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.

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.

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

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.

Most people don't have the power of persuasion.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

We are incredibly poor predictors of our future.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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'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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Being a leader doesn't mean you are the guy who runs things.

I am a sore loser. It's not that I'm so competitive with others. But I'm competitive with myself. I like to do better than I did before.

How great is it to just rest and be happy and not move when you don't have to.

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.

You can only make money doing what you love.

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

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.

Anxiety and gratitude cant live in the same head

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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.

Infinite patience gets you immediate results.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

Luck is created by the prepared.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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