Reinvent Yourself

by James Altucher

You have to ask good questions. “What can I do to improve?” or “How can I find a better job?” or “How can I be grateful that I lost this job?”

TO MASTER ANYTHING, TALK TO THE EXPERTS

BRING THE TARGET CLOSER

Then when she got 10 in a row, I had her move back a few feet until she hit the base line. Now she’s the most consistent server on her team (I’m bragging).

LOOK AT GOALS DIFFERENTLY

“By the end of that session,” Tony said, “it turns out to achieve the exact lifestyle he thought he needed $1 billion for, he needed $10 million.” This is still a lot of money but this was Tony’s way of bringing the target closer.

This made me a lot more successful. Leave the future business for the possibility business and the world will get infinitely larger.

I thought about doing that before my most recent TED talk but there was no trampoline available. But it’s true. When he came downstairs to talk to us he was very excited about the potential for his book to help people. It almost made me want to write about financial stuff again.

Robbins method.” Which I defined as: *At first you don’t know anything. *You find five people who are the experts in the world. *You extensively interview them. *You figure out the simplest things they have in common with each other. *You do that simple thing over and over and over and over (repetition).

But always look for new things to learn. Always look for new ways to surprise. Always look for new ways to break out of your comfort zone.

SHOW PEOPLE YOU ARE GRATEFUL

BE THE SERVANT OF MANY

What a weird thing for someone to not know. Einstein said, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.”

Einstein said, “Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

“If you’re changing the world, you’re working on important things. You’re excited to get up in the morning.”

A) A feeling of competence or growth. B) Good emotional relationships. C) Freedom of choice.

“Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.”

Larry Page keeps pushing so that every day he wakes up knowing he’s going to go past “good enough” that day.

“My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society.”

Empowering others empowers you.

“Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future.”

Never let the practical get in the way of the possible. It’s practical to focus on what you can do right now. But give yourself time in your life to wonder what is possible and to make even the slightest moves in that direction.

“Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don’t believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you’re likely to have issues.”

“I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society.”

“Nobody remembers your bad stuff. They only remember your good stuff.” I live by that.

“If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.”

“Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.”

“If you say you want to automate cars and save people’s lives, the skills you need for that aren’t taught in any particular discipline. I know—I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.”

Escaping the labels and titles and hopes that everyone else has for us is one of the first steps in choosing ourselves for the success we are meant to have.

We define our lives from our imagination and the things we create with our hands.

“It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.”

He cut most of the products and put people into small groups to solve big problems.

“We don’t have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.”

To be a successful employee, you have to align your interests with those of the company, come up with ideas that further help the customers, and have the mandate to act on those ideas, whether they work or not.

“If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered—the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.”

“What is the one-sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!”

Sometimes I push forward. Sometimes I don’t. I want to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

“I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I’ve tried to really stress that.”

Nobody knows what the definition of art is. How about: something that doesn’t exist except in the imagination, that you then bring out into the real world, and that has some mix of entertainment, enlightenment, and betterment.

“The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job—that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.”

When you are at the crossroads, and your heart loves one path and doesn’t love the other, forget about which path has the money and the work, and take the path you love.

“We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren’t that many things people use twice a day.”

What are 10 things that can be invented that people would use twice a day?

“You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we’ve come up with doing that is through companies.”

“Every idea has to be sustainable. Profitability is proof that an idea is sustainable.”

“You may think using Google’s great, but I still think it’s terrible.”

The rule is: if you practice WITH INTENT for 10,000 hours, then you will be world-class.

After doing research, he found that it’s because they forgot the “with intent” part. They were satisfied with “good enough.”

“We have a mantra: don’t be evil, which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.”

The point is: values before money.