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...

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. Never think that someone is undeserving of the money they have. That only puts you one more step removed from the freedom you aspire to. I can tell right away that when someone is so envious and jealous, they will never get the freedom they want but will spend the rest of their life trying.

It’s not about the money. Sara had to tell her fiancé a few weeks before their wedding that Spanx wasn’t just selling a few million dollars’ worth a year but hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth a year. That’s a big difference, right? And it was only a few weeks before their wedding. As he put it in a later interview: “She said to me, ‘I’m not sure you really know how successful Spanx is—[and] I am.’” After she told him, her fiancé started crying. “I was just so happy for her.” He had already sold a successful, private-plane rentals company to Berkshire Hathaway and wasn’t doing badly himself. But it shows how little money played a role in how she defined herself. In an interview with Forbes she said, “I feel like money makes you more of who you already are. If you’re an asshole, you become a bigger asshole. If you’re nice, you become nicer. Money is fun to make, fun to spend, and fun to give away.” In the past fifteen years, the only time I didn’t look at my bank account every day was when I was doing something I was passionate about. Sara was clearly passionate about Spanx. The money quickly became an afterthought. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think about money. But it do...