Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

The key is to be bold right in this moment. As James says in the title of this book, “Choose Yourself,” and he explains how. Choose yourself right now. If you do this, not only can you not plan the impact you’re going to have, you often won’t recognize it while you’re having it. But one thing is for sure: if you don’t make courageous choices for yourself, nobody else will. There’s no one path. There’s every path. Every path starts with this one moment. Did you choose yourself for this moment? Can you be bold? Then all paths will lead to the same place. Right now. #chooseyourself — Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter

In some cultures, like Buddhism, you want things in your life to disappear, to reduce your needs and desires. To achieve some form of enlightenment. I believe in this brand of spirituality as well. I don’t think it and abundance are mutually exclusive at all. If you lower your expectations, for instance, your expectations are easy to exceed.

There’s a saying, “The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again.”

The 1960s fueled the wealth engine with a stock market boom. And then “The Great Society.” A new marketing slogan! When the stock market stalled, the 1970s introduced massive inflation in order to keep people’s incomes going up. 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. In the 1980s we again had a stock market boom. And when that leveled off, we had the junk bond debt boom to keep Americans flush in cash. The ’90s brought us both the “peace dividend” from the downfall of the Soviet Bloc and the Internet boom. Even when Asia crashed, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, kept the party going by artificially pumping money into the system—not only to stave off the effects of a potential “Asian Contagion” but out of fear that the show would be over if Y2K shut off all the lights. The party had to continue! Despite the fact that median earnings for male workers had been going down since 1970 and it was only going to get worse. Don’t believe me? Believe the data:

Every economist in the world can try to explain away this graph, but its downward thrust was inexorable for the reasons I will describe throughout this book: among them increasing efficiencies, globalization, technological innovation, and 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.

And it’s not just your boss. He’s just trying to survive also. It’s his boss. And then the boss of that boss. 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.

The smartest graduate students in China, India, and elsewhere are staying home. And the ones who come to the United States to study are going back after graduation instead of moving to Silicon Valley and starting companies and creating jobs and wealth. The companies and people in the United States who are greatly increasing in wealth are those who invest overseas in search of cheaper capital per technological development.

Prices are always going to go up. 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. Still don’t believe me? Here’s the proof: INFLATION SINCE 1940, COURTESY OF YOUR LOCAL FEDERAL RESERVE BANK: Notice the small blip down in 2008/2009. We had a tiny bit of deflation. What was the result? The worst economic crisis since 1929, double-digit unemployment, and a declining middle class while the upper class got wealthier. AN ASIDE: Have you ever wondered why the stock market didn’t just keep going down?

Why it bounced at all from March 2009

Chocolate releases phenylephylamine, the same hormone that is released when you fall in love.

This is not to say you should eat chocolate all the time. You’ll get obese. It’s much better to just simply fall in love.

This is not a classist or communist argument. This is not about optimism or pessimism. More people are finding financial success than ever before while unemployment or “underemployment” (where people are employed, but at jobs paying less than they are accustomed to, that they are massively overqualified for) has reached upward of 20 percent Does this mean the rest of us just die? Of course not. This isn’t all doom and gloom. It’s just reality. And it’s actually good news. It’s the decline of institutions that have lied to us for the past one hundred to two hundred years. It’s a new reality that people who apply the principles in this book—who start carving their own path—can take advantage of. Human beings are born pioneers. The rise of corporatism (as opposed to capitalism) forced people into cubicles instead of out into the world, exploring and inventing and manifesting. The ethic of the Choose Yourself era is to not depend on those stifling trends that are defeating you. Instead, build your own platform, have faith and confidence in yourself instead of a jury-rigged system, and define success by your own terms. It’s time to get back to our roots. It’s time to ride the surf as the ocean crashes onto the beach. Fight it, and the undertow of falling median earnings and a shrinking middle class will pull you down and drown you.

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. We’re already seeing more startups than ever get funded, get customers, and pull business from the corporate monoliths, which have slept for too long. This isn’t just about money, though. If it were, it would be boring. It’s also not about being a great entrepreneur. I’m an entrepreneur, a writer, and an investor. Not everyone is an entrepreneur. Not everyone wants to be one. 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. They will have to build the foundation internally for that choice to manifest. And from that internal health the rest will come, whether it’s a business, art, health, success. An example: Tucker Max is known for his “fratire” books. The titles of his first two bestselling books were I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and Assholes Finish First. Both books sold millions of copies. But he wasn’t happy with that. The publishing industry was taking too big a piece of the pie. Their claim: th...

I hate to sound like a weirdo Buddhist, but the only things that really matter in this world are the relationships you have with the people you love, and the meaningful things that you do. Haters don’t fit anywhere into that. Don’t devote any mental space to them.” The e-mail was signed: “Tucker Max”

In this new era, you have two choices: become a temp staffer (not a horrible choice) or become an artist-entrepreneur. Choose to commoditize your labor or choose yourself to be a creator, an innovator, an artist, an investor, a marketer, and an entrepreneur. I say “and” rather than “or” because now you have to be all of the above. Not just one. An artist must also be an entrepreneur. That’s it. Those ARE your choices. Cubicles are getting commoditized. And when that happens, they empty out. I saw it with my own eyes when I visited my investor friend and stared out his office windows at the vacant vertical city. And now I see it happening every day. It’s not something that can be changed with laws or with printing money or with a change in values. It’s history now. The world has already changed, and all the pieces are just falling into place. Which side will you be on?

Rejection—and the fear of rejection—is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves. We can all put together books about all the times we are rejected. We’re rejected by lovers, by friends, by family, by the government, by the corporate world, by investors, partners, employees, publishers, and on and on. Try this exercise: Think for a second of ten different times you’ve been rejected. Were you rejected for a job? Did you have a novel rejected? Did a potential girlfriend/boyfriend reject you? List ten. Now think about this: how easy would it be to list one hundred? I can probably list one thousand. But what if you never try? What if you are afraid to try for fear of being rejected? I understand this. I’ve been rejected more than I care to remember; to the point where some days feel like enough is enough. When you put yourself out there on a daily basis, that’s going to happen (whether you deserve it or not): you get hate mail, you get rejected for opportunities (even if accepted for others), you get people who don’t understand you, who are upset with you, angry with you, don’t respect what you’ve done for them. You can’t hate the people who reject you. You can’t let them get the best of you. Nor can you bless the people who love you. Everyone is acting out of his or her own self-interest. What you need to do is build the house you will live in. You build that house by laying a solid foundation: by building physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. This is ...

The first: I was pitching a TV show, III:am. Three a.m. The idea was to explore the flip side of life. From 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., the “normals” are outside, conducting their business. Dressing in their suits, getting the grande soy cappuccinos, kissing up to the boss, eating three meals, gossiping, watching TV, having a glass of wine at the end of a tough day, and finally cajoling themselves to sleep after tucking in all of their worries for another night of rest.

When “normal” human beings wake up at three in the morning it’s usually because those worries have prematurely woken up before the dawn. “James! You have to worry about this.” And when it happens, we tremble. There’s absolutely nothing we can do at three in the morning about our regrets, our anxieties, our fears of loneliness or depression or poverty. The paranoia that creeps in from the cracks in the windows, from the cracks in our minds. Here’s an exercise for those who typically wake up anxious and paranoid at three in the morning: instead of counting sheep to get back to sleep, count all the things you are grateful for. Even the negative parts of your life. Figure out why you should be grateful for them. Try to get up to one hundred.

But what about the people who live only at three in the morning? People who are out and about, conducting their lives every day at those hours. Living a life completely opposite of the “normal.” I started going out at three in the morning on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Not Saturdays, where everyone is out partying, but the nights where if yo...

When you give up searching for frontiers, inevitably you end up stuck in a swamp, sinking deeper into the mud the more you struggle to get out. I’m not sure that analogy holds, but you get what I mean. Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically. Always ask yourself, what can I improve? Who else can I talk to? Where else can I look?

The ability to choose yourself—an ability that is now being forced on us for historical reasons discussed in the last chapter—is the result of a comprehensive framework of health that must be practiced to be experienced, and must be lived to be fulfilled. If you don’t like what I recommend, don’t do it. But it worked for me and all the times I’ve been down on the floor. It’s been the only way I’ve been able to get back up.

No matter how hard it tries, a ripple that laps onto the shore will never be as powerful as the ocean that created it. The goal is to be the ocean—the central force in our existence that moves mountains, creates all life, shakes continents, and is respected by everyone. This book is about becoming the ocean. About choosing yourself to be the ocean. So everything that you do emanates out like ripples, everything you do moves the earth, and enhances your life and the lives of all the people around you. Now, let’s enter the Choose Yourself era.

I would cling to whatever addiction was making me happy at that moment. A fire sucks the oxygen out of everything in the room. When the oxygen is gone, the fire is extinguished. Then burnout occurs. That’s addiction. It takes every form: entrepreneurship, drugs, sex, love, games, and escapism of all forms. I’ve been addicted to all of them. I’ve even been addicted to the 12-step meetings where you get to meet the other people who might be as screwed up as you are. Addictions: let’s work a hundred hours a week for fame, money, sex, health, more fame, then F-you money, then stand on our heads, then get fancy artwork, big houses, guard dogs, pit bulls that kill people, bigger bank accounts. Heck, let’s own the bank. Then let’s double down on all of the above. Now there is a new addiction. “All I want is freedom,” a lot of people say. But freedom from what? Who is enslaving you that you can’t get away from? Then people want freedom for their kids, or their parents, or their siblings, or their kids’ kids. Or five generations of kids. Where did all these kids come from? But still, “It’s all for them. Everything I do.” Then we get burned out. Too much fighting for freedom. Who were we fighting all of that time? When all that time we were free without realizing it. There are no chains on me as I write this. But the feeling is immense: all I want is freedom. There are two very important basics for harnessing that freedom and succeeding in the Choose Yourself era. There’s no avoidin...

A lot of people want to die. And I don’t blame them. The most dreadful thing in life is not dying. It’s being born. Once you are born, you’re screwed. Now you have to actually survive. You have to grow from someone who craps their pants, can’t speak to anyone without crying, and can’t walk or feed themselves, to a full-grown adult who can barely do all of that while also juggling a mortgage, a marriage, kids, career, whatever, to finally being an old man who can’t do any of those baby-like things again. Then you die. No worries after that. How do I know a lot of people want to die? Because Google tells me. The search phrase that is most likely to take people to my blog is, “I want to die.” The number-two search phrase is “I hope to die.” Number three is “How can I disappear,” which is a little more hopeful than dying but expresses no less similar a sentiment (it’s sort of like saying “How can I kill this life I have and start another”). My e-mail is slightly more uplifting. The most popular question I get via e-mail is “I’m stuck. How can I move forward in life?” Each of those last people is not quite at the “I want to die” point, but somehow their lives have stalled. The reason they’re stalled is because the axis of the world has changed. We can’t rely on the job, the marriage, the relationship, the house with the white-picket fence, the college degree, the anything external for that matter. Nothing counts. Everything we dreamed for was an illusion. So people find themsel...

Before we hit the stories in the rest of this book, we have to handle the situation when we’re actually on the floor and it seems like there is no way up. We can’t do the full daily practice, no less our “one thing per day,” if we can’t even get off the floor. Sometimes flossing one tooth to start isn’t enough. Sometimes you’re in agony, your teeth are about to fall out, and you don’t want dentures. Flossing will have to wait. I’ve been in that situation. And I’m not talking metaphorically, I’m talking about my actual teeth being in such bad shape they were about to fall out. But I’m also talking about when life hits a little too hard, a little too fast (okay, now I’m talking metaphorically). Sometimes it’s enough to just climb out of bed. To be grateful for the abundance already in our lives. And abundance is a tricky thing. Right now, look around, and list the areas where you are abundant. If you are in the middle of a rainstorm, there is an abundance of water. Think of the bounty that can be grown with that water. If you are in a traffic jam, there is an abundance of cars. Think of the human achievement those cars represent in our short history on this planet. Turn despair on its head. With each obstacle, turn it into a moment where you can reflect on the bounty that is in your life. I RECENTLY GOT THE FOLLOWING E-MAIL: “So…I’m slowly starving to death, I have –$90 in the bank account, rent is due in 8 days, and I have no chance of paying it. I started two media busines...

For several months he was out of action. Then he started writing again and telling me what was going on in his life. He started commenting on the blog again and interacting with the great community developing there. He was alive again. We finally ended up meeting. “How’d you get better?” I asked. “What happened?” “I’ll tell you the secret,” he said, “I thought I was going to die. I was just lying in bed and couldn’t move, I had a high fever, and was in too much pain. I really thought I was going to die. Finally, I just started saying over and over again, ‘I love myself.’” As Kamal then wrote about his experience in the now-successful book, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It: And I got better. My body started healing faster. My state of mind grew lighter. But the thing I never expected or imagined, life got better. But not just better, things happened that were fantastically out of my reach. This I couldn’t have dreamed of […] I found myself using the word ‘magic’ to describe what was happening. And through it all I kept repeating to myself, ‘I love myself. I love myself. I love myself.’

In the book Kamal describes his transition from sickness into health and the other magical things that happened to him. He also gives a series of techniques and practices so you can try this for yourself. And finally he answers the dreaded question, what happens if you don’t love yourself? Can you still get this magic into your life? “Think about it,” he said to me months later when we met in New York. “When someone is in love, they almost magically look better. I needed to be in love with myself to feel better. So much of what had happened had weighed on me until I collapsed. Now I needed to love myself. It became a mantra for me.”

As someone explained to me the other day, the word mantra has two parts (in Sanskrit): “man”—thoughtfulness with zeal, and “tra”—to protect. So by saying “I love myself” over and over, Kamal was protecting the thought, nourishing it, and the love was nour...

How did he publish his book? He didn’t need a publisher to choose him. He didn’t need an editor to say, “It has to be 200 pages.” He didn’t need a marketing expert to put it in a few bookstores, where it would waste away. The same way he chose himself to LIVE (by forming his own personal Daily Practice) he chose himself to write and, to this day, continues a pattern of choosing himself for success. His book went on to become a bestseller. And he did it all himself. Just like Tucker Max did. Just like I do, and did with this book. Here’s how you can do it: HOW DO I SELF-PUBLISH? There are lots of variations on the path to self-publishing; this is the one Kamal and I have both used. WRITE THE BOOK. Kamal wrote his in a few weeks and made it forty pages (nobody had to give him permission to make it a smaller book). For my last two, I took some blog posts, rewrote parts of them, added original material, new chapters, and created an overall arc related to what the books were about to give them a trajectory, or a direction. It doesn’t matter where you get your ideas or how you write them, just do it. That said, you probably already have the basic material. CREATESPACE. Both Kamal and I used CreateSpace because they are owned by Amazon—where we were going to sell our books—and have excellent customer service. They let you pick the size of your book, and then have Microsoft Word templates that you download to format your book within. Kamal did his all himself. I did my first book ...

When I was twelve years old I had one purpose in life—other than getting the girl in art group at summer camp to like me. I wanted to be a colonel. And not just any colonel; I wanted to be an honorary colonel in the Kentucky State Militia. Just like my hero, Colonel Sanders. I had to start off slow—Kentucky was the glamour state to be a colonel of. First I started off with Mississippi. I called the governor, Cliff Finch, and interviewed him, because for some reason that I still can’t figure out, he was running in the primaries for president against another former Southern governor and incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. Cliff Finch invited me down to Mississippi. His campaign and my dad split my air fare, about $60 each. It was the first time I had ever been in a plane and I was scared. When I landed everything looked the same but people talked differently. It was a weird feeling. As if I had landed in an alternative universe. The main things I remember from that trip were getting the certificate that made me an honorary colonel of the state (I better get an eighteen-gun salute the next time I fly there!), presenting to Governor Finch how he would win the “youth vote,” and a lot of people asking me what it was like to be Jewish. Then I wrote to the governor of Alabama and I told him my family was moving to Alabama, I had read everything about Alabama and I loved the state and now I wanted to be a colonel there. The governor sent back a huge certificate: James Altucher was n...

We get stuck. We get unhappy. Maybe we’re in a hopeless marriage. Maybe a hopeless job. Maybe you picked up this book and you are thinking to yourself, “Well, this is all good but it’s too late for me.” I’m sorry if you feel that way. I’ve felt that way many times. Sometimes you wish you could start fresh, with no responsibilities, an empty canvas you can now paint or repaint your life against. I’ve been feeling this way, on and off, for at least twenty years. As I mentioned before, the third most popular search phrase that takes people to jamesaltucher.com is “I am stuck.” When we feel stuck, we want a massive change, we want the entire world to reverse its rotation and drop us off at an entirely new place. I tried that more than once.

People build up a life, it becomes unsatisfactory, and they want to figure out how to change it like an outfit on a doll.

But you can’t change life from the outside. We all know this now. In the Choose Yourself era, it is only possible to give up the normal contraptions of externalized identity and live a life more free than you can imagine if you start from the inside out. Maybe you can’t live “off the grid” (unless you like a place like Montana. Good luck with that) but you can live a life of unexpected surprise. Where every day is an adventure. And every time you look in the mirror, a new person is there.

When I was a kid, I bought the book How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. I don’t know if any of the techniques still work but here was the author’s plan: Look at old newspapers from around the day you were born to find the names of babies that died that day. Ask members of your state government for their birth certificates. This isn’t unusual. Many people lose their birth certificates. Use the birth certificate to get a Social Security card (say you’ve been a permanent student up until now). Use the two forms of ID to get a bank account, credit cards, and driver’s license. Change your hair color. Lose weight. Put a tack in your shoe so you start to walk differently. Start siphoning money out of your bank account until it is all in cash. Find a crowded city where you can rent an apartment cheap, and disappear in the crowd. Plan on building an employment history by starting with temp or construction jobs. Then disappear. Just walk out of your house and never go back. You’ve just committed pseudocide. The word pseudocide fascinates me. It’s like a “little death,” a phrase often used to describe an orgasm. The book had anecdotal stories of people who had disappeared (how ...

The feeling never left me. When I’m in an unfamiliar neighborhood, I look around and judge whether or not I could disappear there. Would people find me? Would I ever run across someone I knew or who recognized me? Could I just be swallowed up by the chaos here, live in a shelter, work temp jobs in the back of a deli, and argue in broken Chinese in some broken-down Chinatown? Think of the mass appeal that a TV show like Mad Men has. It’s not for the allure of 1960s advertising culture. It’s for the fresh start the main character, Don Draper, has given himself. Don Draper, of course, lives a secret identity. And one of the best episodes to ever appear in television history was the episode “The Jet Set,” where he lived a secret identity within a secret identity—when he just simply disappeared while standing in the lobby of a hotel in California and went off with a bunch of wealthy vagabonds, each with infinitely long back stories that we would never know and never hear of again. By the time Draper emerged from this new identity, he found himself wealthy, divorced, and dealing with the questions we all grapple with: who are we, really? I have baggage. I have people I care for. Other...

BUT REALLY, CAN I DISAPPEAR? Assuming you have the basics down, the freedom described above, is it possible to get the freedom that disappearing implies? The answer is yes. In fact in the Choose Yourself era, you will have no choice. You might not be able to live “off the grid”—we are beyond issues of privacy—because your every move is constantly tracked. But who cares? Do you think the government really cares about you? The key is to make money off the grid, to make money outside the imprisonment of corporate America and out of the reach of the powers that choose or reject us. To be able to work from any location. As we move toward the employee-l...

In I Was Blind but Now I See, I wrote about how people no longer needed a home or an education. How both are leashes that society has created to hold you down and prevent you from growth. But let’s take it one step further. Do you need to even rent? Do you need to stay in one place? Maybe if you have kids and the kids are going to a public school (though I’d recommend unschooling, but that’s an entire other book [1]) then you might be tied to one place. Otherwise, the entire dream of technology’s full potential has finally come true. It hasn’t just created efficiencies at the workplace. It’s created efficiencies at home, as well. Earlier I stated that the rise in technology was partly the cause of the era we now find ourselves in—being forced out of the nest so we either fly or die. But ultimately it’s our ever-increasing quest for a frontier—physical, technological, material, and spiritual—that creates the opportunities for those who hunt for them. We still live in a consumption world, where people continue to accumulate computers, cars, TVs, furniture, etc. But none of it is necessary. You can move from place to place using services like AirBnb, which find very nice, furnished...

But let me tell you something. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I can’t wait to clean out some shit today.’ I’ve never heard any of my buddies who are plumbers say that. But what you learn is that you do the job and you try to make sure you are happy in other parts of your life so the job doesn’t get you down.” Inner balance. Inner health.

Now I’ve learned the “Power of No.” If someone asks me to go someplace, have a meeting, have a coffee, get on a call, etc., my first instinct is to say no. Much more value is created when I do the things I enjoy, when I work on my own creativity and continue to build the foundation for health. Rushing around the world trying to capture every piece of business will only result in financial and spiritual poverty. It’s much better to work smarter, not harder.

HELP PEOPLE. Here are the people who it’s in your control to help when you are an entrepreneur: a. Your employees. I always have the philosophy that I want my employees to call home at the end of a hard day’s work and say, “Mommy, I have the best job on the planet. My boss is great and I can see myself ten years from now running my own business. I’m learning so much.” And you know what? Most of my ex-employees are running their own businesses now, too. b. Your clients. You want them to look good in front of their bosses. How do you do it? Simple: i. Do what they say. ii. Do it on time. iii. Do a little extra to surprise them. iv. Give them ideas for how their jobs can even be better. Never forget sales rule #1: Your best future clients are your current clients. v. Make their lives better. Listen to them. Go to their charity events. Introduce them to potential spouses. Introduce them to new jobs because you will have a bird’s-eye view of the entire job landscape in their industry. These are not just your clients of the month: these are your clients for life. You are on this planet to serve them and make their lives better. I’ve had clients stick with me from one business to the next, even in totally disparate areas. You’re never going to lose touch with the lives you save.

BE ARTISTIC. Being an entrepreneur means you’re going to create something in a way that a customer can’t get anywhere else. Creation is art. It’s how ideas collide in your head, then how materials collide to make your ideas real. Then it’s how people collide to bring your creation to life in the real world with real users. Then it’s how so much value is created so people are willing to spend money on it. How can you create that value? If you can ignore the petty worries. If you look out your window first thing in the morning and find beauty in the silence. The silence is the only place your creative ideas will come from.

MAKE A LOT OF MONEY. A lot of money. Let’s be real. That’s the main reason to be an entrepreneur. “But the economy?” someone might say. There is more money floating around than ever before. And a lot of that money is buried and hidden from you. Time to reach out and touch it. The stock market has a capitalization of several trillion dollars. There’s another $2 trillion in private equity funds. There’s $50 trillion in transactions in the global economy every year. If you make money, someone will buy your company. Or, even better, you’ll make so much money so fast you don’t have time to sell your company. Yeah, it’s hard. It’s stressful. Your employees will have sex with each other and then cry. People will talk about you behind your back. You’ll miss payroll. Your customers will drop you. Your investors will hate you every now and then. The key is to always have the base foundation built; your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies need to be healthy and flowing with each other. This will provide the foundation from which your ideas will get generated, solutions and opportunities will appear almost magically in the face of the problems that inevitably arise for all entrepreneurs, and everyone around you will feel the benefits.

DEAL ONLY WITH COLLEAGUES I LIKE. There’s that test: only hire someone you wouldn’t mind sitting next to on a plane ride across the country. Better, then, to be the one hiring than the one trying to be hired. When you are trying to get hired, you put on the mask that says, “I’m the guy who you will like to sit next to flying across country.” I don’t like putting on masks. Nor do I like the people around me to put on masks. It’s very hard to see through all the costumes. People don’t even know they are wearing th...

COME UP WITH IDEAS. When you work at one job, you come up with ideas for that one job. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. I’m not criticizing working for a big company (although I will. Stay tuned.). But when you have your own company, it never stops. If you have a product company, you come up with additional features to put on your product. Every day. Then you spec it out. Assign it to someone to do it. Put a time line on it, and check in every day until it’s done. Then you roll it out. See how people use it, tweak it. Build a fan base around it. It feels really good to see someone using what you made. If you have a service company, you come up with more services. For instance, if you are helping companies post to Facebook, how about you also help companies build an e-mail list out of their millions of Facebook fans? No matter what, every day you are coming up with ideas to transform your business. When I was running Stockpickr .com, I wanted to create a fund that would invest in the top ideas from the top investors. When I was running a web services company, we almost went into the rap label business, the movie business, the tea business (!), the data business in about ten ...

NOT BE AT THE WHIM OF ONE DECISION MAKER (i.e., if you have a boss. Or if you have only one big client, who then basically becomes your boss). I hate to beg. I hate to look at someone and think to myself, “If only they say ‘yes’ my entire life will be better.” I hate to be nice to someone just so they like me and say yes to me and whatever I’m offering. I bet there are some prostitutes out there who like their job. I don’t know. But I’m not one of them. I hate having sex with peop...

BE AROUND LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE. In every business, I’ve loved meeting my competitors. The reality is there’s no such thing as competition. The world is big enough for two people in the same space. If it’s not, then you are in the wrong business. Your sector should be big enough for a hundred competitors. That’s great news. It means you’re probably going to make money. In every business I’ve been involved in, I’ve gone out of my way to meet my competitors over breakfasts. I always learn so much: how they build up (their “secret origin” story that every superhero and every entrepreneur has), how they get past certain hurdles, how they handle difficult clients, what clients they can throw me (!), do they want to get bought, how much do they think they are worth, how do they get customers, and on and on. Even now I’m not in any one business, but I like to meet successful bloggers, authors, and angel investors. I learn fr...

BE AN EXPERT. When you start a business and you have a service or product that is good enough for people to use over other similar products or services, then you are now an expert in your space. Even if you are new to the space, you’re an expert. I like that feeling. I like giving talks. I like writing about the areas that fascinate me. I like starting businesses or being involved in sectors of industry that fascinate me. Sometimes you shouldn’t be an expert and yet you still are. When I started 140love.com, a dating service for people on Twitter, my site failed miserably. I was actually invited to give a talk at a Twitter-related conference. The title of the talk was “Twitter and Love.” I was going through a divorce, and I had been dumped by four or five girlfriends in a row. Now I was supposed to give a talk about love. The irony is so thick I could spread it on sandwich bread if bread w...

ONE LAST THING. I’ve discussed the reasons why this major paradigm shift is occurring. It’s not that the system is out to get you. Or the system is imploding. This is not a conspiracy theory about the government or capitalism or the “1 percent.” This is actually a great opportunity for people who can now navigate the rough surf that history is throwing up on our shores. Regardless, you need to change for the changes that are coming. Some of these reasons I’ve covered in the preceding chapters, but I will go over all of them again so you don’t have an excuse for not remembering them. 1) The middle class is dead. I laid out all the statistics and anecdotes earlier. Again, I don’t say this as something to be scared of. And maybe I’m saying it a little too harshly. But at the current rate of incomes, and with the flight of capital out of the United States, you have to take this into account when making major life decisions. It’s not like you can choose for this to not happen. It’s not a choice. This is happening. In fact, it’s already happened and we are all the Walking Dead. 2) You’ve been replaced. Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, and productivity efficie...

You’re probably asking: well, if I quit my job, what should I do? I’ve begun asking people who did it. What did they do? How do they quit their jobs and, basically, make a million dollars? Not everyone is Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page. Not everyone is going to drop out of college and create an iPhone or a time machine or a toilet that resizes itself automatically depending on who is sitting on it (although that would be pretty cool). Some people would simply like to quit their current crappy jobs and make a good living. Some people would simply like to quit their jobs and make a million dollars. In that Facebook movie (you know, the Justin Timberlake vehicle), JT says, “A million’s not cool. A BILLION is cool.” Well, actually JT, very often a million is pretty cool. Not everyone is going to be a VC-funded $100 million hotshot. Sometimes it’s nice to make a million dollars, be your own boss, and use that financial success to catapult to freedom. I called Bryan Johnson, who started a company called Braintree. You may have never heard of Braintree but you’ve heard of their customers. They provide credit card transaction and payment services for companies like OpenTable, Uber, Airbnb, etc. I’ve never spoken with Bryan before. I am not an investor in Braintree. As far as I know I’m not even an investor (unfortunately) in any of Braintree’s clients. I like to call people who I think have interesting stories and hear what they have to say. That’s the way I build my network of not...

The way you get back to basics is by doing your Daily Practice and focusing on the Four Bodies (do one from each, every day): The Physical Body: Am I eating well? Am I exercising? Am I flossing? Am I sleeping enough? There are really no shortcuts. The only people I know who claim they sleep “three hours a day and still have a ton of energy” are 100 percent bipolar. No joke. The Emotional Body: Am I surrounding myself with people who love me? Am I not engaging with the people who put me down, even if they are co-workers? Am I not gossiping? Am I expressing gratitude to the people who are good to me? I bet this seems corny, right? You’re probably asking yourself, what does this have to do with a million dollars? Last year, my friend from Miami (the one with the mansion) made several million dollars in his business. A few years ago, he was broke, living in his parents’ basement. He was overweight and unhealthy. He was in a bad relationship. And his ideas were stale, left over from the last time he made a million (which he of course then lost). What changed? Like many people, he realized that he had to do something different in order to get out of the rut he was in. There’s a saying, “It’s your best thinking that got you here.” So the first step is to literally throw away your “best thinking.” My friend realized that the first step was to get back to the basics. He simply began by jogging and eating better. That sense of self-improvement then started to extend out to his relat...