Choose Yourself! (8 page)

I’ll let a quote from Kamal’s excellent book close this chapter:

If a painful memory arises, don’t fight it or try to push it away—you’re in quicksand. Struggle reinforces pain. Instead, go to love. Love for yourself. Feel it. If you have to fake it, fine. It’ll become real eventually. Feel the love for yourself as the memory ebbs and flows. That will take the power away.

And even more importantly, it will shift the wiring of the memory. Do it again and again. Love. Re-wire. Love. Re-wire. It’s your mind. You can do whatever you want.[…] The results are worth it. I wish that for you.

FINDING YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE

When I was twelve years old I had one purpose in life—other than getting the girl in art group at summer camp to like me. I wanted to be a colonel. And not just any colonel; I wanted to be an honorary colonel in the Kentucky State Militia. Just like my hero, Colonel Sanders. I had to start off slow—Kentucky was the glamour state to be a colonel of. First I started off with Mississippi. I called the governor, Cliff Finch, and interviewed him, because for some reason that I still can’t figure out, he was running in the primaries for president against another former Southern governor and incumbent president, Jimmy Carter.

Cliff Finch invited me down to Mississippi. His campaign and my dad split my air fare, about $60 each. It was the first time I had ever been in a plane and I was scared. When I landed everything looked the same but people talked differently. It was a weird feeling. As if I had landed in an alternative universe. The main things I remember from that trip were getting the certificate that made me an honorary colonel of the state (I better get an eighteen-gun salute the next time I fly there!), presenting to Governor Finch how he would win the “youth vote,” and a lot of people asking me what it was like to be Jewish.

Then I wrote to the governor of Alabama and I told him my family was moving to Alabama, I had read everything about Alabama and I loved the state and now I wanted to be a colonel there. The governor sent back a huge certificate: James Altucher was now a lieutenant colonel in the Alabama State Militia. In Texas, I became an honorary citizen. In North Carolina, I became an “honorary tarheel.” But with Kentucky, I couldn’t crack the code. They knew how valuable their colonelship was. They needed references, background checks, etc. I was twelve years old and decided for the first of many times to quit while I was ahead. Still, if anyone wants to call me “Colonel“ (Mississippi), I’m totally fine with that.

Which brings me to an important point. Probably the most important person in Kentucky history is Harlan Sanders, the man himself, the colonel, the “inventor“ of Kentucky Fried Chicken, one of the most successful franchise operations in history. Extra-crispy Kentucky fried chicken still has to be one of the best foods on the planet. You might get sick afterward, but who cares. Buddha says live in the now!

A lot of people say to me, “I’m twenty-five years old and still have no idea what my purpose in life should be.” When Colonel Sanders was twenty-five, he still had yet to be a fireman, a streetcar conductor, a farmer, a steamboat operator, and finally proprietor of a service station, where he sold chicken. The chicken was great and people loved it but he didn’t start making real money until he started franchising at the age of sixty-five. That’s the age he was when he found his “purpose“ in life.

I don’t like the word
purpose
. It implies that somewhere in the future I will find something that will make me happy, and that until then, I will be unhappy. People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness. That we have to “pay our dues,” go on some sort of ride, and then get dropped off at a big location called our “purpose,” where now we can be happy.

It doesn’t work that way.

You can find the tools to be happy right now. I still don’t know what my purpose is. I’m afraid I will never know. That makes me very happy. Maybe I can have lots of adventures between today and the day I die. Maybe I can do lots of different things. And if I don’t—if I die even tomorrow—that’s fine also. What does purpose mean when we are dead? We might as well choose to be happy now.

Other people have found success after changing careers many times: Rodney Dangerfield didn’t succeed in comedy until his forties. One of the funniest guys ever, he was an aluminum siding salesman. And then he had to start his own comedy club, Dangerfield’s, in order to actually perform as a comedian. He chose himself to succeed! But not until his forties.

Ray Kroc was a milkshake salesman into his fifties. Then he stumbled onto a clean restaurant that served a good hamburger run by two brothers with the last name McDonald. He bought McDonald’s when he was fifty-two.

Henry Miller wrote his first big novel,
Tropic of Cancer
, at age forty.

Raymond Chandler, the most successful noir novelist of all time, wrote his first novel at age fifty-two. But he was young compared to Frank McCourt, who won the Pulitzer for his first novel,
Angela’s Ashes
, written when he was sixty-six. And, of course, Julia Child was a young fifty when she wrote her first cookbook.

One of my favorite writers of all time, Stan Lee, created the entire universe for which he is known—the Marvel Universe—when he was forty-four, inventing Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and others along the way.

If you don’t like to kill people but still need a weapon to immobilize them, consider the Taser, invented by Jack Cover when he was fifty. He didn’t sell a single one until he was sixty.

If you like restaurant reviews you might have read
Zagat
, started by Tim Zagat, who quit his job as a lawyer in order to create the book of reviews when he was fifty-one.

Harry Bernstein was a total failure when he wrote his bestselling memoir,
The Invisible Wall
. His prior forty (forty!) novels had been rejected by publishers. When his memoir came out, he was ninety-three years old. A quote from him: “If I had not lived until I was 90, I would not have been able to write this book, God knows what other potentials lurk in other people, if we could only keep them alive well into their 90s.”

Peter Roget was a mediocre doctor who was finally forced to retire in his early seventies. Then he became obsessed with words that have similar meanings. Was his “purpose“ as a medical practitioner or as a guy who could play with words? Do you know him as a doctor or as the author of
Roget’s Thesaurus
, which he wrote when he was seventy-three?

When I was in college, I ate ramen noodles every day for year. One time in a grocery store a woman tried to tell me they were the worst thing I could eat. Really? Like worse than eating a brick, for instance? That was when I was nineteen. I’m now forty-five. It doesn’t seem to have hurt me that much to have eaten ramen noodles for an entire year. It was the only thing I could afford. If something costs 25 cents and has a few slivers of peas in it, then it’s okay by me. Meanwhile, the inventor of ramen noodles didn’t invent them until he was forty-eight years old. Thank god for him!

Charles Darwin was a little bit “off“ by most standards. He liked to just collect plants and butterflies on remote islands in the Pacific. Then he wrote
Origin of Species
when he was fifty.

To top it all off, there’s Henry Ford. He was a failure with his first car, the Model T, which he invented when he was forty-five. He didn’t yet have the productivity efficiencies of the assembly line. He developed those when he was sixty.

This is not meant to be inspirational. You might never have that “great“ thing you do. I’m not even saying it’s the journey that one should love, because some journeys are very painful. And nobody says you get special marks in death if you wrote a great novel at the age of fifty. Or came up with a great chicken, or a way to stuff lots of people into factories. I’ve stumbled and fallen and gotten up and survived enough that I’m sick of goals and purposes and journeys. I want to cut out the middleman. The journey. The desperation and despair that focusing on “purpose“ entails.

Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.

Someone asked on Quora, the Q&A website, recently, “I feel like a failure for being 27 and not knowing what I want to do in my life. What should I do?”

My response was that when I was twenty-seven, I had yet to start a business, yet to ever fall in love, yet to write a book, yet to make a TV pilot, yet to fail at twenty businesses in a row, yet to run a hedge fund, VC fund, even become a chess master (which happened at age twenty-eight for me). Most important, I had yet to fail. But I failed so much in my thirties that I practically forgot I was a chess master. As I write this, I’m forty-five and I still have no idea what I want to be when I “grow up.” But I’m starting to finally accept the fact that all I want to be is ME.

Meanwhile, Harlan Sanders made such a great chicken that, even though he’d barely made a dime off of it (that happened fifteen years later), at the tender age of forty-five, the governor of Kentucky made Sanders an honorary colonel.

So I guess at age forty-five, there’s still hope for me.

HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY AND NEVER BE FOUND

We get stuck. We get unhappy. Maybe we’re in a hopeless marriage. Maybe a hopeless job. Maybe you picked up this book and you are thinking to yourself, “Well, this is all good but it’s too late for me.”

I’m sorry if you feel that way. I’ve felt that way many times. Sometimes you wish you could start fresh, with no responsibilities, an empty canvas you can now paint or repaint your life against. I’ve been feeling this way, on and off, for at least twenty years. As I mentioned before, the third most popular search phrase that takes people to jamesaltucher.com is “I am stuck.” When we feel stuck, we want a massive change, we want the entire world to reverse its rotation and drop us off at an entirely new place. I tried that more than once.

In 1992 I wanted to move into a homeless shelter because I thought that girls who were homeless would be more likely to go out with me. I had this fantasy version of what a homeless shelter would be like. We’d sneak around to each other’s rooms as if they were dorm rooms. It would be romantic. Lots of giggling. And crack smoking. Heck, I’d try it. For love.

I had a job and wasn’t really homeless. I had a place to live. But my girlfriend at the time hated me and I needed a change. Plus the homeless shelter was right next to my place of work. I could’ve lived at the shelter and it would have been about a twenty-second walk to work. How great can life be? I ask again: how great can life really be?

The homeless shelter director said no to my request. I told him I wanted to write about the experience. He called my references. My boss—my ACTUAL boss at the time—said I was probably mentally ill. I didn’t have that job for too much longer. Nor did I move into the homeless shelter. They actually thought I was too deranged to move into a homeless shelter.

All of this is to say, there’s something primal in me that wants to disappear. To mix with what I view as the lowest of the low, to forget about my past, to sign up for a future that is meaningless, to think only about right now and give up everything else.

People build up a life, it becomes unsatisfactory, and they want to figure out how to change it like an outfit on a doll.

But you can’t change life from the outside. We all know this now. In the Choose Yourself era, it is only possible to give up the normal contraptions of externalized identity and live a life more free than you can imagine if you start from the inside out. Maybe you can’t live “off the grid” (unless you like a place like Montana. Good luck with that) but you can live a life of unexpected surprise. Where every day is an adventure. And every time you look in the mirror, a new person is there.

When I was a kid, I bought the book
How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found
. I don’t know if any of the techniques still work but here was the author’s plan:

Look at old newspapers from around the day you were born to find the names of babies that died that day. Ask members of your state government for their birth certificates. This isn’t unusual. Many people lose their birth certificates. Use the birth certificate to get a Social Security card (say you’ve been a permanent student up until now). Use the two forms of ID to get a bank account, credit cards, and driver’s license.

Change your hair color. Lose weight. Put a tack in your shoe so you start to walk differently. Start siphoning money out of your bank account until it is all in cash. Find a crowded city where you can rent an apartment cheap, and disappear in the crowd. Plan on building an employment history by starting with temp or construction jobs.

Then disappear. Just walk out of your house and never go back. You’ve just committed pseudocide.

The word
pseudocide
fascinates me. It’s like a “little death,” a phrase often used to describe an orgasm.

The book had anecdotal stories of people who had disappeared (how the author kept finding these people was never explained). People running from marriages, lawsuits, the IRS, or maybe just every now and then someone who needed an eraser, some Wite-Out to rub over emotions, fears, and anxieties. A clean slate that would bring a temporary nirvana where some, if not all, of the mental and emotional baggage can be discarded with your old life. Wrapped up in a garbage bag and left behind a bowling alley.

The feeling never left me. When I’m in an unfamiliar neighborhood, I look around and judge whether or not I could disappear there. Would people find me? Would I ever run across someone I knew or who recognized me? Could I just be swallowed up by the chaos here, live in a shelter, work temp jobs in the back of a deli, and argue in broken Chinese in some broken-down Chinatown?

Think of the mass appeal that a TV show like
Mad Men
has. It’s not for the allure of 1960s advertising culture. It’s for the fresh start the main character, Don Draper, has given himself. Don Draper, of course, lives a secret identity. And one of the best episodes to ever appear in television history was the episode “The Jet Set,”
where he lived a secret identity within a secret identity—when he just simply disappeared while standing in the lobby of a hotel in California and went off with a bunch of wealthy vagabonds, each with infinitely long back stories that we would never know and never hear of again. By the time Draper emerged from this new identity, he found himself wealthy, divorced, and dealing with the questions we all grapple with: who are we, really?