STRESS
“I bet people have committed suicide while starting a company" – Jason Raznick
My biggest regret: that I spent all of 2002 pacing around, stressed out of my mind, stressed over every trade, over every little downtick or uptick in my bank account, over whether or not I was going to be able to sell my Ground Zero-based apartment, over whether or not I was going to go dead broke with one kid in the family and another on the way. I'll never have that year back. I slept in a
bedroom by myself so it would be easy for me to wake up and pace in the middle of the night or wander around outside. I lived in a constant state of fear. I wish I could have that year back, even if it could be tacked onto the last year of my life.
James Altucher
I was starting a new business: trading for hedge funds. But at the moment I had only one client and mostly I was trading my own meager amount of money that was dwindling fast under the mounting expenses I was accumulating.
Another time: 2 years later, things had already worked out from 2002. But now I needed them to work out again. I was helping an investor of mine sell his company and I would benefit from it. He had just finished telling me on the phone about how his wife peed on him the night before. When you have a big investor you sort of have to listen to everything he says and just say: "Wow, cool." His wife, 20 years younger than him, blonde, then grabbed the phone from him and said: “he should NOT have just told you that” and then gave the phone back to him, neither confirming nor denying. He then said to me: “I should ask for $60 million, not $40 million for my business.”
Why did he say this? Just a few months earlier he couldn’t get $10 million for his little mental health business, and now my partner and I had gotten him an offer for $40 million (for his mental health hospital for kids). How we got him an extra $30 million (cash, I will add) will be the subject of another story, titled, “how to make a man $40 million who is regularly peed on by his wife”. I got stressed then. That night I couldn’t sleep. I needed this deal to go through. I once again had that familiar feeling of the blood going through my body. I could feel every pulse. I felt I could slow my heartbeat
down to zero, and then I would be dead. I was lying in my youngest daughter’s bed, because both my daughters slept upstairs with their mother. So, as was usually the case back then, I slept in a pink bed surrounded by Barbie dolls, stressed out of my mind. Until I would pace again at 4 in the morning.
The next day I called my investor, “put your wife back on the phone.” His wife got back on the phone. I said: “imagine that a teenage girl commit’s suicide in your hospital. Your value is now $0. And that can happen any day. Also, imagine having to do for the rest of your life the job you just did yesterday.” The man’s wife had cleaned shit off the walls of a room where a patient had decided to do a painting with his excrement. So now we have shit, pee, $40 million, etc. in two paragraphs. She conferred with my investor after that and he stopped asking for the $60 million. They closed on $40 million for their hospital a month later. But that’s another story.
Let’s get back to 2002 for a second. As I’ve mentioned I needed my house sold. But until then, the stress was unbelievable. And then I had a second child born. So now I was going broke, I was stressed out of my mind.
Worldcom went bankrupt (I owned shares), and my new baby couldn’t sleep at 2 in the morning unless I literally ran with her from one end of the house to the other. I would take long walks completely circling ground zero. This was going on for an entire year. Nothing helped. I was stressed out of my mind.
James Altucher
One time I tried to get a loan but the loan officer sort of looked at me and my situation and said: “we can’t do this type of loan at this time.” Why not? I only wanted a million or so. Why couldn’t they lend it to me? But I never got an answer. Maybe if I had worn a tie.
Meanwhile, other people I had vaguely bumped into in the street years earlier were calling me asking if THEY could borrow money from me. As a collective, we all needed a little more money or we were all going broke. It wasn’t a good situation to be in. Sometimes Ylon would come over and we’d play backgammon. He had just sold his apartment. “Dude,” he said, “I have more money than you!”
So my biggest regret: why did I worry at all? It all worked out in the end. I could’ve spent the entire year just relaxing and enjoying my apartment, my new little baby, I could’ve read books, written a novel, started an Internet business. Instead, I wasted so much time and energy being anxious. The stress took years off my life. I can’t even imagine physically having that stress again. Stress is related to cancer, heart disease, strokes, alzheimers, inflammation of the body.
Fortunately, I am the expert now in stress. I have a PhD in stress. I’ve lost all my money, I’ve fought hard to make money back, I’ve had people die on me, I've built
businesses that have failed, I’ve built and sold businesses. I know stress.