Mike Slavin • January 25, 2020 • 2 min read

On Engineering Your Own Luck and Surfing Serendipity with Eric James (HEx Podcast #31)

In today’s episode of the HighExistence podcast I sit down for a wild and wide-ranging discussion with Eric James.

Eric is a serial entrepreneur, award-winning photographer, magician, app developer, and all-around polymath who has discovered principles that help him engineer his own luck.

It just so happens that I met Eric in a stroke of luck 5 years ago at a dinner party.

He walked in and I instantly recognized him but not as a person I had met before.

He looked like a celebrity to me but couldn’t quite place it.

As I started talking to him suddenly it clicked.

Eric had started one of the first online magic shops.

It just so happened was watching his video when I was in 8th grade trying to become a magician myself.

And now here he was standing in front of me 10 years later.

We hit it off so well that we ended up becoming roommates for 2 years.

And this little anecdote is just scratching the surface of Eric’s stories of surfing serendipity (wait until you hear about Elon Musk and Richard Branson).

Here’s what we discuss in the episode of the HighExistence Podcast:

White Swans: How positive plot twists and happy curveballs in our lives can change everything (and why it’s important to hold the faith in the face of adversity)
How a bed bugs, a breakup, and 200K in tax debt lead to an important encounter with Elon Musk
Eric’s path to meeting Richard Branson in an attempt to become a space photographer (see his photography here)
The counter-intuitive truth on goal setting: Why big bold goals are easier to accomplish than small ones
Living laterally, portal jumping and leaving traditional career paths behind
How Red Light Therapy can be used to boost energy