Recently by James Altucher: My Last Death Threat in 2011

Sometimes I wish the mother ship would land and take me home. I look in the sky. Where is the ship, with the beautiful aliens. The ones I belong with. Why did they leave me here on this pathetic planet. Did they really want me to grow old and die here?

In the past 15 years I was probably suicidal on at least three different occasions. How would I kill myself? Who knows. I googled it. It’s hard to actually find a technique that works. Try googling “I want to die”. You’ll just end up back on this blog. Which won’t tell you how to die. Because there is no good technique. Trust me.

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But all of those moments had several things in common.

I couldn’t take the pain. I didn’t want to die. I wanted the pain to die. I had gone from a high to a low (being constantly at a low doesn’t do it. You have to go from a high to a low to experience the sense of loss) and when I thought the only way my kids would be happy is if they were able to cash in my life insurance policy. That’s how screwed up I was.

And, the irony is, it’s at exactly these moments that its hardest to have “faith”.

We all have moments when it seems like everything is going wrong. It’s unavoidable. A relationship turns sour. A job is lost. A business goes down in flames. You are robbed. You feel lonely. And so on. The list of possible calamities that are in store for us simply because we are human is awesome and overwhelming.

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When I had my first kid I was very sad about this. I looked at this tiny baby and all I could think about was, “how will I protect her when she’s feeling alone”. “how will I protect her when she’s rejected”. “How will I protect her when the things she thinks she’s most in control of go horribly astray.”

There’s no answer. I can’t protect her.

No matter what you do right now, things might totally suck. Its that enormous leap between your lowest moments and the moments that you think will make you happy that faith is required.

When things are already at the best, that leap is tiny or non-existent. So you don’t need any faith at those moments. Or faith is too easy.

It’s precisely when things are at their worst that you need “faith” the most. I put it in quotes because we still haven’t defined it.

Here are some kinds of faith.

1. Faith in God. In other words, a higher power that if you pay attention to in some way (prayer, gratitude, humility, ethical behavior, etc) then rewards are waiting for you.
2. Faith in a creative power within you. Your subconscious. The idea being that you put in the work, you do whatever you can in the time you have, and then you say, “Ok, I’ve done it all. Now you have to do something.” In other words, you give up. To yourself, to God, to the universe, whatever.
3. Faith in destiny. For instance, if you’ve always succeeded before doing a certain formula (for instance, for me, “the daily practice” I recommend) and things are down now, knowing that if I just apply that formula then once again things will go well. The Wall Street Journa... James Altucher Best Price: $1.21 Buy New $10.41 (as of 08:50 UTC - Details)
4. Other kinds of faith. Faith in Jesus, faith in Buddha, or the Tao, or Yoga, or a spiritual guide, or a higher power, all fit into the above faiths.

The benefits of all of these faiths is that they relieve stress. Hard work and anxiety suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Being anxious about something 20 hours a day probably won’t do much more for you than being anxious about it for 1 hour a day. Working for 10 straight hours probably won’t accomplish more than working for 3 super-productive hours.

One time I was seeing a therapist. He said, “what can I do to help you. What can relieve your stress.”

I said, “the only thing that will relieve my stress right now is if you immediately give me a million dollars.”

That, of course, didn’t happen. I had to develop other methods for relieving stress. In fact, I became an expert at having faith at the critical moments only because I had so many of them.

The Best of James Altucher

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