Recently by James Altucher: The 10 Commandments of the AmericanReligion

After a failure I feel lonely and afraid. Its hardest at these moments to pick yourself up and give a little in order to get. The only way to climb out of the hole, when you have a metaphoric needle sticking out of your veins and you’re lying in the gutter that the world has kicked you to, is to give back without asking, give as if you were the richest man in the world.

This is not the same as giving to charity. There are so many other ways to give that are underappreciated. But its exactly these types of giving where the world will give you back ten times more than you gave.

The Wall Street Journa... James Altucher Best Price: $1.21 Buy New $10.41 (as of 08:50 UTC - Details)

Here’s 13 ways that Giving can help you Receive more

Give credit where its due. Every day, give credit to your boss, your friends, your employees, your colleagues, even if it was your own ideas. Just give them credit. Everyone knows the reality. And the reality is YOU.

Give Equity. When I started Stockpickr, someone wrote a blog post criticizing me for giving thestreet.com 50% of my business. One of my employees even quit, he was so upset at that decision. (Although he’s since gone on to better things.) But that decision hooked thestreet.com into my business. Once the company was up for sale (which was the second after we launched the company) they were basically locked into my tractor beam to the point where they had to buy the company. If I had given them any less of the business I’d probably be sitting on a worthless website right now, post financial crisis.

How to Be the Luckiest... Altucher, Mr James Best Price: $2.49 Buy New $7.95 (as of 10:50 UTC - Details)

Give a customer more than they asked for. When I first did websites for New line cinema (in my old business, Reset), I offered to essentially do websites for all of their movies for almost free. That kept business coming from the whole Time Warner family and also gave my employees fun stuff to do in between doing websites for Con Edison and other boring companies. It also got clients for me because everyone thought our New Line sites were ‘edgy’.

Give up. Some businesses just don’t work. Don’t make the issue worse by raising money and being fooled by the prophets who tell you persistence is key. 140love.com was my latest bad idea. Go check it out. I put $30k into that baby and on the eve of raising $500k I told everyone to save their wires and not send the money. It was a bad idea. The ghost-site still exists. Knock yourselves out.

Give ideas. I’ve told this story before, but when I was really down and wanted to get things going for myself, I came up with as many ideas as I could for other people and simply gave them away for free. The results were stupendous. Sit down every day, picture a person you can give ideas to, and come up with ten good ideas for them. At the very least this will exercise the idea muscle, which atrophies like any other muscle if it’s not in constant use.

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