James altucher quotes

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

Branding jails corporate America but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.

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.

We all have faith in something: usually a mixture of some personal beliefs with modern science. I am not like that. Mostly I just believe in what personally has worked for me.

Games are all about taking risks.

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

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

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

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

The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again.

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.

This is a cliché, but never listen to anyone who says “You can’t do that”. Those are usually the people who can’t do it. Not you.

If too many things have to happen in order to bring about the situation you want, then back out of it and try again later.

Infinite patience gets you immediate results.

I love being honest and intimate with people. I love building community. I love emailing with readers.

Stick with the people who love you and don’t spend a single second on the rest. Life will be better that way.

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.

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

The only way to make real wealth is to get rid of your salary. In a salary, by definition, you are creating wealth for others, and you are creating a chain and handcuffs for yourself.

Mistakes I've made in the past make me afraid to try new things in the future. I want to be perfect.

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

Products are valued higher than services.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Success, in every case, comes from the alchemy of your health, your mind, your positive energy, and the real world situations you persistently improve for yourself.

Only think about the people you enjoy. Only read the books you enjoy, that make you happy to be human. Only go to the events that actually make you laugh or fall in love. Only deal with the people who love you back, who are winners and want you to win too.

Being fearless precisely when you are most scared is the best hack.

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 don’t support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck.

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

Your bosses simply hate you. You created more and more value. They paid you less and less. That's the definition of disdain in my book.

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.

Help is a conversation. If one side talks too much, the other side will get bored. So make sure you help back when you can.

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

Requirements are for people who want to be unhappy. Because it’s your rules or the universe’s rules. The universe is going to win. Every time.

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.

A lot of times, people send me emails, and then I forget about them, or I never respond to them, or I respond to them weeks later.

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

Being grateful is the bridge between the world of nightmares and the world where we are free to say no. It's the bridge between the world of delusions and the world of creativity. It's the power that brings death back to life, the power that turns poverty to wealth and anger to compassion.

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.

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.

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.

When people give you their stated reason for doing something always assume they are giving you a reason that sounds good, but not the real reason.

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.

Worry will never solve tomorrow's problems. It will only take energy away from today.

Writing a book makes you an expert in the field. At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it's more impressive than handing a business card.

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

Buying coffee on the street instead of in a Starbucks is the poor man's way to get rich. In other words, you will never get rich by scratching out ten cents from your dollar.

Being a leader doesn't mean you created something or you did something great in the past or some other person has given you any kind of authority.

Luck is created by the prepared.

I made so many mistakes in my first successful business I'm almost embarrassed to recount them.

I'm a big believer in minimalism. Not materialist minimalism although that's part of it but time and energy minimalism. The body is given only so much energy a day.

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

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.

If you try to get 1% better each day at your health, at your relationships and the way you treat people, at your creativity, and at turning despair into gratitude, then that 1% compounds into an amazing person. Do that 1%. Take one action. Even if the actions is for one minute. The 1/1/1 strategy.

It's easy to get anonymous people to hate you. Have an opinion. Be creative. Be yourself.

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.

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

This is a new phase in history where art, science, business and spirit will join together in the pursuit of true wealth.

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.

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

Don't regret your mistakes. You'll always make mistakes. The better you are, the less mistakes you make. The only way to get better is to thoroughly analyze your mistakes.

It's very important to enjoy what you're doing or else you are always going to procrastinate.

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.

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

Life is a series of failures punctuated by brief successes.

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

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

It's in the valley of failure that we sow our seeds of success.

The best, very best scammers will always ask for your advice. This is their favorite technique. It makes them vulnerable. It flatters your ego.

Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again.

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

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

Dont buy into the 20-hours-a-day entrepreneur myth. You need to sleep 8 hours a day to have a focused mind.

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

We’re taught at an early age that we’re not good enough. That someone else has to choose us in order for us to be…what? Blessed? Rich? Certified? Legitimized? Educated? Partnership material?

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

Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.

The idea that we need to “pay our dues” is a lie told to us by people who wanted our efforts and labor on the cheap.

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

Only worry about your own happiness, which doesn’t have to be limited by anyone else’s stupidity unless you allow it to be.

Anxiety and gratitude cant live in the same head

The big thing in life is to focus on providing more value to people than they expect. The rest comes then.

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

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

Everyone is different. We all suffer from the disease of being human. There are a thousand cures but no antidotes.

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.

No longer is someone coming to hire you, to invest in your company, to sign you, to pick you. It's on you to make the most important decision in your life: Choose Yourself!

Every successful business, even Google, Facebook, Twitter, started with a combination of manual improvements and friends of the founders using the site.

Most people are not good people. In business, in art, in almost every 'world' I've been in, most people I've meet are pretty gray to black. It takes practice to be the person who is a source of compassion and honesty.

The best way I have ever found to fill that hole is not to seek external motivations to fill the emptiness, but to ignite the internal fire that will never go out. To light up my own inner sky.

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!

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.

If coming up with ten ideas sounds too hard, then come up with twenty.

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

The six people you must find today... Someone to love. Someone to thank. Someone to be grateful for. Someone to forgive Someone to forget Someone to admire.

Every game, and almost every life situation, has short cuts: ways you can get better without learning the entire literature of the game from beginning to end.

Out of silence comes the greatest creativity. Not when we are rushing and panicking.

I had ideas first, wealth second. It only worked in that order.

Nobody can tell you what to do. No matter what they pay you. No matter what obligations you feel you owe them. Every second defines you. Be who you are, not who anyone else is, or who anyone else wants you to be.

Hold your breath. Try holding your breath for just thirty seconds. That’s all it takes. Try it right now while you are looking at this line. Now…on the twenty-ninth second, do any opinions matter?

Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction-creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically. Always ask yourself, what can I improve? Who else can I talk to? Where else can I look?

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

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.