Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

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 different areas. In retrospect, some of our ideas were great and we had the software to do them. I wish I had the business sense back then to really pursue some of the ideas. But I didn’t. If an idea didn’t bring in money every month, then it was out. I never raised a dime for that business. For my ...