I’ve been reading an unhealthy amount of James Altucher lately

I can’t remember how I first started reading James Altucher’s blog.  I’m sure it was one of his blog titles.  He has the best blog titles.

10 Unusual Things I Didn’t Know About Steve Jobs

I’m Completely Humiliated by Yoga

10 Reasons You Need to Quit Your Job Right Now!

See what I mean?  So it would have been easy for me to see a title like that and click through to see what the deal was.

Then I got hooked.  I’ve added more of his blogs to Instapaper than any other pub, including TechCrunch and Mashable.  Not using Instapaper?  Check out my post, “Evernote vs. Instapaper”.  For some reason it gets more traffic than almost any post I’ve ever written.  Odd.

I’m currently reading Altucher’s book, “How to be the luckiest person alive” (amazon affiliate link).  I’m devouring it.

Here’s the weird thing.  I’m like the complete opposite of Altucher.  Except for the fact that we both had and sold web design companies, which I guess puts us in a small group of people. But other than that, he’s the polar opposite of me.

He’s been a day trader and has run a hedge fund and has been on TV with Jim Cramer talking finance.  I’m the most unsophisticated investor of stocks you’ve ever met. Bored with it.  Don’t fully grasp many basic elements of it.  Just not interesting to me, though I wish it was.

He’s stressed like you wouldn’t believe.  Half of the things he writes about seem to revolve around the immense levels of stress that he’s gone through in his life.  I am almost never stressed.

He’s a cautious, you’ll-probably-screw-me-over kind of guy.  I just wrote a blog post about how positive I am.

A chapter in his book about being an entrepreneur talks about lying awake at 3am, thinking of all the ways he’s screwed up or going to screw up or who’s butt he’ll have to kiss the next day…and says that you’re not an entrepreneur unless you’ve gone through that.  I’m the opposite.  I had trouble sleeping at night thinking about how excited I was going to be to get up early and get back to work.  Honestly.  My wife thought I was crazy because I loved Monday mornings. In fact, I had to work hard to find a trick to get myself to sleep at night.  I’ve used the same trick for about ten years now.

So although we are so incredibly different and the things he writes about I can’t relate to, I think he’s an exceptional writer.  And he’s lead an incredibly interesting life.

I’ve learned from him that you can blog about whatever you want.  I started this blog a few years ago intent on talking about digital marketing.  Then it ebbed into a social media centric blog with a sprinkle of entrepreneurship.  Lately I’ve been moved to write more about leadership and entrepreneurship than anything at all related to digital marketing.  But I struggle with whether or not I am writing things that people who read my blog are expecting to see.

But thanks to Altucher, I think I’m just going to write what I want to write from now on.  That doesn’t mean it will stray from the topics I’ve been writing about too much, because those are the areas I’m most passionate about, but if there’s something I want to say and it has nothing to do with those topics, then I’m just going to write it.

Kinda like this.