How AJ Jacobs Documented Failure & Became A New York Times Bestselling Author

The Fail On Podcast with Rob Nunnery - Fail Your Way To An Inspired Life

Today, we get to learn from none other than A.J. Jacobs, a four time New York Times bestselling author whose work combines memoir, science, humor, and a dash of self-help. A.J. Jacobs is not only an author, but also a journalist, lecturer, and human guinea pig. He has appeared on Oprah, The Today Show, and Good Morning America, just to name a few, and has given several TED Talks.

On today’s podcast episode, I will be talking to A.J. about reframing moments of failure as amazing opportunities to tell a great story, being okay with failure while also being delusionally optimistic about your goal, how to manufacture confidence and belief when tackling a new project, and how to actually know when to give up and quit on a project that you are working on, and much, much more.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Find out what failure means to A.J. and why he believes it is hugely important in our lives.
• Hear the story of when A.J. went to the Oscars pretending to be a well-known actor.
• Learn how to reframe failures into opportunities to tell a story in the future.
• Understand why it is easier to act act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.
• Find out how to actually know when to give up and quit on a project or endeavor.
• A.J. shares how being grateful for everything can completely change you outlook on life.
• Learn how to learn into failure and not be terrified of it.
• Discover how A.J. pushes himself to get outside his comfort zone often in life.
• Hear as A.J. shares about the person who has had the most profound impact on his life.
• And much more!

Tweetables:

“You have to be delusionally optimistic to undertake anything huge.” — @ajjacobs

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Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

A.J. Jacobs — http://ajjacobs.com/

A.J. on Twitter — https://www.twitter.com/ajjacobs

A.J.’s Books — http://ajjacobs.com/books/

Paul Ekman — http://www.paulekman.com/

James Altucher — http://www.jamesaltucher.com/

Ancestry — https://www.ancestry.com/

My Heritage — https://www.myheritage.com/

The World Family Tree — https://www.geni.com/

Read Full Transcript

EPISODE 003

“AJ: For me, you know, they say write about your life, write about what you know and for better or for worse, I did not have an interesting childhood. My childhood was very dull.”

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:15.1] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Fail on Podcast where we explore the hardships and obstacles today’s industry leaders face on their journey to the top of their fields, through careful insight and thoughtful conversation. By embracing failure, we’ll show you how to build momentum without being consumed by the result.

Now please welcome your host, Rob Nunnery.

[INTRO]

[0:00:52.1] RN: Hello and welcome to the podcast that believes, if you desire to create the life of your dreams then embracing failure by taking urgent and bold action is the only way. Today, you and I get to learn from none other than AJ Jacobs, a four time New York Times bestselling author. I’ll be talking to AJ about reframing moments of failure as amazing opportunities to tell a great story, being okay with failure while also being delusional optimistic about your goal, how to manufacture confidence and belief when tackling a new project, and how to actually know when to give up and quit on a project that you're working on and much, much more.

But first, if you’d like to stay up to date on all fail on podcast interviews and key takeaways from each guest, simply go to failon.com and sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of the page.

Without further ado, AJ Jacobs

[INTERVIEW]

[0:01:44.4] RN: Hey there and welcome to The Fail On Podcast. Today I am sitting down with AJ Jacobs, a New York Times bestselling author, four times over and the ultimate human guinea pig. AJ, welcome to The Fail On Podcast.

[0:01:56.2] AJ: Thank you, I am a huge fan of failure so I’m honored to be here. It’s a great idea for a podcast.

[0:02:01.3] RN: I love it and just to give everybody some context, you're sitting in your New York apartment upper west side?

[0:02:07.2] AJ: That’s right.

[0:02:07.9] RN: 83rd central park west, beautiful spot. Do you actually want me to telling — do you care that I just mentioned where your house is?

[0:02:14.1] AJ: No, I mean, you don’t need the address and apartment number but yeah, general area.

[0:02:18.2] RN: Phone number, email?

[0:02:21.7] AJ: Yes, it is where I’ve done a lot of failing so I’m glad you're here.

[0:02:25.5] RN: On the note of failure, I usually wait to ask this question further in to the interview, conversation but you know, with you, a human guinea pig, self-experimenter, what does failure mean to you? How do you approach it?

[0:02:37.7] AJ: Well, failure I think is hugely important and I’m always telling my kids how important failure is and I always highlight all of my failures to them so I think they think I’m a total loser. I’ve got to remind that sometimes I do succeed. I’ve got to try to stress that so they have a little bit of respect for me. But in general, I think you know, of course, there’s no success without — oh sorry. See? This is a great podcast because you can screw up.

[0:03:07.3] RN: See, this is actually why I started the whole podcast and project, right? In the business. It gives me permission to just embody failure.

[0:03:16.8] AJ: Totally.

[0:03:18.4] RN: If I screw up, awesome, it’s good for my brand, right? If I win, it’s great because I’m winning.

[0:03:24.4] AJ: It is wonderful. You really cracked something there, it’s sort of like Larry David and how his brand is he’s a total jerk so he can like act like a jerk and everyone’s like, “Oh that’s so great.”

[0:03:36.4] RN: That’s who he is, right.

[0:03:38.2] AJ: He can be the worst person in the world and people love it.

[0:03:40.2] RN: I love it.

[0:03:41.7] AJ: Yeah, I think you can achieve anything with failure and anything I’ve done has been you know, 80 failures to one’s success and you talk to experts on creativity and how you know, Picasso, he’s got a bunch of crappy paintings you know? Everyone fails, everyone’s got — it’s a numbers game. You’ve got to just throw out so many ideas and so much product and some of it’s going to suck and some of it’s going to hit.

[0:04:18.6] RN: How did you first come to this realization that you have to kind of embrace failure and know that it’s part of life and know that it’s going to happen a lot? Were you always like, as a kid, were you always just trying crazy stuff, or did this come like later in life?

[0:04:31.9] AJ: A little bit. Certainly, when I started my career as a freelancer, it was, you’re going to get — it’s like being an actor, you’re going to get 99 failures for every one article and I have, there were some particularly humiliating ones. There was one where I had a book idea and I wrote a proposal, I sent it to an agent, he said a couple of publishers were interested, could I send a headshot? A photograph? I was like, “Oh, you know, a little weird but sure.”

He’s like, “Yeah, it’s just to make sure that you don’t have two heads so you can go on a talk show.” So I do that and I send out to them and then two days later, he’s like, “Well, they decided to pass,” and I’m like, “I’m not good looking enough to be an author? An author, you’re supposed to allow to be allowed to be…”

[0:05:20.6] RN: It’s just words, right.

[0:05:21.8] AJ: That’s like one of the few places you can be ugly. So yeah, that was unfortunate.

[0:05:28.1] RN: Was that before you had published a book before?

[0:05:30.1] AJ: That was my first book, yeah. I really — I don’t know what it was, but I decided I’m going to just be okay with failure and rejection and, you know, I’ll give it like three years and if I get no successes then I’m going to reevaluate and go, you know, do something, I don’t know.

[0:05:50.2] RN: In the traditional publishing world, you have to be okay with failure, right? Because you just hear all the stories of people sending out a million proposals and just getting destroyed.

[0:05:59.9] AJ: Exactly and I mean now, luckily I’ve had some measure of success but I still get rejected all the time. It’s hard but you really, you have to try not to take it personally and all that. Yeah, actually, one thing is a nice thing is to try and reframe it as “well I can tell a story about this failure”. Actually…

[0:06:23.5] RN: This is why I love talking to you about this because it’s my whole strategy right?

[0:06:28.2] AJ: Yeah, that’s your job.

[0:06:28.9] RN: How about this, for example? I interviewed a buddy, Nick Tarascio last night and I was telling him this story that I was interviewing James, right? For whatever reason, throughout the whole interview, this is brutal for me because I was a little bit intimidated and nervous to talk to James, even though I had talked to him before.

[0:06:45.0] AJ: Right.

[0:06:45.5] RN: But for whatever reason. We’re going to the interview and he starts calling me Ron. Just like, “Oh brutal.” Nick last time was like, “Man, you should have just started calling him Jake.”

[0:06:58.3] AJ: Nice.

[0:06:59.4] RN: I didn’t, hindsight but like that, that’s a bit of a failure because James just called me Ron the whole interview but I’m going to have to — I gave him a hard time after we got off the air but I didn’t correct him during the interview because I would have felt a little bit like an asshole, you know? It’s like, “My name’s Rob.” But, so like that, but now I’ve got a story about it.

[0:07:16.7] AJ: You have a story, that’s right.

[0:07:16.9] RN: I got a story, I can write an article about it and boom.

[0:07:18.9] AJ: I actually once wrote an essay on something called self-schadenfreude. You know, schadenfreude is when you take pleasure at other people’s pain. This is when you take pleasure at your own pain because you realize it will make a good story later. Even in the most awkward moments, and I’ve had many, at least in the back of your mind trying to remember, “Well, this is so horrible but it’s going to be a good story.”

[0:07:43.2] RN: What’s been one of your more awkward moments where it’s just been like, “Oh this is painful.”

[0:07:48.4] AJ: Well there’s been many. One was I was working at an entertainment magazine, entertainment weekly, this was a long time ago and I looked like a B list actor named Noah Taylor who was in a movie that was very popular at the time it was called — I can’t remember what it is, about a piano player.

Shine, it was called Shine. It was nominated for an Oscar and I looked exactly like this guy. We found out he wasn’t going to be at the Oscar so we were like, “You know what? Maybe I should go to the Oscars.” So I put on a tux, we did have a ticket but I got out of the limo and everyone’s like, “Oh my god, it’s Noah Taylor,” and I was like, waving and signing autograph.

[0:08:34.5] RN: Were you really?

[0:08:35.1] AJ: Yeah.

[0:08:35.2] RN: What year is this by the way, just for some context?

[0:08:38.1] AJ: This was late night, probably 99 or 2000, it’s almost 20 years ago, crazy. At one point I went up to his coast, I got so cocky, I went up to his costar.

[0:08:50.2] RN: No way. That far?

[0:08:51.7] AJ: Oh yeah. Jeffrey Rush, he was a really famous actor, you know? I was like — he was Australian so I had this bad Australian accent, it sounded sort of like the lucky charms leprechaun and I was like, “Hello Jeffrey, it’s me, Noah.” He just looked at me. He knew I wasn’t this guy.

[0:09:11.6] RN: Of course.

[0:09:13.6] AJ: He looked at me, backed away, he’s like calling for security and he’s just so horrible but even in that moment I’m like, “All right, this is really one of the worst moments in my life but I will be able to write about it.”

[0:09:27.7] RN: Were you doing it for the story? So you're doing it for the story, to have an amazing start to write about. Is anybody filming it or what?

[0:09:34.3] AJ: No, no one was filming but I was writing an article about it. I didn’t expect it to go that badly but when it did, it was kind of good and I actually, you know, you mentioned before I do a podcast and some of the best interviews I find are when I just make an idiot of myself and I ask them a terrible question and they kind of get angry at me and yell at me. That’s much better radio than just…

[0:10:06.3] RN: Canned answers that they’ve told everybody before.

[0:10:08.2] AJ: Exactly.

[0:10:08.9] RN: Yeah. This was in the late 90’s and it sound like an amazing stunt. Have you always been doing this crazy stunts to have something to write about?

[0:10:18.4] AJ: I think so, I think for me, you know, they say write about your life, write about what you know and for better or for worse, I did not have an interesting childhood. My childhood was very dull and relatively happy, not happy but uneventful.

Unhappy in a boring way. I figured if I’m going to write about something, I better make it myself. Put myself in interesting experiences and then I can write about that.

[0:10:48.2] RN: Got it. What was — do you remember the first time you did it? Well, not even the first time you did it but the first time you were like, “If I’m going to be a great writer, I’m going to have to create great circumstances and put myself in this situations.”

[0:10:59.6] AJ: Right, that’s like a great way to put it and I think one of the earlier ones was the Oscars. I also did one where I — while I was working in entertainment weekly and La-Z-Boy, the chair company, they come out with the newest highest tech La-Z-Boy ever. It’s like a butt massager, a beer fridge. Yeah.

The idea was, I don’t think I even came up with it, my editor was like, “You got to take this to the extreme, you’ve got to road test this and stay in there for 24 hours without moving.” It did not have a toilet so I did get up once or twice but other than that, it was like, extreme leisure, pushing my body to the limit of laziness. I was like, “This is a nice way to make a living.”

[0:11:50.6] RN: Sit in a La-Z-Boy, the highest tech La-Z-Boy?

[0:11:53.7] AJ: Yeah, not bad.

[0:11:55.8] RN: Beyond that, what made you, I’m sure you did a series or string of articles like this by pure experimentation. Take us back to the first book you did where you wanted to go explore that route?

[0:12:07.5] AJ: Yeah, When I was growing up, my dad, he loved reading and at one point, he started to read the Encyclopedia Britannica. But he didn’t get very far, he got up to like the B’s, Bolivia or something and then he realized he had a life and have probably should do something else.

[0:12:27.3] RN: Can’t read this whole thing, right?

[0:12:28.6] AJ: Yeah, but I just loved the idea of taking this extreme challenge. You know, I’m not very athletic and I don’t — I like oxygen, I like oxygen so I’m not going to climb you know K2. I get cold at around 72 degrees. That’s just not my thing. I like this intellectual Mount Everest’s or social Mount Everest’s. Take on this huge challenge and see what happens. It’s going to be interesting and know that, as you say, you very well might fail. That’s okay, that’s part of the experience.

[0:13:10.8] RN: Is that how you go into it with that kind of mindset of, “You know what? I’m okay if this doesn’t work out.” Were you okay starting that project? Where you read the entire encyclopedia Britannica if you actually weren’t going to get the whole way through?

[0:13:23.1] AJ: Right.

[0:13:23.6] RN: But you’re okay with that or was it just kind of like a do or die, you’re documenting it and writing about it.

[0:13:28.5] AJ: Right, well it’s interesting because I think there are two sort of warring ideas going on and our brains or my brain anyway and one is, being okay with failure and the other is this idea that you have to be delusionally and optimistic to undertake anything huge. If you're not delusionally optimistic and at least some part of you isn’t saying, “I could do this,” then you are more likely to fail because you’ll just give up.

It’s balancing this two parts of the brain; being okay with failure and when it happens, accepting it and turning it into a story and on the other hand, being like, you know, “I can go to the moon, it’s crazy.”

[0:14:13.2] RN: Self-belief that just kind of comes from nowhere. Or like, how do you manufacture that belief to where you feel like, “I can do this, I can stick with this and make it happen.”

[0:14:23.2] AJ: That’s a good question and I think that for me, the most effective method is to act delusionally optimistic. This whole idea I talk a lot about is like, it’s not my quote...