Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

Often when we attach our happiness to external goals: financial success, relationship success, etc., we get disappointed. Even when things work out, everything cycles, and the happiness is often fleeting.

Harry Bernstein was a total failure when he wrote his bestselling memoir, The Invisible Wall. His prior forty (forty!) novels had been rejected by publishers. When his memoir came out, he was ninety-three years old. A quote from him: “If I had not lived until I was 90, I would not have been able to write this book, God knows what other potentials lurk in other people, if we could only keep them alive well into their 90s.”

Meanwhile, the inventor of ramen noodles didn’t invent them until he was forty-eight years old. Thank god for him!

Charles Darwin was a little bit “off“ by most standards. He liked to just collect plants and butterflies on remote islands in the Pacific. Then he wrote Origin of Species when he was fifty.

Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.

Most important, I had yet to fail. But I failed so much in my thirties that I practically forgot I was a chess master.

All of this is to say, there’s something primal in me that wants to disappear. To mix with what I view as the lowest of the low, to forget about my past, to sign up for a future that is meaningless, to think only about right now and give up everything else.

After starting up several businesses, I can tell you this: I have never made one dime by traveling. And yet, I’ve traveled to most continents for business, cross country many times, meetings all over the place. No money from any of them.

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.

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.

You use the corporate job as a rest stop on the way toward being healthy, on the way toward figuring out how to innovate and take advantage of the mythical safety net to move onto bigger and better things.

Some people will say, “Well, I’m just not an entrepreneur.” This is not true. Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

Make the list right now. Every dream. I want to be a bestselling author. I want to reduce my material needs. I want to have freedom from many of the worries that I have succumbed to all my life. I want to be healthy. I want to help all of the people around me or the people who come into my life. I want everything I do to be a source of help to people. I want to only be around people I love, people who love me. I want to have time for myself.

When every day you wake up with that motive of enhancement. Enhance your family, your friends, your colleagues, your clients, potential customers, readers, people who you don’t even know yet but you would like to know. Become a beacon of enhancement, and then when the night is gray, all of the boats will move toward you, bringing their bountiful riches.

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?”

To succeed at something: Know every product in the industry Know every patent Try out all the products Understand how the products are made Make a product that YOU would use every single day. You can’t sell it if you personally don’t LOVE it

That’s what you have to do to succeed. You can’t have any shame. I have a lot of shame in promoting myself, which I have to get over. She had no shame. Not to over-repeat a catchphrase, but Sara didn’t wait for anyone to choose her. She chose herself in every way.

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.

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.”

E) I’ve sold my books on Kindle for almost nothing. I’ve given away books for free to people who showed up at my talks or signed up for my newsletter. Does that sound stupid? Maybe. But it got my name out there. I’ve now given out more than one hundred thousand copies of my books, on top of the sales. This will have lifelong effects for me. I feel them every day.

The key is, don’t be stupid. Only negotiate with people you really want to sell to. Otherwise it boils down to just money. Creating value goes right out the window.

When you add value to people’s lives (for instance, giving away quality content for free), the opportunities that come back to you cannot be quantified.

What are the ancillary benefits of having this customer? When we did Miramax.com for $1,000, we became the GUYS THAT DID MIRAMAX.COM! That helped get twenty other customers that were worth a lot more. I would’ve paid Miramax money to do its site.

Learn the entire history of your client, your audience, your readership, and your platform.

Don’t forget to always give extra. A simple effort will get you a customer for life.

Often the real reason someone buys from you is not for your product, but for you.

Guess what? Turns out, using social media in this way releases oxytocin. You know you feel good when you do it. Do it more.

Procrastination is your body telling you that you need to back off a bit and think more about what you

are doing. When you procrastinate as an entrepreneur, it could mean that you need a bit more time to think about what you are pitching a client.

Try to figure out why you are procrastinating. Maybe you need to brainstorm more to improve an idea. Maybe the idea is no good as is. Maybe you need to delegate. Maybe you need to learn more. Maybe you don’t enjoy what you are doing. Maybe you don’t like the client whose project you were just working on. Maybe you need to take a break.

Out of silence comes the greatest creativity. Not when we are rushing and panicking.

Mediocre entrepreneurs fail A LOT. So they get this incredible skill of getting really good at dealing with failure. This translates to monetary success.

I had a chess lesson afterwards. I couldn’t play at all. It was like I didn’t even know the rules. My instructor, a chess grandmaster, said, “What’s wrong with you today?” I was ashamed. And angry at myself. So my intelligence went way down—like 80 percent down.

Brene Brown has written an excellent book called The Gift of Imperfection, but I’ll summarize it here: perfectionism is sometimes the most dangerous set of thoughts you can let make their home in your head.

But I was ashamed. When I lost my house, I moved seventy miles away. I didn’t want to run into anyone. I felt shame. When I write a blog post I think is weak, I might take it down before too many see it. I’m ashamed of it. I want to win the Nobel Prize for blog writing. Or get at least ten thousand Facebook “like”s. But I can’t control that; I’m imperfect.

And related to perfectionism is certainly the feeling that you want to control the events around you. I want to control everything around me. But sometimes things are bad and there’s nothing you can do about it. Sometimes you have to surrender and say, “This is bad now but good things will happen later.” Then a great weight lifts off your shoulders.

Even worse than trying to control the future is feeling a total lack of control over things that have already happened in the past. This is regret.

If we truly want to learn, we never learn when we are talking. We only learn when we are listening.

Sometimes we just have to Shut Up!

Everyone could’ve made fun of your acne in junior high school and now you want to be loved by everyone. (Err, maybe that happened to me.) But right now, this second, just don’t get hit by a car when you cross the street.

The only superpower you really need is the one to constantly cultivate the attitude that forces you to ask, from the minute you wake up, to the minute you fall asleep, “What life can I save today?” It’s a practice. Often we forget it. We resist it. Instead of saving lives, we worry about saving ourselves too much. “How will I pay the bills?” “What do I do

Nobody can tell you what to do. No matter what they pay you. No matter what obligations you feel you owe them. Every second defines you. Be who you are, not who anyone else is, or who anyone else wants you to

don’t give any advice on things I don’t know about firsthand. Sometimes I find myself in a political conversation and I realize, you know what? I don’t actually know anything here. And I give up. Or when someone asks me a question on my Twitter Q&As (held every Thursday between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. Eastern), I don’t say anything unless I have personally experienced or seen the advice I am recommending.

Sugar is bad. And since most processed carbs break down into sugar,

Ask yourself, “These thoughts that I am thinking, what is generating them?” They are not your thoughts. That is just the biological brain dancing in front of you. Who is the “you” they are dancing in front of? Find that answer, and then you can save the world.

“If you work only three to five hours a day you become very productive. It’s the steadiness of it that counts. Getting to the typewriter every day is what makes productivity.”

He states later in the interview that when he was younger he liked to get things out in one impulsive burst but he learned that was a “bad habit,” and that he likes to wake up early, do his work, and then set it aside for the next day.

they hated each other despite the mega success they had created together.

You can see on their faces as they get to the roof: they were never going to perform again.

Despite his success, Lennon was terrified of being let down by Yoko. Despite our attempts to climb away from the worst fears of our childhood, success only magnifies those fears.