I gave my 11 year old daughter important advice the other day: there’s no painless way to kill yourself.

“What about with a gun?” she said.

I told her about a friend of mine who shot himself in the mouth. He put the gun in his mouth and pointed upwards towards the brain.

He missed.

He shot off half his face, he went blind in one eye, and he is now in a wheelchair.

If you type in “I Want to Die” into google, my website is the first result.

My first business I sold for $15 million. We built websites for entertainment companies. Bad Boy Records, Miramax, Time Warner, HBO, Sony, Disney, Loud Records, Interscope, on and on. Oh, and Con Edison.

Mobb Deep would hang out in my office. Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails would stop by. RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan would want to play chess. We even made a website for a brothel in Nevada.

Then I saw that kids in junior high school were learning HTML. So I sold the business.

I bought an apartment for millions. I rebuilt it. Feng Shui! I bought art. I played a lot of poker. I began investing in companies. A million here. A few hundred thousand there.

Then I started more companies. Then I bought more things. Then I became an addict. The worst kind of addict.

From June 2000 until September, 2001 I probably lost $1 million a month.

I couldn’t stop. I wanted to get back up to the peak.

I wanted to be loved. I wanted to have $100 million so people would love me.

Writing this now I even feel like slitting my wrists and stomach. I have 2 kids.

I felt like I was going to die. That zero equals death. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been.

I lost all my friends. Nobody returned calls. I would go to the ATM machine – from $15 million to $143 left.

There were no jobs, There was nothing.

One weekend when I had $0 left in my bank account I called my parents to borrow money but they said “no”. “College was enough” they told me, even though I had ended up paying for every dime of college. That was the last time I spoke to my dad, who had a stroke six months later.

I tried meditation to calm down but it didn’t work. I never slept. I lost 30 lbs. I’m 5’9″. I went from 160 to 130. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t move. I stopped having ideas. I cried every day.

There was never a moment when I didn’t feel sick. I had let my kids down. I would die and they would never remember me.

We moved 80 miles north of NYC with the tiny bit of money we took out of our apartment after being forced to sell at a million dollar loss.

I couldn’t leave the house for three months. I was depressed. I gained back all my weight and then another 30 lbs.

Finally I had to either die or feed my family. I was forced to choose myself.

- I started to exercise every day. I started to eat better. One item for breakfast. A healthy lunch. Tiny dinner. No snacks.
- I started to sleep 9 hours a day.
- I started to only be around people who loved and supported me. I broke off all ties with anyone who I felt bad to be around.
- I wrote down ideas every day of articles I could write and about businesses I could start. Bit by bit I started to get paid to write. If you don’t exercise the idea muscle it atrophies.
- I decided I wanted to help people every day and be honest every day. I was grateful for my daughters. I was grateful for what I had. I didn’t fight reality or regret. This was my reality and I had to make the best of it.
- Every day I came up with ideas for new businesses. I had a waiter’s pad. I would go to a cafe at 6 in the morning with about 4 books and read for an hour or two and then start writing down ideas for new businesses, articles, etc.
- I started a hedge fund. I started a fund of hedge funds. I started a newsletter. I did deals. I made introductions every day, expanding my brand new network from scratch. At least 5 introductions a day.
- I got involved in a mental health company I sold for $41 million.
- I started a website, Stockpickr! which got millions of unique users. I found advertising for it. I sold it to thestreet.com
- I had made millions again from scratch.

Then I stopped using the fundamental techniques I described above. Every time I’ve lost money it’s because I squandered my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

I was really bad. I did everything you should not do. I was like an addict. Picture the worst abuses. That was me. Again.

And then I lost it all again. Everything. Agh!

I had to start over. I couldn’t even believe I had to start from scratch atgain.

Every day without fail I focus on physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. And it’s worked. I hope. I hope I don’t squander again.

People say it’s not about the end, it’s about the journey.

This is total BS.

It’s not about the journey and it never was.

It’s about right now.

Right now is the only place you’ll ever be. Choose yourself not to waste it.

I had this image that it would be like some sort of sex dormitory. I would meet all of these homeless ex-prostitutes or lonely single mothers and we would sneak into each other’s rooms and fall in love.

We would whisper really quietly to each other at night and it would be exciting and fresh and new.

I asked the manager of the homeless shelter if I could live there. I said I wanted to do research for a book. I also said it was only one block from where I worked so I wanted an easy commute.

He called my boss for a reference but my boss said I was most likely crazy. So the guy running the homeless shelter said I couldn’t live there.

Years later when I moved to New York City it was almost as if I were living in a homeless shelter.

I shared a single room with Elias, who made his living playing chess in Washington Square Park. He slept on the couch and I slept on a mattress on the floor.

The shower was broken and ran water all day and night. If I was sleeping and Elias brought a girl home they would go into the bathroom. My wall was also the bathroom wall. Cockroaches were all over the kitchen.

In the morning I would pull a suit out of my garbage bag which contained all my clothes and belongings and I would put it on and walk to HBO.

One time it was four in the morning and Elias woke me up and said, “I’m sorry, but we have to be out by morning.” I had been paying him $300 a month in rent but he hadn’t been paying any landlord.

I had no idea who actually owned that apartment and still don’t. We had no keys and the door was never locked. But now we were being kicked out. The owners were back.

The next day I moved to Astoria. I still had my garbage bag of clothes and I bought a foam mattress. It was so hot that my sweat would soak into the mattress and stay there forever.

Everyone in Astoria is either Greek or Hispanic. Which means, through a convoluted mathematical formula that I once learned, that I was in love with all of the waitresses.

I had a wad of two dollar bills so that when I tipped waitresses nobody would forget me. I would write my office phone number down on all the two dollar bills but no waitress ever called me.

I would wander the streets all night – one of those guys you see wandering the streets trying to make eye contact with everyone. “Are you the one who will be my magical best friend?” That was me.

In a class in the far future a teacher will be referring to this as The Great Astoria Attempt at Friendship.

Eventually I ruined my life and I made a website for money. I went into the website-making business and went from one employee to three to twenty to fifty to a thousand.

But when it was still just three I made a website that gave me enough cash to move into the Chelsea Hotel back in Manhattan.

Suddenly I was in business. I had payroll to make. And I had a fulltime job on the side. And I was actively trying to meet and impress women. And then I sold the businesss. And then another and another.

Lots of things happened. I kept thinking nobody would like me if I didn’t keep selling businesses.

Blah.

I have to give a talk next week on how to succeed in life. I have no idea what I am going to talk about.

But I do know where I started and where I ended up.

The key to success is knowing that from just a handful of two dollar bills, a garbage bag that can hold all of your belongings, and an extreme insecure desire to be liked, all things are possible.

(When Clark Kent quit his job at The Daily Planet)

I wanted to quit my job. I hated my boss. He always yelled at me. I hated my co-workers. They always yelled at me.

I was addicted to playing chess online. One time my girlfriend called at 6pm and said, “don’t forget, we have guests coming over for dinner in a half hour.”

I said, “I’m just going to play one more game and then I will be home.”

At midnight, my girlfriend was banging on my office door but it was locked and I was in the middle of a set of 100 straight games in a row and couldn’t answer her.

Finally, at 5 in the morning I stumbled home. When I walked through the door she threw a backpack of books at me.

So something was wrong in my life. Something was making me unhappy.

Here’s what I tried:

I tried writing novels. I wrote four novels. But nobody wanted to publish them.

I tried writing a comic book. I wrote a script for one that I thought would be very good. I send to DC Comics but they never wrote back.

I went to the venture capital arm of PNC bank and tried to get a job and they laughed in my face because I didn’t have an MBA.

There was this new thing called “The World Wide Web”. There was maybe 100 websites in existence.

I wrote to every publisher and said, “Ultimately all of your books are going to be in digital form. I can make that happen for you.” Not a single one responded.

One night, while I was playing online chess all night, I went to the bathroom. Another guy was there. “What are you doing here so late?” Although I thought I knew the answer. He had three kids or so. Why wouldn’t he be here?

“I’m trying to write some software that takes random web pages, figures out what they are about, and catalogs them. I’m thinking the government might fund this project.”

I was thinking to myself, “good luck with that” and smirking on the inside while I went back to play another eight hour marathon of chess.

The name of that guy’s computer was lycos.cs.cmu.edu and eventually he started Lycos and made $200 million for himself.

Finally, I wrote to HBO and I said, “You guys should work on virtual reality projects. I can help with it.”

They wrote back and invited me to visit.

I took a few days from work. My parents were really excited. My dad took me to his “Suit man”. He got me a suit.

I went to the interview. Four different interviews. I was so excited. Someone named “Winnie Ho” worked there. I wanted to work at a place that had employees named “Winnie Ho”.

I bombed every interview. “Do you know Macintosh programming?” No. “Do you know how to do networking programming?” No. “Do you know how to configure an Internet server?” No. No. No. No.

After the interview I called my girlfriend and said, “I don’t think i got the job.” She was relieved. She didn’t want me to move. I was depressed.

I sat down and played chess in Bryant Park with the chessplayers that still gather there 20 years later. I was going to cry.

I looked up at one point and there was the boss of the boss of the boss of the first guy who interviewed me. It turned out he was into chess.

We took a walk around the park and talked about chess and music and programming and virtual reality.

I went home to Pittsburgh and applied for a job at a comic book store. They didn’t hire me.

Then two weeks later, Rob, the chessplaying boss, called me and offered me $40,000 a year to work at HBO. I was making $27,000 at the time but had lied and told him I was making $38,000. He offered me a job.

He offered me a job!

A week later my boss yelled at me about some random thing I did. He yelled at me in front of everyone.

He yelled, “did you really just tell me you blah blah *&^*&?”

And I said “yes”. And he yelled again, in front of the team, “I don’t think I heard you. Is anyone that stupid?”

For the entire prior eight months I had diversified my possible outcomes.

Every day I had tried every possible way to get a job.

Everybody rejected me for everything. I probably tried 20 different ways to create the job of my dreams.

Finally one thing worked. One thing got me lucky. I bonded on some random thing with a decision maker. But in chess there is a saying, “only the good players get lucky”.

So when my boss wanted to humiliate me and he yelled at me that second time in front of everyone I finally had a perfect response.

“I quit”.

–

See also: 

• 10 Reasons to Quit Your Job This Year
• Why People Hate Their Jobs
• Choose Yourself!

According to “Craig”, urine is pretty sterile and contains excess “good things” that the kidney was not able to absorb. Getting those good things back in the body either through drinking them or massaging them into your skin could cure cancer, cure insomnia, relieve stress, cure HIV, increase survival in the desert, cure gonorrhea, and it might “even taste good once you get used to it.”

As he says, more eloquently than I can, “Firstly it is down to the fact that your urine contains excess nutrients from your system and that couldn’t absorb because it didn’t need that amount at that time.”

He suggests drinking salty water first to get used to it. But also you can boil out a lot of the salt in urine before you drink it. He also suggests that you drink the urine that results from “mid-stream” because the initial urine might contain bacteria that was in the urethra.

I have no judgment. He has an entire chapter on the history of drinking urine. Apparently people have been doing it for a long time.

But in Western Society we are used to thinking of urine as “dirty”, even going so far as having to “wash our hands after we touch urine” which he feels borders on ridiculous.

Important to note: “Older urine is actually better because it has a higher concentration of ammonia”. I did not know that.

I could go on.

There’s a lot of useful information in this book. For instance, depending on the color and smell of your urine there’s a variety of diseases you can diagnose.

Which makes me think again that the “smart toilet” is not such a bad entrepreneurial idea if someone wants to do it.

Make a toilet that analyzes the chemical composition of your urine and then sends you an SMS text if you are at risk of heart attacks, kidney stones, diabetes, cancer and a ton of other diseases that urine can predict.

“Whatever you do, though, do not inject urine in to the body. This can cause damage to the system.”

I can picture a real enthusiast saying, much to his later detriment, “F**k drinking it. I need it in my bloodstream pronto! I’ve got to inject me some of that POTENT stuff.”

I tell Claudia all of this, asking if she’s heard anything about urine therapy (“Urophagia” for those in the business) in her extensive reading of ancient yoga texts.

She makes a disgusted face but nods her head yes. “I would never do that,” she said.

“But what if it cures cancer?”

“Noooo,” she says and she’s disgusted. “Do you want me to serve you urine right now?”

“Well,” I say, “Craig says that you can’t drink the urine of the opposite sex. I might drink too much estrogen.”

“NO! Ewww!” she says, “I’ll get you a cup for your own urine.”

I have no opinion. Who knows. Is Craig full of it? He’s published a book, after all.

“Why are you even reading that?” Claudia says. She repeats. “Why are you reading that?”

“I was looking up books about Bitcoin,” I say. “I have to go on CNBC later to talk about Bitcoin because I am the bestselling author in history who has pre-released his book ONLY on bitcoin.”

(see bitcoin.chooseyourself.us. Actual release of “Choose Yourself!” on Amazon for hardcover, kindle, and audio is on June 3 in all other currencies)

“That’s because you are the only one,” she says.

Well, maybe. Who knows?

“In any case, for some reason, people who buy books on Bitcoin also seem to buy this one book on urine therapy.”

I kept on reading. I knew where Claudia was coming from. I read more on the history, more on the cures. Some tips on surviving in the desert (better to pee on a towel and put on your forehead than drink it because you might get further dehydrated from the high salt content).

There was zero chance a mainstream publisher was going to publish this. I can just picture the editors working on this!

(click for Amazon pre-order page)

Out of nowhere, Claudia says, “it’s weird that you brought that up. I was just thinking about this earlier this morning.”

“You were thinking about drinking urine for health?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“But why?”

She shrugged her shoulders, “I totally can’t remember. But when you brought it up I remember thinking about it earlier.”

The sun was coming up. Birds were chirping. I’m gong on TV later.

Today promises to be a good day.

ALTERNATIVE ENDING #2

Claudia said, “Get me more coffee, bitch.” And I did. Because I love her.

ALTERNATIVE ENDING #3.

When you write, don’t think about money. Don’t think about who the reader is. Don’t worry about what people will say. Life is filled with limitations.

What comes out of your head shouldn’t have boundaries. Life is either a prison or the highest form of performance art. Every moment it’s your choice.

ALTERNATIVE ENDING #4.

I will leave this ending to wordsmith, Craig Smith:

“You have been brought to this book because you have some condition that you feel urine therapy will help with. Therefore it is important that you start treating yourself with urine and tracking your results with a diary.”

—

[Note: I will be doing a total How-to when this next book comes out. I went ALL OUT on "team-publishing" this]. 

You ever wake up and you just don’t feel like moving? Then you have coffee but you don’t feel like getting to work? There’s a scary feeling in your stomach and the coffee just makes it worse.

And then you get to work and you just don’t feel like talking to anyone? You feel like you’re ugly and nobody should see your face. You feel like there’s glue in your mouth and that if you were forced to move your mouth it would be very painful.

Then when you have a meeting you feel like, ugh, all of these people are going to see me.

Then you have nothing to say in the meeting but if you don’t say anything then you feel like people will think you aren’t contributing enough.

Then you see the girl at the copy machine that you have a crush on and you try to say something like, “So where do you live?” but you suddenly realize that might be a creepy question to ask and she confirms that by saying something like, “not so bad” which doesn’t mean anything once you sit down and think about it.

You think about it for awhile. Like an hour or so.

And then you realize that all of your usual lunch friends went to lunch without you. Because maybe they don’t like you anymore.

You pass your boss’s office because you have to put in daily kiss ass time but his door is closed.

You ever have a job review where the boss says something about you that is so blatantly wrong you want to disagree with him but one of the things he says about you is that you are always “defensive” so you know you can’t say anything.

You ever have an idea and you tell your boss about it and he sort of looks away and has a little smirk and says something like, “I think the people who do that for a living know what they are doing, wouldn’t you agree?”

Remember that time your boss agreed on a salary increase but then later it turned out his boss didn’t agree on the salary increase so you never got it?

Or the time you staked out the bathroom to make sure it was going to be empty when you walked in so you watch and nobody leaves or enters it for five minutes and right when you are sure nobody is in there, your boss walks in and you know you can’t go in then or even right after him just in case he destroys the bathroom.

Do your teeth ever hurt? My teeth hurt right now. Because I’m writing this and it brings back memories.

You ever have someone you look up to say, “I”m disappointed in you”? And you don’t know what to say back so you look down.

I don’t know.

You ever not know how to complete a task but it’s due right away and there’s absolutely nobody you can ask without looking stupid and the worst thing for you at that moment in time is to look stupid.

Because it’s hard to be fearless. It’s hard to say, “I don’t care if I look stupid.”

But you can’t figure it out and it’s due in one hour…ten minutes…yesterday. And now someone is going to be disappointed in you.

This morning I woke up from that dream. The dream of all of the above. And then I realized that it wasn’t a dream. It was all memories. And I still feel like that every day. Everyone will think I’m stupid.

But today maybe I will go a little crazy. Maybe I will go crazy all over the place.

I’m gonna go a little crazy over this *A&A(S&

&**^%^*((&&((!!!!

You ever feel like going totally crazy, and everyone says, YOU ARE TOTALLY CRAZY?

And then you finally do it and bridges burn behind you, and you pour lit gas all over your memories and watch them scream and die.

And then everything in your life changes. And then everything changes for a whole lot better!

Then we picked out a restaurant. We arrived before the date and wired up the restaurant. We picked out a table and put recording equipment in the vase. We had secret cameras all around pointing at the table.

We took Francois with us to protect the girl and we sat down at the table next to the date.

Francois was 65 years old but he used to be in the French Foreign Legion and was a big guy and always smiled. He kept impregnating women despite repeated vasectomies.

Amy was the girl.

She was very funny and beautiful. She could get people to talk.

The guy on the date would have no idea he was being videotaped until the end. Then we would tell him.

Date number 1: He discussed with Amy that he thought he was gay. Gay or straight or a little bit crooked? He didn’t know. He signed the release form but the next day he called Amy and left a message. He was crying. “Life is to be lived. Not videotaped.”

Noted.

Date number 2: In the middle of the date, the guy got a call. It was from his wife. They had a long discussion and then he got off the phone to finish his date with Amy.

At the end of the date Amy asked him to sign the release form. He said he would if she would have sex with him. He didn’t sign the release form.

I wanted to produce a TV show. I had lots of ideas. This was the second idea I was pitching HBO. The first one was already in pilot stage and I was in the middle of shooting it. I pitched this one to a different branch of HBO. HBO Independent Productions.

It was one of those things where they said, “WE LOVE THIS!” and then I never heard from them again. The secretary would say, “Dave’s in a meeting” and then I would say, “I’ll wait” and then she would give me advice. “That’s not a good idea.”

I would get really frustrated. I would pound my head on my cubicle desk.

So then I had to pitch it to the other part of HBO. They said, “We like this but we think it’s a little bit too mean,” said the producer of “Hookers on the Point” and “High on Crack Street”.

That was that. I gave up. In fact, I hated the fact that I worked on something that was fun and creative and interesting to me (I always wanted to spy on other people’s dates. It was like a dream come true for me). And yet, all it took were one or two people to completely destroy my dreams. And I still had to smile at them whenever I saw them.

I quit HBO and started doing my company full time. I didn’t want anyone to OWN me. I wanted to own me.

One time Amy, Joe, me, went to Cafe Edelweiss, a transvestite bar all the way near the West Side Highway and 43rd Street. Amy wore a hidden microphone and started talking to the guys there who were not dressed like women.

One guy told her he was married with kids and living in New Jersey but every now and then he couldn’t help himself.

He told her, “Sometimes I just like to get BLEEP in the BLEEP here in the bathroom and then I go home to my wife and kids.”

All the time we were spying on people. All the time we were figuring out new ways to get people to tell us stories.

I like to come up with ideas and then figure out the next steps. Then I Prepare, Make it happen, Accept the outcome.

PMA.

I make it happen by giving myself as many chances as possible to succeed. I diversify the possible outcomes. Then I can accept the outcome. I did my job. Onto the next one.

This is what I learned when it took only one or two Masters to squash my passions and destroy my ideas. Because I felt like they destroyed me.

I’ve spent the past 15 years systematically destroying anyone who tried to own me.

I don’t want any slave-owner to kill my ideas anymore. Killing is bad. I wanted my ideas to live. And yes, life is to be lived.

–

(My next book, “Choose Yourself!” is about destroying the masters. Coming out June 3. Sign up for email list to get offers, etc about the book)

I thought I was going to drive over a little baby that was crawling across the street.

“What little baby?” my driving instructor said.

Well, what IF there was a little baby? And what if I don’t brake?

“Why wouldn’t you brake?”

So many questions! It’s hard to drive a 2 ton metallic vehicle at 70 miles an hour in an empty school parking lot. And then go on a highway for the first time. And then parallel park!

There could be babies anywhere. Why WOULDN’T there be a baby trying to crawl across the street?

The driving instructor, who was my dad, looked ahead. At some point he said something about kids in Soviet Russia. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. I had to focus on the babies.

Why are you driving so slow? My dad asked me.

Didn’t he understand the danger?

Now, of course, I regularly kill babies while I’m driving at 70 miles per hour, while simultaneously drinking my coffee and texting on my phone, and I don’t even notice.

100s of babies. I get points when I run over babies. I get even more points if I run over the babies and they live. The goal is to win the game with the most points.

Who even cares if I kill all the babies that are crawling all over the highway. I still see them in my mind’s eye. They are everywhere.

But I have enough experience to know now that when I run over them by the dozens that nobody will care, nobody will notice, nobody will ever miss the babies.

It’s the same thing with blogging.

This is my 500th blog post. And I’m scared to hit a baby when I write this post. Ever since my first post, I don’t hit “Publish” unless I’m scared.

Someone asked me the other day what I thought of a particular blog post written by some random guy. I looked at it and thought it was very bad.

The writer had a lot of ego. He started off bragging about his accomplishments. Then he gave a “top 10 blah blah” like “top 10 ways to be the best you can be” or something like that. But he didn’t give any personal stories.

I want to know when the blogger was the WORST he ever was. The absolute WORST. And what technique he used to get over it.

Maybe he should start, “I only felt truly alive when smoking crack with homeless girls” and the steps he took so he could feel truly alive in other situations, like when he was eating oatmeal by himself.

I want to learn how to not be lonely.

I want to know how to feel at peace when my heart is racing in anger over something she said, or he did, or they wanted. Or how to be calm when my bank account is going down. Or how to think “yes” when the people I want to love me tell me “no”.

I want to learn how to make better decisions. So I don’t end up in a gutter with a needle sticking out of my eyeball.

I want to know how to feel alive!

When Kamal told me he was nervous about writing his book, nervous about what people would think of him, I told him, I ONLY write when I am nervous about what people will think. Then he wrote my favorite book.

And people will THINK. Believe me.

People will think I’m a bad parent. Or a loser. Or I used to write better.

Or people will say “James is a scam”. Or people will say “his writing is ADHD” whatever that means. Or they will say “he just tries to provoke” or people will say “he’s a criminal” or people will say “why do they even let him live” or sometimes they will say to me (yesterday) “you have asshole powers” or people will say (yesterday) “you look like a jackass”.

And I get afraid. Will this post be better than the last? Will it be my best ever or my worst ever? Am I revealing too much? Am I helping people? Am I helping people but still telling a story? Is it a good story?

I’m scared every time I sit down to write. I’m ashamed every time I hit “publish”.

500 posts in… What if I run out of stories? What if I run out of things to say? Will I jump the shark?

“James Altucher rubs me the wrong way! I HATE him.”

Why!? I don’t understand. What did I do?

I hit “Publish”.

I lied to him to get a job. The hedge fund manager asked me how much money I had in the bank.

I had ZERO but I said, “a million dollars”. This was in 2002.

In the prior two years I had lost all the money I ever made and my home. Now I was broke.

He said, “how can you afford to live on that?”

Which strikes me as ludicrous now but I felt every blood cell in me turn upside down in shame then.

I felt he would think it was courageous if I threw the question back at him.

“Well, how much money do you have?”

He said, “one hundred million dollars.” Who knows?

One friend of mine told me something, “you can never tell how much money someone has until they file for bankruptcy.”

I read a statistic that people lie (including ”white lies”), on average, 10-200 times a day. I also read that people say, on average, 2500 words a day.

So one technique to stop lying is to stop talking. I try not to talk. I try to say around 1000 words a day.

The hedge fund manager and I then went out to dinner with his wife. He was cheating on his wife but I didn’t know that yet.

I had read all his favorite books so I was able to quote from them. “What are your favorite books?” he said. I quoted from those books (Ayn Rand). Then I quoted from a research paper he wrote in 1969 that I had found buried in some journal.

He asked me, “What are my interests outside of finance?” I knew he liked baseball so I talked about various histories of baseball I had just read. Baseball is boring.

The hedge fund manager gave me money to manage. It was my first “job” in the financial space. In a very short time I more than doubled the money he had given me.

A year or so later I wrote a book about how I did it. He instantly fired me. He thought I had revealed too much. He wrote, “our financial relationship is now over.”

I wrote, “it’s not. You owe me money because I have made you so much.” So he instantly sent a check.

One day, I had to return my dad’s car to the dealership. My dad had a stroke and was in a coma and would never drive a car again. After I dropped it off the hedge fund manager called me and invited me to dinner.

I went to the dinner and started drinking quite a bit. I was feeling depressed.

To my right was the mistress. And in front of me was the hedge fund manager’s daughter.

I was shy and had a crush on the daughter and so I blurted out the only question I could think of, “so what do you think of [manager] and [mistress] being so out in the open?”

[Daughter] looked at [mistress] and said, “I think she is a money hungry slut.” And then she got up and walked out of the restaurant .

I was horrified and embarrassed. [The wife] even wrote me the next day and was upset at me and [manager] was upset at me until finally I said to everyone, “this is your family issue. I have my own family issues.”

Anyway, my book came out right after that and I was fired.

All of this is to say, better to speak fewer words.

Less lies, more time to listen and learn and think and daydream. Less embarrassing situations.

Less masks to wear. My mental closet can only fit so many masks. The older I get, the less masks fit in that closet.

More benefits of not opening your mouth: flies don’t get in your mouth. Less food gets in your mouth so you eat better.

You give less advice. Nobody listens to my advice anyway. People do what they want until they are injured like a kid putting his fingers on the stove.

Telling the truth is easier. It means you just have to remember things.

Telling a lie means you have to remember, AND THEN keep track of the lie. Too much stress! (Polygraph machines, in fact, work by measuring stress levels).

Less “mouth” means you start to use your eyes and ears more. Like the way blind people can hear and touch better.

Blind people seem to develop super powers with their other senses.

People who talk less are like superheroes in the same way.

If you become a superhero and see me lying homeless in the gutter, please save me.

Story #1: 

One time Barry Diller was visiting Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The topic of the meeting was to see how the greatest media mogul could work with the greatest Internet moguls.

It was like two galaxies colliding to create something beautiful when seen from light years away.

Larry Page was texting or doing something on his phone.

Barry Diller was disgusted: “Either choose me or the phone”.

Larry Page, without even lifting his head from his phone, said to the biggest media mogul in history, “I choose this”. Referring to his phone.

So Diller spent the rest of the meeting talking to Sergey Brin.

–

Story #2:

It’s very hard to get a job at Google. They are even making a movie out of the process.

They used to make movies about things like the Vietnam War. Or about preventing Mars from crashing into Earth. Or about a young blonde boy being chosen by a wizened hermit with psychic powers to save the galaxy against his father who wears a black helmet all the time.

Now they are making a movie about how hard it is to get a job at Google. “A sort of Hunger Games for nerds” as Vince Vaughn says in the trailer.

But in the early days, Sergey Brin would interview every candidate.

Like, on a date, you immediately know within five seconds whether you want to have sex eventually with the person you are on the date with.

Sergey Brin would know right away if he was interested in hiring the person.

If he wasn’t interested, he said, “I would try to spend the next hour trying to learn at least one thing from the person so that the meeting wasn’t a waste for me.”

–

From Story #1 I learn the most important rule of my life: don’t have meetings with someone you don’t want to have a meeting with.

Claudia said to me, sounds like Larry Page was just being rude.

I don’t know. I don’t want to judge. Who knows the dynamics of these billionaire meetings. Too complicated for me.

But you are what you eat. I don’t have meetings with people I don’t like. Ever. Else I can feel it somewhere in my body…I feel bad. Why feel bad? It’s my choice to feel bad or good. If I ate glue I’d probably feel sick. I won’t do that either.

Larry Page could’ve been busy kissing his wife instead of meeting with Barry Diller. Instead, he was probably texting his wife. He was probably texting, “I hate Barry Diller”.

Texting? Kissing?

Kissing? Texting?

(this looks like more fun for Larry Page than texting)

Of course it’s nice that he’s so honest and blunt. Maybe I could learn that also. I feel I am pretty blunt but the way to avoid being rude is to not be blunt to people you don’t like. So it’s simple again: Lesson Number One: avoid people I don’t like. Larry Page doesn’t like Barry Diller.

—

The second story is a little harder. Yes, it’s good to learn from everyone you meet.

But if I just hoard everything I learn, I might end up with a very big head.

I feel bad for these guys being interviewed. They are probably scared shitless. And here’s Sergey, already decided he’s going to pick some fact from their brain.

Like maybe the person Sergey is interviewing is an expert on whales.

No need for whale people at Google! But can I eat whale flesh? Does whale loin make a good sandwich? Are whale fats healthy for my testosterone?

Too many facts! I don’t need to know so much about whales.

I think Sergey’s rule should be to do the opposite of what he does. 

Should I turn a rule on it’s head if it’s a rule coming from the most successful, the smartest, and perhaps the sexiest man on the planet?

(is Sergey learning from the woman next to him? Is he googling her with his glasses?)

I don’t know. I want to be a good person. I want to be free from worry.

People say, “are you the signal or the noise?”

Huh?

I don’t need to be the signal or the noise.

So I make my own rules for me.

What if I try to GIVE to each person I meet, even if I know there will be no further contact. Even if I don’t learn anything.

Don’t do it in a creepy way. Like, “Here are some chocolates little boy!”

And you don’t want to be patronizing either. Like, “you should really be up on your Shakespeare, young man.”

But what if you really listen to the person, not to steal away his few morsels of knowledge but just to listen to him. Or just be kind. Maybe that’s the gift he needs.

Or heck, maybe he just needs his time back. Rather than spend an hour at Google, he can be walking around in the sun. He can be doing jumping jacks. Or putting his finger in his ear. Give him back his time!

I don’t know.

What can you do to give to everyone you meet? Or everyone you see. It’s hard! I’m going to try it.

[See, "Give and you Will Receive"]

–

I admit: I’m jealous of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I want to play with my phone while saying, “I choose this” to Barry Diller. I want to make the world’s biggest website and cure cancer at the same time.

I want to be the cool guy on the subway with $18 billion and wearing the first wearable computing on the planet.

I want.

Give me.

But maybe I also want to kiss instead of text. Be QUIET instead of MEET.

And feel like I have something to offer to everything around me, even in the smallest of ways.

That makes sense.

I’ll never have a job at Google. I’ll never be the master of the galaxy.

But I like having Sergey Brin and Larry Page as my reverse-mentors. Thank you very much.

–

[Follow me on Google+ please!]

[See also, "10 Unusual Things I Didn't Know About Google"]

Rob told me JB was dead. JB was my best friend growing up. We sat next to each other on the bus. After school we’d play ping pong or pinball or monopoly or ride bikes.

Every single day we did this for eight years. Then we drifted apart.

Rob said, The last time I spoke to him he sounded like a ghost.

It was like there was nothing there, Rob said.

I hadn’t seen JB in 20 years.

He dropped out of college, Rob said, and never really had a job. His parents gave him money to live. He didn’t want to do anything.

He changed his phone number every few weeks, Rob said. So he was hard to keep in touch with.

I didn’t understand. Why did he change his number every few weeks?

He’d meet a girl, and then a few weeks later he’d get tired of her but not want to deal with it. He’d change his number so the girl couldn’t reach him, Rob said. And he moved a lot.

He had no Facebook page, no internet presence, it was hard to track him down, Rob said.

And it’s true. I had never found him on the Internet.

JB hurt his leg a few years ago, Rob said, and had no insurance because he never had a job. So got addicted to painkillers.

He was into the drug scene, Rob said.

So no job, drifting phone numbers, a hazy identity, drug, nerve damage, pain killers.

One day he never woke up, Rob said.

He was 39.

I don’t feel sad about this. People die. I haven’t seen him since we were 18 and on graduation day.

But I wonder about one thing Rob said.

“He was like a ghost the last time I spoke with him.”

We know when the body and mind are giving up. We know when spirit is exhausted. When the emotions don’t care.

He never had anything he wanted to do, Rob said.

Is that all it is? Do we just need something to do? Something that we want to scratch just a tiny bit so we continue one more day?

We don’t have to save the world. Or invent warm ice. Or time travel. Or even have a passion or a purpose.

When I was dead broke and crying I wanted to die just so my kids could have my life insurance policy. What got me to get up and go again?

And then later, when it happened again. And then again.

Why didn’t JB do that?

I call it “the push”.

You’re riding the bicycle up the hill all the time in life. Everything in life wants you to decay. To be subjugated. To be violated. To be tired. To become a ghost.

To roll back down the hill just when you thought you were close to the top.

It’s fucking tiring to live.

What can give us THE PUSH?

I don’t know.

For me, today, it’s just this post. Some days, it’s to see my 11 year old smile. Sometimes, I just want to take a walk. Or help Claudia. Or do something fun and creative.

What’s your PUSH today?

A little bit, every day, compounds.

A little push today turns into a big life tomorrow.

My one requirement: I have to give something. I have to enjoy it.

Else, it’s too draining. It’s a shit stain. I slip back on the hill.

A deep breath. You can do it, I tell myself. One more turn of the pedals. THE PUSH! Get over the hill!

I want to live.

—-

[Lesson number one went out yesterday on my mailing list. Sign up, get 3 of my books for free, and get updates/offers about my next book coming out, "Choose Yourself"]