 All right, so I think we're live. Welcome everybody to the part two of my favorite ideas from the book Skip the Line by James Altucher. So I wanna thank the, I have a couple of my affiliate colleagues who are here. So thank you, Sherry Harvey and Mary Pizarro for being here live, I appreciate you. So, and you can always chime in with any questions, especially those who are live here on the Zoom version of this, go ahead and chime in with questions in the chat below. Those of you watching later, of course, on YouTube, you can comment below as well. Okay, so if you didn't see part one, you don't have to, although it'll give some more context, but you can, I'm sure use this part just on its own as well. So I'm gonna just go ahead and finish up the book here. And I am gonna be actually reading from parts of the book because I felt like some parts, he just wrote quite well and I'll share it. And then if I have any commentary, I'll share it. So here's one quote from it. From part one, he talked about the importance of making experiments. If you don't make experiments, you really can't learn about yourself and the relationship you have with the world and how the world works in relation to your own system, your own consciousness. And that's really the, I would say the core message of the book, which is the core message of probably several of his books is make more experiments. But here's a nice quote. Imagine that you are a visitor, well, he didn't say imagine, he just said you are a visitor from another universe, another dimension. And you are here to unlock the puzzle that this universe holds for you to play with and to tweak this puzzle until its secrets unfold. This is your mission. And it is only in solving this puzzle that you will truly be able to help the people that you were meant, you were sent in our world to help. The playful child without fear of the reactions of others is the one who sees the world for what it is. The emperor wears no clothes, the wolf has no bite, the sky has no limits. That was a beautiful quote. And I believe that wholeheartedly my whole being as well. When I was really young, I was very grateful to have stumbled upon the quote by Emerson that do not be too timid or squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment, the more experiments, the better. And that was very encouraging to me as a young person and has really, having memorized that Emerson quote has really kind of integrated itself into my being and to the whole way I do my business and my life ever since then. But what helped even more for me was kind of coming across my own spiritual, I mean, deepening my spiritual path. And I know everybody who was watching this may have a different spiritual philosophy and that's totally fine. Whether you are atheist or whether you are a theist or an agnostic or whatever it is, I really want to encourage you. I mean, when it comes to spirituality, I want to encourage you to kind of believe whatever it is you believe, but believe it deeply. So for me, what I believe is that this universe is a simulation, I may have mentioned this in the past but borrow what I'm saying and kind of see how it morphs with your own philosophy. But I believe that this universe is a simulation and that we are like, that movie Avatar so like just like a spiritual being having a human experience. So somehow we're like connected by some silver cord to our soul, which cannot die. And the soul is like, hey, let me go down and play this game, this video game. This is essentially what I believe, this is essentially a really, really sophisticated video game. And I think the points in the video game, it's not to gather gold, which of course some people think it is. So they gather a bunch of gold, right? Like in some video games. The point is not to, the point is to slay monsters, but the monsters is the blindness within ourselves, the lack of integration within ourselves. The monster is outsourcing our pain to other people, meaning if we're having a bad day, we take it out on somebody close to us or we have pain in our lives and we take it out on other people. I think that's the monster that we're trying to slay. And the quest, I believe that we're ultimately on in this video game is to gather more virtue. And actually a lot of role-playing games are like that. You know, role-playing games, like the hero going to slay the dragon, but along the way they grow in video games, it's like they grow in strength and dexterity and intelligence and I mean, video games are like that. But in this life, that's the same thing too. We're growing in inner strength, we're growing in emotional dexterity, we're growing in intelligence for sure, we're growing in spiritual intelligence as well. So that's what I really believe what we're up to here. This is a video game, giant video game. It's a massive, it's what these days is called MMOPRG, whatever, massively multiplayer online role-playing game. That's what this is. And so we can't die, our souls can't. Once this avatar ceases to exist, just go pop back into the soul group and we can, I don't know how the planning happens to go for another round of the video game or whatever, but it's like we integrate our lessons and we get to then at that point, after we die in this body, we get to finally remember all the previous games we played and go, oh yeah, remember what we learned. Oh yeah, I really just got to learn that emotional intelligence stuff, man. I wasn't very good at this round. So next round, I'm gonna try to set it up so that I have to learn these certain lessons. Anyway, so that's what I believe we're up to. And so having that really deep belief, now I'll say that's the maybe the, that's one philosophy. If you are an atheist, let's say you believe, ah, George, that's really sweet that you have this fun faith and stuff like that. But if you're an atheist and you believe that we just cease to exist after this body dies, the brain dies and consciousness ceases to exist, which by the way, science is starting to prove that somehow consciousness is beyond the brain, but that's beside the point. But let's say you believe that this is an atheistic universe, that's fine. That just means that if you die, you're conscious, you have no more pain, no more awareness, and it's actually fine. So why not live as an experiment? Because if you just get into an accident and you die, it's okay, you cease to exist. There's no more pain and no more pleasure, no more anything. So that's fine. So if we can deeply believe whatever it is we believe about the spiritual world or not, then I hope we can fully, fully embody the experimentation mindset because what is there to lose? Nothing. If our consciousness snuffs out, there's nothing to lose because our consciousness snuffs out. And if we do have a soul and we don't die, then there's nothing to lose either except for the lessons that we didn't learn. That's the only thing. That's the only thing we can lose. And so it is true. We are a visitor from another universe. And it is true. We are here to solve the puzzle so that we can really help the most number of people. But really, I don't think we're really here to help people. I think that's a byproduct. And I think it's really sweet and wonderful that we do. I think we're here to learn lessons. And one of the lessons, of course, is compassion, love, understanding and service. And that's part of the lessons we're learning, which of course ends up helping a lot of people. Okay, let's move on. He also talks in this book about the idea of micro skills, micro skills. And I really like this idea because he says you can learn anything if you only break that anything down into the micro components that you need to do. So he gives an example. He says, writing is not one skill. If you say, I wanna get good at writing, then it's intimidating. And you're thinking about the best-selling authors you know and like, oh, it's impossible that I could ever get there. But if you understand that writing is a bunch of micro skills, which involves learning how to do storytelling, which has its own micro skills, right? Language play, I'm just reading from his quote here. Understanding the different genres, character development, editing, dealing with writer's block, learning how to sell and market your writing, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, it's true. Teaching online courses, you know, something I do all the time is a set of micro skills. You know, it's about how do you break down a large idea into different components? How do you structure a course resource guide? You know, I got all these different micro skills. But if you just take each one and go, okay, I'm gonna learn the next month how to break down one idea into micro components because that's gonna be needed as I teach an online course. Great, you'll just work on that bit by bit. And then as you work on these things, you'll realize, oh, now I know how to do that. It gives you confidence. If you look at things in terms of micro skills, it gives you confidence and it actually gives you progress instead of feeling like, oh, it's such a big thing. I can't learn it. So I really like that idea. And he also says that for each skill, for each micro skill that you write down, you need to start thinking about how do you craft an experiment to learn that skill? So for example, let's say that the micro skill you're learning is how do I break down what I know? Like I wanna teach an online course. And how do I break down this large topic of what I know into segments that I could then teach even at separate courses? Well, maybe the experiment you could make is to, the experiment you could make is to tell one of your friends, pick a friend and say, Cherry, I am going to make a commitment. You don't have to do anything, but I'm gonna make a commitment that next Wednesday, I'm gonna send you an outline of how I break down this large topic that I know but intimidated about teaching. I'm gonna break it down into something like 10 segments. And I'm gonna just email to you. You don't have to do anything. You don't even have to respond. Maybe you can respond and says, yay, but that's an experiment I'm gonna make. So that's an example. But you kind of craft little experiments. An experiment, and this is something I probably didn't explain well enough in part one. I really like that he said a good experiment has potential for huge upside. So a good experiment has several elements. One is that if the experiment works, you could really gain a lot. Number one, number two is that the experiment has low cost. Okay, very importantly. And number three is that no matter if you win or lose, or if the experiment is a success or a critical failure, you're gonna learn something. So those are, I think he had other elements of the experiments, but those are, I feel like what are the most important elements of the experiment. So let me give you an example of what's a bad experiment. Okay, which I see a lot of self-employed people do. I teach and coach self-employed people all day long. So I see this experiment. So someone goes, all right, I lost my job or I'm sick of my corporate job. Now I want to become self-employed. And so what they do is they go ahead and pay a business coach or a career coach or a marketing expert, thousands of dollars to help them come up with the correct niche for their self-employment. So already it's an experiment, number one, because they have no idea what their niche, what their ideal client, what their off, what their product is gonna be or service is gonna be. So they have to experiment, right? So their first experiment is to pay a coach $3,000 to $5,000 to come up and to come up with a one giant assumption about what their niche is supposed to be. So they're already making two experiments. One is to pay a coach thousands of dollars, which is a costly experiment. Yes, it has high upside if it works out, but it's a very costly experiment. And number two, the second experiment is that they're going to test out a niche. You don't decide a niche. If you learn anything from me, you'll learn that the niche decides you, not the other way around. You don't decide a niche. Most people don't decide niches. Some people are able to make it work. They're very lucky. Most people I see can't decide a niche. I couldn't decide a niche. The niche decided me. Authentic marketing, that decided me. That kind of bit me after a while of teaching a bunch of different things. And then I'm like, oh my God, I really need to talk about this. That's after teaching a lot. Like, oh my gosh, people really like it when I talk about this. Okay, got it. So when you make a giant assumption about your niche, you invest all this money, you invest all this time and say, this is going to be my niche. You now, that's your baby. It's going to be really hard for you to give it up, even though that might not be the right niche for you. And you might spend years flailing around thinking that's supposed to be your niche when the world is giving you different data and you're ignoring that data because you made this giant assumption. So that's an example of bad experiment because it has high cost. That's never, experiment should not have high cost. So instead of, so what I do, which I, before I even read this book, I realized, oh my God, that's really how I run my own entire business is by micro experiments. So the way you decide a niche, the way you figure out what you're calling is in life, what you're supposed to do, your purpose, what shoes your ideal client, what is your message, what service would you offer? It's by micro experiments. So what I do is, I coach people, I teach my clients, listen, don't decide, don't decide on a niche. Instead, make a commitment to write a bunch of articles on whatever you're interested in. Whatever you're interested in, whether you want to write, if you like to write, write articles. If you don't mind talking on camera, make videos or make podcast episodes, whatever you do, whatever format you don't mind doing, and you should experiment with all of it, do it with a bunch of content on very, very different things, okay? And if you can learn Facebook and Instagram ads, which of course I teach that stuff, that's even better, because you can get it out to people, the different audiences to test them. You need to test all these different things. You need to test the topics, you need to test the audiences and see what's the best match. The best match, like, oh, I really like talking about that. I didn't realize I love talking about that. Ooh, the audience, this audience really responds to me well and to this particular topic. And by testing, making a bunch of micro experiments, you don't have to decide on a niche, that this niche decides on you, and you go, my God, this is a really grounded decision because I can clearly see that the market wants me to talk about this. And I'm really good at talking about it. I wouldn't have known unless I tested all these different things. So that's why he talks about experiments and micro skills, micro experiments. All right, so good. Now, thank you, Ann, for your comment there. Let's go to the next section, which is probably what he's most well-known for, which is teaching people about the possibility muscle. He's calling it the possibility muscle now. He used to call it the idea machine. And I want to invite you, and I was really deeply impacted by his idea machine idea about six, seven years ago. And I invite you to do this. Go to Google and search, idea machine George Cowell. And you will find my article from, I think it's something like 2015 where I basically summarized his idea machine idea. And it had such a deep impact on me that I don't summarize other people's ideas very often. So I did that one that you could see how, and then I did it myself. I exercised what I wrote about in that article. And I'm not surprised that 2015 was a transformational year for me. Before, I would say I did mainstream business that I'm not proud of. I didn't do anything illegal, but it just was more the mainstream marketing that you all see out there is kind of manipulative and kind of the stuff I always talk about. So I did that kind of marketing up until 2013. And in 2014, I kind of started over. I was kind of trying different things, but in 2015 was really the banner year where I really began my new way of doing things. And I started experimenting a lot in 2015. I became consistently creating content in 2015. And one of the reasons I did that, one of the profound reasons was encountering this idea machine method, which again, you can find by going to Google and typing an idea machine, George Cowell, and you will read the entire method in that blog post. So in this book, this 2021 book, or 2020 or 2021 book, he again rehashes the idea machine, except now he calls it the possibility muscle. And I want to read you a couple of quotes from there. Here's one. The world of possibilities is the same as the world of ideas. If you look around and all you see is what's lacking, what's scarce or failing, then your possibility muscle, which I also call the idea muscle, has atrophied, has atrophied. You need to exercise it. You only see the world of possibilities if you can exercise that idea muscle every single day. Which is what I started doing in 2015, which is what changed my life. And ever since 2015, my business kept going up every single year. Yes, my business has gone up from 2015 to 2016, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 every year it's gone up. And I really do credit and my life has also become like heaven since then because bit by bit, micro skill by micro skill, segment of life by segment of life, I have improved it. And I improved it because I now see possibilities and abundance everywhere. People talk about abundance thinking. To me, and whenever I hear people talk about abundance thinking, I don't think they really know what they're talking about. I don't think most people really do, but it's by this idea muscle exercise every single day that abundance thinking actually occurs. I don't think abundance thinking occurs by doing affirmations. Oh, I see abundance everywhere. Because once you start up repeating certain affirmations again and again, it loses its power. Every single repetition loses its power unless you make it fresh again, right? And how do you make it fresh? You need new ideas, you need new formulations. If you are literally saying the same affirmation, but you're saying in a different way every day, you are by definition exercising your idea muscle. But if you say the same affirmation, thinking somehow you can hypnotize yourself into thinking abundantly, good luck. I've seen lots of people try and it hasn't worked. But what I do is I exercise my idea muscle by creating content every day. And I think content is the most, well, of course I'm biased. So I think content creation is the most brilliant way of exercising the idea muscle every day. So essentially there's two ways to exercise your idea muscle in my mind. Okay, there's three ways. One way, which a lot of people will do when they read this book and read James's book, Idea Machine. I think it's written by James's ex-wife, anyway, the Idea Machine. She learned it from him. Anyway, read my article and you'll learn the method. One way, which a lot of people do is by doing the idea muscle exercise privately. They just journal every day. And that's fine. But journaling every day privately is helps your mind maybe, but doesn't, but why not also help your career and your business? Like if you're gonna journal every day you might as well do it publicly. If it's gonna help you build your audience why wouldn't you do it? Oh, I don't want people to see me as wishy washy. No one is seeing you as wishy washy. No one, except maybe a few judgmental people in your life who is not your ideal audience. Your ideal audience are the thousands of people, probably hundreds of thousands of people who are going to follow you over the years who are going to get so much out of you from what you share. They don't care if you're wishy washy. They don't care if you say one thing one day and another thing the other day, that just finds, they just find it interesting and entertaining. Stop thinking you have to be one niche, blah blah blah. No, I can tomorrow I'll talk about basket weaving. I don't care if I'm really, I'm not interested. But you see what I mean? I just talk about whatever I want, at least in the beginning that's what I did and people still follow me. Ah, your child has this interest in it. You're, whatever, you have 50,000 interests, but still all of them have a through line. The through line is your personality and your most ideal audience loves you for who you are. So they resonate with your personality and they too would find your 50,000 interests interesting. Anyway, so let me, so really to become abundant thinking you have to exercise your idea of muscle. And if you're going to exercise your idea of muscle if you might as well do it publicly so you can build an audience at the same time. I was going to say three ways of doing idea machine exercise. One is do it privately, which most people do fine, but why not do it publicly? Number two, create content, do it every day. And so after reading this book again, I am once again exercising my ideal muscle, doing it publicly, I do it on my Twitter feed. If you find my Twitter account, you'll see that I post something every single day, some idea, some idea, I just keep posting it, you know, and just potential future blog posts. I use Twitter as my potential future blog post ideas. Anyway, second way of doing idea machine is to do it publicly as content, content every day, wherever you don't mind sharing content every day, wherever you're not shy sharing content every day, that's the second way. The third way of doing it, which is what he does, this is the way that James does it, the author of this book, he does the idea machine exercise except he is sending ideas to other people. That's a really genius way of doing it too. So he really does the net caring way, right? I have talked about it again and again, there's really two ways to build an audience, content or net caring, or in my case, I try to do both. And I recommend you try to do both as well. So he does net care. Essentially he writes 10 ideas every day for a particular person in his network or a particular company, and he sends it to them. That's it. And then he oftentimes doesn't hear back, it doesn't matter. Now he's famous. So now he tears back probably most of the time, but in the beginning he didn't hear back from most of the people he sent ideas to. He's like, again, these ideas, there's no catch. I just, I practice writing ideas every day and today I wanted to write ideas that I thought might. So if he was writing a journalist, for example, he says, hey, I just wrote these 10 article ideas that I thought you might particularly write about that you're really credible to write about. And I just wanted to share these with you. That's it, no catch. I enjoy your work. Or if he has a company that he really likes, Google or Uber or whatever company that he really likes, he will write 10 ideas to improve the company and send it to someone at the company. Usually it's some friend of a friend or whatever, send it to them. And then just like, and then by doing that, he's gotten invitations to speak at these companies. Okay. Anyway, so he basically says, but in the beginning when he was doing this, he really, he came from a place of being depressed. He had a giant failure. He was really depressed and he started doing the idea journaling. And in the beginning he wrote himself. He did the first method, which is to just write privately his ideas because he didn't think about sending it to people yet. And then eventually he realized, oh, I could just send these ideas to people. You know, why not? And if in the beginning, nobody responded and eventually people started responding. Okay. Now he says, after he wrote this for three months, he did the idea machine every day for three months. He said, I was no longer depressed. I was writing down 10 ideas every day. I started in June of 2002. And by September, I felt like my brain was on fire. In a good way, not in flames, in a good way, spiritual fire. I couldn't wait to get up, get to a cafe, read for a little bit and start writing down my ideas. 10 ideas a day, business ideas, book ideas, article ideas, ideas for other people, other businesses. If I had a business idea from the day before that I liked, then I would write 10 ideas on how to create that business. So we just kind of built upon that again and again. I would share them. I would share the ideas with the companies. I stopped caring whether someone would steal my ideas. Do you start seeing a commonality here? I've done the same thing. I've uncopy, I've uncopy righted all of my work. You can steal any of my writings and call it your own, including my entire books. You don't need to ask me permission. Just call it your own, publish it as your own, whatever I want the ideas to get out there. It's because of this kind of exercise where I'm like, I have so many ideas that you can't even stop me. I mean, I have more ideas than I can do for the rest of my life. So why do I care about protecting the ideas that I already had? I'm just going to keep creating, right? So back to his quote, I would share these ideas with the companies. I stopped caring if anyone would steal my ideas. I was abundant with ideas. Steal away because of those lists that I wrote and because I would try to share them with the companies I was writing about. I've now visited Google. I did the talks at Google. I visited LinkedIn. I spent the whole day consulting. Facebook, Quora, Airbnb. I spoke with the Airbnb Open, Twitter and many other companies. The world opened up. Now I look around and I see possibilities everywhere. When you rewire your brain like this, all you see are possible futures for yourself and they are abundant. 18 years later in 2020 when he wrote this book, I still write down 10 ideas every single day. You become so abundant with ideas. You have no problem sharing them and sharing them will create new opportunities, new connections, new worlds will open up for you. And I like that this happened to be on page 111, which is one of my favorite numbers. It doesn't matter, continuing on the quote, if the ideas are good or bad. This is important. Remember, experiments, everything's an experiment. He actually says that most of his ideas that he writes down are bad because he writes down 3,650 ideas a year, right? 10 ideas a day. He writes down 3,650 ideas a year. He said most of them are bad. Doesn't matter, right? He said it doesn't matter if the ideas are good or bad or if I keep track of them or even if I look at them again, this is important. You're not trying to like make sure you organize all those ideas that you're right now. It's an exercise of your creativity and possibility of muscle. That's what's key here. He says, I don't care if I look at them again, keep track of them, whatever. Writing down 10 ideas a day was rewiring my brain. That's the main benefit. It was giving me a dopamine boost and the feeling of achievement every day. And then it started building up my idea muscle. Muscles atrophy quickly. If you lie in bed for two weeks, you might actually need physical therapy to walk again. That's how fast leg muscles atrophy. The idea muscle is the same way. You use it or you lose it. I had lost it in early 2002. I had no creativity left in me. I was burnt out. By writing down ideas, I was then exercising my idea muscles. I was connecting all the creative parts of my brain, forcing them to light up in new ways. I could feel the dusty unused parts of my brain actually begin to come to life. And it really felt like exercise every day. By the time I hit number seven on my list of 10 ideas, I'd keep counting over and over again. How many ideas have I written today? Is it 10? I sweat out the last three. So it's like exercise. Like, oh, can I come up with another three ideas for this topic? You will if you keep writing. The point is not to have good ideas all the time. The point is just to exercise. You will become creative and then you will know how to execute better than anyone else. And I really like this idea because he says to become good at execution, because ideas is one thing, but then you have to become good at execution. Well, guess what? The skill of execution is basically the skills of having lots of ideas of how to execute and then being able to, and then trying different things to understand, okay, out of these ways of executing, this way works the best, which is about experiments, right? Okay, last thing I'll say from him, everything can be tested with an experiment. There was no judgment. Some experiments will work and some will not. Nobody remembers what doesn't work from you. Nobody remembers, just like you. You don't remember the dozens of videos you've watched from me that didn't make an impact on you, right? You don't remember them. You don't remember the dozens of posts you saw from me that didn't make an impact on you. You probably scrolled on by or just like, ah, whatever. You moved on to the next thing. You only remember the few things I've said that really made a difference for you. And that's the same thing with you. Your audience doesn't care. Your network doesn't care all the things you tried that didn't work out. They only remember you for the things that, wow, that one did really well, okay? Nobody remembers what doesn't work from you. And what does work will help you build your brand, monetize your interests and create more opportunities, okay? So that's the end of my time. And that's pretty much the main thing I wanted to share with you. There were other things, maybe I'll say one more thing, which is he talks about the idea calculus, which I'll summarize it by doing this, which is part of a prompt, a prompt for your idea machine, okay? Basically, you can take any idea and join it with another idea to create another idea. So I'm just gonna make something up right now, okay? I see a flower here and I see an air filter here. Those are two ideas. I'm gonna marry these two ideas. I'm like, what if I created an air filter that had a bunch of flowers on the outside? Why not? I've never seen that before. All air filters look boring. This one is gray, right? I mean, I just literally came up with that in three seconds. Let's see, another idea. I'm just gonna come up with things. Light, lamp and my authenticity. I'm just making stuff up here, right? Lamp and I can now combine those two ideas. What if I created a product called the authentic lamp? Like when you light it up, it represents your authenticity. Whatever, I'm just making stuff up. No ideas don't have to be good. They just have to be created to exercise. But that's, so idea calculus, he talks about how you can add, an addition is to add two ideas together or three or whatever and come up with something new, okay? A product, an idea, a content piece, okay? An idea subtraction is to take an idea and subtract what you don't like about it and create a new idea. Idea multiplication is like, how can this idea serve a lot more people? So it's kind of like the idea of scaling. Idea division, I don't remember what he said didn't make an impact on me. But the main thing was idea addition, idea subtraction. And I think you can come up with tons of tons of product ideas and content ideas just from there. Okay, so with that, I, and brilliant and just say, hey, what about air filter that smells like different flowers? Yeah, right? Why not? And most air filters don't have some, like air filters should either come up with, oh, there's air diffusers, right? There's essential oil diffusers, but you can integrate that into a regular air filter. So you can say, oh, there's a little spot here for essential oils, you put that in there. And then now it's a filter's air and also diffuses nice smells, right? Because air diffusers aren't filters. So why don't you combine the two? See, there you go. You already have a product idea. So I hope this was inspiring for you. And most importantly, I hope you do, you'll do something with this and go in and actually try this. Remember, if you wanna read about the idea method, the idea machine method, just Google idea machine. If you just Google idea machine, there's lots of articles about it. But I wrote about it years ago. Idea machine, George Cowell, you'll find that. So all right, thank you again, Sherry and Anne for joining me live for this. And yeah, and Anne found that link. Thank you. But you can just Google and you'll be able to find it. I will see you all on some other video. Take care, enjoy.