 23 different techniques for quickly skipping the line and, and getting to be in the top 1% and then monetizing it. And

0 (28m 21s):
This is why I love James he's bubbling over with ideas. He's bubbling over with opportunities. And he just kind of like, honestly, it's kind of like the what's that, that old fable with a king, with no clothes. He's just like, guys, this is so obvious. It's just like, why should I make this complicated? Like, why are you trying to make this confusing? It's just like that guy's naked. He doesn't have any clothes on like, stop pretending. Like, and this is the world that we live in is like, people are pretending. They're just like, they put up all these barriers in front of them. It's like, no, just do experiments. You want to be a comedian, get on a subway car and crack some jokes. Like, literally this is like one thing I tell a lot of people when they are in these like traditional paths too. They're like, oh, like I watched Grey's Anatomy.

0 (29m 1s):
I want to be a nurse. It's like, oh, so you want to work from 9:00 PM to 9:00 AM for the first five years of your career, just changing bed pans. Like you realize that's actually what a nurse does. So it was like, go and like, do the thing before you like commit days, months, years of your life, to like, you know, being educated or doing this or doing that. It's like, no, this is about skipping the line and figuring things out quick, fail faster.

1 (29m 26s):
It could be used to build skills. So like, for instance, there's this, you know, the, the high jump in the Olympics, it's an Olympic sport. People used to do to, to jump over the high bar. They used to run facing towards the high bar and then pick up their legs and jump forward. And then this one guy was like, well, I have really long legs. And I keep hitting the bar. I can't do it. So he did this weird thing. He jumped backwards and, and he was like a mediocre high jumper for his high school team. He started jumping backwards and his name was Dick "Pause" Barry. Now it's called the Pause Barry Flop. Two years later, he won the Olympic gold. He did an experiment of jumping backwards over the bar. Now everybody does it.

1 (30m 6s):
He won the Olympics. Nobody believed him that he could do it. People said you can't do that. And then he skipped the line with one, the Olympics watch me.

0 (30m 13s):
I love this whole concept of experiments, that 10,000 experiment rule. And I love how you went into detail too, about making people pay with their wallet to prove the concept. And you gave the example of what I did with Kickstarter, for the freedom journal. And yeah, that's what we crushed it. 450, $3,000 in 33 days became the six-months funded publishing campaign. And we made the journals. But guess what if I had gotten $43, I never would've spent the time, energy and effort creating the journal, getting it manufactured, doing all the things. It would have taken like two to four to six months of my time and not to mention all that money and effort. So this experiment on a micro scale is so critical. So James, we've been talking for a while now, you've given us some great examples, some great experiments, some great, real actionable advice.

0 (30m 59s):
Where can Fire Nation go to learn more about this book to buy this book? And by the way, Fire Nation, don't just buy the book itself, get the audible version as well was one thing I always share with James as something that he does super cool is his audio books always have just different things. You tell James even admitted. He's a little bit of a rambler. Sometimes. Sometimes he'll get off on these kind of ramble things on his audio book. That's not even in the actual book itself. And so it's always important to get both because there's gems all around. So James, take us on brother, where can Fire Nation get this book? Well, anywhere

1 (31m 34s):
You buy books like Amazon or Barnes and noble or whatever, or audible.com, the audio book is selling well, because I always give like extra content in the audio or you can buy both whatever, but can I tell you one more experiment that did so, you know, Charlemagne the God, he's a radio host in New York city has like a urban hip hop kind of show 10 million listeners. So I had an idea for him for a book he should do. And I don't really know him. And I sent him my idea. I, I always write 10 ideas a day to kind of grease the wheels of my idea muscle. And my idealist that day was here's a book this guy could write and 10 chapters and I sent it to him.

1 (32m 17s):
I'm always, I always like to have an abundance mindset, send, you know, share things. No one's going to steal my idea. I always want to share things with people. And if they do steal my ideas, I'm abundant. So I'll have more ideas. So anyway, I shared this idea with him and the, the outline and the chapters. And he said, he wrote back right away. And he said, this is great. Can you help me with it? And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no. I just do this. I got, this is for you. You should write book. And every time we'd readdress it, he'd always said, oh man, help me with this. Like, can you do this with me? And you know, now it's almost a year later. And our, our, all our audio book that we did together came out. It's like the, in the top 10 selling nonfiction books on audible.

1 (32m 57s):
And that was the result of an experiment of just sending ideas to this guy. I vaguely knew. And it worked, it like created out of nothing. That's what happens with these experiments when there's, when there's upside worst case scenario is I would have learned something best case it happened, which is that it became the best-selling audio book on this topic on audible. So that's another what Richard Branson also great experimenter. He wanted to start an airline. Everyone told him you can't do that. You don't know anything about airlines and you're here like a 27. You own a record store, like you're a 27 year old guy. So he says, okay, well, everybody says I can't do this.

1 (33m 38s):
So he calls Boeing and he says to Boeing, can I borrow an airplane, preferably a seven 47? And they're like, well, who, who are you? You're just this 27 year old record store guy. And fortunately he had persuasion skills. And I write a chapter on persuasion in the book because this is key to monetizing, but he said, listen, there's only, there's a government controlled monopoly, British airways in England. You have no pricing control over your competitor. So my what harm is it to you? If you just lend me an airport line, an airplane, I'll return it in a year. And so they're like, Hmm. All right. And so, so he bought, he got an airplane. He managed to get a landing strip at Gatwick airport at JFK.

1 (34m 20s):
And now he has an airline for almost no money. I

0 (34m 23s):
Mean, Fire Nation. This is the things, when you think outside the box and you just try a bunch of things like these 10,000 experimental rules, I mean, this is the process that James is going to walk you through. And you know, this Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with James and JLD today. So can you please please keep up that heat, make sure you head over to EOFire.com, just type James in the search bar. Cause we've done a bunch of episodes together on EOFire. They'll all come up. They're all amazing. Listen to all of them. You'll love them all for obvious reasons. But the links in the timestamps of everything we talked about will be on that show notes page as well for today's episode and makes you head over to wherever you buy books or audio.

0 (35m 7s):
And guess what gets this book? This book skip the line, needs to be on your, to read list in 2021. James, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you brother and we'll catch you on the flip side. Excellent,

1 (35m 26s):
John, thank you so much. And hello and goodbye to Fire Nation.

0 (35m 31s):
Today's at value bound content was brought to you by James and Fire Nation. I worked 480 hours to write my first traditionally published book. The Common Path to Uncommon Success. It is now available. It is absolutely the best work I've ever done. It's the culmination of 3000 interviews over the past decade for entrepreneurs on fire. Please learn more over at UncommonSuccessBook.com, UncommonSuccessBook.com. You're awesome. Does it help with automating your emails, increasing sales gamification in more? It's never been easier to create an online course than with the Thinkific app store.

0 (36m 13s):
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