James Altucher Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Most people don’t have the power of persuasion.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

We are incredibly poor predictors of our future.

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

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

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.

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.’

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Quantity and persistence will get you the outcomes you need.

Games are all about taking risks.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Branding jails corporate America, but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.

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.