Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

This kind of thing hasn’t just happened to me once. Or twice. But many times. In the past twenty years I’ve failed at about eighteen of the twenty businesses I’ve started. I’ve probably switched careers five or six times in various sectors ranging from software to finance to media. I’ve written ten books. I’ve lost multiple jobs. I’ve been crushed, on the floor, suicidal, desperate, anxious, depressed. And each time, I’ve had to reinvent myself, reinvent my goals and my career.

“the American Dream” comes from a marketing campaign developed by Fannie Mae to convince Americans newly flush with cash to start taking mortgages. Why buy a home with your own hard-earned money when you can use somebody else’s? It may be the best marketing slogan ever conceived.

I never blame anyone but myself. Every second I am manipulated and coerced and beaten down it’s because I’ve allowed it. They were just doing their jobs. But still…they are the manipulators. Now we have to learn how to discern the foolish from the wise and build our own lives.

“The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again.”

The term “Keeping up with the Joneses” was introduced into popular culture in 1976 to refer to the idea that we are never satisfied anymore. No matter how many material goods we accumulate, there’s always the mysterious “Jones family” who has more. So we need more.

the fact that your bosses simply hate you. That’s right, they hate you. You created more and more value. They paid you less and less. That’s the definition of “disdain” in my book.

All the way up the food chain. And who is at the top? We will never know. Trust me, you and I will never know who is at the top. I don’t say this to be conspiratorial. It’s just a fact.

Credit card debt went from $700 billion in 2005 to $2.5 TRILLION in 2007.

The reason is simple: deflation is scarier than inflation. In a deflationary environment, people stop buying things because they say to themselves, why should I buy today when I can buy tomorrow for cheaper? So the government will always institute policies that increase inflation. Which in turn will force the above trend in median earnings to continue to go down.

It occurred to me then that nobody would need technology departments anymore. For one thing, at least one-third of the programmers were working on networking software. Well, the Internet is one big networking protocol. So all of those people can be fired.

This is just one example. But across every industry, technology has replaced not only paper (“the paperless office”), but people. Companies simply don’t need the same amount of people anymore to be as productive as they’ve always been. We are moving toward a society without employees. It’s not here yet. But it will be. And that’s okay.

This is about a new phase in history where art, science, business, and spirit will join together, both externally and internally, in the pursuit of true wealth.

It’s a phase where ideas are more important than people and everyone will have to choose themselves for happiness, just like I did.

You no longer have to wait for the gods of corporate America, or universities, or media, or investors, to come down from the clouds and choose you for success.

In every single industry, the middleman is being taken out of the picture, causing more disruption in employment but also greater efficiencies and more opportunities for unique ideas to generate real wealth.

Rejection—and the fear of rejection—is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves.

The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.

obsessing on the things we can’t control is useless. It takes us out of the game. We have to choose to be in the game.

when you enhance everyone around you, you can’t help but enhance yourself.

Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically.

But the most important thing these rejections gave me was a sense that NEVER AGAIN should I rely on the whims of one person to choose my success or failure in any endeavor.

Ninety-nine percent of meetings don’t turn into money. Ninety-nine percent of the news is a lie (trust me. I know them). Ninety-nine percent of TV is about scandal, murder, and cheating. Ninety-nine percent of the people on the street will lick the flavor right off your Life Saver if you let them.

Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again.”

The only real fire to cultivate is the fire inside of you. Nothing external will cultivate it. The greater your internal fir...

Every time you say yes to something you don’t want, your fire starts to go away.

You can’t be beautiful unless you get rid of the ugliness inside.

I can’t control the past or the future. They are empty, just like I am. All there is is now.

A corporation wants identity to go away. He wanted his best and his brightest to be mediocre so that the corporation, not the individuals inside of it, would burn bright.

I don’t like the word purpose. It implies that somewhere in the future I will find something that will make me happy, and that until then, I will be unhappy.

Being physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy will allow you to combine the spiritual with the technological and sculpt the life that most satisfies you instead of the life that most satisfies society.

Your best future clients are your current clients.

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. Four years now. But the jobs have not come back. Everyone is getting fired. Everyone is toilet paper now. Flush.

But you have to make sure if you are being exploited that you learn how to exploit back. You use the corporate job as a rest stop on the way toward being healthy, on the way toward figuring out how to innovate and take advantage of the mythical safety net to move onto bigger and better things.

I have never once seen anyone save the increase in his salary.

Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind.

One hundred years from now, your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.

Blogging is not about money. Blogging is about trust.

My own blog has made me a total of zero cents but has created millions in opportunities.

the best new customers are current customers.

when you write a book, it’s not all about book sales. Books give you credibility in your area of expertise or interest.

If you want to be successful, you need to study success, not hate it or be envious of it. If you are envious, then you will distance yourself from success and make it that much harder to get there. Never be jealous. Never think someone is “lucky.” Luck is created by the prepared.

Very few businesses last forever. There’s a reason it’s called “fifteen minutes of fame.” That doesn’t apply to just people. It applies to almost everything.

But more important is to build relationships than to kill everyone and take every last dime in a negotiation.

Who cares if you got yourself a great price on a product that no one’s heard of or cares about? Hence, the rise of models like “freemium.”

Often the real reason someone buys from you is not for your product, but for you.

Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you can’t—either way you are right.”

You don’t ever have to look at these ideas again. The purpose is not to come up with a good idea. The purpose is to have thousands of ideas over time. To develop the idea muscle and turn it into a machine.

Positive people uplift you, negative people bring you down.

That’s why Apple is moving production back to the United States, because too many Chinese people were killing themselves in their factories. Robots don’t kill themselves, and they get the job done faster.

Robots are the new middle class. And everyone else will either be an entrepreneur or a temp staffer.