Ask Altucher! EP07: How to Unlock Your Twenties

[00:00:00] This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. James, how many kids do you have? You have five kids, right? I have five kids, and they're all from ages of 21 to 24.

[00:00:28] So they're all in that critical period where it's like, should you know what you want to do with your life? And some of them do know what they want to do. Some of them don't. They're all doing different things.

[00:00:39] But also recently, a friend of mine whose son is about 21 or 22, his son asked me for advice on what he should be thinking of if he's thinking in terms of career and so on. So at this age, a lot of...

[00:00:54] Like this is the first time in your life when you're 21 or 22 years old where you don't have a schedule. You don't wake up and you have to catch the school bus, and then you have to

[00:01:06] take classes, and then you have to do after-school activities, and then you have to do homework, and then it all starts over again. From the age of five to the age of 21 or 22, you're on that hamster wheel where you're just trying to survive on that schedule.

[00:01:24] And then suddenly, you're supposed to just magically know what you want to do for the rest of your life and start that new schedule. Right. And because I remember when I was younger, my schedule from five to 21 was wake up at

[00:01:38] six o'clock, get the school bus, go to school at eight o'clock, and then school at three o'clock and then take lunch. And then we go to after-school, what do you call it, tutor from four o'clock to eight o'clock and then go home at nine o'clock and then sleep.

[00:01:55] And you grew up in Malaysia, right? Yep. There's an Asian schedule right there. You wake up, you study, you eat, you study. But guess what? You're not the US schedule. You just described my schedule from the age of five to 22.

[00:02:08] And the reason is, is this all started in like the 1830s when England basically started to colonize the entire world. They created an educational system which the entire world began to follow. And the educational system was the same everywhere because they wanted to know that they could

[00:02:27] just pick a soldier up that was stationed in Australia and put him in India or pick him up and put him in Canada or pick him up and put him in, you know, whatever colony they had in Africa. And this educational system became uniform for everyone.

[00:02:43] It was the same for everyone. And then college has an interesting history. So everybody thinks, oh, this is where you read the classics. You learn about the higher education sciences or whatever. But that's all BS. Who commits the most murders in society? Yeah, young men ages 18 to 22.

[00:03:03] So guess what? Let's send them away to jail. I mean college. And it used to be there were soldiers that surrounded a college like back in, you know, the Renaissance and when colleges sort of first became more widespread among the ruling

[00:03:21] classes, but the soldiers were not protecting the college. They weren't looking outwards. They were looking inwards making sure no kid escaped because the crusades were over. So let's just we have nothing to do with the 18 to 22 year old.

[00:03:34] We used to send them off to get it out of their system by sending them to Jerusalem to kill people. And when I say we, I mean Europeans, I certainly wasn't sending. I'm not even descended from those people.

[00:03:48] But now, now it's like considering, oh, if you don't go to college, you're not going to be educated. So this is where my advice begins. Congratulations, you're done with that BS schedule from nine to five.

[00:04:03] By the way, you would have been fine if you didn't have that schedule. You would have learned to read sooner or later. You would have learned to do whatever math you needed sooner or later. You would have learned geography or basic history sooner or later.

[00:04:17] By the way, if you try to remember the history from high school, you won't remember it if you weren't interested in it. Now I was more interested in history than chemistry. So I don't remember any chemistry, but I remember history. Some people remember chemistry. Some people remember biology.

[00:04:33] Some people remember their Spanish classes or French classes. Yeah, I don't remember any of my English classes because we were always reading like the most the canabary tells. Why would I want to read a book written in? I don't know, the 1400s.

[00:04:47] I'm sure people love it, but it wasn't for me. I couldn't get to read. I didn't start learning how to read until I really read and understand and enjoy reading until I was in my 20s. Yeah, also it's the last time you use calculus. In relationships.

[00:05:04] Wait, relationship? How? Well, okay. When you first meet a girl and you're falling in love, the second derivative is positive because the rate at which your love is going higher is increasing. You might double your love in the first week, but you might triple your love

[00:05:25] in the second week. So that's the second derivative is positive. And then when the second derivative goes negative, it's when you're still increasing in love, first derivative still positive, but the rate has slowed down. The rate is still positive, but the first derivative is not negative.

[00:05:43] Is it like a bell curve? I have a whole complicated calculator. The only way I've ever applied calculus in my life is I have a complete calculus of how to define relationships, but that's another podcast completely.

[00:05:56] But I just want to describe basically this came up because this son of this friend of mine, actually this is a guy I give chess lessons to, and he was starting his new career.

[00:06:09] And I'm really combining the advice I gave him with the advice I give my own kids and advice I've given several others. But this is what made me think that this was interesting because everybody, and not necessarily this kid, but just people, when someone's in their 20s,

[00:06:24] they come to me and they say, is it bad? I don't know what I want to do with my life. And some young people say, oh, I do know what I want to do in my life. I'm going to do this.

[00:06:36] And when I was 22, I knew what I wanted to do in my life, and I was completely 100% wrong. And so is everybody. Very few people know what they want to do at the age of 22. And here's the truth. It doesn't matter what you do at the age of 22.

[00:06:56] For instance, well, when I was 22, I knew what I wanted to do, which was I wanted to be a professor of computer science. And so I wanted to get a PhD in computer science and then be a professor. I love the idea that.

[00:07:06] You want to be a professor? Why? I mean, you do have a professor here right now, don't get me wrong. But no, I like teaching. I look, I've made these writing classes on Thinkific or Udemy, wherever we have them.

[00:07:18] And I like to teach and I enjoyed computer science very much. And I enjoyed academic computer science, like kind of the theoretical side. So I really loved it. I dreamt about computer science. I studied it all day and all night.

[00:07:32] And then at the age of 23, I completely changed 100%. Everything. I got, I changed so bad. I got thrown out of graduate school one year after being obsessed with it. And I was on the path to becoming a writer. I didn't want to be an investor.

[00:07:49] I didn't want to be an entrepreneur. I didn't really want to program computers, even though I've been doing that for years and years at that point. I just wanted to write novels. I wanted to write the great American novel. And that's really when I started reading,

[00:08:03] I started reading like a novel a day and I loved it. And then I would read the critical analysis of every novel I read. I'd go to the library and I would see, I wasn't even attending my computer science classes. This is why I got thrown out.

[00:08:15] But I was attending English classes then and I love them. I didn't, I never loved English classes before. But anyway, this is not about me. So what I'm saying is two things are very okay. It's okay to not know what you want to do. There is no pressure.

[00:08:30] There is no rush. And it's also okay to think you know what you want to do because it's going to change anyway, but you might as well do something. And so those two things are very okay. And it's also okay to not have any clue at all.

[00:08:47] It also doesn't matter where you live. Although that actually is more important, where you live is a little bit more important than knowing what you want to do. Because in general, what you want to do at the age of 21 or 22

[00:09:03] or whenever it is that you get launched into adulthood, you want to increase the potential size of your luck. And I'll give you an example. If you're 22 years old, this is not as much true now because of remote work and everything,

[00:09:20] but if you're 22 years old and you live in San Francisco or Silicon Valley or New York City, the size of your potential luck is higher than if you live in, I don't know, Kansas City, Kansas. I'm not saying anything's wrong with Kansas City, Kansas.

[00:09:36] And again, like I said, with remote work, luck has been dispersed throughout the country. It's more evenly distributed throughout the country. But basically, you want to have an opportunity to run into someone at a party and that person's starting the next Uber

[00:09:50] and he says, hey, you want to be our first employee and you make a billion dollars that way. The first employee of Google, Craig Ferguson, just happened to be in the right play. You know, he was a programmer like anybody else.

[00:10:02] He was the first employee of Google and he's a billionaire. And now he actually is still an employee. He loves being an employee. He's an employee at the Khan Academy, but he's a multi-billionaire because he was the first employee at Google. So was he lucky? A little bit.

[00:10:17] But he was also in the right place. He chose to be, to live in kind of the Stanford area. I think he was a student at Stanford. And so obviously he was a smart guy. But okay, let's say you see yourself. Well, I don't live, for instance,

[00:10:30] I lived in Pittsburgh when I was from the age of 21 to 26. I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania because that's where I went to grad school. And even after I was kicked out of grad school, I stayed there. My friends were there. It was cheap to live there.

[00:10:47] I was able to write all day every day while working very simple jobs. And should I have lived somewhere else? Maybe, again, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. However, always thinking about how can I increase my luck? You don't have to make any big changes,

[00:11:07] but this is something to always keep in mind. How can I increase the potential size of my luck? And so living in Pittsburgh didn't necessarily make me luckier, but I was around a lot of smart people because I went to grad school and everybody was smarter than me.

[00:11:23] So I stayed around a lot of smart people. And also living in Pittsburgh because it was easy to live there, I was able to write a lot and gain a lot. Even though I wrote nonstop bad things, like it was awful, my writing,

[00:11:38] it gave me time and experience to sort of pay my dues to get that out of the way, those first few years of almost being an apprentice of writing. So that increased my size of luck

[00:11:50] as opposed to being the one downside of a place like New York City is it's so expensive to live. You don't really have time to do anything but make the rent when you're young. So I wouldn't have had the same experience

[00:12:00] of being able to write all the time. Always think how can I increase my luck? So one important thing to do is do lots of experiments. And so I discussed this in Skip the Line, but always kind of... The one way you increase your potential future luck

[00:12:34] is by experimenting in lots of different ways. So for instance, at one point, I was writing and I wrote a collection of short stories. I basically made a book, really tiny book that was the size of my palm and I printed it up using the grad school's printers,

[00:12:54] probably inappropriately. They ended up wanting me to pay for the paper when they realized what I was doing. And I went to every local bookstore in Pittsburgh and I asked them if they could sell the book for a quarter and they did. It sold out.

[00:13:07] That was my first quote unquote self-published book. That was really self-published. Like... How much money do you make? Well, I only did like 100. So whatever... One. And I let them keep all... I let the bookstores keep all the money. So it's not like I made...

[00:13:21] So in total, it's all $25 worth. So it's not like it was a big deal. But people bought it and I put my phone number in the back. Typical... My transparency was already in my writing then and people will call me

[00:13:38] because my phone number was in the back of the book. Like, oh, I liked your collection of stories. That was my first... I wish I... I think I have a copy that's somewhere actually, believe it or not. But anyway, obviously I didn't write short stories for a living.

[00:13:51] I wasn't a computer programmer or a computer scientist for a living. I never went back to Pittsburgh after I left it. Like, it's... I didn't end up living there. So nothing that I was doing at the age of 22 or 23 or 24 or 25 had anything to do with...

[00:14:10] I mean, I shouldn't say it didn't have anything to do because it plants the seeds for everything else. But it didn't matter that I had a firm path. Like this is my goal. I'm going to be a veterinarian. I mean, just as an example,

[00:14:23] one friend of mine was the Wall Street Journal reporter for Covering Warren Buffett for many years of her career. That was her career. And her name's Karen Richardson. She was a really great reporter and she got sick of it and ended up going to veterinary school

[00:14:38] and is now a veterinarian living, I think, in London. She was previously here in New York. So that's the first advice. It doesn't matter what you do. Second thing is to be aware that you're going to do many things.

[00:14:51] Like right now, people not only change jobs every three or four years, many young people change actual careers every three or four years. And think about it. That's because industry is changing so fast now. Like when I was young, the only exponentially growing industry where there was like...

[00:15:11] It started to be thousands of opportunities was in the web. Then it became the web plus social media plus mobile. Then it became all of that plus crypto. And now AI is going to add about maybe three to five percent every year to the entire global economy.

[00:15:30] Like it's trillions and trillions of dollars are going to be created out of nothing. So there's going to be so many opportunities. And by the way, many opportunities that you're going to be obsessed by later in life don't even exist now. Like six months ago,

[00:15:45] there was no such thing as a job offer for a prompt engineer. Now companies are looking to hire prompt engineers to basically guide their AI engines. And this is like a brand new job that didn't even exist before.

[00:15:59] Or many people would never even consider being like a graphic designer because they didn't have graphic design skills. Well now with mid-journey and other AI tools, you could potentially consider being like a hybrid graphic designer slash AI prompt engineer using graphic design tools

[00:16:20] to help people, companies come up with their logos or album covers or book covers or whatever. So the job and career you eventually want might not even exist yet. So be aware that you're going to do many things. Expand the surface area of your luck. Don't pressure yourself.

[00:16:38] Like my daughter, one of my daughters, she's so pressured like, oh, she's about to graduate college. And against my advice, she went to college but fortunately, she's graduating a semester early. I'm very happy for her for doing that.

[00:16:52] But she's scared because she doesn't know what she wants to do. And I said to her, well, what would you rather be doing? Spending five hours a day taking some shitty classes or whatever or having free time those five hours a day

[00:17:05] so you can either do crappy 22 year old style jobs while you figure out what you want to do, why you do experiments. You know, so another experiment I did when I was younger is I enjoyed interviewing people. I would sometimes go out and interview homeless people

[00:17:22] or prostitutes or whatever. Here I was as a grad student in computer science and then I'd go out and like interview people as a preload to do on a podcast or I was obsessed with playing the game Go.

[00:17:35] And so I thought about doing an AI version of Go back then which Google eventually with AlphaGo did the world's best Go program. You also want to travel. Travel is a kind of experimentation. So this is another key point. Well, should you save money?

[00:17:52] And the answer is yes and no. You should always have let's say three to six months worth of living expenses saved up. Like if you have nothing saved and you lose your job, you're in trouble. You're going to have to figure out how to get money quickly.

[00:18:07] But if you always have six months worth of money saved up, you're okay because if you're a young person, you can always get a job that can pay your rent if you have six months runaway. But do not save more than six months worth of expenses. Very important.

[00:18:24] Because here's the thing. When I was young, six months worth of expenses meant, okay, I should probably save somewhere between like 10 and $12,000 because I lived in Pittsburgh. My rent was super cheap and I didn't really have any other expenses. So 10,000 might even been too much.

[00:18:42] But after that, there's no point because just a few years later, let's say, when I moved from Pittsburgh to New York City in 1994, within three years, I was making 10,000 a month. So what would be the big deal if I had saved up $10,000?

[00:19:02] If I worked really hard and when I was 25 or 24 and saved up $10,000, that would have been meaningless to my life once I moved to New York City. So people don't understand your income is going to go up very fast when you're young.

[00:19:16] So at some point, whatever you sweated and you saved and you denied yourself buying things so you could save up, you know, $5,000, $6,000, $3,000 and then that amount would become trivial, you know, in just a few years because your income is going to go up really fast.

[00:19:34] So what should you do then if you don't save? Don't buy material items like what do you need a fancy car for or what do you need fancy clothes for? That's not that important. But do buy experiences. So travel, take online courses,

[00:19:53] take an improv class, learn improv comedy, spend the money on getting yourself experiences, whatever those experiences are. And to this day, I don't really buy a lot of things. I like to spend my money on experiences like I'm about to go on a trip to Europe.

[00:20:09] And this is because somebody asked me to, you know, go someplace, do some exciting things. And I always say yes to experience. And when you're younger, that's even more important. Say yes to experience. Don't save more than six months worth of living expenses

[00:20:24] because it's going to be trivial later on when you start making a lot more money. And whatever it is you're curious about in life, find an experience. You're curious about Alaska? Go to Alaska and go fishing in Alaska.

[00:20:39] You're never going to do that again for the rest of your life. So go now to Alaska or go to the North Pole or go to North Korea or wherever it is you want to go. Like be curious and wherever your curiosity takes you,

[00:20:53] go there. Another thing really important is a lot of kids, I say kids, young people ages 21 to 25, 26, they get very stressed out like, oh, I should, I need to know what I'm doing. Oh, this is my first job.

[00:21:23] I need to do really well so that I get good recommendations. No, nothing matters. That it's the same thing as should you know what to do? No, it does not matter what you do in those ages. You want to be a streamer on Twitch?

[00:21:39] You want to try being, you know, writing a novel, spend years writing a novel. What will happen is be curious, read a lot, go to the bookstore, see what section in the bookstore you're willing to read every book in, and see what excites you.

[00:21:59] And gradually more and more things will excite you and you'll have, you know, you're not going to have just one passion in life. You're going to have many. And the important thing is in all of this is you got to take care of yourself.

[00:22:10] If you don't take care of yourself, you're like, if you don't take care of yourself physically, you're going to be too tired or too sick to pursue experiences and have experiments and be curious and be lucky. If you don't take care of your emotional health,

[00:22:24] like don't, you know, try to get into, obviously you're not going to, many people are not going to get into the most stable relationships in their life in their 20s, but try to have a more or less stable relationship life so you could stay emotionally calm.

[00:22:38] Creativity, of course, I recommend writing 10 ideas a day. That's what I always recommend. And even spiritual, like spirituality is something to cultivate. And I don't mean go to church. If you mean do that if you want to, but learn that you can't control the things around you,

[00:22:55] particularly, you know, you can't control everything around you. So learn to be able to surrender to both the good and the bad experiences you're having. And of course, if you're around good people, you're the average of the five people you're around, if you're around good people,

[00:23:09] if you're in a good location so you increase the size of your luck, if you're always curious and doing, and pursuing your curiosity and doing interesting things, if you're practicing managing your stress, if you're exercising, so you're physically healthy, these are all very important things.

[00:23:25] And with excess money, again, more than five or six months living expenses saved, you could buy experiences. By the way, I never had any money saved, so I didn't buy experiences when I was young. I wish that's the one thing I wish I had done more.

[00:23:40] I'm not upset that I left graduate school. I'm not upset that I spent years writing really horrible novels. I wrote four novels and dozens and dozens of short stories. I'm not upset about that. I'm not upset that I lived in Pittsburgh where there wasn't really as many opportunities

[00:23:55] to pursue other interests because it gave me time and money and opportunity to practice writing. And basically, that's it. That's my advice for someone in their early 20s just graduating college. It doesn't matter what you do. You'll do many things. It doesn't matter where you live,

[00:24:14] although do think about how to increase your luck and live where, there's various factors in that including where you live, what kind of people you're around, what you read, what experiments you do, what experiences you buy. Don't pressure yourself too much. Experiment, read a lot, be curious,

[00:24:35] take care of yourself. But you don't need a plan. You don't need to take the initiative. You don't need to start networking. That'll happen naturally as you get more passionate about things. You'll find people to network with and the things you're passionate about.

[00:24:49] But don't force yourself to network just for network's sake. That's stupid. Just do things that you love doing because you're never gonna have that chance again. But what about people like me, like 35 years old and up? First off, I changed my career many times in my 30s.

[00:25:05] When I was in my 30s, I was a day trader, then a hedge fund manager, then I started a website company that I sold. I saw I was an entrepreneur, then I was an investor in venture capital style investments. And then I started writing

[00:25:20] Choose Yourself and books like that which had nothing to do with anything before that. I started giving more public talks. I started a podcast. I started investing newsletter company. I was the stand-up comedian. I play chess. I do lots of experiments.

[00:25:36] So that's what you need to start doing. So in your 30s, you do need to start building some sort of career. Like I've always had some sort of career since my 30s or since my late 20s. And you're doing that, Jay. Like you're making more money

[00:25:51] than you made five years ago. You've gone from being audio engineer of a podcast to podcast producer plus you help out, you're involved in other projects. So that's the other thing too. You don't have to do just one thing anymore. People used to say,

[00:26:04] okay, I'm going to get a job at General Motors and I'm going to do that for the next 40 years and then finally I'm going to play golf. Well, now you could do many things and you could pursue many interests at the same time.

[00:26:14] Some of them will make money, some of them won't, but they're all related to each other. They're all connected and you'll learn over time how they're connected. But that's the key. I also have Etsy shop that I run for fun and I only handle those.

[00:26:27] Really? I didn't know that. What's your Etsy store? I remember you told, I think I showed you to you. It's called something's off shop and then I owe you $10 because I didn't sell anything the only two things that I sold was yours ideas. What were my ideas?

[00:26:41] Oh, the shirts. Yeah, the mug actually. But you sold them to me. No, no, no, no. I didn't sell it to you. Someone bought it and sent it to their friends like, hey, make sure you use this mug all the time.

[00:26:52] Like, I mean none of my stuff worked by your mug works. I'm like, what? Well, look, it's like me. I just launched a course, How to Write a Book in 30 Days. How to Write Your First Book in 30 Days and then I put it in you to me

[00:27:06] and thinkific and I'm about to launch another course and then I want to do a writing course. So this is back to my original thing from 30 years ago where I really do love to teach and I love to write and I love to communicate

[00:27:18] and I love different ways of communicating whether it's writing or comedy or podcasting. Like eventually there's a thread that will run through all the things you're interested in. Like I've always loved games. I've always loved writing. I've always loved computers. I've always loved investing

[00:27:32] and so now my life revolves around those elements and the more I can combine them, the better. But I didn't have any of those interests or most of those interests until my mid to late 20s. So again, just expose yourself to experiences and experiments. Take care of yourself.

[00:27:51] Don't stress it and it doesn't matter what you do. Do not stress out. It doesn't matter what your parents tell you doesn't matter what your professors tell you. You're going to do many things in life. You're going to do many great things in life.

[00:28:02] But the key is not to worry and don't do something just for the sake of doing something. If you don't want to do something, don't do it in your 20s. Yeah, because Steve Jobs has this quote like you can't connect the dots looking forward.

[00:28:15] You can only connect them looking backwards, right? I never heard that but that's a very good saying. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, like when I started writing my 10 ideas a day during a period when I was really depressed, that's often what I would do is

[00:28:30] I would say, oh, I'm interested in investing. How could this be related to writing? And so I combined those two interests of mine and I came up with ideas for articles. I sent them to a writer, Jim Kramer, who wrote for the street.com

[00:28:43] and that's when he said, hey, can you write these articles? And that was my very first time I got paid for writing. It was because I had idea sex. I combined my interests or Scott Adams would say he combined his talent stack

[00:28:57] and it was the writing of the 10 ideas a day and also sharing those ideas and not being too stressed about like, is this going to advance my career or not? Like don't think about advancing your career. Just do what you, the younger you are,

[00:29:08] the more important it is to just do things you love and experiment. Doesn't matter what those things are. I wish I'm 25 again. Me too. Me too. But actually I'm on the right age right now but I wish that my memory wasn't so bad right now. Yeah.

[00:29:24] So I can't even remember that. You have an Etsy store. All right, thank you James. Thank you.