James Altucher Lived with a Trotskyite

James writes:

When I was in college my roommate was a “Trotskyist” like many people in college often are. I’m not even sure what that means. I was working at least 50 hours a week at jobs and struggling to pay all my expenses while taking six courses a semester and 3 courses a summer so I could graduate early and with less debt. His dad was a wealthy doctor so he never sweated it. He was very focused on changing the world. He was upset about “labor” and how it was exploited. I would run into him in the cafeteria where he’d have two plates filled with meals for himself. And all he’d do all day was read about Marxism.

I haven’t heard from him since. But I doubt he changed the world.

The world is made up of individuals. We all suffer. We all go through bad relationships, difficult jobs, hard life experiences, loss, pain. In fact, that’s what most of life is.

But if you slowly work at incrementally improving yourself in the ways I described in an earlier answer then you will make life better for yourself. And as each person makes life better for themselves then incrementally the world becomes a better place to live. We treat with each other with more kindness, more honesty, less betrayal, more humility. If you learn to be fully present with each person you encounter, and when your presence becomes a beacon of light to others, then those people will be uplifted and the world will be a better place.

That is the only way the world will change for the better. No app will do that.

Be sure to check out James' views in his tweetfest, on Greece, on hitting rock bottom and his ideas for someone broke. They are all right here.