James Altucher Quotes

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

- James Altucher

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.

- James Altucher

Honesty is about the scars. It's about the blemishes. But it's more than just bragging about failure, which could be a form of ego. It's about truly helping people.

- James Altucher

I've had to change careers several times. Sometimes because my interests changed. Sometimes because all bridges have been burned beyond recognition, sometimes because I desperately needed money. And sometimes just because I hated everyone in my old career or they hated me.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Every game, and almost every life situation, has short cuts: ways you can get better without learning the entire literature of the game from beginning to end.

- James Altucher

My grandfather was an illegal immigrant for the 60 or so years he was in the United States. I had another great-great-grandmother on my mom's side who snuck in in a suitcase.

- James Altucher

Don't sweat it if you are stuck in the corporate job right now. But begin to plan ahead. I know from much personal experience that it takes 1-3 years to transition from total scratch to making a living from home in any career you want.

- James Altucher

Buying coffee on the street instead of in a Starbucks is the poor man's way to get rich. In other words, you will never get rich by scratching out ten cents from your dollar.

- James Altucher

Don't regret your mistakes. You'll always make mistakes. The better you are, the less mistakes you make. The only way to get better is to thoroughly analyze your mistakes.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

It's hard to know which stars in the sky will turn into black holes. And which ones will open up worm holes into entire new universes.

- James Altucher

Take control of who you report to, what you do, what you create. Or start a business on the side. Deliver some value, any value, to anybody, to somebody, and watch that value compound into a career.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Being a leader doesn't mean you created something or you did something great in the past or some other person has given you any kind of authority.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

In every business I had ever started, even ones that had totally failed, I had kept good relations with the investors.

- James Altucher

When I was 7 years old, I plagiarized, word for word, stories from science fiction magazines so my teachers would think I was smart.

- James Altucher

I am a sore loser. It's not that I'm so competitive with others. But I'm competitive with myself. I like to do better than I did before.

- James Altucher

When I was 22 years old, I thought girls would like me if I wrote a novel. I spent so much time writing that I was thrown out of graduate school.

- James Altucher

When I was 22, I was thrown out of graduate school and then fired from three jobs in a row at higher and higher salaries where I saved nothing.

- James Altucher

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.

- James Altucher

Branding jails corporate America, but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.

- James Altucher

I loved Internet businesses, having built and sold one. And I loved the financial business, despite the fact that it was almost all a scam.

- James Altucher

Poor speakers create an artificial divide between themselves and the audience. They feel they need to do this in order to establish their own credibility.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an employee, a student, a homemaker, a writer, it's time to start forgetting about all the ways the world has promised you safety and comfort.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Nobody wants to make me a rich man. In fact, most people want to make me a very poor man. I can guarantee some people fantasize at night about how poor they can make me.

- James Altucher

Poker is a charismatic game. People who are larger than life play poker and make their living from playing games and hustling.

- James Altucher

I saw 'Star Wars' when I was seven years old, and it changed my life.

- James Altucher

I want every idea I have to make me money. I want every post I write to have 10,000 Facebook likes. I want every talk I give to have people laughing at all the right jokes. I want everyone to like me all the time.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

A lot of times, people send me emails, and then I forget about them, or I never respond to them, or I respond to them weeks later.

- James Altucher

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.

- James Altucher

I find that many entrepreneurs are trying to do everything when it would be cheaper and more time-efficient to delegate, even if there are monetary costs associated with that.

- James Altucher

I've had lots of ups and downs. I've had situations where I've gone against the rules, and I've lost everything.

- James Altucher

I keep track of my blog stats, Facebook subs, my Amazon rank, Twitter followers, Facebook likes per posts, my chess ranking. I get stressed when they all don't go up.

- James Altucher

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.

- James Altucher

You can't make money without selling something real. You can't make something real without first imagination manifesting itself in your head. You can't have imagination without surrendering yourself to an idea that you want to create something of value to other human beings.

- James Altucher

The first rule of personal finance is that it's not personal and it's not financial. It's about your ability to make ten changes and not get too depressed over it.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Happiness is just a positive perception from our brain. Some days, you will be unhappy. Our brain is a tool we use. It's not who we are.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Quantity and persistence will get you the outcomes you need.

- James Altucher

Don't forget: when you start a website, it's not yet a trusted site. So you have to bring people from a trusted site to your site to build up the trust in your site.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Products are valued higher than services.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

If you introduce person A to person B, and then person B is able to solve a pain point in his life, then you just made a good connection.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Here's what a phone is: It's a computer that has a little app on it that allows me to dial numbers and then talk to someone.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Ultimately, the best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Every tomorrow is determined by every today.

- James Altucher

Don't stay at the job for safe salary increases over time. That will never get you where you want - freedom from financial worry. Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

The people who don't know personal finance have TV shows about it.

- James Altucher

You'll have to hire people to expand your business. But it's a good discipline to really question if you need each and every hire.

- James Altucher

Everyone is different. We all suffer from the disease of being human. There are a thousand cures but no antidotes.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Somebody has to be on stage, and some people have to be in the audience. That's the only difference. Don't put any thought as to why you are on the stage or how you need to be 'better' than the people in the audience. You aren't better. You're simply the speaker.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

We all have faith in something: usually a mixture of some personal beliefs with modern science. I am not like that. Mostly I just believe in what personally has worked for me.

- James Altucher

I'm scammed almost every day. Or, if not scammed, at the very least someone tries to scam me. Usually more than once a day.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

Procrastination is your body telling you you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing.

- James Altucher

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.

- James Altucher

Most people are not good people. In business, in art, in almost every 'world' I've been in, most people I've meet are pretty gray to black. It takes practice to be the person who is a source of compassion and honesty.

- James Altucher

We are incredibly poor predictors of our future.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

The universe wants us to have fun doing more than one thing in life. That's how it learns. You don't have one purpose in life. You have maybe 500 or so.

- James Altucher

If you spend a lot of energy on things that are wastes of time, then you waste energy, get sick, and die faster.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

When I give away a book for free, it gets my name out there. That has lifelong value for me that goes way beyond the few dollars I could maybe charge.

- James Altucher

Games are all about taking risks.

- James Altucher

I always imagine a good leader is surrounded by people who call their mothers at the end of the day and tell them, 'Mom, you can't believe what I did today. Let me tell you about it.'

- James Altucher

Most people don't have the power of persuasion.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

You can say no to people who make you feel bad about yourself. To people who backstab you or make you feel anxious in any way.

- James Altucher

You can only make money doing what you love.

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher

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

- James Altucher