Boston Mutual Cash Surrender: Fill & Download for Free

I used to do a Q&A on Twitter every week. I did this for six years.The answers were only 140 characters long. But there were lots of questions and lots of answers. Sometimes the Q&A would stop in an hour, but sometimes it would be keep going until there were no more questions.Maybe over six years, I answered 20,000–30,000 questions.I took some of the answers and expanded them out into a book: FAQ ME. I published the book on Amazon.Then I expanded out the next several years worth of questions and put them in another book, FAQ ME TOO.I never published FAQ ME TOO.Until now…Here it is below:BUSINESS / ENTREPRENEURSHIPPotential client that has shown interest in my product no longer returns my calls, should I drive to him and see what's going on? –@TheRakkerThis is a law of the universe: time is relative. When you need money or love, time moves faster for you. When you are giving money or love, time moves slower.When I was raising money for a hedge fund I'd pitch someone on Thursday. It would be a great meeting. On Friday I'd be pacing back and forth, "is he really going to let this weekend go by without calling me about the money?" I'd think. Would someone actually be THAT RUDE?Or one time I was going out with someone. I listed for her the reasons why I thought we were great together. I wanted her to come up with a similar list. "I'll sit by the phone until you call me back with your list," I said. The phone never rang all night. When I woke up I, of course, had to call her. "Oh," she said, "you mean you wanted that list right away?"RIGHT AWAY? IT WAS THE WHOLE FUCKING NIGHT THAT WENT BY.When someone wanted me to put money in their business I said, "looks good, I'll get back to you on it." Three weeks later I got an impassioned hand-written note: "Did I do something wrong? I thought you were a good guy and then I didn't hear from you for three weeks." When I was single I would lose facebook friends if I didn't call a girl back fast enough. Not only would she unfriend me but all of our mutual friends.Time is relative. But there are corollaries to that. If somethinig approaches the speed of light, mass gets infinitely big and time slows down to zero. If you love someone A LOT and they don't return that love then the importance of everymoment gets unnnaturally big and timefeels infinitely slow.So what you are going through is the "time is relative" phenomenon. Basically, your client hates you. But you want your client badly. He has no interest at all and never wantsto hear from you again. But his importance has become unnaturally big and time waiting for him has become infinitely slow. SO it's hard to move on with life. You need to moving at the same speed and as all of your other potenital opportunities.You need to diffuse the matter. Or reach a middle ground. Here's how you reach a middle ground. Send update letters once a month. No pressure. "Here's our latest products". "Here's our latest returns." "here's our latest clients". And so on. Just an update. Your moving timeand space back to normal. Will he ever respond. Probably not.But the laws of the universe have been obeyed. And you haven't fallen into a black hole of waiting and frustration. The world is safely in it's normal orbit. And you get a chance to spring forward life again instead of falling right into the sun.—-Is it worth having a big client if you know they might be a pain to work with? –@BenDelphiaNo. Fire that client. I don't care how much money they pay you. There's a saying, "God doesn't close one window without opening another." Take out the word "God" if you don't like it. "One window doesn't close without another one opening". Surrender to that quote. It ALWAYS works. It might not seem like it when one window closes, particularly if it closes on your hands. Particularly when it hurts and you scream out loud. And cry. But it works.I had a client once who never paid on time, who always asked for bribes, who called me at three in the morning begging for advice, who lied constantly about what the size and scope of every deal was. Who would literally yell at me if I wasn't his friend. I would go to psychiatrists and even astrologers (and sometimes psychiatrist/astrologers) to figure out how I can be true to myself if I was constantly faking being friends with this client. I hated myself, hated him, hated going to work at my own business.Until I finally dropped him. And I started focusing on the good clients. And they started feeding my business more work. And they paid on time. And they treated me with respect. And I didn't have to pretend to be something I wasn't. And I could sincerely say what I thought and not be afraid of being cursed at or lose the business or made fun of or not paid on time. I stopped living in fear. And my business got bigger.And then I sold the business as fast as I could. Because life is too short.What is your biggest advice in obtaining success as an entrepreneur? –@SerenaBlasingThere is no such thing as success as an entrepreneur.If you ask ten different people what success means you might get ten different answers. Financial freedom, paying down debts, building a big company, personal freedom, etc and there might be psychological goals as well: proving everyone wrong, proving my parents wrong, proving that I can make the impossible possible, and so on. Many rich people become entrepreneurs even though they have financial freedom already. Many poor people become "lifestyle entrepreneurs" - they never get rich from their business but their business sustains their lifestyle.But one thing is in common with anyone who truly is a successful entrepreneur: they set out to create a solution that would make people's lives easier.If you always have the affirmation in your mind, "I need to give to receive" Give and You Will Receive - Altucher Confidential, and force all of your thoughts to coalesce around that affirmation, then over time and experience you will create a product or service that will make people's lives easier or better or wealthier. This is a service that people will pay you more than cost for.I've been involved in many successful businesses. I've also been involved in many unsuccessful businesses.I've written about many of them here. For instance, I thought I had a great idea once: 140love.com. I created a dating site on top of twitter. I thought it was brilliant and I even had investors. What could be better: a dating site (which is a universally accepted successful business model - bringing two people together so they can kiss, have sex, have great pleasure, get married, have kids, prolong the human race, etc) combined with twitter, the fastest growing social network at the time. I was single then and heavily using both dating services and twitter. Plus twitter was "cool" in the tech community and I wanted to be cool.The idea would be that people can't fake it on twitter. My service would match you with people similar to you and then you could judge whether or not you want to go out with them by their tweet feed. No bullshit profiles. You'd see the real them with their tweets.Here's the problem. The very basic problem. On dating sites people like to be largely anonymous. On twitter, people weren't anonymous. So I wasn't helping anyone. If anything, I'd hurt anyone who signed up for 140love. Failure. I spent $40,000 developing it.Here's another failure: http://Junglesmash.com. I wrote about it here An Idea I Had that Went Down the Drain - Altucher Confidential but I'll describe really quickly. I wanted to crowdsource advertising. Typically a big brand hires an ad agency and pays them millions of dollars to create and then spread an ad campaign. I love a good ad.So I set up a site, I picked a random brand (Crest) and offered $2000 to anyone who made an ad that I liked. Hundreds of people submitted ads. PROCTER & GAMBLE EVEN SUBMITTED ADS. I knew this was going to be a success because:I was helping people make money.I was helping people have an outlet for their creativity where they can make money.I was reducing the costs of creating an ad campaign by the major brands. I always think when you take out the middleman that's a valuable service you can offer as an entrepreneur.I was reducing the costs of distribution since the good ad campaigns could conceivably grow viral and create brand awareness.Finally, I was getting results. Both people and brands were responding.So why did this fail? Because I personally failed. It's still a good idea. But precisely those months I was going through a separation, moving houses, I was trying to start a fund that was failing, the financial crisis was scaring me, and I was slipping through the rabbit hole leading me into depression, despair, and a black hole of desperation that would take me awhile to get out of. When I came out the other side I was better for it, but I no longer was doing it.Other businesses I was involved in that I consider successful:Reset, Inc. - Back in 1995, very few companies had a website. My only competitors were companies like Razorfish that would charge a million dollars for a 5 page website. I was able to compete on price and quality and grew my business until I sold it.Stockpickr - a financial site that was pure stock ideas. No news. In order to pick stocks you have to avoid the news. I've been involved in the management of several public companies. What you see on the inside is a lot different from what you see on the outside. It's like a black hole. Nobody knows what really goes on inside a black hole because information would have to escape the gravitational pull at faster than the speed of light. Same thing with a public company. So I created the one website that had ten different ways to come up with stock ideas, combined it with community, and did away with all news. The result was millions of unique visitors per month plus good advertisers like Fidelity.A mental health facility - The mental health space is very regulated. And it's all about filling beds. This particular facility treated teenage addicts. They had a way of getting through all the regulations. They also had a way of quickly expanding their number of beds by buying cheap hotels and converting them. There were no other facilities in their state so they had a monopoly. So once again, helping people in ways that the people could not otherwise be helped. The business sold for a huge multiple of earnings.There are others but when I look back on the ones that were successful versus the good ideas I described above that was unsuccessful I can think of two common denominators:Help others. You have to really make sure you're not just coming up with a "cool" idea but that you are actually solving a problem that many people have.Persistence. In every business I probably thought I was going out of business over a hundred times. Or my investment (in cases like Buddy Media) was going to zero many times. You have to constantly problem solve and not judge yourself so harshly on your bad decisions that you give up. I'll have another post on persistence. But at the very least have this checklist before you start a business.If you have just these two things then success will be achieved, whether or not it matches your definition of success.What kind of startup would get your attention - enough for you to talk about it? –@AnujAdhiyaA startup that would get my attention is one that i would use every day.With startups most people focus on the idea. Everybody wants the biggest, baddest, best new new thing. The thing that will beat Google combined with Apple combined with Facebook.It ain't gonna happen. Or, at the very least, if someone had that idea they are not going to show it to me. They are going to show it to Peter Thiel. And with his secret Illuminati of Paypal mafia he's going to invest $200,000 and make $5 billion on it while I sit out here in the cold trying to figure out why I'm not one of the cool guys who got into Facebook and Twitter in the seed round.I'm no good, by myself, at investing in startups. One time I invested in a startup with profits, with low capital expenditures, with growing revenues, and I did it all by myself because I thought I have to grab all this for me. I invested a big amount. Then the company somehow went out of business or the CEO stole the money or whatever. I don't know. It was part of how I went broke.So now I have a checklist of when to invest. Whenever I follow this checklist, I make a lot of money. Whenever I don't follow this checklist, I lose money. It's like clockwork.The CEO has to have built and sold a similar business before. This would've kept me out of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook (but not Twitter, Intel, or Yahoo). I basically have no way to judge a product. It may be good or it may not be. But if the CEO has done it before then I can check the box. It doesn't have to be the exact same product (Buddy Media is an example where I invested and Lazerow had started two prior businesses but none exactly related to Facebook although I would say similar) but the CEO needs to be smarter than me in the area he's starting his business.I need to have good co-investors. I'm an investor in Israeli startup CTera, for instance, where Benchmark Capital and Venrock are my co-investors. They are smarter than me and they have a team of bloodhounds who did due diligence. In addition, I called the heads of sales in every country. I called customers. I did background checks, etc. So my due diligence combined with the due diligence of people smarter than me was enough to keep me happy. For Buddy Media, Peter Thiel was among the co-investors. BAM!Demographics have to be on my side. I'll use Buddy Media again as an example. This was in 2007 when I invested. A month earlier I had gone on CNBC saying that I thought Facebook would eventually be worth $100 billion. At the time I don't even know if it was valued at one billion but I had a strong feeling about the demographic trend. How come? Because I was using it every day and more and more people I knew from every walk of my life were using it, regardless of their backgrounds. So this was happening. I'm invested in another company right now (IPO expected within the next month) that does personalized cancer diagnostics. 75 million baby boomers are aging. A lot of them will get cancer. They all want to live forever. BOOM! Huge market.I have to get a deal. The valuation has to be better than any comparable investment out there. Somehow I have to be getting a discount to where I think the value is in my head. It has to be a discount to RIGHT NOW valuations. Not to where I think the company is going. Not everyone wants to sell pieces of their companies at a discount. Often you have to wait for the right environment where discounts are available and everyone else is afraid to invest. There are other tricks to getting a deal. For instance, when venture capitalists invest they do something I normally consider stupid. They try to get a deal by saying "we have to at least get our money back if the company sells". This is called a "liquidation preference". They might get other terms also.Guess what? That makes their stock more expensive than common stock. BUT when the company is sold or IPOs, all the preferred stock converts to common stock anyway. Let me tell you something. The company is either going to exit for a higher price or the company is going to go out of business. Either way the preferred equals the common stock. Zero or HUGE. So once the preferred price is established by the big shot venture capitalists you can often get a discount by buying common stock. This doesn't always work (Groupon) but it usually works if you are making sure you are getting a discount. Great in environments like right now where everyone is afraid of pulling another Groupon.I have to see the exit. I have to have a general sense of how big the company can grow and what the exit can look like. I'm helped considerably by the fact that my co-investors are smarter than me and they are all looking for 10x returns on their investments. So we'll see.I keep the investment small. Never more than 1-2% of the capital I have to invest. So no one investment will destroy me.And that's what gets me excited about an investment.What's the best advice for a 24yr old entrepreneur? –@BumperPicknerThere's only one advice: persistence.How to be persistent:Know that failure happens every day. In small ways and in big ways. I would hire the wrong person (small way), I would start the wrong business (big way), I'd make the wrong investment (medium way, depending on size of investment). But failure happens every day. If 50% of your decisions work out then you are doing ok.Don't smoke crack. When I started my wireless software business I thought immediately it was a big Fortune 500 company that would go public and make billions. When someone wanted to negotiate valuation down I was like, "are you crazy?! We are worth ten times that!" Someone once offered to buy the company for $70 million. NO WAY! I was smoking my own crack. I've seen a lot of crack smokers since then. I can always tell a crack smoker. They say their name of their company and it's like they are saying "Coca-Cola" a brand that has existed forever that will never go away. Always double-check that you aren't smoking crack.Don't become attached to one idea. You're 24. Let's look at similar 24 year olds. Larry Page and Sergey Bring came up with their little tweak on search algorithms and they called it first "Backrub" and then "Google". They spelled "Googol wrong. Perhaps on purpose. In any case, they really wanted to be academics. So they tried to sell their business to Yahoo. Guess what they asked. ONE MILLION DOLLARS! And Yahoo said, "no". (see also 10 Unusual Things I Didn't Know About Google 10 Unusual Things I Didn't Know About Google (also: the worst VC decision in history) - Altucher Confidential)They were probably dreaming of what they would do with $500,000 each. History proved Yahoo wrong. But guess what. That was the ONLY time basically that a situation like that worked out for the entrepreneur. Take the money and run. When you are 24 don't get religious about any idea. If someone offers you money that increases your odds of financial stability, you take it. You'll be an entrepreneur for the rest of your life. You'll make a lot of money no matter what. But always TAKE money that is offered you.Don't die in the details. In other words: don't try to patent your idea. Don't get bogged down in legal agreements. Don't get bogged down with accountants. Focus on only one thing: building a product that someone wants, and then getting someone to pay you for it. If nobody will pay you for it, tweak your idea until someone does, or bundle your product as a service that you offer that someone will you for. Ask potential customers for advice on what they will pay for. Keep repeating this until someone pays you. Then worry about the details, as your business is growing.The buck stops with you. In the beginning you have all of these roles: CEO, director of product development, head of marketing, head of sales, head of customer service, head of investor relations. Don't give those roles to anyone else unless you absolutely trust them. Don't delegate before you have something to delegate.Keep adding ideas. You have a product. Great. Now add a new feature. Done? Add a new one. Done? Ok, add another. And keep going. I wish in my first business I had done that. I made money but not as much as I think I could've.Try not to raise money. Of course, at 24, you don't have money. But see how far you can go without money. If your product can start off as a service, then your customers will pay your bills. Eventually you build up and rent a small space. eventually you build from there and hire an intern. And so on. You can raise money when people are begging to give you money. That's the best time to raise money. When it's easy. And then always raise when it's easy. Because you don't want to be stuck when it's hard.Give up fast. If an idea is not working, move on. The best way to push a boat is to let the current push it. You always want to go with the current. You'll feel when things are easy and you are going with the flow. Don't force it. If you are forcing it then eventually you'll end up where you started.Learn from mistakes. You failed? You made a bad decisions? Learn, analyze, study, write it down, figure it out. You won't make the same mistake twice. Also, be ready to blame yourself. Don't blame others. If your business failed then then only fault is with you. Not y0ur partners (pick better partners next time - your fault) and not your clients (pick better clients). It's ALWAYS your fault when you fail.I've just started a website for a small photography business. What's are some good ways to get traffic to the site? –@pscolsThere's maybe an entire post for this now that I brainstorm on it.There's like a ladder that starts at quality and ends with quantity. Let's brainstorm the steps in the middle.Quality. When I started Stockpickr! Your Source for Stock Ideas I wanted a lot of traffic for it. So I did what no other site in the financial space was doing. I put up no news but non-stop ideas for stock picks. And I based the picks not on my opinions but on the opinions of great investors like Warren Buffett, etc but also other investors in the community. And I kept adding features. Like we added a Q&A (sort of a "quora for stocks") that drove a lot of traffic. So it was a quality site. For my blog, as another example, I try to follow these two rules: quality writing + it helps people.Everything else is quantity</strong>. It's about choosing yourself rather than letting other people choose you. I used to think "If only the Wall St Journal published my articles then I would be happy" but nothing could be further from the truth anymore. Now the truth is: you need to be in charge of your own destiny. The big, bad media companies may reach down from the skies and choose you but they will do so on their terms and not yours, even if it's against their own best interests to build your brand. Only you will build your brand.So here's how you choose yourself.Comment on every blog related to your site. Sometimes link back to your blog but usually don't. Don't be annoying. Instead, become a trusted source and friend on every blog you comment on.Syndicate material and ideas to the top blogs in your sector (in your case, the photo biz)Put your photos all over Pinterest. Follow everyone you can on Pinterest so people follow back.Create fan pages for different topics related to your photos on Facebook The Choose Yourself Era - How to Get 100,000 Facebook Fans - Altucher Confidential Use my techniques I describe here to get 100,000+ fans for each page. Then put your photos on the page so it appears in the newsfeeds of your fans. Photos on Facebook get the highest engagement and will improve the "EdgeRank" for all your pages so they get on more and more newsfeeds.You have a really great photo? tweet it.</strong> Pay to promote the tweet.Write a book on photography. Self-publish. Give it away for 99 cents or cheaper if you can. Here's my tips on self-publishing Self-Publishing Your Own Book is the New Business Card - Altucher ConfidentialAnswer questions about photography on QuoraLink with other photographers</strong> on LinkedInOver time you will have created a platform. And it will take time. but you will build your base and it will be as if you have your own television network that you can broadcast out your message to. But, of course, it all boils down to step 1. Make you you have the greatest message in the world to broadcast.What is the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make? –@LeonBenson2One time I started a company and raised a quick $30 million and bought a bunch of companies and then tried to go public and then it went down in flames and everyone lost everything. How I Screwed Yasser Arafat out of $ 2mm (and lost $ 100mm in the process) - Altucher ConfidentialAnother time I started a company and raised $0 and everyone made millions.I'll tell you the difference between the two companies. Money.Not how much money I raised. But how much I thought about it.When I started the first company above all I would think about was how much money I was going to make. I was already spending it. I had it all planned out. I was even looking for apartments. I was planning out what my personal Super Bowl commercial would look like. I was going to ask Spike Jonze to direct it. I was wondering what kind of private jet I would buy.What did the company do? You might ask. Well, I don't know. I bought a company, then two, then three. They all seemed to be in the "wireless Internet" space. But I had no idea what they did. We tried to go public. CS First Boston was going to take us public. They came back to us and said, "we have no idea what you do." Nobody in upper management (where I was CEO) had a clue what we did for a living. Were we even making money? I had no idea. We had $30 million in the bank. Who cares? I tried to sell the company. We could've sold for maybe $50 million. Not enough! We were going to go public for a billion!And we lost everything.The second company started during a period when I had almost nothing in the bank. The second I started the company I stopped checking my bank account like I was obsessively doing every ten minutes of the day to see when it was, exactly, the moment that I would disappear and die.I started to love what I was doing. I came up with more and more ideas for the site. I wanted the site to be perfect. I kept adding more features. It was perfect. Yahoo loved my site. AOL did. I went up to Google and they loved it. Reuters loved it. Everyone did. People would write me and say, "please remove my account from your site because I'm too addicted to it."Not once did I check my bank account. I knew I had value. I was creating more and more of it every day. I had no more need to worry about when I was going broke. Even though venture capitalists were calling me every day I said "no" to all of them. And eventually I sold the business and was very happy. And, without my love pumping into the site every day, the site quickly degenerated. I feel bad looking at it now. It's ugly.The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make is the biggest mistake people make when looking for a spouse. Don't think about money. Fall in love.How important is focusing on one business venture at a time? What about entrepreneurship? –@TiisetsoMalomaIt's not important at all to focus on one business venture at a time. In fact, I would counsel the opposite.Let's take Google as an example. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were just starting Google they had one goal. Sell it as quickly as possible so they could get back to the other things that interested them: academia. They tried to sell Google for $1 million to Yahoo and Yahoo said "no". So they were stuck with Google and they ran with it, not figuring out how to generate revenues until another four years went by.When I started Stockpickr! Your Source for Stock Ideas I started probably 10 other businesses at the same time. I built http://keauty.com to be a beauty contest. I built http://SmokeLove.com to be a dating site for smokers. I built a site that helped people create contests. I really pushed hard on every idea. I had VCs interested in several of the ideas. But finally, like in a horse race, Stockpickr! Your Source for Stock Ideas stuck it's nose out in front as the site that was getting the most attention. So I dropped the others and ONLY THEN I focused.Always have multiple balls in the air in the beginning. This way if one falls to the ground, you are still in the show. The true entrepreneur is looking at everything for opportunity. Opportunity, though, takes its time before giving it's blessing on one idea over another. Give it that time, but also give it many options.Did you start having networking lunches with wealthy people before or after u became wealthy? Thanks! –@tresacaNo, I was always wealthy when I networked. Not in money but in ideas. No random person wants to have lunch with you. Nor do they care if you pay for the lunch. What the random person needs is an idea or a connection that will make their life better or that will make them more money. I prepare at least 1-3 hours before any lunch I have with a new person.So have wealth in ideas. This is the greatest thing you can offer someone. Before I ever meet someone, and this counts for the last 20 years of having lunch with people, I prepare ideas that I think will help them. I try not to think of how they can help me. If I help them, I know that sometime in the future they will help me. Networking is not about drawing a giant graph on your whiteboard of all the people you are connected to, and who they are connected to, and so on down the chain.Networking is about who you have given to without any expectation in return. The entire world is like this quantum bank of probabilities. If you increases someone's probable chance of success, then you have just increased your quantum net worth in this bank. Eventually you will be able to cash that in. Not necessarily in money. Not necessarily in a new job. But you will be able to cash it in. In the world of infinite possibility. It will be wonderful.As a startup, what's the fastest and easiest way to gain reputation with customers aside from a great product? –@dexteryzI know there are some books on this but I, unfortunately, have never read them. I've made a lot of mistakes in this area where I built a reputation and then I lost it. 100% of the time it had to do with poor communication. For instance, in October, 2008 I was managing a small piece of someone else's hedge fund. I was down that month. At the same time, my marriage was falling apart. It had actually been falling apart for years but this particular month it was REALLY falling apart. Arguments every day that were raw to the bone. All I can remember on top of this is that the financial system was also falling apart and for some reason it was raining every day.I'm sure if I looked back at the weather reports it would show that it wasn't raining every day. But I can't remember a single day where it wasn't raining. Where I wasn't on my hammock and being rained on. Where I wasn't walking back from the local museum where I tried to hide in the afternoons and being completely drenched. Where I wasn't outside talking to my partners and thinking, "this phone will get ruined in the rain". Where my kids weren't inside the house all the time wondering when I would come in and play with them. It was wet, raining, and my eyes were blurry from crying.And one time my "customer" called me and said, "you really need to learn to communicate with people". And he pulled his money from me. I've written about this before but now we are friends and work together often on a deal by deal basis. But at the time I thought I would never talk to him again. That time when we spoke was only after I had avoided about 20 of his calls and emails.The same thing happened when building websites for a living. I had a designer that nobody wanted to use. And yet he was the designer on almost all of the projects. So I was avoiding the calls from customers begging me tp take him off the project. And I was avoiding talking to him about it. Finally, companies would call me in for a face to face meeting (always ugly. ugly faces everywhere, ugly scowls, ugly comments, always "we wish we didn't have to have this talk", etc) and I'd have to reel them back in.So here's my guidelines on keeping reputation for ANY business: service or product businesses.stay in touch with customers. If you have only a few customers, call them every few days, even if it's just to chat. You may find hidden needs that they have that you can fulfill, even for free.don't be afraid to do extra. I always try to surprise customers with extra service. Something they didn't expect. Then they know that with all the other guys they will get what they see, with me - they will get a surprise. Always.blog. If you have many customers, you can keep in touch with them via blogging. And with blogging, follow my suggestions 10 Rules About Blogging - Altucher Confidential. Bleed, add value, share ideas, and then syndicate also to get those ideas out as far as possible.customer service. When a customer has a problem, solve it immediately. Give them things for free. Scour twitter for comments about you and respond to them. Every forum is a customer service forum for you."Thank you". Say thank you to everyone. Commenters, twitters, customers. Say thank you in every way you know possible."Crush it". I'm borrowing this from Gary Vaynerchuk's book "Crushing It" and I know it works because I've used it. Go on every blog related to your company's sector and start posting comments. Don't link back to your site always. Only sometimes. Maybe one in five. Go on Quora, Pinterest, Wikipedia and become a quality source about all things related to your company. I use every social medium as a channel. You should also.Become the source. Look at Yahoo. They were a website that became big by being THE source for all other websites. Find everything related to your sector. Become the directory of all tools, websites, blogs, related to your sector. OWN the sector. On facebook, twitter, your site, pinterest, etc.Building a great product is, as you point out, #1. But no man is an island and people live and die by communication. Keep people from loneliness and you have a customer for life.When you quit your job and focused on your business, did you still hate mondays? –@martefrainI used to love my job. It was only when I began to hate Mondays, in fact when I hated every day, that I knew I had to quit it and focus on building the business that until then had just been a side-business.I built the business up and eventually sold it. It was a good result.BUT, here's the problem. You never get rid of the Mondays. Every day becomes a Monday. When you are at a boring corporate job you have several things going for you: nobody really cares that much at the job. Everyone leaves their work at the desk. Everyone takes off weekends. Everyone takes vacations. And during the summer nobody is expecting much from you.That all changes when you have your own business. Here are the things you suddenly start worrying about:Is every project getting done on timeWhat else can I be doing for each clientHow do I get new clients. It's hard. Do I just cold-call them? How do I get word of mouth going? Do I go to parties? Do I "pivot"? Argh, what do I do!?I know I have enough cash coming in to pay employees for 3 more months. But what happens then? What happens on month 4?Will my family survive if the business crashes in 12 months?Who can I sell my business to? How do I start preparing to sell my business?One of my employees today is crying because her boss (my partner) was talking about her behind her back and she heard? How do I talk to her about it? How do I talk to him about it?Another employee is sleeping with another employee and its not going to work out. How will this effect the project they are both working on for our biggest client?I feel like I need a head of sales but everyone I talk to wants a big piece of the company? How do I structure this?Should I productize my service? Will I make more money that way?How do I get client XYZ to pay his bills?And on and on. The worries never end. You never sleep. Every day becomes Monday. Every minute becomes 3am Monday morning. Every day there is constant battles and meager successes to drive you forward. And sometimes there are stretches where it's all 2 steps forward and three steps backwards.I never once considered going back to the corporate job. It would be embarassing. A failure. I had to keep going forward. But the Mondays never ended. And 17 years later, the Mondays still don't end. But you get used to it. Heck, it's Monday right now! And I have 10,000 times more issues than I ever had at a corporate job . But over time the problems that used to be hard get easier. And the problems that you have today become opportunities. And the opportunities get better and better because you learn which ones smell, taste, look, feel better. And it's no longer two steps forward three steps back. It's five steps zig-zagged. And one of these days I'll reach the end of the maze and a unicorn will be there. And I'll ride her away and never look back.How do you tell people who you think will never get funded that you think this is the case? –@vinaecoYou are a good friend for wanting to guide your entrepreneurial friend in the right direction. But don't forget that it's his life, his ideas, his dreams. There's a way to tell him that doesn't step over boundaries but you also have to be very careful not to ruin your friendship. Try to keep the love, and it is love when you want to save him from financial ruin, time ruin, emotional ruin - and try to keep the discussion as honest and gentle as possible.I say, "that sounds like a bad idea. Here's why." And I give not a criticism but a constructive criticism.I find I get unconstructive criticism a lot. Which is fine. People can say whatever they want. But I often get letters that sound something like, "I don't usually like your stuff but this time I did." Or..."I don't usually agree with you but I like this one thing you said." Why do people want to tell me (or tell themsleves) that they usually don't like me BUT. People like to know that they are safe inside. That nothing has moved them. "I'm usually normal but every now and then I..." take a naked swim in a public pool.It's the same thing when criticizing an idea. Most people like to be critics. They think they aren't smart unless they are criticizing. So that makes most people bad critics since usually their criticism has no basis.Don't say anything unless every word is dripping with value. "I don't like your idea because..." you have no plan for getting users, OR...the product is going to be too expensive and you can't raise money...OR it's been done before by X, Y and Z companies... OR your valuation is too high - don't be a pig. This way you have given him what you feel is a roadmap for success. He may agree with you. Or he may not. That is his business and not yours.Don't say something useless like, "Google can easily do it." Duh. Google can do anything. But they won't. Google has done nothing except search well (ahh, Gmail also but a lot of people have done email. And I do admit I'm typing this into Google Docs on a Google Chrome browser right now. Ugh, I guess they can do your product. But they aren't going to do a dating service. Or a car. Well, a car they will do. But maybe you can do a better car but you won't get funding for that).Be constructive and really help. In order to do that you have to dig deep. Your friend has put a lot of thought into his idea. You won't put the same amount of thought in, but you owe it to him to dig deep to come up with an answer. Or don't respond at all. Silence is golden.HEALTHDo you ever get sick? –@jasontohealI do get sick. But I haven't in about three years. Here's how I get sick. It's a tried and true formula and it works every time.I sleep for less than six hours for three days in a row.I drink every nightI eat heavy dinners every nightI meet with a lot of people that I have to impress. This means I always have to be "on", which is hard for me.I don't take time to rest. I'm always going to meetings or working on things.Then, on day three or four, I'll get sick.If I don't do any of the above, I never get sick.So many Americans are so overweight... are they trying to become too big to fail? –@toddrockoffWhen I was a kid I used to eat, every day, an entire loaf of Wonder Bread for lunch. I loved it. Then I'd go home and eat two bagels. Then for breakfast I'd eat about 6 bowls of cereal while I waited for two more bagels to be heated up in the oven. I loved bread. Give me a twinkie. Give me two.And over the years two things happened. Bread as we know it evolved. It became mutant bread. In order to feed a world that has gone from 3 billion people to seven billion people our food has become more and more genetically modified. More and more processed to increase the yield. Nothing wrong with this. This is how the world can survive. Advances in technology have proven the doom and gloom Malthusians of the early 1970s dead wrong. And will continue to do so as the planet becomes more interconnected through both technology, lower trade barriers, less violence (see below book reference) and less corruption.And yet... And yet.Bread, and the wheat it comes from, is worse for your metabolism than ever before.And one other very horrible thing has happened.Todd: you and I have become older. I can't eat two bagels anymore. Even old-school bagels. I can't eat that foot high Carnegie Deli sandwich anymore. I can't even eat three meals a day anymore without gaining weight. For awhile I had a physical trainer that I would meet at the gym three days a week. He would take one look at me and tell me what I had for dinner the night before and breakfast that morning. He was that good. He was very funny. He'd go on these vacations and he knew exactly what look he wanted to have and what he needed to work on. If he needed to work on his 8-pack he would do one routine. If he needed his shoulders a little broader he'd eat chicken and lift weights. If he needed more tone in his neck muscles, he'd eat something else and do some other kind of routine. His goal: to look like a god when the girls saw him walking down the street.He'd get back into town with a camera filled with photos. Photos of the different girls he... Well. Let's leave it at "he". We would spend half that first session after his returns just checking on the photos. One time Claudia interrupted us by surprise and he had to quickly put the camera down and we both felt a little guilty. Claudia was laughing hysterically when I later told her why. "Do guys always do that?" she asked. Yes, Claudia. Yes we do.I don't lift weights. Or drink protein shakes. Or eat the just right amount of chicken to make my shoulder chiseled. But I did have to make changes to my diet to avoid becoming overweight, and to even lose pounds once I realized the slippery slide I had already found myself on. And this will continue for the simple good reason that food is genetically evolving and getting more and more processed in order to feed a developing world filled with billions more people. That will continue for the rest of our lifetimes.But here in America we have to be particularly careful. Because, quietly, 90% of the grocery store is filled with wheat and other carbs. Americans eat carbs for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, and drink it down with sugar-filled alcohol. And they eat late at night which hurts digestion because it's harder to digest when you are lying down inert.I'll tell you my current diet. Then I have a reading list related to it.Breakfast: around 10am. I eat oatmeal with nuts crushed up in it (but NOT peanuts) or I'll eat scrambled eggs. Nothing else. The oatmeal is Gluten free, whole grain steal cut oats. The brand is "Bob's Red mill". Mixed with bananas and finely crushed nuts (Brazil nuts, cashews, pecans, almonds - all raw). VERY finely crushed.Lunch/Dinner: around 2-3pm. Usually some sort of vegetable curry or steamed vegetables and some sort of fish. Sometimes I skip the fish (usually sole, perhaps almond-crusted). And that's it.Saturday: cheat day. You can eat anything. The reasoning described below.Here's a reading list for what I describe above:Macro issues:Abundance, by Stephen Kotler. Describes how food has ALWAYS been genetically modified but now it's increasing for good reasons in order to feed people through better and better technological improvements.The Better Angels of our Nature</strong>, by Stephen Pinker. Describes how violence as a percentage of the human race, has declined every century. This foretells an ever-increasing population where more and more adjustments to how food is farmed (and water cleaned) will have to be made.Food issues:Wheat Belly by William Davis. Describes how bad wheat is for us. Particularly wheat as it is processed today. Essentially recommending a zero wheat diet.Paleo Comfort Foods by Julie Mayfield. A bit richer than the diet I described above but what the heck.The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris with some adjustments. He recommends a somewhat paleo diet and his book describes why the "cheat day" is important. But I do several adjustments from his recommended diet: I won't do wine. I won't do black beans. I eat fruit (the bananas in the oatmeal for instance and sometimes we do other fruits in the oatmeal or during the day). He doesn't specify what oils he uses when he cooks but we only use coconut oil as opposed to corn oil and vegetable oil. If we use another oil it will be safflower oil. He explains that the "cheat day" is to shock the system. Maybe that's true. I think it's to serve as a painful reminder what happens to your body when you succumb to it's food lusts.Here's a link on the benefits</a> of coconut oil. Health Benefits of Coconut OilSo Americans are becoming too big to fail, only because we are developing the technology and methods to feed an increasingly hungry and growing planet. But we have to make sure we balance it off by eating healthier while we feed the world.Do you consider marijuana a dangerous drug? –@TheBJJMindFalling in obsessive love releases various chemicals in the body. And when the girl breaks up with me it means I'm going to walk past her building a million times. It means I might spy on her. It means I might wait for her to call. It means I might cry if she doesn't.I'll write her letters. I'll explain things to her. I'll buy her things. I'll do anything to get her to smile.Whatever that goddamn chemical is that is being released throughout my body during those moments is the most dangerous drug I've ever tried.After that: alcohol. Which makes you do things you know you shouldn't do and it makes you like people you know you shouldn't like. That sounds pretty dangerous to me.After that: nicotine. Which gives you lung cancer, strokes, heart disease, and other things that will kill you.I haven't really tried any other drugs other than those and marijuana. Oh! LSD once. Don't try it after the age of 25. Life is like LSD after that age.So what has marijuana done for me? Pretty much nothing.One time at a party I smoked so much I couldn't stop coughing and everyone was laughing at me. I had to go into a private room at the party and just sit there while I went back and forth between coughing and having this feeling that time was slowing down just for me. I went to the party with a girl. She left with someone else. My friends thought I was an idiot. I woke up the next morning on the lawn outside my apartment and I spent the rest of the day trying to apologize to people who didn't think I did anything wrong, they just thought I was stupid.So that's the worst thing that's ever happened to me on that "dangerous" drug. And I never had it again.Oh wait, that's a lie. I had it once in 1999. I was invested in a company called Gooey. They were an IM chat software that worked on web pages. So if you and I were on the same web page, we would see each other and be able to IM with each other. They got an offer from Star Media (remember them?) for $100 million. I owned 3% of the company. I was on the board. I went up to their apartment (four Israelis in one apartment) and they were all smoking marijuana so I joined them."Please sell the company to Star Media," I told them. "I will get you all hedged up and you can pull cash out of the deal immediately."One of them said, after taking his puff, "Who the fuck is Star Media? We are GOOEY! We want Yahoo to buy us."Six months later they were filing for bankruptcy.So yes, it's a very dangerous drug.You don't eat after 5pm - is this a form of intermittent fasting? What changes to your diet, have you found beneficial and why? –@Anna__PowerOn Saturday mornings I go to the local farmer's market and buy a loaf of Challah bread. I love Challah bread. Jews talk constantly about constipation by the way. Everyone thinks the cliche of a Jewish person is that they are good at money. I don't know about that. I've lost all my money a few times and then some. But one cliche which is true: thick, concrete, starchy constipation - and then talk about it with every Jewish person you know. Usually over dinner.After I buy that Challah bread, I eat it. The entire loaf. I can't stop myself. So sweet and soft. It's like bread made out of clouds. I love it. I eat it. And then I suffer.That's my one treat a week. The rest of the week I don't eat bread at all. I don't eat sugar or sweets. I'm 44. I want to look good, feel good, sleep well, long, and most importantly, when I eat something, I want to shit all of it out. At least the waste parts.So here's what I do for now.After 5pm (sometimes 6pm), I don't eat. And during the day I don't eat carbs or sugars anymore (well, 2 sugars in my first cup of coffee for the day - I can't help it!).Why do this:Better for digestion. I know by the time I go to sleep (between 8 and 9pm) the food will have worked it's way mostly through my digestive system. Imagine you eat a big steak and then go to sleep. Where is that steak all night long? It's right in the middle of your digestive tract, an entire part of a cow. And it doesn't move. Your stomach rumbles, you feel nauseous, etc.Better for sleep. For the reasons above. I like to keep things clear so at night my body is focused on what it's supposed to be doing - sleeping! Insomnia is a horrible illness that I don't like getting.You lose weight. You can't help it.Your face gets more angular. I've seen it happen. Not just with me. With everyone on this pseudo-Paleo diet.Less pain. I used to wake up around 3 in the morning every night with pain in my stomach. Either sharp pain or naeusea. I used to attribute it to stress. But now I see it was because my eating habits were bad. It might've been the starch, or the eating past 5pm, or the drinking. Who knows? I don't do any of those anymore and I no longer wake up in pain.You have more energy. On those Saturdays when I have the loaf of bread I go into "Challah Coma". I can't function for about 3-5 hours afterwards. And I'm even recovering the next day (like right now as I write this). I'm usually fully recovered by Tuesday. I've become much more aware of my body because of this diet and I can see how it changes and reacts to different foods.You appreciate what you eat more. One yoga practitioner suggests this: imagine your stomach as four fists. One fist is for food. The other for water, and two fists for air. This particular yoga guy lived to over 100 and probably only died that "young" because when he was 95 he fell and refused to have hip surgery. When he was 89 he demonstrated 20 different kinds of headstands. He attributed his long life to "good breathing". Claudia is doing a bunch of posts on Pranayama ("good breathing") on her website right now Claudia Yoga - Ideas From a Yogi Entrepreneur.Less snacking. We all know that most diets don't work. The flip side is that EVERY diet works. How can that contradiction be? Well, most people can't follow a diet for more than a few weeks. But why does every diet work? Because there isn't a single diet that lets you eat Cheez Doodles. if all you do is avoid junk food, then you are fine. But extend out your definition of junk food. Over 80% of the grocery store is carbs. Mmm, delicious starchy carbs, cookies, breads, snacks, fried this, breaded that. Mmmmm. If you just do two things: no carbs, no eating after 5pm, you'll get all the benefits of any diet you want.What if you are invited to a dinner and you know there will be heavy eating, drinking, etc. I go to those, but not too often because I know it will take me awhile to recover. I don't drink alcohol at them (all sugar and I hate the taste) and I avoid the dessert and appetizers and eat about half the entree. But it's still after 5pm. And I know I'm going to sleep uncomfortably and be destroyed all the next day. As opposed to tommorrow, where I will be feeling great.You don't eat after 5pm - is this a form of intermittent fasting? What changes to your diet, have you found beneficial and why? –@Anna__PowerOn Saturday mornings I go to the local farmer's market and buy a loaf of Challah bread. I love Challah bread. Jews talk constantly about constipation by the way. Everyone thinks the cliche of a Jewish person is that they are good at money. I don't know about that. I've lost all my money a few times and then some. But one cliche which is true: thick, concrete, starchy constipation - and then talk about it with every Jewish person you know. Usually over dinner.After I buy that Challah bread, I eat it. The entire loaf. I can't stop myself. So sweet and soft. It's like bread made out of clouds. I love it. I eat it. And then I suffer.That's my one treat a week. The rest of the week I don't eat bread at all. I don't eat sugar or sweets. I'm 44. I want to look good, feel good, sleep well, long, and most importantly, when I eat something, I want to shit all of it out. At least the waste parts.So here's what I do for now.After 5pm (sometimes 6pm), I don't eat. And during the day I don't eat carbs or sugars anymore (well, 2 sugars in my first cup of coffee for the day - I can't help it!).Why do this:Better for digestion. I know by the time I go to sleep (between 8 and 9pm) the food will have worked it's way mostly through my digestive system. Imagine you eat a big steak and then go to sleep. Where is that steak all night long? It's right in the middle of your digestive tract, an entire part of a cow. And it doesn't move. Your stomach rumbles, you feel nauseous, etc.Better for sleep. For the reasons above. I like to keep things clear so at night my body is focused on what it's supposed to be doing - sleeping! Insomnia is a horrible illness that I don't like getting.You lose weight. You can't help it.Your face gets more angular. I've seen it happen. Not just with me. With everyone on this pseudo-Paleo diet.Less pain. I used to wake up around 3 in the morning every night with pain in my stomach. Either sharp pain or naeusea. I used to attribute it to stress. But now I see it was because my eating habits were bad. It might've been the starch, or the eating past 5pm, or the drinking. Who knows? I don't do any of those anymore and I no longer wake up in pain.You have more energy. On those Saturdays when I have the loaf of bread I go into "Challah Coma". I can't function for about 3-5 hours afterwards. And I'm even recovering the next day (like right now as I write this). I'm usually fully recovered by Tuesday. I've become much more aware of my body because of this diet and I can see how it changes and reacts to different foods.You appreciate what you eat more. One yoga practitioner suggests this: imagine your stomach as four fists. One fist is for food. The other for water, and two fists for air. This particular yoga guy lived to over 100 and probably only died that "young" because when he was 95 he fell and refused to have hip surgery. When he was 89 he demonstrated 20 different kinds of headstands. He attributed his long life to "good breathing". Claudia is doing a bunch of posts on Pranayama ("good breathing") on her website right now Claudia Yoga - Ideas From a Yogi Entrepreneur.Less snacking. We all know that most diets don't work. The flip side is that EVERY diet works. How can that contradiction be? Well, most people can't follow a diet for more than a few weeks. But why does every diet work? Because there isn't a single diet that lets you eat Cheez Doodles. if all you do is avoid junk food, then you are fine. But extend out your definition of junk food. Over 80% of the grocery store is carbs. Mmm, delicious starchy carbs, cookies, breads, snacks, fried this, breaded that. Mmmmm. If you just do two things: no carbs, no eating after 5pm, you'll get all the benefits of any diet you want.What if you are invited to a dinner and you know there will be heavy eating, drinking, etc. I go to those, but not too often because I know it will take me awhile to recover. I don't drink alcohol at them (all sugar and I hate the taste) and I avoid the dessert and appetizers and eat about half the entree. But it's still after 5pm. And I know I'm going to sleep uncomfortably and be destroyed all the next day. As opposed to tommorrow, where I will be feeling great.Why and how did you stop drinking?One time I was single and on a date. We went to some bar and I started drinking. And drinking more. And drinking more. I was very funny. I had the bartender laughing and refilling. I had everyone around me laughing. The girl I was with was laughing. "You're so cute when you are drunk!"About halfway through I remember staggering to the bathroom and the room was spinning. When I came out of the bathroom I vaguely remember the girl kissing someone else. I vaguely remember leaving the place and falling on the ground around 3rd avenue and 47th street at about two in the morning in the middle of the street. Cars were honking and skidding around me. It was raining. I don't know why a car didn't hit me. Someone, the girl maybe, pulled me off the street and onto the sidewalk. We were all laughing while cars skidded around, avoiding me lying in the middle of a busy Manhattan street. I vaguely remember getting to my hotel room. In the middle of the night I felt sick and I vaguely remember vomit coming out of my mouth and spraying all over the room and the bathroom.In the morning, the room was still spinning. I saw the clock and I was two hours late for a meeting. I went into the living room and the girl I had went out with the night before was lying on the couch with her legs on the floor and her clothes half off. I left her there. I got to my meeting, which was in progress but I was too sick to stay. I said I had a stomach flu and everyone let me leave.I was gaining weight. I couldn't sleep. I was getting depressed. Alcohol causes all of these things. It also loosens inhibitions. When I was single I wanted my inhibitions loosened. I vaguely remember drinking so I could get enough nerve to kiss someone. Finally I met someone who didn't drink. And she was healthy. So I married her. That's how I stopped.How does one to be an early riser? Nothing has ever worked for me. –@JoshuaSheatsThere is only one trick to getting up early: going to sleep early. We all feel like we can't go to sleep early. We might miss something. Often night is the time we can read. Or socialize. Or eat. Or drink. Or watch TV.Well, stop all of those things. Don't eat a meal after 5 or 6pm. Don't watch TV (what's good on TV anyway?). Don't socialize too much (do your friends need to see you every night?). Don't drink - its both a depressant and filled with sugar and calories, which will keep you up at night. Networking at night is ok, but you can't do it every day. Maybe once a week.The benefits of waking up early are enormous. You are able to focus better. Your day will be filled with success by the time everone is just waking up.You can read more. You can exercise. You can think. You can work and nobody is up to bother you. You can meditate or pray. There's no temptation to drink or eat a heavy meal. You can see the emptiness of where you live when the sun just peeks out and lights it up. You can feel the freshness of the air. You can take a pad and after you are done reading, you can write down ideas.You might not want to do this. It doesn't work for everyone. But maybe try it. And see what happens. Try to starting "going down" around 7:30 or 8pm. And by 9pm you will be sleep, and by 5am you will have 8 hours of refreshing sleep. Try it. Will it kill you?INVESTINGWhat's your opinion on the easing of advertising restrictions on hedge funds? It's like they're real businesses or something. –@mattybgameThere really shouldn't be advertising restrictions on any business. We're all adults. We're all big boys. It's amazing how many people get scammed by hedge funds every year despite all advertising restrictions. If there were no advertising restrictions then, ironically, those scams would be revealed a lot sooner because a lot more people would begin complaining early on. A free market is what protects people from scams more quickly than government regulations.Example scams: Almost every hedge fund. Most mutual funds. Most financial services firms. Most food. Most over the counter and under the counter pharmaceuticals. Most education. Most lawyers. Most accountants. Most of everything basically.But still we survive. Still we live. Still all the victims of Madoff got most of their original money back. Still people move on to make more mistakes. more foolish decisions, more misguided purchases, and more of everything. More, more, more, until finally we die and leave it all behind. Advertising restrictions won't protect us from death. Only turning more into less, greed into "enough", pleasure into contentment. We should learn to restrict ourselves before we let the government restrict us.If you had $100 to invest in self-education every month, where would you allocate the money? –@BenNesvigYou don't really need more than $100 a month to self-educate. Here is what I would do:read biographies and books about any topics that interest you. Most books are fairly cheap on Kindle or you can sit in bookstore cafes and read them.draw and/or paint. This gets the neurons firing in areas that have been lying dormant for awhile.by cheap pads (waiter pads, for instance), and just free form write down ideas, observations, thoughts of things you want to try.go to a museum and try to find at least ten things you didn't know before that excite you.go to at least one networking event. Or dance class. Or something you never would've thought of trying. Just one. Don't pressure yourself into suddenly doing kickboxing ten times a week.study yoga. And not just the physical exercises but the reasons behind each one. The reason a move twists a certain way, breathes a certainway, the history of that move throughout the history of yoga, the reasons for doing the physical exercises.As a 28 y/o graduate student, given the neg real return in savings accounts, what areas would u suggest investing in? –@NotthatkindofDrOnly invest in yourself. there is nothing else that will get u more than 5% per year.When I first made some money I would wake up in the middle of the night scared. What if Y2K caused the world to end? I had lunch one day with the head of IT at a big Fortune 500 company. He said all his computers were going to shut down on January 1, 2000. , What would happen to my money. I would take long walks at four in the morning calculating out how I can save my money in Y2K. I would compound things 20 years ahead to make sure I could pay for my then (one) kid, my family, myself. Would I be able to retire? I would stand in the shower and wonder: what if I gave my parents half my money? Would they be able to survive?I had $15 million in cash at the time. About year or so later I had $0.All of that time in the shower, compounding interest, worrying about Y2K or war or inflation led to... $0. At $15 million I honestly thought I was poor. That somehow inflation would outpace me. That people would be making salaries of $10 million a year. Or that every entrepreneur would be richer than me. That I wouldn't be able to afford the lifestyle I wanted. That my kids' kids would go broke. That I hadn't prepared adequately for various scenarios that would bring down the financial system. So I thrashed and invested and re-invested and doubled-down and spent, all in a desperate quest to turn my mortality into immortality. There were moments when I thought I was immortal, that money had somehow acquired for that elusive elixir of youth and vitality. I was 32 years old. Just a baby. Just a little older than you are now.Then I had nothing. I missed the one thing that was most important. I forgot to invest in myself. This means lots of things.Invest in your health. This has nothing to do with money. Are you eating ok? Are you sleeping well? Are you flossing? Dental infections can go from the mouth to the heart to the brain. There's some evidence that lack of flossing is directly correlated to early onset of Alzheimer's. Are you exercising? Are you breathing ok?Invest in your friends. When I had money, I dropped my friends. I took on new friends. Everyone spoke about money all the time. Alex would point out a billionaire at a Las Vegas craps table who was surrounded by prostitutes and say, "that guy is a stud". People who didn't make it in that world were "losers" or "fuck ups". Nobody read. Nobody talked about anything but money. Everything had a price tag. Everyone would put you down because of secret jealousy. And, of course, nobody kept in touch with me after I lose all my money.Invest in your ideas. Are you still coming up with ideas like you once did? I used to come up with ideas for my business every day. New clients, new business directions, new ideas for the clients, new ideas for employees, new ideas for how we could get investors or acquirors. New ideas how to do things cheaply. Once I sold the business I stopped having ideas. My idea muscle atrophied. I was an immature little kid with a room filled with toys. All I wanted to do was play. It wasn't until after I lost everything and lived through a year of excruciating depression that I pulled out a waiter's pad and started coming up with ideas again. And then it was another several years before I finally climbed out of a total financial nightmare.Invest in your spirit. Two ways: Are you grateful for what you have. Don't always think about investing in the future. Be grateful for everything you have right now. Every day list the things you are grateful for. The second way: surrender. You can't control everything. I should say, "I can't control everything". I can't control what will happen with the world, with the economy, with the factors of luck that helped me make the money. Surrender to whatever mystery is inside of yourself that helped you get to this point. You can say, "there is no mystery". But there is. It doesn't matter if you are a scientist, a religious person, a spiritual person, or an entrepreneur, there's mystery in everything you touch. What happened before the Big Bang? What exists in the space between a proton and an electron inside the atom? What combination of molecules inside of us created the consciousness that allowed you to make money. Bow down to the mystery and trust it.When you do the above four things your body, mind, emotions, spirit, will tap into the pulses and vibrations of everything around you. Your mind will be an idea machine. Your spirit will be free from the worries of the future and anxieties of the past. Your emotions won't be sidetracked by the negative people who try to bring you down. And your body will have the energy to pursue any idea to its fullest. You'll also know the most important thing: when nothing is the right thing to do. Sometimes the best investment is waiting. Is decreasing. Is slowing down. Is observing.When I was just starting my first business I met with Jason Calacanis. He was starting his first business, the Silicon Alley Reporter. I loved his magazine. It reported on all the web agencies in the so-called "Silicon Alley". In other words, all my friends that worked in a 10 block radius of where I worked. I was an advertiser in the magazine. At the time, Joanne Wilson (Fred Wilson's wife) was the head of advertising for his magazine.Jason and I met for coffee. He was reeling off fact after fact about every Internet business out there. There barely was an Internet industry and he knew the entire universe of it. I said to him, "why are you doing this magazine? You should be working for a top venture capitalist. You can help invest in all of these companies."He said, "I only want to invest in myself. That's where the best returns will be." Silicon Alley Reporter didn't quite work out. But his next business, Weblogs, Inc. he sold to AOL for about $20 million and his latest business, Mahalo, raised money at a $100 million valuation. It's hard to get returns like that investing in anything other than yourself.And it's not just money. When I was burnt out and really needed a break from everything I thought I was "supposed" to be doing I decided to start writing this blog. There was zero investment in dollars. If anything, it kept me from foolishly investing in a volatile stock market. It slowed me down. It forced me to think. To write. To relate to people. To communicate with people. To make new friends. To open up new possibilities for myself.I've made many investments that have made me a lot of money. Writing on this blog has made me zero money.It's the best investment I've ever made.Your dow 40k call...what's that in "real" terms? –@tpavlikA couple of comments. In the past 10 years I've made lots of predictions based on analysis of the markets. I've published those in places ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Forbes to TheStreet and probably a dozen other places. Most of them have turned out pretty good. I try not to do it too much anymore for several reasons.People will always hate you no matter what. Whether you win or lose, someone lost money. And they hate you.The stock market, in general, is for suckers.People ALWAYS forget my good calls. The stocks that go from $1 to $30 and then get bought out. And there are plenty of those.I lost interest. In general, Wall Street is crooked and I don't like having anything to do with it. Having had everything to do with it for years. Heck, I practically applied to work for Bernie Madoff.I really love the direction my writing is now going. And it's far away from stocks.I get constant hatemail about stocks. Or I see random lies about me on message boards. I really can't stand it after ten years. You'd think I get used to people calling me an "ugly creep" but it just never gets better.So, back to your question. I assume it is somewhat sarcastic or negative towards me for a few reasons. For one thing, I never made a prediction for Dow 40,000. I made a prediction for Dow 20,000. Second, you ask in "real" terms. I only made the prediction a year ago. So inflation's been about 2%. If you look at housing prices (instead of rentals, which is what the inflation index is usually composed of) there's actually been deflation. So I'm not sure what point is being made with the word "real".I predicted Dow 20,000 for the end of 2013. My guess is we won't get to Dow 20,000 by the end of 2013. Growth has been slower than I thought.Does that mean that everyone who followed my prediction was a loser and lost money. Does it make me a loser?When I made the prediction, the Dow was at 12,470. Right now the Dow is at 13,560. So 8.7% higher. Nobody is losing money. Around the same time I also said on CNBC that AAPL was a strong buy and would be the first trillion dollar company. It was at 350 then. It's at 700 now. About a 100% return. A few months earlier, I had also predicted that a stock, INHX, then at $1.80, would go higher. It got sold a year later at $26. About a 1400% return. Everyone who followed the advice is making money. You can't really ask for better. There are no prophets on Wall Street.What is your take on Jim Cramer? Genius investor or mostly got lucky, ie right place right time? @MattKelmonI have one rule: I never say anything bad about someone who has been good to me and has made me money. Cramer has been very good to me and I owe a lot to him.Here are ten things I learned from Jim Cramer. 10 Things I Learned Working With Jim Cramer - Altucher ConfidentialHe gets a lot of heat for his stock picks. For acting the way he does on TV. But you have to keep two things in mind: nobody can make money picking new stocks every day of the year. And, number two, he's an entertainer, and a very good one. The best on CNBC. The best in business. He's like the Rodney Dangerfield of finance. And number three, judge not lest ye be judged.So don't think of him as a great investor, or a lucky guy (he's started at least 3-4 successful businesses so that takes more than luck), or even a PT Barnum. I take him for his word: he is an entertainer. And a very good one.Did you ever blow a bunch of money in the forex market and decide never again like Cramer? –@CycleViewChartsLet me tell you something and<strong> listen very close.</strong> Ask yourself: who makes money in the markets? Who? I honestly have never met anyone who made millions trading on their own. Never. Zero. Everyone I know who has made millions trading did this:they had a fund so they were able to charge fees. If you get 20% of the profits off of $100 million dollars invested and your fund returns 10% then you just made $2 million from trading the markets even if you had no money at risk and even if you "just" returned what the market returned that year.they cheatedthey built and sold a company (or IPOed it) and held onto the stock for a really long time while the stock went upthey built software to trade faster than the software next to them so they can make a trillion trades a second and steal a 1/10 of a penny from you on every trade.[See, “Who Makes Money on Wall Street" Who Makes Money on Wall Street? - Altucher Confidential]Every market in the world returns somewhere between -20% and +20% a year on average and usually more like 5-10%. You can't return 1000% a year consistently, which is what it takes to make a living from scratch in the markets. You just can't do it. You need other people's money. You need to charge fees. You need to hustle and sell and sneak around.Now you ask about forex, and I'll also throw in oil, commodities, gold, options. Other than options, who are the biggest players in all of those other markets. Foreign governments. It suddenly becomes YOU versus the collusion insider trading of the central bankers of Russia, China, Japan, the UK, and the US. Who will win? Will you beat them? Or will they beat you? Who should I place my bet on? Particularly if you don't have a ten year track record beating them.Almost everyone I know has lost not just a little bit of their money in these markets but ALL of their money in these markets. I hope I don't add you to the list.Facebook has an extremely uncertain future, with the outcome teetering from good extremes to bad ones. How does it end? –@JStuartTweetsOnly the headlines say Facebook has an uncertain future. The headlines also said Fukishama radiation was going to hit San Francisco within days of the tsunami. The headlines also said Avian Flu was going to wipe out the world, or at least be a major epidemic? Well, where is Avian Flu?And where are the apologies? How come the people who write the headlines never apologize when they are wrong? Thousands of people in San Francisco and the rest of Japan were scared to death because of the headlines created after the tsunami? Where are the apologies to those people? Where is Swine Flu? Where are the weapons of mass destruction?Ok, and now people are saying a company with a billion addicted users that is also the website that people spend the most time on (compared with a billion other websites) is "teetering" on self-destruction.I'll tell you from my perspective. Not only do I spend a lot of time on Facebook but I advertise on Facebook and I am an advisor or investor in several social media agencies that focus on Facebook and I was also an investor in the largest social media agency. How To Make a Billion Dollar Company From Scratch - Altucher ConfidentialFacebook is an enormous success and is going to continue to be. I am seeing them unveil new sources of revenue on a weekly basis. Do you notice the ad that is now there on the login page? It wasn't there last week. Or the fact that brand pages with over 100,000 fans can now promote specific posts. That's about a month old. Or the fact that there will be realtime bidding on Facebook ad units. That was mentioned on the conference call but I don't think has been released yet. And then there's mobile. Facebook is not going anywhere.But I still see people saying "Mark Zuckerberg is not ready to be a CEO". Are you kidding me? How many users did he build the site up to? Has anyone else ever done that in the history of the planet Earth? Let's look at his latest achievement. The IPO. People say the IPO was a failure. Very funny. He raised the great amount of money at the highest possible amount, with the lowest dilution, and paid a lower percentage of fees to Wall Street than any IPO before him. That's a pretty amazing success. If you bought the IPO for a quick flip, sorry. You lost. But if you bought for the long run, you're going to be a big winner. Even bigger if you buy now.What industries/fields do you feel have the most growth potential in 5 year horizon? –@Vic5557I am going to write more about this on stock-related websites but the industries and companies that I think will do the best in the next five to fifteen years are:Fracking. Most people are worried about fracking as a pollutant. But the latest technologies in fracking have solved just about every issue conceivable. It turns out that the United States probably has more oil left than Saudi Arabia and we are at inning one in drilling for it thanks to this year's advances in fracking technology. This is how you solve an energy crisis. You reduce dependence on the Middle East where we are constantly fighting wars and worried about terrorism. You increase the supply of oil so it gets dirt cheap. And wealth comes to the country so you can focus on spending it on sustainable energy solutions. Fracking will do this.Diagnostics of Age-related diseases. The baby boomers are retiring now at a rate of tens of millions a year. Economists complain (what else do they do?) that the "job participation rate" is going down because people have given up. That's not the reason. It's because baby boomers are retiring. And what happens after they retire? They get cancer, Alzheimers, Parkinson's, heart disease, and other age-related diseases.The best cure is prevention. Companies are spending billions on developing drugs that cure these various diseases. But more important than finding the cure is finding the disease. Being able to prevent a disease before it starts is the key to a long life. So diagnostics companies will massively succeed. The best innovations in this space are in personalized medicine, genomics, etc and there are new technologies being developed successfully every year. This will be a huge boom.Social media marketing. When you advertise on the Super Bowl, you spend millions, hit 100 million people, and then have no way of every communicating with that customer again, or knowing how well your ad did. When you advertise on Facebook, you can reach out to a billion people, you get a customer that you know everything about, and you can continue to communicate that customer for free for the rest of their lives. Again, we are at inning one of people using social media (combined with mobile) to reach out and touch the people who we can really help ("advertising" will fade into "helping"). The social media agencies that were at the forefront have been bought How To Make a Billion Dollar Company From Scratch - Altucher Confidential. So inning zero is over. But inning one is just beginning.Is the stock market "rigged"? I have heard floor traders called "Market Makers". Also heard that everything involving $ is rigged –@granthuhnIf you have to ask the question, then, yes, the market is rigged. And all the people who are rigging the market will tell you it isn't. There's a saying in poker, "if you can't spot the fish at the table, then you're the fish." Guess what? In this very case, you are the fish.The same thing is true with the market. You are asking about "floor traders called Market Makers". That question alone means you are the fish. Do not put a dime of your money into the market if you want to save any of it. Unless you want to hold for the long run and pray for the best (ultimately the market is rigged to go higher in the long run but in the short run the market is rigged to take all of your money).So, yes, Virginia, the market is rigged. The funny thing is: the people who think they are rigging the market are themselves subject to the people who are rigging it above them. There's about 20 layers of rigging. The guys at the top are very happy if they avoid going to jail. They have done the rigging and made billions. Sometimes they retire and build great art collections. Other times they go to jail when someone in the government decides they've had enough of them.Don't be angry it's rigged. It always has been. Every exchange in the planet has always been rigged. Our market is better than most. Don't try to find happiness or sadness in the market because you'll find neither. Even if everything around you is rigged doesn't mean you can't enjoy watching the sun rise in the morning.[See also, "Who Really Makes Money on Wall Street?" Who Makes Money on Wall Street? - Altucher Confidential]UNITED STATES OF AMERICAIf you were born in another country would you move to US? –@danieltobaHere's the twist: If I were born outside of the US, I'd move to the US. If I were born inside of the US. I'd move out of the US.How come? If I were born outside the US, chances are I'm goIng to find more opportunities to work at startups, to make money, to create things, to get funding, to live in wide open clean spaces, to create the life I want to create, than I could in my own country. This isn't always true but mostly true.If I were born inside the US, I'm just like everyone else. I'd learn what I can here, about all the things the US is good at. I'd try to accumulate some money, I'd do what I can to make a dent in life here. And then I'd move some place where I can take that experience and money and make an even bigger dent. I have kids so I would not do this at this point but I had my total choice I'd probably move to India at this point, where the pace of life is a little bit different, US money goes a long way, and I'd have many experiences utterly different than I've had for the first 44 years of my life.VACATION / TRAVELWhat do you do when you know you need a vacation, but don't have the slightest clue as to how to best spend the time? –@thecrintPerfect! Take a "staycation".ReadSit and do nothingFind something athletic local in the area to doSit in cafes and come up with ideas on my waiter's pad for things I never had the time to come up with ideas for before.Go to a local museum and then sit in the cafe/bookstore and come up with ideas.Sit and do nothing again.11am! I used to do this "web show" for HBO called "3am" where I would interview people about what they were up to at 3 in the morning on, say, a Wednesday night. Nobody was up to anything good at 3am on a Wednesday night. I used to think that was the witching hour where all interesting things happened. I was wrong. You know what hour is even better? 11am. Because at 11am, who is walking around? They should be at work, or at school, and it's too late for that mid-morning break, and it's too early for lunch, and even if you worked in the restaurant business you are already at work by 11am.So go to a part of your town that you have barely spent any time and watch the people walking around at 11am. It will be mysterious and dangerous. Give them stories. Find out their stories. Observe them. Draw them. Just relax.In our daily lives we only perceive a small window of our universe. The benefits of a staycation:you see a larger part of your universe. You notice the tiny details that have always escaped you. You appreciate the small things in the lusciousness of the life around you.you don't waste time in the traveling. Think of the 30 hours or so you save not having to pack, get on planes, travel, settle in, etc. It's 30 hours no matter where you are going. What a drag!it's cheap.If you have any other staycation ideas, write me. Enjoy!PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT / LIFEWhat's the quickest way to become famous? –@bhawks4lifeThe quickest way to become famous is to spend 20 years working really really hard for it. And I'm not saying this from experience. Just saying this from observation. Here's what you do during those 20 years.Know every aspect of the history of the area you want to be famous in.Understand how every new idea in your industry was developed.Completely dominate more than one industry. So you can combine ideas in the intersection of all the industries you are interested in.Do the Daily Practice of improving physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. This allows you to be a complete transmitter from the universe into your area of interest. It allows you to become an idea machine. To become the physical vehicle by which change can be channeled. Use The Daily Practice to chart your progress.Once your idea muscle is developed enough start sharing those ideas with a community. Write for websites, comment on blogs, talk on twitter, answer questions on quora, speak at conferences, write a book, post on Pinterest, build a group on Facebook, make an email newsletter, consult for people, coach people, and so on.Respond as much as you can to the people in your community who reach out to you. Every person you touch becomes a new node on your network. The more nodes on your network, the more the value of the network increases exponentially. Introduce different nodes. Becomethe Source.One time I was playing poker in Atlantic City. Right next to me was a guy named Joe who was a very good poker player. The best I ever played against. A new guy came to the table. But he only had cash and he needed to get chips. Illegally(this is illegal in Atlantic City), Joe said, "don't worry about that, I'll sell you some of my chips" and he did. Later Joe told me, "always be the bank at your table. Then the other players like you and don't want to bet against you even if they are pretty sure you are bluffing."Always be the bank. Of ideas, connections, resources, everything.Continue to do A-F. Your network grows exponentially. While I was writing this I was thinking of everyone from Steve Jobs to Bobby Fischer to Cyndi Lauper, Orson Scott Card, Eckhart Tolle, and on and on. I watched how each of these people went from studying the history of their field, to developing new ideas that pushed the field, to networking, to responding, to ultimately seeing their network hit a tipping point. I feel your question was a bit facetious but this answer is basically my analysis of those careers. Do it.Was scammed by Tim Roberts of Savtira, lost small fortune 2 wks before their bogus bankruptcy. Who do I turn to? DA, SEC, FBI? – @TommyOphotosOne time someone I knew fell and broke her leg in a Macy's. She spent the next five years suing Macy's and hoping the settlement would be enough to satisfy her financial needs forever. So for five years she was always complaining about her leg. She couldn't let her leg get better or else her entire wish for financial safety would have no merit. She became obsessed with the details of her case and was always on the phone with lawyers. Any guidance I would try to give her would be blocked by her friends, "Don't say that! She's worked hard for this. She's depending on that settlement".She lost the case. No money.Don't be that person. You were scammed. You're a big boy. Now you know. Don't turn to anyone. Don't count on getting that money back. Don't live your life angry and with regret.When I lost all my money in 2000, people close to me suggested I sue my stockbroker, who is still a good friend of mine. There was no way I was going to sue him. I made every decision. I had only myself to blame. I don't care if suing him would've gotten my money back. Not suing him taught me to take responsibility for my own actions, to move forwards instead of backwards, to focus on ideas and creativity and growth instead of looking backwards constantly at regret and remorse.You tell me what the better way to live life is? And when you make that money again, it will be the sweetest revenge. And you will. But not from the FBI. I don't think the FBI is the way to get rich.Remember: It's Your Fault. Its Your Fault - Altucher ConfidentialWhen trying to get what you want, how do you manage the tension between being nice/rational/reasonable and a complete lunatic? –@wkarmisteadOnly idiots listen to a lunatic. Your goal with everyone you meet is to listen to them. They are human beings. They have something important to say. To tell you. They have been bottled up for so long, so frustrated, so miserable, that when someone turns an ear towards them they will talk, they will freely confide in you, and eventually the will listen to you.This is because you are nice and rational and reasonable. Not a lunatic like the rest of society. You have something you want to sell. Listen first to see if they need it. Listen first to see what they need and how you can help.Then help them. That's how you get what you want. The riches will never stop flowing if you consistently do this.That's not lunacy. It's the ultimate in sanity.What are your thoughts on hunting...and in general being self sufficient w/ regards to your food? –@templec4I had coffee this morning. Probably some migrant labor in South America picked the coffee beans I used and laborers lifted boxes of coffee and put them onships and sent them over here. I'm using a computer that was probably made in Foxconn, the factory company in China none for suicides of it's workers. Yesterday afternoon I ate a steak, which was presumably killed by either a hunter or a slaughterhouse. I'm sure I've got some leather on the sneakers I'm wearing. Which I guess (I don't even know) somehow comes from skinning a cow.You get the idea.There's two things:Ultimately it's a waste of my resources for me to be self-sufficient and gather all of these things for myself. I'm not going to go pick and grow my coffee beans. I'm not going to make my computer. And I'm not going to slaughter cows. But I depend on thousands of people every day to do these things and more for me.2) Perhaps I can grow a few vegetables and be self-sufficient as regards those vegetables. But I'm only fooling myself if I think that handles more than 1%of the things that I would truly need to do in order to become self-sufficient. In a modern world where trade is not only global but permeates almost every aspect of how we live (where does the oil in my car come from? Where do the ingredients of my kid's medicines come from. Or the pages in a book?) there is zero chance of being self-sufficient.The best way I can redefine self-sufficient is to reduce your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs as much as possible. Become happy with who you are. Be more appreciative of what you have now in the present. Be thankful we live in a world that largely provides enormous wealth regardless of where we are in the income strata. Be present as much as possible instead of worrying about the entire world. The world will get better and healthier if we as individuals get better and healthier.The "bad" people are the ones who desire too much or fear too much. So you should desire less and fear less and you can hopefully become a mirror to those who take advantage of the riches the world has to offer.How do you get out of your own way and make things happen? –@happyinspiritI was an idiot. At least in retrospect. For almost every event in my life I've gotten in my own way. I'd be offered a job and I would think, "no, I can't take this job until I've published my first novel." Or I would make a lot of money and I'd think,"no, this money is not enough until I have one hundred million in the bank," or I'd be in a relationship and I'd think, "no this relationship is no good unless we are spending ever moment together". Or sometimes I would pitch my services and then when they said "yes", I would think, "but I don't want this anymore!" and I'd have to figure out how to get out of it.What an idiot. Always.So I've taken all these experiences and put them in a test tube. I heated the test tube up and watch two noxious gasses come out of it that identified the two fundamental chemical reactions that occurred during every time I got in my own way.The Past. I'd be worried about the past. I'd be worried that I was going to go broke, like I three times/four times/infinite times did before, unless A, B, and C happened. I'd get scared. I'd make decisions out of fear. Or anger or regret.The Future. I'd be anxious about the future. I'd think, "unless I had one hundred million I won't be as famous, rich, successful, as thisother person. Or..eventually I will go broke unless I do this. Or...I won't be able to feed my family or I won't be popular or or or...something. SOmething that will happen in the future that has no basis in reality now.I'm thinking of a specific event that your question reminds me of. I had just started a new company in early 2000. I was eating in a restaurant in Chinatown and I got a call from one of my partners. I stepped outside and it was raining. He said to me on the phone, "get ready. We're going to make one hundred million dollars on this." And I was smiling. My chest swelled up with ego. I remember thinking, "now, finally, nothing can hurt me." And almost everything that happened afterward hurt me: relationships, friendships, businesses failing, until I had gotten so in my way I had none of the above, including no money, and lost my house, and lost everything.Why didn't I just say, "I have enough right now." Enjoy the rain. Enjoy the dinner in my family. Cultivate my friendships. Maybe start writing the things that would give me pleasure.But I didn't. I got in my way by being burned somehow in my past and being terrified for no reason about the future.The only way to avoid getting in your way in the future is to be aware of yourself right now in the present. Don't forget every day to be grateful for the things you have. Be grateful you worked hard for what you have. Surrender to everything around you that you can't control. Don't overthink the future or overanalyze the past. People hurt you. There are potential things to be afraid of.But not right now this second. Take at least half this second to enjoy what you have. Take the other half to feel the different parts of your body and think, "I am here". Listen to the sounds you can hear right now. Listen to the silences in between those sounds. Make it a practice to do that as much as possible. Then your mind will be rewired slowly to never get in it's own way. And the time machine will gather dust in the closet, never to be used again.How do you advise someone to mentally cope with/ move past being unattractive, hating permanent features of the way you look? –@AtsalPeterWhen I was 16 it would hurt me to walk past a mirror. Physically hurt me, I'd almost fall backwards if I suddenly realized a mirror was too close. I had wild, tangly hair when all the "cool kids" had straight blonde hair. I had big dorky glasses. I had acne and cysts all over my face. Big purple blotches. Once a month I'd go to the dermatologist where she would drain all the pus out of the cysts, leaving them even more purple and patches of blood and damage all over my face.I had braces with rubber bands criss-crossing all over my mouth. I had no idea how to dress in any situation. One person once asked me "why are you always wearing corduroy pants" in the middle of July. I was clumsy in gym class. And, to top it off, I had the distinct impression my head was bigger than everyone else's. When I rode my bike down the block occasionally the other kids would scream out the window, "Hey Moose!" and I'd hear their laughing as I sped up as quickly as I could to escape.I would take my glasses off and back away from the mirror until I thought, in the blur that I saw, that I looked halfway decent. I'd usually end up about twenty feet away.One time in chemistry class I heard two girls talking, "how can his acne be that bad?" And look at me while I pretended to look away. Another person told me, "you need to smile more. That's the best you can do." One time I called a friend of mine and asked, "am I just never going to get a girlfriend?" We were in tenth grade. He said, "maybe in college or after college you can." At that age even a week seemed like an eternity. I couldn't wait for college.One time I spent an hour in front of the mirror trying to get out the knots in my hair. Then I sat down to eat breakfdast. One of my parents came in and looked at me and yelled, "you're disgusting!" Then I went to school.Even now, when I make an appearance on, say, CNBC, there are more comments afterwards about how I look than about anything I had to say. I never really understand it. When I went on online dating services I wouldn't put my picture. Fortunately Claudia responded and asked why I didn't put my picture and I had a ready excuse that sounded impressive, "because I go on TV a lot and didn't want anyone to recognize me." Good thing she believed and maybe was impressed by that bullshit.And it is true that better looking people get higher salaries, better opportunities, more opportunities for sex, etc. That's just the way the world works.But just because you look in a mirror, doesn't mean the mirror is showing you the correct image. A large part of that image is how you interpret what you see. It turns out almost everyone hates looking in the mirror. It turns out that personality and confidence and optimism add a lot to one's looks. It turns out that being a good person adds a lot to your attractiveness, particularly as you grow older. Experience also engraves itself in your features and moves past the mishapenness of youth.And, by the way, you never look as bad as you think you do.Here's what you do the next time you wallow in your own self-hate. (Ugh, I'm going to do it again:)I'll change it a little: The Simple Daily Practice:Do one thing to improve yourself physically today. A little exercise. A walk. Sleep well. Eat well. Change one thing. Don't snack on junk food.Be around positive people. Don't be around people who are going to judge your looks.Build your idea muscle. People are attracted other people with lots of ideas. The people with lots ofideas will save the world. Those are attractivepeople to be around.Be grateful forwhat you do have. Surrender to what you can't control and know that it's for the best. That in the long run other things will compensate if you get good at not trying to change what you can't control.Believe me, this works. Again and again.[As an aside, it's interesting to read this post "What it's like to date a supermodel” to get some perspective on this. What's It Like to Date a Super Model - Altucher Confidential]Is cumulative/constant improvement the most important "thing" in life? –@JT_BeckI wanted constant improvement. But I didn't know what it meant. I felt it meant better money, better jobs, better women, better friends, more control over the aspects of my life that I felt were out of control. I then felt I could "spend" in those area: have bad relationships, experiment with things and in ways I shouldn't experiment, spend where I shouldn't, and in general purge myself of the good will I created via "constant improvement".Now I think the opposite. The best way to have constant improvement is to decrease constantly the things you feel the need to improve. Everything you want to improve is something external. More money. Better athlete, better at public speaking, better at writing. Perhaps I am just projecting these things and these are all the things I want to improve. But to have a goal is to be constantly striving and building to achieve that goal. And then once you achieve it, what's next? More goals? Less? Do you roll down the mountain and get disappointed. or do you get disappointed there are higher and higher goals to reach, never reaching the highest of all.For me, better to sit, being happy and grateful with what's outside, but giving up all goals on the inside. If you truly want for nothing, then all your goals and dreams will be achieved.Do you have a support group you meet regularly? are you willing to come to ct to meet one? would be honoredI don't meet with any kind of support group BUT I am planning on doing a weekend workshop at Kripalu which is sort of like a spiritual resort hotel.Here's the link to the retreat: Presenters and ProgramsBasically, everyone gets there Friday. There will be dinner (I think) and I'll give a talk and some Q&A.Then Saturday morning, Claudia will teach a basic yoga class which will include some breathing/pranayama exercises.Then I will give a talk about the relationship between entrepreneurship and spirituality. Can one be spiritual, secular, and successful all at the same time?A break at that point will include some worksheets to fill out. Then the afternoon for Q and A and some discussion of the role of meditation in society. At night, a discussion of meditation and the role of meditation (if there is any) in our society. Then some silent time until the morning on Sunday.Then Sunday, yoga and breathing again and a little bit of meditation. Then more Q&A, group workshops, and talks from me.I'm a bit nervous about it. I've given lots of talks before but haven't done the weekend retreat thing. I'm looking forward to being a little out of my comfort zone and seeing what happens.What is the key to persistence. I try the daily practice but cannot stay persistent and flake off after a few days. –@adnanpI think my "Daily Practice" post is usually too hard. For me also. Sometimes I'm busy so I just can't do yoga that day. Or sometimes I let the negative people overwhelm me. Or sometimes I find myself roiled in regrets and unable to be grateful for what I have.I've repeated the "second arrow" story before. When something bad happens to you, it's as if an arrow hits you. It hurts. You're bleeding. But you'll recover. It's when you then feel regret or remorse over what you've done that the second arrow hits you. It's that second arrow that can kill you.So first, avoid the second arrow. Don't feel bad that on your quest to improve yourself, you slipped. It's only you. There are no judges out there on Mt. Olympus saying, "Adnan, you have SLIPPED and FAILED! You must be PUNISHED!" Nothing of the sort. Life is short, we get by as best we can, then we get absorbed back up to where we came and report on what happened.If you want to do the Daily Practice but find it difficult, no problem. Just cut it in half. If that's difficult, cut it in half again. It's like Zeno's Paradox. As long as you keep cutting in half, you will never hit the floor. Remove goals from your daily agenda. Replace them by themes. The theme is that you don't hit the floor. You reduce suffering.Worst case: pick one category (physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual) and do one simple goal from just ONE of those categories (write down two ideas instead of ten). Now put an "X" on your calendar. You did it! Maybe tomorrow, or next week, or next year, write down three ideas and don't drink alcohol. Or not. It's all up to you. The second arrow has poison on it.Is there a correlation between creativity and trying new things (visiting new places, meeting different people, etc). –@ivanhoffTomorrow is Labor Day and I assume I will be busy doing Labor Day things. Then this week I'm going to try a new thing. I'm going to go to LA on Wednesday (after three meetings on Tuesday, all exploring new things), and I'm going to go to a press conference Amazon has invited me to attend on Thursday and then I'm going to spend Friday coming home. Then a weekend with kids (doing new things), and a Monday at a meeting and then dinner with some new people I'm doing business with.Time for creativity: zero.Perhaps new things will give me fuel to write. Will give me insight into ideas or human nature that will form the basic building blocks that will create either a new opportunity for myself or give me some new things to write about. I don't regret doing new things. In fact, I am choosing to do them. I never do something I don't want to do. (At least that is my mantra and I usually stick to it).But time for creativity (again, as a reminder): zero.If I spent this next week (since I just described a period of about eight days until I am next able to really relax at home) thinking, reading, and writing, I'd probably be a lot more creative. I have some talks to prepare (giving two talks in October, two in November, a big weekend thing in January, and two talks next March), I'd get together another book of material ("James Altucher's Guide to Parenting") and spend more time thinking about the intersection between creativity and failure.Which brings me to, what is creativity correlated with:Time. Yesterday, on a Saturday right before Labor Day, what you would think would be the slowest day of the year on the Internet, I tried an experiment. I've been avoiding using LinkedIn for about five years or so. Or whenever it was created. I don't know. 100 years ago. I let LinkedIn come in and peek through my gmail, match it with all the email addresses that were related to LinkedIn accounts, and sent out about 1030 LinkedIn requests. This was around 7am or 8am Saturday. Within an hour maybe 800 people had responded. (maybe everyone had responded but the Internet has evolved into this gigantic beast that never lets you know when people are saying "Heck NO, I don't want to be friends with that guy"). So this tells me two things:i) Why are we all on the Internet at 7am Saturday right before Labor Day. Aren't we buying charcoal or fishing or something? No. Not me either. I was on the Internet from 7am to 2pm yesterday, and then on and off for the rest of the day after that.ii) LinkedIn: why are you only looking at email accounts? Shouldn't you also be looking at twitter and Facebook?iii) I go back to my trading days. If everyone is doing something then perhaps the right thing to do is the opposite.Don't get me wrong: I love the Internet. I've been addicted to playing online chess since pre-web. I've been addicted to newsgroups since 1987. I've been addicted to reading other people's email accounts without their permission since about 1988.Most of all, I don't know the people who live on my block. And thank god. One woman with a tiny baby has the police regularly called on her whenever she and her boyfriend get in a fight. My choices: become friends with her OR make another new, positive, uplifiting connection, among the billions of people on the world wide web. It's an easy choice and I make it every day. I love my friends who I've made on the Internet. Part of the emotional component of what I call "the Daily Practice" involves getting rid of the negative people in your life and adding in positive people. People who will inspire you and uplift you. We used to be limited to the people who lived right near us and grew up all of our lives with us. Then "moving" became possible and we became limited by the people who lived near us and people who we worked with.Now we are not limited at all. I just made 1000 LinkedIn connections yesterday. Who knows which of those 1000 I will eventually become further friends with? There's no limits? I can choose new positive people every day or interact with the friends on the Internet I have already made. This, to me, is the cultural and universal success of the Internet.BUT.... I need to spend less time on it. This goes along with less time reading news and less time socializing at night. Not that these activities are bad. But they do get in the way of creativity.Let's go back to the Bible for a second because it contains a metaphor for creativity. Somewhere in there it says we are created in the image of God. Let's take a scientific version of that and assume that the laws of the Universe apply at the macro level and somewhat at the micro level. We are created in the image of the Universe. The Universe was a ball of light (or something, we don't know) in some area before time and space that was completely NOTHING. It was so much nothing we can't' define it. And out of that was created stars, galaxies, quasars, pulsars, quarks, and LIFE. You and me. The ultimate in creativity.Applying that on the micro level, since we operate by the same laws the Universe operates, it's clear what is correlated with creativity:doing nothing. NOTHING. Give yourself time for that. I don't mean give yourself time to think. I mean do NOTHING. Sit. Whatever. Walk.Combine things. The next thing that happened in the universe was that hydrogen started combining with itself to create new types of atoms. Ultimately, the basics of life were created by combining helium atoms together (three equal carbon) then combining the results of that together, then that together, and so on. Sit down and list things that you know (which implies you should spend some time reading in order to learn things - and reading will give you a lot more learning than doing although doing helps also) and combine them. I KNOW that facebook exists. I KNOW that companies, in general, do not know how to take advantage of new technologies. So it's a slam dunk that a basic lifestyle business one can create is to help companies figure out their Facebook presence.I'm not saying that's a company everyone should start. But it is a method that can be used for creativity. Combine two things that work (or that don't work - go for it!) and see what the new thing that is created is. In the 1970s everyone was fascinated by astronauts. People throughout history have been fascinated by mythology. And, we all love a beautiful woman (men and women love beautiful women). So what was created: "I Dream of Jeannie!" one of the most popular TV shows ever.Creativity then is correlated with the lows of the Universe. How does the Universe operate? Follow it and you will be able to create also. Your mind is like a mini-Universe.Which brings me to one final thing creativity is correlated with. Cue broken record....The Daily Practice. The Universe is healthy. It's expanding constantly (the Big Implosion is most likely debunked). You need to be healthy also. And not just physical health. But emotional healthy. Mental health (your idea muscle must be exercised every day) and Spiritual health (cultivating a sense of surrender to your current situation, feeling gratitude to the abundance both inside and outside of you). Some people have said to me that in my original post on the topic I suggested too many things for health. This is correct. I will have a follow up post soon about this. Or in my newsletter.I'm looking forward to doing new things this coming week. To seeing friends and making new ones. To traveling to LA (I haven't been there in a billion years) and then seeing my kids and then meeting with a new opportunity. But then I'm already looking forward to 8 days from now when I can sit and do nothing. Bliss.Interested in your take on advice to be yourself when seeking leadership roles/new jobs. –@taniahewEveryone puts on a mask when they wake up in the morning. They have different masks for different occasions. I have my father mask, my partner mask, my lover mask, my friend mask. My work mask. Most of the time those masks wear down. Over time, we become more comfortable being ourselves. On a first date we wear our best clothes. We smile. We spend money. We ask questions and then we ask the person to clarify. Six months later we are sitting around in our underwear watching football on TV next to the girlfriends we reeled in. "What, honey? Did you say something?"Everyone does this. Or almost everyone.You don't have to do it. When you are interviewing or taking a leadership position or even going out on a date, imagine if you didn't put on a mask. Suddenly you are standing out from 99% of the population.You're first!People who are good at what they do (even a potential spouse looking for a mate in the wild) can spot the masks pretty easily. They aren't idiots. Nor do you want to work for or be with an idiot.You can choose to stand out from the 99% of the population. Say what you mean. Say what you want to do. As I mentioned in the previous article The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Mediocre People - Altucher Confidential, I know I'm a poor judge of people. So when I meet someone I really want to ask questions and try to learn something. I don't know about this person. I want to learn who they are so I can form an opinion. Ask questions in your interview. Learn more about them than they can learn about you. If you truly want to do well at a company, learn more about the company during the interview. What other way is the best way to learn about a company - you have an employee right there ready to answer all of your questions.You might think: wear the mask in the interview but then do well at the job. If you can't do well being yourself at the interview then why would you want that job? You want to be with people who like the real you, not the you who is good at wearing masks.Before my first date with Claudia she told me she was from Buenos Aires. Like an idiot, I responded, "Oh, I've never been to Brazil!" I didn't know Buenos Aires was in Argentina. Somehow she still agreed to go on a first date with me.On the first date, I said to Claudia how when I was 13 years old I bought every book on astral projection with the idea that I would fly around invisibly in order to see other girls naked. That was my entire goal in life at that time although it never quite worked the way the books said it would.Somehow she agreed to go on a second date with me.Now, over three years later, I'm sitting in my underwear typing this while she is in some other room doing god knows what. Avoiding me probably. But I was myself all the way through and now I'm happy.How do you get past regret ? I can't get past this and have been wasting more compounding months and months. –@JohnPearson555When the web first started I quickly became comfortable with all the programming tools available to make websites. I had the tools in front of me to program many different things: a search engine, a directory of my favorite links, a way to post reviews of places, a way to post gossip about other people, and so on. Also domain name registration was free at the time. "Free Porn Pics, Porn Gifs and Sex Videos – SEX.COM" was available as a domain at the time. The guy in the office next door to mine created http://lycos.com, one of the first billion dollar search engines (actually, the first). Another guy down the hall built goto.com. Another guy built Wisewire, which he later sold to Lycos for $50 million. What did I do? I played chess all day on the Internet. I put some of my short stories on a little website. Blech! I had such a head start. There was a grand total of maybe 50 websites at the time, spread out over four or five universities. "I could've been a contender".What a thing to regret. At the beginning of an entire revolution and was I a revolutionary? No, I did nothing. I was useless. Every now and then I still think about it. 1993. 1994. What was I thinking?Regret is hard. It's a form of time travel. You try to start something right now, in the only moment that counts, and yet your mind is propelled back into the past, into the things that you did that are long gone, that should have no impact on how you do things now and yet they do. They are constantly pulling you down into the morass, into the tears, into the fears that you never will do anything good again.Use the past to help you plan the future. Use the past to help you live better right now. But once you dive into self-criticism, doubt, regret you have begun to time travel. You are living in the past. This is bad. When you catch yourself doing it you have to pull yourself back into the present. It's a practice. Start doing it today.One important way to deal with regret is to put it on the shelf. Say, "I'm going to think about you later but first I have to deal with RIGHT NOW. But thank you very much for showing up. Have a tea while you wait."Fortunately I also wrote about this very issue: 20 ways to deal with regrets 20 Ways to Deal With Regrets - Altucher ConfidentialHow to be more persuasive? –@TheBJJMindI'm going to make a list.Honesty. If people know you are always honest and you never BS, even at the smallest levels. You never exaggerate. You have no hidden agendas, etc. then you will be more persuasive. Your words will have infinitely more power. Honesty has exponential and not linear rewards. The more you practice honesty, the more powerful your words become in an exponential way. But it takes practice and consistency.Love. You can't be persuasive about something you don't believe in. If I was paid to sell vaccuum cleaners I could only be persuasive about it if I felt my cleaner was either the quickest, the "cleaniest", the cheapest, the whatever, of all vacuum cleaners. It would have to be religion for me and that vaccuum cleaner would have to be the god of all vacuum cleaners.People are better at smelling bullshit than you think. Actually, people are about as good as you would expect. If you put a plate of bullshit in front of them, it will smell.The slightest bit of dishonesty and lack of love for what you are being persuasive on, creates bullshit. And it takes only seconds for the other person to smell it and then the meeting is ruined. If you can't say something without turning it into bullshit then better to stay quiet until you stop vomiting. Then you will become a more persuasive person.What got you through your darkest moments? –@christaylor_nycHow can you build your self esteem when you are confronted daily by people who's opinions confirm your worst fears about yourself? –@ciaranmurphyadsThese are two sides of the same question. We've all had many darkest moments. When I first moved to the city I had no friends, no girlfriend, was constantly worried I was going to lose my job, and on and on. I shared a room with one other guy who would constantly bring over his girlfriend when they thought I was asleep. They would have sex in the bathroom, against the wall. My bed shared the wall with the bathroom. I had a garbage bag next to my bed. That was my only luggage. Every morning I would pull my suit out of the garbage bag, put it on and go to work. I don't think I did laundry for three months.This was the best time of my life.Another time I had a penthouse 5000 square foot apartment, money in the bank, kids, I had sold a business, I was starting a new business. This was the worst time in my life. I've had lots of moments in between. But this particular time, along with several others, I felt suicidal.What you have to do is take a step back. It's never about the circumstances. It's never about what is happening to you or who is treating you in a negative way, or how much money you have in the bank.It's about how you are taking care of yourself.In 1995 I was dating a girl who was a creative genius. She made beautiful websites out of thin air. This was back in 1995. She was also incredibly obnoxious and negative. She was so obnoxious but so smart that everything she said made me laugh. Even if her most vicious barbs were aimed directly at me. But since I had no self-respect I just laughed. The jokes were funny.To look at her was to hate her. For instance, we were walking in the street New Year's Day 1996 and a bum walked up to her and simply spat on her. Not to say she caused it but she always looked and acted so negative that one's gut reflex was to spit on her. She was also a heroin addict.One time we woke up and she said let's go bicycle riding. Since I had no opinions of myself and was always willing to do what other people suggested I got on a bike and spent the morning dodging cars that were trying to kill me. We went more and more East, more and more Lower, into the projects in the Lower East Side. She said, "wait here" and got off her bike while everyone around was staring at me, at the bikes. She went into the projects and came back a few minutes later. Later that day she told me she got heroin. And if I was a "bitch" and didn't like it I could just leave. I stayed. Then. It took me awhile to leave.My point in bringing her up is twofold. One, she always put me down. Always. Every hour of every day. And yet it was hard for me to leave her. I felt bad about myself because she was my mirror so I wanted her to say nice things to me and I kept sticking around hoping for those nice things to show up in my mirror. Two, one of the things she said to put me down was "you're like reading the same newspaper twice" because I always kept saying the same story twice. In my constant attempts to interest her in my life I would repeat things and forget I had already told her them,So now I'm going to be like reading the same newspaper twice in what I'm about to say. It's important at these moments (at every moment really but particularly at these moments) to take a step back and say: I'm going to get healthy. Forget all the people putting me down for a second. Forget the dark moments. Right this moment I need to do what I can to get healthy. And this doesn't mean eating yogurt and not snacking. This means, keeping all four "bodies" healthy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. When you do this, your body, mind, and spirit will be like a machine. You'll be like a warrior of the planet Earth. A force of nature.Physical: eat well, eat early, sleep many hours, exercise. Clean yourself.Emotional: Do not be around negative people, people who will bring you down or make your feel bad about yourself. Sometimes you can't help it. Sometimes at your school or place of work or even in your home, they are just there. Then what you have to do is train them by placing boundaries. When they start putting you down, do not engage. Don't laugh, don't fight back, don't argue or get defensive. Just move away. Say "hi" and walk away.I'll repeat it: DON'T ENGAGE. Only by setting boundaries will they understand. Not by talking to them (they won't listen), not by kissing their ass (that will make them worse), not by taking it good naturedly (they will think you like it) - just move away. And, in exchange, try to find positive people in your life. If you can't find them immediately, try to read books or blogs by positive people. I should've done this in 1995. I'm a bit better at it now. It takes practice.Sometimes you have a reason to feel negative. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't read from or be around people with positive energy. Every part of the universe has elements of both types of energy. But too often we get sucked into negativity and we let the positive side of ourselves shrink into nothing. That's called "unhealthy". Don't do it.Mentally. Forget everyone else. Read books every day (not garbage like news or TV). Come up with ideas to make people's lives better every day. This is the only way to get excited about real world things in such a way that it takes you off the floor to actually want to DO something. You must come up with ideas every day. I've been saying this for over a year on this blog and I've also been saying that in "six months your life will be completely different". Well, for the past six months I've been getting testimonials telling me I was dead on.Spiritually. There's not that much difference between you and everyone else. And everything else for that matter. Being grateful. Putting yourself in other people's shoes, appreciating the smallest slices of each moment, no matter how scary the future is or how depressing the past has been - this will keep your spiritual body healthy. Remember that the future is just science fiction. It's far away and doesn't exist, even if it potentially has the gift of fear and failure waiting for you. And remember that the past also is gone. It may have left an impression on you. But that impression exists RIGHT NOW. Thats all that's left of the past. Something that exists right now. Say hello to it. Then appreciate the RIGHT NOW. That's all you need to do to keep the spiritual body healthy. And do it as much as possible. Everytime you feel yourself dragged into the time machine of past and future.Do these four things consistently (and you can track them via a site, The Daily Practice set up just for this) and you will get up off the floor, people will begin to treat you better, you will become an idea machine, and each moment will glisten like a diamond blasted like coal burned in the center of the sun.I don't know what to do in life and over what i am good. I lose interest in whatever i do after some time. can you help me find? –@alihb12Ali, It's a horrible thing and I know how you feel. Not the feeling of "I don't know what to do" but the feeling of "I feel bad that I don't know what to do".When I was 18 I wanted to be a psychologist. Then I wanted to be an academic in computer science. Then I wanted to be a novelist. I felt the only way girls would like me is if I wrote a novel that was successful. I would pass a pretty girl on the street and I would think, "she won't like me until I publish a novel".Then I wanted to be have my own TV show. Then I wanted to be a millionaire. Then... You get the picture. Every few years things changed.My ten year old daughter said to me yesterday, "I don't even know yet what I want to do when I grow up." I told her, "That's funny because I'm 44 and I don't know what I want to do when I grow up either." And she laughed and said, "what do you mean? You're a grownup!". Little kids sometimes think they know more about what "grownup" means than grownups do.We're all given this very deep impression when we are young that by the time we are "grown up" that everything needs to be settled. We need to have a stable financial life, a spouse, children, upward mobility, a career that moves from success to success. We need to be an aquanaut or an astronaut or a politician or a lawyer or something!But that rarely happens. Even now I'm trying to figure out what to do next. I switched careers a few years ago and decided to focus on writing and investing. At some point I will switch careers again. Not because I am interested in anything else but it's because it's what I've done all my life and I finally can't fight it anymore. In fact, I'm excited to see what I come up with that will hold my attention for more than a few weeks.So I'm envious of you. You have an extra decade or so on me where you can continue to discover things you are interested in. You can continue to meander and pick up things along the way, the things that will add up to a great "you". It's like a magnet on the beach, picking up all the stray pieces of metal. Who knows what you will find! Maybe some gold (do magnets pick up gold? I don't even know).Enjoy the meanderings, the soul searching, the loves lost, the time wasted. All of it will add up to a complex and very unique "you". The more you appreciate RIGHT NOW the more the future will become a fantastic reality. Don't pressure yourself to be in the future.Which self help gurus have helped you in your life and how? –@EliSchostakI don't really like the self-help category. That said, I've probably read every self-help author out there, ranging from the psychology section to the self-help section to the occult section and all the sections in between.The problem is, most self-help authors focus on the wrong thing: how to get better at something. The goal in life is not to be the most impressive person in a meeting . Or to have the most money. Or to get the most girls. Not saying those are bad goals. We all have to live in the real world and we can't become monks.But often the goal in life is to cultivate NOT wanting those things. To be happy even if you aren't the most impressive person in the meeting, or the richest, or having the most sex, or being the best speaker, or being the most creative. Sometimes it's important to realize that the struggles, the little sufferings that battle us each day are not to be avoided but to be viewed as opportunities to strengthen the soul. To be grateful for what we have now, struggles and all, rather than to put together some complicated manifesto about how life SHOULD or COULD be in some distant future.I think most self-help tries to convince you that suffering could be circumvented through various tricks and techniques that will ultimately not work or even worse, cause massive harm.That said, a good book is "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. I think he borrows from various spiritual disciplines and condenses it down into something easily accessible. He focuses on various techniques one can use to be content and peaceful right now, rather than obsessing on past issues, or "visualizing" future outcomes that will crush us if they don't happen. I also like Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell. The former for her frank discussions with people during seminars and the latter for his unique modern interpretations of various religions. I didn't realize this until I had already read several books by both but it turns out they are married. Funny how that works.How important to you find it to have a clean/neat workspace? –@joelclark22I've always been a total mess. It's almost as if I'm incapable of cleaning up after myself. This is a cop-out. But once a week I pay to have someone clean my workplace. Sometimes twice a week if the kids have been over. If I could pay someone to bathe me I would.It's really true: cluttered desk = cluttered mind. But it goes deeper than that. You need clean everything. I can't function creatively if my stomach is full. Then all my brain energy, all my blood, all the oxygen in my body, is hanging out near my stomach trying to digest whatever crap I force fed it on some binge.Or if my head is foggy from lack of sleep. Or if my emotions are crowded with anger and jealousy. Or if my breath is bad. It's important to clean teeth because bacteria love to grow in your mouth. And an infection in the mouth can ultimately (and quietly) spread to an infection in the brain or heart. Believe it not but many heart attacks and strokes can find their roots in, basically, the roots of your teeth.Clean your desk! Clean your mouth! Clean your emotions, your sleep, your aches, your pains. Gradually, these will be precursors to greater productivity and creativity. Try it. You'll see.Love 'What Are You?' post. How do u avoid the #fuckitnothingreallymatters effect? –@EricRomerHere's the thing: it's true. Nothing does matter. Whatever you do, 10 years from now nobody will remember. In some rare cases they will remember. But 100 years from now nobody will remember. Or 1000 years from now. The universe is 13 billion years old. We're nobody in it. Each life is like a small pin in the middle of a gigantic stadium. It means nothing.But...we have to feed our family. We have to feed ourselves. Our bodies want us to treat them well and to survive. So we need to do what it takes. And ideally the rest of the time we sit and we think to ourselves, "what will it feel like to be dead". Because eventually we will spend most of eternity being dead. So why not practice thinking about what it will feel like right now. Practice as much as possible. There are secret surprises waiting for you if you think a lot about what it would be like to be dead, to be gone, to have no trace of you left. You end up loving everything around you. Because everything will eventually be gone.All of the people we are arguing with. Everyone who has done us wrong. Everyone we have loved or ignored or hated. We all have that in common. We're all brothers and sisters in death.This moment is very special. Because in just one more moment, like everything else, it passes into the land of the dead.Can you pinpoint an event that changed you into the person you are today? –@holmYes. I was depressed because I had just spent twenty years or more trying to make everyone happy. My friends, my family, my bosses, my investors, my colleagues, my employees, my customers, girlfriends, people I wanted to do business with, people I wanted to kiss up to because I thought I would benefit in some way. And it wasn't working. At some point you have to step back and say, "this plan that I've had my entire life just hasn't worked". Every media outlet seemed to be closing to me. Nobody was investing money with me. Every business I was trying to do was getting stalled at the gate. I felt bad about myself, like I was always trying to please but nobody was very interested in pleasing me.So I decided to choose myself. I stopped worrying about the distant future or regretting the past. I stopped paying attention to people who blamed me or wanted something from me. I only would do what I WANTED to do. I only would be with people who I loved and who loved me. I only would work for things that I hoped would deliver real value.By choosing myself I finally started writing a blog. Previously I had only written in places that "accepted" me. Now I accepted myself. I wrote whatever I wanted, and ultimately wherever I wanted.And that led to new friendships, that led to an increase in my search for wellness and spirituality. It led to living a healthier life. It led to less stress and more positive people around me and more ideas flooding to me. It led to more people trying to do deals with me, asking me to participate in more activities. I started having fun for the first time in maybe 17 years. I feel this blog and everything and everyone that has connected to it has changed my life completely. I'm infinitely grateful for the changes.And if I had to pinpoint, I'd say it was when I totally gave up on everyone and every thing. When I started to be quiet to all opportunities on the outside and choose myself first. This changed my life.You said you hit rock bottom many times. Does it get easier? Do you stop worrying after a while? –@martefrainThe first time I hit rock bottom I couldn't believe it. I assumed that I was going to go broke and become homeless. That my wife and kids were going to move in with her mother. That nobody would ever talk to me again. That everyone would laugh at me and my failures. I was almost right on every count. Probably everybody did laugh at me. I would go to the ATM machine and have a full-scale panic attack when I saw how much was left. I would lose money in the stock market and cry. I would look at my kids and cry. I was scared to fucking death. I'm sorry for the language. There's no other way to describe it.It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more I assumed the worst, the more I pictured it day after day in my mind, the faster it careened towards me.If human warmth could be measured in temperatures, I hit absolute zero. I was cold and hungry and scared and frozen. Nothing was good. Everything was shit. Everything was less than zero. Everything caused my body to wilt, my heart to break, my stomach to hurt, my mouth to lie and then puke.And it wasn't the first time. I've hit rock bottom a few times. And that's the good news.Because the last time I hit rock bottom I didn't think about it. Everytime I got scared about the future I just said to myself, "that's the future. It will take care of itself. And now this second I just need to do the right things. Right now is not so bad." I also knew that, statistically, the worst would not happen to me. It never fully did. So I knew that my mind was creating more worries for me than were actually there. Ghosts in the closet."The future will take care of itself". I knew this was true. I didn't even need to think about it. So I didn't. I enjoyed the Right Now. And I'm glad I did. The only thing I forced myself to do was to stay as healthy as possible across all four bodies: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. That's where the mind tries to sneak in and trip you up.And you know what, it worked. It was like magic. As long as I took care of the "right now" then the future took care of itself magically. Things would happen. Money would show up. The people around me would make the right decisions. Opportunities were thrown my way because I wasn't running scared from them. Anytime I got scared I would literally hit my chest, stiffen my back, stand up straight and say, "I am abundant!" And it was true. I already was abundant, whether my bank account reflected it or not.This is a truism: when you jump, you don't need to look down. The net is there even if you can't see it. And the net will catch you. So what do you look at? You can look at the sky. The blueness of it. The birds. You can take a deep breath. You can enjoy the ride. And when you finally hit the net and bounce you can say "wheeee!" all the way back up, because you know the net will always be there, and you'll always have fun enjoying the ride as long as you realize we live in one big amusement park.I'm afraid of many things. But rock bottom isn't one of them anymore. And as for the rest, who cares? I know that right now I'm having a lot of pleasure writing to you.James, how do you deal with the stress of getting older and the feeling that the years are flying by? –@kevinkoskellaAging, decay, death, is a horrible part of life. And it happens to every atom, cell, molecule, animal, human. But it's horrible. Eventually, about 15 trillion years from now, all of the light will be extinguished from the universe, everything left will just be a lifeless husk. It's sad that such beauty was created and there is no other course for it other than eventual imploding despair and nothingness. I can relate that you are afraid of the decay that will happen. And it's not just the decay, it's the uncertainty of which things will break first, which memories will be forgotten, which bones will be the next to break, and finally, the ultimate question of what happens next. Knowing that we will never know until it's too late.But I hate to tell you, I love getting older. Because the years that preceded my current advanced age of 44 were really not that great for me either. Or for many people.0-5 years old: you shit in your pants and you are dependent on other people 100% of the time to move, to eat, to bathe, to sleep, to wake up, to communicate. It's awful. Those were probably the worst years of my life. Particularly the shitting in my pants part because sometimes it happened in front of my friends. Or on top of them. I still remember that. My mother comforting me when all the other kids on the block were laughing at me.5-13 years old. What a nightmare. The fear of first grade. Of school. Of my father telling me: first there's school until 18. Then college until 22. Then graduate school until 26. Then work until 65. Then you die. What the hell! And then, at age 13, junior high school! That was like a prison. I was getting acne, braces, glasses, and random kids that had beards at the age of 13 were fighting each other in the hallways until there was blood. And girls started getting pregnant. And now I have a 13 year old! This is horrible!13-18. Disaster! High school. Teenage years. Constantly lusting after every girl. If you're not a guy you might not even be able to imagine. All I could think about was girls. It doesn't matter what the teacher was saying, I was pressing up against my desk to get constantly excited. And then I would eye every girl in the hallway with the implicit question: "will you have sex with me". From 13 to 18. And do you know how many girls eyes back with a "yes"? ZERO. What a nightmare.18-25. College, then graduate school. Horrible. And the sex, while plentiful, is not even that great either. Nobody knows what they were doing and I knew even less. And then when you start to get a job and you have to pretend like you know what you are doing but you know nothing and all you want to do is cut every corner and quickly retire. At least, for me.25-44. Career. Family. Debt. Responsibilities. Fears. The first time I ever thought of suicide. Squashed dreams. Failures. What are so great about these years? I mean, I'm glad I have two kids now. Did I want them? No. But now I'm glad they are alive so they can torment me for a few more years.I'm 44 now. I think maybe I enjoyed 5% of the years that came before this year.What do I have to look forward to now?Ahh, bliss. I have Claudia so I hope the next 40 years are good in that department. My kids are older and soon they will be adults so finally I can be their friend instead of just their dad. I legitimately like them so I think that will be fun. I'm wiser do I don't make the non-stop stupid mistakes I made from 25-44. Persistence is not about sticking with something, its about making mistake after mistake after mistake until stop making them anymore. Hopefully I'm at that point.Health after 44. Several good things. I am much more aware of my digestion now than when I was 21 so it means I eat better. I also sleep better because I realized that drinking was one of the stupid mistakes from 25-44. I also have now accumulated enough positive people in my life (after 44 years) that I don't have to hunt for too many more in order to enjoy my friendships. The good thing about maintaining health is that every year I probably move up in ranking in the looks category among people my age. When I was 21 I was probably in the bottom 10%. Now maybe I'm hopefully at the 50th percentile. That's a big improvement!So I figure this is good for the next 20 years and then maybe other health issues start to happen. Like cancer or something. Bring it on, bitches! No chemo for me. Chemotherapy rarely works and just makes you more sick. I'm looking forward to morphine, hospice, saying goodbyes to people. Making jokes about it.Maybe I'm looking at it too lightly. What does death mean? It means nothing. Literally nothing. There's a big ocean out there. My life is a single wave on that ocean. A wave that laps into the beach, disappears, and then gets drawn back into the infinite ocean, where all life began. I'm looking forward to the welcome home party.How to handle disappointing someone without burning the bridge? –@arzviOne time I wanted to break up with a girlfriend but I was afraid to do it. I had no idea how to disappoint her. So I moved cities. And then four months later she finally broke up with me. And a few seconds after she broke up with me she called back and didn't want to break up. And we went back and forth like that for awhile. Finally, she broke up with me for good. And she went and met a new guy. And got married, got a law degree, had some children, has a successful career and marriage. All because I was too afraid to disappoint her.Don't make such big assumptions. What was so great about me that I was so sure I was going to disappoint her. Her life is 1000 times better now without me. As is the case with just about everyone who has ever broken up with me or stopped doing business with me. What is so great about you that you are so sure you are going to disappoint someone. You have no idea. Nor do they.Here's what I do know:don't make any big assumptions about who is disappointing who. That is just ego.don't assume you will burn a bridge. Bridges that are burned are often rebuilt to be stronger and sturdier. Even if for awhile traffic has to go around a different path, eventually the bridge gets rebuilt with the newest materials. Trust in that. You can't burn a real bridge forever. A girl who very tragically (to me) broke up with me 22 years ago (almost to the day) has recently gotten back in touch with me. Now we are friends and I can watch as her children grow and I can see how happy she is. That fills me with happiness, no matter how disappointed I was back in 1990.Be honest about how you feel. The feeling of "leave now" will eat at you until you do it. Be honest, be straightforward, and you will avoid much pain that will happen anyway. You are already on an inescapable path to doing what you have to do. So just do it now and be honest about it.You're not so great. We're all trying to figure our way out in the world. We all need some adventure until that right situation comes along where we can settle down and relax. Sooner or later you have to get on with it. And so does the other person. Don't hold out. Just do what you have to do and make everyone's life better.Whats the best way to become smarter? –@DoronGreenspanThe best way to become smarter is to become stupid. Like, really really stupid. First off, almost everything you learned in school was either insufficient or a lie. And it was also just facts. So being smarter involves starting today with a blank slate. Everything you've learned in the past is either incorrect or a lie designed to manipulate you. Think of all of your commonly held beliefs, for instance. Every one of them. Assume they are all wrong. Now start from scratch.This applies even to basic words and vocabulary. Believe it or not, the more words you know, the more stupid you might be.For instance, take a candle. What if you forget the word "candle". So now you're confused. You see some wax and a string.A study was done: you're given a match and a candle and two metal rings. You're told to make the metal rings into a figure eight. The people who were told they have a "candle" solved the problem about 50% less than the people who were told they have "wax" with a "string" at the top. How come? Because the people who were told "string" tied the rings together. The people who were told "candle" tried to use the match to melt the candle enough to cement the rings together but the rings wouldn't hold together. What a stupid thing to do despite their bigger vocabulary!Take everything you see - try to rename it into it's components. Unlearn the macro words. Take every emotion you feel and do the same. Take all your relationships and do the same. What does that mean? It means if you are angry at someone, look at the situation from their shoes and really accept their anger. What does this have to do with being smart? It means your mind gets less clogged by your anger, which is nothing but shit stuck in the pipes. Eventually a plumber has to come in there and clean things up or the water won't flow. All of your resentments, jealousies, anxieties clog the pipes and make you less smart.Accept the anxieties. They are part of life. But say hello to them and let them move on. If you can. Practice that.And then go outside and look around. Don't name anything. Don't name the sunrise, the people, the mountains, the fresh air, the flowers. Those are just words you were taught. That was all part of the brainwashing. Take a deep breath. Enjoy.How do you apologize to someone? –@edzitronA few years ago I had to call someone I blew off for many years. I didn't have to call him but I wanted to. He had been a good friend and then for some reason I stopped returning his calls. And then when I stopped returning them, he kept calling and saying, "why aren't you returning my calls?" and I felt so bad I kept telling myself, "I'll return his call tomorrow, DEFINITELY" and then I never would.So eventually I called him. I simply said, "I'm sorry. I get that way sometimes and I don't know why. I get weird but I want to get together and hang out and I'm sorry." So we got together and hung out. And, because we truly are good friends, even though years had passed by, we instantly were good friends again. We took a long walk. I showed him the ring I had gotten for Claudia to ask her to marry me. He said congratulations. I hadn't even shown Claudia that ring yet. It was nice to share my secret with a good friend. But the apology came first. Just be honest about it and hold your breath and get it over with. So you can be friends again.How do you deal with feeling like shit no matter what you do or how fortunate you are? –@LeonBenson2I am really sorry you are feeling like shit. Sometimes that happens. We're not really meant to be happy all the time. Nobody ever said that. Sometimes there are real reasons to feel like shit. Like when someone close to you dies. Or you lose a job. Or whatever. Sometimes, though, we just wake up and we're depressed and there's nothing we can do about it.But make sure you check the box on all the big things. There's a lot of macro things people feel upset about that there's really no need to feel upset about.Let's pick the macro things:we can complain about Obama or Romneythe environment. That's something to complain about. It's too hot here today.We can complain about Obamacare and how our taxes are going to go up.How about we complain about how the banks screwed all of us. I can't even get my bank to return my calls.Then there's more personal stuff:I can complain that so-and-so is ignoring me now.Or another person trashed meOr I didn't get enough "likes" on a post.Or somehow I didn't make as much money on something as I thought I was.Or I can't sell my goddamn house.Or my kids don't listen to me.There's lots of things to complain about. I don't know anybody who is so fortunate that they couldn't, if given a piece of paper and a pencil, fill it up with things to complain about. And we can compete with each other. Who can complain the most? This is a popular game played at the water cooler on a Monday.The brain likes to complain. In fact, one of the main duties of the brain is to complain about things. The amygdala usually gets all inputs first, before the other parts of the brain. This is the part of your brain that gets angry about things. In other words, this is the complainer in the brain. It doesn't like for inputs to go around it. It's biological. If you are an animal in the jungle, your brain needs to process the dangers first. Don't forget that we are evolved from the people that actually RAN AWAY from the trampling elephants as opposed to the people who got trampled.But the brain likes to have something to do. Else it gets nervous you will stop paying it. So it obsesses on these dangers. It puts you constantly in a state of "fight or flight". You get addicted to that obsession. Your identity and ego gets wound up in the complaints. "I'm a failure".So see if your brain is getting too active. Too needy for your attention. If it is, you can bring it back in balance using what I call the daily practice where you balance the health and goals of all four aspects of your body: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. You can pick small, incremental goals in each category and check them off each day at The Daily Practice.But the other thing is: you might simply be clinically depressed. Go see a psychiatrist. Talk things over. See if there is a medication that might help. But don't just rely on that medication. That's like someone with lung cancer relying on chemotherapy rather than stopping smoking. Do what you can for your health. But also see a professional.Sometimes I get that not so fresh feeling. –@TrdrFlridaEvansClaudia reminds me: I think you haven't showered in four days. So I know what you mean. But although your question is sort of a joke, I'm going to answer because it's important to me to always feel "fresh".I don't always follow these (at the moment I am not feeling very fresh) but here's what you will do and you will feel fresh:sleep 9 hoursbathebrush your teeth and then use a tongue scraper and flosstake a huge bowel movementshower againdo yogano alcoholno tv or news. Read good books.clean your desk. clean your kitchen.don't gossip, even about people you hate. try to hate less but that's hardmeditate. Easiest one second meditation: Just say "I don't know". Or say, "I love myself" over and overlist five things you feel grateful foreat just two meals today, minimize carbs and sugar and heavy meatOk, you asked and that's the answer.Who's on your list of people you would take a bullet for? –@DafmasterI would take a bullet for you.PERSONAL WEALTHWhat is the quickest way to make a million? –@runwayfashionUKI will tell you.Step one. Figure out an area that is "hot". For instance, Facebook marketing is inning one. Better tests for personalized diagnostics of age-related diseases is in inning one. Understanding the root causes of depression is in inning one. Combining mobile with social is in inning one. Self-publishing your book and marketing it is in inning one. There are probably 30 more areas I'm neglecting to mention. Maybe 100. Or 1000. Start listing them today.Step two. Start a service business in one of those area. For instance, go to every local business in your town and offer to set up the facebook fan page for their business. Then, in store, their customers can "Like" their page. Then all the friends of those customers will see that they Liked that page and will be curious. That's the basics. Then it gets more and more advanced as you get familiar with the Facebook landscape and their tools for targeted marketing. If you can't get any customers for this basic business then something is probably wrong with your pitch, with you personally, or you live in the woods. You can be ten years old and get this business started. Get ten clients or more.What about age-related diagnostics tests if you are not a scientist? No problem. Write a newsletter about the latest developments in that area. Make a blog about it. Or sell your subscription newsletter for a high price to every big pharmaceutical company. In other words, pick an area in "Step One" above and then brainstorm the various ways you can build a business around that area in "Step two". You don't have to make an airline to set up a travel-related company. There are many ways to come up with ideas that work.Step three. Productize your service. Let's say in the Facebook example above. Come up with a way a business can auto-post onto the fanpage timeline their latest offers, polls, etc. Products create more value than services as far as business acquirors are concerned because it follows along the dictum of "make money while you sleep". In the age-related diagnostics newsletter example - find software to scour the FDA database about new submissions that you then collate into your newsletter. And so on. I know one person who is an expert on how to find lists of "rent to own" homes. He quickly made a database, put it online, charged a subscription fee to get access to the database, marketed on Google, and is now making $300,000 a month within two months after launching. He's 27 years old and never went to college. He can do it. So you can also. If he wanted to sell for one million dollars today to a company like Zillow for instance, they'd pay him that in a heartbeat. Since I'm an investor in his company I'm hoping he eventually sells for a lot more than that.Step four. Get customers. Knock on every door. Call up every biz dev person. Make a list of 1000 potential customers and start updating all of them about your offerings, your new offerings, your customer development, your testimonials, your outreach and so on.Step five. Sell the business. You aren't asking for a lot. The question was: "how do I make a million". If you want to sell your business for one hundred million you have a lot of hard work in front of you. If you want to sell your business for a million, there are plenty of companies who want to break into your space, get your products and customer list, and get YOU (because you know the space intimately by this point) and be happy to give you either a million in cash or a million in stock plus pay you an ongoing salary. A million is not a lot if you have a product, customers, a unique offering, and special knowlege, and if you are selling to a much bigger company.That's all it takes. Timeline? One year starting from today. Go for it. Make a million and please report back to me when you do so I can write a book about it.BOOKS / READINGWhat percentage of your monthly reading is non-fiction and what drives the direction of that reading? –@bozwoodI have three goals when I read:funlearn. And when I say "learn" I want to learn things that will mate with my old ideas so I come up with new ideas either for this blog or maybe, in the extremely rare case, for a business.to be a better writer.For "A" I read both fiction and non-fiction. I don't get so strict on whether the reading will improve me. I just want to have fun with a good story or compelling, page-turning reading. There is some selfishness in this reading in that I, eventually would like to write a fun book.For "B" I like to read almost anything. It's not necessarily going to be the best writing (non-fiction writers, almost by definition, have spent time getting good at their area of expertise and not put in the 10,000 hours to become a world-class writer.For "C" I want writing that will literally put me in a trance with how good the writing is. It's this trance that I then try to help improve my own writing.I'll read or spend some time reading, at least 50 different books a month.Here's my list of books I've either read chapters of, or the whole books, in the past week or so. Or books I'm planning on reading. This of this as myBACK TO SCHOOL READING LIST:"The Next Decade" by George Friedman. The folks at stratfor seem to have infinite knowledge about the past, present, and future of all of our geopolitical situations and George perfectly summarizes them all for the layman."SoulPancake" by The Office actor Rainn Wilson. A unique book bursting with creative ideas."How to Write Science Fiction &amp; Fantasy" by Orson Scott Card - planning my BIG BREAK"The Complete Book of General Ignorance" - it's actually amazing how much pure knowledge of gotten from this."I Am That" by Nisaragadatta Maharaj. Was on my last list but re-reading."Myths to Live By" by Joseph Campbell, an excellent comparison of the various myths that have evolved into today's science around the world."Cyndi Lauper" autobiography. Yes, there's a lot to learn here about being an artist."Tiny Beautiful Things" by Cheryl Strayed. Often an inspiration for my Q&amp;A posts. Her book "Wild" is also excellent."Every Love Story is a Ghost Story" by D.T. Max - a biography of David Foster Wallace. I'm not a fan of any of Wallace's work but his creative ascent and then descent into depression and then suicide is tragic and compelling."You Are Here" by Christopher Potter - a good introduction to the Big Bang, particle physics, what happened "after" and what might've happened "before"."Winter Journal" by Paul Auster - a beautifully written memoir"U and I" - Nicholson Baker's internal love/hate relationship/rambling about John Updike. It's interesting in a world of Google because he consciously tries to analyze Updikes works without looking any of them up and without having read them all. And then he deals with his own jealousy over those works and compares Updike's literary career with his own."The Chronology of Water" - Lidia Yuknavitch. Beautifully written and also recommended by Chuck Pahlianuk ("Fight Club") who also recommends my absolute favorite fiction book, "Jesus' Son" by Denis Johnson"Loving What Is" by Byron Katie. An inspirational woman who seems almost supernaturally infused with happiness. She's married to another of my favorite authors, "Stephen Mitchell" who wrote an interesting book "The Gospel According to Jesus" who picks apart the New Testament trying to determine what was added later and which parts might be accurate. I also recommend her book "Who Would You Be Without Her Story". She's like an overly happy Eckhart Tolle.Also, since my visit with Amazon and meeting a bunch of self-published authors I've become addicted to the books of one of the sci-fi writers I met there, Hugh Howey. In particular, in the past two weeks I've read:"Wool Omnibus" - a 5 part collection of his Wool series"First Shift" - a prequel to the above series"The Plagiarist""The Hurricane" and I just downloaded "Halfway Home" by him."Daytripper", a graphic novel by Fabio Moon"You're Not Doing It Right" - Michael Ian Black. Funny.and, finally, rereading "Factotum" by BukowskiThese are the books I've read or re-read over the past month. I've had quite a bit of time on planes, trains, when I wake up early, and before I go to sleep and I spend that time reading. I haven't included books I've only skimmed or read parts of nor have I included the books I'm planning (hoping) to read over the next few months and I left off one or two books that I didn't enjoy.Is it best to just read what is interesting and let the ideas percolate from there? –@bozwoodYes. Only read what you find is interesting. Never read the news. 100 years from now, nobody will care what was in the newspaper today. There's not a single thing in the news that will help you be a better person or will make you more informed about the world. Here's the news today (every day): Everyone in every election is lying. Every media outlet is biased so you are just reading some random reporter's opinion so it doesn't matter. There's more wars going on then you thought. Oops, here's a baby that just got bombed in a war you didn't know we were in. And some houses are being sold and yet foreclosures are through the roof and you student loans can no longer be humanly paid unless we clone ourselves but if you don't want to pay them you have to be declared "legally hopeless". And some celebrity had a baby and the father is not sure.In fact, it turns out you need to use DNA Genetic Testing & Analysis - 23andMe to confirm the genetics of yourself, your parents, and your kids, because apparently illegitimacy rates are much higher than you think (op-ed page).Ok, that was the news.Here's the books I read today. I'm not necessarily recommending them. This is just what I found interesting this morning before I started writing. I got up particularly early so probably read a bit more than usual. I only read a few chapters in each book.Essays by Neal StephensonWait by FrankPartnoyThe Rare Find by George AndersCollected Stories of Leonard MichaelsYou Are Here by Christopher PotterI Am That by Nisargadatta MaharajAnd... the ever useful "The Book of General Ignorance" which has more fascinating facts and ideas than I've read in any other book (I bought it the other day when I took my kids to the Liberty Science Center. I'm always a sucker for the bookstores in museums. Who says bookstores are dead?).From this reading I got an idea for a post that I have not yet written but I know the title. I'm either going to call it "The Death of Slavery" or, if I think that might be somehow offensive, I might call it "The Death of Time". It was a combination of three of the above books that gave me the idea which is, basically, the evolution in thinking about your value that ultimately takes you from poverty to wealth. Or from stress to happiness. You choose. Although it could be both.So, yes, read every morning. Only read things that interest you. Look hard for things that you find fascinating. Because in your head they will all mix together and create a beautiful alphabet soup. And like you were when you were a little kid, you will look down in the soup and see the letters spell out sentences that you know, deep down, could only be direct messages from god to his special little child... you.What is your favorite book about chess? –@MainStInvestingAs the story goes, Laszlo Polgar had a theory about how to educate his children (and if his children or their friends read this, please correct me if I'm wrong). Home school them, teach them a variety of subjects, but at least 3-5 hours a day or more, they had to intensely study one subject. And in doing so from an early age, they will be among the best in the world. He put an ad in the paper looking for a suitable girlfriend / mate who agreed with his ideas. He found his wife. They then had to decide between two areas: tennis and chess. I don't know why they chose chess instead of tennis. Maybe because tennis requires some things you can't teach. Like a certain innate physical talent or strength. Whereas anyone can learn chess.He had three daughters. Susan, Sofia, and Judith. All three were easily world champion level (for women) and Judith is, or was, in the top ten of the world for men. His idea worked. They all made a living from chess. They all became famous from it. The family thrived because of chess.Part of his philosophy, it appears, was quantity over quality. Rather than give them very difficult chess problems (the way to get better at anything is to study prior situations of that field) he gave them bulk quantity problems. Some of them easy, some of them hard. The idea is that the more situations you see, the better your intuition gets.He put them all together in a book called, "CHESS". I find this to be the best book ever on chess.Interestingly, another parent had similar ideas about educating kids. And he chose tennis. Richard Williams' two children, Venus and Serena, are the two best women players in the history of tennis.What book have you reread the most? –@BenNesvigIn 1993-1994 I started reading short stories coming out in various literary journals all by this one guy, Denis Johnson. They were amazing. I'd scour all the literary journals out there to find more and more stories by him. I couldn't believe how good they were. I was reading every short story writer in existence and somehow his stories were an order of magnitude better.Then he finally came out with a collection. Jesus' Son. I remember the day it came out. I ran into a friend of mine and he said, "what you got there?" And I said, "this is the best book that will ever be written".The other day I was reading an interview with Chuck Pahlaniuk, who wrote "Fight Club", "Choke" and other novels. I like his collection of essays also. In the interview he said he must've reread "Jesus' Son" over 300 times. I felt happy that his writer who has been such an inspiration to me is also acknowledged by another great writer who is an inspiration to me. I immediately went home and reread Jesus' Son again. I'm probably not up to 300 times but I'm at least over 100 times.One time I was looking at Fortune magazine. I saw that Denis Johnson wrote an article for them. I got disappointed. Why did he write for a magazine that I could probably write for. Why isn't he in some heaven for magical writers.But that's writing. It's hard to catapult yourself into outer space even if you are the best of the best, a writer's writer, the one that everyone else reads. So use his book as inspiration, but figure out how that inspiration will get you to your dreams.NETWORKINGWhat's the best way to network at an event where you don't know anyone? –@BenDelphiaUsually before you go to an event, you know who is going to be there. Maybe there is a list of speakers or other attendees somewhere.Research the bios of everyone you know will be at the event. Maybe become Facebook friends with them.Then spend time researching their companies. Come up with ten ideas for each person BEFORE the event. You don't have to share those ideas with them at the event. But now for every person there you can easily go up to them and say, "you know,I was just thinking about you" and start reeling off your ideas. If they don't seem interested. No problem. You've made contact. You've touched base. They will remember you the next time. Move onto the next person.This is the best way to network. It may not have dividends for each person you come into contact with but overall it will have great dividends that will compound into great success for you.The key is: make sure you are good at coming up with ideas.LOVE / SPECIAL SOMEONE / RELATIONSHIPHow should a single person find someone? Pitfalls to avoid? –@thecrintI'm ashamed to admit this: I've basically never given myself a chance to be alone. I always went from one relationship to the next. Which, of course, led to many unpleasant relationships. I think I was afraid to be alone. But consequently, I feel like I've mastered the art of meeting someone:Step one: Be everywhere they are. Where are they? If you are a man, the women are in dance classes, cooking classes, art classes, and on online dating services. I met Claudia on J-Date.Step two: Don't be afraid to ask. Start asking out everyone you think is attractive. It works. Practice today. Don't be afraid of rejection. You see someone on the street say, "Nice dress". If she smiles back, maybe ask her out. Don't be rude. Just be pleasant about it.Step three: It's quantity first, then quality. Ask out as many people as possible. Go out on as many dates as you possibly can. Do coffee in the afternoon with one, dinner at night with another. Quantity.Step four: Quality: The only way you will find quality is to cut your losses. How do you cut your losses. This is goal-driven. Make sure your goal is not simply: "to have sex" or "to get a girlfriend". You want someone who likes you. Who doesn't do "The Rules" of trying to "neg" you or make you chase after her or anything that smells like a game. The theme of what you want is someone who likes you, who is easy to be with, where things happen naturally. Cut IMMEDIATELY anyone who doesn't go along with that theme, even if you are amazingly attracted to them.Then repeat.Does this seem sexist? Of course some women go to tech meetups or chess clubs. But at the average tech meetup it's about a 9:1 ratio. I don't like gambling in situations where the odds are against me. If your goal is to meet someone, go where the odds are on your side. Or, as Wayne Gretzky says, "I don't skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going".My wife cheated. I played detective, saw the phone bills, followed her, found out. She confessed and said it wouldn't happen again but I can't get over it. What do I do? –from an emailMany years ago a girl I was going out with got pregnant. She was devastated. She wouldn't return my calls and finally I went over her house. She wouldn't let me in the house. We took a walk and she was crying and she told me she was pregnant. I thought I was in love with her. I would've had the baby. I would've done anything for her. When we were sitting down on a park bench she was crying. I kept asking her what was wrong. People were looking over at us like I was about to hit this crying girl and maybe they needed to jump into the action.She told me she didn't know who the father was. She went over the times and it could've been this other guy. She had cheated on me when I had been on a trip.My entire world turned upside down. I didn't know who she was. Who I was. I felt like I had been played for a fool. I had been played for a fool. I was such a fool. To be chasing her. And I suddenly went over every night where she might've been out. When I was busy doing something. When I didn't stay over. Every moment, every second of every day. The time I saw her walking around the block. The time I ran into her on the other side of town. So many missing jigsaw pieces. Again and again. She was pregnant but I needed to go over the details again and again. I told her not to do anything. I told her. to. do. nothing.Slow it down. I just needed to process what was going on.She disappeared for a week. And when she next called me she told me she had had an abortion. She was crying. "Please see me." And she wanted to get back together.And you know what? We did. We went out for another six months. And every day I wanted to know where she was in all the minutes she wasn't with me. Every dayI wanted answers. I wanted to know why, how, who, what. I wanted to spy on her. I did spy on her. I wanted to go out with other women to get back at her. I wanted to kill myself sometimes. I felt so miserable.And finally SHE couldn't take it. She broke up with me.A few months ago I went to a meeting at a new hotel in NY. Some guys were raising money for a movie. I was curious about it. I met them. I walk in there and for the first time in years I saw. Her. Serving coffee. I felt like I recognized her but I couldn't quite place her and I started walking over while smiling. She saw me and turned red and then smiled back. I realize who it was and I panicked. I just turned around and walked outside. I stood outside for ten minutes. It must''ve been the end of her shift because a few minutes later I saw her leave the hotel with her coat on.When I went back into the meeting I told these guys, who I had never met before, what had just happened. The coincidence.One of them said, "you're lucky you got out of that mess."And yet, I never did. You never get out of the mess. The trauma of betrayal is stamped on you forever. Not only that, the betrayal would never have occurred if I had not been a jerk in many ways. If I had not been so inattentive. If I had not made my own crazy maze that I got lost inside of. It always takes two to create a betrayal.But now you have to look at that betrayal, and yours, in the face of every new relationship you have. It's like a discerning and critical grandmother who sits on your shoulder and has to approve every new relationship. No more games, I thought to myself, with any new relationship. And yet I still got into games. Many games. Too many games. Until finally the games were over. The games had frayed me to the bone. Could I have somehow made it work. Or made any of the relationships in between work? Maybe. Who knows.I don't know why I tell you this. Except to say right now I'm the happiest I've ever been.What is the glue that brings/keeps two people together in a relationship/marriage? Tangibles please! –@thecrintIt's really two question. What is the glue that brings people together. What is the glue that keeps people together.Sex is the glue that brings people together. When I first saw Claudia, I'll admit, before she even said two words to me I wondered what it would be like to have sex with her. And that's how it's been in every relationship I've had. Does that make me an animal? Yes it does. I'm a human animal. I'm a hunter in the wild. I have a biological need to spread my seed. Ok, enough of that.Because no matter what, you need more than that to keep a relationship and marriage going (and by the way, you should always keep the first glue going but now you need cement to really build a house).What's the cement that keeps the house built that's called marriage? I have to constantly put myself in her shoes. I have to constantly wonder when she's happy or upset, what are the triggers that are causing these emotions. I want to alleviate her struggles and help her achieve her goals. And I also want her to be happy right now. I also want to feel like she is doing the same. I don't want it to be one-sided.Sometimes it can't always be two-sided. That's ok also.But sometimes thngs just drift. People change. People no longer want to help the other achieve their goals. People no longer care as much about the other person's happiness.It's ok to leave a relationship. Life is short. Give yourself permission to leave if you want to. And give the other permission to leave if they want to. Thats not glue. Or cement. That's real love.If ex said I was amazing but not ready to feel that strongly this soon and he wants to date others, doesn't that just mean he's not into me? –@aspleniaOne thing I've learned after a 1000 failed relationships: always believe them when they are telling you something you don't want to hear. There is truth in every word.So if they say, "I feel like I'm going to hurt you", believe them - they will.If they say, "I feel I'm too stupid for you", believe them - they are.If they say, "You're amazing but...", then believe them. You are amazing. BUT, break up with them before they break up with you.If they say, "You're the most important thing to me but it's hard for me to end this other relationship," then take a big step back and never talk to them until they end that other relationship, even if it means you might never talk to them again.If they say, "I just don't know right now," then since all we have is RIGHT NOW, it really means, "they don't know". Believe them and move on.So, my guess is, you probably are amazing. You don't need him to tell you that. He's not your mirror. And if he says, "I must date others" then it's a guarantee that you will be waiting by the phone while he is actually in the process of having sex with someone else at the very same time. I know this. Because I've been waiting by the phone too many times.What can be done to restore the consideration needed to keep a relationship healthy, once it has been lost? –@thecrintYou're going to have lots of relationships in life. Spouses, girlfriends, bosses, friends, family, children. Sometimes you're going to be angry. Sometimes you're going to feel regret. Sometimes you'll miss someone, or hate them, or love them, or all of the above.Relationships are complicated.But they are always many. Don't ever be afraid to leave a relationship. It doesn't mean you didn't work hard enough. It doesn't mean you are a bad person. It doesn't mean the other person is bad. It just means two people spent some time together and now it's time for those two people to change the nature of their relationship into one form or other. Change is as much a part of relationships as stability is. There is nothing wrong with change.Even if you really, really want the relationship to work, no matter what happened, no matter what trust has been lost in the past, it still might not work out the way you want. You have to be willing to change the nature of the relationship. You can't ever force someone to love you. No matter what you do, things often change. Love changes. Life changes.Listen to what is really happening. Pay attention to how YOU really feel deep down. Do you feel bad? Do you feel wanting? Do you feel lonely? Then chances are this is a relationship that, one way or the other, needs to change. And then you'll move on and find another slice of the myriad of colors that make up the relationship spectrum. You will explore that entire rainbow before you die. And before you find the pot of gold at the end.What are some best practices for getting over a lost love? –@lloydhtaylorThere's nothing you can do. It's really painful. The last time I had a lost love I would sleep by the phone, hoping it would ring. I would wake up every two hours. Is my phone even working? I would make sure the battery was fully charged. 6am I would start to debate making that first "GOOD MORNING!" call, all cheery, all hoping for the invitation that would never come. Or I would buy something - maybe breakfast, and show up unannounced. Or I would circle her house, all morning, waiting for her first foray out towards work or to her new boyfriend or wherever. "Oh hey, I was just in the neighborhood."It really sucks. And then you think of the person with someone else, a body pressed against her, that smile that used to be all for you and now is shared with...who? No matter what she did, no matter how poorly she treated you, no matter how much she wanted you to change, or she wanted to change, or she wanted the situation to change, or you did, suddenly you can't get over her. Your brain is all lit up on an MRI, every neuron blasting messages of her smile, of the times she made you laugh, of her hair hanging down over your face while she laughs at your jokes.I'm really sorry you are going through it.There's the cliches: better to have loved and lost, etc. There's also the cliche that you will meet someone just as special again. But it's hard to believe in those right now even though they are very true. You'll know they are true later. You'll also know that someone who doesn't really want to be with you is probably not the right person for you to want to be with. But these things take time to realize. Just like it takes time to lose 50 pounds. Just like it takes time to learn French from scratch. Just like it takes time to learn a new musical instrument.Which reminds me of another question somewhere in this post where I mentioned a book I haven't looked at in 32 years but remember very well. It's called "Don't Say Yes When You Want to Say No" and its a pop psychology book from the 1970s. There was a section in it with exactly your question and here's what the author suggested. You can try it if you want. Or not, if you feel foolish. The idea is you need to go on a mental diet and not think of the person. Because right now, to be blunt, those thoughts are a waste of time and the faster you move on, the better.When you think of the person say in your head very softly, "No". It won't work. You'll think of the person again. Say in your head a little louder, "No!" Keep on getting louder and louder in your head everytime you think of the person. Then finally whisper out loud, "No". Then start saying it louder and louder.Ok, that's the exercise in the book. I gave it as advice once before. In fifth grade. To Lori Gumbinger, who was getting over Brian Fox (my apologies to these two if I got the two people wrong but I'm pretty sure I didn't). I forget if it worked but I do remember Lori shouting in the school cafeteria, "NO!"My other technique, which I've used for myself and I don't necessarily recommend it, is: meet someone new. We are often under the misconception that there is only ONE person who is the right person for us or who is the only person we could ever meet because of some problem we have or whatever. Well, it's not true. There are many people who we could love. Who could love us. The fact that you reached out here shows you are capable of giving it your all to fall in love. That's an attractive quality.How do you meet someone new? Let's not forget the basic statistics. Assume you want someone who is in the top 25% (one out of four) of these mutually exclusive categories: Sweet, Pretty, Intelligent, Creative, Emotionally Mature (SPICE). You are asking quite a bit and since those categories are exclusive of each other then if someone is in the top 1 out of 4 of all five of those categories then you are talking about one out of 1024 people who meet that criterion. Here's the good news: that's about 70 million people in the world. You have a lot to choose from.Many of those 70 million people are taken. Or in other parts of the world. But many of them are also your neighbors, your friends, your co-workers, and the girl in the yoga class down the street. In other words, instead of pining for your lost love, start doing the things you love. And when you are doing them, you will be surprised who you meet.Go out now and find her. And don't let her hear you say "NO" to loudly.Honesty and women. What's your experience? Does that superpower scare them? Attract? Something else? –@bkharnishYou mention the word "superpower". Honesty is a superpower. Most people are not honest. Maybe in the big ways they are but in the small ways they cut corners. They forget to mention something. They tell a white lie. They wear too many masks.We all wear masks. Particularly when we first meet people. We want to be liked and we're afraid we won't be if we don't act a certain way. I shouldn't say "we". I should say "I".When I first started dating after my separation from my ex-wife I was very nervous. I didn't know what to say or do. So I told the truth. Probably too much of it. And most women thought I was crazy. One woman wanted to date me but she kept telling me her therapist thought I was "completely insane". At least that was her excuse.And maybe I was. On my first date with Claudia I described how when I was a kid I wanted to learn how to do astral projection so I could fly around and invisibly watch all the girls in my school undressing at night. Somehow she agreed to go on a second date with me.So sometimes honesty will scare away people. But here's where the power lies. Nature doesn't lie. The universe is what the universe is. The less you lie, the more in tune with that you are. The less you lie, the more the universe will naturally bring you the things that belong in your life. This is the superpower. Don't cut corners on honesty. Don't be "radically honest" (where you spew vomit truths out of your mouth). Just be true to who you are. It doesn't mean every woman will love you. Or every business deal will go your way.It means the right woman will love you. And the right things will begin to happen in your life.SADNESS / HAPPINESSI have an incredible sadness that often can be quite overwhelming in my life. Does that ever go away? I'm really scared it won't. I'm not depressed, because generally I'm happy enough- its when the emotions are just overwhelming, the loneliness etc blah blah blah- the usual things that break us all apart. So, does it go away? –from an emailI am sorry you are feeling sadness. I will tell you something. At one point i was addicted to an anti-anxiety drug. I was undergoing a lot of stress. But after awhile (2 years) I didn't have the stress anymore. But I was now addicted to this drug. The drug was no longer helping me. But when I would try to get off the drug bad things would happen. I would survive maybe 2 or 3 days and then I would feel an incredible sadness that was out of my control. I would barely be able to function and the slightest thing would make me cry.It's not just because I was getting off the drug. It's because, if you look for it, the world gives us plenty of opportunities to be sad. The world is a sad place. And if we fool ourselves into believing otherwise, Buddha is there to remind us with his rule #1: the world is full of suffering and there is no way to avoid it. At first I tried to avoid it with the anti-anxiety drug. But when I wasn't anxious anymore and I wasn't sad and I tried to get off the drug, I would notice everything in the world that was still sad. Still a cause of misery, the scent of death, the sulfuric taste of despair. I couldn't shake it off my five senses. And I would sit in my livingroom and cry and think of other people who were sad and think of the beautiful hopelessness of everything.There are solutions then. Not to get out of it, because the suffering is always there. But to understand its purpose. By sitting with it's purpose, understanding it, assimilating it RIGHT NOW instead of disappearing into the past or the fearful future, one learns to live with it, to even rejoice in it.The first solution is to talk to someone. Why are you feeling sad? Is there a reason. Talk to someone you trust. Talk to someone you are sincerely grateful they are in your life. Whether it's a therapist, a friend, someone you love. Someone you barely know.The second, of course, is medication. If there's no reason to feel sad then perhaps some chemicals need to be put back in place, although hopefully in a non-addictive way.The third is exercise, eating well, no alcohol, sleeping well, and meditation or yoga. All of which act as anti-depressants. As does socializing with friends, painting, being creative, etc. [See “10 Unusual Ways to Release Oxytocin In Your Life” http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2012/08/10-unusual-ways-to-release-oxytocin-into-your-life]The fourth is a trick. I do this trick because it's what I personally believe. The universe is like a curious old man. It doesn't know many things. Infinite things. We can't even fathom what it knows and what it doesn't know. it doesn't know, for instance, the experience of "I am feeling sad". So it takes a piece of itself and makes you, just like it makes me, just like it makes animals, and our neighbors, and our friends. We are bits and pieces the universe has breathed life into for but a moment in time. It wants to learn from us. It wants to learn what "James is feeling sad" is like so then it knows forever. And then in the blink of an eye, because that's how long we live in the eyes of the universe, you and I and everyone we know are back in its pulsating heart, part of the universe once again, not even remembering that we ever left it.But it's learned one thing. The feeling of me feeling sad. That moment, that sadness, this moment right now with you reading my email: its not you learning, its the universe learning. Me typing this email is the universe learning. When I sleep tonight, the universe will dream. When I feel sad over a fight my daughter has with her friend, the universe will grieve but then rejoice because it's learning so much. Then I can rejoice because every pain, every sadness, every moment, is ME, the universe manifest, learning something new. What a great thing that is!At the end of all this is nothing but rejoicing. We are giving and giving because the universe takes it all in and then we return home to it. In fact, we never left it. We only did a little dance, so the universe can learn the steps.All of these things will work. And none of them will work. Because at the end, we are part of a much bigger picture. And that picture has no boundary, no edge, the paint drips out of us, runs over the edge, and spills out into all of life.For me, this is what I believe.Doesn't being happy and thwarting your want for things impact ambition? –@PratPreneurWhen I was in 7th grade we had one of those stupid "Most Popular", "Most Funny", etc class election sort of things. For some reason I was voted: "Most Ambitious". I can tell my dad, who was their at the "graduation" was a little embarassed. He said to me, "did you even want that?"What good is ambition? What is it? Let's break it down. It means there's some goal in the distant future that you might achieve that will make you, perhaps, happier than you are now.Ambition is about time travel. It's about traveling to an unknown future science fiction society where your dreams have come true. Your ambition has become magically quenched in this future and I guess the idea is you no longer feel it.Take a step back. Pretend the ambitious side of yourself is another human being living in your body. Feel that ambition in your body. Say hello to it.Now ask, "who am I without that ambition?" Let's say you are ambitious to make a million dollars. Or you are ambitious to fall in love? Who are you without those ambitions? Take a deep breath while you ask it. Are you breathing? What sounds do you hear? What things do you see in front of you?Can you be happy with what you have right now? Now go down the rabbit hole. Take it one step further. Whoever is happy, put that person aside. Who are you now? Keep going. Keep going until nothing exists but you. Who are you?SOCIAL NETWORKWhat would the popular social network of 2020 look like? –@JarmoneyA little website that a few people have heard of. Facebook.Everyone seems to assume Facebook is a fad. Here's some things I hear: "Facebook is the next MySpace". Or, "Mark Zuckerberg is a bad CEO".Really?Facebook has a billion users. MySpace peaked around 100 million. Facebook is in every country on the planet. More time is spent on Facebook than any other site by a factor of about 100. Let's see. What else is Facebook? It's the world's largest dating site. It's the world's largest photo sharing site. It's the world's largest gaming site. I use it every day. My 13 year now uses it every day. My wife uses it every day. I think everyone I know uses it EVERY DAY.What will happen between now and 2020? Facebook will get better. Two ways Facebook will get better:Location: So that means more interesting things will happen between Facebook and my phone. Depending on privacy settings maybe I will be walking in NYC and I will get an SMS: "you just passed John Smith sitting in the Starbucks. If you go in and join him you get 10% off our coffee."Content: What else can get better? I don't mind ads that target me very accurately. The more accurate the targeting, the more likely it is that ads become actual content. For instance, based on my Facebook interests plus my Amazon purchase history I wouldn't mind if every day Amazon recommended a book for me to buy. Or, if most of my friends are in LA and I'm in NYC I wouldn't mind if Expedia offered me discounts to get to LA.As for Mark Zuckerberg:in the past 6 years he's built up a site with a billion usershe's built up a company with a few billion in revenues.he just had an IPO raising $12 billion with the lowest possible dilution, with the lowest fees to Wall Street for any IPO ever at that level. Short term flippers were screwed but long-term shareholders will benefithe's responded to every privacy issue, every complaint, to keep building a brand that people trusthe's "organized" the Internet by developing a common format for individuals and companies to share information. That's why more and more companies are making their company URLs be their Facebook URLs. That's why the notion of "your home page" has now been replaced by "your Facebook page"Let him stick around a little more. I'm sure he's got some good stuff planned for us between now and 2020. And congrats to him for donating $100 million to Newark's school system.RETIREMENTIt seems like ever since you're born life's all about working getting promotion etc. But what's life after retirement? It seems lifeless. –@martefrainI was retired when I was three years old. All I had to do all day was shit in my pants and play with my friends, often at the same time. My friends were disgusted with me when that happened and my mother had to comfort me. Other things I remember about my "retirement": whenever the full moon was out it meant the Bat Signal was ON. Sesame Street had some good moments. I always wanted to try spinach because Popeye ate spinach but I HATED the taste. A special treat in my retirement was when my mom would play JUST ONE MORE game of checkers with me.On other days I would play with my friends. One time I accidentally broke the door of one friend's house. Another time I drew all over a friend's window. Both instances I denied to my parents when their parents inevitably called mine to punish me. Retirement was great. It was creative. I was master of my universe.And then it all ended. One day I woke up and I was told I had to go to something called "nursery school". When is it over? I wanted to know. I wanted my retirement back.My dad explained it to me:Well first you go to nursery school for two years, then kindergarten, then 12 years of school, then 4 years of college, then probably another 4 years of graduate school, then you work for 40 years, then when you are as old as grandpa, you'll be retired and you can do whatever you want.WHAT!!!!Oh god. And then I went to school and everyone hated me (that thing about shitting in your pants while lying on top of a group of kids just didn't work very well in a social environment). And then in grade school it didn't work (peeing in your pants doesn't work either). And then college didn't work (homework? tests? a girlfriend who was throwing food at me whenever she got angry, which was every day, and grad school didn't work (I got thrown out)). Then jobs didn't work. I was always trying to do something on the side (write a novel, start a business). I wasn't very good at corporate politics. Later, when I had more flexible jobs I would disappear for months at a time (CEO to me: "Jim Cramer wants to know why you are never here") or I would just disappear completely (in the middle of a meeting, walking out of the building, never coming back)."Work" is just a tiny subset of the life around you. You do it to live. You do it when you have to. All other times it should be avoided. You're in the Matrix but you don't realize it. Bit by bit you can plan your escape."But what if I have no money?" you might say. Good question. EVERYONE has skills to develop multiple streams of income on their own. Make sure you are healthy. Make sure you are coming up with ideas nonstop and your idea muscle is healthy. Be around supportive people. Give yourself a five year time period to break free. And then start dipping your feet in the River of Change. Once you are immersed from toe to head, you will feel as if you are suffocating for air. But you will find an ocean of life swimming around you. You'll swim off the island, into the current, and sometimes those currents will be rough, will throw you around, will make you feel like you are going to die, crashing into the rocks. But you will never swim back to that little island. The entire world needs to be explored.That is your "retirement". It can start right now and it will never be boring and it will never end.IDEASWhen you generate ideas everyday, do you stick to a particular area (i.e. your current projects) or are you all over the map? –@richcollinsYes, go all over the map. The key is not generating the right idea. The key is that you are making your brain sweat.If someone told me, "Come up with 100 things Congress can do to make the country better" it will be hard for me. My brain will hurt. Maybe I can come up with 10 really quickly (privatize and sell off all highways and schools. Flat tax of 10%, etc) but maybe around 20 or 30 my brain will start to hurt. Just like my arms would hurt if someone kept adding weights to a bench press. But keep pushing. As they say in the gym, "push through the pain". It's only your mind in the way. Get your mind used to sweating past that hard moment where you hit your personal idea frontier.You want to expand out that frontier. It doesn't matter how. Come up with ideas for books, for businesses, for art projects, for your friends' businesses, for recipes you've never thought of trying, for movie sequels, for whatever you want. It's your head! Put the whatever the hell you want in there.For the first six month it will be like any learning curve. Your idea muscle has atrophied. So for six months it will get better super fast, the way you would increase your golf skills every day if you are a total beginner and start playing every day with a pro. Then at six months it will be harder but that's ok. You're already on your way to being an idea machine.Once you are an idea machine, then you can say: "I want to come up with an idea for a new business" and your brain will work magic for you. It will be like pulling ten beautiful rabbits out of a magic hat. And all the rabbits will live and flourish. You just have to decide which one you will want to keep as a pet and which ones you will give away. You will be so full of ideas you can give and give and it won't matter. People can steal your ideas, people can give you no credit, your ideas can end up bouncing across the waves and end up marooned somewhere where you can't touch them. But it doesn't matter. You will always have more.And not just in business. In everything. Your car stuck in the middle of the desert? No problem. You will know what to do. Your kids don't know what to do for their vacations? No problem, you'll figure it out. Your date treating you like crap. No worries - you'll dump her/him and quickly find the next one.Ideas are the way we navigate the zombieland that most people live in. Suddenly you'll realize they are all moving in slow motion. And you'll find the path to safety, the path to riches, the path to your home.Realised I have no idea what I'm working towards with my life. What are you ultimately working towards? How did you figure it out? –@lewisquarteyI want to make a comic book. When I was five years old I read a comic of "The Legion of Super Heroes" that had everything from Superboy, to the Greek god Apollo, to time travel to superheroes from other planets who were, god forbid, in love with each other (inter-alien relationships!). It was like an entire universe of possibility opened up to me. I could make a story that could be...could be...about...ANYTHING! What the...! I wanted to read it, do it, draw it, write it, eat it, shit it, talk about it.I bought so many comic books I filled up two closets worth. Big ones small ones. Archie Digest, Shazam Annual, Classics Illustrated, Amar Chitra Katha (from my Indian friends down the street), Dr. Strange, Batman, on and on and on. And it never stopped.Then, when I was thrown out of graduate school I started up again (I had taken a five year break from freshman year of college until i was about a year out of graduate school). This time I read all the adult-oriented comics from Watchmen to Eightball to Peep Show, Yummy Fur, R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Julie Doucet, Peter Bagge (Hate Comics!). I ran into Peter Bagge at the Aspen Comedy Festival many years later and I told him I was his biggest fan. He actually started crying! The author of Hate Comics! What the..? He said, "I'm sorry, there's too much happening here." And I left him alone.In 1992 I applied for a job at a comic book store. The one I shopped in almost every day. Without me as a customer I was pretty sure they were going to go out of business. The guy didn't know how to answer because he didn't want to lose his best customer. Not only did I shop there but I got all my friends to shop there (Peep Show and Eightball were our favorites). He said, "I'm sorry, we just don't have the money for that." And then he had to explain further. "Comic book stores are not really a good way to make a living. We sort of do it for the love of it." And now I felt bad for even asking for the job.I loved the Sandman comics by Neal Gaiman. "The Sandman" was really this god-like character, Dream, that came from a family of other godlike characters: Death, Destiny, Desire, Despair, etc. You get it. Gaiman is excellent at creating modern mythologies interwoven with ancient ones. I wanted to write like him.So I did. I read everything he had written in comics. Plus everything his mentor, Alan Moore (think: "Watchmen" but even better: "A Small Killing") had written. Their style was very different from average comic book writers. I wrote something I felt was very much in their style. It was titled "Delirium" and it would be an offshoot series based on Dream's sister, Delirium. I sent it to Lou Stathis at DC. I never really heard back although years later I had to deal with Lou over a different issue when I was at HBO (I had interviewed the founder of Juggs magazine and used an image from a comic he had edited).What does this have to do with anything?I want to write a comic book!Oh, and I also can't figure out what the hell am I doing with this blog. I write what's on my mind. And it sort of goes in the direction I go. I've been pretty miserable throughout most of my life. But now I'm not. I write about why and how and what and even when (NOW!) . And I want this blog to get really popular and I want to do videos and radio shows and books and speaking tours based on the ideas of this blog.Oh! I forget: I also want to start a company. In fact, I've started a few. Like I usually do. And some of them will fail. And maybe one of them will work out. In fact, I'm sure one of them will. I don't even have to think about it. One of them will. Just because I say so.Let me see... I also have this idea for a series of young adult novels. Young adult fantasy seems to be the rage. I've loved fantasy novels since I was a kid also. but usually they weren't based on young adults. Now I'm seeing more and more Harry Potter-ish fantasy novels involving kids. Here's my idea. A teenage girl, say 14 years old, is having the usual set of teenage girl high school issues (puberty, boys, grades, cliques). And, by the way, her father is Satan. Which is, of course, a source of continual embarassment and frustration for our heroine, who is basically a good person and just wants to be kissed. Like it? The series can follow her all through college, all through her job. Meanwhile, while she's dealing with gossip from the cliques, a rogue assortment of bitter fallen angels are after her.Anyway, I want to write that.I've done lots of things that before-hand I wanted to do. I wanted to be a venture capitalist. For me, personally, it was awful. You spend half your time holding the hands of companies that are failing. Those people are miserable. You spend another half looking at boring companies (the chart that always starts at $0 revenues on the left but, trust me, "we're going to be 1% of a 5 trillion dollar market in three years and there's no competition"). Then you spend the other half working over contracts to make sure you can do the maximum screwing in worst-case scenarios. Screw or be screwed. I know that's three halves. The fun happens when the market goes up and you start to exit. But guess what. Big deal. No matter what area of the financial industry you are in, the fun happens when the market goes up.I've also run a hedge funds. Run a fund of hedge funds. Started companies. Done a TV pilot. None of it was that fun. None of it was great. And even this blog is sometimes stressful because I pressure myself a lot to put out the best material I can.So what do I want to do? I don't know. I guess some of the above.But I know I can't think about it. I can't wonder about it. I am going to do NOTHING. Today I'm going to stay healthy. I'm going to eat right, sleep well, be around positive people, keep generating ideas every day, and practice being grateful, practice surrendering to my situation no matter what it is, good or bad, and then I know what I'm going to do then. I know what I'm going to do. But I won't know until I get there.Do u believe you, or anyone, can ever have a truly original thought or is everything simply a derivative off past ideas/thoughts? –@FreeMarketsFanWhat are you thinking about the most today? I know what I will be thinking about. Crap. Mindless chatter. He hates me. I like her. She thinks I'm stupid. They like me. They hate me. They are doing wrong to me. Wrong things are being done to me. Stop the wrong things from happening. Trees. More wrong things are happening to me. And so on, On and on and on. A brain is boring. Brains were made to find food and have sex. We've done it well enough to survive 100,000 years and we probably have at least 20 to 50 more years in us, if not much more.So no, there are no original thoughts. They are all derivatives of the first thoughts: more food. More sex.But we got creative about how to get food and sex. We started putting two and two together. Ideas started to mate (hat tip to "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley) and come up with new ideas. Generations of ideas evolve very fast. Much faster than human generations.This is why it's so important to develop the idea muscle. You must come up with thousands and thousands of ideas to give you a basic population of ideas so they can mate and come up with new ones, so that new generations can develop quickly, so that no matter what ideas are thrown at you, the idea muscle will riff instantly so you can became an idea machine and develop new ones that spawn off of the old.Otherwise you will be casting about for the original idea that will never come. A fisherman without his net.Exercise: come up with 10 ideas today. Then throw away the list. Come up with ten ideas tomorrow. And so on. I've written before: but in six months your life will be completely changed as a result.Best way to give away ideas per your suggestion? –@NickBFernandoMy suggestion is this: when you give, you receive.I wanted to trade for a hedge fund. I had never traded for one before. But I was trading very successfully in 2002 using trading systems I wrote the software for. All the trades were automated. I was clocking in money every day. But still, it was too stressful trading by myself with my own money. I felt like any day I could go broke. SOme days I did go broke, because I had living expenses I barely met.So I wrote to the top 20 hedge funds I wanted to trade for. I literally gave them all the ideas and trading systems. Even the software. One person wrote back with some questions that could only be answered by writing more software. ONE person. Out of twenty. And, I should say, this was the second batch of 20. So I wrote more software and answered his questions. Then he invited me to lunch. Then another day to dinner. I read every book I knew he was interested in. He allocated money to me. I was in!Another time, I wanted to write for a publlication. I wrote to the main writer for that publication (Jim Cramer) and I said, "here's 10 ideas you should write articles about". I have to say, they were good ideas. I didn't hold back. They were my best ideas for articles. I should've started my own site and written the ideas up. But I wrote to Jim and he said, "these are great ideas! Why don't you write for us?" And I was very happy. I felt like someone had selected me. I ended up making millions of dollars because of that one relationship. Thank you Jim! Even when I write bad stuff about you, I'm always loyal that you gave me that chance.BLOG / WRITINGHow do you get NEW inspiratioon for your blog? I try to bleed on http://robinheinen.blogspot.com , but some days, inspiration is gone... –@RobinHeinen1986In June 2002 I was very depressed. I had no money. I couldn't sell the apartment I was trying to sell. It was only a few blocks from Ground Zero in NYC and the playground my kids would play in was still covered with asbestos and the whole area smelled. I think there might even have been flames still burning on the actual spot. It was depressing to live there. I'd stand outside the fence as close as you can go and just look at the worst mechanical mess of pipes, buildings, trash, and men in hard hats doing...something, i don't even know, and I'd stand there and I wouldn't know what to do. i was going to die because I had no money, no job, I couldn't sell my apartment, nobody would return my calls, I had a new three month old, I was incapable of having sex at all I was so depressed, every company I had ever been involved in hated me or turned me away. I was just a mess.I started going out for coffee every morning. I couldn't stand being home. The home that I was going to lose. The home with the screaming kids. The home that shook when the towers fell and my oldest child peed on the floor. The home that was covered with black dust just as the shaking began and the lights turned out and people were screaming and voices that will never be heard again could be heard if not seen.I would bring one fiction book, one non-fiction book, one book about games, one book about finance, and one notepad. And I would read a bit of each. Then I would come up with ideas for each. Ideas for fiction. Ideas for non-fiction. Ideas for businesses. ideas for people I wanted to talk to. Ideas for trading systems I wanted to try.It was only when I started writing ideas down every day that I stopped checking my bank account every day. That I stopped shaking every day that I was also going ot collapse into the ground, nothing but dust and smell left to remind the world that I once existed, to remind daughters who would never remember me that I once meant something to the world.Every day.I practiced having ideas. I exercised my idea muscle. I would make my brain sweat. Once I had an idea for a book: How to Win At Every Game in the World. And I would give easy ideas for winning every game. For instance, in Scrabble: if you know that XI, XU, QI, ZA, QAT are legal words then you are going to beat everyone who has a great vocabulary but doesn't know those are legal words. I came up with 5 games, then 10. Then, make the brain sweat, 20 games. How to win everytime at hearts, at Monopoly (get the Orange real estate), at chess, at checkers, at backgammon, and so on. Could I think of 30? Every idea I had, I tried to make my brain sweat until it hurt.So that's number one. It's not inspiration. it's the cliched version of inspiration - perspiration. I sweated. (Women perspire, men sweat).Number two, your body is filled with veins. The boys who made fun of you in the playground. Your fear of the first day on the job. The time you failed and were afraid to tell your parents. The time you got a lower score on the SATs and lied about it to your friends. Your first car crash. The first time you had sex (don't even TELL ME you weren't impotent). The older you are, the more of these you have. Yesterday, my youngest daughter refused to participate in a video I was doing with PBS. I was crushed. It was the first time she had ever said "No" to a fun idea I was doing. Have I lost my little baby? Maybe this will be a vein I bleed. The other day Claudia found what looked like lipstick on a towel. Did she think I was cheating? I'm scared to death of her somehow not trusting me. Every day if there isn't an artery you can cut and burst out your blood, there's at least a vein, a capillary, a tear which can drop onto the page and tell your story.Don't worry about how you will have inspiration every day. Build the idea muscle. And cry. The world is a horrible place and the tears never end.If one is 100% honest in his writing, good chance you'll piss off your significant other occasionally if not often. What to do? –@aarongoldfarbEveryone has two boundaries. The things they can't write about themselves. The things they can't write about others. Some people I don't care about. I'll write anything. But in general I don't want to hurt anyone. So there are some things I can't write about my wife, ex-wife, kids, sisters, mother, friends, etc in that order. And there are some things I can't write about myself. I can write just about anything about Claudia. [just kidding, Claudia. I won't write about how you like...]Sometimes you feel you didn't harm someone but they feel harmed. For instance, I might just say, "Samantha" where Samantha might be the name of my sister and she might get upset because her name was mentioned. The best you an do there is have an honest discussion about why you have the boundaries where they are and see if they disagree. If they do and you want to stick by "do no harm" then you have to respect that. Take a bit more poetic license and see if you get back within the boundaries.My wife once wrote about what happened to her the day her mother died. Her mother died a very upsetting death (are their non-upsetting deaths when a mother dies?) A family member of hers protested so strongly that there was a midnight deadline that she would kill herself if the post was not moved. At just about midnight she removed the post. Did she do the right thing? Or was she manipulated into it? It was after all, her experience, her blog, her mother, and the family member who was offended was not even mentioned in the post. I don't know if she did the right thing but she made a judgment call and then went back and forth doubting herself, particularly since the post in question seemed to help a lot of people. I cried when I first read the post.All of this is to say, nobody is 100% honest. Everyone leaves things out. Everyone adds things in. And top of it, we all have our prismed glasses that look at every situation, adding our own nuances that were never there, and scribbling in poetic license to fill in the gaps. Do no harm, have honest discussions, determine the boundaries, and then do your best to fill up every boundary you can in as artistic and honest a way as possible.What were some of the simple ways you started to get traction for your blog early on? Im starting with consistent content. –@AlexBDavisFirst off, are you sure you want to do a blog? I probably obsess on this blog 20 hours a day, even when I'm sleeping. I've recently had an epiphany. The two biggest things I think about are traffic and "will I come up with new ideas". I've written over 400 posts. There are only so many ideas. And not everything you write will be great. I have over 100 posts in my Drafts folder because I don't think they are good enough.My goal is to create "blogerature". Good writing that fits in the blog format. The way literature is good writing that fits into a novel. I read about two or three hours a morning to get started. I read writers that I think will inspire content for the blog. Usually very autobiographical fiction writers. Just autobiography is not good enough because most people who write an autobiography are not good writers (they spent their lives getting good at something else, hence they have the material for a good autobiography). I'll then spend up to the rest of the day thinking of ideas for the blog and starting and stopping and starting and stopping until I have a blog post. It's grueling. It's 7 days a week. It never ends. And it makes zero money (no ads on this site).So are you sure you want to do this?But ok, you do.So here's what you do: assuming you aren't writing the same BS everyone else is writing. Assuming you have something new to say that isn't said anywhere else. Assuming you are delivering real value into the lives of your readers. Then here's what you do:BlogBuild channels on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Pinterest, Amazon, so people become aware of your blog through a variety of social media."Crush It" - this comes the Gary Vaynerchuk book called "Crushing It" and I like how he thinks about these things: basically, comment on everyone else's blog. Participate in every Facebook question. Tweet in various conversations. Answer questions on Quora. Self publish a book. Why and How I Self-Published a Book - Altucher Confidential. Crush it everywhere. I admit I did not do this so well. But I saw Claudia Claudia Yoga - Ideas From a Yogi Entrepreneur do it for her blog and she built up quite a following from scratch.Syndicate - write for other blogs. Write for the Huffington Post, or the top blogs in whatever field you are interested in. I've syndicated my material on at least 10 other popular blogs and tried to syndicate on others that said, "no" (famously, the Harvard Business School blogs where they passed around my material and I saw at the bottom of the email chain, "And yet another".)Do this consistently for a year. You will get a following. Note it won't be a big enough following to generate a good living from ads. But it will give you a launching pad to think about other business ideas. Someone once told me: "all you need is 1000 true fans to build a business". So you will get your 1000 true fans. And then you can decide what to do with them.But most importantly, cut open an artery close your heart and bleed onto the screen. Else why should I read you instead of the ten million other bleeders out there. Humans are like literary vampires. We want to feast on blood. Give it.You write a lot about your children. Do they read those posts? What do they think? –@kcastagnaroI write a lot about my kids in such a way that potentially they could feel unloved later on if they read it. For instance, “Is it bad I wanted my first kid to be aborted" Is it bad that I originally wanted my first kid to be aborted? - Altucher Confidential. Or maybe they might get the wrong idea about important topics like in, "I want my daughters to be lesbians" I Want My Daughters to Be Lesbians - Altucher Confidential.One commenter even wrote me and said he felt my kids should be taken away from me by the government. This is fine with me by the way. If Barack Obama wants to raise my kids he can have at it.My kids don't read my posts. They haven't even read my comic book, which I have repeatedly thrown at them and told them they would be tested later on. They ignored me and didn't read it. One time one of them (I forget which) told me, "your blog contains inappropriate material for children" and that's why they don't read it.WHAT!? I said. When I was 10 or 12 or 14 you couldn't stop me from reading inappropriate material. I would fake vomit into the toilet, flush (so there was no evidence) claim sickness, JUST so I could stay home from school and read inappropriate content all day long. Which my parents' bookshelves were full of. By the time I was 12 I had read the novels "Candy" by Terry Southern. "Boys & Girls Together" by William Goldman. "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" by Judith Rossner, "Wifey" by Judy Blume and the pop-psych sexual tease: "Don't Say Yes When You Want to Say No". I memorized the pages of every sex scene. I read the books over and over. Heck, I feel like reading them again now. I remember them so well I didn't have to look up the authors even though it's been over 30 years since I last looked at any of those books.That said, my kids don't want to read my blog but eventually they will. Eventually they will see how desperately I want to love them and want them to love me. How I hated being a father. How I grew to deal with it and while dealing with it, grew to love them.But a post doesn't make a father. With or without their knowledge of my darkest secrets, I tell them I love them, tell them they are beautiful, and let them know they are always safe with me, whether they like it or not. And often they don't. Often they don't like me.My biggest challenge now is dealing with the moments they don't like me. I'm sure after they read my posts at some point in the future they might be upset at me. But they will have to deal with it. Because they will know that I love them. And nothing I ever write will convince them that I don't.Good idea or bad idea to read comments on my blog posts that get syndicated elsewhere? –@BenNesvigFirst off, I always read the comments on MY OWN blog. But I try not to read too much on others when I syndicate.Claudia begs me not to read comments whenever I syndicate onto other blogs. Particularly Yahoo Finance is the worst. But I do anyway. And then I regret it. Everyone is accusing me of something. Usually either being ugly, being stupid, or both. Sometimes I've gotten death threats in comments. About one in fifty comments will happen to find the right button to push that will bother me.But I try not to respond. When someone comments on the Internet they are just taking the worst qualities of themselves and throwing them at you. This is not an excuse. This is also not saying they are wrong. They might, purely by luck or accident, actually be saying true things about me. But it's really a mirror they are yelling at. That's why it's pointless to look at or comment on the comments. Just like when I respond, it's not really them I am responding to. I am also just putting up my own insecurities, my own fears, that have nothing to do with the person I'm responding to. And that's all Internet comments are. A battle of insecurities.But sometimes they are painful. Sometimes I am itching to respond. And on my worst days, sometimes I do respond and then regret it.Better to have spent the time with Claudia instead.What are your top 3 tips for narrative writing? –@Mandizzleno1I wrote a post "33 Unusual Tips To Being a Better Writer" 33 Unusual Tips to Being a Better Writer - Altucher Confidential and I'm really afraid I won't be able to compress it down to three but I'll try.Forget the intro. Everyone obsesses on how to start something. So let's make it easy. Don't start it. Just forget all about an intro. Intros are always boring and bad anyway. Which leads to...Start in the middle. Let's say you are telling the story of how you lost your virginity. Don't start with how you met the girl (or guy). Start with how bad it was. And how bad you felt afterwards. And how anxious you were that she would never call again. (uhh, maybe I'm projecting too much of my own story here). How you met her is sort of boring.Ok, back to the actual first sentence, now that you've given us the middle. Start with a cliffhanger. The very first line. Like in my answer here. I wrote down the three items first (including this line). And now I'm going to go and write that first sentence.I just found your blog. I appreciate the honesty. It seems like you struggle with your own advice, does it ever get easier? –@EdgeFoleyYesterday I was angry with Claudia about something stupid. And then I was upset with myself for not following my own advice. About what? About many things. About everything. We're all human. Our bodies get sick. Our minds get sick. Our emotions get sick.But inside, there is no sick.If you are quiet and still. And just listen to your breath for just a second. And delay being anxious, delay thinking for just a second, just wait for it, then you can relax for a moment. Say, "I feel this anxiety and anger, but I'm going to wait a few seconds before I let it really bother me." Keep delaying, even if you feel it in the body. I tried it. I still felt the anger but it was not the real me, it was sitting on top of me, pushing me down. But it wasn't me.In one way or other this happens to me every day.The real practice is to acknowledge the feelings and thoughts that attack us all day long. These thoughts and fears happen all day long but we are parents and they are children. The key is to show your children where the boundaries are. Not ignore them.When I feel overwhelmed with some emotion then sometimes it's very hard to take a step back and say, "that's just an emotion. it's not the real me." But I try hard to feel it in the body, where it's hurting me: in my head, in my chest, in my stomach, wherever. And I just sit there with it. I don't have to label it. Or be angry at myself for having it. It's there. It's painful. I can give it my attention. And wait.Eventually I ended up right here. And the pain is gone.How much or little does ego play a role in your blogging? What about your thoughts on ego and blogging in general? –@JenMaidenbergThere's a saying: "if it doesn't bleed it doesn't lead" in the newspaper business. The same goes for blogging. The easiest way to bleed is to take something you don't necessarily want people to know ("I hate kids", "I failed school", "I lost a million dollars", "I killed a man", etc) and start with that. Then we see your human. I'm human, you're human, so we can relate.When you have ego, "I'm great so I'm going to lecture you on the ten ways to be happy", then nobody wants to read. Ego is a commodity. Honesty is a rarity.I read recently someone saying, "Your knowledge is a commodity". This isn't true. Only ego is the commodity. Your deep, personal knowledge is unique to you. And if you can express it well and without ego, then people will want to read you.There's a new area of literature. It's not novels, or short stories, or literary non-fiction, or magazine articles. It's "blogerature". Very few bloggers do actual "blogerature". In blogerature every paragraph has to deliver value, even has to have a cliff-hanger. And has to be humble and self-deprecating to an extent (don't be insincere about it) .When I sit down at the computer I have enough ego to think "people are going to want to read what I am about to type" but then drop off the ego there. Nobody wants to read crap. Follow these "33 Unusual Rules to Be a Good Writer" 33 Unusual Tips to Being a Better Writer - Altucher Confidential and that will help with the ego.The most important thing I do before I start writing is I try to be quiet. If my mind is filled with junk, then junk comes out. Ego comes out. If I try to just sit here, take deep breaths, relax, then I feel it helps eliminate the ego so real writing can begin. Don't TRY to say anything. Just see what happens and start typing.CAREERWhat advice can you give to someone who's in their 30's and wants to begin a career in trading, but doesn't know where to start? –@DB0pinkOne time in 2003 I lost money on the day before. I had a systematic way of trading. Only software-based. I followed my signals and nothing else. I loaded up all the stock market data and would look for patterns. Like if it's the first day of the month and the last day of last month was down, what tends to happen 99 times out of 100. If many patterns suggested the same high probability trade then I would make that trade. Maybe I was managing about $50 million. Because the trades were (historically) such high probability, I rarely had a down day. And I would only trade with a small portion of the portfolio so even a down day was small.But one day I was down. And that night I couldn't sleep. So around 4am or so I got out and went on the swingset at the local school. Then I got a basketball and played basketball by the river. then I went to breakfast around 6am at the local cafe. Played some scrabble there to get my mind off the trade that was on. Then I went to...church. I got down on my knees. I prayed to Jesus. I'm Jewish/Hindu/Buddhist/Taoist/Muslim/Catholic. It doesn't matter to me. I'm a praying slut. I'll pray to Zeus if I have to. I prayed for about a half hour. Please make this trade work Daddy.Then I went in. Futures were already against me. Every second I could feel all the blood pulsing in and around my body. It was like I was bowling and leaning my body over to make the ball go in the right direction after it's already been released. Please Daddy pleasedaddy please please. Please ZeusJesusAllah.I called my business partner. "Let's just hire a factory in New Jersey and put together the ingredients for some diet pill that combines with protein. I can build a website. We'll get some porn star to do the informercial.". please daddy please please.I forget if the trade worked out. I didn't have the psychology for it. I was down maybe 0.25% at worst. Less than 1%. I hated losing people's money. I had no problem losing my own money. I was an expert at that. But I never wanted to lose anyone else's money.Here's the problem with trading. I won't argue with you. Everyone has their heart set on a dream and sometimes dreams turn into nightmares but you are entitled to your dreams.There's a saying in poker, "If you can't find the fish at the table then it's you".Here's who is at the table with you when you trade: Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Carl Icahn, Vladmir Putin, Ben Bernanke, Sheikh this and that, Hugo Chavez, Timothy Geithner, and what my business partner and I used to call "The Gimp" after the Pulp Fiction character. The Gimp was the guy they keep locked up in the dungeons underneath Goldman Sachs. He's got a mask on and he's chained all up and they feed him once a day. And when they really need the markets manipulated they let him out of the cage and there's nobody better. It's you versus him.Good luck.How does one market himself well inside a company to move up the career ladder? –@WolfgangBremerWhen I worked at a corporate job I was scared to death. I didn't know how I should act, dress, do, think, etc. I kept trying to kiss ass over and over and it just wouldn't work. I kept trying to volunteer to do new things and it just wouldn't work. My boss at the time even said to me, "don't volunteer to do new things. Then you'll be known as the guy that does those things and your workload will double without you getting extra pay for it." I don't know why he would say that to me. Perhaps he had his own issues.That's the thing, everyone in the corporate world has their own issues. They will all try to keep you down, while making themselves look good. They are all trying to maximize pay while minimizing work. Not everyone. Not the ones who do what I'm about to tell you to do.But most of them.On the second day of the job two things happened to me. One is: I was walking from Port Authority, where I had taken a 90 minute bus ride to get to work on time, to my office. The woman who was walking about three feet to my right on the sidewalk was walking one second and then lying on the ground dead the next second. She had been hit by a hit-and-run taxi. I called 911 at a payphone. There was blood everywhere. The ambulance came. I continued onto work.The second thing that happened was that I was given a computer and told, "get this on the Internet". I had no idea what I was doing. I ended up somehow wiping out the operating system on the computer. It was irrepairable. Everyone's email on that computer got wiped out. There were no backups. There was no Internet that day. I had totally failed. I walked out on the hot summer day and called my girlfriend back in Pittsburgh, where I had left her behind, hoping I would leave her forever. I said, "I'm probably going to come back. I think they are about to fire me." I then went back into the building, waiting to be fired.But I kept going. I wanted to stay there. I loved the company. But I was stuck at the bottom and I wasn't even good at it and everything around me was either getting wiped out or dying.You can't climb the corporate ladder. You have to fly to the top. The corporate ladder is too big. When I was at a big corporation my boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's boss was the CEO of the company. And everyone was in their 40s or early 50s. There was no way I was going to climb any ladders.But here's what you do right now to maximize your chances to fly to the top:Learn the history of your industry. Everything. I worked at HBO which was part of Time Warner. I learned all about Time Inc. I learned all about Warner Brothers. I learned the history of HBO. I learned about every division within Time Warner, from DC Comics to Atlantic Records, to whatever. I learned about our fight-to-the-death competitor, Viacom. And then later (after Time bought Turner), Fox.Learn the history of the executives. I learned how the head of marketing went door to door in Louisiana selling Cinemax after Showtime came out. I learned about how my boss's boss was a huge fan of Gurjideff so I read everything I could. I watched all the documentaries HBO put out because I wanted to get close to the head of documentaries even though I officially worked in the IT department.Exercise the idea muscle. I'm like a broken record saying this. But you want to be the go-to guy who comes up with ideas. And if you have an idea, don't play politics. Go to the executive that best fits your idea. Let them steal it. Become Google. The source. Google doesn't need credit if you search for "anal rashes" and find a good solution on another website. You'll still go back to Google later anyway. Come up with ten ideas every day about how your company can be better. By doing this, you BECOME the company, not 8 levels down trying to get away with leaving as early as possible by doing as little work as possible. When I had ideas for other executives, no matter how high up, I'd go directly to their office and tell them. Later, word would get back to my boss and he would be upset and tell me, "Go through me first!" But I always ignored him, I always gave him FULL CREDIT for everything, and he was happy when he got promoted (even when people were congratulating me for being the source of his promotion).Finally, have lunch with all the secretaries. The heart of the company are the people who make everything happen. If you aren't connected to the heart, you won't get the blood and oxygen you need to thrive. You want to reach a certain executive, fall in love with the secretary. She is the vein connecting you. I had lunch with secretaries every day. Secretaries, assistants, Directors (the level below VP), all the people who are the veins and arteries of the company. My best friend at the company was the head of internal communications. He's the one who could spread the word on any idea. Don't play politics. Play friends in the sandbox.Oh, one more "finally": look for a new job. At least every two years. One head of HR once told me, "find your value in the marketplace every two years". The job market is a market like any other and you want to make sure you are being compensated appropriately. Also, sometimes the best way to climb vertically is to leap horizontally. In fact, I was always looking for a new job, always looking for multiple streams of income. This way, if I ever got fired for wiping out a computer, I knew I would be able to survive. I was always on the lookout for anyone who would say, "if you ever leave HBO, give me a call." And I collected quite a few business cards that way.Finally (for the third time), the best thing you can do is simply love the product your company offers. If you don't, then no amount of backstabbing, politics, lunches, ideas, history, whatever, will help you rise up. If you don't love what you do then you'll grow to hate it. And why at the end of your life would you look back and say, "I'm glad I spent 40 years doing something I hated."Riskiest but most fulfilling job? I would say self-employed, do you agree? –@natedogreimerNO!In some ways it's actually the opposite. And I'm talking about your use of the word "riskiest".Think about a corporate job. You're in a big structure that can easily crumble. For instance, the economy can create layoffs and you're fired. Or your boss can get fired which will make you fired. Or a customer can complain and now you are fired. Or your boss can simply, on a bad day, fire you.That's not safe to me.A few months ago I met a guy who had worked in middle management at GM for 38 years. He had been fired when they went bankrupt. The top management got golden parachutes. The union workers got bailed out. He got nothing. "Almost 40 years I was there and then they did this to me. GM had the highest revenues of any company in the 80s. Who would've thought?"Yeah, who would've? Nobody. And yet it happened. The biggest, safest job in the world ruined his retirement.The tide came in in 2008. The myth that the corporate job is "safe" has gone away.The only thing that is safe is you. Choosing yourself.Take your skills and find multiple ways to make income off of those skills. And if you don't have the skills, then get them. And if you don't have the connections then spend the next year making them. But get yourself paid from multiple sources. Then you are safe. Then nobody can fire you (or if they do, you can replace them. You're theboss, not the people who hire you).Will it be fulfilling? Of course, because when you wake up you don't have to worry about what your boss is feeling like when he wakes up. You only have to think about the birds chirping outside, or the rain pelting against your roof. You only have to think about your own fulfillment instead of the whims of the giants who can crush you like an ant.Would you ever go into a career knowing you had a very very low chance of success? How would you prepare for it financially? –@michaeltefulaEvery change is scary. Entering into a new relationship has a low chance of success. Starting a new job. Moving states. Going into a meeting with new people that you have to convince to like you. I get scared of every new thing I have to try. But how many times does one change careers in life? More than you would think? How many times do we take the plunge, do we jump off the building not seeing the net that is waiting there to catch us. The net is always there. We just can't see it the moment we jump.One time I switched careers. I wanted to go from being an Internet investor (which hadn't worked out well for me in the 2000-2002 period and I went broke) into daytrading and hedge fund investing.My chances of success was slim to none. But at the time I loved it. I wanted to do it. I was getting too depressed going broke and losing my house. I had to get off the floor and do something. There are always ways to increase chances. Every day you can do something new to increase chances, to lay the groundwork. I'm envious you get a chance to ride that steep learning curve. It's a beautiful roller coaster.First off, live a healthier life. This doesn't mean just food. But use The Daily Practice to track tiny improvements in these four categories: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. For me this meant: going to sleep earlier, stop drinking, eat better, waking up earlier, take long walks. On the emotional side, I cut off all ties to anyone negative. This was hard to do. One time I had to hang up on my parents, who were upset at me. Six months later, before I had a chance to talk to them again, my father had a stroke. I heard about that and went to sleep that night in great pain, knowing that I would never talk to him again, and the prior six months were my last chances to speak to him and I never used it. Sometimes bad things happen.On the spiritual side I began to meditate every day. Even if it was just for five minutes. I needed to clear my head of all the fear and anxiety that had built up. It was like a steam valve. I needed to let out the steam. And on the mental side, I started to write down ideas every day. Ideas of things I needed to learn, people I needed to network with, ideas I had for trading systems. And so on.Living a healthier life is the most important way to increase your chances but the next steps were almost as important.I probably read over 200 books on investing. I read books by or about every major investor: Warren Buffett, George Soros, the "market wizards" series, any books about traders. I read about daytrading techniques, options trading, arbitrage techniques, value investing, fixed income investing, I read about M&amp;A deals that went bad, that went good, I read about convertible arbitrage, I read about the psychology of trading. I read everything twice. I must have read at least 100 books before I started trading even one dime.Community. I started participating in message boards about trading and investing. I reached out to the writers of books I enjoyed and began dialogues with them to learn more. I started meeting other investors for coffees just to learn more about their lives, their jobs, their techniques, their lifestyles. I began to "network".Software. I knew how to program. So I downloaded every tick of stock market data from 1950 on. Every stock. Every market index. And I started writing software that looked for patterns. For example, what happens if the market goes down 4 days in a row. What happens if a stock opens up 20% down on the day after earnings day, etc. I probably wrote over 500 programs. Then I started showing other people how to program the way I was so that we all began sharing patterns.Trading. I needed to trade to make a living. I had no money. My expenses were outrageous. I had no excuse for such expenses except that during the internet boom I mistakenly decided to live like a drunken rock star. Now I had to survive and I did it by trading the systems I had programmed. And using the techniques I had read about to help me set position size, deal with the psychology, diversify with different techniques ranging from arbitrage to short-term to value.Ideas. I started writing down ideas for articles I wanted to write. Jim Cramer liked my ideas and I started writing for TheStreet and then the Financial Times and then I did a bunch of books on trading.Networking more. Since my track record was getting good I started sending it out to other hedge fund managers. More and more of them started giving me money to trade, which I did successfully until I decided I didn't want to trade anymore but I knew enough about hedge funds that I converted everything I was doing into investing into other traders and I started a fund of funds.Downsizing. I knew that it could take years before I saw significant results from my new career. So I sold/lost the apartment I had been living in in NYC and went into a self-imposed exile about 70 miles north. My expenses were reduced by about 80%. I could breathe again. And in that new freedom, I could explore.Every step of the way I reduced the risk that I would fail. Ultimately it came full circle. I was running a fund of hedge funds that was paying my income, plus I was writing and doing well and then I decided to get back to my Internet roots so I built a website that I, as an investor, felt was more useful than any other investing website.It's when you combine two areas that you've mastered and fallen in love with that you end up creating something unique that nobody has done before. Your own baby that can grow and thrive with your love and passion behind it. I did it and it was profitable from day one and then I sold it when it had millions of unique users a month. I was proud of it.It's through passion and love that you minimize your risk. But that only takes you to the bridge that will take you to your new career. Ultimately health, and massive preparation, reading, learning, networking, self-education, sacrifice, and actual experience will bring you across that bridge to your career.From beginning to end when I decided to do this new career it took me: 2 years before I was making a real living and about 6 years before I can say I was VERY successful at it. I think this is a good rule of thumb. If you want to change careers and you put in the work and preparation then expect at least one year before you are making steady money, and 2-3 years before you are making a living, and you have to stick with it for 5-7 years before it starts being a big success. I've done this four times and I would say this rule of thumb has been true each time. For instance, in 2007 I started angel investing and I can attest that after doing all of the above it is only now I am really starting to see the results of that.s it creepy or overbearing for some1 looking for a job 2 send a fb message to the CEO's inbox. It's a social media savvy company. –@coilsANDcurlsYeah, you're a creep. That's so creepy to send an email to someone.But seriously, send an email but make sure it contains value: here's 5 ways to improve your company. By the way, I'm already applying for a job at your company as an X.Even better: Oh! Try this. This will be fun. Make a Facebook ad and a Google ad where you are ONLY targeting him. Everyone does a vanity search. Make sure you buy the keyword for his name. So the ad reads: "John Quincy, CEO of XYZ! I have 5 ideas for you, here they are! [then put the first one and a link to the rest]" and link the ad to your website with the five ideas. And explain in the website why you want the job and the title you are asking for.ECONOMYWhat oportunities ahead in a double digit inflation economy? –@AgipanamaThere's two worlds that people talk about in commentaries in news. The financial world, where stocks go up and down, the dollar goes up and down, etc. And then there is the world of innovation, where people actually do things to make the world better. In "financial news" people talk/argue/slander/like about everything going wrong in the world. It's so biased it's painful. People want to scare you. So when you say "double digit inflation" I'm not even sure what that means nor do I want to even address it. Perhaps there will be inflation, perhaps not. Look at the conditions for hyper-inflation over history and you can make up your own mind.So let's just focus on what we do know. The world has problems. Smart people are working on solving those problems. And they will succeed, like they always have. The same opportunities exist regardless of inflation. The same problems will be solved. And a lot of money will be made, regardless of the value of some paper currency.Alternative energy solutions, including fracking. Fracking, in particular, because for the past century, oil has been the cheapest energy source and now the technology for fracking is such that they've eliminated the pollutant issue and there's also been plenty of discoveries in the US to make fracking worthwhile. If there's a lot of oil discovered via fracking then there won't be inflation in energy, for instance (which is priced in dollars all around the world).Medical diagnostics for age-related diseases. As the baby boomers grow older: cancer, Parkinsons, Alzheimers, heart disease, strokes, depression, and so on will need to be diagnosed way in advance of full blown inception in order to best treat these diseases. Which leads to...Cures for age-related diseases.Social media marketing. Old school marketing means "one to many" over and over again (think: newspaper ad, super bowl ad, etc) with no direct connection to the consumer. Social media marketing is "one to one" over and over again. You get your customer, you talk to them, you engage with them, and you can do so for the rest of their lives (unless they "opt out" of talking to you. We are in inning zero of social media marketing and mobile marketing. That will change.Clean water solutions. One out of two hospital beds worldwide are filled by people who are suffering from polluted water related diseases. This will change as companies and countries build the technologies to filter water better, faster, cheaper.Food production solutions. In the early 1970s, economists - people with Phds that other people thought were actually smart - thought the world (even the US) was going to run out of food in a decade. Well, we're still here. Food has gone from agriculture with people to agriculture with machines, to agriculture with genetically enhanced seeds, to hydroponics, to aeroponics, to vertical farming, and so on.You say "inflation" but look at the past century. A unit of light has gone from horribly expensive to infinitely cheap. Food production has gotten infinitely cheaper. Most forms of production, because of technology and outsourcing, have gotten cheaper per unit of productivity. Housing has massively deflated because that bubble is over (although government measures of inflation DO NOT include housing prices). Technology has massively deflated per unit of processing power. What else has deflated. Almost everything. Sure, there probably will be double-digit inflation in order for the US to pay down it's debt. Good for us.Work on the innovative side of your life. Not the side that wants to constantly warn and scare you.Paul Krugman a brilliant economist, or whiny elitist? –@eddtorialHaha.Think about it. "Brilliant economist". That means: he went to a good school, he went to a good graduate school, he wrote a PhD thesis that got acclaim from other PhDs in the area and got him published quite a bit in hard-to-read academic journals edited by other PhDs who went to good schools. And he did this over and over for many years.Combine that with the fact that the first doorway information opens to get into your brain is the amygdala, the part of the brain that responds to danger and is ready instantly to pounce with rage, fear, anxiety, etc.Put the two together.Now what words come out? It turns out "brilliant economist" and "whiny elitist" can be interchangeable.If you had an unlimited budget of time, money and manpower, how would you end poverty and war? @jphoenix24The first step to to end poverty and war is for the richest, most successful, most militarily powerful country in the world to take the first step. (That means the US).There's more than enough food to feed all the people in the world. The problem is that corrupt governments have leaders that siphon off all the money a country generates and takes the money for themselves, their relatives, and their friends. The Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia are notorious for this. We let them do it. We're like the kid in school (uhh, we are like how when I was a little kid in school) who thinks he has to pay people to be his friends.The best thing we can do with people is simply trade with them. End sanctions wherever we have them. Don't give foreign aid but allow companies to trade with each other. There's no reason to give foreign aid to a country with a leader that is just going to pocket it. We don't need to pay people to be our friend. But if the people in those countries are allowed to trade with the people in our countries then barriers will go down. We'll see that most of the 70 million Iranians are no different than the 300 million Americans who want to do business with them. We'll see that most North Koreans are dying to do business with us. Literally.It starts with the US opening up our trade borders. Offering to be friends where, superficially, the countries seem like they don't want to be friends because they have corrupt leaders (Iranians, Venezuelans, Cubans, etc hate their leaders but our sanctions make us the enemy instead of the friend).For awhile, the leaders will still be corrupt. The hands will be out. The hands will grab. But nobody goes to war with their customers. And eventually, the more dollars that flow around, the more people will get fed.Got a post card about a class action lawsuit against Bank of America entitling me to $, what are the odds I'll ever get a check? –@charliehayI get one of those a month for various reasons. I have two responses:You will never get a check. If you do it will be for $35.17. Meanwhile, the lawyers make a ton of money. Something should be done to regulate class-action suits but too many congressmen are lawyers and made their money that way (look at John Edwards) so you can forget about that.Business idea: create a class action lawsuit portal. Get every class action lawsuit on there (there are thousands). Almost everyone in the country is entitled to be in the "class" of some lawsuit. For instance, if you are a vegetarian and ate McDonald's fries in the 90s you are owed some money. If you used in ipod in 2005 you are owed some money. Etc. Everyone is owed some money.Meanwhile, how much would a lawfirm pay to either advertise or get leads from your website. A lot! Guess what the most expensive word is on Google AdWords?Mesothelioma!Because it's related to huge huge class action lawsuits involving asbestos. So lawfirms will pay several hundred dollars for even a click if someone searches on that word. So a class action lawsuit portal will make a lot of money. Go for it! I was going to make this but made Stockpickr! Your Source for Stock Ideas instead.POLITICSKinda depressed about upcoming elections.Will be Bama-Redux or Dark Scary Mitt ! Is YOGA d'cure or only Ron P? –@Kitsune808Answer this: what President has every changed your life? I'm going to assume you didn't sign up for the army and get killed in Iraq. Because Bush (and Obama, who continued the wars) certainly changed a lot of lives. But if you're the average person on the street, who changed your life? Did Clinton? Did Bush? Did Obama?Certainly Washington and Lincoln changed a lot of lives. More US citizens died (as a percentage) on their watch than any other Presidency. And Roosevelt sent off a lot of people to be killed. So dying is probably the biggest way Presidents change people's lives. Presidents have very little domestic power. Congress does. Presidents have the ability to make treaties and throw parties but not much else. So, for me personally, I could care less about who is President. Its just a popularity contest and I wish there was no such job as President.See also: Abolish the Presidency, It's a Useless Job. Abolish the Presidency. It's a Useless Job. - Altucher ConfidentialFAILUREHow do you get comfortable with failure? –@JoelEnglanderLet's define failure: you pick a goal, take a number of steps to make that goal, and somehow the goal doesn't happen. And it feels really really bad.Is that failure?No, not at all.Failure is when you then say, "Shit! I failed."Now it's a failure.When I was in my 20s I practically gave my life to write and publish a novel. I wrote 3 novels of about 400 pages each. I wrote a novella of about 150 pages. I wrote dozens and dozens of short stories. I wrote comic book scripts. I wrote screenplays. I planned documentaries. I shot TV pilots. It is so boring to spend 8 hours a day typing something that will never ever see the light of day. I was thrown out of graduate school. I took crappy jobs that would give me time to write. I gave up spending time with my girlfriend(s). Embarassingly (to all my friends), I kept calling myself "a writer".And I never got a novel published. To this day. I kept sending stuff out to agents, literary magazines, publishers. I would take classes on writing. I would read encyclopedias on literary criticism. I would read every writer I could to see what they were doing right that I wasn't. I would think to myself over and over, "Damn, I can do it better than this guy."But I didn't. I wasn't. I failed.So finally I gave up. After five years of writing 3000 words a day, I took a job at HBO, I made some creative websites that I'm proud of, I started a company, I sold it, I lost all the money I made, I bought a penthouse apartment in NYC, I totally lost it, I built and sold other companies. I built and failed at other companies. Meaning: all the money disappeared. I started writing about finance. Very different from writing novels. Or not. I wrote some boring books on finance. I started angel investing. I ran a fund of hedge funds. I did lots of things.I never got comfortable with failing. It's like putting on clothes when you are wet. Sometimes you have to twist and squirm a little to get everything on. The same thing with life. Most of the time you are all wet. But you have to put your clothes on every day and do the things you were meant to do. The things that put a roof over your head, feed your family, live your life, love your life. Eventually you get your clothes on so you aren't naked.Now I write about all the times I tried and it didn't work out. I write about everything I did. I don't hold anything back.And every now and then I write a post that totally sucks. Every now and then I still have many ideas that don't work out. And then I go onto the next one.Sometimes I get stuck in failure. I think "if only" or I think "now my life is over" or I think "why can't it ever work" and so on. It's easy to get stuck in the past. To get stuck in the twists and turns of what could've should've might've happened that would've changed this or that so somehow life would be better. But all of that is just in your head right now. It's not actually what happened.Just like we can never see really see the moon. The moon is just the light reflected off the sun. So is failure. Failure only reflects the light of our memory. It no longer exists. It's only an imprint on our current present. With that present you stil could, you still should, you still will. This is who you are.Did I fail? Am I a failure? I certainly failed at publishing a novel in my 20s. I failed at graduate school. I failed at many jobs. I certainly failed at many startups. At many relationships. When I look back I see a wasteland of failure. It smells, it's rotten, and it's piled up high. All it is is failure.Thank God.How do I find balance between bleeding on page and revealing too much/showing weakness? Will admitting my failures help/hurt business? –@anti_nihilistKamal discusses this a little in his book, <a href="Love Yourself As If Your Life Depended On It - Altucher Confidential">"Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It".</a> Specifically the discussion of how much should one reveal and if you reveal too much, there's the fear that people will judge you or look down on you.I mentioned to him at the time that I don't write something UNLESS I am worried that people will judge me. Else I'm not really hitting the edge of where I think I can deliver value. It turns out that your maximum value is delivered right at the point where you are worried you are saying so much that people will judge you.Note that doesn't mean reveal everything. I reveal a lot in this blog but certainly not everything. I don't want to hurt anyone for instance. The few times I said something that did hurt people, I pulled the posts down or changed them to respect privacy.We live in a "self-help" society. Where people are hypnotized into thinking that striving for greatness is the only way to live. And "Greatness" is defined in various ways: non-stop happiness, productivity, financial success, love success, etc. The problem is is that life is mostly struggle. And that attempts at greatness are often met with failure. We need to give ourselves permission to fail. Not only fail at a business, or at love, but even the little things - failure to remember an important date, or failure to treat the ones around us with love and respect 100% of the time. Nobody is perfect.Reveal enough so that we can see how you are not perfect. How you learned from it (or not). How you still moved on and tried to be honest. Honesty gives your words power. It makes your clients and friends trust you. I can tell you that because of this blog I have had more business opportunities than I ever would've thought possible. And if you look back on my posts you will see every failure and miserable embarassment possible. And yet, that's how I built trust. And you will too.SUCCESSDo all successful people have high levels of energy? If so, is it innate? -@mtgentry81I don't think it's true that successful people have a high level of energy.But look at many successful people and you will find huge periods where they were just silent. Even Steve Jobs took years YEARS off after leaving Apple. And when he came back to Apple he delegated almost every aspect of the job so he could slow down and focus on only the things he was good at.Only from silence, contemplation, reading, looking, observing, can you drill for the inner resources that result in springs of creativity. Success is better categorized by resilience than energy. And resilience doesn't require constant motion. Very often it requires hibernation, an ability to back off and say, "I can't handle this so I'm going to think for awhile".Think of it in terms of the universe. The universe is mostly empty. Think about an atom. Imagine a giant stadium. The electrons are the outer end of the stadium. The nucleus, the center of the atom, is like a pea sitting at the center of the stadium. The rest is completely empty. And yet this emptiness creates all the matter in the universe. Creates everything you see.Silence + emptiness leads to... genius? I don't know. But it will lead to meandering, to thoughts wandering, to wondering, to curiousity. Without that silence you will be busy busy busy. Too busy to do the important things that lights your brain on fire. Too busy to wonder about your next idea, too busy to wonder how the world works. You will have no emptiness in your life. You will have nothing with which to create your own universe.It's only when your energy is low that the mysteries within can be solved. It's almost Fall right now and where I live the trees start to change colors. It's only by stopping and looking at them without judging, labeling, without the mind whirring away, do you see the myriad of beautiful colors that the trees change into, a spectrum from life to death that begins in the summer and ends sometime in the fall. The success of nature that slowly unravels throughout this region and this part of the year.The people who have too much energy are too much at risk for burning out fast. And burning out without having any new ideas to keep the engine going. Will this be you? Then you are truly stopped, and with nowhere to go. The car has stalled. Your body and mind have forced you to wait.You will keep your engine going and drive a long way if you allow yourself to have low energy, to meander, to look at the trees change color, to delegate the things you aren't good at, to read the things you need to recharge and learn, to stop and do nothing so your subconscious can send the messages it needs from far, far away, and finally, so you can stop in your journey and pick up new things along the way.Try it in a small way. Try this: Every day, just stop. Stop worrying about what he or she said. Stop trying to solve a problem. Stop trying to be a hero. Or a salesman. Or a product evangelist. Stop trying to be happy. Or to make a relationship work. Or to be a good father. Or mother. Just stop for twenty minutes. No more. Do nothing. Not even meditation. Don't do anything. Then take a deep breath. Begin to label things again. Your battery has been recharged. Live your life and succeed."The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind" - Albert EinsteinHow do I explain to my parents that a grad degree doesn't equal success? I'm 22, 150k in debt scares me. –@Rothbard_FanBy your twitter account I can see that you personally love liberty, freedom, the pursuit of your own dreams. And yet your name is "John Doe" the ultimate name for those who want to hide. I am sorry you are so torn. Sorry that your parents are trying to bottle up the freedom. They are only doing it because, like all parents, they assume they know what is best for their children and they won't give up control EVER, if they can hang on to it to MAKE SURE you do what you are "supposed to do".My parents didn't like it at first when I wanted to major in Psychology. Then they didn't like it when I wanted to be a novelist. Then they didn't like it when I left graduate school. They didn't like it when I separated from my wife. My mother didn't like it when I wanted to pull the tubes on my father and let him die when there was no hope. I would go in and see him and he would have bed sores while he was just staring at the ceiling with nothing inside. Many the time in my youth when he tried to tell me what to do. When he thought he knew what was best for me and tried in many ways (physically, financially, with logic, etc) to enforce it.I'm an adult. And at 22, so are you. You have maybe 80 years left to live. Lots of people will disagree with things you do and decisions you make: your parents now, then your wife, or wives, then your children, or your peers, or your bosses. In the next 80 years maybe 100 people that are important to you will disagree with things you do. Maybe more.Do you have to explain everything to them? To these 100 people? Chances are they will still disagree with you. Not because you are wrong, or because they are bad or stupid but just because that's what people do. They get programmed with their beliefs at an early age and then they start to disagree with everything and anyone that goes against those beliefs. People have a tendency to walk over boundaries. I'm me and you're you and there's a boundary between us but often people want to say, "I'm me but I'm also going to try get you to do what I would do". If they try to enforce that too hard then that's going over your boundary. Adults shouldn't do that to each other.There's no way to explain to your parents the decision you are making. You are 22 years old. You are an adult, a citizen of the universe, a human capable of great love, great achievements, and many experiences you have yet to experience. You are right to be scared of $150,000 in student loan debt. Maybe they have never experienced that. They don't know what it feels like. But they are scared you won't get a good job if you don't go to graduate school. They have their fears and you have your fears. Your parents love you very much and their concerns are out of fear for your future job safety.Acknowledge their love. Love them back. But it's up to you now to become a little wiser every day. You only need to explain things to yourself. And how do you do that? You need to plan for yourself. You need to outline what you will do and how you will do it. If you require financial assistance from them at this point then you need to start figuring out how you can financially go out on your own. You are 22.Most of all, you don't need to argue with them or convince them. You stay quiet. You don't overthink. Your body will tell you what feels right and what feels wrong. Stay healthy so the message is as clear as possible. Don't muddle the message via drinking, bad relationships, worries about your parents, worries about your future. Just listen.Let your body explain to you what to do. Then do it. Don't worry about anything else.INFORMATIONEstimating over 50% of the "information" coming my way to be... tenuous, how should I change my information gathering? –@FredrikFilteredWhat do you need any information for? You probably have enough. For instance, do you need to know about Higgs-Boson? I don't even know what it is. Supposedly they found it somewhere. Do you need to have the "information" about it in order to get work done. A year ago everyone was obsessed with Fukishama. Now we know the truth: there was no more radiation coming out of there than exists under normal circumstances every day in Denver, Colorado. And yet the entire world was in a state of panic. I got angry hate mails, "YOU"RE GOING TO BE SORRY YOU DIDN'T WARN PEOPLE". Did I get any apologies a year later? Of course not. People forget. People move on.When I was selling my first company I needed to know information. I wanted to know what other, similar, companies sold for. So I read the SEC filings of public companies that bought companies like mine so I could know every deal just as well as my lawyer would know it. Heck, I ended up knowing more about those types of deals that my lawyer did. I also spoke to accountants about the obscure accounting rules ("pooling of interests"?) that would change how the deal would be treated from a tax perspective. On a need to know basis I identified all the sources of the best, most accurate information, and I read it.Other than that, avoid random information gathering. The more information you know, the more you have to unlearn in order to be successful. It's precisely when you think you know too much, that suddenly you become a "know-it-all", with all of the negative connotations. Always assume you are a beginner, always assume that everything around you has something to teach you.And finally, if you really want to read something for information - turn off the computer, turn off the TV, throw out the newspapers, and find a good book to read. That's the information that will stick with you and make you better. Everything else will make you dumber.[See also "My Summer Reading List" My Summer Reading List - Altucher Confidential]FAMILYHow / when did you know you were ready for kids? –@iamadamtannerI have a 13 and a 10 yr old. I'm still not ready to have kids.It is really hard to have kids. For the first few years of their lives you have to devote all your time to making sure they stay alive. Then you have to be a good role model for them. Then you have to entertain them, and feed them, and help them deal with the hardships of turning into an adult. You have to teach them how to be good friends, how to share, how to be polite, how to be respectful, how to be creative, how to avoid bad people. How to deal with it when people are mean to you. How to avoid being mean to others.It's too much for any one human to do.First you have to make sure you know all those things yourself. And nobody does. I still let bad people into my life. I still have a hard time sharing and being polite.That's why I'm glad I now have kids. Because they force me to get better at all the things I'm supposed to teach them. And sometimes I even love them.You've chronicled your experiences as a father, what is your top-ten list when expecting? –@Andrew_FerriI was scared to death when my first wife was pregnant with my first kid. I wasn't ready but maybe nobody is. I didn't want to have kids initially although now I'm certainly glad that she's a healthy 13 years old. Shit, I can't believe it's been 13 years.One time, while my ex was pregnant, she asked me to take out the garbage. I grabbed the green bag and threw it down the incinerator then I did what I did every single night during the entire period of her pregnancy. I went out and played poker all night at the Mayfair Club on 25th Street and Madison. It was only later I realized what I had done: I had thrown out the bag of all her post-pregnancy clothes. The specific clothes that would fit her when her body was in between "here" and "there"" after having the baby.Of course I didn't tell her.So it was only, post-baby, when she was getting ready for an Easter party, that she realized she had no clothes. Zero. I had thrown them all out six months earlier. She was upset. Very upset. Crying upset. I grabbed my baby and I didn't know what I was going to do. I felt like holding onto the baby would be the only way to protect myself. The baby was crying. I felt like if we both jumped out the window 21 floors up, then this problem would be solved.I didn't do that. I didn't do a lot of things. I would go out for a haircut and not come back for five hours. I'd sit in the coffee shop across the street and read. Ahh, peace and quiet. I'd call and say "there's a big line to get a haircut".The whole relationship with my ex-wife changed when we started having kids. I started to travel more. I kept playing poker. I went on a self-sabotage binge that cost me all of my money, cost me the house we bought and rebuilt, cost me many hours and months and years I could've spent with my child. I'm thinking about her right now, all of 13, in her teenage new-hormone daze. How many months did I waste not getting to know her better? Is it too late for me to make that up? I hope not.I remember one time I went to drop her off when she was 18 months old at some sort of kid-play-music thing. As I was walking out I heard her say in the tiniest, squeakiest voice, "bye daddy." And it stopped me. She was waving. My eyes teared up.And now I wonder. Will she ever miss me that way again. Will she ever need me that way again. My eyes are tearing up.Maybe some other time I'll have a top ten list.How do you apply pacifism to being a father. My nephew lied to me. And what good does it do him to just let it go? –@bkharnishAs I write this, I'm upset at one of my kids. She was rude to me right after I took her to a friend's party and picked her up at the party and then Claudia cooked dinner and now she was using my computer to play games. Life was good for her and she was still rude to me about something. What should I do? Here's what I will do:I always have "office hours" with my kids. They can tell me anything bothering them but I can also tell them.If they behave really badly I tell them I'm disappointed in them and why. This may or may not solve the problem right there.If the behavior continues then I suspend certain privileges. Computers for instance. Or phone for a week. This will work.Sometimes there is nothing you can do. As kids get older they turn into their own people. Maybe they are right about what they are saying about you or too you or how they are behaving towards you. How do you know you are right? Sometimes the misbehavior was their only way to express their feelings about an oppressive system (You). So question your own behavior to. The people that you love around you deserve that.GODDo you believe in God? If so, which? –@robbielaneyUnfortunately the word "God" has been bastardized. It started off as one thing and then it's gone through the religion grinder, the New Age grinder, the self-help grinder, the atheist grinder, the science grinder, and what's come out is a cartoon character of an old man with infinite power who gets angry sometimes.But yes. I believe that I am God. And so are you. The universe loves to create. Ever since the Big Bang all the Universe has done is create. It created a bang, it created dust, and stars, and galaxies and planets and life forms and brains. All of these atoms stuck together in trillions of miraculous ways that created consciousness. It created you and me.We are experiments. The universe wants to try something. So it sliced a piece off of itself and made you. It made me. Eventually we go back. And it/we keep making things. Forever.It's one big toy. And each toy is brought to life via the breath of god. Including you and me. The breath brings us to life. The exhale brings us back Home. Where we will all go? How do I know? I don't. But try for just a second to say, "whose body is this?" Then, "whose thoughts are these?" Then, "who is the one asking this question?" And go down that rabbit hole as deep as you can. Do that every day. Somewhere in there, infinitely deep into that rabbit hole, is that initial breath that created everything, that is the only thing inside of everything that exists, including you and me, just different reflections in the same mirror.MOTIVATION / SELF-PROMOTIONBest way to get motivated? –@DoronGreenspanIt's very painful when you feel unmotivated. It's like the world is a merry go round and everyone is having fun and you're just lying down on the ground, unable to get on the ride. When I am unmotivated I can't get out of bed. There was one period in the past three years where I look back on it and I can't even imagine what I was thinking during the day. I did absolutely nothing. Zero. And as a result my entire life turned upside down after just one month of doing nothing. But it turned around for the better. And thank god I did nothing during that month. I needed to gather the strength.You are really asking me two questions:"Why am I feeling unmotivated?""How can I get more motivated?"Forget motivation. There's a reason you are feeling unmotivated. You might not like your job anymore. Or your spouse. Or your home. Or your entire life. Take a step back. You aren't healthy. Something is not connecting.In October, 2008 I was managing some money for a hedge fund. They were getting me started and wanted to see how I would do. In September, a horrible month for the markets, I was up. But in October I was down and I was very depressed about it. I'd refuse to look at the quote screen. I'd lie down on my hammock outside and fall asleep. I remember one time it started raining and I woke up. But I knew the market was crashing and I was long stocks (I even bought Lehman Brothers at one point) so I decided to just keep sleeping. When I finally woke I was soaking wet. Then I got sick and I didn't want to get out of bed. I was unmotivated.I had a down month and the guy who gave me the money called me. He said, "I've been calling you ten times a day. Where have you been?" I told him I had no excuse.He said, "ok, I have to pull the money from you. It's not because you were down on the month. Who cares. It's because you never called me back. If you want to be good in this business, you have to be able to return phone calls and learn to communicate." He was right. 4 years earlier I had helped him seed his own fund and now he was much bigger and had just been doing me a favor and I had let him down.At the same time I was trying to start another company. A crowdsourcing ad agency called JungleSmash. You can see the results of it at Jungle Smash since I no longer have the domain name http://junglesmash.com. It was going well. But I lost motivation for it. The guys from Freakonomics were helping me with it and I disappointed them. Meanwhile, I couldn't focus on writing. I was moving houses AND this is precisely when my marriage was disintegrating. Ultimately, by the end of October I was mostly in random hotel rooms trying to figure out if I was ever going to see my kids again. I was depressed. Nothing could motivate me.What got me off the floor? Not trying to get motivated. But first trying to get healthy.I believe this: we have four bodies: physical (the obvious one), emotional, mental, spiritual. They are all connected. There is virtual blood that flows between them. There is a virtual heart in the middle. The blood is pumping through every second. Any blockage in any body and you have a "heart attack", i.e. you get depressed, unmotivated, unhappy, unwilling to relax, you feel anxious, you feel like purposeless.It's important to get back on track with each. In one post I recommend very lofty goals to get each of the bodies in shape. But I take it back. Start with small goals. For physical, maybe instead of: "working out, sleeping more, eating well" just do "don't drink soda for one day" or "sleep 8 hours instead of six".For emotional, instead of "get rid of all the crappy people in your life" try "next time you are angry, put yourself in their shoes for ten seconds".For mental, instead of "writing ten business ideas a day" how about "write one idea".For spiritual, instead of any kind of meditation or prayer, how about just "find one thing you are grateful about today." Today I'm really grateful I get to answer this question of yours.When you do these things, it feels like you are doing a lot of activity. But what actually happens is that all of your bodies get a little bit quieter. Over time the anxieties and all the thoughts that spring back and forth like a ball in a pinball machine, starts to get more and more silent and less active. This is what happens when you clean these bodies.It is out of this quietness that true motivation and ambition comes. It turns your body into the transmitter for something else. Wait for the transmission. Wait for the message. You won't need motivation then. Motivation will take you over and everyone around you will feel the energy spilling forth.What has been your most effective method of self-promotion? -@davidrowynThe most effective method of self-promotion is more self-less promotion.There is no good method of self-promotion. If your focus is on getting yourself noticed then make a sex tape and "accidentally" distribute it. For 10 years I wrote about stocks, appeared on TV, managed money, wrote books, and started a company about stockpicking which I sold to TheStreet. Did it promote me? Perhaps a little. And when the market went down, everyone hated me. When the market went up, people liked me. I very much enjoyed being liked. I very much hated being hated.CNBC's Erin Burnett show, where I had a regular spot, dropped me in early 2009. The Financial Times dropped me in early 2009. TheStreet dropped me in early 2009. Yahoo Finance dropped me. On and on. And when the market started going up again, they all wanted me on again. Even TheStreet, made up of people who actually hated me, asked me to start writing for them again.This has been pretty hard being rejected by everyone. And not only that, during that exact period I was going through a divorce, I was rebuilding the relationship with my children, I was trying to survive financially, I was still regretting going broke repeatedly in the 00s. 20 years of fighting the fight and suddenly everyone hated me. I had fears of going broke again. Just like everyone, I had fears of the financial world bringing the entire world down with it.In November 2010 I decided, screw it, I just want to say what's on my mind. I wanted to say I was scared also. I wanted to stop pretending. We now live in what I call "The Choose Yourself Era". I'm sick of relying on other people to choose me. Starting in 2010 I chose myself.I started writing on this blog. I started making new friends. I started building new business opportunities for myself and meeting new groups of people. Not just people who were going to have me around to suit their own purposes but people who respected what I had to say because they knew they were getting honest answers based on my limited experiences in a variety of areas.I told people it was okay to fail, because everyone fails. That it's ok to be disappointed in yourself. Okay to be angry sometimes. Okay to not always achieve every goal and that there are other ways to find happiness. Okay to sometimes be sad because life is mostly about failure and sadness, punctuated with occasional success. I gave my own methods for networking. I described my different businesses, the successes and the failures. The things I was ashamed of. It made a difference. Without planning it, I built trust.Sometimes it's even alright to hate what you've become, to realize that 20 years of hard work have put you in a place where you feel stuck and lonely. Everyone feels this way sometimes. After working 100 hours a week for 15 years, I was mentally and emotionally lost. I had to rebuild. Writing this blog helped me with that.And when you relate to what everyone feels, and help them find permission inside themselves to feel that way, and express this in forums and formats that everyone reads (blogs, twitter, facebook, comments on other blogs, syndicate to other blogs, books, etc) then this is effective self-promotion. You don't need one million followers. Snooki needs that. You just need one person that you really, sincerely help. Then they will share that help with someone else. And so on. And if you keep persisting with the thought in mind that you are a radio transmitter for the feelings that are always out there, always in the ether effecting everyone, then people will tune in and hear your message. That is self-promotion.CHESSHas chess taught you more relevant things than school? More worth the HUGE time investment you've put into both? –@bell_erI can write ten posts on this topic. I can write a book or two on this topic and not one mention any actual chess game. I don't even know where to begin. Chess has taught me so much.But right now I will just write about one of the things chess has taught me. Last night Claudia and I were in a dilemma. Every year for the past few years we've gone to India in January-February. Claudia hates the cold weather. HATES IT. Honestly, I'm worried if we stay up north during those months she might even divorce me, that's how much she hates it, although she will deny that. And India has other benefits: yoga classes, very cheap, we have a place to stay that is always available to us, the showers in the Dubai waiting lounge in between flights, the food they serve on the plane on the way back, the dosas, the cheap clothes pants I can buy that will fall apart after a year but only cost $6 each.But this January we have a problem. We are leading a three day workshop starting January 18 at Kripalu. Kripalu is sort of a "wellness resort". It's a hotel where at any given time various programs are happening that teach aspects of wellness in one form or other. So no India this year. And Claudia is upset. She started thinking about Florida but was suddenly coming up with all the negatives.I had an idea. And it was an idea I learned from chess.There's a book, "Think Like a Grandmaster" by Alexander Kotov, a successful Russian grandmaster from the 1950s. For a great overview of Kotov's games I highly recommend the book "Zurich International 1954" by Daniel Bronstein. One of the best chess boks ever written.But first, "Think Like a Grandmaster" is a must-read for every young chessplayer. In the book he simply describes how a grandmaster thinks. He says a chessplayer doesn't look at a position and immediately start analyzing deeply down one path, even if it looks like the most obvious path.First the grandmaster lists all his options, even if they seem totally ridiculous. List as many possibilities as possible, even if a move looks horrible.This is great advice. Florida, California, Argentina, India (why not?), South Carolina, Africa, Italy, Mexico, all appeared on our list. We had lots of choices suddenly! We kept trying to think of more. Maybe today we'll dive deep down each choice and make a decision. Or not. It's nice to know we at least have many choices and one of them will be a good one. We "thought like grandmasters" and in doing so, reduced anxiety, gave ourselves many good choices, showed that the world was bigger than we thought, and will eventually make a decision that will make our lives better and help our minds to rest easy.This is just one thing I learned from chess. In another post I will describe more. But for now, whenever you have to make a complicated decision, take a step back and see if you can think the way a grandmaster of life would think.TWITTER Q&ABiggest benefit from doing twitter Q + A's? ideas for writing, fun interacting with readers, helps to build audience, other? -@BillyMurphI am an amateur at giving advice. I really love doing it. I look forward to Thursdays. Into writing these posts. I hope I help some people. I tend to like the advice I give, whether or not it's right or wrong. But at the end of the day I don't think there's any real benefit to me other than that I just love doing it and it's always fun to do things you love.Any good methods for building twitter followers and interacting with people? –@adamkornfieldI look at my twitter follower count (and related to that: my facebook subscribers, quora followers, klout score, comments on my blog posts, facebook likes on my blog posts, etc) and I feel regret. Regret that I care. But I do care. I want people to like me. I want people to think that my words have some impact. I want to have friends that even in this very ephemeral way, stay in touch with me.So I like to have more twitter followers even though I dislike that I want that. And that's social media in a nutshell. We all want to connect. We want to be loved even when other parts of our lives don't provide all the cravings we need. The cure for that is to just be quiet. To understand that all the tweets in the world, all the Facebook updates, add up to so much of nothing. They exist in 1s and 0s for a few seconds, and then they disappear into some magical ether among the quadrillions of bytes of information shared every day.So while I hate myself for doing it: I do have an answer for your question. The best way for building twitter followers is to give someone a gift. Somewhere, somehow (a blog, a facebook post, engaging in a conversation in twitter, answering a question on quora, etc deliver something of great quality - help someone out, provide someone unique. And in that gift, include a card. The "card" says, "please follow me on Twitter".That's the answer to your question. Ask people to follow you. Ask and you will receive. Don't ask, and like most things in life, nobody is going to do you any favors.What moves you to do this Q&A? Do you expect to retrieve some info? Just interaction? –@danibluebishopWhen I was 12 years old I bought a collection of "Dear Abby" columns. She was the biggest advice columnist ever. One question asked was by a woman who followed her husband home from work one night. He stopped off at a strip club. At the strip club he went into a back room with a stripper. When the man got home the woman confronted him with what she saw. He said, "don't worry! The stripper was only doing 'sexual favors' and nothing else!" The woman asked "Abby" what she should do and what did he mean by "sexual favors".I actually forget what Abby responded. Nor do I remember any other question from the book. But I remember thinking: wow, adults get "sexual favors" occasionally. And, "I want a job like Dear Abby. I could be real good at this." All my life I wanted to do that. I tried to major in Psychology but I got a D- and then a C- in my first two classes so I wasn't allowed to major in it. And my father told me I would make no money being a psychologist but I didn't care. I still wanted to be someone who could give advice. So I read every book I could find on psychology, self-help, spirituality, meditation, etc. And then I forgot it all while I started some companies and became miserable for about twenty years. Now I want to try again.I don't make money doing this. But thank you for letting me do this.

“First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”-General Henry LeeThe Father of our Country, George Washington was the most influential figure in American history, and was arguably the greatest leader of all time. As Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, Washington liberated the colonies from British imperial rule. He assumed office as the first President of the United States with more prestige than any of his successors. He also inherited a greater collection of national challenges than any other president, the greatest of which was that the American people felt primary allegiance to state and local authorities, not the federal government. By the time Washington left office, he had created a unified American nation and had shaped the executive office of the government into a co-equal branch with Congress. Here are his ten greatest achievements:(Before I begin, I’d like to point out that, for this list, I’ve concentrated on specific events, like Yorktown, instead of vague ideas, like winning the War of Independence.)10. The Second Battle of Fort Duquesne: Washington’s life encompassed the final struggle to determine whether the Spanish, French, or English speaking people would rule North America. To protect its fur traders, France established forts between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, an area that Britain had claimed for its settlers. The world first became aware of Washington when he was sent to resolve this dispute in 1753. He, along with his team of six colonists and four Iroquois, went into the Ohio Valley to deliver a letter to the French commander. The French told him that they intend to stay. Washington was sent to meet with the French a second time. Feeling threatened, his Iroquois guides attacked the French, killing their commander and ten others. This firefight ignited the Seven Years War (known in America as the French and Indian War), a conflict waged on five continents. He partook in only one significant campaign in the war. The British objective was to take Fort Duquesne from the French. Washington argued to General Forbes, who commanded the campaign, that the forces must use Native American tactics instead of a frontal assault on the fort. He made his arguments forcefully, even rudely, until Forbes agreed. Washington led one of three brigades. The French were overwhelmed and retreated. The British built a new stockade called Fort Pitt, after British Prime Minister William Pitt. Washington resigned his commission as Virginia’s greatest war hero, leading to his appointment as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army in 1775.9. The Whiskey Rebellion: In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton insisted on paying down the national debt. To do so, Congress passed an excise tax, chiefly on whiskey. Some frontiersmen who made whiskey and regarded it as their only currency (they rarely dealt with cash) saw this as a threat to their existence. Many felt that their incessant war with Native Americans, on behalf of all, was a form of civic service that should exempt them from taxation. These men were aggressive and armed. President Washington tried work through the courts to punish the tax evaders, but resistance became so widespread that collectors fled for their lives. In July 1794, a riot killed an American solder and burned a tax collector’s home. The governor of Pennsylvania refused to act. Washington viewed the frontiersmen’s actions as treason and rebellion. Washington and Hamilton personally commanded a force of thirteen thousand militiamen to crush the insurrection. The rebellion melted before violence ensued. Washington’s actions set the precedent that the government can defend itself from rebellion. This allowed President Jackson to prevent South Carolina’s succession in the Nullification Crisis and President Lincoln to preserve the Union through military force. This crisis also produced a dramatic illustration of two competing versions of what the American Revolution meant by the 1790s. On one side were the rebels who saw standing up to Congressionally imposed taxation as equivalent to standing up to the British ministry. On the other side stood President Washington enforcing the authority of the constitutionally elected government that claim to represent all Americans.8. Valley Forge: This was the nadir of the American experience in the War of Independence. Throughout the winter of 1777-78, Washington and his men had been camped miserably at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. A windy plateau twenty miles from Philadelphia, it became legendary for the hardships endured there by soldiers short of clothing, blankets, and food. Men without shoes left bloody footprints in the snow. Most were housed in flimsy tents. With states refusing to levy taxes to finance the war, Congress was of little help. It urged Washington to seize food and supplies from surrounding farms. Washington warned Congress that without more food the Army would “starve, dissolve, or disperse.” The soldiers did none of those that miserable winter because of their near-religious reverence for General Washington. Knowing that smallpox was raging across the North American continent, Washington inoculated his men against the disease. Even though many educated Americans opposed inoculation, believing that it would spread the disease, Washington acted on his own experience. His half-brother, Lawrence, got small pox when George was young. George got the disease but survived. He was now immune, and wanted the same for his troops. Biographer Ron Chernow wrote, “This enlightened decision was as important as any military measure Washington adopted during the war.” As the worst of winter passed, the Americans’ fortunes rose. Ben Franklin sent Baron von Steuben, a Prussian officer who claimed to have served with Fredrick the Great, to Valley Forge. Washington approved his training of the Continental Army into a professional fighting force. By the time the Continental Army marched out in May, new enlistments swelled its numbers to twelve thousand.7. The Jay Treaty: In the 1790s, the United States faced challenges in foreign relations unsurpassed in gravity until World War II. Britain and Spain still blocked access to the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, thwarting America’s westward expansion. The French Revolution, which began in 1789, ignited a war in Europe in 1792. The revolutionary ideology turned this European power struggle into a total war where entire populations were mobilized for conflict. President Washington assembled his cabinet to figure out a response to the crisis. The risk of getting pulled into Europe’s war and potentially fighting a superpower like Britain or France meant that the young republic’s survival was at stake. Secretary of State Jefferson advocated upholding the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France. Secretary of Treasury Hamilton wanted Neutrality that expressed favoritism toward Britain. Washington took ideas from each and declared the Neutrality Proclamation, which prohibited either the American government or private citizens from acting on behalf of either Britain or France. This caused outrage by both those Americans who supported France and those who thought Washington was overstepping his Constitutional bounds. Washington had made his decision without consulting Congress, establishing an important precedent for Executive Branch initiative in foreign policy. Washington was a foreign policy realist, which means that he thought that nations should pursue their interests when conducting geopolitics, not morality or ideology. Alliances formed when the interest of multiple nations coincided, but countries did not have friends. This puts Washington in the same camp as geopolitical giants like Otto von Bismarck, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger. Although he appreciated France’s help in the War of Independence, Washington no longer saw the alliance with France as beneficial to the United States and did not feel obligated to come to France’s aid. The biggest foreign policy crisis of Washington’s presidency dominated his second term. The British refused to honor the obligation they made in the Treaty of Paris (which ended the War of Independence) to vacate forts around the Great Lakes, where they stirred up trouble with Native American tribes and restricted American migration into the Ohio Valley. Additionally, the British navy seized American ships carrying French goods in an attempt to undermine France’s war effort. To avoid war, President Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay to London to negotiate a settlement. Jay’s treaty provided for British evacuation of the northwest posts and gave America a ‘most favored nation’ status in Britain’s trade, and vice-versa. This swelled American exports. It was a commercial treaty that enormously benefited both signatories while hurting neither. Congress narrowly passed the treaty, and a backlash was initiated in the press by Jefferson’s allies, who now saw Washington as Britain and Hamilton’s pawn. Jay’s image was burned in effigy. Madison, a leading figure in the House, tried to withhold funds for the treaty but was defeated. More ominously, the French saw the Jay Treaty as America taking Britain’s side in the war. France began pursuing American ships, resulting in a crisis that dominated John Adams’ presidency. Washington was exhausted by the aftermath of the Jay Treaty and was upset that his legacy was being damaged by bitter partisanship. He decided not to run for a third term, setting another precedent (more on this later). Washington had exploited the great power rivalry to America’s advantage and avoided a costly war with Britain. Before he left office, Washington negotiated the Treaty of Madrid with Spain, which was similar to the Jay Treaty. Spain recognized the US’s boundary claim east of the Mississippi, removing the last obstacle to America’s westward expansion. This crowned Washington’s life work.6. The Battle of Trenton: General Washington became overconfident after driving the British out of Boston with artillery. He was determined to prevent the redcoats from seizing the Hudson and dividing New England from the other colonies. Arriving in New York in the summer of 1776, as the Continental Congress was adopting the Declaration of Independence, Washington made the mistake of dividing his forces between Long Island and Manhattan. On August 27, the British invaded New York from the sea with thirty-three thousand troops. It was the largest British amphibious invasion until June 6, 1944. The American forces in Long Island were defeated within days. In mid-September, Washington withdrew his army from Manhattan. New York remained under British occupation until the end of the war. Flushed with victory, British General Howe allowed Washington’s forces to escape across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. With winter setting in, most people expected Washington to take a break from fighting to lick his wounds. But he was determined to redeem his reputation after the disaster in New York. He also knew that ending the year with a major defeat could result in the Army’s dissolution. By springtime, the war could be over. Knowing that a garrison of fierce German Hessian mercenaries was based in Trenton, New Jersey, he devised his most tactically brilliant operation of the war that saved the movement for American independence from extinction. On Christmas night, Washington and his forces crossed the Delaware River. Three of his four units failed to cross, but Washington decided to attack anyway in an all-or-nothing wager. Luckily, the Hessians were exhausted from a week of being on round-the-clock alert, expecting an attack. The Hessians fought bravely but were decisively defeated. Embarrassed, the British sent General Cornwallis with a large force to crush the Americans at Trenton. Washington learned of the offensive and struck first. The Battle of Princeton became another American victory. The Trenton-Princeton combination was a huge boost to American morale at this early stage in the war.5. The Constitutional Convention: Since the midpoint of the Revolutionary War, Washington had urged reforming the Articles of Confederation. Particularly, he knew the powers of the national government had to be strengthened so it could raise revenues and regulate commerce. The Articles did not allow Congress to tax. It was up to the states when they wanted to give money to the central government. As a result, Congress had to borrow money to fund the war. The national debt skyrocketed, resulting in a crippling inflation and depression. Paper money was worthless. Debtors feared foreclose and debtor prison. States, desperate to pay off interest on debt accumulated during the war, raised taxes several times. This undermined commerce, leading to a collapse in wages and increased unemployment. States applied tariffs against one another, restricted inter-state trade. Despite this, it took Shays’ Rebellion, an uprising by Massachusetts farmers desperate to shut down courts to prevent the start of bankruptcy proceedings against them, to convince the country that reform was needed. In the summer of 1787, a convention was held in Philadelphia to reform the Articles. The delegates immediately decided to throw out the Articles and create a new constitution that would strengthen the central government and allow it to deal with the economic crisis. Washington was unanimously elected to be the Convention’s president, granting the Convention legitimacy in the eyes of Americans. As president, Washington was expected to stay out of the debates. But he had an intense interest in the arguments that shaped the Executive Branch. Everyone in the room took for granted that he would become the first President of the United States. Although wary of monarchy, the Convention created such a strong presidency only because they knew that Washington would set a standard for the judicious exercise of power. They trusted him because he had surrendered his power after the war (more on this later). Washington’s role at the Convention was a clear endorsement of the new constitution. This, along with the Federalist Paperswritten by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, allowed the Constitution to get ratified.4. Supporting Hamilton’s Plan: Upon taking office, Washington inherited the greatest collection of national challenges of any president. One of those challenges was the largest economic crisis in American history, rivaled only by the Great Depression of the 1930s (see previous section). To plan the administration’s response, Washington turned to his chief advisor, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton had been Washington’s aide-de-camp during the war and was with Washington during crises like Valley Forge and the Battle of Yorktown. Neither man was warm, but their relationship was built on mutual respect. They had similar political views, although Washington was not as conservative as Hamilton. John Locke influenced most politicians of the era, but Hamilton gave Washington a copy of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, which stressed the anarchic behavior of humanity and the need of an artificial constitutional giant figure to keep everyone in awe. Hamilton’s first step in repairing the economy was the “Report on Public Credit.” The federal government was to assume debt owned by the states. Subsidizing northern manufacturers and higher tariffs would result in greater industrialization and more tax revenue for the government. The government would then use this revenue to pay down the debt to a reasonable level, stabilizing the economy. Both during and after the war, many holders of American debt, doubting their notes would ever be redeemable and hoping to get at least something for them, sold them to speculators at prices well below face value. Hamilton’s plan called for full face value to be paid to whoever held the new federal paper, richly rewarding the speculators. Hamilton was untroubled that this aided the wealthy. He hoped the rich would lend out this money, providing capital to spur economic growth (this was a similar logic to Reagan’s supply-side economics). This plan was highly controversial, especially in the south, and it was Washington’s endorsement that got it through Congress. As a result, the national debt was cut in half within fifteen years, and America had the credit to borrow money for the Louisiana Purchase. In the meantime, Washington was able to run the government without a crushing debt overshadowing every move he made. Hamilton’s next step was a national bank where the government would have twenty percent stake and the rest was owned by private investors. The bank would help collect taxes, handle payments on the debt, issue currency notes, and make loans to the government and private businesses. Washington pushed this plan through Congress as well, but the bank fight ignited the vicious antagonism between Hamilton and Secretary of State Jefferson, which became the greatest political rivalry in American history. Washington guided the administration by mediating between these two brilliant but opinionated men, allowing both to serve the country. Washington’s critics claim that Hamilton was the brain behind all of Washington’s policies. The truth is that the two men had decades of experience collaborating and could predict each other’s thoughts. Hamilton’s disproportionately important role within the Washington Administration is comparable to Henry Kissinger’s role in the Nixon Administration or Francis Perkins’ role in the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. Washington led America out of a titanic economic crisis and set the stage for the Industrial Revolution of the Nineteenth Century. America achieved takeoff into self-sustaining growth and a prosperity that lasted until the 1830s. It is fair to say that Washington’s economic policy was the most successful of any president.3. The Newburgh Address: By the time the War of Independence was over in spring 1783, Congress had incurred its tremendous debt. Looking for expenses to cut, it decided not to give the soldiers of the Continental Army their last pay. Outraged, a group of several hundred officers (one of which was General Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga) gathered in Newburgh, New York. They conspired and made a list of demands to Congress about their pay. If Congress failed to meet their demands, the officers would conduct a military coup, overthrowing Congress, and establishing an authoritarian government. Hamilton warned General Washington of the plot. The man who won the war went to Newburgh to confront his soldiers. The occasion showed that Washington was a superb orator and a cunning operator. He pulled out a speech he had written in large letters. For dramatic effect, he made a point of taking out his new reading glasses. His soldiers had never seen him with glasses before; they were taken aback by the physical decline he had endured during eight years of war. He took some time to focus his glasses and said, “Gentlemen, you must pardon me. I have grown grey in your service, and now I find myself growing blind.” Some would find this corny. But it worked, and thereafter the appeal was to willing listeners who viewed Washington as a secular saint. The coup vanished. If it had been carried through, American democracy would have been damaged beyond repair. Washington then turned to Congress, and convinced it to meet some of the officers’ demands. He turned a potential coup into an actual occasion of lawful and constitutional behavior.2. The Battle of Yorktown: After Valley Forge and the victorious Battle of Monmouth Court House, General Washington saw little action for three years. He remained obsessed with liberating New York, the center of British occupation, and reversing his failure from 1776 (see #6). In 1780, the British shifted toward a southern strategy, because they believed southerners would be more sympathetic to the Crown. They captured Charleston, South Carolina, along with over two thousand American soldiers. Upon hearing the news of this defeat, Washington learned of Benedict Arnold’s betrayal (he became a general for the British), something Washington never forgot. Washington sent a small force commanded by Lafayette to thwart Arnold’s efforts to conquer the Virginia countryside. When 1781 began with American mutinies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey (they were frustrated with a lack of pay), Washington wondered if his Continental Army was finally disintegrating. Prospects for American victory appeared remote. Washington’s next move would have to be the decisive one, or else Congress would negotiate a settlement with Britain. Everything changed in the autumn. France assumed responsibility for paying the American forces (since Congress lacked the funds). British General Cornwallis established a fortified position in Yorktown, Virginia, trying to lure Washington away from New York. At first, Washington did not take the bait. He then learned that the French fleet was on its way toward Chesapeake Bay. Washington instantly grasped a matchless opportunity to strike the enemy while the British were vulnerable. The result was the climatic battle of the war and arguable the most consequential battle in American history. The Battle of Yorktown saw nine thousand French and ten thousand American soldiers corner the British while the French fleet cut off any escape routes (the British had temporarily lost their supremacy at sea). Franco-American artillery forced Cornwallis, and over seven thousand redcoats, to surrender. Washington did not realize that this was the final battle of the Revolutionary War. Not true of his enemy. When Prime Minister Lord North got the news in London, he proclaimed, “This is the end.” Yorktown broke Britain’s will to fight. Negotiations began that resulted in the Treaty of Paris two years later, securing America’s independence. Until news of the treaty arrived, Washington refused to disband his army (in case fighting resumed). Some Americans feared that Washington was going to follow Caesar’s example and take control of the government through force. That would not be the case.1. Presidential Precedents and Surrendering Power: The defining moment of Washington’s career was resigning his command at the head of the Continental Army after the Treaty of Paris was announced. In doing so, he became that rarest of creatures, the indispensable figure who declared himself dispensable. Neither Caesar nor Cromwell had done it before him, and neither Napoleon, Lenin, nor Mao would do it after him. The importance of this decision can be summarized by Washington’s nemesis, King George III, who asked an American painter what Washington would do now that he had won the war. “Oh, they say he will return to his farm,” the painter answered. “If he does that,” said the kind, “he will be the greatest man in the world.” This enormous precedent of modern history was followed by many others when the Electoral College unanimously elected Washington as the first president. His greatness was not merely being the first, but that he shaped the Executive Office into a co-equal branch with Congress that could set the legislative agenda and have special powers in foreign policy. None of these powers were written into the Constitution. They exist because of the precedents he set. A handful of those precedents include the Inaugural Address, the Cabinet System, Executive Privilege, and the Executive Order. After eight years, Washington was exhausted from enduring partisanship and managing foreign crises. He decided not to run for a third term and to retire to Mount Vernon, thus establishing another critical precedent. He (along with Hamilton) wrote a farewell address. This tradition has been followed by most of his successors, but only Dwight Eisenhower’s has remained as memorable and important. (That is fitting, because Eisenhower’s career paralleled Washington’s.) Although crafting an executive branch of reasonable influence and surrendering power might not seem as dramatic as, say, Lincoln freeing the slaves, it must be remembered that Washington did not have a historical model to follow. The two previously attempted republican governments, in Rome and England, had become military dictatorships in their formative years. Washington, and the near-religious devotion he inspired, was the main reason why the American Revolution succeeded (and did not follow the path of either the French Revolution or the failed revolutions in Latin America). He remains a gold standard for every leader that has followed him.“I have diligently sought the public welfare; and have endeavored to inculcate the same principles in all that are under me. These reflections will be a cordial to my mind as long as I am able to distinguish between good and evil.”-George WashingtonFor more of my writing, check out “The Eisenhower Encyclopedia” at www.dwighteisenhower.net