Guess quote

James Altucher [1968-0] American

Rank: 102
Author, Entrepreneur

James Altucher is an American hedge fund manager, entrepreneur, bestselling author, and podcaster. He has founded or cofounded more than 20 companies, including Reset Inc. and StockPickr and says he failed at 17 of them.

Failure, Finance, Trust, Business, Chance, Freedom, God, Health, History, Imagination, Knowledge, Learning, Love, Positive, Technology, Time, Travel

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.	God, Health, Knowledge, Love, Time	101
Honesty is the fastest way to prevent a mistake from turning into a failure.	Failure	102
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.		103
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.	Business	104
Poker is a skill game pretending to be a chance game.	Chance	105
Quantity and persistence will get you the outcomes you need.		106
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.		107
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.	Trust	108
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.	Freedom, History, Imagination	109
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.	Failure	110
Procrastination is your body telling you you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing.		111
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.	Finance	112
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.	Trust	113
Don't time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can change. Don't bookmark pages you've already read.	Travel	114
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.		115
Be honest about mistakes. Even if you are afraid of what people think.		116
Poker is a charismatic game. People who are larger than life play poker and make their living from playing games and hustling.		117
The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.		118
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.		119
Become a beacon of enhancement, and then, when the night is gray, all of the boats will move towards you, bringing their bountiful riches.		120
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.		121
Every day, you reinvent yourself. You're always in motion. But you decide every day: forward or backward.		122
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.		123
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.		124
I can tell you this: Everything in my life that I am happy about it is the product of a huge mistake.		125
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.	Learning	126
The people who don't know personal finance have TV shows about it.	Finance	201
The people who know personal finance hide the money very carefully.	Finance	202
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.		203
Life is better when your sinuses are clean, when your arteries are clean, and when your digestive tract is clean.		204
Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class.	Technology	205
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.	Positive	206
Read every book, blog, website, whatever, about what you want to be an expert in.		207
You can only make money doing what you love.		208
Being a leader doesn't mean you are the guy who runs things.		209
Everyone is different. We all suffer from the disease of being human. There are a thousand cures but no antidotes.		210
Don't buy into the 20-hours-a-day entrepreneur myth. You need to sleep 8 hours a day to have a focused mind.		211
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.		212
Most people don't have the power of persuasion.		213
I saw 'Star Wars' when I was seven years old, and it changed my life.		214
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.		215
In every business I had ever started, even ones that had totally failed, I had kept good relations with the investors.		216
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. One hundred 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.		217
Do what you do with love, and success is a natural symptom.		218
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.		219
My feeling, based on my own experience, is that aiming for grandiosity is the fastest route to failure.	Failure	220
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.		221
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.		222
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.		223
The best, very best scammers will always ask for your advice. This is their favorite technique. It makes them vulnerable. It flatters your ego.		224
When I was 7 years old, I plagiarized, word for word, stories from science fiction magazines so my teachers would think I was smart.		225
Life is cold. People stay warm through the intimacy of a story.		226
Games are all about taking risks.		301
You're the average of the five people you spend your time with.		302
Investing is for wealth preservation, not wealth creation, so first you have to make wealth.		303
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.		304
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.		305
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.		306
Nobody is more worthy of love in the entire universe than you. I wish I had reminded myself of that more.		307
I've had lots of ups and downs. I've had situations where I've gone against the rules, and I've lost everything.		308
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.		309
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.		310
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.		311
How great is it to just rest and be happy and not move when you don't have to.		312
Every successful business, even Google, Facebook, Twitter, started with a combination of manual improvements and friends of the founders using the site.		313
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.		314
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.		315
Ultimately, the best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening.		316
Branding jails corporate America, but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.		317
I'm invested in about 13 private companies. I've advised probably another 50 private companies.		318
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.		319
Products are valued higher than services.		320
Whenever things are good, I always worry about what could go wrong.		321
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.		322
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.		323
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.		324
I made so many mistakes in my first successful business I'm almost embarrassed to recount them.		325
I love being honest and intimate with people. I love building community. I love emailing with readers.		326
Mistakes I've made in the past make me afraid to try new things in the future. I want to be perfect.		401
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.		402
America is a country of fighters. People who fought their way in and then continued fighting.		403
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.		404
Read every sentence you write out loud. If it sounds boring, kill it.		405
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.		406
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.		407
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.		408
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.		409
We are incredibly poor predictors of our future.		410
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.		411
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.'		412
The reality is: when you're slouched over, not only are you not using the full potential of your brain, but you look untrustworthy.		413
People unconsciously know when you are not listening to them. Then they say 'No' to you.		414
Worry will never solve tomorrow's problems. It will only take energy away from today.		415
Money you lose you can always make back. But even five minutes of time lost is gone forever.		416
Every tomorrow is determined by every today.		417
If you spend a lot of energy on things that are wastes of time, then you waste energy, get sick, and die faster.		418

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