James Altucher Quotations

Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around you who dont support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck.

I'm scammed almost every day. Or, if not scammed, at the very least someone tries to scam me. Usually more than once a day.

Quantity and persistence will get you the outcomes you need.

The first rule of personal finance is that it's not personal and it's not financial. It's about your ability to make ten changes and not get too depressed over it.

Don't time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can change. Don't bookmark pages you've already read.

Honesty is the fastest way to prevent a mistake from turning into a failure.

If two people believe in the same story, they might be thousands of miles apart and total strangers, but they still have a sense they can trust each other.

Poker is a skill game pretending to be a chance game.

It's hard to know which stars in the sky will turn into black holes. And which ones will open up worm holes into entire new universes.

Honesty is about the scars. It's about the blemishes. But it's more than just bragging about failure, which could be a form of ego. It's about truly helping people.

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.

Be honest about mistakes. Even if you are afraid of what people think.

Nobody wants to make me a rich man. In fact, most people want to make me a very poor man. I can guarantee some people fantasize at night about how poor they can make me.

I loved Internet businesses, having built and sold one. And I loved the financial business, despite the fact that it was almost all a scam.

Procrastination is your body telling you you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing.

I find that many entrepreneurs are trying to do everything when it would be cheaper and more time-efficient to delegate, even if there are monetary costs associated with that.

Don't sweat it if you are stuck in the corporate job right now. But begin to plan ahead. I know from much personal experience that it takes 1-3 years to transition from total scratch to making a living from home in any career you want.

Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur: an ability to fail, an ability to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on those ideas, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

Life is better when your sinuses are clean, when your arteries are clean, and when your digestive tract is clean.

The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.

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

Don't forget: when you start a website, it's not yet a trusted site. So you have to bring people from a trusted site to your site to build up the trust in your site.

The people who know personal finance hide the money very carefully.

Become a beacon of enhancement, and then, when the night is gray, all of the boats will move towards you, bringing their bountiful riches.

I can tell you this: Everything in my life that I am happy about it is the product of a huge mistake.

Nobody is more worthy of love in the entire universe than you. I wish I had reminded myself of that more.

My grandfather was an illegal immigrant for the 60 or so years he was in the United States. I had another great-great-grandmother on my mom's side who snuck in in a suitcase.

Life is cold. People stay warm through the intimacy of a story.

Somebody has to be on stage, and some people have to be in the audience. That's the only difference. Don't put any thought as to why you are on the stage or how you need to be 'better' than the people in the audience. You aren't better. You're simply the speaker.

Money you lose you can always make back. But even five minutes of time lost is gone forever.

Poor speakers create an artificial divide between themselves and the audience. They feel they need to do this in order to establish their own credibility.

Poker is a charismatic game. People who are larger than life play poker and make their living from playing games and hustling.

Most people don't have the power of persuasion.

I always imagine a good leader is surrounded by people who call their mothers at the end of the day and tell them, 'Mom, you can't believe what I did today. Let me tell you about it.'

Here's what a phone is: It's a computer that has a little app on it that allows me to dial numbers and then talk to someone.

I saw 'Star Wars' when I was seven years old, and it changed my life.

We are incredibly poor predictors of our future.

You'll have to hire people to expand your business. But it's a good discipline to really question if you need each and every hire.

When I was 22, I was thrown out of graduate school and then fired from three jobs in a row at higher and higher salaries where I saved nothing.

When I was 22 years old, I thought girls would like me if I wrote a novel. I spent so much time writing that I was thrown out of graduate school.

When I was 7 years old, I plagiarized, word for word, stories from science fiction magazines so my teachers would think I was smart.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an employee, a student, a homemaker, a writer, it's time to start forgetting about all the ways the world has promised you safety and comfort.

When I give away a book for free, it gets my name out there. That has lifelong value for me that goes way beyond the few dollars I could maybe charge.

Whenever things are good, I always worry about what could go wrong.

The people who don't know personal finance have TV shows about it.

Ultimately, the best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening.

Investing is for wealth preservation, not wealth creation, so first you have to make wealth.

Teaching how to think is better than lecturing how to do it.

Read every book, blog, website, whatever, about what you want to be an expert in.

Read every sentence you write out loud. If it sounds boring, kill it.

You're the average of the five people you spend your time with.

America is a country of fighters. People who fought their way in and then continued fighting.

Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class.

The universe wants us to have fun doing more than one thing in life. That's how it learns. You don't have one purpose in life. You have maybe 500 or so.

I've had to change careers several times. Sometimes because my interests changed. Sometimes because all bridges have been burned beyond recognition, sometimes because I desperately needed money. And sometimes just because I hated everyone in my old career or they hated me.

I'm invested in about 13 private companies. I've advised probably another 50 private companies.

If you introduce person A to person B, and then person B is able to solve a pain point in his life, then you just made a good connection.

I've had lots of ups and downs. I've had situations where I've gone against the rules, and I've lost everything.

I keep track of my blog stats, Facebook subs, my Amazon rank, Twitter followers, Facebook likes per posts, my chess ranking. I get stressed when they all don't go up.

Take control of who you report to, what you do, what you create. Or start a business on the side. Deliver some value, any value, to anybody, to somebody, and watch that value compound into a career.

Don't buy into the 20-hours-a-day entrepreneur myth. You need to sleep 8 hours a day to have a focused mind.

I want every idea I have to make me money. I want every post I write to have 10,000 Facebook likes. I want every talk I give to have people laughing at all the right jokes. I want everyone to like me all the time.

If you spend a lot of energy on things that are wastes of time, then you waste energy, get sick, and die faster.

In every business I had ever started, even ones that had totally failed, I had kept good relations with the investors.

You can only make money doing what you love.

You can say no to people who make you feel bad about yourself. To people who backstab you or make you feel anxious in any way.

Do what you do with love, and success is a natural symptom.

Life is too long to reject the opportunities in front of you every day.

When the lights come on inside of you, everyone in the world can see a little better.

Robots are the new middle class. And everyone else will either be an entrepreneur or a temp staffer.

When you get in the mud with a pig, you get dirty and the pig gets happy.

People look for their passions. But often, the passions find you. How does your #‎ passion find you? When you are good at something, you get passionate about it. That’s it.

Life is a series of failures punctuated by brief successes

It's how you view the life inside you that creates the life outside of you. Everyday.

Arguing with people is like reading your e-mail at 4 in the morning. There is absolutely no good that can come of it. It's just scratching an itch.

Don't do something just for the money. Money is a side effect of persistence. You persist in things you are interested in. Explore your interests. Then persist. Then enjoy all the side effects.

People unconsciously know when you are not listening to them. Then they say 'No' to you.

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

If you don't live in the world of choosing, you live in the world of excusing.

But business is just a vehicle for transforming the ideas in your head into something real, something tangible, that actually improves the lives of others. To create something unique and beautiful and valuable is very hard. It’s very special to do. It doesn’t happen fast.

When we die our entire legacy is simply the added together strengths of all the connections we make with others. This is the ghost of ourselves we leave behind. This is showing up.

If we truly want to learn, we never learn when we are talking. We only learn when we are listening.

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

People build up a life, it becomes unsatisfactory, and they want to figure out how to change it like an outfit on a doll. But you can’t change life from the outside. We all know this now.

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.

Rejection-and the fear of rejection-is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves.

Don't Time travel into the past. You can't change it. Today it starts all over again. Every tomorrow is determined by every day.

Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. 100 years from now your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.

Do as many ideas as possible. The right idea will pick you.

What you need to do is build the house you will live in. You build that house by laying a solid foundation: by building physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.

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

The best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening.

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.

Sometimes it's better to just be quiet, to not think of anything at all. Out of silence comes the greatest creativity.

The reality is: when you're slouched over, not only are you not using the full potential of your brain, but you look untrustworthy.

My feeling, based on my own experience, is that aiming for grandiosity is the fastest route to failure.

Purpose is a man-made fiction. Nobody on their deathbed gets a plaque that says "he focused on only one thing for his entire life!" Those are counterfeit thoughts in a counterfeit society.

Reading is the best return on investment. You have to live your entire life in order to know one life. But with reading you can know 1000s of people's lives for almost no cost. What a great return!

Products are valued higher than services.