Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

Nobody chooses themselves to make $1 billion. You don’t wake up and say, “I’m going to do whatever it takes to make a lot of money.” You wake up and you say, “I have a big problem. And a lot of people have the same problem. And nobody is going to solve this problem except for me.” Even better, can you say “A million people have this problem?” Corporate America doesn’t solve problems. These companies are machines that keep churning out the same product, with minor tweaks, forever. With new technology, new methods of marketing, and a healthy, balanced life that helps you come up with ideas and execute on them, you can become the sort of person who solves problems that help millions of people. It’s the external manifestation of if you better yourself, you better the lives of the people around you. Sara Blakely decided she had a problem. A big one. She wanted to look better when she wore panty hose. Specifically, she didn’t want the unsightly bulge that occurs at the end of panty hose underneath the skirt. She solved the problem by creating a seamless panty hose. You may have heard of it. It’s called Spanx, Sounds easy? Sounds trivial? It is. Even she will admit it. And now she’s worth $1 billion. Am I glorifying the billion dollars? Sure I am. That’s what people notice. Nobody cares about someone who made a new panty hose. But that’s the problem she solved that led to everything else. She simply wanted to look better. And then her friends wanted to look better. And so on. Her...