Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

wasn’t just a personal failure, or a failure in business, I was a failure as a father, as well. I didn’t even have enough money every month to pay the mortgage that kept the roof over their heads.

I was officially lost. I had nothing left. Zero. Less than zero, actually, because I had debts. Millions in debts.

At the end of 2002 I had a conversation with my parents. I was angry and depressed. We got into an argument. Over what—it doesn’t matter anymore.

Over the next several months my father tried to reach out to me. I was starting to come back. I was writing. I was appearing on TV. He congratulated me. His final congratulations were about six months after I last spoke to him. I didn’t respond. A week later he had a stroke. He never spoke again. He died without me ever speaking to him again.

Nobody was helping me. Nobody was giving me any chances. Nobody was giving me an outlet to prove how talented I was. I knew I had to hustle to make it, but the world was upside down and I didn’t know how to straighten things out. To make things right.

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.

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.

For our entire lives, we have been fooled by marketing slogans and the Masters of the Universe who created them. I don’t say this in an evil way. I don’t blame them. I never blame anyone but myself.

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

So I did the only thing I could do: I woke up early one morning in early March and bought a bag of chocolates. Small Hershey’s chocolates, like you hand out on Halloween. At around 8 a.m., I stood outside the entrance of the New York Stock Exchange and started handing out chocolates to everyone walking inside.

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

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.

I spoke with several CEOs around that time and asked them point-blank, “Did you fire people simply because this was a

good excuse to get rid of the people who were no longer useful?” Universally, the response was a nervous laugh and a “Yeah, I guess that’s right!”

I’ll tell you the answer: ZERO sectors in the economy are moving toward more full-time workers. Everything is either being cut back, moved toward outsourcing out of the country, or hiring temp workers. And this goes not just for low-paid industrial workers, but middle managers, computer programmers, accountants, lawyers, and even senior executives.

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.

The starting point for all of this is developing the inner perspective that allows you to choose yourself in the first place. Success by itself won’t bring you happiness, because you can’t do any of this from a position of ill health. If your body is sick, if you are around negative people who bring you down, if your idea muscle has not been refined into the perfect machine, and if spiritually you haven’t developed a sense of gratitude and surrender, you will have less chances of success in the new Choose Yourself era.

There is so much writing out there, and so little of it is worth a shit—but your blog is one of those that are worth a shit.

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.”

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

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.

Those with high levels of social anxiety about rejection are shown to have lower levels of a hormone called oxytocin.

And 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.

Dwelling on negativity won’t suddenly have positive results. It only brings more negativity into your head. You can’t buy happiness with the currency of unhappiness. The idea that we need to “pay our dues” is a lie told to us by people who wanted our efforts and labor on the cheap.

But the other interesting thing is how reluctant the students were to even do the experiment. To ask people for their seats went against everything they had ever been taught. This is obviously an extreme. But it points out how hard it is for us to do things for ourselves unless we are given some implicit permission.

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.

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?

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.

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.

ONLY DO THINGS YOU ENJOY.

Only think about the people you enjoy. Only read the books you enjoy, that make you happy to be human. Only go to the events that actually make you laugh or fall in love. Only deal with the people who love you back, who are winners and want you to win too.

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 fire is, the more people will want it.

The best way I have ever found to fill that hole is not to seek external motivations to fill the emptiness, but to ignite the internal fire that will never go out. To light up my own inner sky.

My routine: Wake up somewhere between 5 and 6 a.m. Mostly protein breakfast (I like Tim Ferriss’s slow-carb diet that he describes in his book The 4-Hour Body), and a late lunch around 2 or 3.

creative person has ever complained about too much walking. And then I go to sleep between 8 and 9. Nobody ever died of starvation avoiding that third meal of the day.

THE EMOTIONAL BODY. Emotionally I try to surround myself with only positive people who inspire me. This way I can learn to be positive. To be a beacon to those around me.

The key is: acknowledge that the person is driving you crazy. You can’t suppress that. But with observation, the pain will begin to wither. And the less you engage with the person, the less overall effect that person will have on you. Even if that person is close to you (and they often are. That’s why they get to push all of those buttons), find out ways to not engage. Say hello in the hallway, smile nicely, but no engagement. Put a quota on yourself how much you can complain or feel anxious about that person in a day.

You need to make the mind SWEAT so that it gets tired. So tired that it’s done for the day. It can’t control you today. TIRE IT OUT! Then do it again. Ten MORE ideas. I discuss this much more in the section “How to Become an Idea Machine.”

THE SPIRITUAL BODY. Most people obsess on regrets in their past or anxieties in their future. I call this “time traveling.” The past and future don’t exist. They are memories and speculation, neither of which you have any control over.

When you surrender and accept the beautiful stillness around you, when you give up all thoughts of the past, all worries and anxieties of the future, when you surround yourself with similarly positive people, when you tame the mind, when you keep healthy, there is zero chance of burnout.

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 themselves on the floor. Without “a life,” as they put it. They obviously have a life. They are breathing. But they don’t know how to choose life for themselves. The masses rely on others to do it for them. They have given up their Life to live a smaller “life,” ruled by others.

You can either take the blue pill (become depressed about an artificial reality that is never going to return) or take the red pill

(fully enter the Choose Yourself era and take advantage of its opportunities).

And it’s not as if our bosses will help us. They hate us. No matter how nice they are to y...

First we become better as individuals. You can’t help others if you look in the mirror and hate what you see.

The Simple Daily Practice is the same. All you really need to do to get off the floor is acknowledge that it’s not your external life that needs to change (you have little control over that), but that external changes flow from the inside.

Y) If you think, “Everything would be better off if I were dead,” then think, “That’s really cool. Now I can do anything I want and I can postpone this thought for a while, maybe even a few months.” Because what does it matter now? The planet might not even be around in a few months. Who knows what could happen with all these solar flares. You know the ones I’m talking about.

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.

D) You have to exercise. Even just take a walk. Twenty minutes of exercise a day. How come? I have no clue. But it works. Ugh, it brings to mind when I was worried about rent checks and divorce checks and girlfriend checks and my checks and I had nothing and I would exercise and it would feel like shit.