James Altucher Quotes

Arguing with people is like reading your e-mail at 4 in the morning. There is absolutely no good that can come of it. It's just scratching an itch.

When the lights come on inside of you, everyone in the world can see a little better.

No longer is someone coming to hire you, to invest in your company, to sign you, to pick you. It's on you to make the most important decision in your life: Choose Yourself!

But business is just a vehicle for transforming the ideas in your head into something real, something tangible, that actually improves the lives of others. To create something unique and beautiful and valuable is very hard. It’s very special to do. It doesn’t happen fast.

If two people believe in the same story, they might be thousands of miles apart and total strangers, but they still have a sense they can trust each other.

If coming up with ten ideas sounds too hard, then come up with twenty.

Infinite patience gets you immediate results.

If too many things have to happen in order to bring about the situation you want, then back out of it and try again later.

Be honest about mistakes. Even if you are afraid of what people think.

Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again.

People look for their passions. But often, the passions find you. How does your #‎ passion find you? When you are good at something, you get passionate about it. That’s it.

Products are valued higher than services.

The only way to make real wealth is to get rid of your salary. In a salary, by definition, you are creating wealth for others, and you are creating a chain and handcuffs for yourself.

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

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

The big thing in life is to focus on providing more value to people than they expect. The rest comes then.

Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. 100 years from now your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.

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

We’re taught at an early age that we’re not good enough. That someone else has to choose us in order for us to be…what? Blessed? Rich? Certified? Legitimized? Educated? Partnership material?

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

If we truly want to learn, we never learn when we are talking. We only learn when we are listening.

Branding jails corporate America but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.

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

Dont buy into the 20-hours-a-day entrepreneur myth. You need to sleep 8 hours a day to have a focused mind.

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

When we die our entire legacy is simply the added together strengths of all the connections we make with others. This is the ghost of ourselves we leave behind. This is showing up.

Games are all about taking risks.

The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again.

I'm a big believer in minimalism. Not materialist minimalism although that's part of it but time and energy minimalism. The body is given only so much energy a day.

Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction-creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically. Always ask yourself, what can I improve? Who else can I talk to? Where else can I look?

The idea that we need to “pay our dues” is a lie told to us by people who wanted our efforts and labor on the cheap.

Writing a book makes you an expert in the field. At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it's more impressive than handing a business card.

Reading is the best return on investment. You have to live your entire life in order to know one life. But with reading you can know 1000s of people's lives for almost no cost. What a great return!

The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

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

Hold your breath. Try holding your breath for just thirty seconds. That’s all it takes. Try it right now while you are looking at this line. Now…on the twenty-ninth second, do any opinions matter?

The best way I have ever found to fill that hole is not to seek external motivations to fill the emptiness, but to ignite the internal fire that will never go out. To light up my own inner sky.

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

Help is a conversation. If one side talks too much, the other side will get bored. So make sure you help back when you can.

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

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

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

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

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

Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around you who don’t support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck.

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

Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.

I had ideas first, wealth second. It only worked in that order.