Instead, I’m going to share two things I’ve done that have changed my life for the better and I don’t know anyone else who does them.

A) Get yourself 1000 $2 bills. You can get $2 bills by going to your local bank and asking them to order it from the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve threw out all of their antique copy machines that were set aside for $2 bills. That said, they still have a million vintage 2003 (signed by John Snow) $2 bills lying around. If you go to your local bank branch and ask for $2 bills it will take about 2-3 weeks to get one thousand of them.

Why?

1) When you go to a place where you plan on being a regular, always tip 30% and do it all with $2 bills. Nobody is ever going to forget you and you will always be treated well. Plus people will fight with each other to be the one serving you. That’s a nice feeling. You don’t have to be rich. You just have to have $2 bills.

Note: DON’T waste $2 bills on tips for cab drivers. They are never going to see you again.

2) When you are breaking into a new scene, always use $2 bills. For instance, when I started playing chess for money at Washington Square Park I would always pay off with $2 bills but when I won I’d get $1s or $5s. Pretty soon, everyone was hoarding their $2 bills. My currency was flowing through the local economy. Everyone knew who I was. It was a shortcut to popularity because that’s how desperate I was for friends among a bunch of drug addict homeless chessplayers.

3) When I was dating, I would carry a thick wad of cash. A $100 bill on top, $2 bills filling out the whole wad. Time to pay for dinner, I’d bring out the wad (impressive), peel off a $100 bill (pathetic) and then amaze by tipping with non-stop $2 bills. “Where did you get those?” people always ask. Give a cryptic answer. “I do some projects with the government.”

Extra tip: it helps to go to the same restaurant the night before the date so everyone who works there is excited, anticipating what you will do.

4) Conversation piece. If you pull out a $2 bill people say three things: “what is that?”, “where did you get that?”, “they are so beautiful”

5) Because as far as money goes, they are beautiful. I love the back of the 2 dollar bill. So much detail.

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He started a company in 1970 and it went public in, I think, 1984. The day it went public he was worth 5 million dollars on paper. About a year or so later he was worth zero and the company went bankrupt.

My parents bought a house but then couldn’t pay for it so it was only half built.

All of the other houses seemed to be filled with happy people, children, cars, nice lawns, and then there was this one house in the middle that was half built and falling apart.

They bought it but they didn’t buy it. Lawyers were involved.

Then the new company he worked for fired him and he got health insurance money to pay a portion of his salary. They fired him officially for “mental health reasons”.

When I first made a lot of money I felt like I was going to avoid his curse.

I had money so I was completed as a person. That was it. I was done! I did it!

I bought a big house. I spent a lot of money. I bought other things. Lots of other things. I felt like I was immortal.

My dad would come by the new house while it was being built. He told the builder that we needed a power flush in each toilet.

We put the power flush in the guest toilet so he would always be able to use it and feel like he had made a contribution.

Then the same thing that happened to him, happened to me. I couldn’t escape his curse. I was him.

He made money and lost all of it and became half of who he was. I made money and lost all of it and became a fraction of who I was.

He got divorced from his first wife. I got divorced.

When I was a kid I would work in his office in NYC at least once a month. I had acne so bad that he would take me to a dermatologist who would drain all the cysts on my face and then I’d be too embarrassed to go to school so I’d sit in his office and help the secretary run the copy machine.

Then at lunch he’d take me to the Carnegie Deli. Then he’d get the late afternoon New York Post and we’d go home and play either ping pong or chess until it was time for me to go to sleep.

I like to play games with my kids.

Therapists, family, friends, partners, all told me I wasn’t like him. But I was broke and depressed and empty and I was afraid to sleep.

I knew I would wake up at three in the morning and I would feel lonely and scared and nothing at all could prevent it.

He had a fatal stroke when he was in the middle of an argument with someone who owed him money.

I’m afraid to repeat that mistake also.

Spending time with people you love and who inspire you is not about making money or having fun. It’s a matter of life and death.

I got better at that part and it changed everything for me.

I removed the people who could kill me. And I surround myself with the people who give me life.

Sunday was my anniversary with Claudia. She laughs at me when I try to explain to her I’m from another planet so there’s no possible way her puny Earth mind could understand the love I feel for her.

Her dad is dead also.

She has arguments with me over who should die first.

I don’t know. Let’s just have fun today.

Reprinted with permission from The Altucher Confidental

Everyone there was smarter than me. The first day there, one person told me he was building a computer in his dorm room. Another kid was one of the youngest chessmasters in the country.

The idea of the program was that people only really learn when they are immersed in something.

My subject was “Math.” So in a three week period I passed through all of high school math and one year of Calculus.

From 8am until about 5pm you sat in a room and went at your own pace. Teaching assistants stood around and would help you if you needed it. Then you would take tests to advance to the next level whenever you wanted.

I ended up last in the class.

The second summer I went back I took Statistics. We figured out all the statistics for Monopoly.

I have three words for you: St. James. Place. Then build as many hotels as you can on the Orange group and CHEAPER. Forget about the expensive stuff.

(Oh, and buy all of the railroads. Trust me.)

That third summer I ruined my life.

I liked a girl. Marcy.

Statistics were obliterated when she spoke to me. The odds never went in my favor. She wouldn’t let me own her St. James Place.

For the rest of high school I was obsessed with a girl liking me. Any girl.

So I tried to get good at things. I tried to get good at tricks. At gimmicks.

Maybe if I were special, if I had a gift I could give, then a girl would bless me her special gift back. People would like me.

Chess is probably the wrong thing to get good at if you want a girl to like you.

Breakdancing was slightly better. But if you’re Jewish, with glasses, and braces, then it sort of looks funny when you try to breakdance.

And what completely failed was trying to learn hypnosis so you could command girls to undress in front of you. That NEVER worked.

These were all gimmicks.

The only way to get good at something is to completely immerse yourself in it — to the outside world, immersion is the same as magic.

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Because it’s this very thing that makes me afraid of the dark. When the lights are out and I’m about to go to sleep. The day has died and there is nothing left to squeeze from it.

There”s just that fear.

Will I wake up farting.

If your spouse loves you she’ll think it’s “cute”. Or at least that’s what she will say. And then she will try really hard to forget it. I hope that’s true. I hope she thinks I’m cute.

Phew. Don’t worry. Here’s a worse fear. Don’t read further if you don’t want the truth.

Your doctor is going to kill you.

When you’re sick people say all the time, “oh, no problem, just go to the doctor”. Those “friends” who say that want you to die.

Here’s the sick truth. The truth about sickness. 

- Alcohol Abuse. In a study done on the American College of Surgeons, 15% of male surgeons and 25% of female surgeons suffered from alcohol abuse and dependence. And a significant portion reported having errors during surgery in the prior three months because of this dependence.

I was at a dinner once and part of the topics being discussed in dinner was my opposition to sending kids to school. Someone who worked for Mayor Bloomberg asked me, “would you ever want to be operated on by someone who didn’t go to medical school” .

My answer is “yes”. If you want to be safe, it turns out, be operated on by someone who is male, who has children, and who specializes in operating on veterans. For some reason, these are the people least likely to be drunk while operating on you. I don’t know why.

- Malpractice. Johns Hopkins has done a bunch of studies on this. 98,000 people a year die from mistakes doctors make. Either a mistake in surgery or a mistake in a prescription or some other weird mistake. One study showed that if you randomly pull 100 medical charts, 40 will contain evidence of doctor errors.

- Fake medical degrees. At least 5000 doctors operating in the United States today have fake medical degrees. Don’t believe me? Google “buy a fake medical degree” and you can be operating within a matter of weeks in your basement.

And it makes perfect sense. Some “medical schools” located offshore have “virtual simulators”. You can practice surgery while sitting in your bathroom with your laptop!

- Doctors hate you and they hate their lives.

On average, one doctor a day kills himself. Despite what you hear about lawyers, doctors actually have the highest suicide rate according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

It’s even worse among female doctors. You think they like looking at you with your clothes off? You’re disgusting.

The suicide rate among female doctors is 2.3x the national average. When they cut open that body and see what we’re really made of they think: “this is just hopeless”.

- Doctors are obese. There’s nothing wrong with being obese. But it will kill you. And doctors know that.

Obesity causes everything from diabetes to heart attacks to strokes and is linked to early onset of Alzheimer’s. And yet, doctors have a death wish. 53% of doctors, despite knowing all of this, are obese. And you put yourself in their care.

Why should it matter if doctors are obese? In a sample of patients who are overweight, only 7% of the overweight doctors would diagnose their patients as overweight. As opposed to over 90% of the doctors who were not overweight.

- If you get sick right now, you’re screwed. In medical circles (trust me, I’m a doctor) it’s known as the “July Effect”.

Doctors go on vacation in July. So interns become residents and residents pretend to be the real doctors. Deaths from surgery and malpractice skyrocket in July. I hope you don’t get sick this month.

- Bad handwriting. You know how the doctor prescribes this weird thing to you and you think, “how can anyone read that” but for some reason you trust that your pharmacist has this supernatural power to read doctor’s handwriting? Well… he doesn’t.

Over 7000 deaths a year occur because the pharmacist couldn’t decipher the prescription and gave you an overdose of some weird chemotherapy pill instead of viagra.

Claudia asked me the other day if she thought I would die before her. I know the answer already. The answer is “no”. Because I never go to the doctor. She goes to various doctors throughout the year. So I’ve just eliminated the leading cause of death.

Now I’m going to get a fake medical degree. Because the next time someone asks me what I do for a living I’m going to tell them the simple truth:

“I save lives”.

Reprinted with permission from The Altucher Confidental

I stopped a ten million dollar robbery last week.

For various reasons, including Claudia is slightly worried I could get killed, I am changing all of the names. All of the other details are intact.

A few weeks ago, a guy claiming to be related to Middle Eastern royalty, (call him “M”), had a representative (a friend of a friend of a friend) call me and ask me if I knew anyone who would lend M ten million dollars.

“He has collateral,” the rep said: “$25 million in restricted shares of [well known private Internet company].“

So I called a fund I used to be an investor in. They were interested and made an offer. Call the fund manager, “Bill”.

Bill said, “We’ll lend $10 million IF we get the full $25 million on any default.” Here were the other terms Bill said.

- 15% interest, paid quarterly- the full loan is due back in two years- $600,000 fee paid to Bill up front.- Bill wanted 25% of all the upside on the full $25 million in shares for the next ten years.

I had never seen a term in a loan like that last one but I give Bill credit. Why not ask for it? In a negotiation it never hurts to ask for anything.

M said, “yes”. He needed the money fast for some real estate he wanted to buy.

Bill began his due diligence. M sent a fax picture of the shares. His lawyers sent over all the contracts M had signed to get those shares. M even wired $15,000 to Bill to pay for Bill’s legal fees. M wanted no hurdles to getting the deal done. Lawyers on both sides were busy every day all day, working out the details.

Bill said to M: I need permission from the internet company that I would be the potential shareholder if you default.

It took a day but M sent over a letter. It was written on the Internet company’s letterhead, signed by the company’s “Director of Investor Relations” giving Bill permission to control the shares in a default and “call me at XYZ phone number if you have any questions.”

By coincidence, I knew the Director of Investor Relations but hadn’t spoken to him in a year or so.

Finally, last Friday, Bill calls me in the morning. He was about to wire ten million dollars to M.

“I don’t know,” Bill said, “I have to tell you, James, something seems funny.”

“What?”

“The letter from the head of investor relations at the company. It almost seemed too simple. Why didn’t he throw in a line indemnifying the company?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had no clue. “Is that standard?”

“I don’t know either,” Bill said and he sort of drifted, “I just don’t know. But something makes me feel funny.”

“I have an idea,” I said, “I know the guy who wrote that letter. I’ll write to him and ask him if he wrote that letter. This way he independently verifies.”

Bill said, “ok, do it.” So I did.

I didn’t hear back. Bill called again two hours later.

Bill said, “look, let’s call up the number on this letter. You stay quiet.”

So Bill called and someone picked up and said he was “X”, the head of investor relations for this company. I’ve spoken to X a few times before. The voice did not sound like X but it had been awhile.

Bill and X started talking about the letter. Then Bill said, “hey, by the way, I have your friend, James Altucher on the line to say Hi.”

CLICK.

Dial tone.

“We got disconnected,” I said.

Bill started laughing.

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The Best of James Altucher

I had hired people to run the campaign. I had gotten great advice. I had studied the current incumbent in my district. I had spoken to party officials in BOTH parties who were receptive. I had spoken to local reporters who were going to cover it.

I was even going through the process of being endorsed by a major national politician. I learned a lot. What I learned convinced me I couldn’t run and still be true to my values.

The best way to have a difference in the world is to just do what I do now. The best way to clean a dark room is to open the window and let the light in. That’s what I like to do.

But within three seconds of thinking about running for Congress I learned an enormous amount about the bullshit in the system. Below I tell the story of almost instantly being thrown into the machine where I would have to give up my principles.

Some of what I learned is below. Some I just have to keep to myself for now.

Tactical Things I Learned:

A) For a mid-term Congressional primary, you will win if you only campaign in nursing homes. Every primary campaign is won by senior citizens as the swing votes. So if you just campaign in nursing homes and make sure that vans are available to get them to vote, then you win. People think that you have to win over young people but in primaries it’s the reverse.

B) People remember the names of who they donate to. “The trick is,” said one experienced marketerr, “is to raise just a dollar from everyone.” The second best thing, he said, “is to give a dollar to everyone”.

C) I was going to try something creative. It’s easy to get a list of likely voters in your district. I was simply going to buy the vanity searches of all of those people on Google. Since most people search their name, if I blanket their screen (and their Facebook pages) with my name, then they would remember it at voting time. “What we do,” said my favorite marketer (author of the one million in sales book, “How to Run a Successful Hot Dog Cart”, Perry Belcher), “is to make the ads really ugly so nobody clicks. So you get the effect you want but it costs you no money”. I bet nobody has thought of this before for a campaign.

D) I felt I could win. The incumbent was weak and has already signed up to raise money from PACs that cater to weak incumbents. I also studied his voting record and found weak holes. The bottom line is that a large percentage of the people who have voted for him have lost their jobs and now have worse healthcare. Nor does he actually live in the district. I’ve lived here for most of 11 years.

E) Even though I’m pretty apolitical, I felt very strongly about my particular issues. “But,” said another marketing expert, “if you actually say any of this stuff nobody will take your campaign seriously. So you have to rewrite it completely.”

I have a 10,000 word platform. I sent it to him. “yeah,” he said, “nobody is going to take you seriously and you won’t be able to win.” I agree with him.

My feeling is, if I can’t run on what I believe in then what’s the point? I had a lot of issues (10,000 words was just the start. I could’ve written a 50,000 word platform) but here are some of my ideas.

Some of my Issues:

- Congressmen should NOT be allowed to vote in Washington DC. The only reason they vote there is because there were no phone lines or Internet in 1792. But now Congressmen could stay in their district, help people out, and still engage in debates and learn the issues and vote from home. The benefits:

1. stay closer to constituents and what they want.

2. Most important: it would destroy the hundred billion dollar lobbying/bribery industry. Congressmen basically vote what industry lobbyists want them to vote. Lobbyists have an easy job. All of the Congressmen are located in one small city. It’s easy to wine and dine them ten times a day. If the Congressmen were spread out over the entire country by mandate, then there would be no way to lobby them. End of lobbying industry. More true democracy for voters. In fact, it might even mean the end of Congress, since voters could vote directly and we can have a true democracy instead of a pretend one.

- No more “military actions”. In the past four years we’ve had military actions in at least six different countries and conducted over 20,000 airstrikes, killing many innocent civilians . I’m not sure what good they do. The last LEGALLY declared war was in 1941. Most wars in history have had an economic cause. If we got creative on the economics, we wouldn’t need to send over young 18 year old boys and girls to die pointless deaths that protect nobody.

18 year olds have their senior prom and then they die. Not to mention our lack of nation-building upon completion of a military action. I support the charity “Women for Women International” which helps women whose lives and families have been torn apart by military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, all over Africa, etc. I also support successful technologies that help diagnose returning veterans with post-traumatic stress syndrome as to what medication will most effectively cure their issues. These 18 year old kids are having their lives destroyed.

When I ask my 40 year old friends who disagree with me on this issue if they would volunteer for the military in order to relieve an 18 year old, nobody says “I’ll do it”.

- Economics stops wars. I can give 100 examples. But in Rwanda we sent over billions in military aid. None of it worked to prevent genocide in the 90s. Do you know what worked? The price of coffee is perfectly correlated to the genocidal violence in Rwanda. When Starbucks bought coffee from Rwanda: no more genocide (this is overly simplified but actually true). The entire Middle East situation is going to change simply because we have more oil in North Dakota and the Mississippi Lime than the entire Middle East. Let’s let that play out in environmentally safe ways now that the technology is finally here and getting better.

- Senior citizens are being systematically starved and killed by the government. Social security rises with core inflation, which excludes food and energy increases. Well, food and energy costs have been increasing faster than inflation for many years. So senior citizens get less money each year to cater to their basic needs. And they are living longer.

My calculations are they have about ten years before a senior citizen with no other means of support will starve to death. Solution: we have to live up to our promise to people over 65. But anyone younger than 55 should give up their expectations of Social Security (since it won’t help them live anyway). People should keep working. There’s really no other choice. The retirement age where people get Social Security was set at 65 in a year when the average person died at age 61. Now it’s 78. So the world has changed.

- Every government asset (State and Federal) should be sold. Why do states own horrible universities, for instance, that rob our children of their youth and put them into horrible debt, and then the Federal government backs that debt. Sell the universities.

Sell the highways. Sell the bridges (they are all about to fall apart since the average lifespan of a bridge is about 50 years old and most bridges were built in the 1930s and 40s.) Sell the poorly run post office. Etc.

I’m not suggesting this because the government is horrible at running things. But, yeah, given our debt, I guess they are. So let’s run a surplus by simply selling everything, hiring less government employees (who will move over into private industry that buys the assets), and making enough money to pay down debt before inflation starts paying down our debt. There’s not really any other solution since government is incapable of reducing budgets (we only run surpluses when business is booming). And if companies that buy these assets want to make a profit they won’t let them collapse like the bridge above.

A great example of an organization that should be sold off is NASA. A $100 billion budget couldn’t get a a commercial vehicle into space but a $10 million X Prize was able to. There’s more details here but there is a lot to be learned from the success of incentives funded by private industry.

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The Best of James Altucher

If anyone has any doubts about the stigma of self-publishing and whether or not it is here to stay you only have to check out the recently self-published and instant cult classic “Urine Therapy – How to Drink Your own Urine” by “Craig Smith”.

According to “Craig”, urine is pretty sterile and contains excess “good things” that the kidney was not able to absorb. Getting those good things back in the body either through drinking them or massaging them into your skin could cure cancer, cure insomnia, relieve stress, cure HIV, increase survival in the desert, cure gonorrhea, and it might “even taste good once you get used to it.”

As he says, more eloquently than I can, “Firstly it is down to the fact that your urine contains excess nutrients from your system and that couldn’t absorb because it didn’t need that amount at that time.”

He suggests drinking salty water first to get used to it. But also you can boil out a lot of the salt in urine before you drink it. He also suggests that you drink the urine that results from “mid-stream” because the initial urine might contain bacteria that was in the urethra.

I have no judgment. He has an entire chapter on the history of drinking urine. Apparently people have been doing it for a long time.

But in Western Society we are used to thinking of urine as “dirty”, even going so far as having to “wash our hands after we touch urine” which he feels borders on ridiculous.

Important to note: “Older urine is actually better because it has a higher concentration of ammonia”. I did not know that.

I could go on.

There’s a lot of useful information in this book. For instance, depending on the color and smell of your urine there’s a variety of diseases you can diagnose.

Which makes me think again that the “smart toilet” is not such a bad entrepreneurial idea if someone wants to do it.

Make a toilet that analyzes the chemical composition of your urine and then sends you an SMS text if you are at risk of heart attacks, kidney stones, diabetes, cancer and a ton of other diseases that urine can predict.

“Whatever you do, though, do not inject urine in to the body. This can cause damage to the system.”

I can picture a real enthusiast saying, much to his later detriment, “F**k drinking it. I need it in my bloodstream pronto! I’ve got to inject me some of that POTENT stuff.”

I tell Claudia all of this, asking if she’s heard anything about urine therapy (“Urophagia” for those in the business) in her extensive reading of ancient yoga texts.

She makes a disgusted face but nods her head yes. “I would never do that,” she said.

“But what if it cures cancer?”

“Noooo,” she says and she’s disgusted. “Do you want me to serve you urine right now?”

“Well,” I say, “Craig says that you can’t drink the urine of the opposite sex. I might drink too much estrogen.”

“NO! Ewww!” she says, “I’ll get you a cup for your own urine.”

I have no opinion. Who knows. Is Craig full of it? He’s published a book, after all.

“Why are you even reading that?” Claudia says. She repeats. “Why are you reading that?”

“I was looking up books about Bitcoin,” I say. “I have to go on CNBC later to talk about Bitcoin because I am the bestselling author in history who has pre-released his book ONLY on bitcoin.”

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The Best of James Altucher

I was going into the city to give a talk about college education to an audience of about 150 education experts.

I’m an expert because I wrote a book.

The speakers were me, some professor, some head of tuitions at some shit school (i.e. the one I graduated from), the NYC Chancellor of something (I got there late and everyone just kept referring to him as “The Chancellor” so I’m not sure what he was Emperor of or whatever).

My topic: why they had all wasted their time, money, and lives on going to college.

I told a lot of jokes during my talk.

I have an excellent preparation technique: While other people were giving their talks I had been downstairs watching “Louis CK” on my phone. I like to prepare for a talk by laughing.

Then it was my turn to speak upstairs. I got everybody to laugh quite a bit.

But the bottom line is: the system is broken, the middle class is disappearing, being carved through the middle by a trillion dollars in student loan debt, and everyone is still raising tuition faster than inflation. And 50% of kids with college degrees now are underemployed.

And that one statistic that “if you go to college you make a million dollars more” is totally flawed and I explained why using basic Statistics 101 knowledge (explained in detail in this post).

I also talked about the people I met when I wandered around NYU interviewing students about how they were going to handle their student loan debt.

I talked about the girl who was practically naked while hula hooping so she could make debt payments from a tip jar. I spoke about the two kids who got degrees but were now clerks in an eyeglass store getting paid by the hour, and they felt they were “lucky” because most of their other friends did not have jobs.

And I told my story of how I spent 3 years studying computers then 2 years in grad school for computers then had to take remedial computer classes once I got a job.

The woman who spoke immediately after me, a computer professor from the shit school I graduated from, said, “well James went to our college and was successful so it couldn’t be all that bad.”

And everyone laughed and clapped.

The rest of her talk was about some bullshit called MOOCs. A way for people to pay colleges lots of money while not paying attention to anything.

The Chancellor of Whatever spoke at one point and said I was “idiotic.”

The woman after that was in charge of tuitions at same college. She said “Tutions will always go up faster than inflation.” She said, “We have to be able to hire competitive researchers.”

I leaned over to Claudia while continuing my game of backgammon on my phone and said, “she forgot to say the word ‘educators’.”

Later, during the Q&A, one woman asked: “I need to get a masters in education to teach but it costs the same as an MBA. That doesn’t seem fair. What should I do?”

Nobody had an answer for her. I had an answer but felt shy about saying it. My answer was: “You have to quit your job as a teacher.” That’s the only way to let them know this is a problem. Reduce supply. Your value goes up. Then you can dictate the rules of the universe.

Another question. This one for me. “What about that statistic that says you make a million dollars more if you go to college.” I said, “Please refer to the talk I just gave.” He had a follow up, “So are you saying the system is broken?”

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Recently by James Altucher: Three Stories About Billionaires

I was going into the city to give a talk about college education to an audience of about 150 education experts.

I’m an expert because I wrote a book.

The speakers were me, some professor, some head of tuitions at some shit school (i.e. the one I graduated from), the NYC Chancellor of something (I got there late and everyone just kept referring to him as “The Chancellor” so I’m not sure what he was Emperor of or whatever).

My topic: why they had all wasted their time, money, and lives on going to college.

I told a lot of jokes during my talk.

I have an excellent preparation technique: While other people were giving their talks I had been downstairs watching “Louis CK” on my phone. I like to prepare for a talk by laughing.

Then it was my turn to speak upstairs. I got everybody to laugh quite a bit.

But the bottom line is: the system is broken, the middle class is disappearing, being carved through the middle by a trillion dollars in student loan debt, and everyone is still raising tuition faster than inflation. And 50% of kids with college degrees now are underemployed.

And that one statistic that “if you go to college you make a million dollars more” is totally flawed and I explained why using basic Statistics 101 knowledge (explained in detail in this post).

I also talked about the people I met when I wandered around NYU interviewing students about how they were going to handle their student loan debt.

I talked about the girl who was practically naked while hula hooping so she could make debt payments from a tip jar. I spoke about the two kids who got degrees but were now clerks in an eyeglass store getting paid by the hour, and they felt they were “lucky” because most of their other friends did not have jobs.

And I told my story of how I spent 3 years studying computers then 2 years in grad school for computers then had to take remedial computer classes once I got a job.

The woman who spoke immediately after me, a computer professor from the shit school I graduated from, said, “well James went to our college and was successful so it couldn’t be all that bad.”

And everyone laughed and clapped.

The rest of her talk was about some bullshit called MOOCs. A way for people to pay colleges lots of money while not paying attention to anything.

The Chancellor of Whatever spoke at one point and said I was “idiotic.”

The woman after that was in charge of tuitions at same college. She said “Tutions will always go up faster than inflation.” She said, “We have to be able to hire competitive researchers.”

I leaned over to Claudia while continuing my game of backgammon on my phone and said, “she forgot to say the word ‘educators’.”

Later, during the Q&A, one woman asked: “I need to get a masters in education to teach but it costs the same as an MBA. That doesn’t seem fair. What should I do?”

Nobody had an answer for her. I had an answer but felt shy about saying it. My answer was: “You have to quit your job as a teacher.” That’s the only way to let them know this is a problem. Reduce supply. Your value goes up. Then you can dictate the rules of the universe.

Another question. This one for me. “What about that statistic that says you make a million dollars more if you go to college.” I said, “Please refer to the talk I just gave.” He had a follow up, “So are you saying the system is broken?”

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The Best of James Altucher

Recently by James Altucher: Three Stories About Billionaires

I’m throwing out all my clothes and books and most of my projects and thoughts.

I’m sick of most of the things I own. What do I really need them for anyway. Are they really that important?

Most of my books were swept away in Hurricane Sandy. And all my pants have holes in them. What else?

I have some white shirts, some black pants and a sweater or two.

But I want to take it further. I don’t want to live in a home.

So Claudia and I have been doing a little bit of experiment. In the past few months we’ve stayed via AirBnB in Encinitas. Venice, Austin, Miami, and NYC. We’ve used Zipcar when we’ve needed a car. We use kindle when we read books. Eventually I will stop renting my place and just do short-term AirBnB everywhere.

I’ve mostly replaced my laptop and ipad and phone with the Samsung Note II (and random Kinkos or business centers).

I don’t really collect anything. And I don’t need any extra coffee blenders or whatever you call them.

Do I work? I like to deliver value. And value makes money. I get brain-gasms when I help people.

But I don’t believe in meetings. Or phone calls. Or emails.

When I am in a meeting I am specifically not getting anything done. I have one trick to get things done: I make 5 introductions a day. I listen to people’s issues and either help them on the spot or introduce them to people who could. Then I step out of the way.

This works out very well. I like doing my job.

I wish I could get a job that pays me everytime I wake up at three in the morning and worry. But I don’t think anyone wants to pay me for that. I would ROCK at that.

Sometimes “Less” get very granular. Like if I find myself worrying about the future, I whisper “Less” and remind myself I don’t need to be so anxious. I’m a horrible predictor of the future anyway.

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Recently by James Altucher: Three Stories About Billionaires

I want to put on Google Glasses, stare at the sun until I go blind, and have a Google Hangout with all my friends at the same time while the sun burns my vision away. Everyone will see what I will be seeing (or not seeing. Because of going blind) because of the Google Glasses.

I feel like that would make me a master of the universe.

A mega-champion of everything.

My teachers from grade school would be proud. They might rename the school after me.

I told my kids, “You’re always complaining about school. If you don’t like school just don’t go. I don’t care at all.”

And guess what? They practically spit in my face in rebellion. They didn’t shoot up crack heroin. Or get tattoos. They went to school. HOW DARE THEY! I wasn’t even trying to do any reverse psychology on them. Reverse psychology is for people afraid to say the truth. It was like reverse reverse psychology.

My kids can do what they want. What I give them is not freedom but choice. They choose to go to prison. That’s fine.

School was like a mental institution for me where I was force fed the following drugs:

1) Lots of facts. At talks I ask people, “When was Charlemagne born?” I have yet to get a response that is correct within 200 years. Research shows that 90% of what we learn in a class we forget after 45 minutes. The reason is: our brain likes to have 2 or more things going for it before it is convinced it has a worthy fact for memory. So, “passion + awe” are two things. But boring facts disappear quickly.

2) Perfectionism. Schools celebrate the A+ and punish the C-. Whenever my daughter tells me she got an A+ I ask her why she wants to take a class that is too easy for her. The C- shows you so much more: What you need to learn. What you might not be interested in. How to deal with imperfection. How to deal with the pride of others. How to deal with insecurity. As some woman tweeted on twitter the other day, @jaltucher is a C-. I have room to improve!

3) Cliques. My best friend Jimmy Biondo punched me in the back at my locker and I fell to the ground and started crying. I think I was 15. In school you have a small group of people to choose from for friendship. This makes for political, spiteful, gossip-filled, often Lord-of-the-Flies-style friendships. Yeah, I’m the ugly kid that got killed in the book. And no, I did not read the book in school. I read the Cliff’s Notes.

4) Science and Math. While these are beautiful subjects I often feel that my kids are encouraged to drop their creativity at the door if it involves art or storytelling. Everything is rote, then tested. Then rote again, then tested again. For twenty years. That’s only a tiny part of the brain. Humans are meant to use their entire brain. It’s our entire brain that let’s us DESTROY and RULE the animal kingdom.

5) Work. From 7am to often 10pm, my kids are “working”. They sit in classrooms all day, barely moving, and then they are often working on homework until they fall asleep. They learn to work hard. But…

But as an adult, if you want to succeed, be creative, learn to fail, learn to sell ideas, learn to build momentum around your life, you need to UNLEARN:

HOW TO UNSCHOOL YOURSELF:

A) Play. Playing (however you want to define that word) reduces stress, encourages creativity, increases happiness, is FUN. Nothing wrong with that.

Maybe people think they HAVE to be working. Else they are unproductive. They get this reactive stress when they aren’t “at work”. Because we got addicted to working back in our school daze.

What should you play at? I don’t know! Do whatever you want. Go to a museum. Or a movie in the middle of the day. Or pee in public places, take pictures of the pee, and make a photo exhibit. Who cares?

Homework! — think of five things you can “play” at today.

B) Creativity. Sometimes I’m sick of writing this blog. So I do other stuff. I draw. Or I take photographs of my urine in public places. Or I plan my upcoming run for Congress! (Don’t tell Claudia. She is against it). This makes my brain feel good. I can literally feel the neurons light up. It makes my brain feel loved by me. Every day I try and exercise different parts of my brain.

Homework! — What are some ways you can be creative today outside your normal work schedule?

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Recently by James Altucher: 10 Reasons Why You Have To Quit Your Job This Year

I’m a little nervous about hitting “publish” on this post because it’s definitely going to go viral in the massive very close-knit billionaire community. You know, the many people who post anonymously on Internet message boards.

Claudia and I led a retreat a few weekends ago about yoga and some of the other things I’ve written about this blog: specifically “the daily practice” that I talk so much about. There was a lot of Q&A and I got an opportunity to tell some stories. Here’s a few of them. First, a preview (if you are reading this via RSS, turn on “display images”):

A) Jealousy. I was out for breakfast with a friend of mine who manages some money. About three billion dollars. He’s done very well and written a book about his success. Nice guy.

At the breakfast he told me that the day before he had had breakfast with XY [Insert top billionaire's name who runs a multi-billion dollar private equity fund]. My friend was describing that breakfast to me, “the entire time he was going on and on about what bastards ‘those Google guys’ are. As in ‘why should those google kids be worth $18 billion each and I’m only worth $2 billion?’

People think a billion dollars will solve their money-envy issues. But having a billion dollars could actually make it WORSE. You never develop the muscle for “I-will-never-have-a-billion dollars”.

When you have a well developed “i-will-never-have-a-billion-dollars” muscle you maybe find other things in life aside from money that will fulfill you – having positive people in your life that you love, being healthy, being kind, not taking things so seriously, giving up control over things you can’t control, and so on.

B) Enough. Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, once was at a party in the Hamptons. A guy came over to him and pointed at a young, 25-year-old standing in the party who worked for a big hedge fund. Heller’s “friend” said to him, “see that guy over there? He made more money last year then you will ever make with all of your books combined.”

Joseph Heller said, “Maybe so. But I have one thing that man will never have.”

His friend was skeptical. “Oh yeah, what?”

Heller said, “Enough.”

I think this is beautiful. What is enough? It’s not a number. Look around you this second. Do you really need anything else then the feeling you have this second? If you say “money” or even “sex” or “love” those answers might be true for future seconds. But right this very moment do you really need more money in your pocket? You might be on a train reading my blog. How would you be having sex anyway? Often we get absorbed in the things we want in the future. As if we are unhappy now but there’s some complicated journey that can take us to happiness. The currency of unhappiness will never buy us happiness.

Often to get to happiness, we can skip the journey part and just choose to enjoy this moment. This moment we can have “enough”. Why not? Who can stop us?

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Recently by James Altucher: How Not To Pay for Your Student Loans

This was going to end badly. I would play chess all day in my office with the door locked. My boss would knock on the door and I would put my headphones on and ignore him. People would complain that the software I wrote didn’t work. My boss would say, “where were you yesterday” and I would say, “it was a Jewish holiday” even though there was none and he would say, “well…tell us next time if you leave.” It was bad behavior. I was a slave trying to escape but I didn’t know how. I wanted to start a business but I didn’t know what. I wanted to create something but I would play games all day, burning up the fuel in my brain.

You can’t make money without selling something real. You can’t make something real without first imagination manifesting itself in your head. You can’t have imagination without surrendering yourself to an idea that you want to create something of value to other human beings.

And now it’s too late. Now the course of history has finally written it’s next chapter. There’s no more bullshit. I’m going to tell you why you have to quit your job. Why you need to get the ideas moving. Why you need to build a foundation for your life or soon you will have no roof.

1) The middle class is dead. A few weeks ago I visited a friend of mine who manages a trillion dollars. No joke. A trillion. If I told you the name of the family he worked for you would say, “they have a trillion? Really?” But that’s what happens when ten million dollars compounds at 2% over 200 years.

He said, “look out the windows”. We looked out at all the office buildings around us. “What do you see?” he said. “I don’t know.” “They’re empty! All the cubicles are empty. The middle class is being hollowed out.” And I took a closer look. Entire floors were dark. Or there were floors with one or two cubicles but the rest empty. “It’s all outsourced or technology has taken over for the paper shufflers,” he said.

“Not all the news is bad,” he said. “More people entered the upper class than ever last year.” But, he said, more people are temp staffers than ever.

And that’s the new paradigm. The middle class has died. The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.

And it was. The biggest provider of mortgages for the past 50 years, Fannie Mae, had as their slogan, “We make the American Dream come true.” It was just a marketing slogan all along. How many times have I cried because of a marketing slogan. And then they ruined it.

2) You’ve been replaced. Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class. The working class. Most jobs that existed 20 years ago aren’t needed now. Maybe they never were needed. The entire first decade of this century was spent with CEOs in their Park Avenue clubs crying through their cigars, “how are we going to fire all this dead weight?”. 2008 finally gave them the chance. “It was the economy!” they said. The country has been out of a recession since 2009. Four years now. But the jobs have not come back. I asked many of these CEOS: did you just use that as an excuse to fire people, and they would wink and say, “let’s just leave it at that.”

I’m on the board of directors of a temp staffing company with $600 million in revenues. I can see it happening across every sector of the economy. Everyone is getting fired. Everyone is toilet paper now.

Flush.

3) Corporations don’t like you. The executive editor of a major news publication took me out to lunch to get advice on how to expand their website traffic. But before I could talk he started complaining to me: “our top writers keep putting their twitter names in their posts and then when they get more followers they start asking for raises.”

“What’s the problem?” I said. “Don’t you want writers that are popular and well-respected?”

When I say a “major news publication” I am talking MAJOR.

He said, “no, we want to be about the news. We don’t want anyone to be an individual star.”

In other words, his main job was to destroy the career aspirations of his most talented people, the people who swore their loyalty to him, the people who worked 90 hours a week for him. If they only worked 30 hours a week and were slightly more mediocre he would’ve been happy. But he doesn’t like you. He wants to you stay in the hole and he will throw you a meal every once in awhile in exchange for your excrement. If anyone is a reporter out there and wants to message me privately I will tell you who it was. But basically, it’s all of your bosses. Every single one of them.

4) Money is not happiness. A common question during my Twitter Q&A, asked at least once a week, is “should I take the job I like or should I take the job that pays more money”.

Leaving aside the question of “should I take a job at all”, let’s talk about money for a second. First, the science: studies show that an increase in salary only offers marginal to zero increase in “happiness” above a certain level. Why is this? Because the basic fact: people spend what they make. If your salary increases $5,000 you spend an extra $2000 on features for your car, you have an affair, you buy a new computer, a better couch, a bigger TV, and then you ask, “where did all the money go?” Even though you needed none of the above now you need one more thing: another increase in your salary, so back to the corporate casino for one more try at the salary roulette wheel. I have never once seen anyone save the increase in their salary.

In other words, 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.

5) Count right now how many people can make a major decision that can ruin your life. I don’t like it when one person can make or break me. A boss. A publisher. A TV producer. A buyer of my company. At any one point I’ve had to kiss ass to all of the above. I hate it. I will never do it again.

The way to avoid this is to diversify the things you are working on so no one person or customer or boss or client can make a decision that could make you rich or destroy you or fulfill your life’s dreams or crush them. I understand it can’t happen in a day. Start planning now how to create your own destiny instead of allowing people who don’t like you to control your destiny. When you do this count, make sure the number comes to over 20. Then when you spin the wheel the odds are on your side that a winning number comes up.

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Recently by James Altucher: 7 Things I Learned From HurricaneSandy

Michael Sherman ?@itsmikesherman: what advice wound you give to graduates that worry about paying off their student loans??

Answer:

The other day I went to walk around the NYU campus. My sister went to NYU. Both my parents went there for graduate school. I considered going there but went elsewhere. In any case, I’ve been hanging around that campus since I was a kid and playing chess in the SW corner of Washington Square Park.

There’s much less drugs and prostitution there now than when I was a kid. And probably less violence. But at any given moment, the combined debt of the young men and women in the park at any given moment is probably over one hundred million dollars. It’s one thing for billion dollar corporations to have that kind of debt. Debt is the grease that keep the wheels of capitalism moving. But individual and irrational debt is also the cement that keeps our young men and women from becoming creators, inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs.

People say to me, “well you went to college.” Or “I went to college” Or, “why shouldn’t kids have debt?” The problem is not that we all went to college and kids today shouldn’t. It’s that kids and parents have been scammed into taking on more debt than ever before. And for what? Very few people bring up, “well they read the classics”. I don’t even know what the classics are but presumably they could read those same classics for free on the Kindle and also read as much analysis of those classics as they want. Most people bring up, “they will get a job”.

I will upload this video in a few weeks and we’ll see the real answer to that last question. Suffice to say, it’s pretty scary what actual students at NYU think in terms of how they will pay back this debt and what kind of jobs they are getting right now.

The problem is this: not only are there no jobs…there never will be jobs again. Technology has improved so much that companies are more efficient than ever. They don’t need to hire people. Combine that with globalization where not only unskilled labor but skilled labor can be outsourced for cheap and you are left with a tiny sliver of jobs compared with what used to be out there. Throw in increased managerial efficiency and there is also less jobs for a declining middle management population.

Suffice to say, we’re screwed. And the more student loan debt you have, the more screwed you are.

So what is the solution?

Simple: don’t pay back the debt.

But how do you do that? Even in bankruptcy, the government can still garnish wages to seize your student loan debt. Isn’t that funny? They were perfectly willing to lend you the money so they can make money on your interest payments before you even make enough money to pay them taxes. But when you are struggling, they go after their money first rather than help young citizens, the hope for our future, out.

That’s ok. Everyone needs to make money. Even the government. But I just told you above: there’s no new jobs coming. So what wages will they garnish if you stop paying down the debt?

Here’s what you do: treat yourself like a corporation (uh-oh, is he about to say “corporations are people” the quote that brought down the Romney campaign? No, I’m saying the opposite: people should turn themselves into corporations). Make a company, and start figuring out what services you can offer people. Be freelance, and collect money through your company. And expense all or most or many of your expenses through that company. This way you can pay your bills, and only take a tiny salary. Let the government garnish what they can (it won’t be a lot) but you don’t let that slow you down on building up your ability to innovate, to offer services, to create a product, and so on.

And, if you are “unemployed”, you can work with the government on forbearance programs or even on cancelling your debt.

You might say, “not everyone can be an entrepreneur”.

And that’s true. But EVERYONE can incoroprate a company (go to incorporate.com), and charge their services in a freelance manner, and obey the tax laws on how to take expenses, etc.

Ultimately, though, everyone will have to be an entrepreneur to an extent. Because the concept of “job” which has only existed for about 150 years or so, is going to disappear. And you will need to build your idea muscle, and stay healthy, and become an entrepreneur to succeed in this new and exciting and transforming (and scary!) world.

And when you finally do well and sell your first company do you know you should do? Pay down your student loan debt. You borrowed it, so you have to pay.

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Recently by James Altucher: Why I Won't Vote

Let’s clean up some myths first: Hurricane Sandy is not good for the economy. People in the media always claim hurricanes are good because of the rebuilding. This is bullshit. Yes, people will be buying new furniture, etc. But if it were good for the economy I’d come and smash your house every other month and that would be even better for the economy. So that’s wrong. It’s never good to destroy hard-earned resources.

Second, Hurricane Sandy is not retribution for any societal ills. I’ve seen “gays” blamed and I’ve seen a “two state Israel/Palestinian solution” blamed and I’ve seen “global warming” blamed. It’s none of those things. Death tolls per capita per natural disaster have gone down since the 1950s in developed countries so all of those suggestions are ridiculous.

Scary

Third, 90 people have died and 60 million touched in some way by the hurricane. There’s no way around it — natural disasters suck.

Claudia and I live right next the Hudson River. Early Monday the Hudson River was already climbing above the rocks and crawling it’s way down the street. That was eight hours before high tide and some guy was kayaking in the street while everyone laughed and the police begged him to stop.

My neighbors started taping up their doors and putting sandbags in front of them. I’m always too late to the whole “fix-it” thing so I asked someone if they were just handing out sand bags somewhere. He laughed and said he bought them at the Home Depot a week ago. “There are none left,” he said, and kept on taping. Lot of stuff to do. I pretended like I had something to do also. The alien mothership was going to land and destroy us all but I was embarrassed that I didn’t know what to do in preparation for it.

Time to get Claudia. We spent about three hours taping garbage bags to each door. She cut duct tape with her teeth. I tried to do that and got duct tape all over my mouth.

Then we put up bricks all around to keep the garbage bags secure. We did this indoors and outdoors for all three doors we have that lead to outside. Then we took all first floor furniture and put it upstairs. We took all books on lower shelves and moved them higher. My Go board, which rests on the floor, we put on the kids’ bed. We cleaned out their closet so nothing was on the floor. We moved everything in the refrigerator upstairs. We unplugged all the lights. Took showers to take advantage of any last minute hot water. We charged up all batteries on 4 laptops, 4 tablets, 2 phones that were also hotspots. We drove our car a mile uphill (Claudia drove). We were ready to camp out.

At that point something disastrous happened that I was afraid was going to jeopardize the entire marriage. While we were taping shut the outside door my wedding ring had fallen off and was now gone. By the time we realized, we couldn’t go outside and look. There was three feet of water outside and winds up to 50 miles per hour. That ring was gone. Claudia is definitely going to think this is symbolic, I thought. “It’s a natural disaster,” I said. Of course the blame for our marriage potentially collapsing under the weight of symbolism had to be the fault of a natural disaster named after a woman. “It’s Sandy,” I said, “she took it! She’s jealous.”

Claudia tried to tell me not to worry about it but I was afraid not what she thought right then but what she would think LATER. I was living too much in the future with a natural disaster happening right there.

When we thought we had secured everything, we relaxed. Safe. No way the water was going to get in. We were in there and the forces of Nature were OUT THERE. Then a fountain sprang up in the middle of our kitchen. It was like a baby penis peeing into the air while waiting for a diaper changed. Then another one. Then in the dining room. Then in the kid’s room. Then the living room. Then more of them in the kitchen. Then a panel which led to the basement burst open and water started streaming out. All the water was coming up from underneath, not from outside. Zombies were vomiting hurricane filth out of the depths. Within minutes the first floor had a foot of water in it.

Right after it crept over the river, about 8 hours before high tide, 40 feet from my house

Outside the window, around high tide, it looked like the entire Hudson River was sobbing past each house, surrounding them consuming them, all the way to the train tracks. A giant tongue from outerspace come down to lick everything in its path. Jonah being swallowed by the whale. We are between the train tracks and the river. About two feet of water was now making itself at home downstairs, checking all of our cabinets for food, our shelves for paper, our closets for clothes to snuggle into, our refrigerator for electricity. The first floor belonged to Sandy.

We did what every other couple in a once-in-a-lifetime worrisome situation would do: we relaxed, got in bed upstairs, and watched Casino Royale on the ipad until we fell asleep.

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I was scared when I left the corporate job for the first time. I was even more scared when I was thrown out of graduate school and had to explain why to my parents. When I was first separated and then divorced I was ashamed to tell people about it. When I lost all my money in just one summer and went totally broke and forced to sell my home I was so embarrassed that I even lied to people who asked why my home was being listed. I would say, “that must be a mistake”, even though I had to have signed a contract and everyone knew that. People would smirk.

I needed to break free from all the prisons I put myself in. Shame, embarrassment, fear, anxiety were the guards and the bars that kept me locked up.

When you are a prison, it’s natural to want to escape. But most people don’t. If they do their daily routine, eat on time, play on time, watch TV between 6 and 9, follow their orders, do their chores, pay their dues, then eventually they think they will be released. Many years in the future.

But when you want to escape from prison RIGHT NOW, your powers of observation become heightened. You become like a superhero. Like a mutant from the X-men.

You observe the schedules of the guards. You look for any holes in the wall. You look for ways to smuggle tools from the kitchen. You look for those fleeting moments when the doors are open for supplies, when the trucks release their goods and for a split second, a hiding place might reveal itself. You observe in yourself if you have the courage to do what it takes. You look at maps of the prison, of the outside, of the grounds that you can hide in. You exercise every day to get yourself ready for “the moment” – the point of no return where you begin your run to freedom and can’t look back.

Your powers of observation become so heightened, so superior to your fellow inmates and the guards that watch over them, that eventually, after diligence, you figure how to wiggle out of the chains, how to take advantage of the tiny oversights that add up, how to turn invisible and slip through the cracks. And when the dogs bark at the morning light, spread out in the forest sniffing at the tiny scraps of your scent left behind, you are long gone, even though your presence is felt everywhere.

It’s the same thing every day. We are trapped in this world of sickness and money lust and failure and striving and craving. I am not being pessimistic. I am optimistic we live in a world of increasing literacy, decreasing sickness, decreasing violence, increasing innovation. And yet, the more I want, the more I crave, the more bound I am, the less chance I have. To find my own meaning in this infinite dictionary. To find my own life.

I need to break free from the prison. Sometimes the craziness adds up to too much. I simply want one moment completely free from bondage, and then carry that moment to the next, treasuring the only thing I can ever have – my own peace of mind this second. Here are the things I feel I need to observe to break out of prison. When I can observe and then conquer these, freedom will come. Not before then.

• when am I angry. Not to suppress it. Just to notice it. Not to act on it. Not to kill someone. Just to notice it. When is it happening? Why? It’s a hot plate that cools under observation rather than if I try to ravish it too quickly.
• when am I worried about the future, in particular money. Do I really need to worry about how I will pay bills a year from now? Will that help me to pay the bills a year from now? Or can I use the time spent worrying (even the nano-seconds, when added up) to read, to further myself, to achieve, so that those worries recede beyond the horizon. Can I become the Ocean instead of just the ripples (the fears) that eventually lap onto a muddy shore.
• when do I sit and regret the past? What I said at the party the other day. How I treated those people ten years ago. Not that I want to excuse any failings or not learn from them. I can learn from them right now. But if I regret, if I play over events, then I am no longer being observant of right now, I am lost in the moment, I am in a time machine, I am in a dream factory, floating in nebula, light years from reality.
• when am I feeling lonely, wondering what the other people are doing? Are they wondering about me? How many times have I been lonely in a crowd, dead eyes all wandering aimlessly in their futures or pasts while we shuffle through the dying light of the current day.

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Recently by James Altucher: How To Break Free From Prison

I was asked this during my last Twitter Q&A:

Bryan M. Smith ?@bryanmsmith: Who are you voting for in the election & why?

Answer: I don’t vote. I won’t vote. I have no political anti-establishment reason for not voting. I’m not an anarchist. I just don’t see why I should vote. A vote is a choice between two elaborate theatrical productions. It’s a choice between the aesthetics of Star Wars versus Indiana Jones. It’s a vote to see which artist more cleverly evokes our mythological and unconscious responses to the perilous world around us. We all die but “hope and change” properly demonstrated gives us a signal that our choices can help society live forever, that the small stain we leave behind has a chance of survival even after we are long dead.

Is it better for you or me if Mitt Romney or Barack Obama is President? I wish Bush hadn’t been President. Too many 18 year olds were sent to die. I wish Bill Clinton hadn’t been President and spent years wrapped up in impeachment litigation after lying to his wife and the country. It’s great to have the entire past to look back on. Essentially every President was bad. I can’t think of a good one. They all wove dreams out of the fabric of their intelligence but when they left us we were lonelier than ever.

Heck, I would be bad if I were President. Unless I did absolutely nothing. Which is hard for the leader of the free world to do. He feels like he has to do something. Like kill people (“intervention”) or disrupt the way we trade with each other (“tarrifs”, “immigration!”). Or disrupt the way we try to save for our futures (“money printing!”).

People get very upset about this voting thing. I’m accused of being unpatriotic, for instance. Or my little 10 year old told me, “more people will run stop signs if we don’t have a President.” She associates a President with a magical parent. Perhaps projecting her own sense that I don’t give her enough boundaries for her to figure out where the edge of childhood ends and adulthood begins. I let her run a Stop sign when I don’t set a bedtime, or turn her TV off. She wants a President who will tell her when to “STOP!”

So here are some reasons for not voting. I’m not asking anyone to agree with me. Many people like to vote. Do things that you like to do.

A) One woman wrote: “Sara Manela ?@MidianiteManna: Tell that to sick kids with no insurance. Yes, it will effect our lives, b/c we’re not all rich like you.”

Sara is very angry at me for not voting. Somehow I’m not only allowing children to be “sick” but she takes it personally: “we’re not all rich like you”. Most of my life, maybe even now, I’ve been pretty poor and without any health insurance. It reminds me of the head of Blackstone saying to a friend of mine, “Fuck Larry Page. Why does that kid have $18 billion when I only have $2 billion.”

All the time I grapple with my own emotional issues around money. With the people who have more. With the people who seem to be an overnight success. With the 20 years of 100 hour weeks and the dozens of failures and the thoughts of suicide that will always remind me they were one staring me in the face. With the people who every day send me hate mail for reasons I’ll never figure out. Three last night by the time I woke up this morning. What’s the point?

In 2003 my dad had a stroke. If I hadn’t lost all my money a year or so earlier I would’ve been able to provide him with experimental medical help he needed. Instead, his insurance ran out and he kept getting downgraded to worse and worse hospitals. At one point I felt for sure that he was trying to communicate and with just a little more therapy he could make it. But the doctors didn’t believe me. “There’s nothing there,” they said and pointed at their own heads, supposedly as an example of “there”.

I was convinced my dad was nodding his head in response to questions. He was trying to speak. He mouthed the words, “I want to go home”, to me. He would stare at the giant image of a chessboard I taped to his ceiling.

There were experimental programs I could’ve sent him to. But I didn’t have any money. So he couldn’t go. So he lay in bed staring at the ceiling for three years and then he died without ever moving again.

In terms of sick kids. It’s very bad if sick kids can’t get treatment. Fortunately the State Children’s Health Insurance Program provides insurance for about six million kids right now whose parents don’t already qualify for medicaid. And this insurance extends to long-term chronic illnesses such as cancer. Here’s a link.

I understand why the woman is angry at me for not voting. But it’s a good thing she doesn’t have to be angry at me. I hope her anger doesn’t motivate who she votes for. When you are angry it becomes an “us” versus “them” situation. The reality is, if we want society to work we all have to work together to find common ground. As corny as it sounds, Love will affect more change, create more innovation, than Anger ever will.

B) Another guy, @JohnTMadden wrote, “ @jaltucher Way to respect our flag, our veterans, and our Constitution James. For a bright man, that statement was ignorant.”

I get that one a lot. I don’t like any wars at all. I can’t think of a single war that can be justified when you look back on it with the microscope of history. But most importantly, I never approve of 18 year olds being sent off to be potentially killed. I have a 13 year old daughter. In five years would I want her to risk her life in order to protect “my way of life”? Of course not! I’d rather spend the rest of my life in solitary confinement than have her risk hers. I’d rather be sent to be burned in a concentration camp than lay awake for one night worried that she is risking death for a needless reason.

As far as being anti-veteran. A) I think they never should’ve been veterans in the first place. B) I’m actively involved in a company that is desperately attempting to treat post-traumatic stress syndrome and/or depression for returning veterans and the government is constantly attempting to squash these sorts of treatments by denying that the veterans are experiencing any sorts of mental illness at all for “serving their country”.

The reality is, we all know now that the war in Iraq was a mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction. No Al Quaeda links. And now the balance of power in the Middle East has been so upset (the tension between Iraq and Iran held that balance together) that Iraq will be little more than a colony of Iran. The US historical strategy is to create tension but not to engage. We ruined that strategy in the Middle East with our failed attempt at “nation building” (code for destruction and the slaughter of innocents) and now the media/government is even contemplating war with Iran, which is even more of a geographic impossibility than war with Afghanistan has turned out to be. Look at a map and tell me how troops can get in there?

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Kelly Francis ?@KellyFrancisLaw: How do you know when you’re thinking too big or aiming too high (if that’s even possible)?

Answer:

In the mid-90s I had an idea that lasted about the amount of time it takes to drink two beers. I say this because I had the idea at a bar and it was quickly squashed by the two friends I was with.

I wanted to create a reality cable channel. All reality TV all the time. Reality TV was just beginning. “MTV’s The Real World” and HBO’s “Taxicab Confessions” were the only real two successful examples at that point. The day before, I had gone to a seminar at the Museum of Television and Radio about “The Real World”. All of the guests of my favorite season (but not Puck or Pedro, who was dead) were there answering questions. I felt reality TV was a cheap way to produce TV and people would get obsessed by it, particularly if sex was involved.

“What a dumb idea,” a friend said. “There’s only so much reality.” Which strikes me as funny now.

The other guy said, “you’re not a big TV company. How will you get the cable companies to go for the idea?”

So I never thought about it again. I put up a fence around the idea and decided I would not be able to leap over that fence to execute on the idea. Now EVERY television channel is basically all reality all the time, or at least 50% of the time.

My real problem was: I didn’t have confidence. And I didn’t know what the next step was. In retrospect, I should’ve written down my idea, written down ten ideas for possible shows to launch with, and started pitching TV companies to get someone to partner with me on it. That would’ve been simple and not taken too much time before there was some payoff.

Note: what might be too big for you (thinking of the next step) might not be too big for someone else (they might easily know, and not be afriad of, what the next step is).

Two examples:

I was first asked a similar question a few months ago and I replied that an idea would be too big if you can’t think of the next step. I then added that if I wanted to start an airline with more comfortable seats and internet access and better food and cheaper prices I might have a hard time because even if it were a good idea I wouldn’t know what to do next.

Then I read about Richard Branson.

When Virgin Records was making him a tidy profit of about $15 million a year he decided there should be a more comfortable cross-atlantic airline. What the hell did he know about making an airline? Nothing. Not only that, airlines are a difficult business. Three of the best investors in history: Howard Hughes, Carl Icahn, and Warren Buffett have crashed and burned buying airlines. Warren Buffett once said something like “that the best way to end up with a billion is to start with two and buy an airline. ”

And yet Branson came up with the idea and that very day he called up Boeing to find out what it would cost to lease an airplane. He made a great deal with them that if it didn’t work out he could return the airplane. Else if it did work out, he’d be a great customer for them. I’m assuming he made a similar call to Airbus and took the best deal. He then probably found out what it cost to lease space in the various airports he would need to use. They were probably happy with more business. And then, I’m guessing, he hired some pilots, some ground crew, and put an ad in the paper advertising his new air routes and he was in business.

Virgin Air is successful (I just flew it from NY to LA a few weeks ago) and has since spun off Virgin Galactic. So this scruffy kid who started a record label is now sending rocketships into space.

Note the important thing: the day he came up with the idea he also called Boeing and got a plane from them. So he took the next step. For me, I would’ve convinced myself that the “next step” in starting an airline was too big for me. And then it would’ve been too big for me. This is not quite the same as “the secret” — the idea that our thoughts can create our reality but…they do. If you think you can do something, if you have confidence, if you have creativity (developed by building up your idea muscle discussed in many other posts here), the big ideas become smaller and smaller. Until there is no idea too big. Nothing you can’t at least attempt.

On a much smaller scale I can state a few examples of my own but I’ll stick with one. I had an idea to create a financial news site that didn’t have any news but was just a site made up of various methods to come up with investment ideas. In particular, by piggybacking the investment ideas of the greatest investors. I spec-ed out the site the morning I had the idea, I put the spec on elance.com, several developers contacted me with prices, and I hired one of them. Within a few weeks, version 1.0 of the site was released, stockpickr.com. 7 months later and millions of unique users later, I sold the profitable company to thestreet.com.

So the question is not necessarily, “when is an idea too big” it’s: “how do I make all ideas smaller and achievable”. You do this by developing the idea muscle:

A) Every day, read/skim, chapters from books on at least four different topics. For myself this morning I read from a biography of Mick Jagger, I read a chapter from Regenesis, a book on advances in genetic engineering, a topic I know nothing about. I read a chapter in Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. Her recent book, Wild is an Oprah pick and was also excellent. I read a chapter from Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell, and I, to waste time, I played a game of chess online.

B) Write down ten ideas. About anything. It doesn’t matter if they are business ideas, book ideas, ideas for surprising your spouse in bed, ideas for what you should do if you are arrested for shoplifting, ideas for how to make a better tennis racquet, anything you want. The key is that it has to be ten or more.

You want your brain to sweat.

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HOW TO DEAL WITH BURNOUT?

Lemuel Goltiao ?@suburbandude: Any advice for someone who’s experiencing burnout?

Answer:

I have to confess something. I am feeling a little bit of burnout. I’ve been doing this blog for a little more than two years. I probably write, on average, 3000 words a day seven days a week. If I am not done with my 3000 words by 9am I start to feel a little bit tense (it doesn’t happen often but it happens). I’ve published 464 posts. Five I’ve had to delete for various reasons after I published them. So 459 posts are published averaging about 2000 words each. 136 posts are in my Drafts folder because I didn’t think they were good enough to publish.

My entire Daily Practice revolves around this blog. I stay healthy so I have the energy and drive to wake up early and work on the blog. I started the blog shortly after I got married and began eliminating various negative relationships in my life. That elimination worked magic in my productivity. The blog itself is usually the way I come up with the ideas to exercise my idea muscle. I also read every day to either help with the ideas or to get inspiration from different writers I enjoy. And for me, this blog is about how to combine the spiritual with the secular, the soul with success. Every aspect of the daily practice I have outlined comes full force in how I do this blog.

And most of the time, I love doing it. I feel creative. I’ve made lots of friends through this blog. It’s been such a pleasure.

But I know myself. Two years is sort of my time limit on anything. I’m not the sort of person who spends 50 years doing something (more on Mick Jagger in a future post). I was at HBO for 2 years before I started my first company, Reset. Two years after that, I sold the company. Stockpickr from beginning to end was about two years. I traded for hedge funds about two years. I only stayed in graduate school about two years before I was so burnt out they threw me out.

Does this mean I should stop doing the blog? No, of course not. But the feelings of burnout are natural. They are natural for me. They are natural for you. It’s the body’s way of saying, “Whoops! Time is up. You need to make a change.” Something has to happen. If you stay doing what you are doing, you will regress. If I stick with this exact routine, quality will go down. I know it. So something has to change.

I don’t know what it is. You don’t know what you have to change either. That’s why we are experiencing burnout.

When you say “burnout” it really means you have two problems. One is that you have high expectations of yourself to achieve something. Two is that you did not meet those expectations so now you are unhappy. So the answer is, stop being so hard on yourself. Why the high expectations? Did someone teach you that life would be bad unless you always set yourself up for such high expectations that you were bound to be ultimately disappointed?

Don’t be upset at yourself for experiencing burnout. Be thankful.

If a child didn’t have nerves in his fingers then he wouldn’t know that the barbecue was hot. A child is thankful for those nerve cells. Burnout is your mind touching a hot stove and the mind’s nerve cells are reacting. Hence: “Burn” out. Pull your hand a way. Stay healthy. Continue the Daily Practice. Don’t be afraid of change. Change doesn’t mean loss. It doesn’t have to mean stepping back. It just means “change”.

And then wait. Take walks. Stay away from the computer as much as possible. Eat well. Change your routine. Your routine is designed (correctly) to make sure the unconscious stays out of your process. You didn’t need it. Now you do. So by mixing up your routine, you let your unconscious come in and tell you what it thinks you need to be doing now.

If you respect the burnout, trust that you are not in total control of your universe, be grateful that you live in a world that allows for change and continue all aspects of your daily practice (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual health), then only good things will happen. They might be small changes. They might be rejuvenated energy and creativity. They might be 180 degree changes. You and I just don’t know what they are yet. Surrender to it.

COLLEGE AND YOUR DAUGHTERS

Matt Henterly ?@matthenterly: Because of your view on college, are you preparing your daughters for “post high-school” life? Steering them in any direction?

Answer:

So I rant a little bit in this video about why kids should not go to college and why my kids shouldn’t go. Then my daughter Mollie points out something I hadn’t thought of. And she does it more articulately than me. As she explained to me afterwards, she’s been practicing tongue twisters so she can be more articulate. I, unfortunately, always speak as if I’m totally drunk.

Then, for the sake of my kids, I wrote a book, 40 Alternatives to College, that they refuse to read but maybe they will later. The other day, my kids and I were in a restaurant where we knew the owner. He said, “I bet you kids are excited about college, right?” And then he remembered, “Oh wait, your dad doesn’t want you to go to college.” And fortunately he said, “you two girls are very lucky to have a guy who will support other decisions you might make.” But I don’t think they were listening to him.

My gut is this: they will put up a fight. All of their friends will want to go to college. But at some point they will read my posts and my book on the topic and develop a little common sense of their own. The alternatives I offer are ALL cheaper than college and all more valuable as life experience. They are ages 13 and 10 so we’re already having these discussions. I will help them in any other choice they can possibly have EXCEPT college.

What if they really want to go? one might ask. At some point we all grow up and become adults. If they really want to go, then I don’t prevent adults from doing what they want to do. But my hope is that at some point they see the prison-like bars that society has imposed — the myth that college is a prelude to a good job, a good life, good luck for future generations, etc. The things you remember and learn are not from textbooks but are taught by the things you are passionate about, that then become metaphors for everything in life so that life itself becomes your university. And from that university alone, you get to conquer the universe.

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One time I wanted to sell my company to HBO. The CFO was looking at the numbers. They were willing to buy it for a tiny amount but it was an amount that would’ve taken me about one billion years to save because that’s just the way I roll. I figured I would quit after a decent amount of time and spend a year doing nothing but writing a novel.

They said no.

All I had been thinking about for months was whether or not they would buy the company. And it took only one or two decision makers to say no. To ruin my life, I thought then.

One time I had an idea for a TV show for HBO. I wired up a restaurant with video and audio. A good friend of mine who was very pretty and funny put an ad in the Village Voice looking for a blind date. She would then go on the dates being fully aware they were being videotaped but the guy wouldn’t know. We did two dates. On the first one the guy told her he wasn’t sure if he was gay or straight and was debating the pros and cons of both right in the middle of the date. On the second date the guy received a phone call. From his wife. He then refused to sign the release form unless my friend would sleep with him. Which she didn’t (I assume).

As they say, it was good TV.

I showed it to HBO Independent Productions. They “Loved it!!” I had all sorts of fantasies about how I was going to spend the money. I was definitely living in the future. I was going to be a big TV guy. BIG.

And then suddenly I couldn’t get in touch with them. The guy in charge, Dave B., wouldn’t return my calls. He was always in a meeting. He would “call me right back”. I couldn’t get in touch with him. Not knowing this meant “no”, I called him 15 times a day until finally he confessed, “you know, you have another project going with [he named another division within HBO] so they got upset at me for looking at this project. So I can’t touch it.”

I eventually had lunch with the head of the other division. She said, “your idea seems a bit mean to me.” Her division had just aired “Hookers at Hunts Point” and other family-oriented features so I sort of understood.

Another time I started another company. I wanted Google to buy it. I mean, I really wanted Google to buy it. Google was like some sort of Internet Disneyworld to me. People were riding around in skateboards (technically I signed a contract saying I couldn’t say what I saw in the building. They accidentally had me sign the wrong document so I actually had to GO BACK a day later and sign the right one. But, fuck it, everyone was skateboarding in there while eating fusion lasagna). Everyone was smiling. Everyone was SMART. We all sat around this big conference table and when I say “we all sat around” half of us were in NYC and the other half was web-exed or whatever in from SF. Everyone asked smart questions. I felt like I was in graduate school again.

That night I woke up in the middle of the night sweating. I literally felt like I wanted to call Google at 2 in the morning and asked her if she still loved me. And then say, “but are you SURE you love me?” I wanted them to love me. I wanted to buy a skateboard. I wanted to say “Google bought my company”. I wanted to sexually harass the other employees there. I couldn’t help myself. I was in Google Fever.

They said “no”.

I’m permanently sick of it!

I got sick of one person, or one company, or one decision-maker having any power over me. It’s an internal choice, of course, but also an external one. You can set up your entire life to be diversified in every way so a “no” turns from shit to fertilizer.

Everyone knows this in investing. One time, with my last dollars left, I bought a bazillion shares of Sonus Networks only to watch it go from $7 to 18 cents before it rebounded (long after I sold it for a mega-loss). I got crushed and left on the floor. My 3 year old wanted to play with me. There was zero chance I was getting up off that floor to take her to the park. She had to bounce a ball up and down right next to me. It was annoying me so I picked her up and put her on the pool table so she could’t get off until someone came and got her.

The only way to survive, to get off the floor, to build, to have ideas, to create businesses, to have flourishing relationships, is with diversification. And with the greatest invention since the wheel, the Internet, it’s easier to do it now than ever before.

9 Ways To Diversify Your Life

Start more than one business. Start many businesses. Or jobs. Or careers. Start them at the same time. Eventually one will stand out as the one flourishing. I’m watching this happen to a good friend of mine right now. He has his hand in ten different businesses. He also has at least one fulltime job. One is bursting through and he’s able to make his decision as to where to go – the one that will make him fabulously wealthy while having fun.

Well, what if you have a job? Get two jobs. Apply for more jobs. Always figure out what your value is on the job marketplace. I just went on the board of a temp-staffing company called “Corporate Resource Services”. I don’t know what I can legally say about it (it’s a public company). All I can say is: it fits my idea that the 21st century is moving towards an “employee-less economy” because of all the regulatory and economic uncertainty. Companies are not hiring permanent employees. So you’re going to need to diversify your sources of income starting right now.

Diversify the way you meet people. We are no longer limited to just our coworkers and neighbors. Life is global. We can meet people through the Internet, through travel, through classes on every topic possible. Pick the people who will be the most positive in your life. People who you can look up to, who can look up to you. Eliminate everyone else. Not in a cold or cruel way. But in a way that makes sure you put the importance back on yourself. Make sure you are your own center of gravity. Anyone whose gravitational pull becomes too great needs to be put on “Halley’s Comet” status – once every 76 years and that’s it.

Diversify ideas. Many people ask me, “when I’m working on my list of ten ideas for the day so as to build the idea muscle, should they all be business ideas, or ideas around one sector?” No! Write ideas about anything you can. Then mate them. Here’s an exercise right now. Make two columns. At the top of each column, write an interest. Then write down five ideas for each that has to do with each idea. Now cross-fertilize them. Come up with many ideas combining the two columns as possible. You will never be the best in the world at anything (unless you are, then ignore this), but you can be good at many things. The beauty of that is that you then become the best in the world at the intersection of all these things. It’s at that intersection that you can completely direct traffic and change the world.

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Q: Should I be worried about $16 trillion as a 23 y.o.? Will it ever be paid back?

Answer: My poor baby. You are 23 years old and yet you are carrying a 16 trillion dollar weight on your shoulders. How come? Who has scared you? What are you afraid will happen?

The world has existed for 3 billion years. Debt has never destroyed the world. People came out of the caves. They made tools. Civilizations fell and started and fell and started. In the 1930s we had the dustbowl of the midwest, 22% unemployment, no jobs for anyone, and the rise of the most terrible tyrants in history in Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union (and many would also say the US). And we survived and flourished. The 1950s and 1960s (and the 1980s and 1990s and even the 00s) became the periods of greatest innovation, creativity, and success in every way. Everyone has a TV, the price per unit of light in your house is 1/1000 what it used to be, everyone in the US knows how to read, and almost every family has a car in their driveway. What a miracle. There were 10,000 nuclear warheads aimed at your house for most of your life growing up. Did any of them hit?

So why are you worried about 16 trillion in debt? Two or three things can happen:

A) The country continues to grow and innovate like it always does and that creates more income and wealth for people and eventually we pay down that debt or do what we have ALWAYS done, which is to rollover the debt.

B) The country suffers through inflation (as it has since 1913 when a dollar then is worth 3 cents today) and since all of our debt is denominated in dollars we use those inflated dollars to pay down the debt. I’m not saying that is good or bad. But that’s how we’ve always paid our debts in the past and I don’t see what is different now.

Worry how you can be in the “1%”. Not the one percent in wealth. But the one percent in health.

• Physically, if you simply don’t drink, eat well, sleep well, and do minimal exercise, you will be a 1%-er
• Emotionally, if you simply stop engaging as much with the people who bring you down and spend more time seeking out and spending time with the people who inspire you and bring you up, you will be 1%-er
• Mentally, if you read every day and come up with ideas every day so eventually your brain is a living idea machine (give it six months only) , then you will be a 1%ER
• Spiritually, if you spend time each day counting out loud the things you are grateful for. If you acknowledge that many things are out of your control. If you say, “there’s someone out there who is worried about that 16 trillion so I’m going to worry about my insides”, then you will be a 1%ER

When you are a 1%ER the problems of the world fade away as dots or pixes in a vast landscape of art and creativity. You get to now paint on this great landscape and not be overwhelemed by it. You are 23 and have 80 years in front of you. The weight of the world will shift off your shoulders and gradually you will be light and free and ready to explore.

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A friend of mine left his corporate job yesterday after 23 years of being trapped in the Matrix. I hate it because I’m envious of that moment. The day I left a corporate job to be on my own for the first time. Suddenly you go from managing a cubicle from the hours of 9 to 5 to having to manage ALL OF TIME AND SPACE. The holograph screens that altered the universe around you peel away to show you what the real world looks like. The extra colors and intensity that had been hidden from you behind tinted-black glass windows and fluorescent lights.

I wish I had done it differently. I wish I had known what I know now.

I was working at HBO. I had a cubicle on the 6th Floor of 1100 Sixth Avenue. My boss was down the hall. His boss was in the room next to his. His boss was in the room next to that. And the real boss (the top guy’s secretary) was in front of all of their offices. I had a view of the McDonalds at Sixth Avenue which is now the big Bank of America building.

Work in the corporate world is like a hazy drug dream to me now. You could get in at 10am. Everyone took breaks downstairs to smoke. I didn’t smoke so I took licorice with me. Then at noon, LUNCH! And then after lunch, chess in Bryant Park. Then my boss left to catch his train at 4:15. So I would leave at 4:16. Before I had my own business on the side I’d take the subway to Astoria and go to Steinway Billiards. Everyone there was Greek. We’d all sit and play backgammon and chess and drink thick Greek coffee until about two in the morning. Sometimes my friends from HBO would come with me and it would be like a party every night. And I loved all the girls in the place but not a single one ever talked to me or looked at me no matter how many two dollar bills I tipped with.

There were goals and deadlines at work. Except for the summer. There was never anything to do in the summer. And all other times the deadlines were mild. Like if you missed one then it just meant a meeting was rescheduled. Nobody would get fired. The saying was, “if you want to get fired you have to stand on Albie’s desk and pee on him.” That was the boss’s boss’s boss. As part of my job I got to go to San Francisco for the first time, Los Angeles, and sunny Orlando (to make the website for the series “From the Earth to the Moon” which was shot right in Disneyworld.)

And then I quit.

I had to. I was running a business on the side. We had clients, some of whom were even competitors to HBO. We had employees. I had payroll to meet. And I felt myself stagnating at my job. I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I stopped enjoying the meager things I was doing. And I thought I could handle the psychology of being on my own. What could be different, I thought. I wanted to spread my wings even though I had no idea how to fly.

I cried twice the first day on my own.

First time, at lunch with one of my partners, Randy. It suddenly hit me that I didn’t have a multi billion media empire as my backstop. I was on my own. I felt alone. Which is another way of saying, if I fucked up I had nobody to blame. Like we all did in corporate America. So over pizza I cried. “Are you ok?” Randy said. Poking at my weakness. “Yeah,” I said.

Then later at dinner with all my ex-employees and friends at HBO. I ordered pasta AND fries. Everyone started to laugh at what I had ordered and I wasn’t sure why. That made me cry again but nobody noticed. I felt like a four year old in a room filled with laughing adults. I had no idea what I was or what I was supposed to be.

I had been anchored close to shore with Time Warner as the dock. Now I was in deep waters. Too deep to anchor. I had to fish now. I had to find food. I had to get water. I had to feed a lot of people. I had to kill or be killed. I learned a lot in the next few months:

A) It was always my fault when things went wrong. If you blame others, you go out of business. Take responsibility for your problems and fix them or move on.

B) I had to communicate to people. If you hide from customers, they will fire you. If you hide from employees they lose respect for you. If you hide from investors, they sue you.

C) I had to help employees feel good about their jobs. I had to help customers feel their jobs were about to get a lot easier because now I was in their lives. I had to learn to reward people. I wanted everyone around me to feel good about it. To spread the word that I was someone to work with, to be around.

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On January 30, 1969 the Beatles hated each other, and they were sick of working on their album, “Let It Be” inside of their cramped studios. On a whim, they took all their equipment and moved it five floors up to the roof, in the middle of winter. Then they performed for about a half hour. They had last performed lived over two years earlier. It was their last “concert” together ever. They broke up shortly afterwards and never performed together again.

I’m pretty mediocre. I’m ashamed to admit it. I’m not even being sarcastic or self-deprecating. I’ve never done anything that stands out as, “whoah! This guy made it into outerspace! Or…this guy has a best selling novel! Or…if only Google had thought of this!” I’ve had some successes and some failures (well-documented here) but never reached any of the goals I had initially set. Always slipped off along the way, off the yellow brick road, into the wilderness.

I’ve started a bunch of companies. Sold some. Failed at most. I’ve invested in a bunch of startups. Sold some. Failed at some, and the jury is still sequestered on a few others. I’ve written some books, most of which I no longer like (except the ones you get when you sign up for my newsletter on the right). I can tell you overall, though, everything I have done has been distinguished by its mediocrity, its lack of a grand vision, and any success I’ve had can be just as much put in the luck basket as the effort basket.

That said, all people should be so lucky. We can’t all be grand visionaries. We can’t all be Picassos. We want to make our business, make our art, sell it, make some money, raise a family, and try to be happy. My feeling, based on my own experience, is that aiming for grandiosity is the fastest route to failure. For every Mark Zuckerberg there are 1000 Jack Zuckermans. Who is Jack Zuckerman? I have no idea. That’s my point. If you are Jack Zuckerman and are reading this, I apologize. You aimed for the stars and missed. Your re-entry into the atmosphere involved a broken heat shield and you burned to a crisp by the time you hit the ocean. Now we have no idea who you are.

If you want to get rich, sell your company, have time for your hobbies, raise a halfway decent family (with mediocre children, etc), and enjoy the sunset with your wife on occasion, here are some of my highly effective recommendations.

Procrastination – In between the time I wrote the last sentence and the time I wrote this one I played (and lost) a game of chess. My king and my queen got forked by a knight. But hey, that happens. Fork me once, shame on me. Etc.

Procrastination is your body telling you you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing. When you procrastinate as an entrepreneur it could mean that you need a bit more time to think about what you are pitching a client. It could also mean you are doing work that is not your forte and that you are better off delegating. I find that many entrepreneurs are trying to do everything when it would be cheaper and more time-efficient to delegate, even if there are monetary costs associated with that. In my first business, it was like a lightbulb went off in my head the first time I delegated a programming job to someone other than me. At that time, I went out on a date. Which was infinitely better than me sweating all night on some stupid programming bug (thank you, Chet, for solving that issue).

Try to figure out why you are procrastinating. Maybe you need to brainstorm more to improve an idea. Maybe the idea is no good as is. Maybe you need to delegate. Maybe you need to learn more. Maybe you don’t enjoy what you are doing. Maybe you don’t like the client whose project you were just working on. Maybe you need to take a break. There’s only so many seconds in a row you can think about something before you need to take time off and rejuvenate the creative muscles. This is not for everyone. Great people can storm right through. Steve Jobs never needed to take a break. But I do.

Procrastination could also be a strong sign that you are a perfectionist. That you are filled with shame issues. This will block you from building and selling your business. Examine your procrastination from every side. It’s your body trying to tell you something. Listen to it.

[See also, "5 Great Things About Procrastination"]

Zero-tasking – there’s a common myth that great people can multitask efficiently. This might be true but I can’t do it. I have statistical proof. I have a serious addiction. If you ever talk on the phone with me there’s almost 100% chance I am simultaneously playing chess online. The phone rings and one hand reaches for the phone and the other hand reaches for the computer to initiate a one minute game. Chess rankings are based on a statistically generated rating system. So I can compare easily how well I do when I’m the phone compared with when I’m not on the phone. There is a three standard deviation difference. Imagine if I were talking on the phone and driving. Or responding to emails. It’s the same thing I’m assuming: phone calls cause a three standard deviation subtraction in intelligence. And that’s the basic multi-tasking we all do at some point or other.

So great people can multitask but since, by definition, most of us are not great (99% of us are not in the top 1%), its much better to single-task. Just do one thing at a time. When you wash your hands, hear the sound of the water, feel the water on your hands, scrub every part. Be clean. Focus on what you are doing.

Often, the successful mediocre entrepreneur should strive for excellence in ZERO-tasking. Do nothing. We always feel like we have to be “doing something” or we (or, I should say “I”) feel ashamed. Sometimes it’s better to just be quiet, to not think of anything at all.

Out of silence comes the greatest creativity.

Not when we are rushing and panicking.

[See also, "Multi-tasking will Kill You"]

Failure: As far as I can tell, Larry Page has never failed. He went straight from graduate school to billions. Ditto for Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and a few others. But again, by definition, most of us are pretty mediocre. We can strive for greatness but we will never hit it. So it means we will often fail. Not ALWAYS fail. But often.

My last 16 out of 17 business attempts were failures. I made so many mistakes in my first successful business I’m almost embarassed to recount them. I remember one time I was trying to pitch Tupac’s mom that I should do the website for her dead son. I had a “CD” (what’s that?) of all my work. I went to Tupac’s manager’s office and he said, “ok, show me what you got”. The only problem was: I had never used a Windows-based machine. Only Macs and Unix machines. So I honestly had no idea how to put my CD into the computer and then view its contents. And I had gone to graduate school in computer science. He said, “you have got to be kidding me”.

It was a $90,000 gig. It would’ve met my payroll for at least two months. It was a done deal until I walked into his office. I left his office crying while he was laughing. When I came back to my office everyone asked, “How did the meeting go?” I said, “I think it went pretty well.” And then I went home and cried some more. I roll that way.

Then I bought a Windows-based PC for myself and learned how to use it. I don’t think I ever bought a Mac again actually. It’s possible to learn from successes. But it’s much easier to learn from failures. Ultimately, life is a sentence of failures, punctuated only by the briefest of successes. So the mediocre entrepreneur learns two things from failure: First he learns directly how to overcome that particular failure. He’s highly motivated to not repeat the same mistakes. Second, he learns how to deal with the psychology of failure. Mediocre entrepreneurs fail A LOT. So they get this incredible skill of getting really good at dealing with failure. This translates to monetary success.

The mediocre entrepreneur understands that persistence is not the self-help cliche “Keep going until you hit the finish line!”. The key slogan is, “Keep failing until you accidentally no longer fail.” That’s persistence.

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The Best of James Altucher

I lied to my kids this weekend. I told them I had a fun time with them when really I didn’t. They were brats. I lied to my parents all the time when I was a kid. I lied to clients, colleagues, bosses, employees.

Sometimes people write about me and I wish I could kill them. Sometimes I want someone to return my call and when they finally return my call ten days later I say, “oh, it was no problem. I understand.” Someone wrote me the other day and said, “James, you are a crook.” I lied to myself that it didn’t bother me. I used to lie to people all the time when I was separated from my wife. People said, “all ok?” and I was like, “Couldn’t be better.” When I had to sell my first house because I was going to lose it I lied to everyone and said I was moving someplace better. I was ashamed.

I lied for years telling people I hadn’t lost all my money when I did. I was ashamed I would lose opportunities if everyone didn’t think I was super successful.

I lied to a judge when I said I skidded uncontrollably on water on the ground when I went straight through a stop sign without stopping, hitting a station wagon in the process and breaking the legs of the 70 year old man driving it. It was a clear day.

I lied to myself this morning when I said I wasn’t angry at someone who had written a crappy article about me this weekend.

I’m sick of it.

It’s hard to stop lying. I’m not a believer at all in so-called “radical honesty” where, at an extreme, you might tell some random girl you want to have sex with her even if it involves hurting everyone around you. At some point you need a filter between the brain and the mouth. You won’t find happiness inside the vomit machine your mouth turns into.

But you can slow the lies. Every day you can cut a lie out. You can be a little more open. A little more free. Let me tell you something: when you start to limit the lies you develop super-powers and everyone around you sees it. They either run from you in fear because now you can see right through them, or they gather around you and throw opportunities at you because your superpowers will now help them.

It’s the latter you want to aspire to. Be a superhero.

Here are the types of lies we often succumb to and think it’s harmless:

An exaggeration: saying “my house is 5000 square feet” on an ad to sell your house when it might actually be 4800 square feet. Believe me, they are going to measure anyway.

A white lie: Saying “Santa Claus exists” or “that dress” is pretty” or “this book is good” because you don’t want to hurt someone. This doesn’t mean to say “you look ugly” but better to say “you should wear the red dress that’s a little tighter around the waist.” Offer up a real, thoughtful opinion, not just a blurted out retch straight from your brain.

Fraud: Madoff did this to an extreme. But I see this on a daily level. More than 50% of hedge funds are frauds in my opinion. Most economic analysis is fraudulent. Every day politicians engage in shades of fraud but they are so used to it they think its normal behavior. It’s what politicians do. Pick any elected official and I can probably give you ten ways they engage in fraudulent behavior. One time I went with a friend of mine to visit a financial advisor. She just wanted my second opinion . I didn’t say anything the entire meeting but took notes. I found at least ten cases where he directly lied to her.

Why do people engage in fraud? It starts with….

Shame: first you lie about how much you make because you are ashamed to tell the truth. Or you lie about past relationships because if you say you cheated and hung out with hookers every day you are afraid people won’t like you. You lack self-esteem and only the bricks carefully carved out of shame will protect you in your fortress that gets smaller and smaller.

A lie to ourselves: you might say, I’m going to learn Spanish this year even though it was totally unrealistic. You might say, I’m not an angry person even though you have grudges against everyone around you. Here’s a hint: if most of the people around you are angry at you, then chances are you are an angry person. Projection is an easy way we can lie to ourselves. We give the people around us the attributes we have. We lie to ourselves by blaming them when it’s our fault we have these attributes.

—–>Exercise: make a list of all the people around you and what you think of them. Then erase their names. Chances are what’s left are the attributes that perfectly describe you.

Fear: When I got a divorce I had it great. To everyone who I hadn’t responded to in months I said, “oh, I was going through too much in my divorce. I couldn’t get back to you.” The reality was I didn’t really want to talk to those people. Or maybe I was just irresponsible. But I was afraid of what they would think of me if I just told them the truth.

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The Best of James Altucher

I feel bad. I feel like a sucker. Like one by one I fell for every lie. I talk about “don’t do this”, “don’t do that”, and yet I fell for all of them. I’ve been in everything from a cult to the cult of homeownership, the cult of college, the cult of sex, the cult of drugs, every cult imaginable, the cult of corporate safety, the cult of money. Why couldn’t I just be smart from the beginning? Why does it take stupidity to become smart? Or maybe I’m still stupid. Who knows?

Let’s do one of those psychology tests where I ask you something and you say the first word that comes to mind. Here’s the usual responses I get after years of doing this:

Me: Home ownership. Other: “Roots” Me: College: Other: “Good job” Me: Good war. Other: “World War II” Me: Success. Other: “Fame and money” Me: Iran. Other: “They want to kill all the jews”. Me: Voting. Other: “Doing something for your country”.

Home ownership – think about why you want to own a home. Just really take a step back and forget about all your biases. You think “renting is flushing money down the toilet”. You might think “home ownership is ‘roots’ for your family”. Why do you think these things? Isn’t it suspicious to you that everyone else says the same slogans? That I just wrote down the exact things that are you in your head when you try to justify buying a home?

Does it make sense at all that there is a trillion dollar industry (over 20 trillion to be exact when you add in mortgages plus the part of the economy that is dependent on home building) that wants you to own a home? Banks, the government, home builders, furniture makers, real estate agents, etc are all the priests and ministers of that religion. Don’t you think a small part of that 20 trillion goes into hammering again and again the marketing message that you need to own a home?

Just do the basic math on home ownership. It does not work. It will NEVER work. Maybe if home prices go down another 80% but that’s it.

But this isn’t about home ownership. I’ve bought and sold two homes. And I lost money on both. So maybe I’m just bitter. Who knows.

This is about hypnosis. Why we believe, at the bottom of our hearts, the things that are told to us that have such obvious trillion dollar agendas.

Like college. Here is what everyone says: “You won’t get a good job if you don’t go to college”. I’ve proved countless times how this is a lie. Yes, you won’t get a 90 hour a week job at Goldman Sachs if you don’t go to college. And yes, there is no chance in hell you can be a proctologist (although I have known people to start a private practice in this without any degree at all) if you don’t have a medical degree. Ok, you win. On those jobs.

But don’t you think this trillion dollar industry (where costs have gone up ten times faster than inflation, three times faster than the scam healthcare industry) might have an agenda when they put out these “statistical” studies.

What else happens in college? Well, one in four women are raped in college. But because college campuses are one of the few places in the country (Indian reservations maybe being the only other) that provide their own security, you never hear about this. Campus security is not there to protect you. It’s there to hide things from you.

So you can get a job at Goldman Sachs, but you’re more likely to be raped. Or, I guess, be the raper. You choose.

But “don’t you learn how to think” in college? I don’t know, do you? Did you really learn how to think there? Does it really cost $200,000 to think? And what is so great about thinking. Since 1950, when college started becoming almost a pre-requirement for success, incidence of depression has gone up 50 times. How come colleges don’t report on this statistic?

Again, ask yourself where you got these slogans. Even my ten year old repeats the slogans. They are marketing slogans created by, again, a trillion dollar industry.

Insurance. “Everyone must be insured”. “Insurance companies can’t deny you because of pre-existing conditions.” Everyone says this. Again, why does everyone say the exact same thing. Again, this is a trillion dollar industry. They are telling you what to think.

Let’s think about this for a second. Let’s say you have a pre-existing condition. Do you really think they are going to charge you the same amount that someone without a pre-existing condition is charged? Of course not. Your prices are going to go up. A lot! And everyone’s prices are going to go up. Do you think the insurance companies are going to lose money? Of course not. And if you don’t sign up, you have to now pay a fine (a “tax”) to the government. So who wins in this? Do you win? And then the other side tries to go to the other extreme. “Death panels”. Oh my god! Someone’s going to decide who lives or dies?

Of course not. The other side of a lie is not the truth. It”s just another lie.

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The Best of James Altucher

My dad hit
me when I got bad grades. Particularly when I was young and got
a bad grade in “Conduct”. Happiness was an “A”.
Even better: an “A+”. Sadness was an “F”. It
was almost like a joke. Like the only way to get an “F”
is if you tried to screw up almost as much as you tried to get an
“A”.

But in twelve
years of basic schooling I can’t’ remember anyone asking
where the “E” was. It goes A, B, C, D (which was really
horrible to get a D. It means you were trying somewhat (so as to
avoid the “F”) but you were just plain stupid and got
a D. Not even a C.) and then, the magic “F”. Which was
more than just a letter but a one-letter acronym. None of the other
letters stood for anything. They were just letters. They could’ve
been replaced by numbers (Claudia tells me in Argentina they were
graded by numbers from one to ten. No letters). It’s not like
“A” stood for Amazing. Or “B” Boring. “C”
Crazy. “D” Dumb. You could’ve just replaced them
by 1, 2, 3, 4. Or a “1+”. But F was irreplaceable.

“F”
stood for “Failure”. [Note: except when I was really little.
There was "O" for outstanding. "S" for Satisfactory.
And "N" for needs improvement. I got an N for conduct
and it's the first time I remember my dad hitting me after the teacher
told him I was always calling her old, which she was and there is
no shame of that but I only realize that now that I am as old as
she was.]

So why no “E”.
I think teachers got together 5000 years ago. Maybe 10,000 years
ago and came up with the horrifying conclusion: Some students might
think “E” stood for Effort. As in, “at least I didn’t
get an ‘F’. I got an ‘E’ which means I put in
an effort.” And doesn’t that go along all too easily with
the lie teachers say, “I’m not going to judge you on your
grade, I’m going to judge you on the effort you put into this
class.”

Did they ever
really judge you on that? And if they did, do you really think they
would want you to get an “E” on a test and then have to
put up with your arguing at the end of a semester when you would
say, “See! I put in the effort! I got an “E” on everything
and you said that would be how you would judge me.”

“This
is awful”, said a teacher at that first convention of the union
of the national teachers club. “We have to take the ‘E’
out of the alphabet.”

“But,”
said Mr. Maroon. “We spend years teaching them that song: A,
B, C, D, E, F, G… to the tune of twinkle twinkle little star.
And now we have to tell them there is no E?”

“There
is an E! Just not in grades. Why is this such a difficult thing
to understand? If we put an ‘E’ in there then our schools
will NEVER get funding. All our schools depend on our students,
smart or stupid, doing well on those standardized tests where they
fill in the multiple choice circles and cyborgs read them and grade
them and the better they do, the more funding we get. If we put
an ‘E’ into the system the students might clog up the
pipes with Effort instead of Amazing. They might even think “E”
is for Exceed because at least it beats Failure! WE CANNOT HAVE
AN ‘E’!”

I doubt that
conversation really happened. They really backed themselves into
a corner. They thought by using letters instead of numbers that
would fool kids into some state of confusion where they really didn’t
know how they did. Like, “is a B good or bad?” But everyone
knows where they stand when it comes to 1 through 10.

But now they
were stuck with the “E”. Until they decided to strike
it from the alphabet. But only some of the time. Except for that
one time an entire novel was written without using the letter “e”.
That guy knew what he was doing. The insidious removal of the most
common letter in the English language.

Because that’s
what English is about. It’s not “Anglo”. It’s
not quite “Saxon”. It’s not “Latin”. But
its a weird mixture of all three, concocted like a test tube baby
in some scientist’s laboratory when the aliens landed and impregnated
our ancient Mothers with the sperm from their dying planets (since
they came from a Federation of planets surrounding a supernova,
or perhaps supernovae (there’s that “E” again) ).
So we can keep on experimenting and investing and twisting and testing.
Now “google” is a verb, a noun, a business, the beginnings
of an artificially intelligent singularity, a map, an email, a social
network, and a photo album with the flowers as bookmarks. We don’t
need those anymore thanks to Google. No memories are special enough
to mark them with a flower, thanks to the newest word in the dictionary.

Ugh, trying
to unravel the Rubik’s Cube-like scam of lower education is
a full-time job. Once you get a side with all one color you realize
you’ve hopelessly prevented yourself from getting the other
side to be one color.

I have not
read much about home schooling or unschooling so I am no expert.
But I’ve thought about it. And this is how I would do it
if my kids were to let me unschool them.

A) First,
(and again, this is without reading about it at all so I, at best,
uneducated on the topic). I prefer the word “unschooling”
to “home schooling”. I assume home schooling means I replace
the teacher, buy them science textbooks, math, Canterbury Tales,
etc. I don’t want to do that. That sounds boring to me and
I assume to them as well. Unschooling sounds more like it –
i.e. just completely no education at all.

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July
21, 2012

The
Best of James Altucher

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.

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.

Vaultus.
Started a company that would help Fortune 100 companies create
“wireless websites”. Raised $100 million, including $2
million from Palestinian hero Yasser Arafat. Lost all the money.
BUT, Vaultus got acquired by Antenna Software. I was kicked out
as CEO and thrown off the board. Tried to use 9/11 as an excuse
but board’s response was: “we were all affected by 9/11”.
Learned that I am too shy as CEO. Would call secretary before arriving
at office to make sure nobody was in the hallway between the elevator
and my office so I could run in and lock door.

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July
13, 2012

The
Best of James Altucher

Admit it: you
were jealous of Bernie Madoff. For a split second. That night in
December, 2008 when you first heard the news, interrupting the ongoing
panic of every bank going out of business, every job disappearing,
every ATM machine running out of cash, the organic fruit at the
farmer’s market skyrocketing to $200 an apple. For a brief
moment, you heard that news and you thought, “He stole $65
billion. Man, I would’ve had cosmetic surgery on my face and
then moved to Brazil with that kind of money.”

And then the
truth came out. The news that the money was never there in the first
place. The suicides. The owner of the Mets managed to get his money
back just in time. A woman from Minnesota called me, crying, saying
“why is it they keep going on about the poor jews who lost
their money. I’m a Christian and I lost my last $800,000.”
It became a bit more real then. Madoff in jail. His wife was left
with a measly million or two and finally the horror of their son
killing himself.

But, for a
moment, there was: what would I do with $65 billion?

And then reality:
the only way to make money in this world is to lie and steal.

I get that
question a lot (i.e. more than twice in the past few weeks) in my
Twitter Q&A sessions: why is it that you have to be dishonest
to succeed in this world? And people don’t believe me when
I say that’s not true. They say back, “that’s not
been my experience.”

Not: do you
have to be dishonest to succeed? Nobody asks that. People seem to
know the answer already and they want to know, structurally, why
is this truth?

Capitalism
is still suffering from the mortal blow struck it in 2008. Everyone
was a crook. And Madoff was just the tip of the iceberg. Mubarak’s
family ran away with $200 billion by the time he was kicked out
of Egypt. Every day I get in my inbox news of another Ponzi scheme.
Yesterday it was a $4.9 million dollar hedge fund down in some swamp
country in Florida.

Why? People
want to know. People maybe want some justification. Maybe they are
really asking: ok, I’ve been avoiding it until now but should
I take the plunge and start being dishonest in order to make money?
And then maybe the next question: can you give a “top 10”
for how to be dishonest and make money?

The problem
is this: they are completely wrong. Dishonesty never works. Honesty
is the only way to make money in today’s world.

Nobody believes
me on this. People laugh at me. “Don’t you know anything?
Of course dishonest people step on the honest people and have more
success.” People want to justify their own failures and use
their pretend-goodness to explain why they didn’t start Google,
or steal $65 billion, or get that last promotion when the backstabbing
bitch from aisle3 got the raise after doing who knows what.

But here’s
the truth.

Dishonesty
works…until it doesn’t. Everyone messes up. And when you
are dishonest you are given only one chance and then it’s over.
You’re out of the game, at least until you get your act straight
and you have to start from scratch with your tail between your legs.

Honesty compounds.
It compounds exponentially. No matter what happens in your bank
account, in your career, in your promotions, in your startups. Honesty
compounds exponentially over not days or weeks but years and decades.
More people trust your word and spread the news that you are a person
to be sought out, sought after, given opportunity, given help, given
money. This is what will build your empire.

I know this
through countless failures. The more times I fail but communicate
about it, the more times I make no money at all but let someone
have ideas for free, the more times I try to “get mine”
but only end up getting stabbed by those who think its ok to be
dishonest, the greater the number of seeds planted and the more
money in the long run I’ve made. Be dishonest once, and all
of those seeds will be washed away in a thunderstorm of life-killing
proportions. A hurricane of despair that will sweep away all of
your opportunities forever.

10 Ways
to Be Honest:

Give Credit.
Even if the ideas were all yours. Even if you made nothing on
them. Even if they were blatantly stolen. Give credit and move on.
Hoarding your ideas for the moment when you can shine, will only
leave by yourself in a dimly lit room.

BE THE
SOURCE. “But if I give ideas for free, what if they could’ve
made a billion dollars. I always get screwed by my partners.”
If you are the source of ideas then you are ALWAYS the source. Forget
the losers who steal. Move on. You become THE fountain of ideas.
People come to the fountain and make wishes and throw money in.
Don’t be a trickle of dirty water. Be the fountain and let
people know it by giving away all credit and rewards.

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July
9, 2012

The
Best of James Altucher

“Don’t
you take any pride in your work?” Rob Sansom said to me on
his way to being a billionaire or at least a 100-millionaire. He
called me into his office. I had to write a manual and I did a bad
job at it because I was busy writing a novel in my spare time instead.
He was CEO of Fore Systems, which went public a year or two later.
I was employee number 10 or 11 but long gone when everyone was splashing
around in money.

I didn’t
know what to say. The real answer was “no, I don’t. It’s
a technical manual about a computer chip.” And I was 22 years
old and stupid. The wrong answer was “yes”, because if
I took pride in my work then there would not have been so many spelling
and grammar mistakes. (I guess I still don’t take pride in
my work).

A few months
later I quit. I then worked on a virtual reality project. I didn’t
have much pride in my work there either. I had to help create an
emotional model for the artificial characters in the virtual reality.
But I didn’t have any pride in that work either and it only
lasted a few months and maybe cost me some friendships. I thought
I would like it but the only thing I enjoyed doing was writing novels
that never got published.

At the time
I was working for a guy named Joe Bates. He was almost 20 years
older than me but we were good friends. He had gotten his PhD at
something like age 15 from Cornell. He was a genius but there was
a childlike side to him. He wanted to create a simple virtual reality
that he would have fun playing in. With creatures that bounced around
and that would respond via radar to whatever he was doing and express
real emotions.

“I want
to evoke the same feelings that I had when I first watched Bambi,”
he would say.

I looked up
recently what he was doing. Apparently he had given up on virtual
reality. He’s now at MIT working on something he’s inventing
called “sloppy chips”. A sloppy chip, unlike every other
computer chip, makes mistakes. But that’s ok. If you’re
doing a billion calculations to do some facial recognition, it doesn’t
matter if a few times 1+1=3. You give up 100% accuracy to improve
the speed. And if you get 99% accuracy as a result then that’s
pretty good for many things.

Humans are
sloppy chips. But we try so hard to be perfect computers.

We try to do
everything right. We try to never let anyone catch us doing anything
wrong. I sort of blame the blogosphere right now. Everything’s
about how to be more productive, smarter, have a better memory,
how to be perfect. I look at all these posts and I might as well
be living in Lord of the Rings world. They seem like for people
from another dimension or reality.

Here’s
10 ways its ok if we’re a little sloppier.

A) It’s
ok to fail at a business or at a job. A lot of times in an job
interview people will be asked, “why did you leave this job?”
and they’ll say, “my partners went crazy” or “my
boss was on nuclear steroids.” The blame will be someplace
else. But it’s ok to say, “I just wasn’t that good
at that job.” Or, “the business failed and it was my fault
but here’s five things I learned.”

My last business
that failed I learned these things:

• Don’t
  chase after a fad (twitter-based businesses. Twitter is certainly
  not a fad but businesses that rely on twitter (or Facebook) often
  are. Well, at the very least I chased after it in the wrong way).
• Don’t
  use the same crappy developers you used the first time around.
• Don’t
  continue with a bad business just because everyone around you
  is relying on you to continue with it.
• Online
  dating businesses or a dime a dozen and much harder than they
  look.
• Someone
  who has 100,000 Twitter followers does not equal “distribution”.

B) It’s
ok to fail at a marriage or a relationship. It doesn’t
mean someone did something wrong or evil. People are human. They
outgrow each other. To force it might mean you could go awry on
being the best possible human you can be. The sloppy chip approach
(being flexible in your relationships, despite the standards of
society and Time magazine (the annual cover that says “Divorce
is bad for kids”) might not be right. Or maybe it’s ok
for you to be imperfect for awhile in order for you to find your
optimal solution. By the way, it’s hard to realize this in
the moment but when you are looking for the relationship answer
to “1 + 1 =” there are a LOT of answers other than just
“2”. Sometimes “2.1” or even “3.14”
is just as good.

C) It’s
ok to be unproductive today. Today is a hard day. The markets
might be volatile. Your kids might be sick. You might be feeling
tired. You might not feel inspired. The writer Raymond Chandler
had a great discipline. Even if he had writer’s block he’d
sit in front of a blank piece of paper for three hours. Just to
build the physical discipline of just SITTING there even if he couldn’t
write a single world. Half of the writing process is simply being
able to sit down for a long period of time and trying to focus your
mind. It’s ok if today didn’t work out. But if you make
a little progress (the sloppy chip approach), if you get a little
closer to your answer (even subconsciously) then that’s great.
You’re closer to your ultimate revelation, even if it’s
years away. By the way, hat tip to Haruki Murakami in “What
I Talk About When I Talk About Running” for the Raymond Chandler
example.

So, in other
words, some days you might be productive. But on other days, slip
into the “sloppy chip” approach. Get something done. At
least plug in the equation, even if the wrong answer comes out.
But don’t beat yourself over the head if it’s not the
ideal productive day/week/month/year.

A lot of blogs
are in the “self help” genre. They want to tell you how
to be productive. How to maximize your time. “No Facebook!”
They say. Or “pick one hour a day to answer all emails and
stick to that hour only!” Or, “Cut a half hour a day from
watching TV!”

Read
the rest of the article

July
5, 2012

The
Best of James Altucher