I’ve been at zero a few times, come back a few times, and done it over and over. I’ve started entire new careers. People who knew me then, don’t me now. And so on.

I’ve had to change careers several times. Sometimes because my interests changed. Sometimes because all bridges have been burnt beyond recognition, sometimes because I desperately needed money.

And sometimes just because I hated everyone in my old career or they hated me.

There’s other ways to reinvent yourself. Take what I say with a grain of salt. This is what worked for me.

I’ve seen it work for maybe a few hundred other people. Through interviews, through people writing me letters, through the course of the past 20 years. You can try it or not.

A) Reinvention never stops.

Every day you reinvent yourself. You’re always in motion. But you decide every day: forward or backward.

You start from scratch.

Every label you claim you have from before is just vanity. You were a doctor? You were ivy league? You had millions? You had a family? Nobody cares.

You lost everything. You’re a zero. Don’t try to say you’re anything else.

C) You need a mentor.

Else, you’ll sink to the bottom. Someone has to show you how to move and breathe. But don’t worry about finding a mentor (see below).

D) Three types of mentors

– Direct. Someone who is in front of you who will show you how they did it. What is “it”? Wait.By the way, mentors aren’t like that old Chinese guy in “The Karate Kid”. Ultimately most mentors will hate you.– Indirect. Books. Movies. You can outsource 90% of mentorship to books and other materials. 200-500 books equals one good mentor. People ask me, “what is a good book to read” and I never know the answer. There’s 200-500 good books to read.I would throw in inspirational books. Whatever are your beliefs, underline them through reading every day.– Everything is a mentor. If you are a zero, and have passion for reinvention, then everything you look at will be a metaphor for what you want to do. The tree you see, with roots you don’t, with underground water that feeds it, is a metaphor for computer programming if you connect the dots.

And everything you look at, you will connect the dots.

E) Don’t worry if you don’t have passion for anything. You have passion for your health. Start there. Take baby steps. You don’t need a passion to succeed. Do what you do with love and success is a natural symptom.

F) Time it takes to reinvent yourself: five years.Here’s a description of the five years:

• Year One: you’re flailing and reading everything and just starting to DO.
• Year Two: you know who you need to talk to and network with. You’re Doing every day. You finally know what the monopoly board looks like in your new endeavors.
• Year Three: you’re good enough to start making money. It might not be a living yet.
• Year Four: you’re making a good living
• Year Five: you’re making wealth

Sometimes I get frustrated in years 1-4. I say, “why isn’t it happening yet?” and I punch the floor and hurt my hand and throw a coconut on the floor in a weird ritual. That’s ok. Just keep going. Or stop and pick a new field.

It doesn’t matter. Eventually you’re dead and then it’s hard to reinvent yourself.

G) If you do this faster or slower then you are doing something wrong. Google is a good example.

H) It’s not about the money. But money is a decent measuring stick.

When people say “it’s not about the money” they should make sure they have a different measuring stick.

“What about just doing what you love?” There will be many days where you don’t love what you are doing. If you are doing it just for love then it will take much much longer than five years.

Happiness is just a positive perception from our brain. Some days you will be unhappy. Our brain is a tool we use. It’s not who we are.

I) When can you say, “I do X!” where X is your new career?

Today.

J) When can I start doing X?

Today. If you want to paint, then today buy a canvas and paints, start buying 500 books one at a time, and start painting. If you want to write do these three things:

• Read
• Write
• - Take your favorite author and type your favorite story of his word for word. Wonder to yourself why he wrote each word. He’s your mentor today.

If you want to start a business, start spec-ing out the idea for your business. Reinvention starts today. Every day.

K) How do I make money?

By year three you’ve put in 5000-7000 hours. That’s good enough to be in the top 200-300 in the world in anything. The top 200 in almost any field makes a living.

By year 3 you will know how to make money. By year 4 you will scale that up and make a living. Some people stop at year 4.

L) By year 5 you’re top 30-50 so can make wealth.

M) What is “it”? How do I know what I should do?

Whatever area you feel like reading 500 books about. Go to the bookstore and find it. If you get bored three months later go back to the bookstore.

It’s ok to get disillusioned. That’s what failure is about. Success is better than failure but the biggest lessons are found in failure.

Very important: There’s no rush. You will reinvent yourself many times in an interesting life. You will fail to reinvent many times. That’s fun also.

Many reinventions makes your life a book of stories instead of a textbook.

Some people want the story of their life to be a textbook. For better worse, mine is a book of stories.

That’s why reinvention happens every day.

N) The choices you make today will be in your biography tomorrow. Make interesting choices and you will have an interesting biography.

N1) The choices you make today will be in your biology tomorrow. (hat-tip: Claudia)

O) What if I like something obscure? Like biblical archaeology or 11th century warfare?

Repeat all of the steps above and then in year 5 you will make wealth. We have no idea how. Don’t look to find the end of the road when you are still at the very first step.

P) What if my family wants me to be an accountant?

How many years of your life did you promise your family? Ten years? Your whole life? Then wait until next life. The good thing is: you get to choose.

Choose freedom over family. Freedom over preconceptions. Freedom over government. Freedom over people-pleasing. Then you will be pleased.

Q) My mentor wants me to do it HIS way.

That’s fine. Learn HIS way. Then do it YOUR way. With respect.

Hopefully nobody has a gun to your head. Then you have to do it their way until the gun is put down.

R) My spouse is worried about who will support/take care of kids?

Then after you work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week being a janitor, use your spare time to reinvent.

Someone who is reinventing ALWAYS has spare time. Part of reinvention is collecting little bits and pieces of time and re-carving them the way you want them to be.

S) What if my friends think I’m crazy?

What friends?

T) What if I want to be an astronaut?

That’s not a reinvention. That’s a specific job. If you like “outer space” there are many careers. Richard Branson wanted to be an astronaut and started Virgin Galactic.

U) What if I like to go out drinking and partying?

Read this post again in a year.

V) What if I’m busy cheating on my husband or wife or betraying a partner?

Read this post again in two or three years when you are broke and jobless and nobody likes you.

W) What if I have no skills at all?

Read “B” again.

X) What if I have no degree or I have a useless degree? Read “B” again.

Y) What if I have to focus on paying down my debt and mortgage? Read “R” again.

Z) How come I always feel like I’m on the outside looking in?

Albert Einstein was on the outside looking in. Nobody in the establishment would even hire him.

Everyone feels like a fraud at some point. The highest form of creativity is born out of skepticism.

AA) I can’t read 500 books. What one book should I read for inspiration?

Give up.

BB) What if I’m too sick to reinvent?

Reinvention will boost every healthy chemical in your body: serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin. Keep moving forward and you might not get healthy but you will get healthier. Don’t use health as an excuse.

Finally, reinvent your health first. Sleep more hours. Eat better. Exercise. These are key steps in reinvention.

CC) What if my last partner screwed me and I’m still suing him?

Stop litigating and never think about him again. Half the problem was you, not him.

DD) What if I’m going to jail?

Perfect. Reread “B”. Read a lot of books in jail.

EE) What if I’m shy?

Make your weaknesses your strengths. Introverts listen better, focus better, and have ways of being more endearing.

FF) What if I can’t wait five years?

If you plan on being alive in five years then you might as well start today.

GG) How should I network?

Make concentric circles. You’re at the middle.

The next circle is friends and family.

The next circle is online communities.

The circle after that is meetups and coffees.

The circle after that is conferences and thought leaders.

The circle after that is mentors.

The circle after that is customers and wealth-creators.

Start making your way through the circles.

HH) What happens when I have ego about what I do?

In six – 12 months you’ll be back at “B”

II) What if I’m passionate about two things? What if I can’t decide?

Combine them and you’ll be the best in the world at the combination.

JJ) What if I’m so excited I want to teach what I’m learning?

Start teaching on YouTube. Start with an audience of one and see if it builds up.

KK) What if I want to make money while I sleep?

In Year 4, start outsourcing what you do.

LL) How do I meet mentors and thought leaders?

Once you have enough knowledge (after 100-200 books), write down ten ideas for 20 different potential mentors.

None of them will respond. Write down ten more ideas for 20 new mentors. Repeat every week.

Put together a newsletter for everyone who doesn’t respond. Keep repeating until someone responds. Blog about your learning efforts. Build community around you being an expert.

MM) What if I can’t come up with ideas?

Then keep practicing coming up with ideas. The idea muscle atrophies. You have to build it up.

It’s hard for me to touch my toes if I haven’t been doing it every day. I have to do it every day for awhile before I can easily touch my toes. Don’t expect to come up with good ideas on day one.

NN) What else should I read?

AFTER books, read websites, forums, magazines. But most of that is garbage.

OO) What if I do everything you say but it still doesn’t seem like it’s working?

It will work. Just wait. Keep reinventing every day.

Don’t try and find the end of the road. You can’t see it in the fog. But you can see the next step and you DO know that if you take that next step eventually you get to the end of the road.

PP) What if I get depressed?

Sit in silence for one hour a day. You need to get back to your core.

If you think this sounds stupid then don’t do it. Stay depressed.

QQ) What if I don’t have time to sit in silence?

Then sit in silence for two hours a day. This is not meditation. This is just sitting.

RR) What if I get scared?

Sleep 8-9 hours a day and never gossip. Sleep is the #1 key to successful health. It’s not the only key. It’s just #1. Some people write to me and say, “I only need four hours of sleep” or “in my country sleeping means laziness.” Well, those people will fail and die young.

What about gossip? The brain biologically wants to have 150 friends. Then when you are with one of your friends you can gossip about any of the other 150. If you don’t have 150 friends then the brain wants to read gossip magazines until it thinks it has 150 friends.

Don’t be as stupid as your brain.

SS) What if I keep feeling like nothing ever works out for me?

Spend ten minutes a day practicing gratitude. Don’t suppress the fear. Notice the anger.

But also allow yourself to be grateful for the things you do have. Anger is never inspirational but gratitude is. Gratitude is the bridge between your world and the parallel universe where all creative ideas live.

TT) What if I have to deal with personal bullshit all the time?

Find new people to be around.

Someone who is reinventing herself will constantly find people to try and bring her down. The brain is scared of reinvention because it might not be safe.

Biologically, the brain wants you to be safe and reinvention is a risk. So it will throw people in your path who will try to stop you.

Learn how to say “no”.

UU) What if I’m happy at my cubicle job?

Good luck

VV) Why should I trust you – you’ve failed so many times?

Don’t trust me.

WW) Will you be my mentor?

You’ve just read this post.

Reprinted with permission from The Altucher Confidental.

WHAT!?

I had been telling my daughter Mollie all week we would go to this show.

Mollie was very excited.

“Don’t worry,” Nathan had told me earlier in the day, “you will be on the list.” I am extremely grateful he did this for me.

Then we got there and we were not on the list.

I acted confused. I kept saying, “are you sure?”

I find when you act confused but polite then people want to help. There was a line behind me. I wasn’t fighting or angry. So there was no reason for anyone to get angry at me.

They just wanted to end the confusion.

The woman wrote down an “S” on two pieces of paper, smiled and said, “Shhh”, and handed them to us.

We were in.

BUT.

The “S” meant “Standing Room Only”

WHAT!?

I found a woman inside who could help me.

I said, “I write for the Wall Street Journal and I thought we would get great seats.”

“Ok,” she said, and she went off to find the president of the fashion company to get my front row seats PRONTO! This was all just a big mistake.

She came back. “You know….” she said, “we’ve already seated someone from the Wall Street Journal.”

Oh.

“Well, I blog,” I said.

You know that awkward silence that happens every time an asteroid comes within 47,000 miles of hitting the Earth and then nothing happens?

“Yeah, there’s a lot of good standing room only positions. Have a fun show!”

So Mollie and I took our standing positions behind four rows of seats that were next to the runway. She couldn’t really see.

We made friends with everyone standing around us. The ushers. The other people who were standing room only. I took pictures of Mollie with everyone.

Then when the lights started to dim, the ushers waved to Mollie. There was an extra seat near the front.

After the show we went to “SPIN”, the ping pong club.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the woman behind the counter, “all the tables are booked for the next two hours!”

WHAT!?

Apparently Bank of America was having a party and rented the entire place.

It’s not enough that they crashed the entire economy in 2008. Now they had to prevent me from playing ping pong on my daughter’s special night out.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Mollie, “we don’t have to play ping pong.”

I said, “can we just walk around and watch all the players?” And they let us.

I saw a table labeled “Bank of America” that was empty and it had two racquets left on it.

So Mollie and I played ping pong for the next hour. Nobody noticed.

Then the woman came up to us and said, “I have to ask you to leave. This table has already been paid for. You can’t play there!”

I offered to both leave and pay for the time we used. I did not want to cheat them in any way at all.

But she smiled and said, “Oh, you don’t have to pay. I just can’t let you stay there.”

So we left.

By the end of the evening:

• we had gotten into an exclusive fashion event we had no tickets for and were not on the list for.
• we got great seats even though we were “standing room only”
• we played an hour of ping pong at the best club in NY for free, courtesy of Bank of America.

It seems small, but we broke all the rules and had a fun time. The key is that we were simply nice to everyone and didn’t argue and were very thankful at everything we got to do.

Don’t break the laws. Don’t kill people. Don’t steal. But most other rules can be bent.

If you act like the river, you ultimately flow past all the rocks along the way.

Reprinted with permission from The Altucher Confidental.

I needed to somehow be someone I wasn’t in order to burn away invisible scars that I was sure everyone could see.

I thought I had to, for instance, get into a good college for people to like me. Or be a chess master. Or even have straight hair. Or get rid of my glasses. Or acne. Or have a lot of money.

These were all lies I told myself because I didn’t think I could be liked without these medals shining bright off my shirt.

Then there were lies I told others. I told the first girl I ever went out with that I once stole a lot of money from my parents and lost it all gambling on horses.

Then her dad came to visit and he heard all about my race track adventures. So he said, “Let’s all go to the horse track!” I had never even been to the race track before.

So we went and I had no idea what I was doing and it was pretty clear that I had lied to her, like I did on many occasions before that and even after that until there was nothing left of us.

The truth is: I did steal money from my parents. But I spent it all on going to movies and buying comic books and books about chess. And I would use the money to skip school and go into New York and hang out in Washington Square Park playing chess with everyone there.

Not an exciting enough story, though, to tell a girl who wanted me to confess all sorts of things to show her what an outlaw I was instead of a jewish suburban middle class kid.

Then there’s the lies I told as I went from job to job. Skills maybe I had 10% of but I claimed 100% of. A salary that I would enhance by a few thousand so when I got an offer I’d make a few thousand more. Titles I had at old jobs that never even existed.

Then later I wouldn’t tell people I was getting a divorce. Or losing a home. Or losing hope.

Why did I tell the lies to others?

I never thought I was good enough for anything. And I always wanted more of it. If I could just get to the 4th rung on the ladder, I was sure the 5th rung had my name on it.

And even though I was sweating, hungry, unhappy, scared, I knew if I just reached that 5th rung I’d be happy. That the prize was waiting for me there.

So I’d lie to get it.

Everyone would forgive me then. Everyone would pat me on the back and have a big meeting and all say, “we knew you could do it.”

Girls who had broken up with me would claim they were only testing me, that they were also waiting for this moment. They would be side by side with the bosses that fired me. The people who had ignored me. All of them together in a big party to celebrate me.

They would all be happy, laughing and slapping me on the back.

I wouldn’t believe it.

How did they all know each other? Here they all were – loving me, because now I had finally gotten to the point where I didn’t have to lie to them anymore.

But I never reached that rung on the ladder. And I never will.

I fell off the ladder.

A few months ago I had breakfast with the CEO of a company I once worked for. They had fired me and then withheld a bonus payment I had desperately needed.

But they had since changed CEOs several times and now I was meeting their latest CEO who had reached out to me.

It was around the time they withheld that payment that I realized nobody out there at all was going to help me. Nobody would be fair. This wasn’t a blame thing. Nor was it pessimism.

I just needed to pick myself up and it’s my own fault for not dealing with good people. For not constantly being creative. For not feeling grateful.

But in order to be around good people, I also had to be a good person, not an imaginary one.

I had to feel abundant without lying about it in order to have abundance hit me. Not in a law of attraction way, but just so I could sleep at night.

It was that simple. I had to stop using all the energy in my brain coming up with imaginary futures. The brain is too powerful and needs a lot of fuel to keep the lies going.

Better to use that fuel for being happy and good now than to make up futures and anxieties and regrets.

The CEO told me, “I heard you had a heart attack or a nervous breakdown a few years ago. That’s what everyone told me.”

I couldn’t believe what she said. To me I had just had the most fulfilling and successful few years of my life.

But to the people who knew me, to people looking in from the outside, it appeared to be a nervous breakdown, as every facade fell away. I had been buried in my lies and now I no longer was.

“No,” I told her, “I’ve been healthier than I had ever been.”

She repeated it, “Everyone insists you had at least a nervous breakdown.”

Maybe I did. But I wasn’t nervous. I wasn’t broke. And I wasn’t down.

Anymore.

Reprinted with permission from The Altucher Confidental.

A) student loan debt you’ll never be able to pay back.

B ) for the first time ever, greater than 50% of the unemployed have college degrees. So that whole myth of “you can’t get a job without a degree” is over

C) you don’t learn anything in college that you can’t learn on your own.

D) you can get a five year head start on your peers if you give up on college.

None of that works. The myth is too strong. I had to fight harder.

So then I wrote a book: “40 Alternatives to College”.

I found out a lot of people don’t have calculators. A lot of people, for instance, said that “starting a business costs money”. But they didn’t compare it to the cost plus opportunity cost of college.

A lot of people also said, “not everyone is an entrepreneur”, ignoring the fact that I had 39 other alternatives in the book. So I really wondered what college gave all of these people.

Ok, I give up on all of that.

I have a new approach. It’s a sneaky approach because that’s the way things get done. By people doing sneaky things.

The College Challenge:

If they do one of the below items I will “help” them go to college.

I wanted to come up with challenges for them that are realistic but extremely difficult. (e.g. I didn’t put on the list, “win the NY Marathon”).

I’m convinced if they do any of the below they will no longer buy into the societal myth that you need to go to college to be happier and more successful.

And it’s not all about money. The below challenges will make them healthier, more creative, wealthier, etc, depending on what they do. And none of the below requires that much money.

They will also have the pleasure of doing something that is utterly unique and will ultimately be considered cool or fascinating in their social group.

A) Make a youtube video (or channel) that has five million real views.

B ) Get past the second series of Ashtanga Yoga. (at least part of this has to occur in India).

C) Make a business that has over $50,000 in revenues in the 12th month.

D) Write a book (or set of books) that has more than 5000 paying readers

E) Create a blog that has over 100,000 unique monthly readers. Note: you don’t have to be the only writer on that blog.

F) Take 50 or more courses on Coursera. With me.

G) Intern with someone who is among the best in the world at what they do.

H) Organize at least 20 meetups of twenty people or more around a specific topic.

I) Run for political office and get at least 30% of the vote in a primary.

J) Have 50 people write to me explaining, in detail, how you saved their lives.

All of these are such massive achievements that you should no longer see the need to go to college to achieve something great in life. All of these will solve the problem of “how do I socialize with people?”

And any of these challenges will put you on the path to mastery at a much younger age than most people. You will feel immense self-satisfaction.

Also, after people graduate college, they can no longer afford to go on the path to mastery. They have to pay down their college debts.

Well, what if you are not an entrepreneur? No problem, don’t do “E”.

What if you can’t write a book that gets 5000 paying readers.

No problem. Write 100 books that get 50 readers each. Make each book 15 pages. No big deal.

Anyway, just pick one.

Well, what if I pick one and then I fail at it?

Ok, then learn from your mistakes and either try again or move onto the next thing. You are still no worse off than your peers who are learning nothing and getting into massive debt.

I wish my parents had done this for me when I was eighteen.

But it’s easy to believe the storytelling and mythology of prior generations which put blinders on how much the world has changed in the past few years.

Doing the above items will help you take the blinders off.

Doing the above will help you succeed far greater than your peers and even me (hard to believe but true!).

And even if you don’t succeed in the traditional sense, my guess you will learn much more about yourself than joining the herd and becoming another monkey in the zoo.

Reprinted with permission from The Altucher Confidental.

I was honest and I told her. She said, “that’s not enough.”

I asked her what her ex was worth but she said, “why do people always ask that.”

Her ex was well known, 20 years older than her (maybe 30), and probably worth over $100 million according to the newspaper.

But there’s a saying (it’s a saying because one person has told it to me but I repeat it everywhere as if I had made it up): “You never know what someone is worth until they declare bankruptcy.”

I felt bad about not having enough so I told her some things I was working on.

“None of that stuff ever works out,” she said.

And she was right. None of that particular stuff worked out. But I didn’t know it then. I wouldn’t know it for years.

Another time I asked her, “how come you never introduce me to your friends?”

And she said, “Because you’re too crazy.”

Which made a lot of sense. I do NOT introduce my crazy friends to my normal friends. One of her friends was running for Senate or Governor or something. That would’ve created a lot of problems if he was seen hanging out with a crazy person. But I could’ve maybe offered to be Vice-President if he ever made it that far.

I don’t know.

Sometimes you give a carrot but they take the whole stick.

One time she said to me, “my people can destroy your people.”

Which I doubt. My people at that time were largely zombies. In the movies you often see the Governor or the Head of the Joint Chiefs totally powerless against the Zombie army.

But I couldn’t tell her that and reveal my true identity.

I said, “Maybe.” We were in a Mexican restaurant, which I considered neutral territory considering as how my DNA tests showed I have some Canadian blood in me.

We broke up. I’d like to think I broke up with her if it wasn’t for that one conversation where she called me and said, “I’m not ready for you. I need time. Maybe A LOT of time.”

And then I broke up with her.

I was in a Borders bookstore at that moment and she was at President Obama’s first inauguration, and I still had a Blackberry.

Those big buttons that required the slightest of pushes. We were texting. I remember typing out, “b…r…e..k” and then backspacing. You know the drill. I miss my Blackberry.

How things have changed.

Back then just a smidgen of Chinese food could cause enlightenment. People were having orgasms over politics and the country was heading towards the Apocalypse.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to those days when nothing semeed to matter except being lonely, eating hot dogs for breakfast, being scared of going broke, being forced to move rooms every 29 days by NYC law since I lived in a since shut-down hotel, and wandering around bookstores looking for women to hit on.

But then I gave up.

I started saying “No” to people who weren’t right for me. I started saying “No” to everything I didn’t want to do.

I started saying “No” to mindless meetings, mindless events, mindless people who were bad for me, mindless food or alcohol, mindless anger and regret. Mindless TV and news.

I started saying “No” to colonoscopies and other things related to painful medical experiments. I listed all the things I could say “No” to and I still do.

When you have a tiny tiny piece of shit in the soup it doesn’t matter how much more water you pour in and how many more spices you put on top. There’s shit in the soup.

I had been saying YES to the wrong things for 20 years.

Within six months my life was completely different. I met Claudia. I moved out of hotels. I was working on ideas that actually made money. And I needed fewer and fewer things to make me happy. That’s the Power of No. That’s true minimalism.

Every six months since then my life has changed. Even in the past few days, remarkable things have happened.

When you start just saying “No” to the bad things, the “Yes” compounds every day. It compounds automatically, the way interest does in a non-US bank.

When she asked me what my net worth was I could’ve just said, “No” and got up and not wasted three months of my life. But as easy as that sounds, I didn’t know how to do it.

Now I do. Now I’m free. I dumped the old soup. Now I can finally drink from the soup I just cooked.

Reprinted with permission from The Altucher Confidental.

And when he was standing right in front of me tonight I was blown away by what he said.

We went to an opening for an exhibit of his calligraphy.

He looked like a child. He smiled like a child. He talked like a little boy. It was almost funny to look at.

Here’s some things he either said or drew that I learned from.

How to Do What You Love.

He starts his day with tea, he said. And he loves calligraphy. So he puts the tea in the ink and starts his drawing.

Funny, I thought. He combines the things he loves. But then he went further.

He said he imagined his father’s hand was on his when he drew, and that he loved his father.

And that all his ancestors hands were on his when he drew. And all his students hands and all the people he knew.

He showed a drawing of a circle. He said that the circle was made out of smiles.

He didn’t say “do what you love”. But he showed that if you love something, here’s how you do it.

You pour all of your love into it. You hold nothing back.

He laughed when he said that. But the woman next to me was crying.

Peace can only come from peaceful people.

Here we are on the eve of dropping more bombs on people in order to establish peace in a region that we know nothing about.

Peace seems hard, which is why I guess we never get it right. It’s not a fight but more like something that is shared.

Understand your own suffering.

Stop everything for a moment and really think about your own suffering, he said.

Your own moments of hitting bottom. This, he said, was how compassion is created. Compassion then cradles the suffering like a mother cradles a baby.

And this is then how you learn to have compassion for the suffering in others. The pain we all feel. The loneliness we all feel. The regrets and uncertainty.

Every breath is a miracle.

“It proves we are alive again!” and he laughed.

During the day I sometimes think my breathing is so shallow when I’m on the computer I have to stop to take a deep breath.

I just read in the book “Crazy Sexy Cancer” that how we breathe can help us battle cancer.

No mud, no lotus.

This phrase was on one of his calligraphy drawings.

The lotus flower is beautiful, but comes from the mud. Just as compassion often comes from suffering. The lotus shows the true value of the mud.

He started a small meditation by ringing a bell.

By coincidence, a company I’m on the board of is going on the Nasdaq tomorrow. I’m very proud of them.

So at 9:30 I’m going over to the Nasdaq and the CEO of the company will ring the bell to start the day’s trading for thousands of companies.

Both Thich and the CEO use the ringing of the bell to stop us for a moment. To start something new and amazing. It’s all connected.

I learn the same thing from both Thich and this CEO. Nothing can stop you when you pour all of your love into the things you do.

Reprinted with permission from The Altucher Confidental.

One might think: don’t be a jerk. You weren’t in chains in the 1800s. That was real slavery.

Ok, I hate arguing. Go away.

But let’s take a look at the average person.

The average person works at a job. Fine, you might say, a job is a lot different from slavery: I can take a water break for instance. And sometimes go to the bathroom. And when I talk to people the same sex as me there aren’t even any rules governing what I can say.

Great. I agree.

But let’s just take a look at your income and your behavior.

Sure, you might say, I realize I don’t get all of my income. About 40% goes to taxes.

And there you would be wrong.

Your true salary is the value you create for the place you work.

Some percentage of it goes to your boss. He has to get paid also you know. Who do you think pays him? You do.

Some percentage of your salary goes to his boss and however big the hierarchy is. I know this, having been a boss, having run a company, and having been an employee.

Some percentage of your “salary” goes to the shareholders of the company before you even see it.

And some percentage goes to the vendors of the company. Like the insurance “benefits” your company gives you that you most likely will never need (if you were likely to need them, then the benefits would be higher, until you no longer need that much. That’s how insurance works).

And some percentage goes to employees that don’t pull their weight. The 80/20 rule applies where approximately 80% don’t pull their weight so any money left over from your efforts has to be used to pay them. You pay them.

Finally, you have to pay for your cubicle, your office supplies, the computer on your desk, your phone, etc. If you created no extra money to pay for these things then they wouldn’t exist. So this comes directly out of your salary.

I call all of the above your “Above The Line” salary. Try to figure out what your Above The Line salary is.

You can say, “my company gives me the opportunity to make this above the line salary”. That’s fine. But they take quite a bit. It’s probably four or five times higher than your “Below The Line” salary. There’s better ways to get your “Above the Line” salary so you personally benefit from it. Most companies are very wasteful and you pay for that waste directly out of your salary.

Then there’s your Below-the-Line salary.

40% goes to Federal and State taxes. This is already after your services have been taxed at the corporate level, now your being taxed another 40% at the personal level.

Note that only salaried employees pay 40%. Nobody else does.

The richest Americans pay less than 15% on average on gains in their net worth. That’s because salaried employees are slaves and have the least political power.

Another 5-8% goes to taxes on everything you consume. Now we are almost at 50%.

Then, like most Americans, you have a mortgage. Maybe this is another 10-20% of your salary. Your company likes you to own your house because you are less likely to quit (you need the money to pay the mortgage) and you are less likely to move (you’re not mobile).

Then student loans you are paying off. For the first time ever, greater than 50% of the unemployed have college degrees. So it”s pretty scary. You got this degree because (in part) you thought it would get you a job. But it didn’t guarantee anything and now you have to pay for it. Some percentage of your salary is sliced off every month to pay for that degree.

Then some portion of your salary goes towards health, upkeep of your relationships (they always cost money. This is not being cynical. Just reality), your transportation to your job (they force you to pay for the honor of transporting yourself to your slave quarters).

How much goes to you? You wake up before dawn. You travel. You work hard. You come home late. You’re feeling stuck. You’re mildly depressed and may take medication for this. And you have trouble sleeping and digesting.

Shouldn’t you get paid more?

As it stands, between above the line and below the line expenses taken out of your salary, you are probably left with 1/10 of your salary. In other words, you could be making ten times as much money if you started to un-slave yourself.

Then there’s behavior. “I can do whatever I want,” I used to say. In fact, when i was at a job I felt free. I could “sneak out” at 4pm. I could take lots of breaks. Vacations were big.

But did you look at the manual?

There’s a big manual. And sometimes there are workshops to go over the manual.

Like you can’t talk to people of the opposite sex in certain ways. They teach you what are good ways to talk to people of the opposite sex.

You can’t talk to your boss a certain way. Because for all of your slavery, all he has to say is, “you’re fired” and all of that goes away.

You can’t wear what you want. Most office situations have a uniform, either explicit or implicit.

You can’t be friends with who you want. You’re mostly just friends with the people you spend your day with – the other slaves. When they go away you never talk to them again.

You can’t be creative when inspiration hits. “Anything done on equipment owned by the company is intellectual property owned by the company”. Good luck arguing with that one.

You can’t have an office romance even though those are the only women you know. For one thing you might get fired. And all of your emails can be read by human resources. My closest friend when I was at HBO was fired when his office romance went awry and all of his emails were read by his boss.

If you want more money, you have to beg for it. There are entire seminars created just to teach people how to ask for 5% more money at work. People are scared to death to Ask.

And by the time you get home to have real social interactions, you’re tired and bitter and angry at work.

I know I’m doing a little bit of projecting here. This was my personal experience about having a job.

I felt like a slave. I hated it. Maybe a lot of people like it. But I am just doing the math. The Above the Line salary is real and comes straight out of your pocket before you even knew that money was there.

Most people can make 5-10x more by being creative and figuring out how to offer services on their own without the company taking out all of the “Above the Line” expenses. And then there are ways to limit the “Below the Line” expenses.

Money won’t solve all of your problems, but it will solve your money problems. Don’t let them take your money so they can keep you in slavery.

You want to own your time. Own your work. Own the value you create for others. Protect yourself so nobody can fire you. Not be owned by the bank or the government. Not be owned by your relationships. Own your thoughts.

“I can’t just quit my job!” you might say.

And I agree with this. Don’t quit.

So many people read self-help books to help them deal with what they think are the realities of work. Self-help books are often self-hurt books because they try to keep you happy about being enslaved.

For instance, “show compassion to the people who hurt you” many of them say. This might be good advice. But I’d rather show compassion to the people who love me.

Start to be an explorer. We live in a 15 trillion dollar economy. You helped create it. Just like slaves and death and misery helped create the beautiful pyramids.

But 90% of what you create is taken from you.

Start to explore what parts you can take back. Work every day on ideas. List every interest you’ve had since you were a kid. List every business or job that can be started from that interest. Read every day about your interests.

Don’t be angry at the people at work, even your boss. They are all slaves also. You need to break free from them. Don’t indulge your free thoughts on the other slaves with their Rolex shackles.

Study the lives of people who aren’t slaves. What did they do? Study the people online who seem to have broke free. What are they doing? Keep working on the idea muscle I discuss in my book.

I did this. And in six months my life changed completely. Sometimes for the worse. Much worse. I didn’t know what I was doing and sometimes I ended up on the floor, depressed and suicidal.

Sometimes freedom is very scary. It’s outside of the jail cell (“comfort zone”) you created for yourself.

But every six months since then my life has changed completely. My life is completely different than it was even six months ago.

Sixteen years ago I had a boss yell at me. He’s a good guy and has since broken free himself. But one time he yelled at me and I couldn’t yell back or I would risk being fired. I felt like crying. Actually, I did cry.

So I went to the library on 41st Street and 5th Avenue. I found a science fiction book I read once before as a kid. It had that cellophane wrapping and a library card in it. And it had that smell when you open the pages.

I went three or four levels down, to my private bathroom in the library. My sanctum sanctorum.

And I sat there and I read about a man who lived forever and was happy. And the world disappeared and for a brief moment I was no longer a slave.

From that moment on I plotted my escape. And every day since, I figure out new ways to escape, new ways to be free. New ways to own my world.

Reprinted with permission from The Altucher Confidental.

There are many types of business. Depending on your business, some of these won’t apply. All of these questions come from questions I’ve been asked.

The rules are: I’m going to give no explanations. Just listen to me.

1) C Corp or S Corp or LLC? C-Corp.

2) What state should you incorporate in? Delaware.

3) Should founders vest? Yes, over a period of four years. On any change of control the vesting speeds up.

4) Should you go for venture capital money? First build a product, then get a customer, then get friends and family money (or money from revenues which is cheapest of all) and then think about raising money, But only then. Don’t be an amateur.

5) Should you patent your idea? Get customers first. Patent later. Don’t talk to lawyers until the last possible moment.

6) Should you require venture capitalists to sign NDAs? No. Nobody is going to steal your idea.

7) How much equity should you give a partner?
Divide things up into these categories: manage the company, raise the money, had the idea, brings in the revenues, built the product (or performs the services). Divide up in equal portions. Should you have a technical co-founder if you are not technical? No. If you don’t already have a technical cofounder you can always outsource technology and not give up equity.

9) Should you barter equity for services? No. You get what you pay for.

10) How do you market your app? Friends and then word of mouth.

11) Should you build a product? Maybe. But first see if manually your product works. Then think about providing it as a service. Then productize the commonly used services. Too many people do this in reverse and then fail.

12) How much dilution is too much dilution? If someone wants to give you money, then take it. The old saying, 100% of nothing is worth less than 1% of something.

13) Do you listen to venture capitalist? Yes, of course They gave you money. But then don’t do anything they ask you to do.

14) What if nobody seems to be buying your product? Then change to a service and do whatever anyone is willing to pay for.

15) If a client wants you to hire their friend or they won’t give you the business (e.g. like a bribe) what should you do? Always do the ethical thing – hire the friend and get the client’s business.

16) What do you do when a customer rejects you in a B2B business? Stay in touch once a month. Never be angry.

17) In a B2C business: release fast. Add new features every week.

18) How do you get new clients? The best new clients are old clients. Always offer new services.

19) What’s the best thing do for a new client? Overdeliver for the first 100 days. Then you will never lose them.

20) What if your client asks you to do something not in your business plan? Do it, or find someone who can do it, even if it’s a competitor.

21) Should I ever focus on SEO? No.

22) Should I do social media marketing? No.

23) Should I ever talk badly about a partner of an employee even though they are awful? Never gossip. Always be straight with the culprit.

24) I have lots of ideas. How do I pick the right one?
Do as many ideas possible. The right idea will pick you.

25) What is the sign of an amateur? Any of these things:
- asking for an NDA
- trying to raise VC money before product or customers
- having fights with partners in the first year. Fire them or split before anything gets out of control
- Worrying about dilution
- Trying to get Mark Cuban to invest because “this would be great for the Dallas Mavericks”
- Asking people you barely know to introduce you to Mark Cuban
- Asking people for five minutes of their time. It’s never five minutes so you are establishing yourself as a liar.
- Having a powerpoint that doesn’t show me arbitrage. I need to know that there is a small chance there is a 100x return on money.
- Catch 22: showing people there’s a small chance there’s 100x return on their money. The secret of salesmanship is getting through the Catch 22.
- rejecting a cash offer for your company when you have almost no revenues. Hello friendster and foursquare.

26) What is the sign of a professional:
- going from bullshit product to services to product to SaaS product. (Corollary: the reverse is amateur hour)
- cutting costs every day
- selling every day, every minute
- When you have a billion in revenues, staying focused. When you have zero revenues, staying unfocused and coming up with new ideas every day.
- Saying “no” to people who are obvious losers.
- Saying “yes” to any meeting at all with someone who is an obvious winner.
- knowing how to distinguish between winners and losers (subject of an entire other post but in your gut you know, trust me).

27) When should I hire people fulltime? When you have revenues

28) How long does it take to raise money? In a GREAT business, six months. In a mediocre business: infinity.

29) Should I get an office? No, not unless you have revenues.

30) Should I do market research? Yes, find one customer who DEFINITELY, without a doubt, will buy a service from you. Note, I don’t say buy your product because your initial product is always not what the customer wanted.

31) Should I pay taxes? No. You should always reinvest your money and operate at a loss.

32) Should I pay dividends? See above

33) What should the CEO salary be? No more than 2x your lowest employee if you are not profitable. This even assumes you are funded. If you are not funded your salary should be zero until your revenues can pay your salary last. Important RULE: the CEO salary is the last expense paid in every business.

34) When should I fire employees? When you have less than six months burn in the bank and you aren’t getting revenues growing fast enough.

35) When should you have sex with an employee? When you love her and the feeling is mutual.

36) What other reasons should one fire an employee?
- when they gossip
- when they don’t over-deliver constantly
- when they ask for a raise because they think they are making below industry standard
- when the talk badly about a client
- when they have an attitude

37) When should you give a raise? Rarely

38) How big should the employee option pool be? 15-20%

39) How much do advisers get? 1/4 of 1%. Advisers are useless. Don’t even have an advisory board.

40) How much do board members get? Nothing. They should all be investors. If they aren’t an investor, then 1/2 of 1%

50) Should you take the offer to buy your company? Yes . in cash.

51) What is the only effective email marketing? Highly targeted email marketing written by professional copywriters and the email list is made up of people who have bought similar services in past six months.

51A) Corollary: If you have zero skills as a copywriter then everything you write will be boring.

52) Should I give stuff for free? Maybe. But don’t expect free customers to turn into paying customers. Your free customers actually hate you and want everything from you for nothing so you better have a different business model.

53) Should I have schwag? No.

54) Should I go to SXSW? No.

55) Should I go to industry parties and meetups? No.

56) Should I blog? Yes. You must. Blog about everything going wrong in your industry. Blog personal stories that you think will scare away customers. They won’t. Customers will be attracted to honesty.

57) Should I care about margins? No. Care about revenues.

58) Should I spin off this unrelated idea into a separate business? No. Make one business GREAT. Throw everything in it. Do DBAs to identify different ideas.

59) Should I hire people because I can travel on a seven hour plane ride with them? Don’t be an idiot. If anything, hire people the opposite of you. Else who will you delegate to.

60) When should I say “no” to a client? When they approach you.

61) When should I say “yes” to a client? Every other conversation you ever have with them after that initial “no”.

62) Should I have sex with an employee? Stop asking that.

63) Should I negotiate the best terms with a VC? No. Pick the VC you like. Times are going to get tough at some point and you need to be able to have a heart to heart with them.

64) Should I even start a business? No. Make money. Build shit. Then start a business.

65) Should I give employees bonuses for a job well done? No. Give them gifts but not bonuses.

66) What should I do at Christmas? Send everyone you know a gift basket.

67) If my customer just got divorced what should I say to him? “I can introduce you to lot’s of women/men”.

68) When should I give up on my idea? When you can’t generate revenues, customers, interest, for TWO MONTHS.

69) Why didn’t the VC or customer call back after we met yesterday and it was great? They hate you.

70) Why didn’t the above call back after we met yesterday and it was great? “Yesterday” was like a split-second ago for them and a lifetime for you. There’s the law of entrepreneurial relativity. Figure out what that means and live by it.

71) Should I hire a professional CEO? No. Never.

71) Should I hire a head of sales? No. The founder is the head of sales until at least ten million in sales.

72) My client called at 3am. Should I tell him to respect boundaries? No. You no longer have any boundaries.

73) I made a mistake. Should I tell the client? Yes. Tell him everything that happened. You’re his partner. Not the guy that hides things and then lies about them.

74) My investors want me to focus. Should I listen to them? No. Diversify in every way you can.

75) I personally need money. Should I borrow from the business? Only if the business can survive for another six months no matter what.

76) I just bought two companies. Should I put them under the same roof and start consolidating? No. Not for at least two years.

77) Should I quit my job? No. Only if you have salary that can pay you for six months at your startup. Aim to quit your job but don’t quit your job.

78) What do I do when I have doubts? Ask your customers if your doubts are trustworthy.

79) I have too much competition. What should I do? Competition is good. It shows you have a decent business model. Now simply outperform them.

80) My wife/husband thinks I spend too much time on my startup? Divorce them or stop your business.

81) I’m starting my business but I have relationship problems. What should I do? Get rid of your relationship.

82) Should I expand geographically as quickly as possible? No. Get all the business you can in your local area. Travel is too expensive time-wise.

83) How do I keep clients from yelling at me? Document line by line every meeting and send your document to the client right after the meeting.

84) I undercharged. What should I do about it? Nothing. Charge the next client more.

85) I have an idea for an app but don’t know how to execute. What should I do? Draw every screen and function. Then outsource someone to make the drawings look like they come from a real app. Then outsource the development of the app. Get a specific schedule. Micromanage the schedule.

86) I want to buy a franchise in X. Is that a good idea? Only buy a franchise if it’s underperforming and you can see how to improve it. Don’t buy on future hopes, only buy on past mistakes.

87) I want to buy a franchise in X. Is that a good idea? Rely on the three Ds: Death, Debt, Divorce. When someone dies, the heirs will sell a business cheap. When someone is in debt, they will sell a business cheap. When someone divorces, the couple usually have to sell a business cheap. IMPORTANT: even if the trends in the industry are in your favor, you CANNOT predict the future. But you can use the past to help you get a deal. Always get a deal.

88) I have a lot of traffic but no revenues. What should I do? Sell your business. There’s only one Google. (well, there’s two or three Googles: Facebook and Twitter).

89) I have no traffic. How do I get traffic? Shut down your business.

90) Should I hire a PR firm?

No. Do guerilla marketing. Read “Newsjacking” and “Trust me I’m Lying”. PR firms screw up from beginning to the end. The first time I hired a PR firm, instead of sending me my contract they accidentally sent me their contract for “Terry Bradshaw”. He was paying $12,000 a month. Was it worth it for him?

91) My competition is doing better than me across every metric. What should I do?

Don’t be afraid to instantly shut down your business and start over if you can’t sell the business. Time is a horrible thing to waste.

92) I’m in business now for 6 years and my business doesn’t seem to be growing. It’s even slowing down. What should I do?

Come up with 10 ideas a day about new services your business can offer. Try to get a customer for each new service. I know one business in this situation that refuses to do this because their VCs are telling them to focus more. You’re going to go out of business otherwise.

93) Is it unethical to run my business from the side while still at my job? I don’t know. Did God tell you that in a dream?

94) My customer called me at 5pm on a Friday and said, “We have to talk” and now I can’t talk to him until Monday. What does it mean? It means you’re fired.

95) XYZ just sold for a $100 million. Should I be valued at that? I’m better!

No, you should shut up.

96) Investors want to meet me and customers want to meet me. Who do I meet if I need money? You should know the answer to that by now.

97) If an acquirer asks me why I want to sell, what should I say? That you feel it would be easier for you to grow in the context of a bigger company that has experienced the growing pains you are just starting to go through. That 1+1 = 45.

98) I just started my business. What should I do? Sell it as fast as possible (applies in 99% of situations)

99) I can change the world with my technology. No you can’t.

99A) Corollary: Don’t smoke crack.

100) If you’re so smart why aren’t you a billionaire? Because I sold my businesses early, lost everything, started new businesses, sold them, and got lucky every now and then.

You create your luck by being healthy and not regretting the past or being anxious about the future.

Reprinted with permission from The Altucher Confidental

The stress is unbearable when you need to sell. And you have no money when you need it.

It’s a prison. The white picket fence is the prison bars. The bank is the guards looking in. And the need to protect your family keeps you in a solitary confinement of guilt and anxiety and stress.

I won’t give all the reasons. Google “Altucher” and “home ownership”. I wrote about it a few times. Then someone wrote against my arguments and I responded to those. On and on.

BUT, some people simply MUST own homes. I will no longer argue with them. They have good reasons:

• roots
• a lawn for their kids (somehow lawns costs a $100,000 down payment and huge interest rates)
• a place where they KNOW they can be there for 20 years (even though, on average, Americans buy new houses every five years)
• they love the neighborhood and there are no rentals in the neighborhood
• they think it’s an investment.
• it’s the “American Dream”. Blah.

Fine. Buy a house.

But please at least do the below checklist before you make this decision. You have to say “YES!” to all of the below. And then it might be a decent choice for you.

A) YOU LOVE TOILETS. Or talking about them. Or talking to people who love toilets.

Because, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you are losing your hair. And clumps of hair will get in your pipes. And then your toilets will stop. And when guests are over the toilet will overflow and “stuff” will go all over the floor.

It will happen. Good luck.

YOU LOVE HOME DEPOT. Love it!

It’s so amazing: empty aisle after empty aisle. It stretches to infinity. And nobody seems to work there.

It’s like an abandoned Death Star. Where did all the Storm Troopers go? Is there one goddamn person who can tell me where the air conditioners are? And then the bug spray? And the shovels? I need a shovel. NOW! But there’s nobody.

C) YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO ADD. I have nothing against that. A lot of people can’t do basic addition.

I’m one of them (see above: lost millions).

If you don’t know how to add I have a solution below that makes it so you don’t need to know how to add.

But first, what is the true cost of your house:

OWN = down payment + size of mortgage, + all the interest payments, + all the taxes (which can’t be calculcated since taxes will go up in unexpected ways) + all maintenance (which also can’t be calculated) + opportunity cost of time (which is minimal because you love Home Depot and toilets).

RENT = All of your rental payments added up MINUS what you would make buying bonds with the money you would’ve used on a downpayment.

Then compare the two. Which one is more? Don’t do the choice that adds up to more. (Unless…see parts D and E)

You can argue that I should also MINUS what one would make from the rising value of a house. But it’s basically unpredictable and people put that money into buying the next house anyway.

Housing prices in many parts of the country are still down from ten years ago. So who knows? And housing has not gone up faster than inflation over the past 100 years.

And if you believe in housing as an investment you can Rent and then take what would’ve been your downpayment, borrow 100% against it (this is allowed in any bank) and buy a residential REIT on the stock market.

Then it’s liquid and you can sell any time regardless of how the economy is doing. So if you truly believe that housing is going up from here (e.g. you are a prophet from God and somehow know these things when nobody else does) then you can rent and put all your money times two into a REIT.

So ” a house is a good investment” is never really a good argument… unless…

D) YOU LOVE DEATH, DEBT, AND DIVORCE WHEN IT HAPPENS TO OTHERS.

There’s no way to predict if housing is going up or down. So you need to get Death, Debt, or Divorce on your side. These are basically the ONLY ways you can guarantee you are getting a better deal than anyone else.

If every house in an area is going for $400,000 then you want to make sure you don’t pay more than $200-250,000.

That’s called “good investing”. Good investing is not about predicting the future, it’s about getting a deal. This is an important concept no matter what you are investing in and it’s the concept everyone forgets.

You get a deal when someone dies (and the kids don’t want to handle the hassle).

You get a deal when two people get divorced (and they need to quickly sell their house, regardless of price).

And you get a deal when someone gets into too much debt (and, for instance, is foreclosed on).

That’s it. Sometimes you get a deal when someone has to move for work also but in these days, this is usually related to Debt.

Don’t buy a house unless you are getting a deal, even if you’ve convinced yourself you will living there for 30 years (remember: you can’t predict the future).

Well, you don’t need a deal if….

E) YOU HAVE A LOT OF CASH. If you buy a house, have 4x the amount of the mortgage sitting in cash in your bank account.

That seems like a lot, right? Why not just buy the house in cash?

Because then you might run out of money. Particularly if there is a prolonged economic slump (again, unpredictable but why risk the worst-case scenario when you don’t have to). I don’t like to risk bad worst case scenarios.

I don’t think there will be a big slump. But why take a chance with your life?

Worst case scenarios are too scary! You can die!

Cash is a beautiful thing. Having cash in the bank keeps you calm when everyone else is committing suicide.

Treat your cash nice so it treats you nice. Don’t throw it all into a down payment on a house. As I explain in prior posts, that’s a very nasty thing to do to your cash.

So there, that’s my checklist.

I assume you do all the other things whether you rent or buy: look for good schools, live in a nice area, etc.

This is not an argument against buying a house. I respect that many people want to own a home for whatever reason.

This is an argument to keep you sane so you can focus on other things in your life.

Follow this checklist and whether you rent or own you will preserve enough of your sanity to be able to be creative and explore the world.

Be an explorer, not a prisoner.

Reprinted with permission from The Altucher Confidental

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?”

Read the rest of the article

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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