James Altucher
It’s Going to be a Storm, Do You Have an Umbrella?
But you also have to look at an important data point: the IRS says the average multi-millionaire has seven different sources of income.
Five years and you need to start learning new skills, practicing new efforts, trying on new careers for size.
Habits. It’s the 5×5 rule. You are not just the average of the 5 people around you. You’re the average of the 5 habits you do, the things you eat, the ideas you have, the content you consume, etc.
The Ultimate Guide to Finding a Mentor
Over deliver. This is your only chance. And your mentor has plenty of people around him. Over-deliver on everything. Look for every opportunity to over-deliver.
How to have 1,000 Mentors in Your Life
I wanted Prakash to be my mentor. So I went and offered to take his class notes and turn them into a book. After that I spent time with him every day for months.
I wanted Victor to be my mentor. So I sent him free software for his trading. I sent him everything I had ever worked on. I read every book he ever quoted from. I read papers her wrote in the 1960’s and referred to them.
I wanted Jim to be my mentor. So I read all of his articles and I wrote to him: “Here are 10 articles I wish you would write.” And then he said, “How about you write them?”
What I learned about negotiation from the FBI’s best hostage negotiator
He wrote an excellent book about negotiation called Never Split the Difference – Chris Voss
Mirror. Whatever they say, repeat the last one to three words. Do this as much as possible. If they say, “We cant go higher than $100,000 on salary because that’s what everyone else is making,” just say, “that’s what everyone else is making,” and see what they say next. They will always say more.
“If everyone else in my industry is paid “X” then how can I go with the number you suggest?”
Preparation. Don’t go crazy over this since you don’t want to over-prepare. But get your “how” questions ready. Your “no” questions.
The Tao of Louis C.K.
“People say, ‘My phone sucks,’ No, it doesn’t! The shittiest cell phone in the world is a miracle. Your life sucks. Around the phone.”
If you’re great at ideas, or great at execution, but you eat poorly and are constantly sick, then you’ll be constantly sick and never get anything done.
“It doesn’t have ANY effect on your life. What do you care?! People try to talk about it like it’s a social issues. Like when you see someone stand up on a talk show and say, ‘How am I supposed to explain to my children that two men are getting married?” I don’t know. It’s your shitty kid. You fuckin tell them. Why is that any else’s problem? Two guys are in love and they can’t get married because you don’t want to talk to your ugly kid for five fuckin minutes?”
The key to the Tao of Louis C.K. is not to expend extra energy on things that don’t matter, things you can’t change, things that you’re being stupid about, things that won’t be issues a billion years from now.
How Picasso Produced 50,000 Works of Art
Picasso might know. He said, “The less art there is in painting, the more painting there is.” In other words, just do it. Leave behind everyone else’s definitions or else you will drown in them.
Jimi Hendrix made around 70 albums before he died at the age of 27.
“Action is the foundational key to all success.”
“The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.” When ’50 shades of Grey was on its way to selling 40 million copies, everyone hated it.
Picasso also says, “I am always doing think I can’t do – that’s how I get to do them.”
And then at each of these thing, I try to improve 1% – which means nothing; what is the math of gratitude? But here’s the math. Compounding 1% a day in X makes X 38 times better in a year.
Are you a plus, a minus, or a zero? Lessons from an astronaut.
I have to keep quoting Chris: “Continually investing in the success of others is what will eventually lead to success for yourself.”
What I Learned about Photography from Chase Jarvis
Every attempt at art depends first on connect. Every business depends on connection.
13 Wayne Dyer personally taught me
maybe the most important thing I learned was one thing he said to me toward the end: quote Are you willing to do whatever it takes to make the thing that excites you come true? Are you fearless?”
Six things I learned from Mick Jagger
I think of the bands that stand out for me now. I was just listening to Gotan Project, which combines old school tango music with a more techno feel.
7 unusual things I learned from Louis Armstrong
Life is truly owned by the people who dive into it make every experience special and unique. The masters of the world don’t let the oppressors– even their internal oppressors ( the worst ones of all)–drag them down. Instead, they create out of thin air the experiences, the situations, the magic that constantly exist around them.
I keep telling my kids, if they want to learn just saying, or to tap dance, we’re drawl manga comics, or to do anything, learn everything you can about all the masters in your field over the past 100 years. Learn all of their styles, learn how to mimic them, learn what influenced them. Be able to recognize them at a moment’s glance. And only then will you start to develop your own unique style, which you can only then begin to master.
Armstrong went to LA to plant pot club, drawing in the Hollywood crowd that was only vaguely aware that the rest of the country was in a depression.
The secret of all art
For Kurt Vonnegut, it was dramatically affected by the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany, where he was a prisoner of war. About 130,000 people died in a single day. Compared to 90,000 in hiroshima. Kurt Vonnegut survived in his job after that was to dig up all the bodies.
When he anchors the book–in slaughter house five, for instance, he anchors to the most horrific moment of his life– he can go crazy after that: Time travel, other planets, placing the author as a side character in the book, all sorts of experimentation.
It doesn’t matter because he can always pull back the motional anchor we need to. And then we all relate. No emotional anchor = no art. No meaning.
Another example: the Harry Potter series. Emotional anchor: an orphan, mistreated by relatives, wants to feel special. Craziness: off to wizard school to fight bad magic everywhere!
Another example:”Carrie.” Anchor: socially outcast girl with overly religious and strict mother. Craziness: rains blood on everyone at the prom.
Vonnegut’s critical tips on writing are a must read for anybody who wants to create or innovate or explore.
Five unusual things I learned from Isaac Asimov
So I reread the foundation series by Asimov the premise is that with use of statistics ( he called it psychohistory) you can gather up all the prior history and use it predict the future. So that’s exactly what I did. I loaded up all the historical data of the stock market into some software and wrote programs to figure out what would happen next. So, for instance, what happened the prior 90 times that MSFT opened up 5% down? Oh, if you buy at the open, then 89 out of 90 times it went up 2% before 10 AM. Okay, I’m a buyer. And that’s how I would do all my trades to make money almost every day trading for the next three years.
Are you there, Judy Blume? It’s me, and James
People often say a lie: “solve other peoples problems and you will be successful.” This is never true. Never. Show is how you solved your problems. Even if you never solve them, still show how you try. You can give us permission to be confused just like you were.
10 things I learned from interviewing Tony Robbins
ask lousy questions, get lousy answers
The 20 things I’ve learned from Larry page
To be a successful employee, you have to align your interest with those of the company, come up with ideas that further help the customers, and have the mandate to act on those ideas, whether they work or not.
“We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like it toothbrush. There aren’t many things people use twice today.” What are 10 things that can be invented that people would use twice a day?
Mimi’s three steps to make 1 million
Learning to find happiness with less is true wealth.
How to learn to do the impossible
Say instead,”I’m already doing this. Here are the 10 or 20 things I’ve done so far. Here are the results. Are you in?”
Never start with a blank page. Find all the things closest to what you want to be possible and use those ideas as starting points to find the next generation of possible.
The 10 things I learned from Richard Branson
- “listen more than you talk. Nobody learned anything by hearing themselves speak.”
- “start making suggestions for how to improve your workplace. Don’t be a shrinking violet, quietly getting your job done adequately. Be bold, and the limit.”
Note he’s not suggesting starting a company. You can always create inside any surrounding and you will be instantly rewarded for that. The first employee at Google is now a multi billionaire.
“It can be easy to find reasons not to do something. However, you might be surprised by how much help is at hand if you put yourself out there and commit to a project. It doesn’t have to be a case of struggling along by yourself.”
When people think the problem is impossible they value it at zero. Successful people buy ideas low ( zero) and sell them high.
I’ve been an employee many times. The key is to realize that an “employee” doesn’t mean you give up on creating, on making, on coming up with ideas. In fact, an employee often has more opportunity for abundance and entrepreneur. The playing field is much larger in a big corporation where everything is possible. I went to graduate school with Astro teller. He runs the special projects division of Google, previously called Google X but now just called X. He’s an employee at Google.
Do you make fear decisions are growth decisions?
For instance, do you sing your job because you are afraid you won’t get another job? Are you saying your job because you’re excited about the growth potential there?
Dare of the day
“Okay,” she said. “Sometimes I would do what I call a “dare of the day.” I would do something that I might be scared to do was out of my comfort zone.”
The day I crushed my 13-year-old
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “Your brain is what learned today but your body learns when you sleep.”
“Don’t be sad when you fail unhappy when you. Both are going to happen again and again at every level.”
Lessons I learned from playing poker for 365 straight days
Poker is a skill game pretending to be an chance game. Many things in life are like that: sales, negotiating, entrepreneurship, etc. all of these things have the element of chance and then the ones who are skillful take all the money from those who are not.
Appendix
You need a mentor. Else, you’ll sink to the bottom. Someone has to show you how to move and breathe.