Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

Let’s focus on the things school doesn’t teach you, because these are the exact things you need to survive: how to come up with ideas (discussed in an earlier chapter), how to sell those ideas, and how to fail and bounce back. Then repeat.

When you’re negotiating you have to say no a lot. When you are selling, you are always trying to find the “yes.” Everyone has a “yes” buried inside of them. A good salesman knows how to find where that “yes” is buried and then how to tease it out. Great salesmen know it instinctively. When you’re a negotiator you have to be willing to say no, regardless of what the other side says. So although they aren’t total opposites, the goals are completely different.

NEGOTIATION IS WORTHLESS. SALES ARE EVERYTHING.

Very few businesses last forever. There’s a reason it’s called “fifteen minutes of fame.” That doesn’t apply to just people. It applies to almost everything.

In fact, it seemed like I was a horrible negotiator. And I am. But more important is to build relationships than to kill everyone and take every last dime in a negotiation.

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. And only sell something you love to someone you love. Always think, “What is the bigger picture here?”

What’s the lifetime value of the customer?

What are the ancillary benefits of having this customer?

Learn the entire history of your client, your audience, your readership, and your platform. You need to love your client. Love all of their products.

Give extra features.

Recommend your competition.

Idea machine. There’s that phrase “always be closing.”

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

Show up. When I wanted to manage some of Victor Niederhoffer’s money [2],

Knowledge.

Love it. You can only make money doing what you love. If you work a 9 to 5 job that you hate, then you’re on a leash that gives you just enough lead to get by and stops just short of real freedom and happiness.

Then I decided to write articles I enjoyed. To get back to my true roots, where I loved writing and reading. I also wanted to really explore all of my failures, my miseries, and my pain. In public. I love being honest and intimate with people. I love building community. I love e-mailing with readers. It was about a little over a year ago that I decided to make the shift where I was just going to open the kimono at jamesaltucher.com and say everything I wanted to say, and at the same time indulge in my love of writing, art, creativity, and reading. More than 4 million “customers” later, I’m enjoying more than ever doing what I love.

The idea muscle is no different than the writing muscle. It’s no different than your leg muscles, for that matter. If you don’t walk for two weeks, the muscles will atrophy. And you will need physical therapy in order to walk again.

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.

To become an idea machine takes about six to twelve months of daily practice with the idea muscle.

You can’t develop the idea muscle if you’re suffering through a bad relationship, or an illness, or you lose your sense of gratitude and wonder toward the world around you.

Note: what might be too big for you (thinking of the next step) might not be too big for someone else. They might easily know, and not be afraid of, what the next step is.

Two examples. Someone asked me, “How do you know when an idea is too big?” I answered that an idea is too big if you can’t think of the next step. I then added that if I wanted to start an airline with more comfortable seats and Internet access and better food and cheaper prices, I might have a hard time because even if it were a good idea I wouldn’t know what to do next.

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.”

You don’t ever have to look at these ideas again. The purpose is not to come up with a good idea. The purpose is to have thousands of ideas over time. To develop the idea muscle and turn it into a machine.

Be a transmitter. Two farmers live side by side and drink their water from wells they’ve each built on their respective property. One farmer’s well runs out of water and he needs rain to come quickly or he will die of thirst. The other farmer did the work and dug his well so an underground stream ran right into it. His well was always filled with water and he never had to worry. How do you find and tap this underground stream?

disengaged

Collisions. Ideas mate with other ideas to produce idea children. Read other ideas. Compare your new ideas with your old ideas. After the Big Bang, the rest of the universe was basically created from collisions.

Collisions are the fundamental life-giving processes of the universe. Ideas are no different. The best ideas come from collisions between newer and older ideas.

Shake things up. I have a very strict routine every day. I wake up, read, write, exercise, eat, attend meetings (phone or live), then reverse the process: eat, write, read, and sleep. Some days I have to work on something that’s just not coming. And in those instances, I need to rejuvenate a little bit and shake things up. Do something different. Maybe I take a walk at 5 a.m. instead of reading. Maybe I sleep in four-hour shifts one day instead of eight hours straight. Maybe I spend a day writing handwritten letters instead of going on the computer. And when it comes to the work, it’s enough to just jot down some ideas, or look at what I’ve done so far, and then set it down again. Get my subconscious working on it.

We only ever remember the things we are passionate about. Ultimately, these become the fields where ideas

But research them first. I guarantee a quick conversation or e-mail exchange with someone inspirational will also inspire you. “Touching” someone who has made the impossible possible helps you realize that your ideas are also possible and inspire you to do more. Don’t underestimate the power of being social. The idea muscle is a natural side effect of putting the Daily Practice to work. When you are physically healthy, when you are around the people you love, when you exercise your idea muscle, and when you cultivate an ability to surrender to the reality around you, it frees you up so you can become an Idea Machine.

cryogenic

Opinions are a way of clinging to the past. To some belief system our parents instilled in us, our education system “taught” us, our corporate masters forced on us, our peer group shoved down our throats, or some other brainwashing/programming that was implanted into our brain. If I have an opinion, you can gladly take it from me. Here’s why:

The point is, don’t focus on those things in the material world that you cannot control or possibly ever change, when you can focus on inner health, on your inner world, on the things that matter.

visceral

But at the end of the day, it’s spiritual waste that I’m after. And how do you get that? How do you get to that peculiar desire of trying to have no desires? Because when you expect nothing, you have the immense satisfaction of getting everything you want.

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. I find that many entrepreneurs are trying to do everything when it would be cheaper and more time-efficient to delegate, even if there are upfront monetary costs associated with that.

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. There’s only so many seconds in a row you can think about something before you need to take time off and rejuvenate the creative muscles.

most of us are not great (99 percent of us are not in the top 1 percent),

Do nothing. We always feel like we have to be “doing something” or we (or, I should say “I”) feel ashamed. Sometimes it’s better to just be quiet, to not think of anything at all. A very successful, self-made businessman once told me, “Never underestimate the power of a long, protracted silence.”

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

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 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!

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.

Being mediocre doesn’t mean you won’t change the world. It means being honest with yourself and the people around you. And being honest at every level is really the most effective ...

If I want to be happy and productive, I think back to those moments of pain and try to figure out what was going on in my head that made me so miserable that I couldn’t function. Paranoia is certainly one of them. Waking up in the middle of the night and wondering: is she cheating? Is he stealing? Are they talking about me? Will they sue me? Etc. You lose about 30 to 50 percent of your intelligence.

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. When I was running a fund, I never wanted to have a down month. I’d be afraid to talk to my investors. One guy, who is still a good friend (I spoke with him today even) said, “Listen, if you’re going to be a fund manager you have to be able to talk to people when you have a down month.”