How to Write Your Own Best-Selling Autobiography: Part 2 – Crafting Your Life Story with Impact

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_02] You've learned a lot about the art of autobiography, but we're only just beginning now. Now we learn how to write an autobiographical work.

[00:00:14] [SPEAKER_01] This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_02] So take the questions you answered on the difficult questions where you wrote about your obstacles or your losses or the things you've grieved about or your addictions and so on. Find the ones that intersect with the important events in your life, the most important people in your life. Intersect that with the lessons you've learned and who you are now, why you are now, why now. Play around with all the different intersections and see what resonates the most with you and what you would like to really convey to readers.

[00:00:57] [SPEAKER_02] What is the most important story out of all these intersections? Only you can know. You might have many, many stories. You might have one. You might have to think about this for a while. Given all these possible intersections of difficult experiences, lessons learned, people you learn from, important events, and so on. And finally, who you are and why you are and why now. What are the most important things you want to be able to convey to a reader?

[00:01:24] [SPEAKER_02] And which of these intersections of possibilities would be the story that does the best job of conveying it? That is the core, the heart, the backbone of your autobiographical book. And I say autobiographical book instead of autobiography because, again, maybe you write a memoir. Maybe you write a mini-memoir. Maybe you write a nonfiction book. Maybe you write a hybrid book where it's about, again, puzzles or man's search for meaning or extreme ownership.

[00:01:52] [SPEAKER_02] And you use your autobiographical stories as the backbone of the book. That's all up to you. You get to decide what type of autobiographical work you'll do. Maybe it'll be a novel. Maybe it's a collection of short stories like The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Maybe it's in the form of a diary or a journal or a much more intellectual work like Annie Duke using her experiences as a poker professional to make an almost more academic book called Thinking in Bets,

[00:02:20] [SPEAKER_02] where she relies on a lot of scientific research and other stories and so on. So all these possibilities are good, but the backbone comes from the intersections of those stories. So I'll give you one example. A friend of mine, Craig Stanlund, he wrote a book called Blank Canvas. And so what's this book about? Well, let me read to you the first line or the first few lines. October 1st, 2013, you have one unheard voicemail.

[00:02:47] [SPEAKER_02] Mr. Stanlund, this is Special Agent McTernan with the FBI. We are at your residence and have a warrant for your arrest. You will need to call us and come home immediately or we will issue an APB with the federal marshals for your arrest. My lungs can't find air. It's quiet except for my heart. It's pumping so hard it's on the verge of giving up or bursting out of my chest. My mind is trying to comprehend what I just heard. I don't know what the fuck to do. I know I want to rip off my skin and leave this place. A voice whispered to me. It was always there, but I always ignored it.

[00:03:17] [SPEAKER_02] The FBI sitting in my house made it impossible to ignore. And the book continues. And Craig ended up committing a serious crime. He was arrested by the FBI in Chapter 1. He goes to jail. But the book isn't really about that. The book is how he reinvents himself afterwards and how he finds a full and complete life afterwards. And what he's conveying to the reader, what he conveyed to me so strongly was that no matter what happens to you,

[00:03:43] [SPEAKER_02] you could still find a thriving and beautiful life afterwards. And that's why his autobiographical work, which is about jail and prison and afterwards, how he comes to grips with it and the techniques to come to grips with it, is so powered by his autobiographical story. And again, he talks about other people he's met along the way who also survived very adverse circumstances. Maybe they survived prison as well. And he gets wisdom from them. And he has more and more challenges. He can't get a job afterwards.

[00:04:12] [SPEAKER_02] And he has to figure out how to really reinvent his career and so on. And all the while avoiding jail again, which as we know is a very difficult thing to do. So that's how he put together all his lessons, all his adverse experiences, all the people who helped him, all the important events in his life, all the people who were meaningful to him, like how his relationship with his wife was affected and how it affected other relationships going forward. And he wove it together into this beautiful memoir.

[00:04:40] [SPEAKER_02] And every memoir has the same components like that. And we'll talk a little bit more finally about what those components are. But right now, you have all the meat you need to figure out what the story is. And again, you have also to make the decision of what kind of book you want to write. Is it an autobiography? Is it a mini memoir about one slice of your life? Is it a fiction book based on your autobiographical story? Is it a hybrid where you take your experiences and the experience of others

[00:05:10] [SPEAKER_02] and you write a book about what you've learned, like The Power of No or Man's Search for Meaning or Extreme Ownership or The Puzzler by A.G. Jacobs or Blind Canvas by Craig Stalin? And we'll talk a little bit more about that. But first, even in an autobiography, a story about yourself, it still has to follow the classic arc of the hero. So back in the early 90s, Disney writers were having a challenging time with one of their movies.

[00:05:39] [SPEAKER_02] They just couldn't nail down the story. And they were trying draft after draft. And it just wasn't clicking. It wasn't working. And the executives were rejecting it. And one of the writers was researching the art of storytelling. And he stumbled across Joseph Campbell's work about mythology and the hero's journey. And so he wrote this memo to all the Disney writers and executives and so on and described the arc of the hero. And here's how he described it. First, there's a call to adventure.

[00:06:08] [SPEAKER_02] I'm going to describe it in the context of Star Wars. I know some people probably haven't seen Star Wars, but think of your favorite stories. Think of The Hunger Games or think of Harry Potter, whatever story you want to put in. But I'll describe in terms of Star Wars. So there's a call to adventure. So in the beginning of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker, he wants to go explore the galaxy and fight for the rebels. Then there's part two, the refusal of the call. He can't do it because his uncle needs him to work on the farm another year.

[00:06:37] [SPEAKER_02] So he has to refuse the call to adventure. But then part three of the arc of the hero, meeting the mentor. He met Obi-Wan Kenobi, who showed him the force and told him things about his father. And he can journey across the universe and save a princess. And then unfortunately, his aunt and uncle were killed by the empire. So that pushed him along. And part four, crossing the threshold. Now you leave the ordinary world and you go into the world of adventure, this world that you've never been to before.

[00:07:07] [SPEAKER_02] And I'm sure many entrepreneurs have experienced this. You're working at your corporate job. You feel the itch to leave the job and start a business. At first, everybody tells you, no, don't do it. You'll fail. Nine out of 10 businesses fail. But then finally, you cross the threshold. You meet maybe entrepreneurial friends who become mentors and allies and so on. And you cross the threshold and are now in the new world of entrepreneurial activity instead of the old corporate world. So Luke Skywalker, suddenly he's in outer space.

[00:07:36] [SPEAKER_02] He's on Han Solo's, the Millennium Falcon. He's in the magical world that he always dreamed about. And then part five of the arc of the hero, allies, tests, enemies. In the case of Star Wars, he has to rescue the princess. And he meets the princess. He meets Han Solo. He meets other friends and allies. He also encounters Darth Vader who kills his mentor. So he meets friends, but he also meets enemies. And he's put after test, after test, after test. Like first he had to find the princess.

[00:08:05] [SPEAKER_02] Then he had to get her off the Death Star, which leads to part six, the inmost cave. So in this case, in the case of the movie Star Wars, Luke Skywalker had to really learn to trust the force. Like he's about to destroy the Death Star minutes before it's going to destroy an entire planet and all the rebel forces. And he hears the voice of his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi. And Obi-Wan Kenobi says, trust the force.

[00:08:32] [SPEAKER_02] And so Luke has to learn inside to trust the force. That's his deepest challenge. So he goes through this ordeal and he transforms. Previously, he was a young person who didn't even believe in the force. And now he believes in this force and he's on the way to becoming a Jedi Knight. And ultimately, he takes the road back to the ordinary world. And along the way, he might even experience greater challenges, which we see experiences in the Empire Strikes Back and the upcoming Star Wars movies.

[00:09:02] [SPEAKER_02] And finally, there's the final challenge, which he experiences later on in the movies, which he defeats. And that's the whole story of Luke Skywalker. And now the tale can be told. So that's the full arc of the hero. You don't need every component of the arc of the hero to tell your story. You just need a few of these. But think about your story. Write it down. Write down the different components. The call to adventure. The refusal of the call. The meeting with a mentor.

[00:09:29] [SPEAKER_02] The crossing from the ordinary world into the magical world. The tests, allies, enemies. The inmost cave, which has the biggest challenges you need to face. The ordeal you go through. The transformation. The reward. The road back, which also might have challenges. In fact, you might even have the biggest challenge. Imagine a horror movie where they think they've killed the monster. But then suddenly at the end, the monster has one last chance to kill them all. So there's the final challenge.

[00:09:58] [SPEAKER_02] And finally, there's the return where you tell the story. You don't need every component. But write all those components down and see which things are in your story. And if you have to play around with this arc a little bit, that's fine. It's your story. You do what you want with it. But fill this out the best you can. And we see this in memoir after memoir. Blank canvas by Craig Stanlon. He went to prison. He didn't want to go to prison. He was reluctant. But he had to go. Along the way, he found mentors.

[00:10:28] [SPEAKER_02] He found allies. He found enemies. He found challenges. He had harder and harder ordeals. Until finally, the final challenge. And then he comes back to tell the tale. Specifically with his autobiography about surviving and reinventing yourself after life in prison. Or obviously, we've talked about Viktor Frankl a lot. We could talk about The Liars Club by Mary Carr, who also wrote a book called The Art of the Memoir. The Liars Club was about a very challenging and dysfunctional childhood that she went through.

[00:10:57] [SPEAKER_02] And she certainly was reluctant to go through that. But then that led to her call to adventure and the mentors she met along the way, the allies, the tests, and so on until she reached the final ordeal and came back to tell the tale. So every autobiographical work has some or maybe multiple instances of this. So all the way back to when we discussed The Puzzler by A.J. Jacobs. Imagine when he and his family went to compete and represent the U.S. in the World Jigsaw Puzzle competition.

[00:11:27] [SPEAKER_02] And that by itself, that one chapter, is the arc of the hero. The whole book has the arc of the hero. But every chapter also can have the arc of the hero in it. And if you think about it, using Star Wars as an example again, just when Luke gets to the Death Star and has to save Princess Leia, that entire little section of the movie contains the whole arc of the hero in it. So think about the arc of the hero when constructing your story. Very important.

[00:11:55] [SPEAKER_02] Even when you bring in the stories of other people to prove out your example even further, like Susan King, when she was writing Quiet about being an introvert, she had many, many stories of other people who dealt with being an introvert in different ways. And she was able to put a small version of the arc of the hero around every single story she told. So very important in autobiography. Even more important than fiction. You need to bring all your characters to life. I call them characters because that's what they are. They're people in your book.

[00:12:24] [SPEAKER_02] So they're called a character. And it's even more important than fiction because people know that these are live people. It's an autobiographical work. So you have to bring them to life. They can't be cartoon characters. And to bring them to life, you need to give them the arc of the hero. You need to give them emotions. You need to give them reasons for everything you do. Kurt Vonnegut once said, every sentence in your book has to move forward the goals and intentions of some character in your book.

[00:12:53] [SPEAKER_02] So again, that's another way to bring characters to life. But the arc of the hero is the most important tool. Now, Chris Vogler wrote this memo to the executives at Disney. And guess what? The very next draft, they nailed it. The Lion King was a huge, huge success. One of Disney's biggest successes in history. And it was all due to bringing to life the arc of the hero in this story. This episode of The James Altucher Show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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[00:14:13] [SPEAKER_02] Visit BetterHelp.com slash James to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash James. I talked about a checklist you need to use to make sure that your story and your characters and your chapter, whatever, your whole book is compelling and is going to drive the reader forward every step of the way. There's a slightly different six U's that I personally use for writing autobiographical

[00:14:43] [SPEAKER_02] style of content. And I'm going to describe those six U's to you and how you can use them to make your book as good as possible. And you should always think about them on every page. So the first U is unique. Of course, if you made the list I described earlier, you have your own unique adverse experiences, your own unique people that inspired you, your own strengths and weaknesses, and the unique perspectives and lessons you learned.

[00:15:10] [SPEAKER_02] You always make sure your voice and your writing is authentic and vulnerable and true. I'll give you an example. I don't hit publish on even an article, let alone a book. I don't hit publish unless I'm afraid of what people will think of me. That's one way that I know it's unique. Because if I'm not afraid of something I'm writing, that means everyone's already thought about it or they don't really care or I'm not saying something new.

[00:15:36] [SPEAKER_02] So again, I'm not trying to make something up that will scare myself, but I need to be worried like, oh, are people going to think differently about me after I reveal this? You have to be vulnerable. And again, you have to be authentic to you and tell the truth. When you're not truthful and vulnerable, you could end up in a situation like we talked about James Frey earlier with his amazing book, A Million Little Pieces, but people weren't sure what was true and what wasn't. So there was some controversy around it.

[00:16:03] [SPEAKER_02] And he did that, of course, to heighten the drama and intensity of the story. I don't blame him for it. It's a beautiful, amazingly written book, a must read for any writer or reader of memoirs and autobiographies or readers of stories about addiction. But he had his very unique approach to describing the story. And for me, when I wrote Choose Yourself, I think people were a little bit taken aback. I was writing kind of a business self-help that was all about my failures.

[00:16:32] [SPEAKER_02] Everyone would say to me, how can you publish this? No one's ever going to give you money to run a business again. But I found I had more opportunities than ever because of the uniqueness of my book and the vulnerability and so on. So unique, you have to check off. Useful. Is this book useful to people? So I'll use as an example again, Amy Warren's book, 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do. She took the inverse experience in her life. She found other stories similar.

[00:17:02] [SPEAKER_02] She found ways to cope and deal with her loss and her grief and her stresses. And then she used those techniques because she herself is a psychologist. She used those techniques to help others. And then she wrote a book about it. She returned to the ordinary world and wrote a book about it, which was a nonfiction book, 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do. It was incredibly useful for people, including myself. So unique and useful. The third you, urgent.

[00:17:28] [SPEAKER_02] Write in a way that makes people want to read the next page so that they're almost urgent to do it. And how do you do that? Well, cliffhangers. Think about that Craig Stanlin memoir that I was just writing about. The first paragraph, he gets the call from the FBI. He has to show up to get arrested. Now, I didn't finish reading the rest of that chapter to you, but let's just make it up right now. Let's say he decided to end that chapter with, would I run or should I show up at my house

[00:17:57] [SPEAKER_02] and get arrested by the FBI? That's a cliffhanger. It's one that we all relate to. It's a question that we would all ask ourselves if we got that kind of call. And now it's urgent. I have to turn the page and see, did he get arrested or did he run? Unforgettable. Again, I'll use that book as an example where he described how he felt like his lungs collapsed. He was out of breath, but his heart was pumping. He was so scared. And you feel, you feel that fear. He's writing it so well.

[00:18:27] [SPEAKER_02] It evokes feelings of fear. And the way you write like that, there's no one technique. You just have to read. Again, the fourth you is unforgettable. You want to write in a way that people are there with you and they remember, oh my gosh, that kind of fear. I felt like that way as well one time. And you remember the times when you felt that way. So it's relatable. So that's unforgettable. And finally, the final two yous are uplifting and universal. So uplifting, because at the end of the day, you need to bring people full circle.

[00:18:56] [SPEAKER_02] It's not that he just went to jail and lived the rest of his life in jail. It said he got out of jail and he learned how to turn his life around. And now he's a big success. Or Brian Keating, who wrote the book, Losing the Nobel Prize, where he was literally trying to find the truth about the beginning of the universe. And he built the biggest telescope in the world. He put it in Antarctica and his experiment found the truth about the beginning of the universe until he realized it was a mistake. There was a flaw.

[00:19:26] [SPEAKER_02] And so it would have won him the Nobel Prize in physics easily if his experiment had worked. Instead, he lost the Nobel Prize and wrote a beautiful book about his story in physics and all of the interesting characters he encountered and all the theories about how the universe began and then how he dealt with it when he failed. And what does it mean to lose the Nobel Prize? And why do people covet it so much? And so on.

[00:19:50] [SPEAKER_02] But at the end, he becomes an even more successful physicist because of how he dealt with this adversity in his life and almost this shame. And he returns to tell the tale of, and he continues his experiments. Perhaps he'll win the Nobel Prize in the future, but it was an uplifting story. Or ultimately, as sad as the story was, Viktor Frankl's man's search for meaning comes back at the end and uplifts us. Here's how he survived such extraordinary pain.

[00:20:19] [SPEAKER_02] Like his wife died, his family died. He was suffering. And he comes back and introduces this new theory about searching for meaning and the psychology of it. And it's uplifting at the end. It's one of the most inspirational stories I've ever read. And then, of course, the end is universal. Not everyone is going to be in a concentration camp. Not everyone's going to be a slave. Not everyone is going to go to jail or have a loved one die at the age of 25, their husband or wife die at the age of 25.

[00:20:48] [SPEAKER_02] You know, I was reading a book, The Art of Clear Thinking by Hazard Lee. He was a pilot for 25 years. And it starts off with a story where he's basically in a fighter jet going almost 1,400 miles per hour. His plane starts spiraling out of control. And he loses 5,000 feet in altitude in seconds. And he has one second left to decide whether to eject or try to straighten out the plane. And he ends the chapter that way and leaves us with a cliffhanger.

[00:21:18] [SPEAKER_02] Very few of us are fighter pilots who have that kind of experience. But we can all relate to the fact that something bad is happening and we have seconds to decide what to do. We can all relate. That's happened to all of us, whether it's in a relationship or at work or with grief or a medical decision, some life decision that we had to make that had really high stakes attached to it. So that's a universal theme. And again, that's a hybrid book. Supposedly, the book is The Art of Clear Thinking.

[00:21:45] [SPEAKER_02] But it's also his autobiography as a fighter pilot and all the decisions he had to make. And he tells stories of other high intense, high impact decisions made by other pilots where some decisions were good and some decisions, unfortunately, did not go so well. And deaths and crashes resulted. Through all these stories and through his own autobiographical stories, he talks about how to develop the art of clear thinking. So what's universal that is there is that even though he's got this unique perspective

[00:22:13] [SPEAKER_02] as a fighter pilot, and we haven't all been through fighter pilot experiences, obviously, we all experience the need to think clearly in high impact situations. And that's why it's universal. So we've all dealt with adverse situations. We've all dealt with high intense situations where our true character is tested. And that's what makes a good autobiographical work universal.

[00:22:41] [SPEAKER_02] We haven't been to Vietnam, but in the book, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, he describes how every soldier that he's working with, they're all carrying these things. Now, some of them are carrying guns and bullets. Other of them are carrying letters from a girl at home that they don't know loves them or not, but they carry these letters. There's a bigger picture there where they're also carrying the feelings and they're carrying their personal experiences and their backgrounds. These are part of the things they bring with them to war, and they're going to bring new

[00:23:11] [SPEAKER_02] things out of the war. And that's what makes it universal as well, is that we all carry around our past with us and to some extent our hopes and dreams for the future. This is what makes autobiography so important, is that we know it's real. And so we know that this happened and that we can learn from this. So again, unique. It's your own, meaning it's your own personal voice, your own unique story, your own lessons learned. Useful.

[00:23:40] [SPEAKER_02] How can you teach us from your story things that are going to be useful to my life, to the reader's life? Urgent. Use the power of storytelling. Use the arc of the hero. Use cliffhangers to make it urgent that I read the next page, that I learn about different characters that we encounter and so on. Unforgettable. Use vivid descriptions to describe how you felt personally in those high intense situations. Why were they so intense? What was happening to you physically? What was going on in your mind? What were you so afraid of? We've all been there.

[00:24:09] [SPEAKER_02] Be as vulnerable as possible. Uplifting. Finally, it's inspirational. You get through the ordeal and you have an uplifting lesson and experience and story to tell us. And universal. It's not some thing about how to take care of a sick cockroach. Maybe that is a universal theme too. I don't know. But it's a universal thing like the art of clear thinking or how to deal with depression or how to deal with, you know, in the book, when breath comes to air, Paul Kalaniti is

[00:24:37] [SPEAKER_02] dealing with the diagnosis of his own death, his upcoming death and how he deals with that. It's a universal theme. And it doesn't sound uplifting, but it's beautiful and uplifting, the message he leaves for his family and then for the readers. So, again, unique, useful, urgent, unforgettable, uplifting, universal. I had to look at my list because I always forget these six years apply specifically to autobiographical stories.

[00:25:03] [SPEAKER_02] I want to read the beginning of one memoir by Elizabeth Wurzel. It's called Prozac Nation. It came out, I want to say, about 1998, 1997. I think 1998. And here's the beginning. I'm 27 years old and I hate myself. I hate the way I look, the way I talk, the way I think. I hate my body, my face, my hair. I hate my clothes, my apartment, my job. I hate my friends, my family, my life. I hate everything about myself.

[00:25:32] [SPEAKER_02] I've been depressed for as long as I can remember. I remember feeling sad and hopeless when I was a little girl. I remember crying myself to sleep at night, wishing that I was someone else. I remember feeling like I didn't belong in this world. As I got older, my depression got worse. I started to have panic attacks and suicidal thoughts. I withdrew from my friends and family. I stopped going to school and work. I just wanted to sleep all day. I finally decided to get help when I was 25 years old. I went to see a therapist and started taking medication.

[00:25:59] [SPEAKER_02] It took a few months, but the medication started to work. I started to feel better. I started to have hope. Prozac Nation is my story. It's the story of my depression, my recovery, and my journey to self-acceptance. There's a story about hope, love, and the power of the human spirit. That is a great beginning of a memoir. We know what to expect. We know why it's urgent. We know what she was feeling. We know what's going to be useful. We know how it's going to be uplifting. We know how it's going to be unforgettable. And it's her unique story, which we can all relate to.

[00:26:28] [SPEAKER_02] So that's the six U's. And next, we're going to cover how to take your autobiographical story and turn it into a hybrid so it becomes the best-selling nonfiction book you always wanted to write. So you've made all your lists. You've figured out which difficult situations you survived, what lessons you've learned, what mentors you had, what friends you had, your strengths and weaknesses.

[00:26:55] [SPEAKER_02] You've figured out your story and what you want to convey to readers. You know the arc of the hero, so you're able to communicate your story in this almost heroic fashion. You have the six U's as a checklist, so your writing could be as urgent and impactful as possible and how people can universally relate to it. And now you're thinking, oh, I want to use this autobiographical story as the backbone for a nonfiction book.

[00:27:21] [SPEAKER_02] Kind of the way I myself used Choose Yourself and The Power of No and other books I've written, where I wrote my own experiences and then turned them into, I don't want to say self-help books. I still consider them almost memoirs, but they're very specific about the insights I have. In one case, it's about how to say no. And in another case, how I figured out I needed this concept for myself to not let other people

[00:27:45] [SPEAKER_02] choose me, whether it was the bosses or the publishers or investors or a spouse or whatever. I had to choose myself in every situation. And for me, that was very autobiographical, but also the insights I learned and how it was inspirational for others and so on. So you want to be a hybrid book. And now there's a range of hybrid books. I would say with my books, I'm probably a little more on the autobiographical side and I don't have

[00:28:12] [SPEAKER_02] as many stories of other people, although I do include stories of other people. And I don't have as much scientific evidence. I'm not a big believer that personality can always be determined by scientific experiments. But there is a lot of research done on every area of life. And so you might as well use the things that you feel are important and relevant to you and so on. So let me talk about making a hybrid book where, again, your mission and your autobiography are at

[00:28:41] [SPEAKER_02] the core. The why am I is at the core, plus all the other things we've discussed. But now you're going to be more universal and use other stories and turn it into a bigger nonfiction book. And I'm going to use it as an example, Limitless, by my friend Jim Quick. Jim's own story and his adversity was when he was young, he basically had a brain injury that affected his functioning and the way he memorized things and the way he learned and so on.

[00:29:09] [SPEAKER_02] He had learning issues because of this massive brain injury he suffered as a kid, similar to James Clear in the book Atomic Habits. And so he had to get through this adversity and learn techniques for memorization, learn techniques for learning. So how to learn things very quickly and so on. But now he wants to turn it as not just his story, but he wants to make it a book called Limitless. Upgrade your brain, learn anything faster and unlock your exceptional life. So essentially he wants to turn his story into a self-help book.

[00:29:37] [SPEAKER_02] So he starts talking about not only his story, but he researches and finds the story of others. So among his travels, for instance, he meets Jim Carrey and he talks with Jim Carrey, how Jim Carrey became the actor he is. He talks, for instance, about Carol Greeter, an American molecular biologist who won the Nobel Prize in 2009. And he says, with such an illustrious career, one would assume that Carol Greeter whizzed through school, but this was not the case. It turns out Carol Greeter had her own

[00:30:06] [SPEAKER_02] adversity. She had dyslexia, so she really couldn't read when she was younger and she couldn't even spell and she was having low grades and trouble in school. And how did she get through this adversity to become the genius she was to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry? And he talks about many stories like this. And at one point he even tells the story of Bruce Lee. So I didn't know this until I read Limitless. I didn't know he was born in San Francisco and his whole family moved to Hong Kong. I thought he

[00:30:34] [SPEAKER_02] was from Hong Kong, but when he gets to Hong Kong, he's a little smaller than the other boys. He is not from China like all of them. And, you know, also Hong Kong had just been taken over and occupied by Japan at the time. So he had to deal with that. And consequently, because he wasn't as good with the language, he got low grades. He was bullied. There was a lot of street fighting and gang fighting. He started learning martial arts. And at one point he beats up in one of these gang fights, the son of

[00:31:02] [SPEAKER_02] the chief of police. I didn't know this. I read this in Jim Quick's memoir, his hybrid memoir, Limitless. And this is when Bruce Lee had to come back to America and he fused the martial arts he was learning in Hong Kong with the martial arts in America and practice insanely good so that he can, you know, overcome all the obstacles he faced in his youth and become the success he later came to be.

[00:31:30] [SPEAKER_02] So again, to create a hybrid, the backbone of the hybrid is your own autobiographical story, but then find other stories that connect the dots with your different chapters and the different parts of your life. And then even further, find academic research, perhaps that proves out the kind of techniques that you're talking about. So for instance, Jim Quick talks about Daniel Coyle, who wrote the talent code and talks about whether talent is innate or whether it can be developed.

[00:31:59] [SPEAKER_02] And Daniel Coyle's conclusion and Jim Quick's conclusion is that yes, people have talent, but skill is grown. It is, you're not born with all the skills you grow it. You have to grow your talent and here are the techniques for doing it. This is a great way to take an autobiographical story and turn it into a hybrid book that tells many stories. And again, every story has some aspects in the arc of the hero. Every story has some aspects of the six U's. You always want to move

[00:32:27] [SPEAKER_02] characters forward. And again, very important in autobiographical work is that these aren't cartoon characters. There's no Darth Vader, who's not really super believable in Star Wars, but these are real people, real human beings that live. And so you want your characters come to life. And that's what you have to do in a hybrid. You get many stories, you get many pieces of evidence that your own story is not unique and that the insights you've discovered, you've learned from,

[00:32:55] [SPEAKER_02] and also you show that other people have discovered these insights in order to kind of really underline the messages of your book. So in a nutshell, that's how to turn your autobiographical story into a hybrid. Come up with the overall theme, like in Amy Morin's case, the 13 things mentally strong people don't do. In Brian Keating's case, losing the Nobel Prize. In Kamal Ravikant's case, love yourself like your life depends on it. Jim Quick's case,

[00:33:21] [SPEAKER_02] limitless. In Hazard Lee's case, the art of clear thinking. Jocko Willink, extreme ownership. There are basically almost every nonfiction book, there's exceptions, is some form of hybrid. There's some form of autobiography. Again, Atomic Habits by James Clear is an example. And Choose Yourself by me is an example. I could go on and on with these hybrid type of books, but they all have these same ideas that you've been learning. And if you ground these ideas into yourself, guaranteed you'll write a

[00:33:51] [SPEAKER_02] best-selling autobiographical work. One of these hybrid style works where your story, your inspiration, your insights are the core, and then you use other stories and examples to further underline your message. And that's how you build a best-selling hybrid. Sometimes people ask me, how important is memory for autobiography? They say things like, oh, I can't write an autobiography. I don't even remember

[00:34:16] [SPEAKER_02] anything about my childhood or anything about the events that happened to me. Or I never kept a diary or a journal. My friend kept a diary and journal so she can write all about her life. Let me tell you something. Memory is not important at all for autobiography. And let me explain why. If you can't remember something, and let's assume it's not because it was so traumatic or because you were blacked out

[00:34:42] [SPEAKER_02] and drunk, but you just simply, it wasn't a big event. I can't remember certain things that happened to me in eighth grade, ninth grade, or in college. If something is not important in your life, you're going to forget it. Your brain is not going to go back to it over and over again and build it into your memory. So memory is not important. It's the things you do remember that are important. Even if you only remember five things from your childhood, those are the most important five things because you

[00:35:07] [SPEAKER_02] remember them. So sometimes having not so good memory is really helpful for autobiography. And then you can say, well, what about dialogue? How do I put in dialogue from when I was 12 years old? You have to decide for yourself. You could describe how the dialogue made you feel. Even if you don't remember the exact words, you could make up and put the probable words that were used as long as you're not making any outrageous claims or anything. But once again, I want to stress memory doesn't help or

[00:35:35] [SPEAKER_02] hurt in autobiography. In fact, it might hurt more than it helped because if your memory is not so good and some things you really do remember really well, then you know exactly what to put on your list for the important events in your life and the lessons learned and so on. So once again, memory is not important at all for autobiography. Let's even say you have complete amnesia. Well, start writing your autobiography of how it feels to have complete amnesia. If you have zero memory, knock yourself out and write an autobiography.

[00:36:08] [SPEAKER_02] Sometimes people ask me, well, do I write everybody's names? Do I write their real names? Or what if am I going to get sued if I say something about someone? And those are reasonable questions to ask. My personal role has always been if it's going to hurt someone, I don't mention them. I'll create a sort of combination character. Like this might be a combination of several bosses and how

[00:36:34] [SPEAKER_02] one boss might have treated me, but it might not be that boss. I might change the names. I might change the situation. I might change the year. But the important thing is not the specifics. The important thing is the insight you learn. As long as the story is authentic, like this happened and you felt like X, Y and Z and you learned A, B and C and the interactions with the boss are not overly exaggerated

[00:36:59] [SPEAKER_02] just for effect. You could tell this story without having to name the person. Or let's say you were in a relationship where the person abused you or cheated or did things that were extremely inappropriate. Again, you don't have to name the person. And depending on what your life was like, you could perhaps make a combination of different people and make the time very ambiguous so nobody really

[00:37:24] [SPEAKER_02] figures out if you're talking about them. So again, there's many autobiographies that do that. The important thing is the message and what you want to convey to readers and the truth. Don't make yourself too good just like you don't make the other person too bad. Everyone is multifaceted. So nobody is pure evil or pure good with few exceptions, of course. Somebody once told me fiction is the art of telling a lie truthfully. So you don't want to lie. You want to tell the

[00:37:53] [SPEAKER_02] truth in an autobiography. But there are many ways to tell the truth without hurting someone else. And I encourage you to do it that way. So you don't have to worry about being sued if you do that as well. Write your autobiography. That's the important part. A few months before my book, Choose Yourself came out, I had to give a talk about business and entrepreneurship and investing and

[00:38:17] [SPEAKER_02] so on. And I decided to talk about the topics of Choose Yourself, which were not necessarily about success or business, but about the failures I had experienced and the death spiral of depression and loss. I lost my house. I lost my family. I lost everything when I went completely broke after making money and failing. And I decided to give the talk about that. And there was minutes to go before I

[00:38:46] [SPEAKER_02] was going to give my talk. And I left the building and I started walking towards the train station. The talk was going to be in Toronto and I was just going to leave the country and just not show up five minutes later for my talk. And the audience would have to figure out, where is he? This guy's a flake. He didn't show up. And I finally convinced myself to go there. And I almost said, I'm going to

[00:39:10] [SPEAKER_02] pretend that I was using a technique that I read in a book recently where I would pretend that the nervous part of myself was separated from the confident part of myself and it would walk up with me. And I would say, don't worry, I'll take care of you. And then the confident part of myself would give the talk. And you know what? That technique worked. And I had people laughing and it was a fun talk to give. I had a fun time and there was scared James right next to me, but he was fine.

[00:39:40] [SPEAKER_02] And at the end, my talk was voted. People had an anonymous vote. My talk was voted the most inspirational talk of the conference. And it was just a truly great experience that put me on a career of giving talks about this. If I were to write an autobiography where I mentioned that experience and I'm talking about how to improve your anxieties and nervousness around, let's say, public speaking

[00:40:05] [SPEAKER_02] or other public events, I would think to myself, well, what other stories about people who are afraid of public speaking can I refer to? And so I asked ChatGPT, give me examples of people who were nervous about public speaking and how they dealt with that nervousness. It gave me 10 different names. Most of the names I'd never even heard of. Like there was a Greek philosopher who used to practice public

[00:40:32] [SPEAKER_02] speaking with pebbles in his mouth. He knew if he could speak clearly with pebbles in his mouth, he'll be able to speak clearly and fluently when there weren't pebbles in his mouth and he was speaking in front of a public audience. Or it gave me the story of Mark Twain that described a story where he was really nervous. So he built this whole persona, you know, how he would use humor in the beginning of a story and how he would throw people off throughout the story with his humor and gave me example after example. Winston Churchill apparently was very nervous giving talks in his high school years.

[00:41:01] [SPEAKER_02] So if you're looking for other stories and other examples that are similar to yours and that show, you know, maybe different takes on the lessons you're trying to show and underline, feel free. Use AI. Hey, give me different examples of someone who failed a business and then succeeded in their next venture or failed twice in a row and then succeeded. Or give me an example of someone who

[00:41:26] [SPEAKER_02] went to jail and then had a huge career afterwards. Give me an example of someone who only did one sport all their life and then suddenly an injury, you know, took them out of the sport and they had no money and they had to find a career. And there'll be plenty of examples. AI is a valuable research assistant with one caveat, which is that AI sometimes will lie to you. So I was earlier preparing

[00:41:51] [SPEAKER_02] for this course and I was saying, Hey, how did this one memoir begin by James Baldwin? And it gave me a sentence. And I was like, I think that comes from a Steve Martin movie. Actually. I don't think that comes from the James Baldwin book. And I looked it up and I was right. I would have been very embarrassed if I said, Oh, just like James Baldwin said, blah, blah, blah. It actually was a joke from a Steve Martin movie. And so you have to proof check and double check and triple check anything AI tells you,

[00:42:19] [SPEAKER_02] but knock yourself out. Look for other stories that align with yours, play around with titles using chat GPT. Sometimes chat GPT comes up with generic stuff. I think the thing you come up with on your own will be the best, but you can experiment and try different ideas and maybe you'll get inspiration from it, but use AI where you can don't use AI to fill in the blanks for your own story because you have to be as authentic and truthful as possible, but find other stories that you might never have heard of

[00:42:48] [SPEAKER_02] as part of your research. Use AI as a research assistant. Congratulations, dear listeners. You are ready to write your autobiography. Do the homework, answer the questions, learn about the arc of the hero, learn about the six U's that are your checklist for throughout your book, decide what your core story is, decide what the theme is and whether you're going to do it as a

[00:43:15] [SPEAKER_02] hybrid or fiction or nonfiction or memoir. It's all good. And you've got this skill now. By the way, an autobiography is not just one book. I've written 25 books. All of them are memoirs. I've even written a memoir that's a comic book. So knock yourself out. You can write as many memoirs as you want, each with different themes or different takes on the same theme. You are ready to go. If you write your

[00:43:40] [SPEAKER_02] autobiography, send it to me. I will read it. I will comment on it. I will look at it. If you want, get my other course, write and publish a book in 30 days, but you're all set. Write your autobiography, write your nonfiction or hybrid book or novel using these techniques. Begin this journey in your life.

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