Professional Documents
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Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth
Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth
Th e Ch o o se Your self
Gu ide t o Wealt h
h
Copyright James Altucher
A L L R IG H T S R E SE RV E D
Re-selling through electronic outlets (like Amazon, Barnes and Nobles or E-bay)
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any
other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.
h
This book is bold, empowering, and useful. It gave me the courage to turn
down distractions so that I could focus on the important things in life, like
endorsing this book. I would never say no to James partly because he is my
cousin (genetically proven!)
~A. J. Jac obs,
Experiment and the pioneer behind the worlds largest family reunion.
Your freedom may be closer than you think. . . . Im so grateful for this
book and I know you will be, too.
~K ris C a rr,
You can make a lot of money, no matter what your age. You can reinvent
your retirement. You can become a successful writer, photographer, or
consultant. You can get paid to travel the world or learn a new hobby. The
list is endless.
~Port e r Sta nsberry,
h
James has become my go-to guy for getting my mind in the right place
and my future on the right track. At fifty I feel like thirty and once again
excited about what can be! Anyone interested in a new beginning and
every young adult just starting out should read this book.
Bria n D i cus
James Altucher has an irreverent way of looking at life, success, and
happiness. He has a lot of insight on how the world is changing.
Hellen K. C level and
Be forewarned. Reading this book is like choosing between the red pill
and the blue pill in The Matrix. If you prefer the safety of the your own bed
and believing what you want to believe then take the blue pill and dont
read this book. However, if you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes
then take the red pill and read this book.
D ona ld Murr ay
James is one of the most authentic voices out there. Read his books,
follow his blog, and listen to his podcasts.
A l a n Ba rnes
The world has changed and we need to catch up. Since reading Altuchers
blog about quitting your job in 2014, Ive become an absolute Altucher addict.
I suggest this and everything else you can get from him, podcasts, blogs.
C h ri stoph er Ko s s ow
This book got me and my partner motivated to start our own business.
E ri c Von Welbaum
Its not about selfishness; its about self worth. In other words, no one is
more valuable or less valuable than me.
C h ri sti ne L Wh eeler
The two days I read this book in the a.m., before work, were two of my
most productive days ever. Though Ive finished it, Im going to start the
book over and make it required pre-work reading!
Jenni fer Si lverb erg
James is very honest about his life. Both his Successes as well as his
Failures. He is a relentless idea machine and forward thinker.
D on M.
Im in the first year of my business and this book reminds me why I chose
myself and why I will continue to blaze my own path.
M a ry Hua ng
This is one of the most honest analysis of work, business, and the
psychology of being an individual and an entrepreneur. Changed my life
and continues to daily.
A ndy Ki ng
No holds barred, painfully honest, and joyfully blunt expose on why the
most important choice you will ever make is you. Altucher has written a
primer for life that should be required reading for every graduating high
school senior. It may just save them from a life of mediocrity and despair.
R ay Holli ste r
I call Choose Yourself! a gift to all willing to receive it. I encourage everyone to accept it and start doing what James suggests. Youll bless not only
yourself but also everyone in your growing circle of influence.
K a ren Ha nsen
This book, and other materials by the author, helped me change my life.
The Daily Practice is working for me.
Kri sti n M.
This isnt like any other book, and James is fortunately not like anyone
else. The content is real, engaging and definitely life-changing
G. Sa nch ez
Altucher is somewhere between Bukowski and Woody Allen. His selfhating personality is benign for all. Finally, a self-help book that does not
pretend to help you. Judo with Altucher, and learn to fight yourself.
Robert L oeber
The most honest and heart-wrenching book I have ever read. I feel
as if my thinking has been reprogrammed and I actually started to
smile once again.
Bria n Mi ller
Good read, good advice. Honest and openhearted work. I recommend
this book to anyone looking to get unstuck Thanks, James.
O ni R . Wo od s
If, like me, you are in the midst of a major life decision, I thoroughly
recommend taking the time to read this to gain confidence in yourself and
just live your life. I have only just finished this but I plan to read it again
R ec e n t Te st i monials:
h
James, you inspired me to get off my butt. Ive started to write down ten
ideas a day to help my creativity and now demand my kids do the same.
Ive started the Daily Practice and already feel like a happier person. I dont
know how to thank you enough. Im a fan for life.
Ni k Seetha ra m an
I bought your book and was deeply influenced by your insights at a point
in my life where I needed change. Since then I have quit my job, started a
company and we are actually raising money. So just saying thanks, what
you are doing matters.
Da n Da rel
Its Juan again. I was the guy who was making $25 writing a real estate
blog. You guys were awesome enough to answer my question on how to
make more money writing, back in episode 55 of Ask Altucher. Thank you
so much! Ive listened to the episode over 30 times. I wanted to give you a
quick update on whats happened to me since then. I have indeed, started
making more money. I now make $45 per blog post flat rate, plus a bonus
if they reach over 1,000 views.
Jua n Ga rgi ul o
D e di c at i on
h
When I dedicated Choose Yourself!, I couldnt think of a more fitting
dedication than to myself. Not in a self-glorifying way but more in a way
that would remind me each day that I needed to choose myselfto follow
my own Daily Practice that I recommend.
Because a practice is just thatpractice. Its not a solution. Its not
a cure. Its something that has to be undertaken every day (or as
much as possible) in order to work.
With this book I can safely get back to the norms of what dedication
pages are all about.
S
This b o ok is dedicated to my wife,
C l au dia A zu l a Altucher .
For being everything that Im not.
For putting up with everything I am.
For stitching me together whenever I bleed.
For letting me surprise her.
For laughing whenever I joke with her.
C on te n ts
h
INTRODUCTION: IDEAS ARE THE CURRENCY OF THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
THE 18 NEW RULES OF ABUNDANCE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
HOW I ENDED UP IN PRISONAND HOW I BROKE OUT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
THE FACTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
THE HISTORY OF THE END OF THE WORLD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
WHY ALL THE PERSONAL FINANCE GURUS ARE OUT OF DATE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
DEVELOP A PRACTICE FOR SUCCESS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
RESULTS OF THE DAILY PRACTICE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
PART 1
NEW GAME, NEW RULES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
WHAT IF YOU DONT KNOW WHAT YOUR PASSION IS? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
WHY YOU HAVE TO QUIT YOUR JOB THIS YEAR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
BE AN IDEA MACHINE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
HOW TO SELL ANYTHING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
HOW TO CONVINCE ANYONE OF ANYTHING IN SIXTY SECONDS. . . . . . . . . . 84
ONCE THE IDEAS GET ROLLING . . . : TEN THINGS YOU NEED TO
KNOW ABOUT LEADING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
SHARING IDEAS: BEING A GREAT PUBLIC SPEAKER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
DISCUSSING IDEAS: HOW TO NEGOTIATE WITH ANYONE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
102
114
120
120
130
138
139
PART 2
MAKING MONEY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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146
TREND #1 BIOTECH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
150
152
TREND #3 : OBSERVATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
153
154
155
156
157
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170
WHY I WANT MY KIDS TO KNOW WHO THE MYSTERIOUS S.J. SCOTT IS. . . .
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180
183
186
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MONOPOLY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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SCALABILITY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
191
NETWORK EFFECT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
192
BRAND. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
192
DEMOGRAPHICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
193
194
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PART 3
KEEP AND GROW THE MONEY YOU MAKE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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216
232
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TEN MINUTES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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AVOID REGRETS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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In trodu c ti on:
Ide as A re t h e Cu rrency of th e
Tw e n t y - Fi rst C entu ry
It wasnt an easy process for me. For my whole life I felt like a stray dog, dashing
around until I could survive in the jungle. I was dead on the ground. I was broke. I
was separated. I was fired. I was scared and lonely. Everywhere I looked, I couldnt
believe people knew how to smile. They were faking it, I thought. It took a long
time for me to get itbut now I get it.
In Choose Yourself! I describe the first tiny steps I took to get off the ground.
Well, actually, the second, because the first were horribly embarrassing: I pretended to be a psychic on Craigslist just so I could make friends. But lets ignore
that. I was lonely and just needed to reach out into space. Specifically, my second
step was that I tried to improve physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually,
just a little bit each day. I followed the one percent rule: improve one percent each
day, in each of these areas of life.
They are all equally important. If you sit on a four-legged chair, you are firm
on the ground. Use a three-legged chair, and a strong wind will blow you over.
Any less than that, youll fall easily.
Something I realized during this process: ideas are the most valuable cur-
rency of our time. Nothing else. Which is why in this book I focus a lot more on
ideas, for example:
Why ideas are the new currency of the twenty-first century, a century already
defined by declining currencies and more volatile employment.
How to create good ideas and sell them and negotiate the highest value
for them.
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James Altucher
Most important: You dont need to start a business to have great ideas and
create abundance.
This is not a self-help book. Its just exactly what I did for myself. I know it
worked for me. I had ideas first, wealth second. It only worked in that order.
At my worst moments, I had no ideas. All I could do was work on others ideas,
even bad ideas, because I needed a paycheck. Then I had bad ideas. But bad ideas
come back at you with loan shark prices, and you have to pay. Good ideas are
a link between the real world and the world of myths and dreams. I needed to
survive. I needed to pay for my family. I was going through a divorce. I was dating
people who were not so good for me. I was miserable all the time, and I was
scared it was going to get worse. Often there is no bottom until you make the
active effort to climb out of the hole. I did that by keeping my health up and being
only around people who loved me and whom I loved. That is when I created the
idea matrix (see figure 1). This is when I finally took the red pill instead of the
blue pill. And ever since, my life has changed 100 percent every six months. I cant
even believe the ways in which it has changed. But at least Im not crying on the
floor anymore, pretending to be a psychic.
The horizontal axis of the idea matrix starts off when you are working solely
on others ideas. This is not necessarily bad, but it basically means you are an em19
ployee and an idea slave to someone elses whims. You could get fired. Your boss
could have bad ideas and go broke. There is no loyalty. You are not in control. You
feel stuck all the time.
But as you keep moving toward the right on this axis, you start offering your
ideas to others. At first this just helps you, but as you keep giving and giving better
ideas, they start to help other people as well, and toward the end of the horizontal
axis you are helping an enormous number of people.
The vertical axis of the matrix shows the quantity and quality of the ideas you
are coming up with every day. It starts at zero, meaning you are not yet exercising
your idea muscle, and it gets stronger as you start coming up with ten ideas a day,
using something I call Idea Sex (a concept Ill describe in more detail later), and
ultimately becoming an Idea Machine.
The top right of the matrix (figure 2) is when you are an Idea Machine: you
are working nonstop on your own excellent ideas that help the lives of others. You
mind dips into dreams, and you make them reality or art or abundance.
Founder of PayPal and first investor in Facebook Peter Thiel underlined this
for me when he told me the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg turning
down Yahoos offer of $1 billion to buy his company in July of 2006. Zuckerberg
wouldve made $250 million that summer. Thiel, who was advising Zuckerberg
at the time, wanted him to take it, or at least consider accepting the offer. Zuckerberg decided in ten minutes: No. As Peter put it, ideas were more valuable to
Mark than money.
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James Altucher
Not everyone is going to create Facebook. I never will. But everyone could
create abundance in this upper right corner, and enjoys wealth as a side effect of
being an Idea Machine.
The bottom left corner (figure 3): Ive been here many times. For example,
when I was working a job where Id keep my office door locked all day long. I
had to write an instruction manual for some chip, and I was horrible at it. I make
grammar mistakes all the time, and I was worse then. My boss even called me into
his office and yelled at me, Dont you take any pride in your work?
Id leave work at 4:45 on the dot every day so I could hitchhike home. I wrote
horrible novels at night. I hung out with my friends. I lived with a woman I
didnt love. Nothing was going well. I was an idea slave. Many employees are at
the bottom left of the matrix. They get their paycheck working nine to five, or
longerworking on the bad ideas of others.
This is not a natural state for human beings. We need to explore. Were
curious. We want to adapt constantly to new environments and use the part of
our brain that evolved specifically so we could create new works of art or new
productions. But a century of corporatism has fooled us into thinking that if we
just pay our dues and climb the ladder, well find a pot of gold at the end. Such
loyalty on behalf of companies toward employees never existed and is now gone
forever as people slowly adapt to a new world.
21
The bottom right corner (figure 4) is where you have bad ideas that you are
giving to others. Many professions exist here: lawyers and stockbrokers are the
most common. They have tons of ideasusually bad ones.
This is not such a horrible thing for society. But it requires that the custom-
At the top left (figure 5) is when you are working on good ideas, but they are
based off of other peoples ideas. Whoever created Gmail on top of Google is in
this category. Whoever buys a losing business and turns it around is here. There
is money here, just not as much as the upper right.
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James Altucher
I was in this category when I worked at HBO. I was initially hired to do some
basic computer programming for them (idea slave), but then I started pitching
them ideas for their website. I was still under their umbrella but I was able to
become an entre-ployee by working on good ideas within the umbrella idea of
HBO. I made more money this way, had some fun, and got some promotions
but I was still an employee.
I dont mean like a kid running away from home for the first time. Because the kid
always comes back. I came back. Again and again.
This is where you break free from the system. Where you realize that every-
thing is a stage set and now its time to get to work. This is where you do what you
want, and say sorry instead of asking for permission. This is where you wake up
23
and everyones attached to a tube and you pull the tube out and maybe then, just
like in the movies, you learn karate and fall in love.
When you are in the Idea Machine, nothing can stop you.
This is where abundance is. This is where seeds are planted. This is where you
A few months ago I sent Amazon a list: ten ideas for the company to improve
its self-publishing division. The folks at Amazon liked the list. They flew me out
to their offices, gave me a tour of the different departments, and showed me what
they were working on. It was a lot of fun. I even took a photo of the very first
Starbucks, in Seattle.
They didnt pay me, but I got to meet everyone, and be at the center of the
universe for publishing. And I planted a seed. Who knows where those seeds will
grow in the future and what kind of abundance theyll create?
builds many bridges into the world of dreams. I know, I hear you: you still have to
pay the bills. So Ill tell you that Ive also made a lot of money in this area.
What about big companies like Facebook or Apple? Are they in this quad-
rant? Of course! Facebook is a great example: they set up the platform so that
everyone can aggregate information about their identity into one place. They basically generate nonstop ideas for a billion different people around the world who
want to communicate and share their online identities. Despite all the complaints
24
James Altucher
you read in the media, everyone I know uses Facebook, including the people
making the complaints.
the TV show The Profit and who recently joined me on my podcast, would be on
this matrix. Two places: He buys declining/failing businesses and helps turn them
around, which is in the top left: take an idea from someone else and start to throw
good ideas at it.
But hes also in the top right. Hes an Idea Machine. He takes his simple
him. No matter what the problem, he had a solution. If I argued back, hed show
me where I was wrong. And I was always wrong. He built up a good business and
went public. But then it went bankrupt, he went broke, he got depressed, and
he let that stop him. I dont know if he ever had a good idea again. At my worst
moments I thought I was turning into him. I would cry to therapists that I was
turning into himsomeone who would sit all day and do nothing until he died.
They would assure me, for two hundred dollars an hour, that I wasnt. But how
could they know?
The Daily Practice I discuss throughout this book gives me the energy to
come up with ideas, and to come up with ideas for coming up with ideas. I write
down ten ideas a day no matter what.
Being scared and lonely happens in a cycle. It affects all of us. Watching the river
go into the ocean sparks a little bit of that loneliness. But I think were meant to
often feel lonely and scared. It allows us to recalibrate where we are and ask the
25
Its when Im most scared that I get out of bed and I know that today is the day
KA-BOOM!
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James Altucher
27
every day)
The Real Rules of Leadership (give more to others than you expect back
for yourself)
How to Live by Themes Instead of Goals (goals will break your heart)
The Monopoly Rule. Nobody can predict what will happen. But understanding demographic trends and how to use them to take advantage of the coming monopolies in society will be of great benefit.
Idea Sex (get good at coming up with ideas. Then combine them. Master
the intersection)
The Google Rule - give constantly to the people in your network. The value
of your network increases linearly if you get to know more people, but EXPONENTIALLY if the people you know, get to know and help each other.
Note that Google measures its success by how quickly it sends you to other
websites where you can help. But thenwhere do you return to when you
need more help?...Google.
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James Altucher
Failure is a Myth: how to fail so that a failure turns into a new beginning.
Turn the word failure into experiment. Become the scientist of your life,
the explorer of your future.
The Secrets of Mastery. You cant learn this in school with each field being regimented into equal 50-minute periods. Mastery begins when formal
education ends. Find the topic that sets your heart on fire. Then combust.
The Noise Rule: news, advice books, fees upon fees in almost every area of
life. Create your own noise instead of falling in line with the others.
The Save Big Rule. Dont save small. Save big. Big is a worthless college
degree. Big is a house. Saving 10 cents on a cup of coffee is a poor mans way
to get rich. There is a myth that saving a dollar is the same as making a dollar. This simply is not true. It ignores the fact that you start off with money.
If you start off with $100 you can ONLY save $100 but you can MAKE a
gazillion dollars.
Investing is a Tax on the Middle Class. There are exceptions, which Ill show
in the chapter The Ultimate Guide to Investing.
The Daily Practice. Discussed in Choose Yourself! but Ill describe a little
more here and the science behind it.
In the chapters that follow Ill dive deep on these rules and how Ive
used them.
Society is very good at keeping the carrot at the end of the stick that it puts in
front of our face. It then says, hurry and get that carrot.
But the key is that success is found only by avoiding the carrot, ignoring it,
choosing yourself for peace, for abundance, for gratitude, in that order.
If you do all this you will gradually make more and more money and help
more and more people. At least, Ive seen it happen for me and for others.
29
How I E nded Up in
P risonAnd How
I Broke O u t
spent at least thirty years of my life in prison. I tried to break out several
times and was punished. Finally I freed myself. In this book you will read
about how I broke out of prison. My previous book, Choose Yourself!, gave
the basics of how you can free yourselfhow to get physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually healthy.
This book takes it one step further and reveals what Ive done to create actual
abundance for myselfto turn my life around in ways that still surprise me. To
change my life completely, still, every six months.
But how did I get in prison in the first place? What kind of prison am I even
It happened on the first day of nursery school. I was put in handcuffs and
led out to the car. Sort of. In reality, I asked my dad what was happening. Why
did I have to go to school? Every word out of his mouth was a lie that kept me
in prison for decades.
He said, Well, first you have two years of nursery school. Then a year of
kindergarten, then you have twelve years of grade school and high school. Then
you go to college for four years. Then you might get a masters degree and become
a lawyer or you might go to medical school and become a doctor, then you work
for forty years, get promoted if you do a good job, make some money. And then,
when you are as old as Grandpa, you can retire.
And during that time, he continued, you buy a house, you get married and
have kids and send them to college. And then they do the same thing.
30
I thought about Grandpa. He was so old. He could barely walk. He had heart
James Altucher
attacks every other year. He sat in front of his old TV and did crossword puzzles.
He couldnt move fast enough to chase after me.
Its not my fathers fault that he said all of these things. He was just repeating
to me the life he was leadingthe life that his father had taught him to lead. My
friends all said the same thing. Not in nursery school, but in grade school, and in
college, and at my first couple of jobs where maybe a dozen of us would vie for the
same promotions when jobs opened up.
My friends, family, and colleagues also said the same thing when it was time
to buy a house. It is the single biggest expense most people will ever make in their
lives as a percentage of their net worthand nobody questioned it. This is what
you do, of course. And not only thatyou take on massive debt to do it.
This is what people do. This is how people live. This is what life is about.
That life was a rainbow and each of these important decisions were shades on the
rainbow and at the end would be the pot of gold.
great company and then put my money in a 401(k) where I would never see it
again, and buy insurance products that I would never use, and buy a car, or maybe
two, that I would never drive, that would contain the latest this and that and the
other thing, and by the way youll have to get a new this and that in a few years.
This was all part of the American Dream. Get a checkup once a year. Get blood
tests. Live your life. But protect yourself. Dont step out of the box. Take care of
yourself. Life is hard. But then life is easy if you follow the rules.
I cant pinpoint whose fault it isand it doesnt matter. If you fall down and
you get hurt, you dont have to know exactly the biology of why you got hurt; you
just know youre in pain, and then you do something about it.
Every time I refused to believe in and act on the American Dream, I was pun-
ished severely. Because everyone else has invested so much of their money and
lives in this dream that it freaks them out when other people deviatelet alone
take a detour, or be happier.
But heres the truth. At every level of the Dream, someone is stealing
from you.
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First they steal from your time. Then they steal from your loves your pas-
sions, the things you love to do, the people you love all of it. Then they steal
money from you. Oh, I should mention, they steal a lot of money from you. Then
they steal from your middle age, where the ambition you worked for starts to
marinate into meaning.
Then they steal from your retirement, where now you are so exhausted from
paying off so many debts and so many needless expenses that you forgot how to
live, Live, Live.
book. Why?
The economists cannot explain how. The professors cannot explain how.
Your colleagues and friends might not be able to explain how. But everything
has changed, 100 percent, and for the better. And now is the critical time to take
advantage of those changes.
The old ladder metaphor has shifted. Theres no longer a ladder. Its more like
an amusement park. And we are all invited to play in it. Theres more opportunity for abundance than ever. This is the new paradigm of this century, a century
where ideas take precedence over money in terms of creating abundance. These
are the new rules. And this book will show you they work in your favor, and how
you can succeed in this new economy.
A person who still follows the old way will get an education through graduate
school, get a great job, get the promotionsbut will at some point feel stuck, lost,
may even betrayed if he is fired or unhappy or if the world didnt turn out as he
had hoped it would, or if the ladder he imagined turned out to be missing a rung
and he fell down, broke a leg, and had to start from scratch, slightly more broken
than he was before.
A person who follows the new approach, with the new skills of abundance
that I outline in this book, will skip through the ladder. Hell realize that there is
no ladder anymore; theres just opportunity. Hell see that we live in a world of
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James Altucher
ideas and we can skip from one idea to another, each one building on the last,
each one creating the seeds of abundance that will grow into our lives.
But the only way to take advantage of that abundance is to learn the skills, the
habits, the hacks, the techniques, the tricks, the wonders of how to succeed and
accomplish in this new world of innovation and freedom. In Choose Yourself! I
describe the philosophy: if you dont make your own choices, someone else will
do it for youand it wont be pleasant. I describe how to build a Daily Practice
that will lead you into a world where you actually could make the choices for
yourself. But its not that easy. There are skills to learn. There are things to do now.
This book is about how to do themand how you can succeed in the new world.
So lets get started.
33
The Facts
h
L ets l o ok at some cha rts f i rst :
orget the top line in figure 1. Thats the richest 5 percent. Were all going to
be in that line if we follow the rules of abundance. Look at the next line,
and youll notice that the average income of the bottom 50 percent of the
country is basically flat. And these arent bad incomes. The second quintile makes
on average $82,000 a year. These incomes are realwhich in economist terms
means they are adjusted for inflation. Which is a BS term designed to fool people
into thinking things are better. First off, even inflation adjusted, things are not
better for 75 percent of people. They are just basically flat.
But what does the term inflation mean?
To be honest, I have no idea. Im not sure anyone really does. The formula the
government uses is very obscure, yet that is the number every economist uses.
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James Altucher
But I do know what inflation does not include. It doesnt include the price of a
home. So if home prices go up faster than inflation, then a salary will never let
you buy a home better than your parents home unless you borrow money. And
the banks will certainly lend out at rates higher than inflation. What if housing
doesnt go up faster than inflation? Well, they dont. The hundred-year return on
housing is 0.2 percent annually. Good luck trying to get rich off that (More on
that in a bit.)
Something else inflation doesnt take into account is another trap of the old
Both college and healthcare costs have risen faster than inflation while sala-
Its almost unbelievable when we put it all together. The three biggest expenses
in a persons lifehousing, college, and later on, healthcarehave all crushed the
average person with their rising costs. No wonder society as a whole is so disap35
But dont worry if youve already paid for an education. Or paid for a home.
Or are in great debt. Its simply important to have a clear windshield while we
drive forward in the rain. Its important to keep the above facts in mind as we
begin our in-depth dive into the new rules of abundance.
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The History of the E nd of the World
Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, etc.) When people ask me about current events,
they are sometimes shocked that I have no idea what they are talking about.
wanted to, I could cry all day. But I dont want to do that. I know the best thing I
can do is exactly what Im doing. We all have our ways of helping people. Most of
us wake up in the morning and wish we could do our best and be honest and try
to make the world a better place.
book Choose Yourself! (and later in this book), then it wont just be me who reaps
benefits, but also everyone else.
When Choose Yourself! first came out, someone close to my wife said, I
refuse to read it. The title sounds selfish. My wife started to respond and then
thought better of it. Why bother? She knew she wasnt going to change his mind.
And the guy was just saying this to provoke a response. Often someone who is
trying to provoke an argument is really engaging in what I call status junkfood binging. For evolutionary reasons we all try to find out where we belong
on the status hierarchy. Thats how weve survived as mammals for millions of
years. Thats one of the key ingredients that separate a mammal from a reptile. A
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James Altucher
reptile gets born and then hops on his way. He already knows how to take care
of himself and he gets down to business. He doesnt really care about status. He
cares about survival.
Mammals care about survival, too, but they know their chances of surviv-
ing increase if they travel in a pack, a herd, a tribe, a city, a state, a kingdom,
an empire, or whatever you want to call it. And inside the tribe, each mammal
figures out where it is in line for food and for mates. This is neither good nor bad.
Its not like any ape says, I wish I were higher in the status hierarchy.
Im not saying that you should be a lower-status ape. This is just a fact of our
having been mammals for millions of years: your brain is going to spend a lot
of time figuring where you are in the hierarchy. Then its going to govern your
behavior, often without your conscious permission, based on where it concludes
you belong. The only way a mammal can choose itself is by fighting a mammal
above it in the hierarchy and winning, even if this means maiming or killing.
So when you see a human trying to pick a fight, its really just a primitive form
of this status clinging. They The person feels that their status is not high enough,
so they will attempt to control things by picking what they view as an easy fight.
So you can fight and I can ignorebecause humans, unlike any other species,
can choose. We get to pick the hierarchy in which we want to find status. No other
species gets to make this choice.
Everyone who lives according to the old way has doubtlessly noticed this: you
work at a company and a job opens up , and there is a ferocious fight to see who
is going to get promoted internally to fill that position. It involves maybe a tiny
increase in salary and almost always a huge increase in workbut people will kill
for that move up in status.
And then lets say you leave that workplace, and you are suddenly very con-
fused: why was I ever trying to get that job? Look at how much bigger the world
is now. Look at how much sunnier everything seems.
I ask people for testimonials and stories about how Choose Yourself! helped
them. I get e-mails, phone calls, even people stopping me on the street to tell me
37
how they quit their jobs and it took a few weeks/months/year but now things are
better than ever. And it all happens when they start doing the Daily Practice Im
about to summarize for you.
We get to choose the sandbox we want to play in. We get to choose the hierar-
chy where we are going to fight for improvement. How come? Because our brains
are bigger than those of reptiles. Thats it.
We developed a prefrontal cortex for this exact reason. Well, almost. It was
really evolved so we could travel. We were nomadic and we were growing and
soon East Africa was no longer big enough for our species. So we went to Europe.
We crossed over Asia. We even crossed a massive body of water to get to Australia. We went to cold areas, hot areas, jungles, deserts, etc. and had to learn how to
adapt and survive. Our brains evolved to handle this immense adaptation.
And now we can use it our brains to adapt to different social hierarchies. We
The history of the world, in the traditional sense, is over. Im not saying this
to promote fearmongering, but just throw out the history textbooks for a second.
You may well have heard the phrase history is written by the winners. The only
problem is, what if the authors of history are about to become losers? They will
have no idea! They wrote all the history books!
So in a thousand words or so, Im going to give you the history of the last
hundred years, and you can start to see what is about to happen.
I can start with any point in history, really, but I will start a century ago to the
day that Im writing this chapter: June 28, 1914, and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that kicked off World War I. And a relatively minor country on
the other side of the Atlantic that had pretty much kept to itself until now became
the only superpower left in the world: the United States. Everyone was in debt
to us and we now had the largest navy for the first time. If you control the water,
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James Altucher
tions, which in turn brought down the European economy and led to the rise
of Nazism throughout Germany. The European economy spread to the United
States, causing the Great Depression. The Depression and general worldwide economic collapse led to World War II.
BOOM!
Guess what happened that then changed everything for the next seventy
years, ultimately leading to total economic collapse in the United States? Little
boys put on helmets and got real guns and left the country in order to shoot other
little boys.
And while the little boys played, women went to work. When the men got
back, the women, quite correctly, didnt want to go home. They liked working and
making money! So we got the first taste of the double-income family. They had
more money and they wanted to spend it.
Lets buy a house and a fence. Lets buy two cars. Lets buy a TV! And a phone.
And a pool if we want! It felt good to spend money. It made us happy to buy a new
toy. The toys have pretty much remained the same. They just got bigger and better
and faster and, in some cases, more expensive. But then the happiness wears off
after a while: you have to buy a new toy. And a new one.
The 1960s started a new stock market boom but it wasnt enough. Lyndon
Johnson pumped the economy full of dollars with his Great Society program
and he also increased spending on defense (or, really, offensive spending) when
we went to Vietnam. But then we needed more money to afford that. So Nixon
took us off the gold standard, so the dollar could wander off where it will.
Heres what happens when inflation occurs. Its not a bad thing at first.
Nobody really knows its inflation. The first thing you notice is that you have more
money. Inflation makes you feel flush at first.
39
So suddenly everyone felt flush until prices started to rise too quickly in the
1970s. Then we felt sick againwhich meant that we needed more money to pay
for the price increases.
Enter the 80s junk bond boom. Creative ways were found to basically create
money out of nothing. And this fueled a stock market boom. We had more money!
When this started to slow down (stock market crash, people going to jail,
But then recession again in 199394. Hmmm What could we do now? In-
ternet stock market boom. Suddenly, everything would cost nothing (since its
all digital!) and there were no taxes on Internet sales. So Wall Street took every
company public, creating enormous paper wealth. The Federal Reserve helped
out by pretending to be nervous about Y2K and printing an enormous amount
of money to keep things going, which led to a housing boom. Then Wall Street
joined in by coming up with creative ways to bundle the housing loans to create
more paper wealth for everyone.
was looking out for their own interests: the spenders on Main Street, the government, Wall Street, and all the bureaucrats, lobbyists, bloated corporations, media,
and everybody in between. It all collapsed for about a five-month period, until
the US government once again printed up trillions of dollars to stabilize things.
And thats the end.
This is the final bubble. The US government now has to keep printing money
to keep things stable. Maybe when the economy booms again they can hold off
but that might be a while.
This is why we cant rely on anything to bail us out anymore. Theres nothing
left, unless youre getting a direct check from the government, the bailer of last
resort. I see it from my vantage point. Im invested in about thirty companies.
And Im on the boards of several others, including a billion-revenues company
in the employment sector. Basically, peoples salaries are going down versus inflation, versus healthcare costs, versus housing costs, versus everything. A salary
will not keep your family afloat. Two salaries wont even keep your family afloat.
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James Altucher
You have to master the rules taught in this book. You have to learn how to live in
the new economy.
There is no single style of business that works for everyone. If it were that
easy, then there would be too much competition and there will be no money left.
I do know that when I began living by the idea matrix principles of abundance outlined in these pages, they worked for me and they began working for the people
I described them to. Some people quit their jobs and are now making a steadily
rising income doing that they love. And others got wealthy.
True wealth occurs when you dont have to bow down to any gatekeepers
regardless of the money involved. Money is just a by-product. You are out of
prison. You are free.
Well, one reason is that I enjoy writing. Another is that I want to help people
because I get so many e-mails from people in despair. And another part is that
I think we all benefit when one of us benefits. Not everyone will read this book.
And initially, only a few who are on the various lists Ive shared this book with.
The more people who choose themselves, the more people we can all do business
with, the more people will focus on the actual problems in society instead of the
fictional ones the news proposes every news cycle, every twenty-four hours.
If you choose to follow the new ideas presented here, you will gradually make
more and more money and help more and more people. Ive seen it happen for
myself and for others.
Dont plagiarize the lives of your parents, your peers, your teachers, your col-
leagues, and your bosses. Be the criminal of their rules. Create your own life.
I wish I were you because if you follow the above, then you will most likely
end up doing what you love and getting massively rich while helping many others.
I didnt do that when I was twenty. But now, at forty-six, Im really grateful I have
the chance every day to wake up and improve one percent.
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41
Are O u t of Date
erhaps you found this book in the personal finance section of a store or
website. The phrase personal finance was never a thing before 1970, give
or take a few years. Heres what people expectedand in many cases at that time,
they were correct.
Get promotions. Watch the stock market go up. Watch the value of your
house go up. Now you are a VP (or even higher!). Then, retire at sixty-five with
enough money saved, combined with Social Security, to take you well into your
eighties, where you can die in peace.
Of course, there could be some blips along the way. Maybe you get divorced.
Maybe you get fired or get hired by a new firm. But the blips were not incredibly
drastic. Lets call this timeline the Ladder of success.
Never before in the 2 million years of humanitys history was there a ladder of
success. But after the postWorld War II boom of prosperity in the United States
we now had many decisions to make:
How do I manage assets for tax purposes (and if needed, divorce purposes)?
How do I save for retirement (that period between the Rolex watch party
and a grave being dug for you by your closest loved ones).
How to set reasonable goals for different ages so you know you are on the
right track.
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James Altucher
How to best fit into the cog of the enormous productivity machine that
America was becoming so you can aspire to take advantage of the many opportunities.
How to protect your assets (estate planning) so that your kids and their kids
have a decent chance at continuing any legacy you might leave.
When is it good to go into debt? And once in debt, what is a good debt reduction plan?
Whats the role of inflation and how do you protect yourself against it so that
it doesnt eat into savings?
How to define how much risk you can take, given your age, your income,
your assets, and given that you have a certain level of allowed risk, how to
take advantage of that risk to maybe invest differently based on the statistics
accumulated over a relatively short period of human history.
Entire industries were set up to answer each one of these questions. In fact,
I would go so far as to say that every single one of these questions is still being
addressed by multibillion-dollar industriesin some cases, even multitrilliondollar industries. And these industries sometimes make mistakes (the 2008 financial meltdown, the 2000 IPO bubble, the Asian crisis of 1997, the savings and
loan corruption of the late 80s and early 90s, and so on).
In some cases, these industries have been very successful. I am not going
to call out any names. But many people made tens of millions of dollars writing
books, having TV shows, creating software, giving advice, and creating companies that have attempted to answer the above questions and focused on one question or other.
43
As noted, the phrase personal finance didnt exist before 1970. Nor will that
phrase have any meaning in the near future. The world has already changed, but
momentum has kept the personal finance industries alive and media outlets from
TV networks to book publishers have kept alive the myth that you need this help
in order to make the best decisions for your life. The reason I separated the points
above is that every item involves a fee.
For instance, there is a cost if you go to college. When you buy a house, there
is a cost. When you decide to stay in a job for a long time, there is a cost. When
you make financial decisions with a bank, and then a financial planner, and then
a mutual fund, there are costs and fees at every level.
Its common sense that there is, and should be, a cost for all of these things.
And in many cases, you get benefits for that cost. Thats why people pay. But now
the benefits are getting fewer and fewer, and even turning from benefits into
drawbacks. But many peoplemillions, evendont want to hear about this.
They think and want to think that the same rules still apply, and so they squeeze
tight their prison door so nobody from outside can open it, even though there are
no locks.
When I write about these topics its not like people just ignore me. The
idea that the economy has completely changed and that the old way wont work
anymore actually gets people angry. Ive had many death threats. Ive had many
people who cant handle the changes that have happened write me and tell me I
dont know what Im talking about.
But why do people get so angry? If they disagree with mewhich they clearly
Again, with each aspect of personal finance (and Im going to keep putting
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to protect us from the wildkeep us on the narrow path that has been deemed
safe for various reasons. Some of those reasons are genetic. Some of them are due
to the habits youve developed during your life. Some of them come from the
company you keep (your tribe), and some of them come from people whom
you admire.
called cortisol shoots all over your brain. This is the same chemical that would
get you to run as fast as you could a million years ago if you saw a lion. Of course,
there are no lions chasing you in the streets anymorebut your brain doesnt
know that,
Todays version of the lion sighting might be someone telling you that you
made a decision at too great a cost to you. Then your investment bias kicks in and
your brain freaks out. No! Run!
This is why this book is not for everyone. If you tell someone they made
a mistake in buying a house, even now, seven years after the housing bubble
burst, they might go crazy. If you tell someone that college might not be the
best use of four years of their life and $100,000 of their money at such a young
age, they might go insane thinking about what you are suggestingespecially
if theyve already invested the time and money and need to push away any feelings of regret.
If you tell someone that getting a job and a salary might not be the best
way to make money, in fact it might be the best way to go broke, this doesnt
even compute. The investment bias is too large. This is my entire life youre
talking about!
This is also why I ask that you not give this book to anyone. Just put it aside.
Maybe later you can take it out while you are in the bathroom and open up to one
of the middle chapters and see what you think. If you dont like what you read,
you can use it as toilet paper.
The key point to remember: every level of personal finance has a fee, or cost.
45
Those costs add up to millions of dollars over the course of a lifetime, sometimes
over the course of just a few years. They are so greatand spread over so many
households in our economythat they are often the difference between wealth
and insolvency. The net societal result is an increase in inflation, which continues
the vicious cycle of personal finance all over again.
This is why its time to get out of that cycle. Its time to embrace and being
Throughout this book, I talk about abundance, which often means money.
And for the most part in this book you can assume it means money.
But consider as well that abundance means gratitude. You cant be grateful for
things you dont have an abundance of. Im abundant in children so Im grateful.
Im abundant in friends so Im grateful. When Im stuck in traffic, Im abundant in
time where I can sit and listen to music and think and daydream. Im also grateful
I live in an area that so many people want to live in.
Abundance means many things. This book explains how I try to create abun-
dance in every area of my life. Money is just a side effect of real abundance. Sometimes I fail miserably at creating money. But as long as my abundance continues
to grow, all of the side effects of abundance will.
know youve heard this before, but its important to emphasize it again: the only
way to have success is to build the foundation for it.
Ive failed so many times its almost like Im a one-man statistical experiment
on failure. So I finally took a step back and asked, what was I doing right on the
way up, and what was I doing wrong on the way down?
One time I made a lot of money and I thought, OK, now Im done. I dont
James Altucher
need to do all the right things anymore. Two years later I was dead broke.
If you start hanging around with people who dont love and support you, then
youll die. If you dont take care of your body, then youll die. If you dont exercise
your idea muscle (a major topic of this book), then youll die. If you complain
instead of feel gratitude for the bounty in your life, then youll waste your life (I
dont say youll die here, but you will live a miserable life).
My only three goals in life are
1. To be happy.
2. To eradicate unhappiness in my life.
3. For every day to be as smooth as possible. No hassles.
Thats it. Im not asking for much. I need simple goals, or else I cant
achieve them.
There have been at least ten times in my life that everything seemed so low
I felt like I would never achieve the above three things and the world would be
better off without me. Other times I felt like I was stuck at a crossroads and would
never figure out which road to take. Each time I bounced back.
The Daily Practice is to take care of these four areas of your life every single
day without fail. It doesnt mean you have to go crazy with them, just a tiny bit:
aim for a one percent improvement a day.
how do you ever expect to get there if you dont start taking care of your basic
needs? The old way is to concern yourself solely with making money. The new
way requires that you see how everything in your life is connected, including the
physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
47
P h ysi ca l
Sleep well.
Eat well.
Exercise. This doesnt mean go to the power gym with a trainer. It might just
mean take a walk three times a week. Whatever works for you.
E moti ona l
Be around people who love and support you and whom you love and
support.
Ignore everyone else as much as you can. Engage with nobody who is bad to you.
When you get in the mud with a pig, the pig gets happy and you get dirty.
Menta l
I discuss this more in the chapter on becoming an Idea Machine. But basically, the idea muscle atrophies if you dont use it every day. Every single day
write down ten ideas.
Spi ri tua l
1. Repeat to yourself, I notice Im feeling anxious. This distances you from the
feeling of Im anxious!
2. Think of at least one new thing you are grateful for.
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James Altucher
ithin about one month of beginning the practice, I started to notice coincidences happening. I started to feel lucky. People were smiling at me more.
Within three months, the ideas had really started flowing, to the point where
Within six months, good ideas had started flowing. Id begin executing them,
Within a year my life was always (and it still is) completely different100
percent upside down from the year before. More money, more luck, more health,
etc. And then Id get lazy and stop doing the practice. And everything would fall
apart again. But now Im trying to do it every day.
Its hard to do all of this every day. Nobody is perfect. I dont know if Ill do all
Nobody knows how long it takes to develop a new habit. Some research says
Do this Daily Practice every day for six months, even just a tiny bit, and I
49
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James Altucher
Part 1
NEW GAME,
NEW RULES
h
51
ou know by now that this book is about the new rules for abundance,
and how to create it in your life. One question people ask me is, what if
everyone does this?
My answer: dont worry about anybody else. As the title says, Choose Yourself!
And if you are having trouble identifying your passion? Well, its a big world.
Why limit yourself to a single passion? Heres a secret: you dont have to worry
about finding your passion. Youre naturally going to get passionate about what
you are good at.
The first time I made a dollar on my own, I became passionate about deliver-
ing newspapers. If you want to break out of a rut, out of the cubicle slavery, and
youre working on your idea muscle and the other aspects of the Daily Practice,
then you can really go in any direction. But let me give you one starting idea to
get your juices flowing.
Start whats called an information product. There are a few billion people
on the Internet and they all have credit cards (or PayPal, thank you, Peter). Remember this phrase: Get Paid, Get Laid, Lose Weightbecause those are the
three things people will pay for. I have paid for all three of those items at various
points in my life in some form or other. Even though I dont need to lose weight I
just bought something in that category ten minutes ago. I went to Dave Aspreys
Bulletproof Coffee site and bought his ingredients for a coffee that can help metabolism, improve brainpower, etc. I had read his book, scheduled him for my
podcast, and already tried some of the basic ideas he mentioned and found for
myself that they worked.
52
For the past twenty years Ive been buying financial newsletters. Some decent,
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some great, some not so great. But I was looking for a way to Get Paid. I know
people who make seven-figure incomes selling newsletters or webinars or other
digital products in each of those categories.
Mon op oly. If you have your own twist on an idea, then youve just created a niche and can dominate it before you build into other markets.
There are almost no costs to adding a new customer. Marketing is your main
cost, but once you develop a good product you slowly build up by doing what is
called A/B testing. You can use the chapter How to Persuade Anyone of Anything in Ten Seconds to come up with ideas for ads.
Test ads out on Facebook to see if people click and buy. You can buy ads
super cheap. And you can use not only Facebook, but any ad network. The best
networks for advertising change all the time, which makes it easy to find out what
works for you. Then, when something works, scale it up. If nothing works, start
from scratch until you find something that works. See books like Breakthrough
Advertising, The Architecture of Persuasion, and Kevin Harringtons (from AsSeenOnTV and Shark Tank) book Act Now, where he discusses the power of testimonials and infomercials.
I had one friend a few years ago who lost his job as a TV show anchor. He
was depressed and verging on broke. He moved to his hometown and went into
virtual isolation. He finally wrote an article about stocks he thought would go up
in the new economy. I told him, Youre crazy. Dont make this a free article. Sell it
for two hundred dollars and call it, One Hundred Stocks That Will Go Up 1000
percent. He did it and sold two thousand copies and then bought a fifty-acre farm
and wrote his next ten books and newsletters.
53
Im not insinuating that free is bad. In fact you want to write for free as much
as possible and for as many sites as possible to build up your brand. But this
friend already had a great brand (he had his own TV show!) and was ready to
make some money. And guess what? He was right. Most of the stocks did go up
1000 percent.
Come up with ten ideas you can write newsletters about. They dont have to
The old way of doing things is to not try. To think that the best course of
action is to climb the corporate ladder and hope, hope, and hope that the ladder is
not crooked or broken or that there isnt someone at the top thats about to throw
the ladder off the building. The new way of doing things, the red pill, is to jump
into the abyss. To try and fail and cry and wail until finally you say, I cant do this
one more time. I just cant. Please dont make me.
But you do it anyway. And that one last time, you chose yourself
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Why You Have to Q uit Your Job
This Year
wrong, of course: I had sent a product to the client without debugging it thor54
James Altucher
oughly. It was my fault. But I dont like being yelled at. And fortunately I was
sitting on a job offer that I decided to take that moment. So the next day I walked
in and said the magic words: I quit. And then a few years after that, I quit again,
and never went back to work in the corporate world.
Im going to tell you why you have to quit your job. Why you need to get the
ideas moving. Why you need to build a foundation for your life or soon you will
have no roof.
few weeks ago I visited a friend of mine who manages a trillion dollars.
No joke. A trillion. If I told you the name of the family he worked for you
would say, They have a trillion? Really? But thats what happens when $10
million compounds at 2 percent over two hundred years.
He said, Look out the windows. We looked out at all the office buildings
I dont know.
Theyre empty! All the cubicles are empty. The middle class is being hol-
lowed out. And I took a closer look. Entire floors were dark. Or there were floors
with one or two cubicles occupied, but the rest empty. Its all outsourced, or
technology has taken over for the paper shufflers, he explained.
Not all the news is bad, he said. More people than ever entered the upper
class last year. But, he said, more people are temp staffers than ever.
And thats the new paradigm. The middle class has died. The American
Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam. The biggest provider of
mortgages for the past fifty years, Fannie Mae, had as their slogan, We make the
American Dream come true. It was just a marketing slogan all along. How many
times have I cried because of a marketing slogan?
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echnology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficienciesthese have all replaced the middle class.
Most jobs that existed twenty years ago arent needed now. Maybe they never
were needed. The entire first decade of this century was spent with CEOs in their
Park Avenue clubs crying through their cigars, How are we going to fire all this
dead weight? The year 2008 finally gave them the chance. It was the economy!
they said. The country has been out of a recession since 2009, or for almost six
years now. But the jobs have not come back. I asked many of these CEOS, Did
you just use that as an excuse to fire people? And they would wink and say, Lets
just leave it at that.
enues. I can see it happening across every sector of the economy. Everyone is
getting fired. Robots are the new middle class.
But before I could begin giving any sort of advice, he started complaining to
me: Our top writers keep putting their Twitter names in their posts, and then
when they get more followers they start asking for raises.
Whats the problem with that? I asked. Dont you want popular and well-
respected writers?
individual star. In other words, his main job was to destroy the career aspirations
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of his most talented people, the people who swore their loyalty to him, the people
who worked ninety hours a week for him. If they only worked thirty hours a week
and were slightly more mediocre he wouldve been happy. But he wants to them
stay in the hole, and will throw them a meal every once in a while in exchange
for their excrement. If anyone is a reporter out there and wants to e-mail me privately, I will tell you who it was. But basically, its all of your bosses. Every single
one of them.
common question that I get asked at least once a week during my Twitter
Q&A (every Thursday from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. EST) is should I take the job
I like or should I take the job that pays more money? Leaving aside the question
of should I take a job at all, lets talk about money for a second.
First, the science: studies show that an increase in salary only offers marginal
In other words, dont stay at the job for safe salary increases over time. That
will never get you where you wantfreedom from financial worry. Only free
time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver
value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of humankind.
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dont like it when one person can make or break me. A boss. A publisher. A TV
producer. A buyer of my company. At any one point Ive had to kiss ass to all of
The way to avoid this is to diversify the things you are working on so no
one person or customer or boss or client can make a decision that could make
you rich or destroy you or crush or even fulfill your lifes dreams. I understand it
cant happen in a day. But you can start planning now to create your own destiny
instead of allowing people who dont like you to control your destiny. When you
do this count, make sure the number comes to over twenty. Then when you spin
the wheel the odds are on your side that a winning number comes up.
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Your Job P robably Isnt Satisfying
Your Needs
will define needs the way I always do, via the four legs of what I call the Daily
Practice. Are your physical needs, your emotional needs, your mental needs,
and your spiritual needs being satisfied? The only time Ive had a job that met all
of these needs was when I had to do little work so that I had time on the side to
either write, or start a business, or have fun, or spend time with friends. There
were plenty of other times when I was working too hard, dealing with people I
didnt like, getting my creativity crushed over and over, and so on. When you are
in those situations, you need to plot out your exit strategy.
Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax ma-
chines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. One hundred
years from now your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make
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wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.
Someone might argue, Not everyone is entitled to have all of those needs
satisfied at a job. Thats true. But since we already know that the salary of a job
wont make you happy, you can easily modify lifestyle and work to at least satisfy
more of your needs. And the more you can fulfill these needs, the more you will
create the conditions for true abundance to come into your life.
Your life is a house. Abundance is the roof. But the foundation and the
plumbing need to be in there first or the roof will fall down and the house will be
unlivable. You create the foundation by following the Daily Practice. I say this not
because I am selling anything but because it worked for me every time my roof
caved in. My house has been bombed, my home has been cold, and blistering
winds gave me frostbite, but I managed to rebuild. And that is how I did it.
dont care how much you set aside for your 401(k). Its over. The whole myth of
savings is gone. Inflation will carve out the bulk of your 401(k). And in order to
cash in on that retirement plan you have to live for a really long time doing stuff
you dont like to do. And then suddenly youre eighty and youre living a reduced
lifestyle in a cave and can barely keep warm at night.
form or a lifestyle that allows you to put big chunks of money away. Some people
can say, Well, Im just not an entrepreneur.
This is not true. Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an
entrepreneur are an ability to fail, an ability to have ideas and to sell those ideas,
the courage to execute on those ideas, and to be persistent so even as you fail you
learn and move on to the next adventure.
report to, what you do, and what you create. Dont just do whats listed in your job
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description. Thats the old way. Go beyond that. Or start a business on the side.
Deliver some value, any value, to somebody, to anybody, and watch that value
compound into a career.
Your other choice is to stay at a job where the boss is trying to keep you
down, will eventually replace you, will pay you only enough for you to survive,
will rotate between compliments and insults so you stay like a fish caught on the
bait as he reels you in. You and I have the same twenty-four hours each day. Is that
how you will spend yours?
I can already hear the excuses, because Ive heard them all before. Im too
I said, Hey! Im doing well. But I had no idea who I was talking to. Why
would this woman be talking to me? I was too ugly. It took me a few minutes of
fake conversation to figure out who she was.
It turns out she was the frumpish-looking woman who had been fired six
months earlier from the job we were at. She had cried as she packed up her
cubicle. At the time she was out of shape, she looked about thirty years older than
she was, and now her life was going to go from better to worse. Until . . . she realized that she was out of the zoo.
What are you doing now? I asked her. Oh, you know, she said. Consult-
ing. Some people say, I cant just go out there and consult. What does that even
mean?
And to that I answer, OK, I agree with you. Who am I to argue? If someone
insists they need to be in prison even though the door is unlocked, then I am not
going to argue. They are free to stay in prison.
I cant just quit! people say. I have bills to pay. But its okay to take some
baby steps.
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I get it. Nobody is saying quit today. Before a human being runs a marathon
James Altucher
he or she learns to crawl, then take baby steps, then walk, then run. Then exercise
every day and stay healthy. Then run a marathon. ( I might know what I am even
talking about, since I cant run more than two miles without collapsing in agony.)
But I do know that if you make the list right now, every dream, you can start to
take those steps. I want to be a best-selling author. I want to reduce my material
needs. I want to have freedom from many of the worries that I have succumbed
to all my life. I want to be healthy. I want to help all of the people around me or
the people who come into my life. I want everything I do to be a source of help
to people. I want to only be around people I love, people who love me. I want to
have time for myself.
These are not goals. These are themes. What do I need to do to practice those
themes every day? It starts the moment I wake up. I ask, Who can I help today?
I ask the darkness when I open my eyes. Who would you have me help today?
Im a secret agent and Im waiting for my mission. This is how you take baby steps.
This is how eventually you run toward freedom.
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Abu nda nc e Wi l l Nev e r C o me fro m Your Job
nly stepping out of the prison imposed on you from your factory will allow
you to achieve abundance. You cant see it now. Its hard to see the gardens
when you are locked in jail. Abundance only comes when you are moving along
your themeswhen you are truly enhancing the lives of the people around you.
It happens when you wake up every day with that motive of enhancement.
Enhance your family, your friends, your colleagues, your clients, potential customers, readers, people who you dont even know yet but you would like to know.
Become a beacon of enhancement and then, when the night is gray, all of the
boats will move toward you, bringing their bountiful riches.
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Be an Idea M achine
he way to have good ideas is to get close to killing yourself. Its like
weightlifting. When you lift slightly more than you can handle, you get
stronger. Then you add more to that, and more to that, until the muscle
keeps getting stronger. Your idea muscle works the same way. If youre broke and
close to death, you have to start coming up with ideas. If you destroy your life, you
need to come up with ideas to rebuild it.
The only time Ive been forced to have good ideas is when I was up against
the wall. My life insurance policy was like a gun to my head: Come up with good
ideas . . . or else your kids get your life insurance! Or at an airport when I realized a business I had been working on for four years was worthless. Or when I was
getting a divorce and I was lonely and afraid I wouldnt make any money again, or
I wouldnt meet anyone again.
The problem is that were not in a state of panic most of the time. States of
panic are special and have to be revered. Think about the times in your life that
you rememberits exactly those moments when you hit bottom and were forced
to come up with ideas, to get stronger, to connect with some inner force inside
you with the outer force.
This is why its important now to strengthen that connection to that idea
force inside of you. This chapter is about how. Nothing you ever thought of before
amounted to anythingthats why you are exactly where you are at that moment
of hitting bottom. Because all of the billions of thoughts youve had led you to
right there. You cant trust the old style of thinking anymore. You have to come up
with a new way of thinking. A new way of having ideas. A new way of interacting
with the outside universe.
My life has changed 100 percent for the better every six months since I started
following the Idea Machine practice. Its moved me to the upper right quadrant
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of the Idea Matrix (see the Introduction). Its flooded me with ideas. Its made me
money. Its changed my life.
People know what a second wind is. Its when you are running for a long
time, at the point of exhaustion. At that moment, something kicks in and gives
you a second boost of energy. Four hundred thousand years ago people didnt
jog for exercise. They didnt even have jogging shorts or sneakers. Four hundred
thousand years ago people needed to eat and live. And either they were running
to catch prey or they were running from a lion. In both cases they needed that
second wind, or else, they died.
The same thing happens in the brain today that happened 400,000 years ago.
When you are about to die, a second wind kicks in. Ideas, experiences, opportunity, and probably hidden forces and neurochemicals we dont understand. But
you cant get a second wind unless youre already in good shape. Its not possible
unless you are already able to run long distances. This is why its important to
exercise the idea muscle right now. If your idea muscle atrophies, then you wont
have any ideas. How long does it take this muscle to atrophy? The same as any
other muscle in your body: just two weeks without having any ideas. Just as, if you
lie down in a bed for two weeks and dont move your legs, you will need physical
therapy to walk again.
Many people need idea therapy. Not so that they can come up with great
ideas right this second (although maybe you will) but so that they can come
up with ideas when they need them: when their car is stuck, when their house
blows up, when they are fired from their job, when their spouse betrays them,
when they go bankrupt or lose a big customer, or lose a client, or go out of business, or get sick.
Ideas are the currency of life. Not moneybecause money can run out. Money
gets depleted until you go broke. But good ideas buy you good experiences, buy
you better ideas, buy you better experiences, buy you more time, save your life.
Financial wealth is a side effect of the runners high of your idea muscle. Ive
often written about the idea muscle as part of what I call my Daily Practice. Every
day I have to check the box on physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.
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And I get a lot of questions about it so I will try and answer them here. Sometimes people ask, Did you only start coming up with ideas because you already
had it made?
Answer: I was on the floor crying because I was dead broke and dead lonely
Justice League of America. You will have a ton of ideas for every situation you are
in. Any question you are asked, you will know the response. You will take every
meeting you attend so far out of the box that youll be on another planet. If you
are stuck on a desert highway, you will figure the way out.
After I started exercising the idea muscle, it was like a magic power had
been unleashed inside of me. Its OK if you dont believe me. There are many
times when I dont have ideas. But thats when I stop practicing what I am about
to advocate.
Try it for yourself. Its like a part of your brain has opened up and a constant
flow of stuff, both good and bad, gets dropped in there. From where? I dont think
about it and I dont care. Because I use it and it works for me.
The year 2009 was one of those times when I desperately needed to do this. I
spent all of my time either trying to find a girlfriend or trying to start a business
or both. I was also going broke in the stock market and losing my home.
Every night, Id have waffles for dinner and a bottle of wine and start writing
ideas down. This is before I went paleo (no waffles allowed!) and stopped drinking alcohol (five years sober!) and I was writing ten to twenty of the most ludicrous ideas a day down. And you know what? It worked.
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Take a waiters pad. Go to a local caf. Maybe read an inspirational book for
ten to twenty minutes. Then start writing down ideas. What ideas? Hold on a
second. The key here is, write ten ideas.
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Why a Waiters Pad?
A waiters pad fits in your pocket so you can easily pull it out to jot things
down. Its too small to write a whole novel or even a paragraph. In fact, its specifically designed to help you make a list. And thats all you want, a list of ideas.
A waiters pad is a great conversation starter if you are in a meeting. Someone at
the meeting will inevitably say, Ill take fries with my burger, and everyone will
laugh. You broke the ice and you stand out.
Waiters pads are cheap. You can get about a hundred for ten dollars. This shows
you are frugal and dont need those fancy moleskin pads to have a good idea.
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Why Ten Ideas?
If I say, write down ten ideas for books you can write, I bet you can easily
write down four or five. I can write down four or five right now. But at six it starts
to get hard. Hmmm, you think, what else can I come up with? This is when
the brain is sweating. Its like when you exercise in the gym and your muscles
dont start to build until you break a sweat. Your metabolism doesnt improve
when you run until you sweat. Your body doesnt break down the old and build
the new until it is sweating. The poisons and toxins in your body dont leave until
you sweat. The same thing happens with the idea muscle. Somewhere around idea
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number six, your brain starts to sweat. This means its building up. Break through
this. Come up with ten ideas.
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What if I Just C ant C ome Up
With Ten Ideas?
You are putting too much pressure on yourself. Perfectionism is the enemy of
the idea muscle. Perfectionism is your brain trying to protect you from harm
from coming up with an idea that is embarrassing and stupid and could cause you
to suffer pain.
You actually have to shut the brain off to come up with ideas. And the way to
do this is by forcing it to come up with bad ideas. So lets say youve written five
ideas for books and they are all pretty good. And now you are stuck. How can I
top this brilliant list of five?
Well, lets come up with some bad ideas. Heres one: Dorothy and the Wizard
of Wall Street. Dorothy is in a hurricane in Kansas and she lands right at the
corner of Broadway and Wall Street in NYC and she has to make her way all the
way down Wall Street in order to find The Wizard of Wall Street (Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs) in order to get home to Kansas. Instead, he offers
her a job to be a high-frequency trader instead.
What a bad idea! OK, now go on to the next fifteen ideas. (And if anyone
wants to buy the movie rights to The Wizard of Wall Street, please contact Claudia
on Twitter @ClaudiaYoga.)
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How d o I Know If An Idea is a
G o od O ne?
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You wont. You dont. You cant. You shouldnt. Lets say you come up with
James Altucher
ten ideas a day. In a year you will come up with 3,650 ideas (no breaks on weekends, by the way, if you want to get good at this). Its unlikely that you came up
with 3,650 good ideas (after you become an Idea Machine your ratio goes up,
but probably in the beginning your ratio of bad ideas to good is around a thousand to one).
Dont put pressure on yourself to come up with good ideas. The key right now
is just to have ideas, period. When Tiger Woods is practicing he doesnt get disappointed in himself if he doesnt hit a hole in one every shot. Youre just practicing
here. Practice doesnt make perfect. But practice makes permanent. So that later
on when you do need good ideas to save your life, you know you will be a fountain of them. When theres a tidal wave of good ideas coming out of you, you only
need a cup of water out of that to quench your thirst.
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How D o I Execu te My Ideas?
Heres what I do often when I am writing down ideas that I think I might
want to act on: I divide my paper into two columns. In one column is the list of
ideas. In the other column is the list of First Stepsonly the first step, because
you have no idea where that first step will take you. Imagine you are driving one
hundred miles to your home late at night. You turn on your headlights so you can
see in front of you. All you can see is about thirty feet in front of you but you know
if you have the lights on the entire time, youll make it home safely, one hundred
miles away. Activating the Idea Machine is how you turn the lights on so you can
get home. But you dont need to do any more than that.
And he provides one of my favorite examples of taking a critical first step. Branson
didnt like the service on some airline he was flying. So he had an idea: Im going
to start a new airline. But how the heck can a magazine publisher start an airline
from scratch with no money?
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No idea is so big you cant take the first step. If the first step seems too hard,
make it simpler. And dont worry again if the idea is bad. This is all practice. So
Bransons first step was to call Boeing to see if they had an airplane he could lease.
(More on his next steps in a later chapter).
In 2006 I had ten ideas for websites I wanted to build. I knew how to program
but didnt want to. So my first step was to find a site like Elance and then put the
specs up and find programmers in India who could make the websites for me. I
paid one of them $2,000 to develop a site I sold for $10 million nine months later.
Nine of the ten ideas were bad. But you only need one good one.
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If I m C om i n g Up w i t h Bu si ne s s Ide as , How
D o I Kn ow i f Im on Th e R i ght Track?
started around 1996 but didnt make a dime of money until around 2001.
set up podcasts. Since I do a podcast now, this seems like a great idea to me. So
they raised a ton of money from professional venture capitalists. Then one of their
programmers started working on a side project. The side project got a little traction but not much.
But the CEO of Odeo decided to switch strategies and go full force into the
side project without having a clue if it would work. He felt bad, since this wasnt
what the investors had invested in. So he called up all of the investors and described the side project to them and all the traction they were getting, etc., and
then made an offer: Since this is a different direction, Id be willing to buy all of
your shares back so nobody will lose any money. One hundred percent of his
investors said, Yes! Give it back! and so he bought all of his investors shares
back. The side project was Twitterand now founder Ev Williams is a billionaire
as a result. Nobody knew. Nobody knows. You have to try multiple ideas and see
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which ones create excitement among customers and employees, and you can see
that people are legitimately using it and excited by it.
someone once wrote me and said, Please block me from the site. Im too addicted to it and its ruining my life. Thats when I had a sense that I had a halfway
decent idea. And that was one of ten ideas I was trying simultaneously. The rest
failed. So dont be afraid to test, fail, test, fail, try again, repeat, improve, test, fail
again, and keep improving. The way to keep improving is to keep coming up with
ideas for your business and for other new businesses.
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Speaking of Failing Q uicklyWhen D o I
Shu t D own an Idea?
In 2009, I started The Leading Love Site on the Net. It was going to be a dating
website where your Twitter feed was your profile. Everyone I spoke to said, Thats
a great idea! I had already raised money and was raising more. Then, on the day
I was going to close the fund-raising round I woke up shaking. I had this vision
of myself a year from now explaining to all of the investors why it wasnt going to
work. So I returned all the money. I was out the money I had spent to create the
website. I can guess why I realized it was a bad idea (people on dating sites want
to be anonymous, for instance), but I didnt really know at the time. I just had that
feeling that I had to return the money.
When your idea muscle is developed along with the other legs of the Daily
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How D o You Keep Track of Your Ideas?
I make a list of ideas and then I usually just throw it out. The whole purpose
is to exercise the idea muscle. I know most of the ideas are bad ideas, so theres
no sense keeping them around. If one of the ideas is good, then I will probably
remember it and build on it for the next day. Sometimes its kind of funny, when
I come across an old list of ideas, to see what I was thinking. Every now and then
I think I find a good idea in my old lists, but its rare. And then what do I do with
that rare good idea? Probably nothing.
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Are All of Your Ideas Business Ideas?
No. Its hard to come up with over 3,000 business ideas a year. Im lucky if I
come up with a few business ideas. The key is to have fun with it. Or else you dont
do it. People avoid things that are not fun.
IDEA SEX. Combine two ideas to come up with a better idea. Dont forget
that idea evolution works much faster than human evolution. You will always
come up with better ideas after generations of idea sex. This is the DNA of all
idea generation.
OLD TO NEW. Ten old ideas I can make new. (Dorothy on Wall Street, etc).
Its similar to idea sex, but with a twist.
Ten books I can write (Ex: The Choose Yourself Guide to an Alternative
Education, etc).
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Ten podcast ideas I can do, or videos I can shoot (Lunch with James, a video
podcast where I just have lunch with people over Skype and we chat).
Ten ways to make old posts of mine and make books out of them.
Ten ways I can surprise Claudia. (Actually, more like one hundredways.
Thats hard work!)
Ten items I can put on my ten list ideas I usually write list.
Ten people I want to be friends with and I figure out what the next steps
are to contact them (Azaelia Banks, Im coming after you! Larry Page better
watch out also.)
Ten ways I can save time. For instance, dont watch TV, drink, have stupid
business calls, dont play chess during the day, dont have dinner (I definitely will not starve), dont go into the city to meet one person at a time for
coffee, dont waste time being angry at that person who did X, Y, and Z to
you, and so on.
Ten things women totally dont know about men. (that turned into a list
of one hundred and Claudia said to me, Uh, I dont think you should
publish this).
Todays list: Ten more alternatives to college I can add to the book Im work71
Ten things Im interested in getting better at (and then ten ways I can get better at each one).
Ten things I was interested in as a kid that might be fun to explore now. (Like,
maybe I can write that Son of Dr. Strange comic Ive always been planning.
And now I need ten plot ideas).
Ten ways I might try to solve a problem I have. This has saved me with the
IRS countless times. Unfortunately, the Department of Motor Vehicles is impervious to my superpowers.
This is just a sample. Every day, come up with ten ideas. The other day I
thought of ten ways I can release more endorphins into my body. Today,
ten ways I can help people build their Idea Machine. Tomorrow is ten ways
I can turn my next book into a webinar for Oprah.
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Is The Idea Muscle The Most Imp ortant
Part of What You C all The Daily
P ractice?
No! They are all equal. Remember what I said about sitting on a stool with
four legs. If someone pulls away one of the legs you might still balance and the
stool stays up, but its tricky. If someone pulls two legs off, youre down for the
count.
and spiritually healthy. If you arent physically healthy you wont come up with
ideas. Youll be coughing and vomiting.
If you are around people who hate you, you wont come up with ideas. Because
they will be yelling at you while you are trying to think. And if you arent feeling
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grateful and calm in your life on a regular basis, then you will be anxious and it
will be harder to come up with ideas. So all four parts of the Daily Practice work
together to come up with great ideas.
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D o I R eally D o This Every Day?
Lets say you get tired for a day of writing ideas. Then just try something
different. The key is to keep activating parts of your brain that have atrophied.
Sometimes if I dont feel like writing down a list of ten ideas Ill do something
elsesay, draw ten eyes. Or make a collage. Or take photographs of the ten most
beautiful women I see today. Or the ten ugliest men (if I take picture of the ten
most handsome men, then I might get jealous and thats a whole other thing Id
have to deal with). Or I might go make ten prank calls (well, when I was a kid I
did that. I never do that now! Maybe).
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Is It Imp ortant To R ead Before Writing?
I dont know. But I do. At any given point I have about ten to twenty books on
my to go listbooks that I can just pop into and continue reading. Every day I
read at least 10 percent of a nonfiction book that gives me tons of new ideas and
similar portions of an inspirational book, a fiction book of high-quality writing,
and maybe a book on games (lately Ive been solving chess puzzles). And then I
start writing.
Right now the inspirational book is The Untethered Soul. The nonfiction book
is Antifragile. The fiction book is Blind Date (Kosinski), and the games book is
actually my chess app (Shreder), which has nonstop puzzles. But this list changes
almost every day.
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It takes at least six months of coming up with ideas every day before you are
an Idea Machine. Then your life will change every six months. I know Ive said
this before, but my life is completely different than it was six months ago, and six
months before that, and so on. So different there is no way I couldve predicted
the differences. Six months ago I had no podcast. Now its a big part of my day. Six
months before that, Choose Yourself! had not come out. Six months before that, I
had not yet accepted several board seats that have done well for me.
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D o I Give My Ideas Away For Free?
When you come up with ideas for someone else, always give all the ideas
away for free if you think they are good ideas (remember: six months). I read
recently about one person who recommended giving half of your ideas away for
free and making others pay for the other half. But this guarantees you will only
come up with bad ideas, because you will hoard your ideas. You will develop a
scarcity complex around your ideas.
Ideas are infinite. But once you define your capacity of good ideas (i.e.,
half ), then they instantly become finite for younot for anyone else.
If you operate according to an abundance mentality, and be grateful for the
ideas that are flowing through you, then they will be infiniteand they will keep
flowing. Where they come from, nobody knows.
So give ideas for free, and then when you meet others, give more ideas. And
if someone wants to pay you and your gut feels this is a good fit, then give even
more ideas.
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heres this cult of failure that has popped up recentlythis notion that you
This is not necessarily true. Failure really sucks. You dont want to fail. But
there is an easy way to solve this. Take the word fail out of your vocabulary.
ness, and we deal with other human beings. We improve. We have experiences.
This is magnificent and abundant success. Just even being able to try new things is
something to celebrate every day. To smile at another person. To play. Most things
I try to do dont work out as I planned. But who am I to predict the outcomes of
my preparation? My only job is to prepare.
stock analyst. But we can all be good at preparation. And once I prepare, I show
up at the starting line. Then the whistle blows, the race begins, I try my hardest
with the most amount of integrity, and the results are not up to me. Then I go
back and learn from the race, I prepare more, I love more, I celebrate more, and I
show up for the next race. The whistle blows, and eventually good things happen.
Preparation leads to faith in yourself.
Every moment, this moment while you are reading this, you get to choose
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Is It R eally Worth It To Bec ome
an Idea M ach ine?
I come up with ideas every day. I havent had a business since 2009and it
failed, as mentioned above. Since then Ive made more money than I know what
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to do with because I come up with ideas for people, for companies, for me, for
people who have no idea who I am, for random anonymous things.
I then get invited to share my ideas. Sometimes I get paid for them. Some-
times I give them for free. Sometimes I get more introductions to people and
sometimes I get a chance to advise companies that do well and make me money.
And sometimes I write books. When youre an Idea Machine, everything you
look at breaks down into a collection of ideas, just as physical objects would
ultimately breakdown into collections of particles if your eyes were subatomic
microscopes. Your eyes and brains become sub-idea microscopes that see the
ideas that become the building blocks for everything in society. See them, build
them, change them, seed them, birth them, love them, and live them. Ideas
are the dark matter of the universe. We know its there, but only those in the
know can see them.
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What D o I D o O nce I Bec ome an
Idea M achine?
This is what I dont know the answer to because you are the master of your
life. Now youre ready to take your unique place in the world. Now you have superpowers. You will know how to get to the Justice League satellite that orbits the
Earth and solves problems at a moments notice. You will know what to do. I dont
know. Nobody else knows. Youll do it and the world wont be the same.
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hances are, you are eventually going to want to try to sell one or some
or all of your ideas.
Ive never read a book on sales. They seemed corny to me. Like many
other people, I always looked down on the concept of selling. It seemed like
something lower than me. To some extent, selling appears manipulative. You have
a product, and you want to give potential buyers the perception that it has more
value than it truly does. So you need to manipulate people to buy it. This seems
sad, as in Death of a Salesman sort of sad. So I dismissed it. I was a sales snob.
But I was wrong. For the past twenty-five years all I have been doing is
sellingproducts, services, businesses, and myself. Sometimes I have been manipulative. And sometimes Ive sold things Ive had such passion for cheap just
because I wanted to get the message out about what I was selling. And often, it
was very much in the middle: I needed to sell something because I had to pay my
bills. Maybe I was a little desperate, a little hopeful, a little scared, and I wanted to
make sure my family got fed.
Our basic needs cost money. And as we get older, we become responsible
for others basic needs. We become adults. Adults sell for today. Professionals
sell for life.
These are the new rules of the economyand all of this is from my own
experience. That means they might not work for you, and that they might fly in
the face of basic rules of salesmanship. I have no idea. But its brought me such
abundance, I cant not share it.
Over the past twenty-five years Ive sold hundreds of millions of dollars of
stuff. That stuff being everything in Pandoras box that I had to sell just to stay
alive. When I think whats worked for me in the realm of sales, heres what I
come up with:
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Be A Friend
Nobody is going to buy from someone they hate. The buyer has to like you
This sounds sort of whorish and it is. The times when Ive hated myself the
most were the times when Ive prostituted myself to make money (this isnt as
sexual as it sounds but it might as well be).
One time when I was raising money for a particular venture, the buyer was
going through a business catastrophe and was worried he would go out of business. I didnt like him but I called him every day for three months at the same time
to see if he wanted to talk and to offer my advice on how he should deal with his
situation. I eventually raised a lot of money from him even though the first time
I met him he was honest with me and said, It seems like you dont know your
industry very well. Which just goes to show: friendship outweighs almost every
other factor in selling.
maker was involved with a school in Harlem for charity. I went up there for four
weeks in a row and played twenty kids simultaneously in chess. Everyone had fun.
I got the website job. My competitors were all bigger, better financed, and probably better. But I was the one who spent time with the people who mattered to the
person hiring. I was the one who showed that I cared.
I lost the business. The only good outcomes arise when both sides like each other.
At one point I was so sick of my new friendships I went to see a therapist and
uttered the clichd line, I dont even know who I am anymore because I hate all
my friends and all my friends are customers so Im their slave friend.
Now I only do business with people I like. The fastest way to lose all your
money and mutilate your heart is to work with people you dont like. I will never
do that again. And you dont have to do it either, despite what you might think.
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L earn to Say No
When someone wants to do a big deal with you, it may be hard to say no. But
Opportunity cost. Instead of pursuing something you really dont want to do,
you could free up time and energy to find something more lucrative or something
you would enjoy more. Opportunity cost is the one biggest cost in all of our lives.
We spend it like theres no tomorrow.
Supply and demand. If you reduce the supply of you by saying no, then the
demand for you goes up and you make more moneyand have more fun.
Youll hate yourself. I see this every day, particularly in my own life. The reason
I can write about this is not because Im an expert. We dont write about the things
we know. We write about the things that are deep down challenges for us right
now. When I say yes to something I dont want to do, I end up hating myself,
hating the person I said yes to, doing a bad job, and disappointing everyone. I try
try try not to do it anymore.
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O ver-deliver
If someone pays a hundred dollars and you give them just a hundred dollars
in value, then you just failed. F.A.I.L.E.D. Youll never sell to that person again.
Thats fine in some situations, but in most situations its no good. If someone pays
a hundred dollars you need to give them $110 in value.
Think of that extra ten dollars as going into some sort of karmic bank account
that pays interest (as opposed to a US bank account). That money grows and compounds. Eventually, theres real wealth there. And that wealth translates into wealth
in the real world. Most people are three-year-olds. They like to get presents.
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People want to do business with people who give them presents. Over-deliv-
ering is a present. And it makes you feel good. Give and you will receive.
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Never Take No for an Answer
incorrectly.
People think it means that you should keep pushing and trying new things
until you get a yes. Thats not what it means. Remember the first point above: be a
friend, however flimsy that connection of friendship is. Follow them on Twitter,
on Facebook. Say nice things about the person to other people. Never gossip.
Practice the art of the check-in. Send updates after the no on how the
person is doing, how the product or service or business or whatever is doing. You
dont need to check in every day. Maybe once a month. Maybe once a year. Who
knows? Eventually you will find the yes with that person. It could be, and often is,
up to twenty years later. You plant a seed and eventually the garden blooms.
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Underprice
I once wanted to do the website for Fine Line Films. I loved their movies.
I met the guy running their site. He kept saying over and over again, We cant
afford a lot, and I kept saying, Dont worry about it and would show him more
and more of our work. Eventually we did the websites for every one of their
movies And got paid $1,000 per website. Then, when Con Edison wanted to hire
us, Nevin at Fine Line was a reference.
I write for a lot of places right now for free. Any medium I love, I am willing
to write for. Its like a dream come true for me. The benefits from doing that have
been incalculable. Not always financial, but always real.
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Financial is just one. But all of our constituencies need to work together to make
us well balanced and peaceful.
The art of selling, for me, is to have everything inside of me working together.
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Be The S ource
One time I wanted to buy a company. The details of how I would do that are
sort of obscure and not important. The company is well-known in the financial
media space. At the critical moment, the owner called me and said, What should
I do? I have this other offer and I have your offer. He described the other offer to
me. I told him to take it.
I missed out on what couldve been a lot of money to me. But there was a
slight chance we wouldve all gone bust. Now the buyer is thriving, and eight years
later he is a friend. Will we ever do business together? I cant predict the future.
But I know I delivered value to another human being. That value is real and I can
put it to use whenever I want.
Often the best way to make friends and customers for life is to direct them
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What you offer is not just your product. Your offering is product, services,
your employees, your experiences, your ideas, your other customers, and even (as
mentioned above) your competitors. So sell them all. When you are good at what
you do, the product or service you offer is just the way people build the first link
to you. Its the top of a huge pyramid.
But the base of the pyramid, the real service, is when customers have access
to you and you can provide advice and the full power of your network and experience. This is when you are over-delivering on steroids and how you build real
wealthnot just a one-time fee for a service or product.
Many people say, No! My product is high margin and I want to make money
when I sleep.
In the long run, nobody cares about your product. In the long run, it is
the entire holistic view of your offering, your service, you, that you are selling.
Without that, you will build a mediocre business that may or may not pay the
bills. With that, you will create wealth.
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Sell The D ream
People can see what your product is right now. What they want to know is . . .
the future. Will your product make them more money? Will it get them a promotion? Maybe even, will you hire them if they buy your product?
When you get in the door, do not sell your product. People make a decision
on your product in five seconds. Sell the dream. Build up images of the dream.
Give a taste of what the dream is like. Let it linger. Let it weave itself. Let the
imagination of the buyer take hold and run with it. The dream has up to infinity
in value.
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Fire Customers
This is similar to Saying No, with the one difference that you have already
made a sale. And if its not going well or if its leaving a bad taste somewhere
inside of youor if the customer has gone from friend to enemy for whatever
reason and it seems like there is no repairthen fire your customer. The sooner
the better.
This applies not just to customers but everyone in your life. Everyone.
If someone no longer has your best interest at heart, then in your own self-
interest you need to back off. Now. A bad customer (a bad person) spreads like a
disease inside you, your employees, your other customers, your competitors, your
future customers, your family, etc.
When I tell people to build their idea muscle (by writing down ten ideas,
good or bad, every day) its not so they can come up with great business ideas
(although they might). Its so they can come up with ideas in situations like this.
This is where being an Idea Machine saves your life and saves everything around
you. But remember: bad customers will kill you and your family and your friends.
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P ersuasion
Your best new customers are your old customers. If you need to make more
money or build a new business, then go to your customers (who are now your
friends) and tell them, I need advice. What other service can I provide you or
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Do it. It might be that your customer is looking for a new job. Thats great. Make
it your business to find him a new job. Now you have a new customer.
your friends who might be good for her. If youve been following this approach
to sales, then your customers are now your friends, are now your family, are now
the lifeblood of how you wake up in the morning.
We spend years building a garden. We plant the seeds. We tend the soil. We
water the plants. But we are also the sun. The sun shines no matter what. It doesnt
care which flower blossoms. The sun is always there providing value every second
of the day. Be the sun and you will create abundance.
I dont know the buzzwords to make a sale. Im not very good at shaking
hands. I dont take people out to baseball games or do any of the things I see
other people do. But Ive been selling for twenty-five years. And whenever Ive
been dead broke, depressed, and suicidal, Ive picked myself up and sold again
and again.
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elling will require you to have a lot of conversations and attempt to convince a lot people of various things. Think of it this way: youre on the most
important elevator ride of your life. You have ten seconds to pitchthe
classic elevator speech. Love or hate. Money or despair. And you may never get
this chance again.
Ive been on both sides of this equation. Ive had people pitching me. But
mostly, Ive been scared and desperate and afraid to ask someone to give me, want
me, love me, all in the time of an elevator ride. Perhaps the hardest thing for me
was when I was doing my 3am Web series for HBO. I had to walk up to random
strangers at three in the morning on the streets of New York City and convince
them within five seconds to spill their most intimate secrets to me rather than kill
me. Not quite an elevator pitch but the same basic idea. I had a lot of practice. I
probably approached over 3,000 people cold. In some cases people tried to kill
me. In one case I was chased. In other cases people opened up their hearts, and I
am infinitely grateful to them.
The ideas below have worked for me in the hundreds of times Ive had to be persuasiveeither in writing, or in person, in business, or in friendships and in love.
I hope variations on it can work for you. You decide.
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People want to know they are talking to a good, honest, reliable person that
they can trust and perhaps even like, or love. Yes, love.
They wont love you by looking at your rsum. You have to do some method
acting. Before you even youre your mouth, imagine what your body would feel
like if your customer has already said yes. You would be standing up straight,
smiling, palms open, ready to close the deal. You have to method act at the
beginning of your pitch. If you are slouched and your head is sticking out, then
your brain is not as well connected to your nervous system and you wont be in
the flow.
I can drag out the science here, but this is a chapter in a book, not a peer-
reviewed scientific paper. The reality is, when youre slouched over, not only are
you not using the full potential of your brain, but you dont look confident, or
even trustworthy. And who wants to do business with you then?
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R el ax and Breathe
Think about how you breathe when you are anxious and nervous. I will tell
you how I breathe: short, shallow breaths in the upper chest. So do the reverse
before a ten-second pitch.
Breathe deep and in your stomach. Even three deep breaths in the stomach
(and when you inhale, try to imagine your stomach almost hitting your back)
have been shown to totally relax the mind and body. People sense this. Again, this
builds trust and relaxes you.
Now, even though you havent said a single word, youve probably done the
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I have a hard time with this. It seems natural to say, yup or right or uh-
huh or whatever. But here are the facts (and, again, there have been studies
on this): people perceive you as stupid when you do this. Just keep quiet when
someone is talking.
Then, when theyre done speaking, wait for two seconds before respond-
ing. They might not be done yet. And it gives you time to think of a response. If
you are thinking of a response while they are talking, then you arent listening to
them. People unconsciously know when you are not listening to them. Then they
say no to you.
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R emember The Four Us
Finally, now were getting to the heart of the matter. The actual nuts and bolts
of persuasion.
Ive googled the 4 Us and each time I get a different set of four. So Im going
dont want to do. This is a way for you to consolidate your vision into a sentence
or two and then express it in a clear manner. This is the way to bond and connect
with another persons needs instead of just your own pathetic wants. You can use
this in an elevator pitch, on a date, with your children, on your motherwhatever. But it works. Think about these things when talking.
Urgency
Why the problem you solve is urgent to your demographic. For example: I
can never get a cab when it rains! So whats the solution here? How does your
offering address this urgency?
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Uni que
Useful
Why is your solution useful to the lives of the people you plan on selling to or
Ultra -speci fi c
This shows there is no fluff. Our app knows where you are. Your credit card
is preloaded. You hit a button and a car shows up in four to five minutes. Of
course the example I give is for Uber, but you can throw in any other example you
want. Ill throw in a fifth U.
User-fri endly
Make it as easy as possible for someone to say yes. Give them a money-back
You can show this in the form of profits, or some measurable statistic. Or
Have a nd Sh ow D e si re
A lot of people say you have to satisfy the desires of the other person in order
for them to say yes. As much as we would like to think otherwise, people primarily act out of self-interest. The less they know you, the more they will do so. Oth89
We all know that kids shouldnt take candy from strangers. In an elevator
pitch, the investor is the kid. What you are asking is the candy, and you are the
stranger. So, unless you make the candy supersweet, their gut reflex is to say no.
So make sure you make your candy sweeter by sprinkling in their desires. And
what are their desires?
Recognition
Rejuvenation
Relaxation
Relief
Religion
Remuneration
Results
Revenge
Romance
If you can help them solve these urgent problems or desires, then they are
I dont know what you are selling, but hopefully its not to satisfy their desire
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L earn How To Handle O bjections
of times before. Do you know how many times Ive been approached to have sex
in an elevator?
None.
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But probably many others have and you have to put up with nonstop objec-
James Altucher
No t im e .
(Thats OK. Its on an elevator. So they have elevator-length time. The key here
is to stand straight and act like someone who deserves to be listened to).
No in t e rest.
No be lie f.
No dec ision.
With great power comes great responsibility. Most people dont have the
power of persuasion. They mess up on each of the points Ive outlined above. It
takes practice and hard work.
But this is not just about persuasion. Its not about money. Its not about the
Its about two people, who are probably strangers, reaching through physi-
cal and mental space and trying to understand each other and reach common
ground. Its not about money. Its not about the idea. Its not about yes or no. Its
about two people falling in love.
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h
hey fired me. They fired me as CEO. Then they fired me as a board
member. Then they took away my shares. And now none of them ever
talk to me. I started the company, I had the initial idea, I raised $30
million for it from A-plus investors (i.e., rich people). I bought two companies
for it, I hired the first fifty employees, and then I was shown the door.
The reason? I was a bad leader. Here are some things I didnt know about
my own company: I didnt know what our product did. I didnt know any of the
clients. I didnt know how much money we made. I didnt know how much we
lost. And I had crushes on the secretaries and maybe two or ten other employees.
I wouldve gladly stuck my tongue in the ears of any of those employees. Ewwww!
But why was I fired? I just didnt do anything for anyone. I never wanted
to talk. I would lock myself in my office and people would knock and I would
pretend not to be there. If anyone wanted to talk to me about vision I would just
nod my head and say something like, make it happen, like I was Captain Picard
on the Starship Enterprise.
Being a leader doesnt mean you are the guy who runs things. Being a leader
doesnt mean you created something or you did something great in the past or
some other person has given you any kind of authority. Being a leader happens
right now, today. Its something you can do without money, without authority, and
without anybody. But first, you have to lead yourself. Its a mind-set. Im going to
make a list (surprise!). Feel free to add to the list or include your own experiences.
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ing in thirty companies (most of them successes), after advising or being on the
board of a dozen companies (most of them successes), and after being married
twice (50 percent success rate), I have a sense of what I think a leader is today. It
has changed vastly from what it used to be. The skills are different, but the underlying idea is the same.
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D esire More Suc cess for O thers Than
for Yourself
Most important by far is that you be able to care about others success more
than your own. Everyone around you needs to ultimately become better than you.
Thats how you lead. The light is in front of you and you take them to the light and
then go back.
If all the people around you achieve more than you, then life will be good.
Ive seen this happen repeatedly. It doesnt matter if they are employees, investors,
friends, or spouses. If you just focus on this one principle in all of your actions,
then you are a leader. Today, figure out how the people around you can have a
successful day.
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Say Yes, and
I just wrote a book called The Power of No. Buy it because your life will be
Claudia had an idea for a joke this morning that she wants to start a talk off
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with. I had a suggestion to change it. I didnt say, Dont do that. Do this. I said,
Yes, and . . . a technique used in improvisational comedy. What does it mean? I
trust Claudia and value her thoughts, so I if I just say no it shows I havent been
respectful enough of the time she put into coming up with an idea.
So I say, Yes, and . . . then elaborate on what is good about her idea and how
I think it can be made even better and why. I give all of her ideas and thoughts
respect and add to them rather than ever subtract from them.
Figure out the vision that is the base of the idea that you are talking about.
Connect the why of what you are suggesting to the initial vision. Does it
work better than the initial idea?
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Show Gratitude
lar webinar and LinkedIn expert who was on my podcast a few months ago. Lewis
told me that his outgoing voice mail says, Before you leave me a message, tell me
one thing you are grateful for. He says the messages people leave blow him away.
mothers at the end of the day and tell them, Mom, you cant believe what I did
today. Let me tell you about it. Not that every day is fun. Because some work isnt.
But your goal should be to make sure your employees can call Lewis Howes every
day and have at least one new thing they can be grateful for.
Maybe they learned a new skill. Maybe they met a new client and created value
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for that client. Maybe a client they hated was fired. Because you cant let your employees get the disease that bad clients are all too happy to spread.
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Foll ow The 30-150 Rule
(AKA The Vision Rule)
from 70,000 years ago that if a tribe got bigger than thirty people, it would split
into two tribes.
A tribe is like a familythat is, you learn personally whom to trust and not to
trust. You learn to care for their individual problems. You know everything about
the people in your tribe. Having just thirty people in the tribe allows a leader to
spend time with each person in the tribe and to listen to their issues.
When your organization grows from thirty to 150 people, you might not know
everyone. But you know of everyone. You know you can trust Jill because Jack
tells you you can trust Jill and you trust Jack.
Once that number gets past 150 people, its impossible to keep track of ev-
eryone. But this is where humans split off from every other species. We united
with one other by telling stories. We told stories of nationalism, religion, sports,
money, products, better, great, best! If two people believe in the same story, they
might be thousands of miles apart and total strangersbut they still have a sense
they can trust each other.
And that is how a leader connects to all those people in his tribe, even the
ones he or she doesnt know personally. A leader tells a visionary story. We are
delivering the best service because We are helping people in unique ways
because We have the best designs because We treat people better because
A good story starts with a problem, goes through the painful process of solving
the problem, and has a solution that is better than anything ever seen before.
First you listened to people, then you took care of people, but now you unite
people under a vision they believe in and trust and bond with.
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Companies live and die by this. One company I advise grew themselves
by buying two hundred regional offices, and then unifying them under one
brand. The key to their success is how powerful the story will be that they
tell of that brand. Why are they delivering the greatest value? People need to
believe in the story.
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Be OK with C hange
Everyone has pain they dont want to feel. For instance, I might feel pain if
So we do things to hide the pain. Imagine all the things we do as buffers for
pain. We might wear nice clothes not because we like the clothes but because they
are buffers for the pain: nobody will make fun of my looks. We might avoid going
to the store because we dont want to run into the people who cause us pain. We
might hide some numbers because we dont want investors to think we are bad
CEOs. Soon, everything in our lives we might think gives us pleasure (because
we are now avoiding all the pain) is actually just a buffer against pain and change.
When you can get rid of the buffers against pain and change. life becomes more
insecure, but you become free.
Luckily for you and for me, we live in a bigger world, a world where risk and
beauty go hand in hand and we are no longer afraid of the underlying pains. A
leader is always prepared for change, and realizes that pain is just an opportunity
to live in a bigger and more abundant world. This is the secret that most people
forget when they build their brick houses and hide inside from the outside world
so pain doesnt seek them out.
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minute. I had rescheduled other meetings and even changed the time I would see
one of my daughters plays so I could interview this very successful entrepreneur.
Now she wanted to reschedule again but I said no, even to the detriment of my
podcast and all the people who work with me on the podcast who were looking
forward to the interview. I wasnt angry with the person. Shes running a business
and was probably very busy. And people reschedule all the time. I just didnt like
that it was last minute. I had studio time booked and no program to fill it.
has transformed their life and created the life they wanted. I want my guests
stories to help my listeners. The world is changing very fast and its scary. I want to
help people be less scared, and I know I am less scared when I hear the stories of
my guests and learn from them. Although Im relatively new at podcastingIve
only been doing it for 12 months I treat my podcast as if its already achieved
the dream I have for it. It is a place where experts appear to help others deal with
the crazy changes happening in our world and economy.
If I dont treat my own projects with respect, then how can I expect others to?
If I dont treat myself with dignity, then how can I expect the people around me to
treat me, or even one another, with dignity?
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Know Theres Always a G o od R eason
and a R eal R eason for Every thing,
and Share It
When you are a leader, people come to you with problems every day. The
problems are usually very good problems. The client is asking for too much. Or
Jill didnt do her job right, or My car broke down.
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One time an employee asked to meet me outside the office. She was crying. I
asked her what was wrong. She was afraid she was doing a bad job with a client.
And she was. But it turned out the real problem was she had heard one of my
business partners talking poorly about her behind her back and this was affecting
her every day at work. This was what we truly needed to fix. And so we did. And
then everything, employee, client, partner, etc., went well. One hundred percent
of the time there is a good reason and a real reason for everything.
A leader listens to the good reason closely to try and figure out what the real
reason is, and then comes up with a solution. And there is always a real reason.
Listen for that and see if you can help. A good solution solves one problem. A real
solution solves a hundred problems.
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C are Ab ou t Your Health
A sick leader is not a great leader. A leader who is spending time with people
not good for them is not a good leader. A leader who doesnt constantly practice creativity is not a good leader. A leader who is not grateful for the abundance already
in his or her life will never lead his vision into abundance. He wont know how.
Theres no such thing as instant health. Theres only such thing as practice and
progress. All you have to do is check the box on progress. Progress compounds
every day into enormous abundance.
Warren Buffett says he skips to work and that he would do the work he does
for free. Maybe its easy for him to say that because he has $50 billion. Ive gone
through and read his letters from the 1950s when he was first starting out. These
letters are not publicly available. I had to really try hard to find them when I wrote
my book on them in 2004.
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Even back then, when he was broke and starting his business in his living
room, you can tell by reading his letters that he loved what he did. He took glee
in finding companies that nobody else knew about so nobody was looking when
they became horribly undervalued, and he would then buy those companies.
Dont do something just for the money. Money is a side effect of persistence.
You persist in things you are interested in. Explore your interests. Then persist.
Then enjoy all the side effects.
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Know How To L ead Yourself
You dont need to be leading anyone. Before I can lead anyone I have to lead
myself. I have to read. I have to try and improve one percent a week. I have a
handful of interests and I have a lot of experience. I have to get better at the things
Im interested in. I have to understand more deeply the painful experiences Ive
had. I have to every day practice the healthphysical, emotional, mental, spiritualthat I suggest to everyone else. Sometimes I dont. And I feel it. But thats
OK. Dont regret. Today is a new day. Today is the only day.
Because who knows if tomorrow will even exist? Today is the only day I need
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n order to do all the things discussed in the last chapter, leaders need to
communicate with people. This often involves speaking to large groups at a
time. There are polls that say that people would rather be dead than speak
in public. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld joked that a guy giving a eulogy would rather
be in the coffin.
Ive given hundreds of talks, but for some reason, last week I wanted to die
Heres the operating theory: you dont need to spend 10,000 hours at anything
to be the best. You just need to be pretty good at something (spend a couple of
hundred hours) and then you need to know how to give a good talk in public. You
will stand out, because so few people want to talk in public.
I wrote a post a while ago called Tips to Be a Great Public Speaker. I still
follow those tips, but since the first post Ive given a lot more talks to a varied set
of audiences. Ive spoken about everything from spirituality to business to creativity to entrepreneurship to failure. And before each talk Ive always thought
to myself, Holy s**t. How did I write that post about public speaking? Im more
nervous than ever! So Ive come up with a few more tips. And these tips for
public speaking are as important as the ten I provided on leading in the previous chapter.
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Watch C omedians
I watch great stand-up comedy before every talk. It puts me in a looser mood
When possible, I will directly steal a joke from whatever comedian Im watch-
ing. After all, theyve tested out the joke, so its probably a good one that will work
for me as well. I even practice imitating their timing: the way they pause, the way
they change voices and move around the stage, everything.
Comedians are the best public speakers and are up against the most brutal
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D o Not Use Powerp oint
as my words are, weve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. This
is total BS. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then you are worth 100,000
pictures.
I compare comedian Daniel Toshs stand-up with his TV show Tosh.0. His
stand-up just involves him, making jokesno PowerPoint, no visuals, no pictures worth a thousand words. The Tosh.0 format involves him watching YouTube
videos and making fun of them. His stand-up is better than the show. Even
though the show is great, it isnt as fun as just watching him do stand-up. In a
similar fashion, PowerPoint will only distract from the main attraction: you.
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Wear C omfortable C l othes
I only dress in clothes I feel most comfortable in, even if everyone else is
wearing tuxedos.
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I wear a specific uniform when I speak: I wear a T-shirt I had custom made
that has all 67,000 words of my book Choose Yourself! printed on it. And I wear
a white shirt over it and black pants. Like a waiter. Im at your service and Ive
chosen myself. BAM!
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R emember to Pause
I had this unnatural fear that if I paused too much during a talk people would
get bored.
But inserting pauses allows people to think about what you are saying. It
allows you to breathe, to be funnier, and diminishes the impression that you are
rushing through the material. Take a drink of water. Walk from one side of the
stage to the other. Do whatever you need to do.
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Have a Q&A Portion
maximum amount of Q&A. Always good to have the audience as involved in your
talk as you are.
care who you are, is smart enough to just dole out advice. Just talk about your own
experiences and what you did to help yourself. Mix in interesting facts. Straight
out advice will never help anyone. Buddha himself realized this about public
speaking. He said, Dont believe me on anything. Try this out for yourself.
Poor speakers create an artificial divide between themselves and the audi-
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ence. They feel they need to do this in order to establish their own credibility. Let
me tell youthere is no such thing as credibility. In one hundred years there will
be no buildings named after any of us. Somebody has to be on stage and some
people have to be in the audience. Thats the only difference.
Dont put any thought as to why you are on the stage or how you need to
be better than the people in the audience. You arent better. Youre simply the
speaker. We all woke up lonely and confused this morning. What a miracle that
we get to speak to one another.
And even better, we feed the soul by listening to one another. Ultimately, the
best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening.
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very day for the past twenty years Ive learned something new about
negotiation. Communication is the thread that weaves humans into humanity. Make sure the result brings you life and love. Tomorrow is 100
percent based on the negotiations you do today. Constantly study yourself, the
negotiations youve done, and try to improve so you dont experience the terrible
effects of bad negotiations.
When I do what I tell you to do belowwhen I live life as gently and posi-
closing a sale, buying services, getting married, getting divorced, figuring out
what to do with my life, screwing up my life (in a big way), and all the variety of
things in life that happen in between. I havent read any books on negotiation,
and there may be better suggestions than what Ive got for you. This is what
works for me and I think what will work for othersbut you have to try for
yourself to find out for sure. Negotiate something today involving all of these
things and tell me if they work.
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Say No
I told this to someone the other day who is about to get fired from his job:
dont act like its a done deal. Getting fired is a legal action. Its always a negotiation with many more moving parts than people realize. Say no and that you need
to think about it. Your employer might well say something like, This is not a
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negotiation. You can say, Thats OK. I need to think about this.
on the job. Think about what you need to get a new job or career. Employ the
techniques listed below. In general, with everything you negotiate; give yourself
permission to think about it. Or else its manipulation and not negotiation.
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D ont Be a C hild
Dont meet in the middle. Here is a dumb negotiation scenario that never
actually plays out in real life: You offer forty dollars, I offer twenty, and we meet in
the middle at thirty.
The middle stuff never happens. Many people think it does so they always
start off negotiations with being inauthentic. Always be honest. Say what you
want and why. Negotiation equals authenticity. Without authenticity you lose the
tires on your car. Then you end up going nowhere.
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L et The O ther Side Help You
Theres the trick I have to talk to X, where X is someone else you need to
confirm your decision. But this is just a trickone that works when you have it,
and when you dont have it, its useless. So I will give you a better trick: get the
other side of your negotiation to be X. In other words, get them to negotiate against
themselves.
The word against is probably the wrong word to use here. The only way the
negotiation is going to work is if they are happy also. So against also means
for. They clearly want something from you. Thats why you guys are at the table
in the first place.
So heres how what you say: Im new at this. You guys are the grand masters
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of negotiation. If a grand master plays a novice, then he will always win. So help
me out. What would you do if you were me? And then no matter what they
say, you say, But seriously, if you were me, what would you do. Again, Im just a
novice. I have no clue what Im doing. Help me out here. And they will help you
out. Because they want the deal to close and you really do need their help, or else
the deal will never close.
This isnt being inauthentic, because you want as much information on the
table as possible. If they help you, then you have more information, and can be
even more authentic. If anything, you might end up helping them more than
they help you.
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Make Sure Your List is Bigger Than Theirs
Lets say you are negotiating a book advance. They offer a $10,000 advance
and they cant budge higher. Thats fine. Now make your list of other things: how
much social media marketing will they do? What bookstores will they get you
into? Who has control over book design? What percentage of foreign rights, of
digital rights, can you get? Do royalties go up after a certain number of copies
are sold? Will they pay for better book placement in key stores? Will they hire a
publicist? And so on.
Make a list before every negotiation. Make the list as long as possible. If your
list is bigger than theirs (size matters), then you can give up the nickels for the
dimes. This is not just about negotiation. This is to make sure that later you are
not disappointed because there is something you forgot. Always prepare. Then
you can have faith that because you prepared well, the outcome will also go well.
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Lets say someone is buying your company. It may seem like all they are
doing is buying the assets of your company. But they are also buying your companys negative imprint. In other words, they are buying the fact that nobody
else can buy your company. They can say, Well, we dont care about that. Then
fine. See if its true. Offer your services to other companies. If you cant walk
away from a negotiation, then you arent negotiating. Youre just working out
the terms of your slavery.
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If its Not E asy, Then Walk Away
If a negotiation is not easy, then it means you need to work harder to develop
more value to offer. Negotiation should always be easy. If its not, you need to take
a step back and be patient for the moment when it becomes easy.
Never waste time chasing down a difficult negotiation. You will lose, you will
be unhappy, the other side will be unhappy (even though they got you cheap, they
will secretly think you are worthless), and you will have wasted time and squandered money.
do well, to be happy. You dont get infinite energy. One way to replenish energy is
to sleep. The other way is to eat well and to exercise. But another way to replenish energy is to live a gentle life. As gently as possible. So your energy grows and
is used where it is needed. Which means all negotiations need to be smooth else
they result in anxiety and fear and guessing and out guessing and much future
depletion of energy. And then you die faster than the one who lived gently.
Try this. Next time you are in a negotiation, dont forget to relax your face.
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For instance, a freelance employee has the ability to take on more than one
job. An employee cant take on more than one job, and everything he does on
company time is owned by the company. Thats slavery.
Lets say you rent an apartment. Try to give yourself as many options as pos-
sible to leave. Dont sign a two-year lease, for example. When you get married,
make it clear in advance what you want (maybe one side wants kids and the other
doesnt) and how you can resolve these issues. This is not the same as a prenuptial
agreement (which is purely financial) but an understanding of what both sides
want (communication is always good in a marriage) and an understanding of
how it can be resolved if wants and desires change (i.e., options to leave or change
the nature of the relationship).
Sometimes there are not that many options you can negotiate. Thats OK. Just
remember the line options equal freedom. In some cases, you may want to sell
your freedom if the price is right.
For me, there is no price that is worth sacrificing freedom. But not everyone
is the same.
If someone says, you can be CEO of Google but you have to work fourteen
hours a day for five years or we take all the money back, you may think that is an
OK sacrifice for your freedom. Or not. But until you sign, you have the option.
This seems like a contradiction. Most people think, More money equals
more freedom.
Theres a balance. You dont want to be a slave to your bills and debts. But you
Dont let cognitive biases limit your options when you make decisions. If you
spend $400,000 and twelve years of your life learning how to become a brain
surgeon, you now have this huge cognitive bias that you must be a brain surgeon.
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This is not true. Maybe after all that, you decide you dont want to be a surgeon
anymore. Make sure you can always list your options. Dont allow yourself to
become trapped.
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Think, Its Not Me, Bu t What I
C an D o for You
When you negotiate, you always are bringing something to the table. But the
negotiation is not about what you own. Its about the value you can deliver to the
other person. The negotiation should be about whoever is bringing the higher
value to the table.
As an extreme example, lets say you are selling your technology to Google.
Youve invested $5 million in the technology. They offer you $10 million. This
seems great, right?
You counter: With this technology, you can generate an extra billion in
profits every year! Now the negotiation is about that billion and not about your
$5 million.
If they say, no, then no problem. You say, OK, lets just work together. And
you keep your options open while you talk to other companies and they start to
get nervous you might sell to someone else.
Remember: the negotiation should always take place on the side where the
higher value is. Unless the secret options discussed below take precedence.
Which leads me to
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Note that infinite patience and immediate seem to refer to time. But they
dont. There is no unit of time called immediate and no unit of time called infinite. When you have to deal with time in a negotiation, then you loseif a
negotiation has to be done by tomorrow, for instance, or next month.
If you can have infinite patience, then the negotiation will work out. And
whether it works out immediately or not wont matter. You will have immediate
results anyway.
We dont know what those results will be. But infinite patience means that
whatever happens next will all take place according to plan. New suitors may
show up. The negotiation might finish. Or something new altogether might
happen. Your only goal is to structure your life and business and opportunities
so that you can always have that infinite patience. Then the results will always
be immediate.
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Negotiate With Your Gu t
Many people think that the brain is where all of the reasoning happens. Its
true that this is where you calculate math, make logical assumptions, and draw
logical well-thought out conclusions from your observations. But your gut and
your heart have just as many neurons as the brain. Its really all one big intelligence system). Your gut doesnt say yes or no. But it does tell you when you are
feeling good or bad about something.
Klux Klan, then your gut will feel pain even faster (I hope) than your head will.
Thats an extreme example, of course. But your gut is very much involved in every
negotiation you do. So you have to practice paying attention to it.
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Most people dontso they make their negotiations with their brain and
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their gut gets less practice and therefore, less effective. One way to practice is to
try not to do anything today where you feel even the slightest twinge in your gut
that this might be wrong.
See what then happens. This is how you learn to trust your gut or at least
build a better connection between the gut and the brain. Lets say someone invites
you to a meeting and you feel a twinge. But, your brain might say, You have to
go this meeting. Your boss will be there. Pay attention to the twinge. Maybe you
are not prepared enough. Maybe you think it will be a waste of time. Maybe you
have other things to do.
Everything is a negotiation. Make your list of reasons why you cant go bigger
than the list of why you can. Negotiate your way out of the meeting. Listen to your
gut just as much as you listen to your brain, if not more.
is in the gut and not the brain. So in many cases, the decisions of your gut are
much more important for your overall happiness. DNA doesnt care about happiness. The only goal of DNA is to replicate itself. But my guess is you care about
your happiness.
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Negotiate With Your Heart
I only negotiate with people I like. What is the point of living otherwise?
Lets say you have to negotiate with the IRS. Like most people, I dont particularly like the IRS. But I recognize that the people there are just doing their jobs.
And I can help them do their jobs by doing a good negotiation with them. On
a bigger scale, there is no sense in selling a company or a service to someone
you dont like.
Both sides will feel remorse. Both sides will be unhappy. And then they will
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There are really two things components to every negotiation: the visible ne-
Maybe you are selling your company. But you might be buying your
freedom (if you get a lot of money for your company). Or if you are getting a
book advance, the secret thing (author Hugh McLeod calls this your evil plan)
might be that you feel that publishing a book will get you speaking opportunities, since most books dont make a lot of money. Always make sure that a negotiation gives you secret options. Remember: options equal freedom. Research
your secret options thoroughly. Or else dont begin the negotiation because you
have not prepared properly.
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Be R idicul ous
In their book Think Like a Freak, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt describe
the negotiation that the rock band Van Halen would do with concert organizers.
Van Halen had a clause in their contract that required that a jar of M&Ms be delivered to their hotel room at the beginning of a gig and that there would be zero
brown M&Ms in the jar. Why would they do this? Are they just being rock stars
with ridiculous demands?
The answer is interesting: If they get brown M&Ms in the jar, despite this
rider in the contract, then they know that the concert organizers were probably
not detailed in all the other thousands of things that go into concert preparation.
This would be a bad sign for Van Halen and force them to pay closer attention to
the details of the concert or even force them to abandon the concert altogether.
So throw some ridiculous things into your negotiation. Not only does this
make your list bigger, but also it will allow you to test how much someone really
wants you involved and the care and attention they will place on you once the
negotiation is finished.
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R enegotiate
Even the Ten Commandments were easily broken (Moses actually smashed
them and had to go back up the mountain to get new and different ones.) Every
day and every interaction is a negotiation. Just because you have a signed and
sealed contract doesnt mean you cant break it.
Im not encouraging you to act in an unethical way. But if you are unhappy
and feel you cannot perform your fullest, then make sure you come equipped
with two things: the new value you offer the other side (or a big list of value) and
what you need to succeed in this value. People sometimes seem unreasonable.
But if you start off with the suggestions Ive laid out here, then when it comes time
to renegotiatewhich happens in 90 percent of situationsthen everyone will
continue to be reasonable.
ally healthy, which allows you at all times to negotiate with your gut, heart, and
brain instead of just the overworked brain.
No. Because the value you bring is constantly changing and the world needs
to be adjusted. All contracts can be broken if both sides agree that the world has
changed. And the more options you have, the more the world will change in ways
that are positive for both sides.
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P repare Every thing; S crip t Nothing
Make sure you know all of your numbers. All of your lists of wants. All of the
other sides numbers. All similar deals in your industry. All similar deals that the
other negotiator has done. As many examples of negotiation, particularly in this
arena, that you can find.
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Then make sure you are negotiating from a position of strength. People
usually think that means, I have more power than you. But this is not what
strength is. That will only result in a bad negotiation that will satisfy nobody in
the long run. Strength simply means physical health (youre well slept, youve
eaten well, you feel energy), emotional health (you are dealing with people you
like), mental health (you have done your preparation), and spiritual health (you
feel fully deserving of the abundance and gratitude that is coming your way).
Having faith in your strength is all you need to bring to the table. Nothing
else. Once you do your preparation, have faith that the right negotiation
will happen.
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R emember That The Best Negotiation
is No Negotiation
read recently that in a good negotiation, both sides end up unhappy. I
strongly disagree with this. Thats a horrible negotiation. In a good negotia-
tion, both sides dont even realize they were negotiating. They have just made
a wonderful change to improve their lives and enhance the value they offer the
people around them.
Dont forget the bigger picture: that you get a chance to love what you do
and to live life as gently as possible, which gives you the energy to love what you
do. You dont need to read all the self-help books on how to win a negotiation.
There is no winning or losing. Were all negotiating with the universe around us
every single second, as you are even right now as you read this.
The good news is, the universe wants us to win and has given us the sun, air,
the ground, and all the people around us whom we love so we have the best opportunity to succeed.
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115
he old rules and way of life made people ask, How can I get ahead?
The new rules compel us to ask: How can I help others get ahead?
Connecting people who can benefit each other is the most useful skill
you can have on the entrepreneurial ladder of skills. When you help others make
money by connecting them together, the world forces itself into the Mbius strip
of success that brings the money right back to you times ten.
Some billionaires are especially great at this. If I write Mark Cuban an e-mail
he responds in two seconds, even though he doesnt even know me. Hes a super
connector. I know quite a few talented super connectors and they will be very
successful as they grow into future Mark Cubans.
I love meeting new people. Ive always done a good job with the initial skills
involved with meeting new people. I feel like I can meet anyone in the world that
I want to. Whether I make use of that meeting is another story (Ill expand on the
importance of following up later).
Introducing people to others who can provide value for them. Make sure its
permission networking (you get permission from both sides first. Otherwise, you are a burden and not a help).
Finding a meaningful connection between you and the other person. A connection that person might value. Lewis Howes contacted many former ath-
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E ight Skills You Need to Bec ome
a Super-C onnector
1. In t rodu c e t wo oth er c onnectors . If you can introduce
two people who are themselves great connectors, then you become a metaconnector. They will meet and get along, since connectors get along with
one another for two reasons: they are naturally friendly people (hence their
ability to connect so easily with people) and they have a lot of friends in
common almost by definition.
If you are in the middle of that connection, then the two people will
always remember you and youll always be on their mind for future potential
connections they can make that would be useful for you. And their Rolodexes are immense. So if you need to meet Prince William or Ellen Degeneres,
for instance, then just connect two connectors and the next thing you know
youll be dancing right down the aisle with Ellen on her show or bowing to
Kate Middleton, or whatever you want to do.
2. In t rodu c e t wo people, but this time with a specific idea in mind.
Marsha, meet Cindy. Cindy, meet Marsha. Marsha, you are the best book
editor in the world. Cindy, your book is the best book idea I have ever heard.
You both can make money together. No need to cc me.
If you can help two other people make money, then eventually good things
will happen to you. In a few cases, Ive been able to do this. Theyre rare, but
its happened
The first time I ever did this, back in 1994, I went home and told my girl-
friend, I just helped two people make money for the first time ever. And she
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said, Yeah, but what did you get? Well, I got nothing. But I felt something.
I felt like I had done good in the world and that if I kept doing it, eventually
it would return to me. And it did. With those very two people from that first
time, but years later.
3. Ho st a dinner of i nteresti ng people. Ive only done this
twice. When the last Star Wars prequel came out I invited people from every
aspect of my life (friends, hedge fund investors, writers) to a dinner, I got
everyone movie tickets, and it was a fun night. I solidified my relationships
with some of my investors, plus some of the funds I was invested in, and I
managed to connect people who later did business together. On another occasion I threw a party for everyone who had been fired by TheStreet. It got
a little awkward when the guy who had done most of the firing (who had
himself been fired right before the party) was also therebut it was all in
good fun. Im not sure how much goodwill it created for me. Its early to tell.
I much more enjoy going to the dinner that Im invited to. Ive met a lot of
interesting people. My main problem is that my normal bedtime is about 8
p.m. So sometimes I fall asleep at the table and everyone thinks Im on drugs.
4. Fol l ow u p. This is the hardest part for me. I have a five-year-old list of
people who introduced me to people I actually wanted to be introduced to
and then I never followed up. For instance, a few months ago I wrote a post
called Burton Silverman, are you dead yet?? Burton Silverman is one of my
favorite artists. I wanted to know if he was dead to see if the value of one of
his paintings had gone up. He wrote me to tell me he wasnt dead yet. And as
I type this, his studio is only a few blocks away. I could visit him right now if
I want. Except for some reason I never returned his e-mail. Hes on my list.
But following up is the hardest part for me. Then I put it off until I start to feel
guilty about not following up. So then I push back the follow-up even more.
offered to follow up for me on e-mails. But I have a hard time letting other
people do things for me that I should really be doing for myself. So learn
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connecting!
8. P rodu c e someth i ng of va lue. In order to connect two people,
you must have people to connect. You have to meet them in the first place,
and the best way to do that is to produce something of value. I tell a story
where I describe how when I was broke and about to go homeless I tried
a technique of just reaching out to people. I would write letters like, Hey,
would love to meet. Unfortunately, that never worked. People are busy. Nobody wanted to meet some random guy like me.
business of each person I wanted to meet and come up with ten ideas to help
them that I would give them completely for free. I gave one guy, Jim Cramer,
ten article ideas he should write. He ultimately wrote back, You should write
thesewhich started my financial writing career. It also led to a habit of
exchanging ideas with people at TheStreet that ultimately led to me selling
Stockpickr to them. Another guy to whom I gave several trading system ideas
ultimately allocated money for me to trade. This started my hedge fund trading career. Once I started concentrating on producing something of value
without worrying about what I would get out of itit started coming back to
me. Pretty amazing, huh?
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his chapter is about achieving mastery, but also why its OK to not get
mastery in the traditional sense. You can define it for yourself; you can
avoid the definitions provided by everyone else. In other words, its fine
to be a loser.
There are a lot of books written on this topic. If you want to read one, try
Robert Greenes Mastery (or listen to my podcast with him). Theres also Outliers,
by Malcolm Gladwell.
But it doesnt take a book to describe what makes a master. For one thing,
most of us, and I mean me, will not be masters at anything. I try. I tried with
chess. I hit the rank of master, but that doesnt mean anything, since Ill never be
world class at it. Ive tried with writing. Ive been writing for twenty or so years.
Ive known a lot of people who are among the best in the world in their field.
Ive talked to people and dissected what they thought led them to their mastery.
Ive built and sold businesses to people who were masters of their fields in every
industry. Ive invested in people who were masters in their fields. So Ive at least
recognized who were masters and what they did. So take this advice with a grain
of saltbut know that it is based on my experience and the experiences of all the
people with whom Ive interacted. Here are the elements of mastery, and they
involve both good news and bad news.
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Having a Talent
I hate to say it, but talent is a factor. Theres a myth that everyone is talented
at doing at least one thing and you just have to find it. This isnt true.
Most people are not truly talented at anything. However, most people can
be pretty good at something. For instance, author Timothy Ferris shows in his
book The Four-Hour Chef how you can be a pretty good chef with four hours
worth of work. Ive tried his techniques, and in four hours I made some pretty
good dishes. Thank you, Tim. But at the launch of Tims book he held a dinner
where each course (I think there were eight of them) was cooked by a different
chef. One of the chefs was (approximately) eight years old and his dish mightve
been the best served. That kid will be a master one day if he isnt already. Thats
talent. And thats the difference.
against a girl fittingly named Irina Krush. She really did crush me in about twenty-five moves. After the match she told me, Maybe your bishop to B4 move felt
a little weak to me. She was right. She was thirteen years old. I stopped playing
chess in tournaments right that moment and now only play when Im on the
phone with people. She had talent. Shes now one of the youngest women grand
masters in the world.
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Finding What Youre Talented At
I think there are roughly t wo methods for d oing this:
in that one field. I dont know if I will ever master anything, but since I was
a kid I have loved writing, games, and anything to do with business. So Ive
combined some of those and done what I think is pretty well. Maybe one day
Ill master something. Well see.
2. G o to t he b o okstore. Find a topic you would be willing to read
five hundred books on. If you cant wait to read all five hundred books in the
knitting section, then you probably have a talent for knitting. (Note that it is
really OK not to be talented in the arts or with crafts. Most us werent put on
this earth to be talented at knitting.)
things we are interested in, all of the things we flirt with. And that combination might look like garbage to everyone else. So play with your garbage and
be happy. If you can do that, youre in the top 0.00001 percent.
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D oing That Thing for Four Hours a Day
There is a reason that the titles of all of Tim Ferrisss books start with The Four-
Hour I ask almost every master I encounter, in every field, how much time per
day they spend mastering their field. They never give the standard Silicon Valley
BS entrepreneur answer: I work twenty hours a day and if I didnt need to sleep
Id work thirty hours a day. You cant get good at something if you are working
twenty hours a day. In fact, something is very wrong in your life if that is how
much you are working at one thing.
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The typical answer is I study four hours a day. Former world chess cham-
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pion Anatoly Karpov said the maximum he would study chess is three hours a
day. Then, when he wasnt in tournaments, hed spend the rest of the day exercising, studying languages, and doing other things to balance out his life.. If you
just do one thing, the benefits quickly decline and you also ignore the pleasure
of becoming well-rounded. Ultimately, mastery is about connecting the dots of
many fields. So while you can focus for only so long on your field of choice, its
often of great benefit to learn other areas of life.
Prominent behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely has done research that tells us
that the peak productivity period in a persons day is 2-5 hours after they wake up.
After that, he says, there are declining returns on the work you put in.
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Knowing The History
In any area of life you want to succeed at, you have to study the history.
All art is created in context. If someone wrote Beethovens Fifth Symphony right
now it would be laughed at. It wouldnt fit the context of todays popular music,
even though it would be a work of genius. Andy Warhol tried many different approaches before he decided that art based on things like Campbells soup cans was
the right art for the right moment in time. Studying the history of how previous
world champions played and trained in any sport is critical toward figuring how
you can improve on that training and playing.
In any business, studying the history of your focus industry, the biographies
of the prior executives, and the successes and failures of those who went before
you is critical for mastering that business.
For example, I had Greg Zuckerman (author of the best selling book The
Heck, the one McDonalds in Williston has gone from $5 million in revenues to
$18 million in revenues last year. (The average McDonalds does $8 million in
revenues.)
If I were remotely interested in fracking Id study where all the oil was drilled
back in the 1920s, 50s, 70s. How the first wildcatters found their wells. What
technologies they used and the history of the technology. How they made improvements. Id ask, whats the history of the geopolitics around oil drilling? And
so on. Somewhere in there, there is a path to getting incredibly wealthy. Not for
me, because I could care less about oil. But for someone. Or many someones.
I was once talking to poker champ Ylon Schwartz, who has won over $7
He said, Everyone wants to blame someone. They want to blame bad luck.
Or they had a fight with their wife. But the key is to study your failures. You have
to take notes about your losing hands and even your winning hands. You have to
think about everything.
We spoke about another friend of ours who went from homeless to million-
aire in six months, once he found that he had a knack for backgammon. His
nickname was Falafel because that was once all he could afford to eat.
Ylon told me, Falafel memorized every statistic about backgammon. Right
now on the Web you can see that his tournament games are ranked number one
in terms of how accurately they mimic a computer. Falafel also studied every
single game he lost.
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I used to play Falafel every day in chess. Hed sleep on the ground in Wash-
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ington Square Park and get up in the morning with dirt and leaves in his hair and
wed play chess for fifty cents a game. Now million-dollar paydays from backgammon are normal for him.
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Gaining Experience
At some point you have to cook 10,000 meals. Or play a million hands of
Those familiar with baseball know that the best hitters in the world are enormous
successes if they are called out only 70 percent of the times they go to bat.
A lot of people can play the 10,000 hands of poker and never get better. Or
bake a thousand cakes and never get better. You have to remember your experiences, study your failures, try to note what you did right and what you did wrong,
and remember it all for future experiences.
Future experiences will almost never be exactly like the old experiences. But
they give you the ability to say, Hmm, this is like the time four years ago when X,
Y, and Z happened. And then you are engaging in . . .
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Using Pat tern R ec o gnition
Being able to recognize when current circumstances are like an experience youve
had in the past or an experience someone else youve studied had in the past is
critical to mastery.
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L oving It
Andre Agassi has famously said he doesnt love tennis. I believe this and I
dont believe it. We all know that there are all kinds of love. Theres unconditional
love, which is very hard to maintain. Then theres lust. You look at someone and
she is the oomph to your ugh. She is the BAM! to your BOOM! You dream and
daydream and dream and daydream until the love is all worn out, and six months
or six years later its over and you move on.
Then theres love that matures. Theres a set of things you like about a person,
even love. Mix that in with some lust. Then this love mash-up changes over time.
Or you learn to adapt because you know that a maturing love is not one where
you settle or explore the subtleties inside the other person but you are finally able
to explore the subtleties inside of yourself.
And sometimes you just fall out of love. There is no shame in this. Do what
your heart tells you to do. Some relationships are weird combinations of all of
the above. They are tumultuous. There is much pain and much pleasure. Perhaps
tennis was like that for Agassi.
But to become a master at anything there has to be loveso there will inevi-
tably be much pain. And it cant be avoided. Nobody has avoided it.
If something is too painful, then its not the worst thing in the world to give
up. I dont like dental surgery. Its too much pain for me. So my teeth are messed
up a bit. I give up on having perfect teeth.
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Applying Positive Psychol o gy
One reason most people in the world dont get really good at anything is
because they have no talent for anything that anyone cares about. Another reason
is they dont want to put in the work. This is understandable. Often its better to be
social and have friends and strong family relationships and love people.
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When you have a career, theres this idea that you will go from one success to
the next. You start in the cubicle, then you get an office, then a corner office, then
you move horizontally into a CEO position at another company, and so on. You
might have some failures along the way but they wont be big failures. But when it
comes to mastery, there are always big failures.
The day before poker champ Ylon Schwartz left for Las Vegas in 2008where
he won over $3 millionI was with him, providing support for him in a court
case. He had a court-appointed attorney because he was dead broke and in debt.
He asked me that day, I have to get on a plane for Las Vegas tomorrow and when
I get back I could go to jail. How am I going to get through this? I didnt have an
answer for him other than the usual clichs. But he got on that plane. And every
day he went higher and higher in chips. And he won $3.7 million in that tournament and hasnt looked back.
When I was at my worst, the first thing I had to do was convince myself that
I could succeed again. Then, and only then, could I take the first step backthe
tiniest step that would release me from my fears and anxieties and allow me to
move forward, if not to mastery, then at least to success.
As Robert Greene points out in his book, Napoleon got banished to Elba,
where he supposedly said his famous palindrome (somehow speaking English for
the first and only time in his life) Able was I ere I saw Elba
Every master has his Elba. Banished to an island where the life you once knew
no longer exists and it seems like there is no way to escape. Napoleon escaped
because he was the best in the world at what he did. Because he had the psychology, or perhaps the blind spot, to not recognize that this was it, his final destination. The story of how he came back to power offers a great study in psychology
and exemplifies the skills required of a master.
Bobby Fischer spent much of his life in borderline schizophrenic agony when
he couldnt deal with his losses. Hed disappear for years at a time but then come
back stronger than ever.
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How do you build that psychology? I dont know. Its a combination of a few
things, including:
E g o. Real belief that you can be the best, against all possible rational evidence to the contrary, against everyone trashing you simultaneously.
Which leads us to
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Having P ersistance
Add up all of the above and you get persistence. Persistence creates luck.
Theres no answer. Thats why its called persistence. Because no matter where
you are, there you are, doing what you always did. Not letting any of the above
stop you. Using all of the above in your mastery arsenal to propel you to higher
successes (if sometimes also deeper failures) and then even higher successes. Its
painful and brutal and no fun and nobody will ever understand why. And when
you achieve success people will act as if its the most natural thing in the world to
have happened to you.
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And you try to explain, No, there was this one time . . . but they dont want
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to hear it. They want to know what their next move should be so they can be
where you are. Theres no next move. Theres only your next move.
So you can only do this:
Ask, What can I do right now to move forward, in this second? Having a
goal in the distant future is almost a damnation of this moment in time. An insult.
We cant predict the future. And the history of mastery shows that nobody was
able to predict which goals would work and which wouldnt. Only this moment
matters. Health-wise: physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Can you
move forward today in each area? Then you will attract mastery.
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The G o od News
You dont have to be the master of the world. You dont have to do any of the
above. Very few people do. And many of them experienced much hardship and
pain along the way. And will continue to experience that hardship.
But society has no clue about what real mastery is. Freud has said that our two
goals in life are human connection and achievement. But often its a reasonable
goal to overcome these evolutionary inclinations. To be happy with your loved
ones. To be satisfied for every gift in your life, for every moment, not rushing to
the next moment of mastery. True mastery can be found right here, right now.
Choosing yourself right now in how you treat yourself, how you treat the
people around you, how you treat your efforts and your loves. Nothing is more
important than this. Nothing compounds into greater happiness in life than this.
Because when you rush to get to a mythical there, one day you will arrive and
realize you missed all of the pleasures and mysteries along the way.
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here were many times over many years where the only thing I was abundant in was excuses. I was too ugly to meet a beautiful woman. I didnt
have any money so couldnt start a business. And even if I started one, I
didnt have an office, or clients, and I was too shy to cold-call clients.
I didnt have talent. Nobody was going to hire me. I didnt have the right
equipment.
because I was afraid people would heckle me. I was often afraid to write blog
posts, because what would people think of my ideas?
between what I have now and what I would like. And that gap is all of your
excuses. All it takes to close the gap is to be creative and work your way through
the excuses. I repeat: this is all it takes.
Following are some of the types of excuses that Ive used in the past and still
havent quite completely let go of. You should make your own list, because no
one knows your excuses better than you do. In this way, excuses are the map to
success and fulfillment. Its fun to take a blank piece of paper and draw out the
map. Label the roads, mountains, buildings, rivers, obstacles, and destinations.
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I D ont Have E nough Money
When I started my first business, called Reset, (we made websites for en-
tertainment companies) I had no money in the bank at all. And I had a very
low salary at HBO. Oh, and I had a full-time job. It was brutal. I had to get very
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creative about finding computers to use and reaching out to friends and family
to tell them what my skill set was and what sorts of clients would be great for me
(Answer: anyone who needed anything, I would help for a fee). So my solution
was to make sure everyone knew what my skills were and why they were needed.
Then I carved out time (weekends, nights, days when I could hide) to do the work
for clients until I was ready to jump to being a full-time entrepreneur (by that
point, my company was up to having about ten employees).
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I D ont Have The E quipment
A friend and I recently spoke about people doing YouTube videos who are
making a living from all the views and advertising they generate. He claimed,
Id do it but I dont have the right camera. I said to him, You want to borrow
my phone? Because any phone in the world has a camera a thousand times better
than what you need for YouTube. I asked him what else was getting in the way.
Theres always a good reason and the real reason, I told him. You just gave me
a bullshit good reason. What do you think the real reason is? And he thought
about it and told me. Laziness. I get that. Im lazy also. So take your phone
camera. And practice executing. Pick an easy video to do. Go to the Forty-Second
Street subway and videotape the guys playing underground there and upload it.
Just get into the rhythm of making a video and uploading it. Then, write down
ideas every day about more and more fun videos you can do. Its a quantity game.
Will he do it? I dont know. We love our excuses. They are just as much our
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I D ont Have The Time
Lets say you are a single mother with three kids and a full-time job. You might
think you dont have time to write Harry Potter. But you give it a try anyway.
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Its really harsh, but you find the time. You stop watching TV. Or skip a meal.
(Nobody in America will ever starve by skipping a meal. I will put my medical
seal of approval on that statement.) The magic of excuses is that there is always a
way to be creative around them. We all have obstacles. You can view the obstacle
as an opportunity to grow or as a reason to stop. You get to choose.
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Im Not G o od E nough
When I had New York Observer sex columnist Jasmine Lobe on my podcast,
we talked about Kamal Ravikants approach when he was sick. He would look in
the mirror and say I love myself over and over again. He might not have believed it at first. But repeating it, as he put it so eloquently in his book, rewired
his brain.
I told Jasmine I would do the same (and here is my excuse), but I hate
looking at myself in the mirror. She said, Why dont you look in the mirror and
repeat, I am handsome until your brain is rewired. I havent done it yet. But
maybe one day I will.
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I D ont Have a D egree
I get e-mails every day. Id like to work at Google but I dont have degree. Or,
And its not just degrees. I get e-mails from people who think they need yoga
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to be that a stranger knew he could cooperate with you if you had that stupid
piece of paper. But now there are many ways you can show you can deliver value
without that paper. Come up with ten ideas on how you can escape the trap of the
degree and demonstrate you still have value. Ideas for the company you want to
work for, or the person you want to work with. Or just go get a camera and start
making movies without a film degree.
When actor Andy Samberg was starting at Saturday Night Live he didnt just
huddle in the writers room with everyone else and try to come up with jokes.
There was too much competition! Instead, he took a camera and with his buddies
Jorm and Akiva went out and shot Lazy Sunday, which was the first YouTube
video to get over 100 million views and became his first SNL digital short. He
didnt wait to rise through the ranks and hopefully get a joke or a sketch produced. He went out and produced it himself.
Before Macklemores Thrift Shop got a billion views on YouTube, the rapper
turned down every record label. He realized he didnt need the validation they
have provided to generations of artists. The distribution is there to reach the
world no matter what your field is. You validate yourself now through your work.
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Im Not in The R ight L o cation
closer to the publishing industry. Some people move to Silicon Valley to get
funding for their start-up. I once had a friend who felt she needed to live in Paris
before she could paint. I know many people who think they need to own a home
before they can really have roots and start creating.
All of these are good reasons, but they are not the real reasons. What affects
whether people will get to see your work is not where you live but if you actually
do the work. When I built stockpickr.com, I spent less than five thousand dollars
and virtually never left my basement, eighty miles north of NYC. Oh, I was afraid
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all the time. It was the tenth website I had tried to launch, and the prior nine had
failed. I had no idea if it would be good or bad. It kept breaking down (I couldnt
afford good programmers), one employee working on it quit (because I couldnt
pay him), and I realized too late that it had three or four decent competitors. But
eventually it took off and in the second month had almost a million visitors and
then kept growing until I sold it to TheStreet just five months later.
It didnt make a difference where I did it, because I loved doing it. I wanted to
create what would be the ideal site for someone like me interested in finance. So it
worked. No matter that I was in a dark basement the entire time with no money.
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I D ont Have The R ight Net work
called a bank and asked them if I could do their website. My only in: I said I
had a checking account there. They laughed and told me to call them back in
a few years.
connections and then invite them all out to open-bar parties where they could
network.
You want to be that guy. We covered some of this in the chapter on network-
Building a network from scratch requires three to four hours a day of work.
What if you have a job? Well, build your network at work. Ask to lunch the assistants of people in different divisions. Come up with ideas for the heads of different divisions. Do one thing a day to help someone in your work group that
you didnt have to reach out to. Networks build exponentially and not linearly.
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overcome this excuse you are going to meet many amazing friends whom you
will know and love throughout your career. I know this because my network has
changed 100 percent in the past five years, starting from total scratch. Every day I
bow down to how powerful this one excuse was to motivate me into making such
great and wonderful new friends.
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My Idea is To o C razy
When he was about fifty years old (maybe even older), Rodney Dangerfield
was an aluminum siding salesman. But he wanted to return to his old career as
a stand-up comedian. It was crazy for him to think he could be a success. I dont
know what was going through his head. But whatever it was, he did the smart
thing. He opened up his own comedy club. Dangerfields. It became the most
popular comedy club in NYC, and many famous comediansincluding people
like Jim Carreygot their start there. Who would deny Dangerfield if he wanted
to go on stage there? He developed his craft more and more until he was basically
the most obscene movie star ever.
A. J. Jacobs wants to create the worlds largest family reunion. Over 4,000
people. Thats crazy! But every day he takes tiny steps closer to his goal. (For one
thing, we found out through DNA testing that we are cousins, as are his wife and
I!). He also found a venue. A publisher is going to publish a book about it. Hes
getting sponsors. Every day, there are new answers to the Thats crazy! excuse.
Dr. Wayne W. Dyer had a tenure track position at a college. He was in his
late thirties. He was set for life. But he quit, loaded up the back of his car with
copies of a self-help book hed published, and drove across the country leaving his
books at every bookstore. Everyone he knew thought he was crazy. He sold over
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Many things might be too crazy. But Ive been in business on my own for
twenty years now. I have helped over three hundred companies get financed. Ive
started and sold many companies (and gone broke many too many times).
I have seen the craziest things happen. People rise from unbelievably bleak
and desperate ashes to be the one flower in a graveyard to blossom. The sun
is always there. But the flower has to be ready to blossom. Thats crazy is a
roadmap. Start with that phrase and circle it. Then draw all the roads that lead
out from that spot. They dont all have to end up at the place you expect. Have fun
with it. Find different roads and see where they lead.
Some will end up in Oz. But some will end up in even more magical places
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I D ont Have Talent
Neither did Mick Jagger. He had a weird voice and couldnt play an instru-
ment. But he loved the blues and wanted to put his spin on it with the help of
Keith Richards and others. And he worked it. It turned out he had this weird sort
of charisma that kept the fans coming back.
Jagger never wouldve found that out if he hadnt played every night at
the seedy underground clubs where he would bang out his horrible music. He
wouldve finished his degree at the London School of Economics and become a
respectable accountant somewhere. Instead, hes Mick Jagger.
Its widely agreed that the best chess player ever, Bobby Fischer, didnt have
that much talent. He was above average but maybe not world class. He had to
figure out his own particular roadmap to success. So he did three things:
1. He st u died ga mes from th e 1 800s and came up with improvements to each one. This way, when people played him and found them138
James Altucher
selves in positions he recognized from his studies, he would know the best
moves to make and they wouldnt.
2. He l e arn ed Rus sia n so he could read the Russian chess magazines
to learn the latest openings that none of his US opponents knew.
3. He pl aye d speed ch es s every day with his teacher, strong master
Jack Collins.
Then he came out of nowhere (he had literally disappeared from the scene)
and became the youngest US champion ever. Then the strongest player ever.
Remember to always tune your inner ear so you can listen for (and separate
from each other) both the good reason and the real reason when anyone (including yourself) gives you an excuse. Most people dont tune their ear this way.
They believe their own excuses because its easier to do so. Because it gives them
permission not to do something they love. I understand that, too. I give myself
permission every day to miss out on some opportunities because I choose others.
Thats why on your roadmap of excuses, some excuses dont have many roads
coming out of them. They dont need an extra traffic circle or bridge because their
port is not in use much.
I know my children will have excuses as they climb each rung on the ladders
o how on earth are you going to start all of this? Get all of these ideas out
there? Get all of these people together? Youre probably thinking, man, I
need to make a to-do list.
But to-do lists dont work. To-do lists kill people. They will make you so
In 2003, I was just beginning a new career. I had lots of things to do every day.
I was writing a few articles a day. I was day trading. I was selling a business. I was
thinking of other businesses to start. And my dad had a stroke and died.
Well, it didnt happen that fast. The last time I had spoken to my dad I had
hung up on him. He called back but I wouldnt pick up. He wrote every few
months but I didnt respond. Then he had a stroke. Then he never spoke or moved
again (he blinked) and then he died two years later. I would visit the hospital once
a week and just sit there because I felt obligated to. I would turn on CNBC. Everything smelled bad. Id feel sick to my stomach. Brain-dead dad in front of me,
whom I hadnt spoken to when I could have, even though we had been close all
my life. And I was losing money every second and maybe going broke. Again.
All of this is to say, I had so much to do that I tried keeping a to-do list to
Youve likely heard the mantra that one must have goals. I dont live by goals. I
dont have the goal, do this by X date. I have a theme that I want to have a high
quality of life until the day I die.
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To-do lists are very goal oriented. They are the exact opposite of achieving
themes. Here are the simple reasons why I never use a to-do list.
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They C ause Stress
For me (maybe not for you), the reason these items made the list is because I will
feel stress until they are done. Items like respond to Jimmy the Tools e-mail.
Until the moment I hit send on an e-mail to Jimmy the Tool I will feel. deep
down, I have to write an e-mail to Jimmy the Tool and a tinge of anxiety. Multiply that by twenty and thats real stress.
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They D ont Highlight Imp ortance
The reason I dont make a to-do list is because I know if I stick to my general
themes of the day (be creative, be healthy, less stress, do things I love) I will naturally do the things that are important to me.
For instance, writing this book is important to me. Going to my kids plays is
the worst thing in existence (err, I mean, they are very important to me and I will
be there). I know that if I live a healthy and creative life I will automatically always
do the next thing thats important to me.
Someone could say, Well what if you have a programmer job or some job
Well, I do feel I have a career like that. So try it. Create a theme of how you
want to live your life. And then do the next thing thats important to you. It might
be to take a nap. But I doubt it will be to watch the Kardashians.
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During the day I often end up doing things that are important that I would
never have guessed were important to me. Like maybe getting a flower for
Claudia. This would never appear on my to-do list but it might suddenly become
important to me (if I accidentally spill coffee on her dress, for instance).
If I had a to-do list I might get even more stressed not getting to it. The to-do
list becomes my master and I become the slave. One of my themes is less slavery
in my life.
Id rather do the things that I realize are important that moment rather than
some random BS I wrote down over a cup of coffee at six in the morning.
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They C ause D isapp ointment
Youre never going to do all the things on your to-do list. Most people put too
much down on the to-do list. I bet most people only get done 50 percent of the
things on their to-do lists.
Not only that, but people keep daily, weekly, yearly (i.e., New Years resolu-
Thats a lot of things to do! When do you relax and enjoy life? Youre going to
When you die are you going to say, Damn, I forgot to e-mail Jimmy the
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D elegate
Try this: make your usual to-do list and then dont do anything on it. Its like
a to-dont list.
Did the universe end? Now see how many of the things on your list you can
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For instance, you can call Jimmy the Tool next week when things are a little
less hectic. Or, heck, never call him again! Who cares about him?
Things are never less hectic! you might say. Thats because you have too
many to-do lists. Please trust me and try this. Things will get less hectic.
Im not saying do nothing. Im saying if you make themes of your life, you will
always do what is important to you, your family, your friends, and so on. Themes
ripple out to the farthest shores. To-do lists keep you anchored to the ocean floor.
Also, your to-dont lists will point you in directions where you can delegate
instead of do.
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Themes are Bet ter
Im not saying do nothing. Try making a themes list instead. This way, you will
always do what is important to you, your family, your friends, and so on. To-do
lists keep you anchored to the ocean floor. Themes ripple out to the farthest
shores. Also, your themes list will point you in directions where you can delegate
instead of do.
I like to check the box on being creative every day. And on the Daily Prac-
tice I advocate in my books and blog: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual
health. Thats all. Those are my themes.
All that means (at a minimum) is that I like to sleep well, eat well, take a walk,
be around people I enjoy, be creative every day, and be grateful every day. Then I
know if I do that today, life will be a little better tomorrow.
So,
Make a themes list. When you have themes, you build unbelievable intuition
on what is the next thing you should be doing in your life. Youre no longer
trapped by a long list of tiny inconsequential things you feel you have to do.
The benefit of the I Did It! list is as follows: I did it! And it felt great!
Accomplishment releases all kinds of chemicals in the brain that then make
you feel better. Very addictive chemicals. Dopamine, endorphins, blah, blah. Im
not trying to be a productivity expert here, since Im not very productive by traditional measures. I dont respond to e-mails very well and I dont use my phone
or do all the things that people might expect me to do.
But I am writing several books, running two podcasts, and preparing for a
third. And I also write every day. I love every minute of it. Even though I have to
go to my kids performances, Ill play backgammon on the iPad in the back of the
room when its not the kids turn to speak or sing. I dont know if that makes me a
good dad or bad dad.
night. Or chess. And I suspect he sometimes would let me win when I would
throw all the pieces on the floor in disgust. Or throw my paddle at him. Even
when I was thirty-five years old.
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Part 2
MAKING MONEY
IN THE TWENTYFIRST CENTURY
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ts very special to me that you are reading this book. As you read this
book, Im reading it, too. Im always rereading it, wondering what people
think about different sections, concerned about whether Im getting my
message across.
The odds are, though, that if youve made it this far, then you want to keep
going. Thats good. This chapter is important, because its going to highlight some
of the big demographic trends that are sweeping across the twenty-first century.
The last chapter gave you direction on how to develop habits and think about
this new economy were living in now. This chapter is going to get a little more
specific, starting with identifying where a lot of those changes are taking place.
Trends are an interesting metaphysical topic for several reasons. For one
thing, I strongly believe the key to success is to be calm today, since thats the
best predictor of a successful day tomorrow. But that doesnt mean you stand on
the edge of the beach when a hurricane is coming. You still have to do right now
whatever it takes to ensure your survival, to make the moves that will help you
and your family survive, and maybe even thrive for tomorrow.
The trends that are coming are that hurricane. When you notice a trend, you
It might indicate what businesses to start. And for every one trend there are
many different businesses you can start.
If its a negative trend, it might suggest how you can position your family to
survive.
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It gives you ideas that may morph into revenue streams that nobody has ever
thought of before.
I will tell you that the way I make money is through the last item listed. I
think of ideas for other companies who call me, and my business is to them help
them implement those ideas on their own and become massive successes.
If you combine the ideas that trends give birth to with an understanding of demographic trends, there are trillions of dollars waiting to made.
Think about it: this entire book is about a trend, the end of corporatist
America or the corporatist world where a handful of institutions and the people
that ride them like wild horses are losing the power to make choices for you.
Choices regarding what you make, what you eat, where you live, where you
educate yourself, whom you marry, what you do to make money, what you do to
find peace and happiness. And we know by now that that trend is ending for the
reasons we discussed as early as the first chapter in this book.
The way you deal with end of that trend is by developing the skills of a suc-
A trend is a reflection that some way of life is ending and another way of life
is beginning. For instance, Henry Ford couldve said that the era of transportation
by horse was ending, while that of the automobile was dawning.
No matter what the trend, a group of people will gather and complain. When
Henry Ford was talking about his big trend, many people were happy, but then
later many people were sad. For one thing, there was horse poo all over the street
all the time. It was the end of the era of horse poo in the street. But now because
we have to get to work and we live farther out in the suburbs, we need a lot of fuel
that we dig out of the earth and then do something to and then spit into the air
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to get to work. People complain about that. Any time there is change, people will
complain, and resist. Some people will always insist that the old way was better.
But you and I know better.
Most of the trends Ill discuss are based on two important ideas:
1. All t hin gs end , and the better we prepare for that end, the more our
legacies will just be beginning.
2. In n ovat ion ta kes pl ace nonstop. Humans didnt innovate
for 2 million years, and then suddenly, with the arrival of the printing press,
we began to innovate at faster and faster rates. Every year the level of innovation is higher than that of the year before.
So if you want to buffer yourself against everything you ever worry about, best to
do so focusing on a trend that relates to one of the above two ideas.
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151
andsurprisekept going. They kept playing tennis. They kept skydiving. And
because of the nature of the economy, many of them kept working. But here are a
few things that happen to lots and lots of people when they get older:
They look for cosmetic treatments to take care of the veins on their legs, or
now-splotchy tattoos they had etched painfully into their skin years earlier that
they now regret. They might look for new spouses after old ones get sick or die.
Their children are no longer massive financial burdens on them, so they can
finally spend some money on travel. Or a fiftieth or sixtieth anniversary. Or an
eightieth-birthday party.
Another common but unfortunate event that occurs as we age is that a lot of
us suffer from physical ailments and diseases like cancer. Everyone in the world
has cancer cells in their body. You do and I do. Sometimes those cells aggregate
together in such ways that it hurts us and we go see a doctor. The doctor says, Oh
my god, you have ten months to live.
I am constantly on the lookout for new ways to diagnose cancer. The current-
ly most popular way is going to be replaced just as travel by horse was replaced
by cars. Doctors do something called a biopsy, a surgery where they take some of
your skin and blood, send it to a lab, and then call you while you anxiously await
their call, and tell you the results. This is the old school approach.
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Every day, I look for companies that are able to diagnose cancer faster and
more efficiently than this old method. Tests are taking place at all the largest
cancer research facilities in the world for testing cancer via your stools, your
urine, and your DNA. I keep track of all of these tests. I go out and visit the facilities. I get doctors to explain the science to me. There are a few reasons for this.
First of all, if I ever get cancer I want to know it right away.
When Steve Jobs first got cancer he decided to use alternative approaches to
treat his cancer. I have nothing against alternative approaches. Some work and
some dont. In his case, they did not work. When he finally got tested again, ten
months later, he was in a much worse, more advanced stage of a dreadful sort of
cancer, pancreatic cancer.
for a painful surgery? He wouldve known very quickly if the alternative treatments were working. With the tests going on now, I am sure Steve Jobs would
still be alive.
How can you take advantage of this trend? For one thing, you can buy stocks
of companies that are involved in these new technologies. This is not a stock recommendation book so I will leave the details for another time. You can write
a newsletter about the latest technologies. There is a market closing in on 100
million people that would love to read about these technologies. You can use the
technologies to perhaps create other companies to help people be aware of them.
In 1999, nobody knew how to value Internet companies. It was very clear to
everyone that the Internet was going to be big. And everyone was right. Amazon
and Apple have gone straight up in revenues since 1999. So have eBay and Priceline. For a while there was a bubble in fascination, in IPOs, about the Internet.
But now Facebook has a billion customers and Twitter has 400 million users and
everyone buys books and other products on amazon.com. The dream came true.
But because we didnt know how to value these companies, a strange thing
happened on the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street. In a little building on that
corner, the New York Stock Exchange, the prices of these companies went straight
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through the roof. When society as a whole doesnt know how to value something,
the prices will either stay down near zero or will go up near infinity, only eventually settling down to their rightful places when the companies start bringing in
earnings and revenues. Now we know for sure that the Internet dream is not a
fantasy and we can value Internet companies more accurately.
In the same way, today nobody knows how to value a biotech company. As I
write this, both good and bad biotech companies are being valued near zero. But
the good ones will break out eventually and will ride parabolic curves toward
values near infinity, just as with any bubble that may take years to burst.
panies that diagnose cancer. I invest in companies that I think can diagnose Alzheimers. I dont like to invest in the cures but I like to invest in the diagnostics. I
stay away from the cures because the FDA charges you $2 billion to test your cure
and then they still might reject you, which doesnt seem very fair. Given our aging
population, the FDA does much more harm than good now. But I do look into
more natural causes for curing things. Its important to be aware that the FDA and
the pharmaceutical industries have a vested interest in charging some of us tens
of thousands a year for a medicine, when we could be seeking more natural cures
at a fraction of the cost. So billions have been spent to suppress useful information about many diseases.
I keep track of all of it. It probably would make a good newsletter if someone
Tre n d # 2 : He a lt h care
his is a subtrend of Trend #1 as people age and get sick. But it deserves its
own section.
Heres a problem: when I switch from one doctor to another, theres no easy
way for the new doctor to access all of my health records. There are technological
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But some companies out there are figuring out ways to overcome these issues.
Software that helps human resources deal with all the new changes in healthcare
laws will be a huge trend.
billion in revenues, Ive become the ultimate HR department. I see the trends that
people are innovating in this space. Its an enormous space and the companies
that get it right will make billions.
Tre n d # 3 : O b se rvati on
ou are being watched. And the people who are watching you are getting
better at it. Theres direct surveillance and indirect surveillance. When you
make a purchase or a phone call, indirect surveillance hones in on certain patterns and either labels you as a terrorist or not. They dont know or ask who you
are until they need to.
Direct surveillance involves the satellites that are constantly taking photos
of your street and sending them to the government. There are companies that do
this. When you surf a website about lingerie and then go to the New York Times
op-ed website, what do you see? An ad for Victorias Secret on the right. This is
called retargeting. There are companies that look at what you do and then retarget the ads that follow you around the Internet.
When you walk on a street in New York City there are companies that not only
look at you the way a camera would, but also look at what you do and analyze it. If
you are carrying a backpack, and then you put the backpack down in the middle
of the street and walk away, theres a company that rings a little bell somewhere
and police are alerted.
Youre being watched all the time. And its only going to get worse/better,
depending on how you view it. Fortunately, there are many ways you can take
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advantage of this trend: you can write a newsletter about the technologies. You
can make your own company involved in the observation industry (a term I
had never heard until recently but an industry valued at over $100 billion). You
can buy one or some of the many stocks that keep getting bigger each year. You
can work for one of these technologies. You can be a banker or an investor in
these technologies, both in the public and the private space. For each trend Ive
mentioned Ive done deals in the industries and Ive invested in the industries,
and although I havent started a company in any of these industries, Ive helped
the people who have.
R
Tre nd # 4 : Th e Te m p Work f orce
espite what a lot of people think, trends are neither inherently good nor
bad. They are things that are happening to tens of millions of people. Being
One trend thats taking place right now is that many people are getting fired
Bu yin g u p sto cks of employment firms that are getting more and
more technologically savvy about helping to place employees, deal with
healthcare issues, etc.
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an example of one of these companies. Uber allows you to see what cabs are near
you so you can hail one electronically. You press a button and your car shows up.
This allows people who are out of work, but who have a nice car, to sign up for
Uber and make some money. Uber will slowly become a way for a workforce to
connect with the people who need it. Its a logistics and workforce software rather
than a car-hailing service. And people are embracing it: Uber gave more car rides
in San Francisco in October, 2014 then all cab rides combined. Times three.
AirBnB is another example. This website allows people with extra rooms in
their home to post the availability online for people looking in that particular
place at that particular time. These extra rooms essentially become hotel rooms
for people looking for accommodations (except theyre usually a lot cheaper).
AirBnB has more rooms available in New York than all the hotels combined.
Uber and AirBnB are hard to invest in right now because they are private. But
figuring out how to piggyback on, or use, their modelwhich is becoming widely
known as the sharing economywill provide ways for people to make money.
In essence, people are taking what they already havehomes, cars, timeand
using these assets to create wealth.
Or, we can take it one step back: creating an information product that studies
this trend and gives suggestions on how to make money is another way to generate income.
Tre n d # 5 : R ob oti cs
n 1988 I went to a lecture given by MIT professor Rodney Brooks. I was neck
deep in studying the technology behind current-day robotics at the time. He
said that robots dont have to start out smart. They can figure out lots of small
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things along the wayjust like humans, he said. He showed an example of a small
robot that would bump into a wall a few times, then realize that a wall was there,
and turn around and go a different direction. That robot, more than a quarter
century later, is now called the Roomba and vacuums your room. Its also called
many other things, in many industries, and has enhanced many technologies.
Studying this trend will make you money.
We now fight our wars with robots. We perform surgeries with robots. Robots
listen to your phone calls. What do robots need? They are hungry for technology, for more powerful batteries. Every battery uses lithium. Were going to go
through a worldwide lithium shortage (is this a trend, or a subtrend? I dont know,
but its there). They are going to use more powerful cameras. They are going to
use more powerful sensors. They are going to use more powerful techniques to
communicate and then store what they learn. What they need changes every day
because they are getting more and more powerful.
Tre n d # 6 : C h e mi stry
lcoa has made aluminum the same way since the late 19th century. Their
profits are razor thin because everyone knows the aluminum manufactur-
ing process and anyone can supply the appropriate chemicals and metals at just
the right price.
However, this is going to change and someone is going to find a new way to
make aluminum. They might discover new elements to use and new processes
to smelt. Companies that hoard those elements or develop those new processes
will benefit in a big way. Chemistry is going to be much more influential in the
coming ten to twenty years than information technology.
Keep track of the changes in how people are innovating in chemistry and
suddenly you will see whats happening in alternative energy, battery storage, isolation of valuable chemical isotopes (like pure oxygen, for instance), etc. How
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do you make money on this? Read about it, keep an eye on the companies and
markets involved, and you will see the right moment to place your bets. Just like
the biotech markets, the chemistry space is difficult to value but the markets are
huge, even in the trillions.
I couldve called this trend alternative energy but that would be weak. Al-
ternative energy comes and goes. First theres solar, then theres wind, then were
back to solar, and so on. But every change that finds its way back into alternative
energy stocks starts off in a chemistry lab. I like to be where the technology is
happening, as close to the laboratory as possible, in order to understand where
to invest or where to build. Does this mean I need to be a chemist? Not at all. I
barely know what the periodic table is. But I am able to read the latest reports and
try to figure out how they are going to be applied. Understanding trends is not a
day traders game. Its the long game. But since trends are so hard to value at the
beginning, there are enormous profits to be made.
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Tre nd # 7 : Fi na n c ia l Tech nol o gy
running late. It actually made the podcast more interesting to me, because it gave
me the perfect starting question: What were you doing during the past hour?
Thiels answer: We were looking at new innovations in financial technology.
There are many things happening in the financial technology world. For
starters, the rise of the cashless economy. What Thiel started when he cofounded
PayPal is ongoing. Can I go to a hotel, pick up my key at a kiosk, go to my room,
stay overnight, and then walk out, without having to pay or deal with a line and
tips and a desk clerk and so on? Yes, I can. And this is only one example of the
sort of thing that will begin to happen in every service industry.
The global economy has always been subject to policies that are restrictive of
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money exchange. Lets say I buy an item from you and you are in China (something that can easily happen in a global economy). I have to send you a wire.
This can turn into a huge hassle. First there are fees at my bank. Then there are
fees at the local Federal Reserve. Then there are fees at your countrys central
bank. Then there are international wire fees. Then there are fees down the chain
at the central bank in China and the local bank there. Not to mention the taxes
every step of the way. What do all of these fees add up to? Inflation. The global
economy creates layers and layers of fees that are hidden inside almost every
transaction that you make now.
Of course, this was the old way. Fortunately for us, there are now forces at
work to eliminate that. The software-based online payment system bitcoin is one
such force.
I dont know whether bitcoin will work or if people will embrace this form of
money exchange. But I keep track of it and I keep track of the companies that are
innovating on top of it. I even released Choose Yourself! a month early last year as
a bitcoin-only book.
Someone wrote an article saying that Choose Yourself! was the best-selling
book ever on bitcoin. CNBC had me on and asked, Did you just do this as a marketing gimmick? and I said, Well, Im on national TV right now, arent I? Guess
what domain name belonged to most of the people who bought the book using
bitcoin: amazon.com. So whether or not bitcoin is the winner, I have no idea. But
someone will win, and many people are looking at ways to do this.
But heres something that will never go away: people who live paycheck to
paycheck, a rising phenomenon, often need money the day or days before their
check arrives. What do they do? They go to a payday loan company that might
charge them one dollar for a hundred-dollar check even though their paycheck
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may be there tomorrow. Thats 365 percent interest. A payday lender charges
much higher interest rates than the banks. Sometimes this is regulated, sometimes it isnt. Its a great business to be in but theres one problem. Many people
who borrow money are scamming the lender. Theres no check coming. This is
not a frequent problem but its a problem in the industry and keeps margins low.
What if you can solve this problem? For instance, PayPal used to use soft-
ware to identify which potential customers were engaging in fraudulent transactions. Once they built this software, their margins went way up. I have no
idea what Peter Thiel was talking about the day of the podcast when he said hed
been looking at innovations in financial technology, but perhaps this was kind
of software was one idea. Keeping track of the changes in this space will make
readers a lot of money.
C on c lu si on
he purpose of this chapter on trends is not to predict the future. Nobody
can do that. Its like when Swine Flu killed one person and then the UN an-
nounced that 200 million people around the world will die of Swine Flu in 2008.
Nobody died of Swine Flu in 2008. But there was a stock with the symbol HOGS
that fell 20% that day. Thats an opportunity to buy. Because most predictions are
wrong, so many irrational things happen when a trusted source makes an outrageous prediction.
Think of each trend like a rainstorm. Its coming down and you cant block
it. But you can open up an umbrella and be safe. There are many things that
can fit under a big umbrella. The bigger the trend, the bigger the umbrella you
can have. Thinking of each trend and the things that fit under those umbrellas:
stocks, new businesses, new information products, new ways to live your life,
is going to be an important part of how to live a Choose Yourself lifestyle.
Whats been happening since Choose Yourself came out is that people are
forming meetups in their cities to discuss not only how they are making use
of the Daily Practice that lays the foundation of how to live a healthy Choose
Yourself lifestyle, but also to share their thoughts and entrepreneurial ideas
around these trends, and money is being made.
I discuss how to operate a Choose Yourself meetup in a later chapter and Ill
set up ways online at jamesaltucher.com so people can share more about their
meetups but Im not involved at all in them. Its just like-minded people getting
together to help each other improve their lives. We can feed ourselves but ultimately life is better when we feed each other. Its my hope that the purpose of this
chapter and others will point people in a better direction to live their lives.
Ive made use of each one of the above trends to make my life better. For
instance, when I saw the trend in employment, I went on the board of an employment agency, theyve been implementing my ideas, and everyone makes money.
When I saw the trend and people getting older, I started investing in startups
that diagnose cancer and some of these startups have now gone public. Once you
build the foundation of the Daily Practice, then develop the skills and habits described in this book, and then build or participate in a community of like-minded
people, you will also be able to benefit from the trends that are affecting your and
everyone elses lives.
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163
ack in late 2006, I had to shut down my fund. People who had invested in
mewho trusted me to, in turn, invest in what I thought were the best
hedge fundswere furious at me. I had been analyzing probably close to
a thousand funds to find what I felt were the best ones. I had been up almost every
month for my investors. I was doing a decent job raising money. I had a business.
were making money. When I cant understand something and nobody can explain
it to me, then I have nightmaresparticularly when a lot of money is on the line.
So I pulled about $70 million out of the funds I was invested in and returned it to
my investors. They were very upset even though they had all made money. None
of them wanted me to take fees while I was winding down the fund.
In every business I had ever started, even ones that had totally failed, I had
kept good relations with the investors. Except for this one. Not a single relationship survived, even though I had made money for everyone. When things are
confusing, when you cant understand how or why or whether or not you should
be making money, its time to switch focus. In 1998 when kids in high school were
learning how to make websites, I sold my website design business for $15 million.
Two years later almost all website design businesses were out of business.
So now, in 2006, no matter how hard I tried to figure it out, it seemed like the
I specd out a website I wanted to make: a financial site that had no news
James Altucher
specd, I mean I wrote down what all the buttons on the front page would do and
what other content would appear on the front page. I completely defined the next
five layers of the site and what buttons and actions and content would occur on
each page.
Once I had the specs, I went to a firm in India and asked them to design five
pages of the website. Just the design. No code. This cost me five hundred dollars
I showed those pages to a potential distribution partner (thestreet.com) and
worked out a deal where they would help me get traffic and would place ads in
exchange for 50 percent ownership. They had a billion page views a year, so I said,
Yes! (Actually, thats not quite true. I said, I was thinking 3 percent ownership
for them, and they said, No, 50 percent, and then I said, Yes!)
I paid the Indian firm to finish the site, which cost $2,000. Then I came up
with more ideas for the site and more ideas and more ideas, and although we
did a soft launch at version 1.0, we did a hard launch at version 5.0 about five
months later.
I got my friends to use the site. For a while, I created over seven hundred fake
users and manually entered in probably over 10,000 pieces of data onto the site
just to make it useful right away. This taught me an important lesson that I now
pass along to you: dont be afraid to do things manually to get things going on
your site. Even with user-generated content, its OK if you are the first thousand
users if you expect a million users to benefit from it.
I got my friends to write reviews of the site on their popular blogs. I wrote
articles that would link back to the useful content on the site. I guest blogged
on many different websites. This is how you get users back to your site. Its true
for any site: financial sites, bird-watching sites, weight loss sites, sports sites,
whatever.
I created three areas of community on the site: a way for people to message
and have friends, a user-generated forum system, and a Q&A system. The Q&A
system in particular generated 40 percent of the traffic the day after it launched.
At this point, I had ads on every page, a million users a monthand no em165
I couldve used other examples. I couldve used the debit card business I
started. The delivery service I started. The mental health hospital I was involved
in. The billion-revenues business Im on the board of directors of, and the many
other businesses Ive advised and consulted with and invested in. But the lessons
Ive learned are all the same. There are things you have to do when you start a
company, no matter what kind of company it is.
S
Get D own on Your Hands and
Knees and S crub
Even when something is scalable, dont be afraid to get down on your hands
and knees and be the first part of that scaling. Dont expect anonymous users or
computers to do all your initial hard work. No one cares about this venture like
you do. You do all your initial hard work.
S
P rovide Free C ontent on
The Front Page
I had so much free content available it almost obscured the design. But I
wasnt a graphic artist. I was mostly concerned about getting people as much
quality information as possible as quickly as possible, so they would then sign up
for the sites more advanced features. Once I had an e-mail address I had more
opportunities to market to them. Give away as much for free as possible so you
can get that e-mail address.
S
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First we designed pages, and then after we knew we were going to get big
distribution, we made the rest of the site. Then, based on user feedback and more
ideas, we designed four more versions before an official launch. The site changed
drastically from version 1.0 to version 5.0. You save a lot of time and money when
you can learn as you go and use what you know to make better decisions for
your growing business. Remember what I said about to-do lists? They never work
because you really dont know what should go on them when you start a project.
The same goes for your business.
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D iv ersify Your D istribu tion
which I was getting traffic, I also worked out deals to get traffic from AOL, Yahoo,
Forbes, Reuters, and basic advertising. I would post articles there and link back
to my site.
Ultimately I had traffic coming from about 20 different websites. Never let
one company decide your fate. 1000s of businesses have been lost because of this
one mistake.
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D ont Spend Time Worrying Ab ou t
C ompetition
Heres how: I had competition but they were using the build it and they will
come technique. Ninety-five percent of businesses forget that its important for
you to be the first heavy users of your product (back to the first point I made).
Ill be honest: when I first realized I had competition, I cried. I actually called
the developers in India and told them it was all over. They had to cheer me up.
One thing I ultimately learned was that the biggest asset the business had was
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the passion my partner and I had for it. That passion was much higher than the
passion of our competitors, so we ended up creating and implementing the best
ideas. End of competition.
A restaurant is a great example of this. Its initial success doesnt depend just
on how good the food is, but how many of your friends and their friends come
in the door to buy it. Dont be afraid to call everyone in your Rolodex to come on
over and try the food.
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It D oesnt M at ter if You Know Anyone
I certainly didnt. I cold-called Yahoo, AOL, and Forbes to get on their radar.
In fact, I had a negative network. The first guy I called at Yahoo said he knew me.
Oh yeah? I said because I had no idea who he was.
investment.
You would think that would have hurt my chances. But Yahoo became one of
my biggest sources of distribution after that call. And that guy became my biggest
advocate within Yahoo.
The key is to anticipate what the people youre aiming to serve might want,
show them how it will cost them nothing but they will get huge benefit from it,
and then just simply do it. Make it as easy as possible for the other side to say yes
before you ask them.
If you want someone to say yes, show them exactly what yes looks like and
S
C ombine Interests
I had already spent twenty years in the technology business (since the time I
was in college). And I had been in the financial industry for about seven years. So
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I combined interests and made the best financial website. Nobody else was as well
placed in this intersection as I was.
Maybe there isnt one thing you do better than anyone else. But I bet there are
two things youre pretty good at that havent been combined before. Poof! Youre
the one to do it.
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M ake It a Business You Would Use
In the financial industry I was a writer, a day trader, and a hedge fund
manager, and I was probably an expert in all three areas. Expert enough to write
five books on the topic. Which, of course, means nothing but Im going to say
it anyway.
So when I set out to make a website I created the website I would use. One
with no news, but tons of interesting ideas, perspectives, and community. Reading
news never made anyone rich, but it is very common in the hedge fund business
for professional investors to call one another and exchange ideas. Hedge fund
managers are on the phone all day with one another. I made it very simple for
everyone, and not just hedge fund managers, to do that online.
S
ABDAlways Be D eal M aking
Even though I had a 50 percent distribution partner right from the begin-
ning, I was constantly meeting with companies and people to see what extra deals
I could make.
I would come up with ideas about the value I could deliver them and then
I would offer up that value. Maybe they needed a white label version of my site.
Maybe they needed content from my site. Maybe they needed their blog to be
distributed on my site, or maybe they wanted their newsletter sold on my site. I
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did any deal I could do. Until finally I sold the site. But that wasnt even the final
deal. I stuck with it and the site continued to grow.
S
R ealize That Nothing is a Straight L ine
There were constant cases where the code was bad on the site and times when it
would crash if it had too many users at the same time. I thought I was going to
have a heart attack every other week because the site kept crashing.
And some companies were very slow to do deals with me. Some companies
outright rejected me (Google). You cant be bitter or burn bridges. There may
come another day, another company, or all the people at Google might move
to other places where you do business. The key here is to always stay in touch
and provide monthly updates showing how you are improving things. Always be
willing to help people no matter what. Things dont move in a linear way. There
are ups and downs and good days and bad days, as with anything else in life.
S
R ealize That Youll Know When to Give
Up if The Time Ever C omes
I was willing to give up every step of the way if I didnt see some form of traction.
Sometimes that meant more users. Sometimes that meant more profits. Sometimes that meant more reviews. Sometimes, I dont know, I just got more excited.
S
Build C ommunit y By Hand
and In P erson
I traveled around the country holding meet-ups with the most active users so I
could see with my own eyes how the site was helping people. It was exciting to me.
As long as I had that excitement, I knew something was working.
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When the CEO is looking, the cow grows fatter. A business builds fastest when
the CEO is looking at it, because he or she sees a thousand details. The COO sees
a hundred details, the regular employee ten. And details slip through the cracks
when there is nobody looking.
Perseverance is like a fire that needs oxygen. Love is the oxygen for persever-
ance. You can love it. Users can love it. Partners can love it. Investors can love it.
There are a lot of sources of love.
Ultimately, you create value for people and thats how you build the love.
And if you want the world to get better, you write about that love and abun-
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his chapter includes the nuts and bolts, an FAQ on starting a business. If
youre a lawyer, feel free to disagree with me so you can charge someone
your BS fees to give the same advice. If you can think of anything to add,
please go to AskAltucher.com and tell me. I might be missing things. If you want
to argue with me, feel free. I might be wrong on any of the items below.
There are many types of business. Depending on your business, some of these
questions wont apply. All of them come from questions Ive been asked.
The rules are: Im not always going to give explanations. Just read.
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C C orp or S C orp or LLC? C C orp.
Should founders vest? Yes, over a period of four years. The vesting speeds up
on any change of control.
Should I go for venture capital money? First build a product, then get a customer, then get friends and family money (or money from revenues, which is
cheapest of all) and then think about raising money. But only then.
Should I patent my idea? Get customers first. Patent later. Dont talk to lawyers until the last possible moment.
How much equity should I give a partner? Divide things up in equal portions
into these categories: manages the company, raises the money, had the idea,
brings in the revenues, built the product (or performs the services).
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Should I barter equity for services? No. You get what you pay for.
Should I build a product? Maybe. But first manually see if your product
works. Then think about providing it as a service. Then productize the commonly used services. Too many people do this in reverse and then fail.
How much dilution is too much dilution? If someone wants to give you money, then take it. The old saying, 100 percent of nothing is worth less than one
percent of something.
Should I listen to venture capitalists? Yes, of course. They gave you money.
But then dont do anything they ask you to do.
If a client wants me to hire their friend or they wont give me the business
(i.e., like a bribe). What should I do? Always do the ethical thinghire the
friend and get the clients business.
How do I get new clients? The best new clients are old clients. Always offer
new services.
What if my client asks you to do something not in your business plan? Do it,
or find someone who can do it, even if its a competitor.
Should I ever talk badly about a partner of an employee even though they are
awful? Never gossip. Always be straight with the culprit.
I have lots of ideas. How do I pick the right one? Execute on as many as pos173
Having fights with partners in the first year. Fire them or split before
anything gets out of control.
Trying to get Mark Cuban to invest because this would be great for the
Dallas Mavericks.
Asking people for five minutes of their time. Its never five minutes so
you are establishing yourself as a liar.
Catch-22: showing people there are a small chance theyll see a hundredfold return on their money. The secret of salesmanship is getting through
the Catch-22.
Rejecting a cash offer for your company when you have almost no revenues. Hello Friendster and foursquare.
When you have a billion in revenues, staying focused. When you have zero
revenues, staying unfocused and coming up with new ideas every day.
Saying yes to any meeting at all with someone who is an obvious winner.
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How long does it take to raise money? In a great business, six months. In a
mediocre business: infinity.
Should I do market research? Yes, find one customer who definitely, without
a doubt, will buy a service from you. Note, I dont say buy your product because your initial product is always not what the customer wanted.
Should I pay taxes? No. You should always reinvest your money and operate at a loss.
What should the CEO salary be? No more than two times that of your lowest
employee if you are not profitable. This even assumes you are funded. If you
are not funded your salary should be zero until your revenues can pay your
salary last. The CEO salary is the last expense paid in every business.
When should I fire employees? When you have less than six months burn in
the bank and revenues arent growing fast enough.
When should one have sex with an employee? When you love her and the
feeling is mutual.
When should one fire an employee? When they gossip. When they dont
over-deliver constantly. When they ask for a raise because they think they are
making below industry standard. When the talk badly about a client. When
they have an attitude.
How big should the employee option pool be? Fifteen to 20 percent.
How much do advisers get? One-quarter of one percent. Advisers are useless. Dont even have an advisory board.
How much do board members get? Nothing. They should all be investors. If
they arent an investor, then one-half of one percent
Should you take the offer to buy your company? Yes. In cash.
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What is the only effective e-mail marketing? Highly targeted e-mail marketing written by professional copywriters and the e-mail list is made up of
people who have bought similar services in the past six months. Corollary: If
you have zero skills as a copywriter, then everything you write will be boring.
Should I give stuff for free? Maybe. But dont expect free customers to turn
into paying customers. Your free customers actually hate you and want everything from you for nothing so you better have a different business model.
Should I blog? Yes. You must. Blog about everything going wrong in your industry. Blog personal stories that you think will scare away customers. They
wont. Customers will be attracted to your honesty.
Should I spin off this unrelated idea into a separate business? No. Make one
business great. Throw everything into it. Do DBA (a legal term for doing
business as) to identify different ideas.
Should I hire people because I can travel on a seven-hour plane ride with
them? Dont be an idiot. If anything, hire people who are the opposite of you.
Otherwise, who will you delegate to?
When should I say yes to a client? Every other conversation you ever have
with them after that initial no.
Should I negotiate the best terms with a VC? No. Pick the VC you like. Times
are going to get tough at some point and youll need to be able to have a heart
to heart with them.
Should I give employees bonuses for a job well done? No. Give them gifts but
not bonuses.
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When should I give up on my idea? When you cant generate revenues, customers, interest, for two months.
Why didnt the VC or customer call back after we met yesterday and it was
great? Because they hate you.
Why didnt the above call back after we met yesterday and it was great? Yesterday was like a split second ago for them and a lifetime for you. Theres the
law of entrepreneurial relativity. Figure out what that means and live by it.
Should I hire a head of sales? No. The founder is the head of sales until at least
$10 million in sales.
My client called at 3 a.m. Should I tell him to respect boundaries? No. You no
longer have any boundaries.
I made a mistake. Should I tell the client? Yes. Tell him everything that
happened. Youre his partner. Not the guy that hides things and then lies
about them.
I personally need money. Should I borrow from the business? Only if the
business can survive for another six months no matter what happens.
I just bought two companies. Should I put them under the same roof and
start consolidating? No. Not for at least two years.
Should I quit my job? No. Only if you have salary that can pay you for six
months at your start-up. Aim to quit your job but dont actually quit your job.
What do I do when I have doubts? Ask your customers if your doubts are
trustworthy.
Should I expand geographically as quickly as possible? No. Get all the business you can in your local area. Travel takes up too much time.
I undercharged. What should I do about it? Nothing, now. Charge the next
client more.
I have an idea for an app but dont know how to execute. What should I do?
Draw every screen and function. Then outsource someone to make the drawings look like they come from a real app. Then outsource the development of
the app. Get a specific schedule. Micromanage the schedule.
I want to buy a business in X. Is that a good idea? Rely on the three Ds:
Death, Debt, Divorce. When someone dies, the heirs will sell a business
cheap. When someone is in debt, they will sell a business cheap. When someone divorces, the couple usually has to sell a business cheap. Important: even
if the industry trends are in your favor, you cannot predict the future. But you
can use the past to help you get a deal. Always get a deal.
I have a lot of website traffic but no revenues. What should I do? Sell your
business. Theres only one Google. (Well, theres two or three Googles, if you
count Facebook and Twitter. But youre not any of them).
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I have been in business now for six years and my business doesnt seem to be
growing. Its even slowing down. What should I do? Come up with ten ideas
a day about new services your business can offer. Try to get a customer for
each new service. I know one business in this situation that refuses to do this
because their VCs are telling them to focus more. Youre going to go out of
business otherwise.
Is it unethical to run my business from the side while still at my job? I dont
know. Did God tell you that in a dream?
XYZ just sold for a $100 million. Should I be valued at that? Im better! No,
you should shut up.
Investors want to meet me and customers want to meet me. Who do I meet if
I need money? You should know the answer to that by now.
If an acquirer asks me why I want to sell, what should I say? That you feel it
would be easier for you to grow in the context of a bigger company that has
experienced the growing pains you are just starting to go through.
I just started my business. What should I do? Sell it as fast as possible (applies
in 99 percent of situations).
Should I even start a business? No. Make money. Build stuff. Then start
a business.
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gesting people stop reading Chaucer and make solar cars instead.
The thing is, these people are right. They probably cant be entrepreneurs if
they are so insistent that they cant. Nobody has a gun to their head to make the
next Google. But they also are misreading my words, which is probably my fault.
Im not giving advice. Im merely saying what the reality is, and Ill say it again:
the age of domesticated cubicle jobs, an era that lasted only about one hundred
years out of the past 4 million, is over. People are getting fired. That way of life is
over. Everyone is getting outsourced or replaced by robots or just downsized or
demoted. That world is depressing and oppressing if you are trying to cling to the
past and keep climbing that ladder, since everything you cling to will ultimately
disappoint you.
Theres a guy out there named Steve Scottthe mysterious Steve Scott, aka
S. J. Scott, maybe aka other names I dont even know. His books kept popping up
everywhereoften beating my books on the various Amazon lists. How could
23 Anti-Procrastination Habits rank higher than Choose Yourself!? Who the hell
is this guy, I wondered? And he was writing other books, too, with titles like 70
Healthy Habits, or How to Start a Successful Blog in One Hour. And every few
weeks there would be another book.
At first I noticed the books appear under the name Steve Scott. But then, with
a completely different picture of the author, I noticed the same kind of books
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coming up under S. J. Scott. He was like a machine for books: Is $.99 the New
Free? Declutter Your Inbox, and on and on.
So I finally called him. I didnt know him. I didnt have any friends who knew
him. I think he lives in the middle of Ohio. But I wanted to know what the hell he
was doing. I wanted my kids to do it so they would never have to have the worries
and anxieties that I had all through my twenties and thirties. He told me just two
years ago he was dead broke and trying to figure out what to do. He had basically
zero in the bank and was making no money.
Last month I made over $40,000, he told me. Hes written forty-two books
in the past two years. He now writes a book every three weeks.
Scott basically writes 2,000 words a day. In the front of each book he has
various things he gives away for free if people sign up for his e-mail list.
Take a concept youre interested in, he told me, and break it up into a lot of
For instance, if you are interested in golf, write a book about how to get the
right equipment, write a book about how to improve your swing in ten easy steps,
write a book, Learn to Putt 100 Percent Better in Sixty Minutes, and so on.
Each book gets him more e-mail subscribers. More e-mail subscribers gets
him more book sales. And so on. Did he study writing or marketing in college?
You decide: he majored in criminal psychology at Montclair State University. It
took two years to build up but now he is a marketing and entrepreneurial machine
even though he has never done anything like this before. He has no boss. He
enjoys his free time. He makes more money than 95 percent of the CEOs in the
corporate world.
I asked him why he was being so transparent. Why he was telling me every-
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lbert Einstein supposedly said, The eighth wonder of the world is compound interest. The idea that if you put some money in the bank and
let it sit there or invest it wisely it will somehow allow it to compound
into millions of dollars by the time you need it does sound somewhat wondrous.
This quote has been the underpinnings of many books, shows, marketing campaigns, and myths about personal finance. Too bad its total nonsenseand a
myth thats cost people millions of dollars.
First off, Einstein never said it. In 1983 the New York Times claimed that he did,
but nowhere else before that (and he died in 1955) is there evidence he said it.
Tonight Show in the early 80s that is very real and very true: Scientists have
developed a powerful new weapon that destroys people but leaves buildings
standingits called the 17 percent interest rate. In other words, saving money is
all fine and good. But when inflation hits, and financial meltdowns happen and
youre in debt, chances are your money hasnt compounded enough to help you
when you most need the money.
There are stories about some janitor who dies and it turns out he had $90
million saved up because he invested in Exxon in 1950 and he reinvested the dividends, etc. Maybe one or two of those stories are true, but that is not the norm.
Those are anecdotes used in commercials by people who want to capture your
fees to build their business.
First off, inflation is always going to rise faster than the value of money left
in a savings account. Theres rarely been a period where that didnt happen (the
Great Depression and early 2009 are the only examples I can think of).
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Second, nobody can merely invest their way to wealth, not even Warren
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Buffett. Warren Buffett made fees on his hedge funds and reinvested those. That
is how he made the initial part of his wealth. Then he used the money people put
into his insurance companies, invested that, and kept 100 percent of the profits,
and thats how he made billions. So compounding, by itself, will never make you
rich. The argument for saving money is that it then begins to work for you. But
there are much better ways for your money to work for you than compound interest, which is the fools gold found at the end of a rainbow. You can chase after it
but youll never find it.
The word interest usually refers to money. Since we know money is a side
that never happens. Youre going too fast, she says, and she ends it. When I started
a novel when I was younger, I wanted to finish it the next day. When I start a business, I want to sell it a day later and count my riches. When I started graduate
school, I was already planning how I was going to be the fastest PhD in history.
Around the time that I had initially planned on receiving that PhD, I ended up
getting thrown out for lack of maturity, according to the letter I received.
I dont believe the claim that life is short. Sometimes it feels very long. Like I
wish every day would be over already just so I can get to the next. And the next.
An imaginary tomorrow always seems to be better than today in my head. Which
makes me think of my hero, Gene Wolfe. Gene Wolfe understood the principles
of compound abundance.
Gene Wolfe was given the task of taking a baked potato, pressing it down,
and slicing it up in such a way that it would fit into a tennis ball can. And he did
it. He invented Pringles. And I ate one this morning. But thats not why hes my
hero. While many normal human beings, not as obsessed with status and creativity as Gene was, might say: OK, I just did my lifes achievement. Ive achieved
my purpose. Ive created an easily storable food based on a vegetable that, when
doused with a ton of salt, will please children and adults for decades, maybe cen183
turies. I mean, what would you do at that point? If I were Gene (and I almost hate
using his first name, as if I know him when its only in my dreams that I imagine
having dinner with him and, oh, the things we would talk about, the laughs we
would have) I wouldve rested on my laurels, collected awards, imagined playing
golf with friends, can of Pringles always in tow, maybe a little belly develops, but,
hey, he deserved it. He earned it.
But Gene knew the magic secret. And it is only with the record of his lifetime
(and at eighty-three hes still going) that he is able to share that secret.
ene has been an adult for almost 25,000 days. He writes a page a day. A page
is about three hundred words words. A paragraph or two. Can you do that?
Twenty-five thousand pages. About eighty books worth of pages. Gene ended up
writing fifty published novels, including many best-sellers and award winners. He
didnt get stereotyped and stuffed into that Pringles can, as dead as the chips he
created. He did what he loved to do. Thats what keeps you alive every day. Thats
the Push. Life is too long to reject the opportunities in front of you every day.
I was talking to James Manos, the creator of the HBO hit show Dexter. He
Its OK if right now the two are separate for you. Today is a new day.
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friend of mine bought a chain of about thirty pizza stores that were underperforming. They were in great locations: all near college campuses. And
they all had a great brand name, which you likely know: Dominos. My friend had
been a high-up executive at Dominos but now he wanted to branch out on his
own, so he bought the thirty Dominos stores and turned them around. He then
sold them and became very wealthy. I asked him: How hard could it be to turn
around a Dominos store? He said, Its very simple. Make round pizzas.
Apparently the Dominos that he took over were poorly managed, and
the pizzas werent coming out consistent. They were odd-shaped, which was
ruining the brand. Additionally, they would claim the pizza would arrive in
thirty minutes when in reality it would arrive in forty-fivealso inconsistent
with the brand. An important part of the Dominos brand is that its not a location restaurant. Its a delivery service. If you are known as a quality delivery
service, you better deliver when you say you are.
So because these locations were struggling, my friend was able to buy them
cheap. He then determined why they were struggling, and fixed those two items:
make round pizzas and deliver on time. And then he became an enormous
success. He didnt need to discover the next Facebook to be a success. He just
understood the basics of business and was able, fairly quickly, to make extremely
simple adjustments, and because of that he made millions.
First off, I should mention that Ray Kroc was fifty-nine years old when he
bought the McDonalds franchise. Just a few years earlier he had been working
paycheck to paycheck to pay for the rent on his one-room apartment. This is just
another example of how its never too late to choose yourself.
Was serving clean food Rays dream or passion? Of course not. After he
retired, at the age of seventy-three, he bought the San Diego Padres. My guess is
that was closer to his favorite passions. Passions he had discovered within himself
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when he was just a little boy. Sometimes it takes a while to get to do what we love,
but its always worth it.
Or does it?
The company that once owned the thirty Dominos franchises mentioned
above was going out of business. If a company has no or declining cash flow, debt,
employees to pay, and is about to go out of business, then what is it worth? Well,
it depends on the negotiation. This is a very important point about business.
We know, thanks to the Idea Matrix presented earlier in this book, that ideas
are more valuable than money. The man with more ideas will be able to out negotiate the man with fewer ideas. The man with fewer ideas might say to himself:
Im about to go out of business and I will be broke and I have no idea how to
improve this business and here is a nice man willing to actually give me cold hard
cash for this useless business. The man with ideas might be able to say: Round
pizzas = instant turnaround = huge cash flows of millions of dollars. Both are
looking at the same thing.
People claim that they can value a business by looking at their profit state-
ments. Nothing can be further from the truth. These traditional, or old school,
businessmen will soon find themselves out of business. This is the old way of
looking at things. The new rules require us to recognize that ideas as currency
become critical when both sides of a negotiation are looking at the same thing.
The person with more ideas doesnt need to negotiate hard. There are no secret
tricks, although hed be wise to follow the tips given in the earlier chapter on negotiation. Its just a matter of identifying what the value is in the other sides eyes
and meeting that value. Remember: good negotiations are win-win. Both sides
get what they want.
Lets say that in the Dominos case the selling location owners were so afraid
it was worth zero that they were willing to take anything but they put up a confident front. Maybe they said, $100,000 per store. My friend saw millions in
potential per store so this might not have hurt him. But thats a lot of money,
you might say! $3 million!
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Again, ideas are more valuable than money. Ideas are currency. Money itself
is meaningless. Its just pieces of paper that our minds have assigned value to.
If you are twenty-two-years old you might not be able to get the $3 million. You
might not yet have enough friends, family, network, experience, to command
the trust in your ideas that an older person can command. Or you might. I dont
know. But basically, raising money is a matter of presenting ideas. How do you
raise $3 million? In this case:
You say who you are. My friend had been in the pizza business for a while, but
as an employee and not an owner.
You say how you are going to turn them around and you get specific (round
pizzas, consistent delivery times).
Most importantly, you be specific: Exactly how are you going to make rounder pizzas and better delivery times? This is just a matter of keeping an eye on
the business and hiring the right employees.
Many owners get bored of their businesses, or are not qualified to run them.
Theres the Argentinean motto I cited in an earlier chapter: When the CEO
is looking, the cow grows fatter. If you have ever been to Argentina, you know
that the one true religion there is steak. They have their own way of making steak,
different from that of anyplace else in the world, and it starts from the moment
the cow is born and ends when the beef enters your mouth. When the CEO is on
top of things and is not lazy, the cow will grow into the perfect steak.
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h
he choose yourself-er needs to know how to value a company as a
starting point to any negotiation. If you are smarter about how you
value a company, then you have an edge in any negotiation. Youre
smarter because you have the ideas, which give you information and provide
an advantage.
Forget about stocks for a second. Many people think that the way they value
stocks is the way they should value companies. Stocks on the stock market are
tiny slivers of a company. Warren Buffett often says that if you buy a stock you
should think of yourself as an owner of a company. This might be true, but unless
youre someone like Warren Buffett, youre not really an owner in the traditional
sense. An owner has power. An owner can fire people, direct a change in strategy,
improve the product, and so on. An owner chooses himself and can move the
company more toward the top right quadrant of the idea matrix (see figure).
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stock and must depend on the good graces of the real owners to make money.
A shareholder can move from the bottom left/idea slave quadrant to the bottom
right quadrant (or higher) by owning shares of many companies and diversifyingbut lets assume for a second were talking about valuing a company for the
sake of really owning it or making a deal where our profits are, in part, dependent
on our own actions. There are many models by which you can value a company.
Im going to discuss three of them in detail.
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The Z ero To O ne
Approach
eter Thiel has written an excellent book about what I will call super entrepreneurship called Zero to One. I had the good fortune to discuss the
contents of Peters book in depth when I had him on my podcast. He
highlights the four qualities of a good businessbut its important to note that
hes not valuing a business. His goal is to make a great businessnot just a great
business but also a world-changing business. And theres almost no way to value
a world-changing business. It can be priceless.
Thiels four attributes for a good business are monopoly, scalability, network
Monop oly
his one is a funny one because technically the word monopoly stirs up negative feelings of antitrust legislation, the government stepping in, anti-com-
petition, AT&T in the 80s, Microsoft in the 90s, price manipulation, and even
anti-capitalism. The genius of Peters perspective, however, is that its the exact opposite. Capitalism, he says, is about profits. If everyone is competing, the service
or product you are selling becomes a commodity and profits quickly go as tiny
as they possibly can. He therefore concludes that competition is anti-capitalist.
Thiel isnt suggesting price manipulation or anything like that. He just sug-
gests doing the following: find your niche, then find a small or a nonexistent
market where you can enter and dominate 80 percent of the market, as if you were
a monopoly. Two examples that immediately come to mind are companies hes
either started or invested in: PayPal and Facebook. Peter had a vision of a cashless
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economy. He wanted people to be able to e-mail payments back and forth to each
other over the Internet rather than exchange cash or (worse) private credit card
information. Although the service was available to every retailer and consumer,
he found a niche market where many online transactions were occurring and
he decided to build his monopoly there: eBay customers. Why shouldnt every
eBay customer use PayPal to settle their transactions? Only two things stood in
his way: eBay could compete and Peter had one competitor, X.com, run by Elon
Musk. So rather than try to directly destroy his competitors, Peter reinforced that
PayPal was a monopoly. First off, he paid customers who signed up ten dollars.
This basically killed off eBays efforts almost immediately.
Second, he merged with X.com. Why merge with a company he could poten-
tially defeat? When you have a fifty-fifty merger like that your percentage ownership gets diluted. I see too many entrepreneurs worry about dilution and fight to
the bone for it.
Youll recall from an earlier chapter that when I was making a deal with TheS-
treet to distribute Stockpickr on their site, I told them I thought they should take
3 to 10 percent. CEO Tom Clarke laughed and responded, We were thinking 50
percent. I didnt even think twice about it before saying, OK. In fact, TheStreet.
com taking 50 percent was a much better deal for me than their taking 3 percent.
There are several reasons for this:
First is the clich that 1 percent of something is better than 100 percent of
nothing. I saw other companies in which TheStreet.com had invested that
ended up being worth nothing because they over-negotiated on percentages
which led to . . .
When I was negotiating to sell the company, they werent just a passive investor waiting to be bought out. They were dreading that I was finding them an
unwelcome new partner. So instead of letting me sell the other 50 percent,
they had to go in and buy the other 50 percent less than five months after we
launched our deal.
The other company they invested in around the same time ended up going
So Peter Thiel naturally figured, why fight Elon Musks X.com and destroy
each other in the process plus waste a ton of time and money when they could just
merge and become a monopoly and go public and create real value, even if meant
they all had lesser stakes? Once they merged they had twice as many ideas
which meant that their stakes would be worth more than twice as much, since we
now know that ideas are more valuable than money. So they merged, went public,
and guess what? eBay acquired them for $1.5 billion. Peter Thiels final stake was
worth $55 million. He didnt become a billionaire there but his savvy moves had
created wealth for generations.
I asked him about Facebook, which he didnt really talk a lot about in his
No, he said. Facebook was the first social network to force you to use your
true identity. It had a monopoly on social networks that focused on real identity.
And it started in its small niche, Harvard, and slowly expanded out, dominating
one market at a time before expanding further.
Heres where we can veer off. Peter Thiel is a game changer. With each idea, he
wants to not only create a monopoly. He has a vision and wants to see everyone
in the world be a part of that vision in the long run.
Think of how this relates to the chain of pizza stores discussed in the prior
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into. If you are in a college dormitory and want to order pizza, then theres probably a 50 percent chance the first place you think to call is Dominos. As soon as
you open up and distribute some flyers on campus, youll get calls that night and
make back all of your marketing costs. The key for a good monopoly is that it
doesnt need to market much because its the only game in town. If competition
opens up, they are going to have be extra special to compete against a Dominos
or they will quickly go out of business, like most restaurants (since restaurants are
rarely monopolies).
When you value a business, you have to ask where is it a monopoly? What
divisions that are not monopolies can you sell off? What new areas can you move
it into that will make it a monopoly? What companies can it buy? Etc.
S
S cal abilit y
In other words, can you add customers at almost no additional cost or effort while
youre off in dreamland? A platform like PayPal or Facebook has almost zero additional cost when it adds customers. A company like Dominos is not as scalable
but its still scalable, since I can hire more low-cost labor as customers ramp up
and I can buy more locations. Again, there are more costs involved so youll need
to factor this into your decision about whether this is a good or a bad business.
Are you comfortable with the costs of expansion?
By the way, even if you never scale, then you also fit into the idea matrix. If
you have good ideas but dont want to scale, youll find yourself dead center on
the top of the idea matrix. Youre not really going out of your way to come up with
many ideas to help lots of people, but you have good ideas and ideas make money.
There are many lifestyle entrepreneurs that like their one particular idea and
dont want to replicate it and just want to make enough to get buy. For instance,
someone who hand makes furniture can fit into this category. Or a gym where
the trainer likes his training program, enjoys training people, and doesnt want to
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franchise it. Franchising an idea makes something scalable. Having one physical
location makes it not scalable.
S
Net work E ffect
The more people who use a service, the more valuable it is. Its not a busi-
ness, but e-mail has the network effect going for it. The more people who signed
up for e-mail, the more valuable it was that you also had to sign up for e-mail
in order to communicate with everyone. Facebook and PayPal, as you may
now have guessed, had the network effect. Dominos, believe it or not, had the
network effect. Where would you rather order fromthe same place all your
friends trust, or some random place that nobody has ever used before? And
these three attributes are intimately connected to Peter Thiels fourth attribute
of a successful business.
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Brand
I mentioned before in this book that people would prefer to buy an item
on Amazon rather than your own personal site (even if its more expensive on
Amazon) simply because Amazon is known as a trusted site. And so it is with the
Dominos brand as a reliable deliverer of pizza.
Apples brand has a significant reputation for focusing on design. They dont
always have the best products but often, when they catch up to competitors,
they end up with a better-designed, good product, which gives them an edge.
Again, Thiel focuses primarily on world-changing businesses. Ive probably never
interviewed a greater visionary and I probably never will. But every business in
the world fits into these categories and you can begin your valuations here. Part
of the process of valuing something is saying: OK, its not a monopoly but it will
cost me $X to make it one. And thats part of your equation of determining a
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value to offer for a business. In the case of the Dominos Pizza chain that my friend
was buying, the previous owners had been ruining their brand by not delivering
on time and not having round pizzas. This was critical to the Dominos brand.
With businesses like Dominosin an industry where its easy to competebrand
might be everything. In fact, brand is so important that the company was being
run into the ground simply because they were not sticking to it. And once he
bought the business, all he had to do was fix the brand to completely turn around
the franchises.
I am going to add one more variable to Peter Thiels four items, and it might
S
D emo graphics
It doesnt matter if you have the above four items. If you had a business that
relied on training horses for horse-and-buggy cab services, then you were going
to go out of business in the early 1900s as everything moved over to cars.
management is awful, the brand is awful, the competition is tough, and on and
on, but still, the demographics are growing, hell buy itso even an idiot can run
the business successfully. For instance, when Coke was having troubles Buffett
made his biggest investment ever in Coca-Cola. How come? Because he realized
that sooner or later everyone in the world would want to drink his favorite sweet
drink. When American Express was mired in scandal in the early 60s, Warren
Buffett sat down next to the cash register at his favorite steak house and saw how
many people were using the American Express card as opposed to paying with
cash. He realized that we were moving toward a credit card economy and put
one-third of his hedge fund in the business, resulting in probably his best return
of the 1960s. This was probably the one investment that set him on the path to
permanent wealth. Demographics can work in your favor even in a small town
or a lifestyle business. If a small town doesnt have a laundromat, and if you open
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one up, you can be pretty confident youll have customers. If your laundromat is
unique in any way, then perhaps you can scale it. Everyone needs to do laundry.
That said, if another laundromat opens up next door, you might be in trouble,
which is why you have to do everything you can to create a natural monopoly in
your area first.
ery rarely do you want to buy a company that is at the top of its game,
since this usually means you are paying the most expensive price and many
a prior chapter, but this is a model that has been in use for centuries to buy businesses and it often works. Find a business that satisfies the three Ds:
Death
Divorce
Debt
If the founder of a business dies and the children are off doing other things,
often they will be willing to sell it cheap rather than watch it run into the ground.
When founders get divorced, they often have to sell the business at any cost in
order to divide up the assets and end their marriage. And finally, if a company
is in debt and for whatever reason starts to go down because it starts lacking in
the five qualities mentioned above, then you may be able to buy that company
super cheap. Sometimes you just have to take over the debt and youve bought
the company.
I was talking to Marcus Lemonis, the CEO of Camping World, who has bought
hundreds of companies. He is also the star of the TV show The Profit, where he
helps struggling companies turn around and he always gets skin in the game by
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I suggested to him that it seemed like all his purchases were related to the
Often companies get paralyzed when they have to make critical decisions,
and the resulting delay can start driving their value down until they are in trouble.
For instance, if two brothers are running a business and arent getting along they
will often delay on critical decisions.
I bring Marcus up for a specific reason. Before you can value a company, you
have to also see what it takes to turn the company around. Turning it around
doesnt necessarily mean turn it into a monopoly.
businesses where the sky is the limit. But when you buy a company, you probably want to make more money than you spent on it. You want to have better
ideas than the prior owner so you can simply improve the company. It may not
become a monopoly, but maybe you can improve it over its competition so it
seems more like a monopoly. Or you may want to figure out the cost to improve
the brand. Or you may want to see how to make it more scalable. Or it might
even be simpler than that.
S
The Three Ps Model
When Marcus values a company he uses a model he calls the Three Ps. If you
watch his show on CNBC, you will see him repeat the three Ps in every episode.
People
Process
Product
A company will probably be failing (and hence need a financial partner) if the
people running it are no good, if the Process is inefficient or too expensive, and if
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the product is poor or doesnt stand out against the competition. In 100 percent
of cases, Marcus told me, it starts with the people. This is usually because the
people running the business are the ones who need to come up with the ideas on
process and product.
So Marcus will often take an ownership stake, reorganize the people man-
aging the company, and then use his own ideas to improve the process and the
product. Since hes done this hundreds of times, hes an idea machine and is
usually more qualified than the prior owners, which is why they take his financial deal.
Honestly, nobody has a clue. As they say, its more art than science.
Why did Facebook pay $19 billion for WhatsApp, a company with no rev-
enues whose CEO had actually been rejected by Facebook for a job just a few
years earlier? I have a guess as to how they made the decision but still, that value
might be right, or horribly wrongmaking it either the best valuation decision or
the worst in history. Heres what I do to value a business. I look at all of the above:
The Three Ds. I look at what is causing the problems: Death, Divorce,
Debt, Delay (because they all add up to a fifth D: Desperation, which drives
prices lower)
Then I ask myself, what does the company look like when its turned around
or made better?
Whats the size of the market and how much will I dominate it? If its scal-
able, how much is it scalable and whats the value of the additional markets it
can scale to?
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And I simply figure out how much money I can make out of this company in
a certain period of time, minus what I have to put into it to keep it running or to
turn it around.
Then I divide by half. Then I divide by half again. This makes it as safe as
possible for me. So, if I think a company is worth $1,000 but I pay $250 for it, Ive
given myself a lot of room for safety.
By the way, I do the same for stocks. But, again, its a little different because
I cant control the ideas flowing into any company, so I might give myself even
greater room for safety. A stock has to be really cheap by my standards in order
for me to even look at it. For instance, Exxon might be a great company and even
a cheap stock but I would never look at it. Not cheap enough.
If Im trying to sell a company, Ill do the reverse. Ill demonstrate how much
money the buying company can make given our status as a monopoly combined
with their customer base. Always use the bigger customer base to value your
company. Then divide in half and then divide in half again.
Ive thrown in a lot of ways to look at a company here. How to value a start-
up. How to value an old industry company. How to turn around a declining
company. And how I value a company. Plus, Ive shared the models I think are
most important when assessing companies.
You might have different ideas or different models. For instance, you might
love the hotel business, so no matter what the price, youre going to buy the hotel
in your town. Thats fine.
The methods Ive outlined above are for the Choose Yourself person who
wants to find a cheap asset, apply money and ideas to it, and then become wealthy
as a result. Of course, we know, its not always about the money. You will need to
love being in business. But money is a great side effect of the ideas and effort you
put into this.
Knowing the art and a little bit of the science of valuation is the key to making
a lot more money than you put out. This is about how you take an asset that is
far from the top right corner of the idea matrix and you move it closer to the top
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right corner. Once you do that, money appears, opportunities appear, abundance
automatically happens. This applies no matter whatwhether you are doing a
tech start-up, a media company, a laundromat, a car wash company, whatever.
And note that this is how I would start my valuation process of a company. If you
want to choose yourself and you want to do it by owning businesses, this is the
approach I would recommend. It beats sitting in a cubicle saving up money for a
future that might not exist.
But valuation is only part one of how you buy a company. Next, Ill show you
how to structure the deal. Just because you know something is now worth $X
doesnt mean youll pay $X for it. Your goal is to bake even more safety in and pay
a lot less than $X.
Buy a Company for Free Without Any Experience, and Become a Billionaire
I have to admit: Ive always been jealous of Richard Branson. I dont know if you
remember that feeling when you were a kid and you were curious what sex was
all about so you sneaked a look at some magazines in the pharmacy before they
caught you and threw you out? Uhhh, Im not saying thats happened to me. But I
felt the same way when I read Bransons book Losing My Virginity.
Branson is a great example of the ultimate Choose Yourself deal: you get
from here to there with no money. You buy something for free and with no experience. People often say they have a ton of ideas, but they just have trouble taking
action. This is not true. Action ideas are a subset of ideas. In fact, you can have
action ideas before you have a good idea.
Richard Branson was in his early twenties. He had a record magazine and a
record label and a few other businesses. He wasnt a well-known name. He was,
fittingly enough, in the Virgin Islands and he needed to get to Puerto Rico that
night. The flight was canceled. But rather than focus on rebooking, he found a
private plane that was available for a certain price. He didnt have the money
on him. He put up a sign that said Virgin Airways $39 to Puerto Rico and he
showed the sign to everyone who was on the canceled flight. He sold out the
private plane and made it to Puerto Rico that night.
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Then, he called Boeing and basically leased a plane from them the same way
you would lease a car. He knew that if the business wasnt profitable, he could
return the plane. He negotiated a route between Gatwick and Newark and he had
a one-plane airline.
Branson started with nothing and did it. He offered services that no other
airline did (the thirteen airlines that told him he was crazy to compete with
them have all since gone out of business). Then he begged and borrowed to
buy another plane, and another. And now he has Virgin Galactic ready to send
people into space.
Theres no single path that works for everyone, no one easy way to structure
You want to be trading ideas and value for money every step of the way. Very
few deals go like this: Heres $X for your product or company. Ive reviewed
standard negotiation in the chapter on negotiating, and I go over standard types
of structures in A Cheat Sheet for Starting and Building a Business. But always
remember that life is not a straight line.
First I met with Ericsson, and some of their executives actually gave me part
of the $30 million. Now I had a real company. What were my assets? Barely anything. I had an agreement to buy a company for $30 million and I had a partner
in Ericsson. Using those meager assets I raised money from Henry Kravis, Investcorp, CMGI, Allen & Co., and about a dozen other high-profile investors. Many
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deals are like that: what comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Nineteen out of twenty deals dont work out. Nineteen out of twenty of any-
thing doesnt work out. But so do twenty things. Or as Scott Adams, creator of
Dilbert, told me, so do two hundred things. Something will eventually work out,
because luck favors the prepared, the persistent, and (I need a third P), the promiscuous. There! I think I pulled it offbe promiscuous with ideas. Go for every
idea that excites you, and for every deal you can find. There is always time for
excitement and fun.
When Scott Adams was stuck in his cubicle he tried every idea to get out of
there and almost every idea failed. Finally, he returned to a passion of his from
when he was ten years old: cartooning. You can see his first fifty Dilbert cartoons
on his blog. I dont want to make a judgment but I think you can even see what he
thinks of those first fifty. But this was one of his two hundred attempts to break
out of prison and choose himself. As he described to me, he got rejected almost
everywhere. Finally, the decision maker at United Media called him. She said she
didnt like the cartoons but her husband, who worked at IBM, had seen them on
the floor of her car, picked them up, and started laughing. So now she wanted to
do a deal. Scott wanted to sound like he was doing serious due diligence so he
asked her, Well, can you tell me other comic strips you represent.
He said to me, There was this long pause at the other end. And finally she
OK, I told her, and that was the end of my due diligence. And now hes in
A friend of mine named Marni Kyrnis was telling me how she was miserable
in her PR job. I believe Ive already used PR jobs as the worst-level jobs on the
bottom left quadrant of the Idea Matrix. Often, people who have no right to be
in the medias eye at all hire a PR firm because they want to be famous and they
have absolutely zero ideas or reasons for being known. Its then the PR professionals job to come up with ideas (and all of them will be bad) to get their client
into the news.
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Marni went out to a mixer one night and saw that the men were standing on
one side and the women were standing on the other side. It was like a junior high
school prom, she told me. So she went over to the men and one by one walked
them over to who she thought the appropriate woman would be and introduced
them. By the end of the evening everyone was dancing, exchanging numbers,
even making out in the corner, she said. My mind was buzzing when I got home.
I had found what I wanted to do. I wanted to help guys meet women because they
were totally incompetent at it. My roommate told me I was crazy. But I put an ad
on Craigslist that said, I will be your wing girl at the bar. She listed a charge of
some outrageous amount in the ad and then went to sleep. When she woke up she
had seventy-five replies and a new career.
Then she wanted to scale it, so she started selling videos to guys telling them
how they could meet women. And she built up her brand by writing and podcasting her experiences. Now she has a perfect Choose Yourself career.
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Part 3
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h
ost of us (e.g., me) fail because we believed a story and it didnt
work out for us.
Heres what happened, and its a good thing: in order for you and I
to cooperate, even if we are total strangers, we need to believe in a story together. Our brains tell us we can both trust each other, for instance, if we believe in
the Bible, even if we are strangers and speak different languages. In the history
of the world, for three billion years, this has only happened ONCE: with the
human species and only over the past 40,000 or so years. Thats how we went
from the middle of the food chain to the top. Thats how we went from nomadic
tribes without the ability to tell stories, to global civilizations. But because storytelling is only the latest programming inside of our DNA there are many
bugs or fatal flaws.
or religions break down we end up with wars and death and despair. That is
how our DNA weeds out the bad storytellers from the good storytellers. The DNA
doesnt care who lives and who dies.
But you and I care. It was that familiar story about the old way and the old
approach, the American Dream so many embraced for so many years. We know
by now that this isnt the way things are anymore. And the good news is this: if
you can become aware of the myths that people hold and the way they manipulate
societies and cultures, you can write your own rules and create abundance for
yourself. This book has (hopefully) already given you a lot of ideas on how to do
this. But the myths will persist, for a while anyway. Every single myth listed below
costs people millions or makes them millions.
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If you think of any Ive missed, please tell me. Each one of these myths can
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lead to entire businesses, can lead to happiness if you are aware of them, can lead
to less stress if you understand how the myth manipulates its way through our
society.
1. Owning a home will give you roots, and is far better than flushing money
down the toilet with rent. Most people dont realize that owning a home has
all the attributes of the worst investment possible: its highly illiquid, theres a
high leverage, it includes most of your net worth, and provides you with an
average return of only 0.2 percent over the past year. And this doesnt count
all your maintenance costs. Id rather rent, and either invest the extra money
in myself and my own ideas.
2. Going to college is a pretty safe guarantee of getting a job, and leads to more
money and happiness than if you dont go to college. Right now more than
50 percent of unemployed people have some college experience. College is
no guarantee of anything. Debt keeps rising and its a waste of four years of
a childs life. There are so many ways to learn better and for free now on the
Internet while you can spend the time exploring the world, exploring your
interests, making friends, or doing whatever you want to do while you have
the energy to do it.
3. Getting married means you wont be alone. (you might still feel alone if married. Im not saying marriage is bad. Just that it is a myth that it solves loneliness.)
4. Having kids is the purpose of life, and having a purpose in life is important
to having a fulfilling life. I like how Scott Adams from Dilbert fame put it:
live according to Systems and not Goals. Nobody has a single purpose in life.
We are often put into our life circumstances and have to figure out how to do
the best. In this book and in Choose Yourself! I try to give a system to develop
great ideas and build abundance.
5. My family is my family.
6. You have to be dishonest to be successful.
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Yes, we went through a period in 20082009 where it was pretty scary to hold
stocks. But less than five years later we were hitting all-time highs every week.
Will we continue to hit all-time highs? I dont know. Weve been doing it for two
hundred years, so we might keep doing it. There are a lot of times when people
claim that this time its different, and one of these days they will be right.
But in case you are going to put some money in stocks, well talk about that in
a second. First, lets look at some common criminal, or at least dubious, behavior
that the banks, the brokers, the government, the lawyers, the corporations, the
mutual funds, the hedge funds, the funds of funds, the ETFs, the Federal Reserve,
would rather you didnt know about. First, Ill tell you a story.
One of the largest investors of a public company called me up the other day.
He said to me, James, the Nasdaq wants to know how someone could short 10
percent of our stock in the final minute of trading. How is that even possible?
This man, who is a good friend of mine, owns about $800 million worth of his
company. I said to him, David, do you allow your broker to lend out your shares
to short sellers?
I said, Well, in order for someone to short your stock, at some point they
have to have the stock they are shorting in their hands. Shorting is the same as
selling. You cant sell something you dont have your hands on.
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named a bank here that is at least in the top three or four of the most prestigious
banks in the worldand Im a huge customer for them. Why would they lend
out my shares to anyone that would hurt me?
I said, Because they charge interest on that and make money, and because
youve never asked them to split that money with you they get to pocket that
money. You own a lot of stock so its great for them to get people to short a ton
of your stock because they can lend out all of your stock and charge 10 to fifteen
percent interest on it.
Just call them tomorrow and ask. And then tell them you are not allowing
The next day David called me again. James, I asked them and they were dead
silent. Then my broker said, Dave, I have to call you back. And now its the end
of the day and nobodys called me back.
The very next day after that, his stock was up fifteen percent.
There are lots of things happening in the above story that explain how Wall
Street works. And by the way, Im not bashing Wall Street or saying everything
about it is bad. Wall Street helps companies raise money, and companies that raise
money can hire people and invent new products and services and do all sorts of
fun things.
But I dont want to play in their sandbox, whether I have one hundred dollars
or $800 million.
First off, why was someone shorting my friends stock in the last minute
of trading?
Easy: the short seller wanted to scare people at the open the next day. People
would be shocked into selling, and the short seller could buy back his shares at a
lower price, pocketing a nice profit.
Well why would the bank lend the shares, thereby hurting their customer?
in some cases. And if the customer is not aware of it, even hes one with $800
million, then they dont split it with their customer.
Well, you might say, I have my money in a mutual fund. So I bet the bank
Wrong. But in this case the mutual fund is sophisticated. The mutual fund
says, Excuse me, bank, can I please split that with you and we wont tell anyone?
So mutual funds benefit by taking some of the interest when they lend the shares
to the short seller. This is actually a pretty safe way to make money on Wall Street:
to be in the business of lending shares.
No, of course not. Short selling has often been the way that smart investors
have exposed scams like Enron and Worldcom by giving them financial incentives to do so.
But if this is what one of the largest banks in the world is going to do with
someone who has $800 million in the bank, then you really have to ask yourself:
Your next question is likely, well, what about Roth IRAs, 401(k)s, employer-
Nopenot until you are sixty-five. The only things that are yours are things
you can hold in your hand. They will tell you its yours but the fine print de212
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scribes penalties if you want to hold that money in your handsin some cases,
huge penalties.
Some of the money goes into buying stocks. When someone buys a stock,
another person sells a stock. So your money went straight from your employer, to
a 401(k) plan to a mutual fund to someone selling a stock who needs to buy his
boat. At that point, you can good-bye to that money.
Some of the money sits in cash in the bank. The bank either charges fees on
that money or lends it out. After all, thats how a bank makes money? So some
of your hard-earned money might be going into the hands of either a bank managers salary or someone borrowing the money from a bank to buy a house or a
car. This is whats happening to your money.
And some of the money goes into the hands of the people who manage the
mutual fund, right? Then, some of the money goes into expenses that are set
aside to market the mutual fund. They are allowed a certain amount to buy ads
in magazines, etc.
There is a con for every pro. Yes, your money might go up in huge amounts
and allow you to retire as a very rich person. Or it might not. Some plans do well,
some dont. Its a lot of work to figure out what works and what doesnt, let alone
whats going to be working between now and when you are sixty-five.
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right now.
One more thing you might be wondering, and its a great question: what if
your employer matches the money you put in your IRA? Its as if youre doubling
your moneyright?
First off, they dont do that with all of your money. Second, most people dont
stay at jobs long enough anymore for them to really benefit from it. Third, for me
personally, I still rest easier not handing over my money until Im sixty-five. Im
forty-six now. I can die tomorrow. I like to see the money I work for.
What if I want to take out all my money in the form of two-dollar bills, fill up
my swimming pool with the money, and dive right into it? Heck, I want to have
that option. And you might want to have it also.
from your employer to Wall Street professionals, bypassing you along the way.
This is a different question, by the way, than Should I put my money in the
stock market?
But as we move into a Choose Yourself economy, you need to take control
over what happens to your personal assets. Nobody else is looking out for you.
You have to look out for you.
The US government has laws that allow sophisticated or what they call ac-
Right now, get down on your hands and knees and pray to God or Allah or
A fraud doesnt become a huge fraud unless it has the blessings of many so-
phisticated investors.
If you give me the year, I can give you a scam that took place. In the 90s
it was Reg S trading, and everyone involved went to jail. In the early 2000s it
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was mutual fund timing. In the late 2000s it was PIPEs. In the later 2000s it was
insider trading.
Of course there were plenty of Ponzi schemes, of which Madoff is the worst.
I was not invested in Madoff. But I was running whats called a fund of hedge
funds at the time. This means an investor would invest money with me, Id charge
a fee, Id then invest the money in hedge funds I did due diligence on, and they
would all charge me fees.
Forget that the initial investor is now paying 1 percent to me and then 2
percent to all the funds I invest in, plus a percentage of the profits to all the hedge
funds I invest in (since hedge funds are allowed to charge on a percentage of
profits, unlike mutual funds for unsophisticated investors).
But when I was trying to raise money, very smart people would say to me,
Why should I invest in you when I could invest in a great fund like Madoff?
In fact, I visited Bernie Madoff one time. He had a lot of employees up there.
You know what he said to me? One day, computers will be doing what all of these
employees are doing.
Oh, he said another thing to me. He said, I cant put money with you because
I dont know where you are putting your money. The last thing we need to see is
Bernard Madoff Securities on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
And he was right. That is the last thing he needed to see.
Ultimately, I had to shut my fund down. Who could compete? So many legiti-
mate funds that might have been better places for investor money (better to pay
all the fees than lose all your money in a Ponzi scheme) couldnt survive because
the illegitimate funds crowded them out of the space.
Some vehicles that sophisticated investors invest in: hedge funds, funds of
Other than the Ponzi schemes and super-fees charged by all these entities,
here is the dark secret that none of these funds will tell you: when the market
goes up, all of these funds do well. When the market goes down, pretty much all
of these funds go down. There are exceptions, but thats the case with any broad
statement. In most cases, all of these sophisticated vehicles are highly correlated
with the US stock market, which is highly correlated with global markets.
Everything Ive said so far in this chapter might suggest that I like John Bogles
approach.
John Bogle is a hero for many in the investment community. He is the founder
of the Vanguard funds, which charge super-low fees to be fairer to the investor.
This is not such a bad approach.
However, you still often have to pay fees to the bank to buy into his funds.
Theres still an annual fee (albeit very low) and theres till this nonsense about
lending out their shares so people can short the stocks they own (to be fair, I dont
know if Vanguard does this but many funds like Vanguard do).
Again, Im not saying do or dont (yet). But I will tell you exactly what I do
with almost all of the shares I own. Not every share, but the bulk.
Im sitting right now at a little white desk, typing into a computer. The desk
has two drawers. In one drawer I keep stacks of two-dollar bills just in case I need
to make a coffee run to the local caf.
In the other drawer is the physical shares of stocks I own. They are beau-
tiful. They are all nicely designed, and you know what I like? They have my
name on them.
So I can do something almost nobody else in the United States can do. I can
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217
m going to give you one tip in this chapter to avoid going broke. There are a
lot of tips actually that will help you. OK, Ive just decided while writing this
that Im going to give two tips.
A big chunk is more than 2 percent of your money. So if you have $10,000, dont
buy a TV that costs more than two hundred dollars. Dont buy an iPad. Dont buy
a car. Definitely dont buy a car. Just be happy with the money in the bank. But if
you have even more money heres what it means:
Dont go to college.
Dont invest more than 2 percent in any stock or any bunch of stocks in the
same sector (dont put more than 10 percent overall in stocks).
Dont invest in your own company. I know one guy who had a big idea that
he loved. He put a million a month into his own company. Had 40 employees.
Slept with the secretary. Divorced his wife and married the secretary. Had
two kids with the secretary. Divorced her. Married another secretary. Went
broke. Disappeared.
These are common mistakes, by the way. I went broke several times doing
James Altucher
in the morning I was crying in the streets, Why did I do that? I was feeling so
bad I lost 30 pounds. I weighed the same amount as I weighed in 8th grade. I
lost everything. I would look at my 3 year old and think, I just ruined your life.
OK, enough of Tip #1. I hate that tip because if I had followed it, my whole life
wouldve been different.
Tip #2. The whole point. Stop paying your debt. Let me clarify. If you bor-
But all other debt is a contract, and there are several situations where you can
stop paying debt. Ethics is a government-made term to try and induce you to
pay back your debt when you dont have to. But you can ignore that.
R
House D ebt
f your house is underwater then stop paying back your debt. This isnt about
ethics; its common financial sense. You have a contract with the bank. Your
mortgage is really rent until the bank no longer owns your house. If you stop
paying it, then the bank will take your house. The good news is, you can stop
paying and it will be a good eighteen months or more before the bank actually
forces you out. Theres various ways you can extend that eighteen months to be
even longer, particularly if your house is underwater (your bank doesnt really
want your house so even they will help you delay).
But, you might say, My credit will go bad. OK. It will. Who cares? Dont
But, you might say, Its really annoying that the bank will be calling me all
No. You agreed in a contract the exact thing that will happen if you dont
pay back. The bank can take the home you live in. Thats quite a bit youve agreed
to give up. The bank has scammed you. And now your house is underwater and
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youre expected to keep paying them. So instead, you will give them something of
great value. Your shelter. Have at it, bank. You try to fucking sell it.
AM! Student loan debt is now over $1.4 trillion. It should be zero. Yall
should stop paying down your student loan debt now. How come?
For one thing, its better for the country. Much better for young people to be
investing in their lives than giving that money back to the government.
Its better for you. You need a start. You dont need to be in more debt than
everyone else when youre only twenty-two. Its crazy how much money you owe!
The colleges scammed you. They knew that the government would be backing
any loans to you so they upped tuitions ten times faster than inflation since 1977.
You, sir or maam, are the victim of a con. And your own country will try to force
you into bankruptcy if you dont pay. Its much better to stop paying this debt
and use the money you save to make yourself a life, rather than be an indentured
servant to the government for the rest of your life.
Lets send a message: the education wasnt worth it. Look at how many people
are unhappy right now. And unemployed. Or making 50 percent less than what
they made a few years ago, while everything else has inflated (the so-called U5
measurement of unemployment).
Well, thats a lot of debt. Ive just helped you forgive $16 trillion worth of debt.
I hope you put that money to good use. Maybe by starting businesses, making
inventions, feeling better, hiring people, and so on.
What about IRS debt? You have to pay that. The IRS will put you in jail if you
dont. I dont agree with what they do with the money. They use my money to
kill innocent babies in Afghanistan. But I cant do anything about it now. Maybe
when my kids are older and I move away from here. Or maybe Ill sign up to go
to Afghanistan. This way I can get some of my money back.
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What else do you owe? Credit card debt? Screw it. Heres what happens to
your credit card debt. The credit card company writes you down to three cents
on the dollar within just three to six months of you not paying. Theyve already
long forgotten you. They then sell your debt to a hedge fund. The hedge fund then
outsources the collection to local lawyers or collection agencies in your area. They
collect six to eight cents on the dollar. I know this because Ive invested in several
of these hedge funds. The hedge funds make 100 percent on that debt they buy.
You never had to actually pay that back. What were they going to do? Seize your
assets? Put your assets under another name? Why let a bunch of rich guys who
invested in hedge funds get paid on your hard-earned dollars?
Yeah, you will. Dont get a credit card ever again. What do you need that
big TV for anyway? Only buy what you can afford. Dont be an idiot anymore.
But, you might ask, if everyone followed this advice, wont the banking system go
down the drain. And the answer is: yes, it will. But nobody will follow this advice.
So dont worry about everyone else. Just worry about making sure you dont go
broke so you can feed your family, yourself, start businesses, and take a step back
and really enjoy your life before you die.
Life doesnt have to be just a bus station. Make decisions that are scary right
now so you can have moments that are not only fun, but also funny, later on.
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n the history of capitalism, this is the hardest time ever to invest. People are
going broke, losing their jobs, and fear more than greed rules the news and
tries to rule thoughts. In short: people are scared. And I do think the uncer-
tainty is going to rise quickly so I wanted to put this note together. In 2001 and
2002 I lost all my money through bad investing. The same thing happened to me
on a couple of occasions after that. So why should anyone listen to me about investing? You shouldnt. You shouldnt listen to anyone at all about investing. This
is your hard-earned money. Dont blow it by listening to an idiot like me. Heres
my experience (and perhaps Ive learned the hard way about what NOT to do and
a little bit about what TO do.):
Ive run a hedge fund that was successful. I ran a fund of hedge funds, which
means Ive probably analyzed the track records and strategies of about 1000 different hedge funds. Ive been a venture capitalist and a successful angel investor
(I was a HORRIBLE venture capitalist though - but I put that under the category
of does not work well with others).I cant raise money anymore. Nor do I want
to play that game. I dont BS about my losses and everyone else does. So Im not
in that business anymore. Its too much work to run a fund anyway. In the past 15
years Ive tried every investing strategy out there. I honestly cant think of a strategy I havent experimented with. Ive also written software to trade the markets
automatically and I did very well with that. And Ive written several books on my
experiences investing, with topics ranging from automatic investing to Warren
Buffett, to hedge funds, to long-term investing (my worse-selling book, The
Forever Portfolio, which has sold 399 copies since it came out in December 2008,
including one copy for the entire last quarter).
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Incidentally, why publish a book called The Forever Portfolio during the
James Altucher
Dont follow any of my advice. This is advice that I do and follow and it
Ive seen it for 20 years. Ive seen every scam. I can write a history of scams in
Without describing them, heres the history: Reg S, Calendar trading, Mutual
fund timing, Death spirals, Front running, Pump and Dump, manipulating illiquid stocks, Ponzi schemes, and inside information. Inside information has always
existed and always will exist.
One time I wanted to raise money for one of my funds. I went to visit my
neighbors boss. The boss had been returning a solid 12% per year for 20 years.
Everyone wanted to know how he did it. Get some info while you are there,
a friend of mine in the business said when he heard I was visiting my neighbors boss. The boss said to me, Im sorry, James. We like you and if you want
to work here, then that would be great. But we have no idea what you would be
doing with the money. And here at Bernard Madoff Securities, reputation is everything.So I didnt raise money from Bernie Madoff although he wanted me to
work there. Later, the same friend who wanted me to get info and figure out
how he does it said to me: we knew all along he was a crook. Which is another
thing common in Wall Street. Everybody knows everything in retrospect and
nobody ever admits they were wrong. Show me a Wall Street pundit who says I
was wrong and Ill show you...I dont know...something graphic and horrible and
impossible [fill in blank].
I told you about: #1. Pick some stocks and hold them forever.
Warren Buffett has some advice on this (and I know because I wrote THE
book about him. A friend of mine who knows him told me my book was the
only book that Buffett thought was accurate about him). He says, if you think a
company will be around 20 years from now then it is probably a good buy right
now. I would add to that, based on what Warren does. It seems to me he has
five criteria:
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With Coke, Buffett knew that everyone in the world would be drinking
sugared water before long. Who can resist? He also started buying furniture
companies right before the housing boom. He knew that as the population in
the US grows, people will need chairs to sit on. Note that Buffett is not what
some people call a Value investor. But I wont get into that discussion here.
F) What E lse?
One time I accidentally got an email that was intended for a famous well-
known investor. It was from his broker and contained his portfolio. I cant say
how this accident happened but it did. Of course, I opened the email. This is a
man who writes about lots of stocks. His entire portfolio was in municipal bonds.
I dont know whether or not municipal bonds are good investments. But I would
look into stocks that are called closed-end funds that invest only in municipal
bonds. They usually pay good dividends, usually trade for less than their cash or
assets in the bank, and are fairly stable (its very hard for a municipality to not pay
back its debts for various reasons, some of them constitutional). But do a lot of
research into the towns.
Ill tell you one story. I had an idea for a fund in 2008 when oil was crash-
ing at the end of the year. Stocks / funds that invested in municipal bonds in
Texas were getting destroyed. Somehow, because oil was going down, everyone
naturally assumed that Texas was going to simply disappear. I researched every
municipal bond out there and found a good set of Texan cities that were being
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sold off with everyone else even though they had nothing to do with oil. I pitched
it to a huge investor who had told me he wanted to back me on any idea I could
come up with. He loved the idea. He loved it so much he told me, Youre too late.
We already have about $500 million in this strategy and we bought the very stocks
you are recommending. They went up over 100% in the next six months while
the world was still in financial collapse. So he made a lot of money. As for me, I
didnt put a dime into my own strategy and made nothing.
No, because youll never know anything about a company and you wont get
No more than 3% of your portfolio in any one stock. But if the stock grows
past 3% you can keep it. To quote Warren Buffett again: If you have Lebron
James on your team, you dont trade him away.
No more than 30% of your portfolio in stocks (unless some of the stocks
grow, in which case you just keep letting them grow).
Bubbles dont mean anything. We had an Internet bubble in the 90s. Then
a housing bubble. Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. And if you just held through all
of that, your stock portfolio would have been at an all time high last Friday. So
ignore cycles and bubbles and ups and downs. And NEVER EVER read the news.
The news has no idea about the financial world and what makes it tick. Any investing off the news is like taking out your eyes because you trust a blind person
to drive you to work.
James Altucher
Probably not. But if you want a checklist, make sure these four boxes can be
checked:
The CEO has started and sold a business before.
The business is a sector with a strong demographic headwind behind it. (or
is that a tailwind?)
The company has revenues and/or profits.
You are getting a really good deal. (This is subjective but you can look at
similar companies and what they were valued at.)
Every time I have invested with this approach its worked miracles. And
every time I have not invested in this approach its been a DISASTER. Like, a
CLUSTERF*(*K
Claudia doesnt let me invest in a private company unless all four items on my
I) What D o You Th i nk of Bi tc oi n?
of my portfolio in bitcoin.
No, they have zero correlation with inflation. The best hedge against inflation
is the US stock market since about 60% of revenues of the S&P 500 come from
foreign countries.
The only currency in the history of mankind that had actual intrinsic value
was when people traded barley in the markets of the ancient city of Ur. Since
then, weve developed currencies that we had to have faith in their value. Every
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currency has faith and hope backing it. When people began to lose faith in US
currency (in the Civil War), the words In God We Trust were put on the dollar
bill to trick people into having faith in it. But if youre going to pick a metal, wait
until the gold/silver ratio gets higher than its historical average and buy silver.
How come? Because silver is both a precious metal (like gold) and an industrial
metal (also like gold, but much much cheaper). So there actually is some intrinsic
value in silver.
I bought some silver bars back in 2005. But then lost them when I moved.
No. Mutual funds, and the bank representatives that push them, consistently
lie about the fees they are charging. I know this from experience. One time I
accompanied a friend of mine who had made some money (she was a model
and had a good run for awhile) and was looking to invest it. She asked me to go
with her to see her bank representative who had some ideas. Because she was
beautiful, I went with her to the bank. I didnt talk at all during the meeting but
jotted down every time the bank guy lied. He lied five times. Afterwards I explained each of the lies to her. What happened? She put all her money with the
guy. Hes practically family. I cant argue with a good salesman. But he lied about
the mutual funds performance that he was pitching, the fees they were charging,
the commissions he was charging, and a few more I cant remember now. I wrote
an article about it in the Financial Times back then.
Fact: Mutual funds dont outperform the general market so better to invest in
James Altucher
Everyone will disagree with me on this but the answer is an emphatic NO!
If you can avoid, a, b, and c and dont mind the opportunity cost in the
time required to maintain your house then go for it. Else, rent, and use the money
you saved for other investments that will be less stressful and pay off more.
Fact: Housing has returned 0.2% per year in the past 100 years.
Why are you in such a rush to put all of your money to work? Relax! Dont
do it! Theres a saying cash is king for a reason. I will even say, Cash is queen
because on the chessboard the king is just a figurehead and the queen is the most
valuable piece. Cash is a beautiful thing to have. You can pay for all of your basic
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needs with it. You can sleep at night knowing there is cash in the bank. I love a
stress-free life. When I look back at the past 15 years, the times when Ive been
most stressed are when Ive been heavily invested and the times when Ive been
least stressed is when I had cash in the bank. With cash in the bank you can also
invest in yourself.
Or write 1000 small books about different topics and publish them on
Amazon. You can do this on the side while you learn and have a full time job
and then when you are ready, you can jump to your other passive streams of
income. Note: It takes a lot of work to find passive income but when it happens, its worth it.
No. Just try to make more money. That is easier than saving money. I find that
whenever I try to save money I end up spending more. I dont know why that is.
Im a horrible spender, which is probably why Ive gone broke so many times.
Better to just make more with many streams of income so you dont have to
worry about going broke. And then saving will come naturally as you make more
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money. Dont forget that a salary will never make you money. After taxes and
the daily grind, and your exhaustion and the feelings of I hate my job, and then
inflation and then new expenses (kids), you will never be able to save. Avoiding
Starbucks every day wont make you a millionaire, thats a fact. I say it glibly, try
to make more money. I know its not that easy. But in the long run, if you have a
constant focus on alternative ways to make more money, then you will.
I talk a lot about the daily practice I started doing when I was at my lowest
point. I know now after years of doing it that it has worked. Ive done very well
with it, and I started doing it when I was dead broke, lonely, angry, depressed, and
suicidal. I didnt start it from a position of privilege. Heres the whole thing: stay
physically healthy in whatever way you know how (sleep well, eat well, exercise).
Be around good people who love you and respect you and who you love and
respect, and be grateful every day.
Think of new things each day (or all day) to be grateful for. Gratitude is
another word for Abundance because the things you are most grateful for,
become abundant in your life.
And finally, write down 10-20 bad ideas a day. Or good ideas. It doesnt
matter. After exercising my idea muscle for six months, I felt like an idea machine.
It was like a super power that just wouldnt stop. More on this in another post.
Money and abundance in your life is a natural side effect of the above. I know this
for myself but now since writing about it for almost four years I can tell you from
the letters I get that it works for others.
I dont know. I used to write about money stuff because I wanted investors,
or I wanted to sell books, or get speaking engagements. Now I want none of that.
But I get worried that in a world of increasing economic uncertainty that more
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and more people are getting stuck and are scared about what is happening. Too
many people I know are nervous and depressed. Theres nothing else to know
about investing your money. If your bank tries to give you any advice just say,
thanks but Im ok.If they want you to put your money in a savings account, even
so you can get the interest I would politely decline. Theres a reason they are
asking you to do this and I have no idea what it is but its not good for you. You
wont get rich investing your money but you can do very well. And if you combine
that with investing in yourself, you will get wealthy. But only if you remember
that financial wealth is a side effect of real inner wealth. This is the most powerful
investment you can do with your time and your life.
You can always make money back when youve lost it. But one single split
moment of stress and anxiety you will NEVER make back again. Investing in
the future will never bring back the past. To be able to sit and not have a million
stressful thoughts racing through your head. To be able to appreciate everything
around you for the abundance it is. Most people think they need to say thank
you to the world. But the world is constantly saying thank you to you for being
alive, for creating new things, new energies, new experiences.
Every day give the world at least one more reason to whisper thank you
to you. If you can hear that whisper, everything else, every gift in life, becomes
expected. You earned it.
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233
o, now that you have a fly-on-the-wall view of how Wall Street treats
people and you know where not to invest your money, where should you
invest your money?
Warren Buffett, for instance, has to file a form every three months called
a 13G Form which lists his holdings. If you study all his 13G forms you can
understand roughly what price he bought. Try to buy at a lower price than
Buffett did (you may need to wait for a down market). This makes Buffett
your free employee. Note, that this means I dont have to worry about all the
BS that everyone else thinks aboutcash flows , P/E rations, expenses, etc.
I assume my buddies at Warren Buffett Inc have taken care of all of that for
me. Its important to know one thing you never really know whats going on
inside a public company. Everything is as secretive as possible. So I just trust
that Warren Buffett, in some fancy bridge tournament, has figured it all out
instead of me using Yahoo Finance. By the way, this applies to everything:
commodities, art, bonds, etc. But the key is: the investor I co-invest with HAS
to be smarter than me and that can only be demonstrated with an audited
track record that ideally has lasted for decades and not just a one-time winner here and there or a guy who is a talking pundit on TV. Only invest with
the real winners and often you have to dig to find them but a starting point
is the 13G filings at sec.gov. If anything, diversify not across stocks but across
the smart people you follow. That is real diversification instead of Yahoo
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Finance diversification.
2. Remember that cash is king.
Having a lot of cash leads to a stress free life. Invest as little as possible.
Follow the 3 percent rule: put no more than 3 percent in any one invest-
ment. And have 70 percent of your money in cash. When the market crashes,
this all changes. A market crash means the market is down 30 percent and at
least one newspaper is saying capitalism is dead. At this point, put as much of
your money as possible in either high dividend companies that have crashed
or private companies where the co-investors are smarter than you. How do
you find these co-investors? Go to Angel.co and study all of the private companies that list there and who their private investors are. Its OK if you then
experience volatility. In the long run the market will go back to all-time highs
like it always does.
6. For private investing: Invest in at least TWO people smarter than you: another investor and the CEO of the company who has to have succeeded before.
Or else, politely turn down the opportunity to flush your money down
the toilet.
7. The S&P 500 index is proven to be the best hedge against inflation except for
hyperinflation.
8. Investing in you is the best hedge against hyperinflation. If you have a good
business, you collect all the money.
9. Never invest in anyone elses ideas of investing: mutual funds, ETFs, bank
advisors, hedge funds, venture capital funds.
10. Never invest because of tax reasons: 401(k)s, IRAs, Roth IRAs, 529 Plans,
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invest myself as I instruct others to. I have as much in cash as possible. None
in money market funds. Just cash. I own blue chip stocks that pay dividends
for wealth preservation and I invest in some hard-to-value idea companies for
wealth creation. Im also invested in about thirty private companies that I primarily invested in the 2009 crash when valuations were extra low and I was always
investing with sophisticated investors smarter than me and was always investing
in CEOs that had succeeded before.
I spend money on experiences and not objects. I dont really own anything
except books, some clothes, a phone, a tablet, and a computer. But Ill take my
children on extravagant vacations or Ill hold dinners of ten people who dont
know each other, or Ill travel to California just to meet someone I want to meet.
I dont have a credit card. I dont have debt. This is not because debt is bad. In
fact, when interest rates are low its never a horrible idea to take on some debt.
But money is a subset of things that go BOOM! and I like to be as stress-free
as possible.
I choose public over private school. I moved about eighty miles out of NYC
so I could send my kids to a good public school and pull them out of the BS
private school they are in. Im in favor of unschoolingno school education at
all. I trust that kids want to learn and if they dont, then school is even a worse way
to get them to learn. School is intended as babysitting so I dont let a BS private
school charge college-like prices to babysit my kids.
I lease a car and dont own. How come? you might ask. Cars can last fifteen
years now. Why lease? The reality is a car is just a computer with a car app in it.
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Cars will last for fewer years than you think because now the car companies make
sure your car breaks down just when the next model comes out. So I lease for
three years and then get the next model. Plus, less money down and cash is king.
I rent and I will never buy a house again. As discussed previously a house
has all the qualities of the worst investment in the world: it takes up too much
of your portfolio, its highly illiquid, and too much leverage, plus it has negative
dividends (e.g., every year you pay real estate taxes that go up faster than inflation and you pay unpredictable maintenance costs). Unless you are pro at renting
and a pro at maintenance and understand all the other hidden costs and fees, you
should not own.
When given the choice of investing in someone elses ideas (like a mutual
I dont hire lawyers. Sometimes you need a lawyer. But for most things you
dont. I use legalzoom to set up a company,. To get a divorce, remember the most
important thing is that your children will learn from the example you set on how
you treat their mother or father. My ex-wife and I wrote up our own divorce
agreement and used a lawyer to shepherd it through the court system. Total cost
to lawyers: $1,000.
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like that with a program when you know the pros will do a decent job during
times when you can be doing other things with your life?
I dont carry much life insurance. I have life insurance but I am reducing it
as it becomes less necessary and as I get older (where the payments get more
expensive).
I give to charity. Give to something that matters to you. I give to Women for
Women International. I think that for most charities you have to do severe due
diligence to see how they are allocating funds, but I like the way W4W does allocations. I also give to the charities of anyone who has helped me make money in
the past. So I regularly give to the leukemia charity of the ex-CEO of a company I
invested in, which was sold for a good exit.
I look for ways to give. Im aiming to have fewer things in my life. I want to
die with no possessions. But over the years I have accumulated possessions. So as
much as possible I give as gifts things that are important to me but have a lot of
value to the people receiving them.
Inheritance. Nobody should inherit more than the minimal they need
monthly to get by but still have motivation to go out and make something for
themselves. I set up trusts for my kids, not just to guarantee that theyll never have
to lie on the floor scared (like I have) but that their kids and their grandkids will
hopefully have money to spend.
I value convenience over luxury. I live in a nice enough (rented) house thats
right next to the train so I can get into NYC quickly if I have to. It also has the
feature that its about one hundred feet from the local river so its probably easier
for me to take a beautiful walk in nature than just about anyone.
I value convenient travel. I dont try to save. I fly business class whenever
I travel. First class is a scam (not much difference between the two other than
the prices). I try to stay in AirBnBs instead of hotels, because why pay the same
price for a room that I can pay for a five-bedroom brownstone? I use Uber for
a car service so I dont have to wait in the cold for a cab. I use Zipcar instead of
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rental car agencies because Zipcars (or Cars2Go) are everywhere and require
zero paperwork. I hate paperwork or waiting on line. (Does anyone like either
of those things?).
Im going to repeat this: I buy experiences and not things. I dont like to buy my
kids gifts. But Ill take them places and wont hold back. They will lose and forget
the things in the long run. But they will never forget the experiences.
And thats about it. I cant think of anything else I do with my money. I dont
buy name-brand clothes (many of my pants and shirts I bought in India for about
five dollars each). I dont buy any jewelry. I use the wholesale companies that sell
to pawnshops to buy things like an engagement ring. Claudia has to remind me
to get new shoes when my shoes wear out every two years or so.
Claudia keeps track of all airline and hotel points but I never think about
these things. Not that Im so above them but I have more confidence in my ability
to make money than to save money.
Everyone does a very silly math. They say, If I save a dollar its the same as if
I make a dollar.
If I have $1,000 to my name, then the maximum I can save is $1,000. But the
I dont spend a lot because I dont have many financial wants. But when I need
The common theme is that I dont want stress. I dont want other people
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What H appe ne d To Me Wh en
I Day Traded - L es s ons
L ea rne d from Day Tradi ng
was a day trader for many years, and it almost killed me. I made money by
making profits on my own money and also taking a percentage of the profits
for the people I traded for. I traded up to $40 million or $50 million a day
at my peak. I did this from 2001 to 2004. I learned about day trading but I also
learned a lot about myself and what I was good at, what I was horrible at, and
what I was psychotic atthings that had nothing to do with day trading.
Day trading is the best job in the world on the days you make money. You
make a trade, then maybe twenty minutes later you are out of the trade with a
profit, and for the rest of the day you think about how much money you made.
However, on a bad day, its the worst job in the world. I would make a trade, it
would go against me, and then I wanted my heart to stop so my blood would stop
thumping so loudly.
I did it for years, though, because I was unemployable in every other way.
Heres what I learned. All of these lessons I will certainly use today, many years
after I stopped day trading.
You cant predict the future. Everyone thinks they can. But they cant. This
applies not just to trading but everything. You could be married for ten years and
the next thing you know you are divorced and living alone in a sad apartment.
You could be healthy all your life and drink your vegetables and exercise and
reduce stress, and a year later you could be dead from cancer.
Most of us would have much less stress if we let go of trying to predict the
future. You can always seek to increase the odds in your favor. If I dont jump off
bridges, for instance, its more likely Ill be alive a year from now. But certainly a
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Hope is not a strategy. If you get to the point where you hope you dont get
ruined, then you did something wrong beforehand. For instance, if you plan a
wedding outside and you dont have a backup plan in case it rains, then you probably planned your wedding poorly, unless you are getting married in a desert.
Hoping in and of itself is not a bad thing. I hope that every day my life goes perfectly. But if hoping is the only thing Im relying on, then it means I didnt really
look at all the possible outcomes of something that was important to me.
are created because people are uncertain about almost everything in their lives.
We are constantly trying to close the enormous gap between the things we are
certain about and the things we are uncertain about, and almost every invention, product, Internet service, book, whatever has been created to help us close
that gap.
Sometimes this is hard. If your husband leaves you, you often feel like crawl-
ing on the floor and burning all the self-help books. They all lied. Its hard to feel
in the now or to positive think when life feels like its over. Ive tried. For me
its too hard. But at the very least you can say . . . help me. You can say it to your
close friends. You can say it something inside of yourself. Help me is the most
powerful, and most forgotten, prayer.
Taking risks involves reducing risk. Some people take too many risks and they
go bankrupt. And sometimes people are too cautious and dont take enough risks.
When I first started day trading, I was so afraid of risk that Id end the trade if I
had a small profit. But then I would take big losses and that would wipe out all
my profits. The key is that you can take larger and larger risks if you work on
better ways to deal with those risks. For instance, I might be able to risk marrying
someone if I know she is not a hard-core drug addict who regularly betrays the
people she is close to. I can risk driving without a license if I always stay below
the speed limit (I know this is a stupid risk, but still). Once you have a method of
reducing risks, its easier to make trades or decisions about anything.
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Diversification is critical. Often I get e-mails telling me, I really want one job
but they dont seem to want me and now Im miserable. How can I get that job?
Well you cant. And youre going to be unhappy. You cant wish yourself a job.
When I was raising money to day trade, I probably contacted over 1,000
people. I started over a dozen Internet businesses and watched all of them fail but
one. Then when I was trying to sell my Internet business I contacted over a dozen
companies (although Google broke my heartdamn you, Google!).
When I wanted to get married, I went on lots of dates. Claudia had an even
smarter approach: she wouldnt waste time with dinners. She would only go to tea
with guys. Within the first twenty seconds you know if you are attracted. So keep
it to a tea.
Say no. If something is not working out in day trading even if your heart
wants it to work outyou have to say no and cut your losses. If a business relationship is not working out, dont put more energy and time into it. There is a cognitive bias called commitment bias that leads us to think that just because weve
already put time and energy (or money) into something that we have to stick with
it. But we dont. Say no to it. You have to decide every moment if this is the situation you want to be in. Just because you were in the situation a moment ago, or
yesterday, or for ten years, doesnt mean the situation is right for you anymore.
Your health is always important. Day trading pulls everything out of you. It
sucks the soul out of your body, blends it up, and then explodes. So you have to
take care of yourself. If you dont sleep enough, if you dont eat well, exercise, be
around positive people, be grateful for what you have, blah, blah, blah, you will
lose all of your money and go bankrupt. And obviously, this applies to everything
else in life. So think about it: what small thing can you do every day to become a
slightly better you?
The reason we get so attracted to safe cubicle jobs is that the pain is subtler
and sneaks up on us. Its not the blender drama of day trading, so the need for
health on a daily basis doesnt seem as important. But it is.
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Laughter is essential. The only way to survive is to laugh. Theres that saying:
James Altucher
Man plans, God laughs. Well, you might as well be on the same side as God,
right? Saying This is crazy means youre crazy. Ive seen it a million times. Guy
makes a trade. The market goes against him. He says, This is crazy and puts
more money into the trade. And then he loses all his money and goes crazy. Ive
had to talk people off the ledge or tell them to put the gun down.
The market is never crazy. The world is never crazy. And I will go so far as to
say that your girlfriend who just lied to you about where she spent the night is
not crazy. I only care about you. And youre effin crazy if you thought the world
was going to line up any other way than the way it lined up. Tough on you. I know
that when I feel like, ugh, this situation is insane, the first place I need to look is
at me. I am insane.
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It d oesnt mat ter if a trade (or a day,
or a life) is go od or bad.
ood and bad days happen. But life is about a billion little moments that
add up to all the things around you. If you let one of those moments have
too much control, then you are bound to be mostly miserable. I was mostly miserable during the period I was day trading, because I let that aspect of my life
take control. I stopped focusing on being a good husband, a good father, a good
friend, a good anything. All of my other constituencies went to hell. I would have
nightmares. I would lose sleep. I would wake up many mornings and go to the
church across the street so I could be by myself and pray. What would I pray?
Jesus, please make the markets go in my direction today.
Its never about the money. Every day I get e-mails like, Can you show me
I know a thousand day traders and only two that wont go bankrupt. So what
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makes anyone think they will have an edge? How many people listen to me? Zero.
How come? Because people are sick of their lives, their relationships, their jobs,
and all the lies that have been told to them ever since they learned how to walk.
They want freedom from the BS.
I get it. Day trading is the dream. You can make enough money to not care.
You can skip right to the being happy part. You can skip right to being free.
But we never learned that. We were taught we had to do something first to earn
freedom. We were taught that suffering was the currency to buy happiness.
OK, go do it. Then cry about it. Then get scared. Then curse the craziness.
Then read this chapter again. Not because it will make you happy. But
And laugh.
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Street Smarts Are Vital: Mental
Models Worth L earning
Im not going to recreate the wheel here, since many good writers and think-
ers have already developed models for life that have largely worked for them and
others. Im going to describe the ones I think you should learn and where you can
read more about them.
Ive been really lucky: a lot of the developers of these models have appeared
on my podcast and Ive been able to ask them more about these models than they
revealed in their books. And now you get to reap the benefits of their wisdom.
Looks like youre pretty lucky, too.
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Antifragile is a book by Nassim Taleb. The word antifragile refers to a system that
gets stronger as it gets hurt. This is different from being resilient. Resilience is if
you get hurt and can stay the same. Its not so bad to be resilient. But its better to
be antifragile.
The book is about whether or not the economic system we live in is anti-
fragile. Its not. Its as fragile as can be which is why I wanted to write this book- to
make you personally antifragile regardless of the system.
Before Nassim came on my podcast I told him I wanted to talk about per-
sonal antifragility. Specifically, Ive never really been sick. So Im worried that
the first time I get sick, Ill just be a whining baby and collapse in pain and
agony and die.
We spoke about some of the ways Nassim works on his personal antifragility.
For instance, he walks twenty hours (hours, not miles) a week. Our ancestors
walked constantly for millions of years. Now, he told me, we take the car to go
two miles to the gym and then we walk on the treadmill for two miles.
We spoke about diets, particularly the paleo diet (i.e., where you essentially
eat like a cavemanhigh fiber, meat, vegetables and fruits, nothing processed/
dairy, etc.) that has become popular. He said the big problem with the paleo diet is
that it doesnt have random fasting. Fasting is necessary and has to be random,
he said. Our ancestors never knew where their next meal was coming from. They
didnt have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And almost all ancient cultural practices
include some form of fasting.
Its worth reading his book or listening to my podcast interview with him to
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The Four-Hour Work Week
Tim Ferriss is a good friend who has also come on the podcast. When The
4-Hour Work Week came out it was explosive. It turns out thatno surprise
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But what people think of working four hours and the actual implementation
is very different. The basic idea is: build a successful business, figure out what you
can outsource or what unprofitable (or barely profitable) clients you can fire, and
then use your extra time to explore new ideas.
One thing Tim told me on the podcast that I thought was fun: I wanted to
call the book the Two Hour Work Week because that was what was really happening to me. But the publishers didnt think anyone would believe it.
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The 10,000 Hour Rule
recommend just for the section on how the Beatles obtained mastery in
playing rock. Basically, they took a gig for a few years where they were playing
almost twenty hours a day in German strip clubs. This gave them their 10,000
hours of practice with intent, and that made them the best in the world at
rock and roll.
Its not just practice, but practice with intent thats important. (Review the
If you dont need to be in the top 0.001 percent, then yes, you can cut down
your hours significantly and still be better in a field than 90 percent or 80 percent
of the population, which is enough in most fields to demonstrate mastery (as
opposed to being the best in the world.
Many fields of life have very steep learning curves and then very slow learn-
ing curves after a certain point. Id rather spend 2,000 hours each on five areas of
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life with very steep learning curves, get in the top 10 percent of all of those, rather
than spend 10,000 hours on one area of life.
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Idea Sex
If you combine two areas of life and get reasonably good at both and then
combine them, then you are suddenly the best in the world at the combination.
Google is a great example. Larry Page was an academic at heart but he built a
search engine. Then he combined it with the idea of how academics rank the
value of their papers. Putting the two together gave him the basic algorithm
of Google, dubbed PageRank, and Google became the best search engine in
the world.
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The 80-20 Rule
Tim Ferriss talks about this in his various books, and its a notion thats been
around for a long time. It was originally discovered when someone noticed that
80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the people. The basic
idea is that 20 percent of your effort will result in 80 percent of your results.
For instance, 20 percent of your clients will result in 80 percent of your profits.
Twenty percent of what you practice in tennis will result in 80 percent of your
wins. Twenty percent of your employees will do 80 percent of the work. This rule
works in almost every area of your life.
What I like about the 80-20 Rule is that it can be applied to itself. In other
words. Take the 20 percent that produces results and apply it again. Now 4 percent
(20 percent of the 20 percent) of your work results in 64 percent (80 percent of
the 80 percent) of your results. Applied again and 1 percent of your work roughly
creates 50 percent of your results.
Understanding this rule and its applications is what led to that of The 4-Hour
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Work Week and can also help reduce the 10,000 Hour Rule so that you can learn
very efficiently only the things you need to learn to be perceived as a master
in a field.
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The O ne P ercent Rule
I forget where I read it. But basically I live my life by this rule. If you try to
improve in some area of your life one percent a day, then in one year you will
be thirty-eight times better than you were at the beginning of the year. These
numbers dont make a lot of sense in much of personal life (for instance, will
you be a thirty-eight-fold better husband if you put in one percent more effort
every day? Maybe!). But I always try to find at least one thing that I can improve
one percent at each day. Then I know that everything is in the direction of small
improvement and within a year I will be, in some weird notion, thirty-eight
times better.
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The Four Agreements
This is the title of a book by Don Miguel Ruiz. Its intended as an inspirational
book but I like the four simple agreements he makes with himself to make his life
better.
I recommend reading the book but Ill describe the agreements here:
1. Be Im pec ca ble wi th Your Word. This is not the same as radical honesty where you just spew everything out of your mouth that is honest. It just means if you say you will do something, do it. If you feel like you
have to lie to make excuses, then just dont say anything at all.
2. D on t Take A ny th i ng P ersona lly. This is valuable advice in
this era of Internet trolls and outrage porn.
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3. D on t M a ke As sump ti ons . If someone is upset at you, for instance, who knows what might be going on in their life that you have no idea
about? Also, dont assume you wont get a raise, or that someone doesnt like
you. Be curious. Ask questions. Be simple about finding out the truth in a
situation before you jump to any assumptions.
4. Always D o Your Best. If you know you arent cutting corners and
always doing your best, then guaranteed you will do exactly the job you
need to do.
I describe many other methods for success throughout this book. But I
wanted to include these models because they can be read about elsewhere and
theyve changed the ways in which I live my life.
Not everything is about being the best in the world. Sometimes its good to
have fun. In the next chapter I describe what I do to make my life personally
easier. Perhaps it can help you. Perhaps it can help you come up with your own
ideas on how life can be easier.
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Four Things I D o That C an C hange Your
L ife in the Next Ten Minu tes
Im going to be dead for about 9 or 10 trillion years. and probably only alive
for the next forty or so. It sounds like Im trying to put things in perspective. But
Im not. Its just true and even a little depressing. Ive never built a rocketship that
will make it into space. Ill never cure cancer. I might not even write a best-selling
novel about a teenage girl that falls in love with a dominating billionaire.
What can I learn in ten minutes that will be useful for the rest of my life. This I
can do. I can show you four insanely stupid things that will make the rest of your
life better. Sometimes they work and sometimes they dont.
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I have 203,433 unread emails not counting my spam box. Not only will I
never launch a rocket into space I will never even read all the emails addressed to
me. I dont like the term life hack. It takes a lot of work to be really good at something in life. You need: a teacher, a passion, read a lot of books, practice three to
four hours a day for many days. There are no shortcuts to learning something.
Even if you have every life hack in the book, this is what it takes to be
GREAT at something you love doing. Great enough to make a living or even
wealth at iteverything takes time and effort. Ive done enough interviews now
on my podcast with people who the best in the world at what they do and I can
see there are no real shortcuts. This is true no matter what field. So instead, Im
going to tell you four dumb things I do that I have fun with and has made life a
lot smoother for me. Since there are no real rules to life I would encourage you
to seek out the four of five or ten or twenty things that give you fun, and makes
life a little easier for you.
How come? Because then people remember me. They always say, whoah!
Ive never had one. And then the next time I come into an establishment, Im
remembered. This is good for restaurants, dates, poker night with friends,
even for paying at the local deli. I also find that this is a quick way to make
friends whenever I move to a new town. Im very shy and this gets people
talking. This has also been very good on dates. Nobody ever forgets the guy
with a roll of two-dollar bills.
2 . W EA R A D O CTOR S C OAT
I wear a doctors lab coat most of the time. Like in airports, restaurants,
Its comfortable.
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The big pockets let me put any electronic devices I might needan iPad
Mini, for example, plus waiters pads (see below).
3. USE WA ITER S PA DS
I spoke about this in an earlier chapter, but its such a benefit for me that
Ill say it again. I have about three waiters pads. I order them for about ten
cents a pad in bulk on a restaurant supplies website.
I use them to write at least ten ideas a day. Dont keep track of the ideas.
I use a pad instead of a laptop or iPad because a screen messes with your
dopamine levels. I like the visceral experience of putting pen to pad. Specifically, a waiters pad forces you to be concise. A waiters pad has a limited
number of lines. You cant write a novel there.
And Ive said how its a great conversation piece in meetings. How once I
pull out the waiters pad someone always says, Ill take fries with my burger
and everyone laughs. Again, Im shy so its a good way for me to break the ice.
When you pull out a waiters pad in restaurants, guess what happens? Waiters
treat you better.
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4.iv. The other day in a cafe I was working and someone potentially violent came
up and asked me for money. I held up my waiters pad and said, Im a waiter,
do you want to order something? and they sort of looked at me and grunted
and then walked away.
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Watch Standup C omedy
introverted. Stand-up comedians are the best public speakers in the world and
quite frequently, the most astute social commentators on the human condition.
So I watch them before most social encounters personal, professional, media
because it gives me a boost of energy. My mirror neurons are going to feed off of
their boost of energy for at least one to three hours after I watch them. It gives me
material. I wont steal from a comedian (yes I will). And at the very least, I often
improvise based on material I heard a comedian said.
Studying the subtleties of how comedians get laughs: their timing, their voices,
their silences, the way they look at the audience, the way they move across the
stage, the way they benefits from the comedians who came before them, and their
actual commentary about life, helps me in my many interactions with people.
Anyway, those are the four insanely stupid things that I wanted to share.
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money from him. I was two hours late. This was pre-GPS and I had no cell phone.
I was totally lost.
I kept playing Lose Yourself by Eminem over and over again. I was afraid
this was my one shot and I was blowing it. I was even crying in my car. I was going
broke and I felt this was my one chance. What a loser.
Finally I got there. The hedge fund manager was dressed all in pink. His
house was enormous. Maybe 20,000 square feet. His cook served us a great meal.
I had made him wait two hours to eat. And he had cancer at the time. I felt real
bad. Eventually I did raise money from this manager and it started a new life for
me. But thats not why I bring up Eminem at all.
The song Lose Yourself is from the movie 8 Mile. Although I recommend
it, you dont have to see it to understand what I am about to write. Ill give you
everything you need to know.
the movie. A scene I will break down for you line by line so you will know everything there is to know about sales, cognitive bias, and defeating your competition.
First, heres all you need to know about the movie. Eminem is a poor, no-collar,
white-trash guy living in a trailer park. Hes beaten on, works crappy jobs, gets
betrayed, etc. But he lives to rap and break out somehow.
In the first scene he is having a battle against another rapper and he chokes.
He gives up without saying a word. Hes known throughout the movie as someone
who chokes under pressure and he seems doomed for failure. Until he chooses
himself. The scene that really drives this point home, for me at least, is the final
battle in the movie. Hes the only white guy and the entire audience is black. Hes
up against the reigning champion that the audience loves. And he wins the battle.
You can use the techniques Eminem employs to go up against any competition.
First off, watch the scene (with lyrics) before and after my explanation. Go to
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YouTube and type Eminem rap battle vs Papa Doc 8 Mile lyrics.
How did Eminem win so easily? One very important way we humans evolved
is that the brain developed many biases as shortcuts to survival. Setting aside his
talent for a moment (assume both sides are equally talented), Eminem used a
series of cognitive biases to win the battle.
For instance, we have a bias toward noticing negative news over positive
news. The reason is simple: if you were in the jungle and you saw a lion to your
right and an apple tree to your left, you would best ignore the apple tree and run
as fast as possible away from the lion. This negativity bias is the entire reason
newspapers still survive today.
We no longer need those shortcuts as much. There arent that many lions
in the street. But the brain took 400,000 years to evolve and its only in the past
fifty years maybe that we are relatively safe from most of the dangers that threatened earlier humans. Our technology and ideas have evolved, but our brains cant
evolve fast enough to keep up with them. Consequently, these biases are used in
almost every sales campaign, business, marketing campaign, movie, news, relationshipseverything.
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In-Group Bias
Notice Eminems first line: Now everybody from the 313, put your
The 313 is the area code for Detroit. And not just Detroit. Its for blue-collar
Detroit, where the entire audience, and Eminem, is from. So he wipes away the
out-group bias that might be associated with his race and he changes the conversation to who is in 313 and who is not in 313.
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Herd Behavior
Put your hands up and follow me, he says. Everyone starts putting their hands
up without thinking. So their brain tells them that they are doing this for rational
reasons. For instance, they are now following Eminem.
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Availibilit y C ascade
The brain has a tendency to believe things if they are repeated, regardless of
whether or not they are true. This is Availability Cascade. Notice Eminem repeats
his first line. After he does that he no longer needs to say follow me. He says,
Look, look. He is setting up the next cognitive bias.
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D istinction Bias or O u t-groups Bias
Brains have a tendency to view two things as very different if they are evalu-
Eminem wants the audience to see his opponent Papa Doc as someone dif-
ferent from the group, even though the reality is they are all in the same group
of friends with similar interests, etc. Eminem says: Now while he stands tough,
notice that this man did not have his hands up. In other words, even though Papa
Doc is black, like everyone in the audience, he is no longer in the group that
Eminem has defined and commanded: the 313 group.
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A mbiguit y Bias
He doesnt refer to Papa Doc by name. He says this man. In other words,
theres the 313 group that all of us in the audience are a part of, and now there
is this ambiguous man who is attempting to invade us.
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C redential Bias
B ecause the brain wants to take shortcuts, it will look for information more
from people with credentials or lineage than from people who come out of
nowhere.
So, for instance, if one person was from Harvard and told you it was going to
rain today and another random person told you it was going to be sunny today
you might be more inclined to believe the person from Harvard. Eminem uses
this subtly two lines later. He says, one, two, three, and to the four. This is a direct
line from Snoop Doggs first song with Dr. Dre, Aint Nothin But a G Thing. It is
the first line in the song and perhaps one of the most well-known rap lines ever.
Eminem directly associates himself with well-known successful rappers Dr. Dre
and Snoop when he uses that line.
He then uses Availability Cascade again by saying, one Pac, two Pac, three
Pac, four. First, hes using that one, two, three, and to the four again but this time
with Pac, which refers to the rapper Tupac. So now hes associated himself, in this
little battle in Detroit, with three of the greatest rappers ever.
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In-group/O u t-group
Eminem points to random people in the audience and says, Youre Pac,
hes Pac, including them with him in associating their lineages with these great
rappers. But then he points to his opponent, Papa Doc, makes a gesture like his
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head is being sliced off and says, Youre Pac? None. Meaning that Papa Doc has
no lineage, no credibility, unlike Eminem and the audience.
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Basic D irect M arketing: L ist the
O bjections Up Front
Any direct marketer or salesperson knows the next technique Eminem uses.
When you are selling a product, or yourself, or even going on a debate or convincing your kids to clean up their room, the person or group you are selling to
is going to have easy objections. They know those objections and you know those
objections. If you dont bring them up and they dont bring them, up then they
will not buy your product.
If they bring it them before you, then it looks like you were hiding something
and you just wasted a little of their time by forcing them to bring it up. So a great
sales technique is to address all of the objections in advance. Eminems next set of
lines does this brilliantly.
I am white.
I am a fucking bum.
I do have a dumb friend named Cheddar Bob who shot himself with his
own gun.
And so on.
By the end of the list, theres no more criticism you can make of him. Hes
addressed everything and dismissed it. In a rap battle (or a sales pitch), if you
address everything your opponent can say, hes left with nothing to say.
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When he has nothing to say, the audience, or the sales prospect, your date,
your kids, whoever, will buy from you or listen to what you have to say.
Look at direct marketing letters you get in e-mail. They all spend pages and
pages addressing your concerns. This is one of the most important techniques in
direct marketing.
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Humor Bias
Eminem saves his best for last. But I know something about you, he says
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Extreme O u t-group
You went to Cranbook. And then Eminem turns to his 313 group for em-
BAM!
Theres no way now the audience can be on Papa Docs side but Eminem
makes the outgroup even larger. His real names Clarence. And his parents have
a real good marriage.
BAM and BAM! Two more things that separate Papa Doc out from the crowd.
Hes a nerdy guy, who goes to a rich school, and his parents are togetherunlike
those of probably everyone in the audience including Eminem. No wonder Papa
Doc doesnt live in the 313, which was originally stated somewhat humorously
but is now proven without a doubt.
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Eminem says, There aint no such thing as . . .and the audience chants with
him because they know he is quoting a line from Halfway Crooks! the song
by Mobb Deep (I did their website back in 1998), another huge East Coast rap
group (so now Eminem has established lineage between himself and both the
West Coast and the East Coast).
And by using the audience to say Halfway Crooks were all in the same
group again while Clarence goes back to his home with his parents at the end of
the show.
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S carcit y
The music stops, which means Eminem has to stop and let Papa Doc have his
turn. But he doesnt. He basically says, F*ck everybody, F*ck yall if you doubt
me. I dont wanna win. Im outtie.
He makes himself scarce. After establishing total credibility with the audi-
He reduces the supply of himself by saying hes out of there. Maybe he will
never come back. Reduce the supply of yourself while demand is going up and
what happens? Basic economics. Value goes up. Hes so thoroughly dominated
the battle that now, in reversal to the beginning of the movie, Papa Doc chokes.
He doesnt quite choke, though. Theres nothing left to say. Eminem has said it
all for him.
Theres no way Papa Doc can raise any objections because Eminem has
already addressed them all. All he can do is defend himself, which will give him
the appearance of being weak. And hes so thoroughly not in the 313 group that
there is no way to get back in there. Theres simply nothing left to say. So Eminem
wins the battle. And what does Eminem do with his victory? He can do anything.
But he walks away from the entire subculture. He walks off at the end of the movie
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with no connection to what he fought for. Hes going to choose himself to be successful and not rely on the small-time thinking in battles in Detroit.
50 Cent, who has sold hundreds of millions more (and is another example of
a choose yourself-er, as Robert Greene so aptly describes in his book The
50th Law).
Doesnt it seem silly to analyze a rap song for ideas on how to be better at sales
fact, I dont publish anything unless Im afraid of how people will react. When
you expose yourself there are many ways for people to attack you. People will stab
you and hurt you. But you cant create art unless you show how unique you are
while being inclusive with others who share your problems.
Avoi d R e g rets
veryone wants to know what dead people say right before they die. Words
maybe infused with speckles of a heaven. Beethoven supposedly said on his
deathbed, Friends, applaud! The comedy is finished! Lou Costello said, This
was the best ice cream soda I ever tasted.
A question similar to this is, What are common regrets of people in their
thirties and forties? And, can we avoid them if we know what they are?
Well, here are my regrets. And each one can be organized around one
word: Dont.
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D ont Buy Things
I have said it before, but Ill repeat: buy experiences. A house is a thing. An
experience is a trip. An experience is a visit to that girl or guy on the other side of
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You think you have time to get out of it. But you dont. And then it happens.
And then its too late. And then its something you did. You were the target and
you got shot. A black ink stamp leaving its mark on your wrist. You went to the
party and the next day, all blurry and inky, it shows and everyone can see. And
now all you can think about is what you would have done with that time or how
you would have spent that money instead of buying $ fifteen cocktails.
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D ont Try to P lease P eople
Nobody is more worthy of love in the entire universe than you. I wish I had
reminded myself of that more. I couldve saved all of that time where I was trying
to please someone else. Money you lose you can always make back. But even five
minutes of time lost is gone forever.
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D ont Fall in L ove With S omeone Who
is In L ove With S omeb ody E lse
These people are magnets of love. Theyve sucked all the love out of the room
so when you walk in, its already too late, youre past that zone in the black hole
where nothing ever gets out and nobody ever knows whats there. Its lost in space
and time. When Ive fallen in love with someone who was in love with someone
else, only pieces of me have ever survived. And even then I had to put those pieces
back together into the Tinkertoy robot that became me for a long time.
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S
Run, D ont Walk
I dont mean run to a goal or a destination. There are no goals and you realize
this around the age of thirty or so. I mean just run. You build up your blood
vessels. More oxygen gets to the brain. You get smarter. Life is better. And youll
see more in life than the people who are walking. Who take their time failing.
Who take their time falling for others. Who take their time while waiting for
the right moment. Waiting for the right weather, the right coordinates, the right
person, to drop anchor. Theres never a right moment. So just run to get there.
S
D ont Wait for Them to Say Yes
Who is them? What are they saying yes to? What do you think will happen
after the wait is over? Yes. Thats my point. All of the answers to these questions
are lesser versions of what happens if you dont wait so Ill say it again. Dont wait
for them to say yes. Say yes to yourself first and everyone will say yes later.
S
D ont Steal Paper C lips from
The O ffice
It seems small. But a million paper clips in life add up to what you are, a mish-
mash of twisted metal. Be honest. Honesty compounds until your word becomes
The Word. Try it and see.
S
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I mean McRibs, but also I mean the news. And dramas that kill lots of people.
And coworkers who gossip in the hallway, everyone trying to pull everyone else
down. And family who yells at you only because you have become the piano they
play their own anguish on. And late nights with the girl who smiles but you know
it will never work. At twenty, life can either compound into beauty or into insanity. This is the dont that forks into both.
S
D ont R egret
It may look like these are regrets. But they are just tattoos that live on me right
now. Dont time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can
change. Dont bookmark pages youve already read. Today it starts all over again.
Every tomorrow is determined by every today.
Ive been to every part of the prison. I went to school. Ive bought and lost two
Ive started over twenty businesses and failed at seventeen of them. Ive
also run a hedge fund and a venture capital fund. Ive started and run software
companies. Ive managed thousands of people. And Ive been on the floor lonely
and scared to death and wishing I could just press a button to end it all. And it
was out of that, that I had to find the way to recover, to finally put it behind me.
To finally break free.
I cant say I succeeded at it. Freedom is not a point in time where before that
point you were enslaved and after that point you are free. Freedom is something
that you practice every day.
If you do everything Ive discussed in this book you will gradually make more
and more money and help more and more people. At least, Ive seen it happen
for me and for others. I hope this doesnt sound arrogant. But Ive messed up too
much by not following the advice Ive laid out. So I really had no choice but to
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Dont plagiarize the lives of your parents, your peers, your teachers, your col-
I wish I were you because if you follow my advice, then you will most likely
end up doing what you love and getting massively rich while helping many
others. I didnt do that when I was twenty. But now, at forty-six, Im really grateful I have the chance every day to wake up and improve one percent. And I hope
you do the same.
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lot of what youve read in this book will come to life when you discuss it
with other people. So I thought carefully about what the ideal components of a Choose Yourself meetup would look like. Choosing your-
self requires that you make your own networks and connections that can allow
you to continue along the themes of your life. Freedom is the result. More calm
is the result. Less conflict in your life is the result. A Choose Yourself meetup
will, over repeated meetings, automatically lend itself to increasing the benefits of
doing a daily practice. I encourage anyone to form one and run it.
Ideas on how they can move away or get less dependent on the gatekeepers
in their life.
Ideas on networking. We all need help from others to succeed, pay our
bills, meet our obligations, and move forward. Having the support or even
simply meeting people who have a similar mindset would certainly help.
Human contact. The life of someone who chooses him- or herself can be
lonely at times, the meetings can ensure that we socialize and have fun.
like. And by the way, if you recognize some themes from twelve-step meetings of
Al-Anon or AA, you are right. Those meetings have been working fine for over
one hundred years. The model works, people attend and they benefit, so why not?
By using their models we get hundreds of years of popular consensus on the best
ways to get everyone to
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James Altucher
Participate.
Feel welcome.
Speak up.
Mingle.
Choose themselves.
Also, each meeting can, through their own monthly or periodically busi-
ness meeting, modify their own format. Each meeting can choose itself; its group
can do its own thing, provided that the members of the group agree on it.
lated time the meeting starts, exactly on time as this is a sign of respect. The moderator speaks:
Hello, my name is X and I today choose myself. I am the chair for this meeting,
and that does not mean I own anything or direct anything, I am just member of
the community doing service for a specified period of time.
(At this point a notebook might be passed around with dates of future meet-
ings for people to write down their names for when they are available and willing
to chair a meeting.)
People attending this meeting are welcome to chair any of our meetings,
because when we rotate the leadership, and follow meeting guidelines, we ensure
that we put principles before personalities and that we keep the focus on what is
important: choosing ourselves for success.
In the spirit of camaraderie and for the highest good of all, we do not criticize,
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gossip, interrupt or talk over each other. We respect the order of the meeting.
comfortable at any time, anyone can ask the chair to read this introduction again.
brought up in the business meeting, which for this meetup is held every Xth of
the month.
not here. We do not blame others or put anyone down. Instead we focus on
ideas and healthy partnerships that can help each of us move forward toward
creating the life we want. We know that choosing ourselves starts with our own
health, and we start with that, with getting to a place of health for us, regardless
of other people in our lives.
In short, we put the focus on the life we want to create, and not on regrets
of the past.
The only purpose of this meeting is to choose ourselves, become idea ma-
chines, and help each other surpass gate-keepers that may appear to stand
between us and a rewarding and successful life, for today.
Explain that the format of the meeting consists of reading for fifteen minutes
from either Choose Yourself!, The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth, or The Choose
Yourself Stories. Follow this with an introduction of every member and then
break the meeting into separate sections to address issues that will help members
choose themselves for success.
and must not leave the room. Confidentiality allows all of us to feel safe and
share our deepest vulnerabilities. Keeping these meetings confidential is a sign
that we are willing to be altruistic, and ready to create a safe space for everyone
to choose themselves.
Now lets go around the room and introduce ourselves by first name only
and share one sentence on something you did during this week to bring the
Daily Practice alive.
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James Altucher
E.g.: Hi, Im Mary and this week Ive been making lists with ten ideas per day
or I slept eight hours a day, I spent time with my friends, or Im very grateful
each day for ten things.
If you are a newcomer we welcome you and hope that the meetings can help
Ti mekeeper
We need a timekeeper who will be willing to time the fifteen minutes of the
Everyone please keep an eye on the timekeeper and respect his or her signals.
When the timekeeper says that the time is up please acknowledge his or her and
say I will wrap up, and finish, so we can all share.
Fi fteen-Mi nu te R ea di ng
Now lets read from [Choose Yourself!/The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth].
The book will be passed around and each of us will read two paragraphs. If
you do not want to or cannot read, simply pass the book to the next person.
O p tion #2
ome groups may opt to change the reading of the book if there is a person
who can share their story of how they choose themselves, in that case, the
person will speak for fifteen minutes. There will be no interruptions, no questions
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and no cross talk. The qualification for a speaker or qualifier is that she or he
has been to at least twelve meetings and has been a member of the Choose Yourself meetings for six months, and, has a Choose Yourself story to tell.
O p tion #3
nce a month, or once every so often, the meetings need to have a business
meeting because it is key to maintaining the finances/electing new chairs
(for example if the meetings happen monthly and we need a quarterly person to
commit to running the scripted meetings) / select a library person who will use
funds from the treasurer to buy a book if it is needed, select a treasurer etc. The
meeting is timed at ten minutes. And it runs like this:
1. O pe n : Read minutes from the last business meetings. Treasurers report he
or she says how much money there is in reserve, if we are on time paying the
rent and the meetup fees, etc.
2. L ibr ary rep ort : do we need to have a book for new comers? Can we
get money from the treasurer to do so?
3. O l d Bu sines s Foll owed by New Bu si nes s : People propose
ideas, if one is proposed it needs to be seconded, and then there is discussion
and voting. If time is running out things can be tabled for the next meeting
D onati ons
Now, before we move on to shares we will pass a basket around for dona-
tions. We do have some fees associated with the meetup and the rental of a
room, and a suggested donation is three dollars [never more than five], but if
you cannot do it, we understand, please keep coming back because we need you
more than your money.
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James Altucher
Sha ri ng:
The floor is now open for sharing. Please remember to acknowledge the time-
keeper, do not talk about other people in the room and keep your sharing to your
own experiences. Cross talk or criticizing is not accepted as we keep the focus on
ourselves. We share our stories of how we are choosing ourselves and the experiences we encounter along the way.
We are now fifteen minutes from the end of the meeting so we will discuss
gatekeepers.
By show of hands people ask permission to speak and the facilitator picks the
first person, who in turn, when finished, will pick the next.
If nobody volunteers, then the facilitator can do the first share, or wait until
If you are experiencing a gatekeeping situation you can share it with us and
we will listen. There will be no cross talk, but in the after-meeting if anyone cares
to share or help one another you can do so.
Volunteers can describe the gatekeepers that are in their way. For instance,
they just submitted a book to a publisher. Or they are hoping for a promotion
from their boss. There will be no cross talk, and networking is highly encouraged
after the meeting.
People will have suggestions but its hard to follow suggestions. Everyone has
to come up with the solutions from inside. By sharing in the open we give each
other a chance to form new ideas from within.
If nobody is sharing on this you can continue with the next segment.
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Perhaps someone has an idea they want to share with someone at a certain
People can simply state: I would like a contact at SalesForce, in the marketing
Probably when people were sharing their Daily Practice of the week, they
shared one or two of their ideas (or more) from their idea-list that week. Imagine
taking one of your ideas and combining it with one of their ideas, what would
result. Some riffing could occur here but no criticism. Every bad idea is an idea
and worth exploring.
Ideas are like mazes. You never really know where you are going until you
hit the exit. Even a dead end is an opportunity to turn around and explore more
of the maze.
Write down ten ideas that you got just by being on the meeting.
C l ose
We have now come to the close of the meeting, we are grateful that you are
Th e A fter-Meeting
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James Altucher
This also gives people a chance to get to know and support one another and
to fulfill the second part of the daily practice, which is meeting more and more
people who are interested in helping you and supporting you.
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Ab ou t the Au thor
ames Altuchers books include the WSJ bests-sellers Choose Yourself! and The
Power of No. He is an entrepreneur, chess master, and hedge fund manager.
He has started and run more than twenty companies, some of which failed,
His writing appears in major media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal,
the New York Observer, Tech Crunch, The Financial Times, and others. His blog
has attracted more than 20 million readers since its launch.
He hosts three podcasts that have been downloaded over 10 million times.
O ther B o oks by
James Altu cher
h
Choose Yourself!
The Choose Yourself Stories
The Power of No
50 Alternatives to College
FAQ ME
I Was Blind But Now I See
The Forever Portfolio
Trade Like a Hedge Fund
Trade Like Warren Buffett
h
ou can ask James a direct question by going to AskAltucher.com and
he will answer on his daily podcast. You can also listen to The James
Altucher Show, where he interviews people who have chosen themselves for
wealth and happiness.
James holds a weekly Twitter Q&A on Thursdays at 3:30 p.m. EST. Join him
@Jaltucher.
You can text questions to Jamess personal cell at 203 512 2161. Dont call him
because he never picks up nor has a voicemail. He answers text message questions
on Ask Altucher.