Is James Altucher's Advice Really Sound?

James Altucher is always writing about skipping college. He has a new book out about it. And he also says you shouldn't worry about failure, just keep trying, he says:

WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOU KEEP FAILING? HOW DO YOU STAY MOTIVATED?

ANSWER:

I failed at collegecard.com, my first business in college. I’ll describe it some other time or maybe I already did.

In fact, here’s 20 careers in a row that didn’t work out for me. I’ve sold 4 companies but have had 20 failures Probably 40 failures but I only admit to 20.

Careers zigzag. The only happiness comes when you lower your expectations below zero. Everything above that is struggle and pain with fleeting moments of success and pleasure.

When humans attempt something, they can succeed and they can fail. That is being human. There is nothing wrong with not trying something. Your question implies being motivated is a good thing. Let me just say…its an ok thing. Nothing great. Nothing horrible. You can live a perfectly great life that helps many people for generations to come by living an unmotivated life. I know many unmotivated people much happier than me.

Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before the bulb stayed lit. I bet he cried at night. Like I do. But now the cost per unit of “light” is one thousands times less than it was then.

Careers are always a zigzag. Accept that. When you feel bad about a failure I know how it feels. It’s in that gut. It’s in the chest. It drags you down. For me, it makes me feel suicidal. Ugh, its horrible.

Butthe most important thing for staying on a zigzagged track is staying physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually healthy. Do that every day for six months. Check the box. You can check the boxes here at tdp.me.

In six months your life will be 100% different. I know this because it happens to me every six months.

But can you actually put Altucher's advice into action?

I came across a short-bio of a person, who seems to have taken Altucher's advice to heart. He is made every move Altucher is suggesting. But, the only problem is that this person died in 1993. So he did it on his own, but his life is based on making the moves that Altucher regularly recommends and we can see if it worked for him.

At the age of 17, this guy decided to become a professional philosopher. Unfortunately, his family financial situation grew precarious and rather than head off to Harvard, he attended the College of the City of New York (City College). He had to support not only himself, but his mother as well, and so he could afford to attend City College full time only 1 year, and then part of a 2nd year as an evening student while working during the day. He eventually quit attending classes as he was too exhausted after work to get much benefit from the lectures.

Some philosopher this guy was going to be, a college drop out.

At the time he quit attending City College, his only skills were those that qualified him for a job as an office boy. He proceeded to take a series of jobs working as an office boy for the going rate of $5 a week to help support himself and his mother. He would work a few days, get fired because he didn’t know what he was doing, but then get hired by another office where he tried to avoid making the same mistakes. Though he was fired often, he claims he was never out of work for more than a day or two. Eventually, he learned from being on the job and he could stay on longer than a few days. These lessons learned at the bottom of the economic ladder were important to him as he attempted to climb out of his and his family’s financialy precarious situation.

During this time he kept reading and engaging serious works in philosophy and psychology. It was at this time that he happened to also read a series of articles in The Saturday Evening Post on “The Newspaper Game” (April-May 1912). This series of articles gave him the idea that perhaps becoming a reporter would serve as a good occupation until he could become a philosopher. In 1913, he took a secretarial job at The Wall Street Journal, where he worked until 1916. He transitioned from secretarial work to a reporter assigned to cover a small number of firms. In one of his first assignments, he reports, he made an egregious error out of ignorance of economic and financial terminology. The discovery of the error and his fear of losing his job gave him the impetus to study the economics and financial literature in more depth.

Got all that? A college dropout, who got fired in job after job. What happened to this guy who seemingly followed the Altucher guide to success? He became a best selling author, who wrote important books in the fields of economics, thinking and ethics. The man is Henry Hazlitt and the above biographical information comes from Peter Boettke's recent paper on Hazlitt. In the paper, Boettke concludes:

Henry Hazlitt was a unique public intellectual, who strove to not only to enlighten the general public with his writings, speeches, and appearances on TV and radio, but sought to contribute to the specialized disciplines of economics and philosophy. From the publication of his first book in 1916 to 1984, when his final two books appeared – fittingly From Bretton Woods to World Inflation and The Wisdom of the Stoics – Hazlitt sought to write works that would garner approval from specialists while generating a wide readership among intelligent laymen. 

The evidence that I have tried to marshal to support my conjecture that Hazlitt occupied a unique position in mid-20th century intellectual life in the US as a public intellectual attempting to contribute to scientific economics consisted of not just pointing to his prominent position in the world of journalism – both as a literary critic and more importantly as an economist – but more importantly for our purposes to the attention his written work commanded in the specialized professional journals in economics and philosophy, as well as the active correspondence he engaged in throughout his life. The company Hazlitt kept was not just that of the New York intelligentsia, but included many of the leading minds in the social sciences during his lifetime.

In his paper, Boettke also quotes Leland Yeager on Hazlitt:

As Yeager states... Hazlitt’s The Foundations of Morality is “the best single book on ethics that I know of.”

And Boettke summarizes Hazlitt's overall contributions, this way:

 Hazlitt was an author of books ranging from literary criticism to social philosophy, with multiple volumes in economics, political economy, and public policy in-between. Hazlitt even wrote an economic novel, Time Will Run Back that attempted to illustrate the failures of central planning. His Economics in One Lesson (1946) is perhaps his best known work, but his critical work on Keynes, as well as his work on ethics, garnered professional attention with reviews in The American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Economic Journal, and Ethics. Even when the general thrust of the review was negative, the critic would more often than not begrudgingly acknowledge Hazlitt’s unusual strengths in exposition and even analysis.

Boettke calls the success of Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (which can still be found in bookstores today) a "publishing phenomenon".

Bottom line: In this day and age when college graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs, this should not be reason for despair. Failure should not be reason for despair. If Henry Hazlitt could develop a career as a major writer (In addition to his book writing, he wrote for both The New York Times and Newsweek) without a college degree, in an industry where educational background is probably scrutinized more so than other fields, then Altucher's advice passes a key anecdotal test.

The reason most fear attempting things on their own and fear failure is because of the indoctrination received in government schools (and government influenced schools). Teachers, in general, are the least entrepreneurial people on the planet. They went to schools, they took tests and now teach at schools and administer tests. They have never experienced life. They are not the movers and shakers in this world. They are about seniority and taking even more classes to get pay raises. There's nothing about real achievement or entrepreneurship in the education system. The education system is frozen in a deep government created freeze. Nothing has changed in first grade, high school or in colleges for decades. You feel bored sitting in these classes for good reason. You learn nothing about real life. You learn nothing about how to survive or how to succeed. That's why so many college students are lost after graduation.

Schooling has been pushed and squeezed by governments to produce unquestioning robots who are just waiting to be spoon fed the next command from the banksters, government and the crony capitalist. Fall in line, take you shoes off, spread your legs.

To breakout of this mind control and have a successful, exciting life, stick a firecracker in your butt: read Altucher's new book.