I recently appeared as a guest on Alex Wieckowski’s podcast, “Alex and Books.”

He recently tweeted the five top lessons he took away from the podcast. So I decided to share them here.

Also, you can check out the episode here.

5 KEY LESSONS I LEARNED FROM MY PODCAST WITH JAMES ALTUCHER

1) We live in a Choose Yourself era. What does that mean?

You don’t have to wait for approval from gatekeepers to get your dream job: Want to be an author? Self-publish on Amazon. Want to be an actor? Record videos on YouTube. Want to be a musician? Upload songs to Spotify.

2) Three ways to find your passion

Reflect on what activities make you happy and think of ways you could earn money from them.

List things you loved doing as a kid, explore those activities.

Ask yourself, what area of a bookstore do you always gravitate to?

3) Advice for finding happiness

Work on mastering a skill you enjoy doing. Invest in relationships with friends & family. Take responsibility for your life and situation. Take care of yourself both mentally & physically (cut out toxic people & exercise daily)

4) Helpful life advice

Don’t let failure keep you down (James had nine businesses fail in a row but the 10th worked great).

You don’t have to quit your day job tomorrow to choose yourself (James didn’t quit his day job until 18 months after starting his business).

5) More life advice

Look at life as a series of experiments: Some will work, some won’t. Either way learn and move forward. It’s never too late to choose yourself: James got into podcasting in his 40s and standup in his 50s.

Whatever your dream job is, choose yourself.

James Altucher is the author of the bestselling book Choose Yourself, editor at The Altucher Report and host of the popular podcast, The James Altucher Show, which takes you beyond business and entrepreneurship by exploring what it means to be human and achieve well-being in a world that is increasingly complicated. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Image courtesy of Jake Melara.