10 Things I Learned From James Altucher

#4: Don’t pay your credit card debt.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the lessons I learned from Seth Godin. People liked it. If you haven’t read, check it out, it might change your life or give you food for thought.

I want to continue this series and write about other ‘heroes’ of mine and the lessons I’ve learned from them.

These lessons are going to be short, concise and to the point, and I’ll provide links (full disclosure: they will be affiliate links), quotes and personal stories to each lesson.

Without further ado, enjoy the 10 lessons I learned from my hero, James Altucher.

#1. The 1% Rule

This is something James calls his ‘daily practice’.

If you improve at anything 1% per day, by the end of the year you’ll become better at it by 37 times.

1.01³⁶⁵ = 37.7834343329.

In Choose Yourself! and The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth James advises us to take care of our health: spiritual, mental, physical and emotional and improve at each of its aspects 1% per day.

You take care of your spiritual health by being grateful. You take care of your mental health by learning something new each day. Physical — exercise. Emotional — being around people you love, and who love you back.

If you stick to anything for a year, you’ll become better than 99% of people in the world at it.

Whether it’s writing, blogging, building a business or exercising. Stick to it, and improve 1% daily. Let the compounding effect do the rest.

Take care of your health. You can always make more money later, but a split second of stress and anxiety — you can never take that back.

You’ll need it to come with ideas (more on that later on).

#2. The Google Rule

I’ve been blogging for three years, but my following didn’t grow. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. I was creating valuable content and ‘teaching’ others.

Turns out, people don’t like it when you teach them. People like when you share something valuable with them or share your personal, vulnerable story.

There are two types of blogging and creating content.

Bad blogging: “I am smart, here’s what I know.”

Good blogging: “I don’t know anything, but this guy [points finger] is amazing, go check him out.”

I learned that people don’t read you because you’re smart. They read you because you’re passionate about a certain topic, and repackage ideas in the way that only you can.

You don’t have to bullshit yourself to success.

You can be like Google:

1. Don’t say you’re smart. Point to other people.
2. Give all the credit to them.

Google is not smart. It’s actually pretty stupid. It knows nothing. Yet, people use it all the time.

Use James’s ‘Google Rule’ and be a great blogger and person.

#3. Cut Out the 1st and Last Paragraphs

Whenever you write something long — whether it’s a book, a blog post, a newsletter — you should focus on the writing itself.

Once you finish writing, you should spend about the same time editing. Cutting out stuff feels better than writing it.

And always, always — remove the first and last paragraphs. This rule works even if you know about it.

It takes only a minute to do so. Yet, your piece will be so much better.

Once I started putting this lesson to use in my own writing, my exposure, views and writing quality skyrocketed.

#4. Don’t Pay Your Credit Card Debt

If you haven’t heard it from James before, I bet if you haven’t ever heard similar advice to money management. It’s pretty controversial, and that’s why I love it.

There are two tips to avoid going broke that James gives out in The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth:

1. Don’t invest more than 2% of your net worth in anything. If you have less than $10,000, this means you shouldn’t buy a TV, a new MacBook, etc. If you have more, this means you shouldn’t go to college, buy a home, etc.
2. Stop paying your debt. If you borrowed from a friend, you should pay your friend back. That’s called being a good person. But any other type of debt is a contract and ‘ethics’, as James so eloquently put it, “is a government-made term to try and induce you to pay back your debt when you don’t have to.”

When you take a loan from a bank, you sign a contract. It says, “if you don’t pay your debt, we will seize your assets and your home.”

Ok, go ahead, bank. Now what?

Answer: nothing. (Except that your credit score will suffer, but who cares? Don’t get another loan. Don’t be stupid. Only buy what you can afford.)

#5. Choose Yourself

The only way to have enough money for retirement is to ‘choose yourself’, make money and set aside large chunks of it. Pensions are dead.

You choose yourself by quitting your job. You don’t have to be an ‘idea slave’ to somebody anymore in 2020. You can have your own ideas, and you can start your own business (e.g., online business or a blog). More on that later.

You choose yourself by stopping to pay your debt. Figuratively and literally speaking (see above).

You choose yourself by stopping to create excuses. You have the power in your hands, the tide has shifted. You don’t have to climb the corporate ladder anymore. You can do you.

You choose yourself by following your dreams. Nobody will choose you unless you do. Everybody chooses themselves. You owe that to yourself.

Read James Altucher’s book, Choose Yourself and you’ll know what I am talking about.

#6. Everyone Is an Entrepreneur

I quit business school after 7 months. I couldn’t understand why they were teaching me something that can’t be taught. ‘Entrepreneurship’ is not a skill, it’s a mindset.

According to James, all you need to do to be an entrepreneur is to:

1. Take risks.
2. Come up with ideas (we’ll talk about this one later).
3. Don’t be afraid to fail, look stupid and embarrass yourself. Take a look at how James is open with his painful stories on his blog.
4. Have the ability to sell your ideas.
5. Have the courage to execute on your ideas.
6. Have the craziness to be persistent, even if everybody else tells you it’s not worth it, and you keep on failing.

That last one is the most important, in my opinion. Whenever I had success in anything, it was because I just stuck to it, no matter the odds. If you believe something is worth pursuing, put on your headphones and go for it.

That’s what entrepreneurship is.

You don’t need to go to business school to understand that. (On the opposite, business school will only make you too rectangular to try anything).

#7. Everything Is Content

If you are alive, you have content. It’s you.

If you are twenty years old, it seems that you haven’t accomplished anything. But you survived childhood (which is a feat in itself). Talk about that.

If you have painful moments in your life (which you do), you have content. If you learned anything ever in your life (which you did), you have content.

Everything is content. Whether it will be interesting or not depends on how you tell it.

But you won’t know until you try, right?

#8. Self-Publish

Last year I wrote my first book. It was in Russian and I self-published it. This month, I self-published another one. This one was in English. It became #1 in the ‘Social Media’ category on Amazon in just 2 days.

And this year alone, I plan to self-publish 11 more books.

There’s no reason why you should give up 80–90% of your royalties to a published, wait for 16 months to get published and then still do all of your marketing by yourself.

Yes, getting published by Penguin is cool. I would want that eventually. But that’s more like a status symbol. You don’t need that today.

If you want to write, write.

Here’s an idea on how you can self-publish your first book this weekend:

1. Write a book that’s 10,000–20,000 pages. No publisher will accept that. (The easiest way is to put together your old blog posts that have a common theme).
2. Pay $30 for a cover on Fiverr.
3. Pay $10 more for Kindle formatting.
4. Upload your book via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
5. Boom! You’re a writer.

The world has changed. There is no middle-man anymore. It will take for people to realize this, and until they do — you have an opportunity to seize the day.

This is something I learned from the way James operates, rather than reading him or hearing him speak.

He doesn’t wait. He self-publishes all of his books.

#9. Don’t Focus On One Thing (And Run!)

For a long time, I blamed myself for not being able to focus on one thing only. I thought that success comes to people who are ‘focus machines’.

Success comes to those who stick to something for a long time. But you can be multi-passionate, and have many things on your plate.

James Altucher has 3 podcasts, he wrote 18 books. He also blogs daily. Not counting the fact that he consults various companies, invests in 20 or 30 and has built 20 businesses, 17 of which failed.

And it’s OK if you want it fast. You can run.

“I don’t mean run to a goal or a destination. There are no goals and you realize this around the age of thirty or so. I mean just ‘run’. You build up your blood vessels. More oxygen gets to the brain. You get smarter. Life is better. And you’ll see more in life than the people who are walking. Who take their time failing. Who take their time waiting for the right moment…there’s never a right moment.

So just run to get there.”

#10. Become an ‘Idea Machine’

This is the meta lesson from James. It changed my life.

The ‘Daily Practice’ (lesson #1) will give you the energy to come up with ten ideas per day.

James Altucher comes up with 10 ideas per day no matter what.

You need to become an idea machine. And to do that, come up with 10 ideas per day.

If you want to change your life, become an idea machine.

If you feel stuck, depressed and in debt, come up with 10 ideas to get out of it.

If you want to build a business, ‘10 ideas per day’ is where you start.

If you need writing ideas, you should come up with at least 10.

Coming up with ideas is hard. That’s why you don’t just come up with ideas, you come up with bad ideas. Make it easier on yourself. No need to put that pressure on yourself.

A ‘good idea’ is always a by-product of 9 bad ideas.

Becoming an ‘idea machine’ is just like building any other muscle. At first, it will be easy. If I ask you to come up with 10 ideas for a book, you’d probably name 3 or 4 off the bat. 5 will be harder. And 6,7,8 is where the real pain and progress will start. Just like building a biceps.

You don’t come up with ideas that will change your life (although they might). Rather, the idea behind coming up with ideas regularly is to train your brain, so that it can save your life when it’s needed.

Say, you’re having a hard time at work. You get fired. What do you do? If you trained by 4 months up to that point, you’d come up with ideas on the spot. If you haven’t, it will be hard.

Becoming an idea machine will open up your brain. It will make you creative, even if you don’t think of yourself in that way.

What kind of ideas should you come up with? I don’t know, you tell me.

10 Ways I Can Become a Millionaire This Year

10 Definitions of the word ‘Change’

10 Businesses I Can Build That Don’t Require Money Upfront

10 Things I Missed in London, While I Was Away

10 People I Like Learning From

It almost doesn’t matter what kind of ideas you come up with, as long as you make your brain sweat daily.

This series of posts (“10 Things I Learned From…”) is one of these ideas.

Thanks for reading! I spend my time packaging ideas into a fun and beautiful way, that you can resonate with. Join my email newsletter and I’ll send you something meaningful to read each week!