We're in the midst of profound change. It's happening in the country, on Glenn's show, and within Glenn himself. And as Glenn sees the world changing, he is trying to connect his audience with people who are finding new ways to make the world work. Tonight, he was joined by James Altucher, a entrepreneur and author who has some radical alternative ideas about education and success.
In his book Choose Yourself, Altucher talks a lot about happiness and success. Below are the five most highlighted passages of the book from Kindle readers.
1) Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically. Always ask yourself, what can I improve? Who else can I talk to? Where else can I look?2) Only think about the people you enjoy. Only read the books you enjoy, that make you happy to be human. Only go to the events that actually make you laugh or fall in love. Only deal with the people who love you back, who are winners and want you to win too.
3) Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again.”
4) The only real fire to cultivate is the fire inside of you. Nothing external will cultivate it. The greater your internal fire is, the more people will want it.
5) Rejection—and the fear of rejection—is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves.
So what advice did Altucher offer on The Glenn Beck Program? Focusing on education based on gained through experience rather than the classroom, he proposed that people:
1. Start a business
Even if you fail the education you receive is invaluable. "Now, everybody will say to me, “Well, not everyone can be an entrepreneur,” and that’s the point, learn how to fail. Nobody in college ever teaches you how to fail, and yet the rest of your life is basically a sentence of failures punctuated only by the briefest of successes. So you need to learn failure, but in college everybody gets A’s, go to class, get your A’s. So start a business, fail or succeed, you win."
2. Travel
It costs a lost less than college. "Now, travel costs money but not anywhere near as much as college, and you could make it cheaper by traveling with a charity or whatever."
3. Work in the real world
Want to be a doctor? Go work in a hospital and see if you really want to work with sick people. "Now, let’s say you want to be a healer or a doctor or whatever, okay, work in a hospital. I’ve never seen someone say I’m just going to work for a year, I’m going to intern in a hospital for a year and get vomited on and see what it’s really like to heal people, and that’s how I can learn whether this is what I want to do."
4. Take advantage of online education courses
Use Youtube and other outlets to learn new skills, and seek out much less expensive online education options. "Now you can go on YouTube, start getting millions of views, and make a living. There’s many other ways to make a living. There’s many other ways to get an education, courser.com, codecademy.com, Khan Academy. There’s many ways to get an online education that cost zero...Of course, and then you get a four- or five-year head start on all your peers who spent the four years in college, and you have no debt. Can you imagine a society where an entire generation is $1 trillion in debt? That’s what we have now. That’s creating this economic uncertainty."
Read more of Altucher's alternatives to college HERE.