Reinvent Yourself

by James Altucher

Malcolm Gladwell refers to this in his excellent book “Outliers” as the time when the Beatles got their 10,000 hours in order to achieve mastery before they hit it big.

F) CONTENT IS JUST THE TRUNK OF A TREE Then there are a 1,000 branches. People all the time ask me how you make money from writing a blog. Or writing a book. There really is no way. Most authors will tell you the fastest way to go broke is to spend years writing a book. Same goes for blogs. But you use the content you create as a launching pad. In the case of blogs—speaking gigs, consulting gigs, multiple books, subscription products, etc. I’ve seen some bloggers make millions not off of their blogs but off of the ancillary activities that

happened because they built up their platform through blogging, tweeting, Facebook, etc.

books: I’ve seen people write best sellers to non-sellers, but the ONLY way that I’ve seen serious money being made by authors that I know (even for the bestsellers) is by either doing speaking tours after the book comes out (far exceeding whatever they got in advances) or by selling information products that complement the value they deliver in their books.

“The media only writes about the sinners and the scandals, but that’s normal, because a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows.”

Why choose to be miserable?

pillars of true love: deeds, and the gift of self.”

Gandhi said, “Because before I could tell your son to stop eating sugar, I had to stop eating sugar first.”

we have a bias toward noticing negative news over positive news. The reason is simple: if you were in the jungle and you saw a lion to your right and an apple tree to your left, you would best ignore the apple tree and run as fast as possible away from the lion. This is called “negativity bias” and it’s the entire reason newspapers still survive—by very explicitly exploiting this bias in humans.