Treat Your Life As An Experiment | James Altucher | Modern Wisdom Podcast 138

... when you exercise that creativity muscle, you're able to come up with experiments. How can I experiment to improve this aspect of my knowledge or life or whatever? So for instance, with comedy again, I was having a hard time coming up with one-liners. Like, I'm, I'm a public speaker for a long time, so that means I'm good at storytelling and humorous storytelling. But coming up with one-liners, it's one sentence that gets people to laugh, that wasn't an expertise of mine. So here's an experiment I did. Took a half hour. I went onto a subway and every stop I moved from car to car in the subway, and I would do standup comedy in the subway. And now no other person sitting in the subway wanted to hear me doing standup comedy. (laughs) So it was really difficult. It was really out of my comfort zone. Yeah. It's got to be a little uncomfortable- Yeah. ... because no one's ever done it before, so it's got to be uncomfortable. And I had to really tighten up my jokes super hard to get anybody to laugh, and that was an experiment that helped me improve my one-liners and, by the way, it also became a story I could tell, or a story I could write about.

One of the things that I was talking about recently was with an ex-Marines officer from the UK, and he was talking about his time over in Afghanistan. And he was a Somalia, uh, pirate hunter, Somali pirate hunter. Was, like, his second sort of, uh, career after he left, left work in Afghanistan. And, um, he was talking about just how different life is out there, and he said he was talking about singing the praises of travel and new experiences. And what you've suggested to there about the idea generation and how important it is, is you kind of don't really know what you like until you-

Yeah.

... until you, you try to do something. And our sample size, the sample size of experiences that we're working with is so... it's such a fraction of the total potential number of experiences that you could have as a human, right? Like, uh, unless you try something, how do you know whether you do or don't like it?

Right. Like, people often think to themselves that they could think... uh, they, they can think their way to their passion. Y- there's no way to figure out what your passion is with just your brain. You have to do things. The- there's no thinking. You have to actually do in order to know, and that's critical. That's why, that's why travel is interesting. If you're, if you're the sort of person who benefits a lot from travel or, or, you know, if you enjoy traveling, travel to as many places as possible to see where you like, what you like to do, wh- what you like to do in each place. For me, I like to ex- experiment with these different ideas because again, I'm not gonna know until I do something. I'm not gonna know what it's like to write... Like, I could think b- uh, of a great plot in my head for a novel, but I'm not gonna know what it's like to write a novel unless I sit down and write it.