Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

That’s when it clicked. When everything changed. When I realized that nobody else was going to do it for me. If I was going to thrive, to survive, I had to choose myself. In every way. The stakes have risen too high not to.

In the past four years I’ve begun writing about this practice and the steps I took on my journey back from the grave. In the process, my life has changed so much for the positive it’s like magic.

Internet crashed. And instead of shoring up the foundations of the American economy, Alan Greenspan kept the Federal Reserve’s foot on the

Prices are always going to go up. The reason is simple: deflation is scarier than inflation. In a deflationary environment, people stop buying things because they say to themselves, why should I buy today when I can buy tomorrow for cheaper? So the government will always institute policies that increase inflation.

In this new era, you have two choices: become a temp staffer (not a horrible choice) or become an artist-entrepreneur. Choose to commoditize your labor or choose yourself to be a creator, an innovator, an artist, an investor, a marketer, and an entrepreneur.

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

Just know that the house does not exist in the past.

Deja de querer construir una casa en el pasado

The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.

Those with high levels of social anxiety about rejection are shown to have lower levels of a hormone called oxytocin. We are all born with different levels of this and other hormones that help modulate our reactions to different external stimuli relating to things from social anxiety to money to happiness to loss.

Investigar

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.

We need to unlearn this imprisonment. Not dissect and analyze it. Just completely unlearn it.

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.

Creemos que no merecemos o que no nos lo daran?

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.

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?

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. I’ve been addicted to all of them. I’ve even been addicted to the 12-step meetings where you get to meet the other people who might be as screwed up as you are.

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. They will smoke every drug lit by your fire. They will try to ignite their own fires. They will try to light up their own dark caves. The universe will bend to you. Every time you say yes to something you don’t want, your fire starts to go away. You will get burned out.

La vida es como el motor del auto. Si el fuego no esta dentro entonces te vas a quemar. Saldran adicciones u obsesiones que te seguirán quemando.

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. How do you surrender? By trusting that you’ve done the right preparation. You’ve done all you can do. All that is within your power, your control. Now, give up the results. The right thing will happen.

Because Google tells me. The search phrase that is most likely to take people to my blog is, “I want to die.” The number-two search phrase is “I hope to die.” Number three is “How can I disappear,” which is a little more hopeful than dying but expresses no less similar a sentiment (it’s sort of like saying “How can I kill this life I have and start another”). My e-mail is slightly more uplifting. The most popular question I get via e-mail is “I’m stuck. How can I move forward in life?”

Often when we attach our happiness to external goals: financial success, relationship success, etc., we get disappointed.

clinging to the past, depending on the future.

La peor manera de vicir

kept repeating to myself, ‘I love myself. I love myself. I love myself.’

Louise Hay. Me amo y me apruebo

Struggle reinforces pain.

people say to me, “I’m twenty-five years old and still have no idea what my purpose in life should be.” When Colonel Sanders was twenty-five, he still had yet to be a fireman, a streetcar

Other people have found success after changing careers many times: Rodney Dangerfield didn’t succeed in comedy until his forties. One of the funniest guys ever, he was an aluminum siding salesman. And then he had to start his own comedy club, Dangerfield’s, in order to actually perform as a comedian. He chose himself to succeed! But not until his forties. Ray Kroc was a milkshake salesman into his fifties. Then he stumbled onto a clean restaurant that served a good hamburger run by two brothers with the last name McDonald. He bought McDonald’s when he was fifty-two. Henry Miller wrote his first big novel, Tropic of Cancer, at age forty. Raymond Chandler, the most successful noir novelist of all time, wrote his first novel at age fifty-two. But he was young compared to Frank McCourt, who won the Pulitzer for his first novel, Angela’s Ashes, written when he was sixty-six. And, of course, Julia Child was a young fifty when she wrote her first cookbook. One of my favorite writers of all time, Stan Lee, created the entire universe for which he is known—the Marvel Universe—when he was forty-four, inventing Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and others along the way. If you don’t like to kill people but still need a weapon to immobilize them, consider the Taser, invented by Jack Cover when he was fifty. He didn’t sell a single one until he was sixty. If you like restaurant reviews you might have read Zagat, started by Tim Zagat, who quit his job as a lawyer in order to ...

Todas las personas exitosas después de los 40

The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.

You might say, “But I can’t get another job just like that. I can’t quit my job.” Fine. Don’t. Do the Daily Practice instead. It will be like magic, I promise you. You will find another job. You will find the right places where you belong. You will find ways to develop alternative sources of income so your reliance on one source of income diminishes. The opportunities are there, you just need to be flexible and fluid enough to take advantage of them.

MAKE MY OWN HOURS. There’s the myth that entrepreneurs work twenty-four hours a day. This is horseshit. Most people, entrepreneurs or not, waste time.

Never forget sales rule #1: Your best future clients are your current clients.

Abundance only comes when you are moving along your themes. When you are truly enhancing the lives of the people around you.

Rule #2: Pick a boring business. Everyone is always on the lookout for “the next big thing.” The next big thing is finding rare earth minerals on Mars. That’s HARD WORK. Don’t do it! Bryan picked a business that every merchant in the world needs. He also knew that it was an exploding business because of the e-commerce explosion. You don’t have to come up with the new, new thing. Just do the old, old thing slightly better than everyone else. And when you are nimble and smaller than the behemoths that are frozen inside bureaucracy, often you can offer better sales and better service. Customers will switch to you. If you can offer higher touch service as well, they will come running to you.

When you are a small business, there’s no excuse for having poor customer service.

Introduce two people. Every company is for sale.

Qué pasaría si la UG empieza a comprar los institutos y se hace cada vez más grande?

Books give you credibility in your area of expertise or interest. Credibility gets you: consulting (Tim Ferriss has done this very well) speaking (the authors of Freakonomics have made a career out of this) other media opportunities (TV show, radio show, etc.) other writing opportunities. Most authors I know, even bestselling ones, don’t make millions from their books. But then they get paid to write for big-paying magazines or corporations or whatever. These add up. And if they add up enough, you can outsource a lot of your writing to people whom you trust, as long as you triple-check their work. When I was writing finance articles in 2005, I was writing up to five articles A DAY with the help of a team of cheap labor (high school students) who knew more about stocks than just about any hedge fund manager I knew. an e-mail list you can sell other products to. I have never done this but several of my friends (see Ramit Sethi’s book or John Mauldin’s book) have done it very successfully

He just launched a rent-to-own laptop product. He bulk buys the laptops for $200 apiece and rents-to-own them out for $20 a week for a year. BAM! Huge margins.

If every day you wake up and say, “What adventure will happen to me today?” then adventures will happen to you.

Prepare. How did she do it? Sara had never done anything in fashion before. So she spent every day at the library and the hosiery stores. She had a full-time job but at night she researched every patent. She bought every type of panty hose. She knew the entire industry. 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

Don’t focus on how you will make a living. Do this: Build your product Sell it to a customer Start shipping Then quit your job.

Nobody questions anything if you have confidence, intelligence, and you are proud of your product.

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.

Someone I don’t know at all just wrote me with the worst-selling technique of all time. He wrote, “I really need to talk to you. Can I have twenty to thirty minutes of your time?” The answer is no. Not that I think I’m so great. Or that my time is so valuable. But his message sort of suggests that my time is worth zero. He is offering me nothing, even less than nothing since there’s opportunity cost to twenty to thirty minutes of time. I could be watching half an episode of Mad Men,

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

Recommend your competition. Think about it this way: what are two of the most popular sites on the Internet? Yahoo! and Google. What do they do? They just link to their competition, other websites. If you become a reliable source, then everyone comes back to you; if your knowledge has value, they can only get that by having access to you. They get access by buying your product or services.

The idea muscle must be exercised every day. Even if you’ve come up with ideas every day of your life, it will atrophy if you give it a two-week rest.

Write down ten ideas. About anything. It doesn’t matter if they are business ideas, book ideas, ideas for surprising your spouse in bed, ideas for what you should do if you are arrested for shoplifting, ideas for how to make a better tennis racquet, anything you want. The key is that it has to be ten or more. You want your brain to sweat, like I mentioned earlier in the book. Want to really sweat, and learn from my early mistakes with reality TV? Right now, list ten ideas that are “too big for me” and what the next steps might be. For instance, one idea might be “launch solar panels into outer space to more efficiently generate solar power.” Another idea might be, “genetically engineer a microbe that sucks the salt out of water.” I have no idea if that’s even possible. Another idea might be, “within one year I am going to write a book and give away a million copies for free.”

Some good places to start are brainpickings.org, thebrowser.com, and (not safe for work), extragoodshit.phlap.net.

Three things I do when struggling for idea topics: 1. Twitter Search I’ll search phrases like: “I wish I had” “I just paid someone to” “is the worst product” “is a horrible company” “has a terrible website” “is my favorite website” “does anyone know how”

E) I could be reading a book. Time is also a limited resource. You can respond to a comment on Facebook with an opinion no one will care about in a hundred years, or you can do something. Right now. You can take a walk by the river. Or you can kiss someone. Or you can jump on a trampoline.

F) Loneliness. I think most people fight because they are alone. There’s nothing we can do about loneliness in the material world. We’ve been trapped in these bodies since birth. But we try. We want people to agree with us so that for a brief second we can feel good about ourselves, establish a connection, and then make slow, sweet love.

“Nobody should go to elementary school anymore because it’s a brainwashing concentration camp posing as a glorified babysitting service!”