Recently by James Altucher: 10 Ways Honesty Makes You MoreMoney
I’m scared to death of having a job. But you never know what opportunities could come my way. There’s a lot of money out there willing to pay anyone. So I figured I’d dust off my resume, finally accept every LinkedIn request and just put it out there. You know, to see what was up.
EDUCATION:
Graduated with a 2.99999 average, BA in Computer Science. Really should not have graduated but begged Fortran professor to move me up from a D- to a D+ and he said, “yes”. Needed a 3.0 to graduate in 3 years because I didn’t want to take out loans for a fourth year. I think I technically still don’t have the degree because I owed library fines.
Thrown out of graduate school. Failed seven of the eight courses I took in a two year period. Received a letter citing my “lack of maturity” but that the door was open if I ever somehow gained that maturity. I learned a lot from the experience. I learned that most people back then didn’t know how to protect their private files, even if their accounts were password protected. Chances are they left the files in their folder open to the public so if you read the .mbox file you could read all of their email. Read all of the love letters a famous visiting professor had. Read the “recommendation” from one professor that completely trashed me.
I also learned that chances are if you are reduced to stalking the girl you think you love, then chances are it’s never going to work out. Even if you think she’s the only girl you can ever like. With three billion women on the planet it’s hard to imagine that girl won such an unwanted lottery.
During this period I wrote four or five unpublished (or I should say, “unpublishable”) novels and about 50 short stories.) I drove all my friends crazy by forcing them to read each one. One girl said to my girlfriend, “doesn’t it bother you that he writes so much about masturbation and prostitution?” Another time, I forced my girlfriend to read my 500 page novel and when she was finished and said, “this is great!” I asked her to tell me the ending she had read ten minutes earlier. She couldn’t remember.
I Was Blind But Now I ...
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Altogether I collected about 400 rejection letters. They were all form letters. Not a single note of encouragement.
WORK:
#10 employee at Fore Systems. Left every day at 4:45pm on the dot, proud of my punctuality. Learned to hitch hike. Closed office door all day long so I could work on various unpublished novels. Quit one day by simply not showing up. Every other employee got rich in the IPO a year or so after I quit.
Worked at Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Machine Translation. Wrote one program that I had to maintain. It never broke so I never had to do any work. Played chess online 20 hours a day until I had carpal tunnel syndrome. Too much one minute chess. The guy in the office next door was writing Lycos, the first big search engine for the “world wide web”. Whenever my boss knocked on my locked office door I would pretend I wasn’t in, particularly if I was in the middle of a game of chess. People complained about me but there was nothing they could do. Nobody could understand the messed-up way I had programmed the program they were all using so nobody could fix it but me.
HBO. Was in charge of their website. Started a company on the side. Outsourced HBO’s entire website to my own company. Became highest paid junior programmer analyst in HBO as a result. Then spent every Tuesday night interviewing prostitutes and drug dealers for HBO website. Learned important communication skills: like how to interrupt a drunken arguing couple at 3 in the morning and ask them why they were arguing. Learned how to ask out girls who put their phone numbers on the release forms. Had one transvestite explain to me what a “chocolate highway”’ was. Had another prostitute justify her income when she said, “Men don’t pay to have sex with me. Men pay so they can leave after having sex.” Shot it as a pilot also for HBO but the head of HBO Family Programming said, “for material like this you need to show someone shooting their mother while naked or you need to show your neighbors fucking.”
(me doing my job at HBO)
Reset. Started a company that made websites for entertainment companies (and Con Edison). Got most of clients through bribery. Else I would’ve had no clients. Got acquired. One year to the day after acquired I quit. Precisely when all the clients were quitting. The company that bought mine went bankrupt three years to the day after buying my company.
