Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

The vagus nerve stretches from your brain to your stomach and hits every organ along the way (almost). It gets inflamed when your cortisol levels are too high for too long. The vagus nerve basically causes every disease known to mankind. High stress inflames it, as does bad food, smoking, etc.

GIVE MONEY AWAY. Turns out that showing compassion in a visceral way like giving money is linked to higher levels of oxytocin.

HUGGING. Touching and hugging release oxytocin—with

Guess what? Turns out, using social media in this way releases oxytocin.

laughing, make my oxytocin hormones go on fire,

Walking outside, as you might guess, is statistically correlated with higher levels of oxytocin.

Vocally hug people today.

BEING TRUSTED. This is hard. You can’t force people to trust you. And trusting someone doesn’t release oxytocin. But being trusted does. So live your life in such a way that more and more people will trust you.

LISTENING TO MUSIC. Just lying down and listening to music releases oxytocin.

FOOD. Here is my oxytocin-rich meal: eggs, mixed with bananas and pepper. Each ingredient is known to release high levels of oxytocin.

BREATHING. Deep breathing hypnotizes your body into thinking everything is calm. And, guess what, it’s not like you are being hunted down by wild giraffes right now. Things are calm, relatively speaking. When your body is calm, so is your mind, and oxytocin gets released. Ah, your body is saying when it breathes deep, everything is safe. So now I have time to be happy.

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. It could also mean you are doing work that is not your forte and that you are better off delegating.

So the mediocre entrepreneur learns two things from failure: First he learns directly how to overcome that particular failure. He’s highly motivated to not repeat the same mistakes. Second, he learns how to deal with the psychology of failure. Mediocre entrepreneurs fail A LOT. So they get this incredible skill of getting really good at dealing with failure. This translates to monetary success.

“Keep failing until you accidentally no longer fail.” That’s persistence.

one might think. Shouldn’t we strive for greatness? And the answer is, “Of course we should! But let’s not forget that nine out of ten motorists think they are ‘above average drivers.’” People overestimate themselves. Don’t let overestimation get in the way of becoming fabulously rich, or at least successful enough that you can have your freedom, feed your family, and enjoy other things in life.

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

Honesty is the only way to make money in today’s world.

How many people are “using you?” The value of your network goes up exponentially when you view your contacts and resources not as a list but as a network of nodes on a graph.

pretend everyone was sent to this planet to teach you. Famous people, dead people, your neighbors, your relatives, your co-workers. This will give you a strong feeling of humility. And guess what, you will learn from people, you will appreciate them more, and they will actually appreciate you more. Because everyone loves to teach.

A creator can’t ever rest. No matter what you do, no matter what your creation is. Every moment is the audition. Every time you create is a chance to go on the roof and do something new, in a way that hasn’t been done before, in a way that is potentially disruptive, playful, unique, and vulnerable. People will hate you, people will love you, people will climb on the rooftops to see you before the police arrest you.

I didn’t give up on being creative. I expanded the power of my creativity by not limiting myself to one domain, and vowing to return to book-writing later, ultimately to fiction-writing.