James Altucher
Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around you who don't support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck.Collection: Time
Don't time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can change. Don't bookmark pages you've already read.Collection: Travel
The people who don't know personal finance have TV shows about it.Collection: Finance
The people who know personal finance hide the money very carefully.Collection: Finance
The first rule of personal finance is that it's not personal and it's not financial. It's about your ability to make ten changes and not get too depressed over it.Collection: Finance
Poker is a skill game pretending to be a chance game.Collection: Chance
Money you lose you can always make back. But even five minutes of time lost is gone forever.Collection: Time
Honesty is the fastest way to prevent a mistake from turning into a failure.Collection: Failure
The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.
Every day, you reinvent yourself. You're always in motion. But you decide every day: forward or backward.
I'm scammed almost every day. Or, if not scammed, at the very least someone tries to scam me. Usually more than once a day.
Everyone is different. We all suffer from the disease of being human. There are a thousand cures but no antidotes.
Most people are not good people. In business, in art, in almost every 'world' I've been in, most people I've meet are pretty gray to black. It takes practice to be the person who is a source of compassion and honesty.
Life is cold. People stay warm through the intimacy of a story.
If you introduce person A to person B, and then person B is able to solve a pain point in his life, then you just made a good connection.
Quantity and persistence will get you the outcomes you need.
Don't regret your mistakes. You'll always make mistakes. The better you are, the less mistakes you make. The only way to get better is to thoroughly analyze your mistakes.
Procrastination is your body telling you you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing.
Worry will never solve tomorrow's problems. It will only take energy away from today.
I love being honest and intimate with people. I love building community. I love emailing with readers.
Honesty is about the scars. It's about the blemishes. But it's more than just bragging about failure, which could be a form of ego. It's about truly helping people.
I'm a big believer in minimalism. Not materialist minimalism, although that's part of it, but time and energy minimalism. The body is given only so much energy a day.
The only way to make real wealth is to get rid of your salary. In a salary, by definition, you are creating wealth for others, and you are creating a chain and handcuffs for yourself.
Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur: an ability to fail, an ability to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on those ideas, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.
A lot of times, people send me emails, and then I forget about them, or I never respond to them, or I respond to them weeks later.
People unconsciously know when you are not listening to them. Then they say 'No' to you.
Games are all about taking risks.
Become a beacon of enhancement, and then, when the night is gray, all of the boats will move towards you, bringing their bountiful riches.
Nobody wants to make me a rich man. In fact, most people want to make me a very poor man. I can guarantee some people fantasize at night about how poor they can make me.
When I give away a book for free, it gets my name out there. That has lifelong value for me that goes way beyond the few dollars I could maybe charge.
I saw 'Star Wars' when I was seven years old, and it changed my life.
We all have faith in something: usually a mixture of some personal beliefs with modern science. I am not like that. Mostly I just believe in what personally has worked for me.
How great is it to just rest and be happy and not move when you don't have to.
In every business I had ever started, even ones that had totally failed, I had kept good relations with the investors.
I loved Internet businesses, having built and sold one. And I loved the financial business, despite the fact that it was almost all a scam.
Every successful business, even Google, Facebook, Twitter, started with a combination of manual improvements and friends of the founders using the site.
Don't forget: when you start a website, it's not yet a trusted site. So you have to bring people from a trusted site to your site to build up the trust in your site.
Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class.
Don't stay at the job for safe salary increases over time. That will never get you where you want - freedom from financial worry. Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind.
Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. One hundred years from now, your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.
I've had to change careers several times. Sometimes because my interests changed. Sometimes because all bridges have been burned beyond recognition, sometimes because I desperately needed money. And sometimes just because I hated everyone in my old career or they hated me.
Do what you do with love, and success is a natural symptom.
Happiness is just a positive perception from our brain. Some days, you will be unhappy. Our brain is a tool we use. It's not who we are.
Poor speakers create an artificial divide between themselves and the audience. They feel they need to do this in order to establish their own credibility.
Somebody has to be on stage, and some people have to be in the audience. That's the only difference. Don't put any thought as to why you are on the stage or how you need to be 'better' than the people in the audience. You aren't better. You're simply the speaker.
Ultimately, the best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening.
Branding jails corporate America, but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.
I'm invested in about 13 private companies. I've advised probably another 50 private companies.
You'll have to hire people to expand your business. But it's a good discipline to really question if you need each and every hire.
Products are valued higher than services.