Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

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 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 used to go out every night. You never know, I would think. I used to go to every business meeting I was invited to. You never know, I would think. I used to go on TV every time I was asked. You never know, I would think. Maybe someone would SEE me. And call me and offer me and give me and want me and like me and love me.

Maybe they would press the LIKE button on my face. Brilliant.

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.

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.

This is how we form a better society. First we become better as individuals. You can’t help others if you look in the mirror and hate what you see. And it’s very easy to hate what is there. We live most of our lives hating the mirror. Heck, I’m pretty gruesome to look at in the morning. It’s a daily challenge!

CREATESPACE. Both Kamal and I used CreateSpace because they are owned by Amazon—where we were going to sell our books—and have excellent customer service. They let you pick the size of your book, and then have Microsoft Word templates that you download to format your book within. Kamal did his all himself. I did my first book by myself, as well. But for my second book, for a small fee, I hired someone (Alexanderbecker.net) to format the book, create the book design, and create the final PDF, which I uploaded. He also checked grammar, made proactive suggestions on font (sans serif instead of serif), and was overall just extremely helpful.

self publish

I’ve stumbled and fallen and gotten up and survived enough that I’m sick of goals and purposes and journeys.

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

As I write this, I’m forty-five and I still have no idea what I want to be when I “grow up.” But I’m starting to finally accept the fact that all I want to be is ME.

We get stuck. We get unhappy. Maybe we’re in a hopeless marriage. Maybe a hopeless job. Maybe you picked up this book and you are thinking to yourself, “Well, this is all good but it’s too late for me.”

I hate to beg. I hate to look at someone and think to myself, “If only they say ‘yes’ my entire life will be better.” I hate to be nice to someone just so they like me and say yes to me and whatever I’m offering. I bet there are some prostitutes out there who like their job. I don’t know. But I’m not one of them. I hate having sex with people I don’t love. And that’s what happens when one decision maker has control over your financial future at any moment in time.

Leaving aside the question, should I take a job at all?, let’s talk about money for a second. First, the science: studies show that an increase in salary only offers marginal to zero increase in “happiness” above a certain level. Why is that? Because of this basic fact: people spend what they make. If your salary increases $5,000, you spend an extra $2,000 on features for your car, you have an affair, you buy a new computer, a better couch, a bigger TV, and then you ask, where did all the money go? Even though you needed none of the above, now you need one more thing: another increase in your salary, so back to the corporate casino for one more try at the salary roulette wheel. I have never once seen anyone save the increase in his salary.

The only way to create value for yourself is to create value for others.

The only real retirement plan is to Choose Yourself. To start a business or a platform or a lifestyle where you can put big chunks of money away.

start a business on the side. Deliver some value—any value—to somebody, anybody, and watch that value compound into a career.

There’s a saying, “It’s your best thinking that got you here.” So the first step is to literally throw away your “best thinking.”

Corporate America doesn’t solve problems. These companies are machines that keep churning out the same product, with minor tweaks, forever.

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.

if YOU ARE thinking too much about money while building your business, then either you are not very passionate about the business or you aren’t helping people with your business. Those two thoughts alone will crowd out the thoughts of your own personal bank account.

FAILURE. As far as I can tell, Larry Page has never failed. He went straight from graduate school to billions. Ditto for Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and a few others. But again, by definition, most of us are pretty mediocre. We can strive for greatness but we will never hit it. That means we will often fail. Not ALWAYS fail. But often.

My last sixteen out of seventeen business attempts were failures. Ultimately, life is a sentence of failures, punctuated only by the briefest of successes. 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. The mediocre entrepreneur understands that persistence is not the self-help cliché “Keep going until you hit the finish line!” It’s “Keep failing until you accidentally no longer fail.” That’s persistence.

The best ideas are when you take two older ideas that have nothing to do with each other, make them have sex with each other, and then build a business around the bastard, ugly child that results. The child who was so ugly nobody else wanted to touch it. Look at Facebook: combine the Internet with stalking. Amazing!

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.

I’m imperfect. The shame of imperfectionism takes at least 20 percent of my intelligence away. Because people sense and appreciate honesty, and honesty about imperfections, believe it or not, creates enormous opportunities. I’ve seen it happen in my own life.

Everyone has excuses. Everyone says “I can’t.” I can’t be a medical professional unless I go to medical school. I can’t be a filmmaker unless I raise $10 million to make a movie. I can’t marry a supermodel because I’m ugly. I can’t I can’t I can’t. For every “can’t,” you should send me $10. I can do all those things. Particularly if I have your $10. Don’t hit yourself over the head when these thoughts are in your brain. Just notice when these things come up. It’s not like you’re going to get cured of paranoia. But notice when it appears. Water withers the rock away. Every time you notice, the window clears a tiny bit. A smudge is gone. You get a glimpse of the light outside.

HONESTY COMPOUNDS. It compounds exponentially. No matter what happens in your bank account, in your career, in your promotions, in your startups. Honesty compounds exponentially, not over days or weeks, but years and decades. More people trust your word and spread the news that you are a person to be sought out, sought after, given opportunity, given help, or given money. This is what will build your empire.

BE THE SOURCE. “But if I give ideas for free, what if they could’ve made a billion dollars? I always get screwed by my partners.” If you are the source of ideas, then you are ALWAYS the source. Forget the losers who steal. Move on. You become THE fountain of ideas. People come to the fountain and make wishes and throw money in. Don’t be a trickle of dirty water. Be the fountain and let people know it by giving away all credit and rewards.

To choose yourself you must first be fearless. To know that abundance is everywhere, not just hidden behind the masks you wear to display your skills to the public.

The way you create the network effect is by encouraging people in your network to connect to each other and to help each other. It feels funny sometimes. Sometimes people say to me, “Oh, I met so-and-so, thanks to your blog.” And I think to myself, “HEY! THAT’S MY SO-AND-SO!” I have to stop that feeling. It’s only limiting. The universe has limitless resources. You have limited resources and limited time. The only way to create abundance is to behave more like the universe. Set the conditions for life. Then sit back and watch the matings occur. Before long you will have created life, you will have helped create the many great things that your connections will create together. Once again you have become the source.

Ten years later I ran into the employee who became CEO of that spinoff company. He ran after me and called my name. It was in Times Square in New York. We hadn’t spoken in almost ten years. His company had greatly expanded. They had taken in major investors, and the company was now profitable and had lots of employees. He told me that when he walked the floor, he always pictured two people as his role models: his commander in the Israeli Army. And me. I felt really honored. He had greatly helped me when I was building my business. And now it was an honor for me to help him back in that way. I don’t ever have to benefit off of his business. But his business is helping many people now and, in its own way, that creates abundance for me. The abundance can never stop when you help others.

I haven’t always been honest. I try. And I hope I’m getting better. I try every day to improve and to follow the advice I’ve just given you. Otherwise I wouldn’t have given it. But I’ve seen it. With people who have been in business for ten, twenty, forty years. Honesty compounds little by little. And that compounding turns into millions or billions. The dishonest people disappear. They die. They go to jail. They don’t maximize their potential. They run. They are scared.

Persistence is more important than industry validation because it’s not the industry that is buying what you’re selling.

I’ve seen it in action repeatedly: no matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter who your audience is: 30 percent will love it, 30 percent will hate it, and 30 percent won’t care. Stick with the people who love you and don’t spend a single second on the rest. Life will be better that way.

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 be. An entrepreneur, for instance, has investors, customers, partners, employees, and competitors.

Nothing is more important than the cultivation of yourself. So many people think they will save the world if they defeat “them,” where “them” is some evil force that is bringing the world down. But once you divide the world into categories, into an “us” versus “them,” then you immediately become a “them” and lose touch with who you really are. And before long you’re calling me a fucking douchebag on the Internet.

Try this exercise: 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.

So what can we learn from Woody Allen? Wake up early. Avoid distractions. Work three to five hours a day and then enjoy the rest of the day. Be as perfectionist as you can, knowing that imperfection will still rule. Have the confidence to be magical and stretch the boundaries of your medium. Combine the tools of the medium itself with the message you want to convey. Don’t get stuck in the same rut—move forward, experiment, but with the confidence built up over experience. Change the rules but learn them first.

I hate the phrase Life is too short. Sometimes it feels very long to me. But it’s certainly too short to spend any time on hard feelings. Everyone is just trying to get by. Both the rejected and the rejecters. Nobody is free from this. So let’s all keep in touch. It’ll be a tiny bit easier to make it to the finish line.