CHOOSE YOURSELF! by James Altucher, Dick Costolo

• The key is to be bold right in this moment.
• If you don’t make courageous choices for yourself, nobody else will.
• We can no longer afford to rely on others and repeat the same mistakes from our pasts.
• For the past five thousand years, people have been largely enslaved by a few select masters who understood how violence, religion, communication, debt, and class warfare all work together to subjugate a large group of people.
• In fact, “the American Dream” comes from a marketing campaign developed by Fannie Mae to convince Americans newly flush with cash to start taking mortgages.
• For our entire lives, we have been fooled by marketing slogans and the Masters of the Universe who created them.
• Prices are always going to go up. The reason is simple: deflation is scarier than inflation. In a deflationary environment, people stop buying things because they say to themselves, why should I buy today when I can buy tomorrow for cheaper? So the government will always institute policies that increase inflation.
• ZERO sectors in the economy are moving toward more full-time workers. Everything is either being cut back, moved toward outsourcing out of the country, or hiring temp workers.
• Companies simply don’t need the same amount of people anymore to be as productive as they’ve always been. We are moving toward a society without employees. It’s not here yet. But it will be. And that’s okay.
• 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.
• In this new era, you have two choices: become a temp staffer (not a horrible choice) or become an artist-entrepreneur.
• Rejection—and the fear of rejection—is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves.
• You can’t hate the people who reject you. You can’t let them get the best of you. Nor can you bless the people who love you. Everyone is acting out of his or her own self-interest.
• The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again.
• And obsessing on the things we can’t control is useless. It takes us out of the game. We have to choose to be in the game.
• 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?
• People are walking around blind. If you are the one who can see, you will be able to navigate through this new world.
• Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically.
• ONLY DO THINGS YOU ENJOY. This might seem obvious to you, but it isn’t to most.
• Ninety-nine percent of meetings don’t turn into money.
• 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 only real fire to cultivate is the fire inside of you. Nothing external will cultivate it.
• It’s important to avoid people who bring you down. Not in a cruel way. But avoid engaging or overly dwelling on people who are constantly draining you of energy.
• Think about the things we worry about. How, almost 100 percent of the time when we look back on a particular fear, we realize how useless worrying about it was.
• This is how we form a better society. First we become better as individuals. You can’t help others if you look in the mirror and hate what you see.
• Often when we attach our happiness to external goals: financial success, relationship success, etc., we get disappointed.
• It doesn’t matter where you get your ideas or how you write them, just do it.
• If you have a story to tell or a service to offer (it doesn’t matter what), love yourself enough to choose yourself. Take control of your work, your life, your art.
• You can find the tools to be happy right now.
• Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.
• Cubicles have become commodities. Whoever sits in a cubicle becomes replaceable.
• The opportunities are there, you just need to be flexible and fluid enough to take advantage of them.
• There’s the myth that entrepreneurs work twenty-four hours a day. This is horseshit. Most people, entrepreneurs or not, waste time.
• Much more value is created when I do the things I enjoy, when I work on my own creativity and continue to build the foundation for health.
• Never forget sales rule #1: Your best future clients are your current clients.
• Creation is art.
• The reality is there’s no such thing as competition. The world is big enough for two people in the same space.
• When you start a business and you have a service or product that is good enough for people to use over other similar products or services, then you are now an expert in your space. Even if you are new to the space, you’re an expert.
• Most jobs that existed twenty years ago aren’t needed now. Maybe they never were needed.
• studies show that an increase in salary only offers marginal to zero increase in “happiness” above a certain level. Why is that? Because of this basic fact: people spend what they make.
• The only real retirement plan is to Choose Yourself. To start a business or a platform or a lifestyle where you can put big chunks of money away.
• 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.
• Be an entrepreneur at work. An “entre-ployee.” Take control of who you report to, what you do, what you create.
• Deliver some value—any value—to somebody, anybody, and watch that value compound into a career.
• Abundance will never come from your job.
• Rule #1: Take out the middleman.
• Rule #2: Pick a boring business.
• You don’t have to come up with the new, new thing. Just do the old, old thing slightly better than everyone else.
• Rule #3: Get a customer! This is probably the most important rule for any entrepreneur.
• Rule #4: Build trust while you sleep.
• Rule #5: Blogging is not about money. Blogging is about trust.
• Rule #6: Say YES!
• Rule #7: Customer Service. You can treat each customer, new and old, like a real human being.
• When you are a small business, there’s no excuse for having poor customer service.
• Don’t forget: the best new customers are current customers.
• Every company is for sale. Every company has a price.
• Remember: when you write a book, it’s not all about book sales. Books give you credibility in your area of expertise or interest.
• Corporate America doesn’t solve problems. These companies are machines that keep churning out the same product, with minor tweaks, forever.
• the only way to get anywhere is to come up with ideas and then have a strong ability to sell them.
• If you want to create $1 billion in value, you need to find a problem that nobody has solved.
• To succeed at something: Know every product in the industry Know every patent Try out all the products Understand how the products are made Make a product that YOU would use every single day. You can’t sell it if you personally don’t LOVE it
• If you have something that’s worthwhile, you can’t be afraid to cold-call. They need you more than you need them.
• If you have an idea, don’t focus on the money. Don’t focus on how you will make a living. Do this: Build your product Sell it to a customer Start shipping Then quit your job.
• Never ask permission, ask for forgiveness later.
• Nobody questions anything if you have confidence, intelligence, and you are proud of your product.
• Take advantage of all publicity.
• If you don’t promote yourself, nobody else will.
• Don’t be a hater! Ninety-nine percent of people are haters.
• If you want to be successful, you need to study success, not hate it or be envious of it. If you are envious, then you will distance yourself from success and make it that much harder to get there. Never be jealous. Never think someone is “lucky.” Luck is created by the prepared. Never think that someone is undeserving of the money they have. That only puts you one more step removed from the freedom you aspire to.
• No amount of schooling will teach you how to choose yourself.
• Everyone has a “yes” buried inside of them. A good salesman knows how to find where that “yes” is buried and then how to tease it out. Great salesmen know it instinctively.
• NEGOTIATION IS WORTHLESS. SALES ARE EVERYTHING.
• Only negotiate with people you really want to sell to.
• Do the first project cheap. And whatever was in the spec, add at least two new cool features. This BLOWS AWAY the client. Don’t forget the client is a human, not a company.
• Don’t forget to always give extra. A simple effort will get you a customer for life.
• Often the real reason someone buys from you is not for your product, but for you.
• The idea muscle must be exercised every day.
• To become an idea machine takes about six to twelve months of daily practice with the idea muscle.
• If you think you can do something, if you have confidence, if you have creativity (developed by building up your idea muscle), the big ideas become smaller and smaller. Until there is no idea too big. Nothing you can’t at least attempt.
• The purpose is not to come up with a good idea. The purpose is to have thousands of ideas over time. To develop the idea muscle and turn it into a machine.
• The best ideas come from collisions between newer and older ideas.
• We only ever remember the things we are passionate about.
• By default, everyone gives the minimum amount of attention required to complete tasks.
• Don’t underestimate the power of being social.
• But the reality is, most ideas are bad. Most of my ideas are bad. I want you to feel comfortable coming up with hundreds of bad ideas.
• Studies show that it’s better to be around positive people than negative people. Positive people uplift you, negative people bring you down.
• The reality is, most people should not be at work. Why? Other than the many reasons already elucidated in this book, it’s simply because most people are bad at their jobs. It’s rare that someone is actually good at what they do. I know maybe ten people who are good at their jobs. This is not a criticism. It’s just a fact. And basically, robots are better.
• Robots are the new middle class. And everyone else will either be an entrepreneur or a temp staffer.
• Only worry about your own happiness, which doesn’t have to be limited by anyone else’s stupidity unless you allow it to be.
• Opinions are like money. No matter how much you know, there’s always someone who knows more. And they aren’t afraid to flaunt it.
• The point is, don’t focus on those things in the material world that you cannot control or possibly ever change, when you can focus on inner health, on your inner world, on the things that matter.
• Procrastination is your body telling you that you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing.
• There’s only so many seconds in a row you can think about something before you need to take time off and rejuvenate the creative muscles.
• Often, the successful mediocre entrepreneur should strive for excellence in ZERO-tasking. Do nothing. We always feel like we have to be “doing something” or we (or, I should say “I”) feel ashamed. Sometimes it’s better to just be quiet, to not think of anything at all.
• But again, by definition, most of us are pretty mediocre. We can strive for greatness but we will never hit it. That means we will often fail. Not ALWAYS fail. But often.
• Ultimately, life is a sentence of failures, punctuated only by the briefest of successes. So the mediocre entrepreneur learns two things from failure: First he learns directly how to overcome that particular failure. He’s highly motivated to not repeat the same mistakes. Second, he learns how to deal with the psychology of failure.
• The best ideas are when you take two older ideas that have nothing to do with each other, make them have sex with each other, and then build a business around the bastard, ugly child that results. The child who was so ugly nobody else wanted to touch it.
• “I thought being mediocre is supposed to be bad?” one might think. Shouldn’t we strive for greatness? And the answer is, “Of course we should! But let’s not forget that nine out of ten motorists think they are ‘above average drivers.’” People overestimate themselves. Don’t let overestimation get in the way of becoming fabulously rich, or at least successful enough that you can have your freedom, feed your family, and enjoy other things in life.
• Being mediocre doesn’t mean you won’t change the world. It means being honest with yourself and the people around you. And being honest at every level is really the most effective habit of all if you want to have massive success.
• Subtraction, and not addition, is what makes the window to the brain more clear, wipes away the smudges, and opens the drapes.
• Paranoia will destroy you.
• We ultimately have no way to predict the future. But our mind does one thing over and over that leaves us less intelligent: it constantly puts us in a fantasy world that includes our worst-case scenario.
• If we truly want to learn, we never learn when we are talking. We only learn when we are listening.
• Honesty is the only way to make money in today’s world.
• Dishonesty works…until it doesn’t. Everyone messes up. And when you are dishonest, you are given only one chance and then it’s over.
• HONESTY COMPOUNDS. It compounds exponentially. No matter what happens in your bank account, in your career, in your promotions, in your startups. Honesty compounds exponentially, not over days or weeks, but years and decades. More people trust your word and spread the news that you are a person to be sought out, sought after, given opportunity, given help, or given money. This is what will build your empire.
• To choose yourself you must first be fearless.
• The value of your network goes up exponentially when you view your contacts and resources not as a list but as a network of nodes on a graph.
• The way you create the network effect is by encouraging people in your network to connect to each other and to help each other.
• Nobody is perfect. It’s a lie to expect the people around you to be perfect.
• Excuses are easy lies we tell ourselves to cover up our failures.
• At heart, everyone wants to be perceived as special. That’s because everyone is special but are often never acknowledged that way.
• DO WHAT YOU SAY YOU ARE GOING TO DO. Be that guy.
• Always help people grow into their own potential.
• The world has changed, become different.
• Everyone will say you CAN’T.
• I’ve seen it in action repeatedly: no matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter who your audience is: 30 percent will love it, 30 percent will hate it, and 30 percent won’t care. Stick with the people who love you and don’t spend a single second on the rest. Life will be better that way.
• Nobody can tell you what to do. No matter what they pay you. No matter what obligations you feel you owe them.
• Nothing is more important than the cultivation of yourself.
• To be creative and stand out in today’s world, you must always be diversifying the artistic experience you put out.
• In general, all relationships in general shift and change.
• Probably the most productive schedule is to wake up early—do your work before people start showing up at your doorstep, on your phone, in your inbox, etc., and leave off at the point right when you are most excited to continue. Then you know it will be easy to start off the next day.
• Nothing comes out exactly how we want it. But we have to learn to roll with it and move to the next work.
• In other words: master the form you want to operate in, get experience, be willing to be imperfect, and then develop the confidence to play within that form, to develop your own style.
• up.As Allen famously stated, 80 percent of success is “showing up.” Nothing more really needs to be added there except it might be changed to “Ninety-nine percent of success for the entrepreneur is showing up.”
• Study the history of the form you want to master. Study every nuance.
• Despite our attempts to climb away from the worst fears of our childhood, success only magnifies those fears.
• Competent people move forward and do what they do.
• A creator can’t ever rest. No matter what you do, no matter what your creation is. Every moment is the audition.
• Every day, in all aspects of our lives, we are rejected. Rejection is probably the most powerful force in our lives.
• You’re going to be rejected all your life. In every way. It never hurts to understand why.
• The NORMAL thing is to be rejected.
• So acknowledge that it’s perfectly normal to feel rejected over something. And it’s perfectly normal to fear it for the future. In fact, to do otherwise would be to reject reality.
• When you’re a kid, everything has a question mark at the end of it. Only later do they turn into periods.