James Altucher Quotes & Sayings

One candle can light a thousand other candles and still remain lit itself. Be that candle. — James Altucher

Ideas are the dark matter of the universe. We know it's there, but only those "in the know" can see them. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

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

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

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

I call this "permission networking". My network is not the list of how many people I know. The strength of my network is how well everyone on the list of people I know, knows each other. Most people don't know this important principle. — James Altucher

Games are all about taking risks. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

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. — James Altucher

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

Excuses are easy lies we tell ourselves to cover up our failures. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

40% of people who graduate college never read a book again. If you are in the remaining 60% you are 1000x ahead of everyone else. — James Altucher

Have Themes Instead of Goals — James Altucher

The only thing you have control over is your mindset, your habits, and the choices you make internally about how you're going to deal with a situation. — James Altucher

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. — James Altucher

Everything that happens in your future is a direct result of what you do today. — James Altucher

Some people say, "Oh! You have to meditate!" You have to sit in the lotus position! Blah blah blah. No, you don't. All you have to do is stay in the present. When you catch yourself upset about the past or worried about the future, say to yourself, "Ah, I'm time traveling," then STOP. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

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. — James Altucher

There's always a gap between "what I have now" and "what I would like." And that gap is all of your excuses. All it takes to close the gap is to be creative and work your way through the excuses. I repeat: this is all it takes. — James Altucher

But once you divide the world into categories, into an "us" versus "them," then you immediately become a "them" and lose touch with who you really are. And — James Altucher

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. — James Altucher

Coming up with ten ideas a day is like exercise. And exercise makes the idea muscle stronger. — James Altucher

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. — James Altucher

We are incredibly poor predictors of our future. — James Altucher

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. — James Altucher

Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of humankind. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

Now, every day when I wake up I am grateful. I have to be. And I have to count the things that are abundant in my life. Literally count them. If I don't they will begin to disappear. I've watched them disappear before. I don't want it to happen again. In — James Altucher

entrepreneurs can't use the excuse that "I don't have time, I'm running a business." This is your business. — James Altucher

If something is not a "hell, YEAH!", then it's a "no! — James Altucher

Infinite patience gets you immediate results. — James Altucher

I would watch either Michael Cera doing comedy or Louis CK doing stand-up. This would — James Altucher

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

This is the final bubble. The US government now has to keep printing money to keep things stable. Maybe when the economy booms again they can hold off - but that might be a while. — James Altucher

Diversification is everything. You get past "this" by having lots of "that"s. — James Altucher

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

If you don't give yourself permission to create a new world, chances are nobody else will. — James Altucher

g) 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, and you can quit your day job. Year Five: You're making wealth. Sometimes you get frustrated in years one through four. You say, "Why isn't it happening yet?" That's okay. Just keep going. Or stop and pick a new field. — James Altucher

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. — James Altucher

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

I wrote a blog post about how the book is different from the blog and why I chose to go the self-publishing route. I wrote guests posts for blogs like Techcrunch, which helped immensely and for which I'm very grateful. I used my social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, Quora, and Pinterest. — James Altucher

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. — James Altucher

Remember to always tune your inner ear so you can listen for (and separate from each other) both the good reason and the real reason when anyone (including yourself) gives you an excuse. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

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. — James Altucher

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

Each excuse let me learn about myself, let me discover entire worlds of surprising possibilities. Each one led me to more and more love. — James Altucher

*Have humility. Learn from everyone you can. Even if it's just one takeaway. *Be grateful for the many lessons you get, and realize that everything is a lesson. *Only be around people you love and who inspire you. *Life is a billion times smaller than the point of a needle. Don't waste it doing things you were told to do. Do the things you love to do. *Health is the most important thing, else your body today won't let you enjoy tomorrow. *Every day, be creative. Creativity is a muscle. *You're going to make mistakes, but 80% is always good enough. Keep learning the next thing. *Life will constantly hit you until you are senseless. Don't forget these are lessons. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

Noticing your reactions to suffering, anger, pain is the key to well-being. — James Altucher

This book is about those other pieces, and getting them in place. It's about understanding the external myths that have broken down; the same ones that created the massive American middle class, which is now dying, and left us with the Choose Yourself era in the fallout. People are walking around blind. If you are the one who can see, you will be able to navigate through this new world. You will be the beacon that will enhance the lives of everyone around you and, in doing so, trigger the actual law of nature that says when you enhance everyone around you, you can't help but enhance yourself. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

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. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

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. — James Altucher

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.' — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

In the 1890's horses, carrying people to work, dropped 4.5 million tons of manure on the streets of Manhattan, every year. That was the big environmental problem of the day. "NYC will be buried in horse manure by 1950!" screamed the headlines. It doesn't matter what your opinion about this was. None of the people living in NY solved the problem despite the 1000s of opinions. People with passion for mechanics in Detroit made something called a car. Problem solved. — James Altucher

Luck is created by the prepared. — James Altucher

Poker is a skill game pretending to be a chance game. — James Altucher

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

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. — James Altucher

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

you don't have to worry about "finding" your passion. You're naturally going to get passionate about what you are good at. — James Altucher

The way you get good ideas is to do two things: 1) Read two hours a day. 2) Write ten ideas a day. By the end of a year, you will have read for almost one thousand hours and written down 3,600 ideas. One of these ideas will be a home run. — James Altucher

The definition of "success" for me is: "Is today successful? — James Altucher

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

Did you know the leading cause of suicide in the 1800s was dental pain? — James Altucher

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

It's one thing to know "The Secret" or take whatever life-affirming steps you've read about in order to bring positivity into your life, but it's something else altogether to actually create opportunities for yourself. You're definitely not going to find them reading a book. — James Altucher

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

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

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

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. — James Altucher

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! — James Altucher

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

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

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

Anxiety and gratitude cant live in the same head — James Altucher

Get Paid, Get Laid, Lose Weight" - because those are the three things people will pay for. — James Altucher

You no longer have to wait for the gods of corporate America, or universities, or media, or investors, to come down from the clouds and choose you for success. In every single industry, the middleman is being taken out of the picture, causing more disruption in employment but also greater efficiencies and more opportunities for unique ideas to generate real wealth. You can develop those ideas, execute on them, and choose yourself for success. — James Altucher