I had a tape recorder and I was trying to tape a phone conversation with US Senator Bill Bradley by having one phone off the hook in another room and having an old-fashioned tape recorder right next to it.

I faked being sick that day. (“I threw up in my throat but swallowed it back down”) so my parents let me stay home. It was 1980 and I was 12 years old.

Then I psycho-called Bill Bradley, the US Senator from New Jersey, formerly an NBA Hall of Fame basketball player, and much later a candidate for President.

“He’s in a meeting,” the secretary always said. I said I was calling to interview him for a newspaper and that I would call back. So I called all day but they never put me through.

Then around 2pm, Bill Bradley called. The first thing he said was, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

And I told him they had given us the day off. So I started the interview off by lying to Bill Bradley. Then we spoke for a half hour or so.

I don’t really remember it although I’m sure one of my questions was the brilliant and insightful “Do you like being a senator?” My interview style still hasn’t changed much.

I did a lot of interviews that year. I called people all day long every day. I’m grateful to all the people who took the time to call a 12 year old with a tape recorder.

Bill Bradley didn’t start off as a very good basketball player. In fact, he was big and clumsy and horrible at it but he loved it.

He said, “I stayed behind to practice after my teammates left. I would make 15 baskets in a row from each of five spots on the floor.” If he missed a shot, he would start over from the beginning.

He did this through college and all through his pro career. He didn’t miss a day.

He was inspired by a quote he heard from his coach when he was in a summer basketball camp as a kid.

“When you’re not practicing, someone somewhere is. And when the two of you meet, assuming roughly equal ability, the other person will win.”

This is true for everything you do: writing, business, games, fitness, coming up with ideas, any art, sport where there are millions every day around the world trying to achieve what you want to achieve.

I took that quote about Bill Bradley from a book by Jack Canfield called “The Success Principles.”

Just like I spoke to Bill in 1980, I spoke to Jack Canfield yesterday.

I asked Jack when he was at his lowest and how he survived it.

He told me after his divorce he was basically broke despite having sold hundreds of millions of copies of “Chicken Soup for the Soul”. “I was in a depression,” he said.

He then went and gathered as many quotes as he could from inspirational stories and he made a book about them (“The Success Principles”).

He gave talks about them, he trained others to teach these stories, he taught these principles at corporations, he worked every day at inspiring himself to inspire others.

This is what he loved. This, for him, was what basketball was for Bradley.

He was over 50 years old then and he came back from nothing and made millions by finding what he loved to do and doing it over and over. He made millions by helping others find what they love.

“That’s why I’m on your podcast,” he said, “and this is the third one I’m doing today and it’s only 9am in the morning.” He’s 70 years old now.

Three things I get from this:

– If you aren’t practicing what you love, someone else is.
– It’s never too late. You stay truly alive as long as you love your life.
– The best way to make your dream come true is to make other people’s dreams come true.

21 years later I passed Bill Bradley in the street.

I was dead broke after having made a lot of money. I was depressed. Bill Bradley seemed huge to me, walking past me, smiling, larger than life.

He was walking into a building on 5th Avenue that was the home of an investment bank he was about to be made partner at.

I wanted to stop and say hello to him but I was too ashamed at my own misery. So many things separated him from me that I felt like a piece of dirt stuck in a crack on the sidewalk.

But right after that I started writing down ideas every day. I started being grateful for the people in my life. I started taking long walks every day to be healthy. I started sharing my ideas if I felt they could help someone.

And 14 years later, I still do it, I’m still grateful, I still try to be creative, no matter what is happening in my life. If I’m not practicing at living, then someone else is.

Thanks Bill Bradley, for being my first podcast guest in 1980. I don’t know where that cassette tape is, but I’m glad I didn’t strangle myself with it when it inevitably became tangled.

The post What I Learned from my First Podcast Guest in 1980 and What I Learned from My Last Podcast Guest (Yesterday) appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

I was out of ideas when I googled “how to kill myself”.

I was sure that three things were going to happen: I’d go broke (and then my 3 year old would starve to death), nobody would kiss me ever again, and I would die because of course self worth = net worth (duh!).

I started coming up with 10 ideas a day and I’ve written about this several times before: it saved my life, my career, my friendships, made me better friendships, partners, opportunities, a wife, better relationships with my kids, and oooga-booga (lots of kisses).

In 2011, I wrote a post “how to be the luckiest person alive” where I described a daily practice I started to follow to get off the floor of suicide. Physical Emotional Mental and Spiritual health were the four pillars of this practice.

Read More: How To Be The Luckiest Guy On the Planet in 4 Easy Steps. 

Under “Mental” was the approach that if you don’t exercise your “idea muscle” every day it would atrophy and you would lose the ability to be creative.

So I encouraged people to write 10 ideas every day. I write 10 ideas every day no matter what. Yesterday, for instance, I wrote 10 ideas how Airbnb can be improved. Today I haven’t written my list yet.

Over the past 4 years I’ve gotten a lot of questions about this approach. Many of the questions have been the same over and over again.

I’ve also gotten a lot of testimonials (unasked for) from people who told me they tried this approach and all the amazing things that happened to them afterwards.

For me, I can safely say, my life completely changes almost 100% every six months in every way because I simply write down 10 ideas a day.

Here I’m going to try and answer the questions that I often get asked. If you don’t like my answers then feel free to ignore them.

If you have more questions, ask them in the comments and I will answer.

Different approaches work for different people. This approach works for me and I now see has worked for many others.

A) Is “The Idea Muscle”, or the Mental side of your daily practice, the most important part of the four?

No. They are all equally important. If you get sick, then you can’t be as creative.

If you are staying up to midnight arguing with the loved ones in your life then you can’t be creative (I learned this particularly well during my divorce).

If you are anxious all day instead of grateful (the spiritual side of the practice) then you can’t be creative.

Worry never solves the future and always takes away energy from the present.

Of course, you can try. But it’s hard. If a chair has four legs then it’s sturdy. If you remove one leg, then you can still sit in it but it will fall over at the slightest wind. And we all have the winds of change blowing in our lives.

If you remove two of the legs then you will fall over. And if you try to sit in a one-legged chair then you probably need serious help in general.

B) Do you have a theme each day for your ideas?

Yes. As a simple example it might be “10 businesses I can start?” Or “10 books I can write” or “10 chapters I can write for a book on quality parenting” (which would obviously be a fiction book).

Claudia is coming out with a book at the end of January with 180 possible themes.

A theme is like a target, and knowing that you can come up with 10 decent ideas gets you closer and closer to hitting the bullseye on the target.

C) What if I can’t come up with 10 ideas?

Here’s the key: the first three ideas are always easy. The next two are a little harder, and for me, I find that ideas 5-10 make my brain literally sweat. It almost hurts.

Ideas, art, business, life is all about connecting the dots of one area of your life with the dots in other areas of your life.

Doing this directly translates into biologically building up the neural pathways between collections of neurons in your brain.

This is what changes you from becoming a person with the occasional idea, to a creative person, to an idea machine. You become the one-eyed king in the land of the blind.

D) My idea muscle has atrophied. How long will it take to become an idea machine?

If you come up with 10 ideas a day for 180 days I’m pretty convinced based on what I’ve seen from 100s or 1000s of others then you will be a full force idea machine.

E) What is an idea machine?

It means that you can have confidence that no matter what situation you are in, you can start spewing ideas to help yourself and others in that situation. Ideas are about giving. And the more you give to the world, the more value you get back.

Almost everything you look at will become sources of inspiration. Almost every problem you hear about you’ll be able to come up with solutions.

Will they be good solutions? No, not necessarily. Which brings me too.

F) Do all 10 ideas have to be good ideas?

That would be impossible. If you are writing 10 ideas a day, that’s 3,650 ideas a year.

Nobody can come up with 3,650 good ideas a year. Someone who is a creative genius coming up with non-stop ideas might come up with a handful (less than 10) really good ideas and maybe slightly more (less than 100), decent ideas and the rest are probably bad ideas.

Part of the idea of this exercise is give yourself permission to come up with bad ideas. To love yourself by recognizing that nobody is perfect.

There’s a story the advertising legend George Lois wrote where he says that he told everyone to come up with a great idea for a client. He came back in an hour and nobody had any ideas at all.

So he said, “ok, come up with 20 ideas.” He came back in an hour and everyone had 20 ideas. Some good, some bad, some decent. That’s because they released the idea of perfectionism.

If you are a perfectionist, you will never come up with good ideas. You have to love yourself enough to come up with bad ideas and still be happy and confident.

If you wait for inspiration, you will never come up with good ideas.

Inspiration is not like lightning. It doesn’t strike. It’s always there, like a deep well. Only by digging every day, do we get to tap into that well.

G) I have so many ideas, I don’t know which ones to work on? How do you pick?

I never do. I always throw out my idea list for the day. The whole purpose of the exercise is to (metaphorically) expand the brain. Nothing else.

Now, if an idea truly sets your heart on fire, then you won’t forget it. The next day you’ll come up with ten ideas to expand on that first idea. Or ten next steps to get that idea going.

When you are an idea machine, trust that this will happen. Again: the ideas that are good will literally set your heart and mind on fire and you won’t be able to wait to come up with the next batch of ideas for them.

Don’t think too much about which ideas are good and which ideas are bad. 99.99% of ideas are bad.

Once, when I came up with the idea for a good business (one among ten business ideas I wrote the day before), then the next day I came up with ten pages that would be on the website for that business.

And the next day I came up with ten ideas for partners that business might have. And the next day I came up with 10 ways I can execute on this business.

And that morning I started executing on that business. Two weeks later I had a big partner for that business. Eight months later I sold the business. Every week in between I had more and more features for that business.

I was excited about it. I loved it. I thought every day about it. If you have to look back at prior lists to remember the ideas, then they didn’t excite you enough. Don’t do it.

H) What is Idea sex?

All of life is about connecting the dots.

This is not a poetic metaphor. Since the Big Bang that created the universe, every piece of matter is the result of atoms combining and creating something new.

Life on Earth is about organic molecules combining and creating something new.

Societies are formed when people connect to form babies, when groups of people connect to form tribes, when tribes connect to form cities, or countries, and so on.

Any achievement in science is the connection of all the achievements before it. As evidence, look at any patent and see all the prior patents it refers to.

Any achievement in art is the accumulated knowledge and experience of all the artists and musicians and even scientists and philosophers, as well as personal experiences of the artist, that came before it.

I once did an experiment with a group of people. Write down 10 titles of books you would like to write. Now turn to your partner. Make a list of ten books combining the titles.

I asked for some examples. I loved all the results. For instance, a “How to Make Toast in Space” or “A History of Music as Told by the Instruments of the greatest performers”. And so on.

If you turn on any late night comedy show, the opening monologue is almost all idea sex. News topics of the day combined with “set up / punch line”.

The fastest way to generate themes and ideas is to take two different areas and combine them.

The fastest way to master any area of life, is to become good at two or more areas, intersect them in a unique way, and now you are the best in the world at the intersection.

If you look at every great achievement in history, idea sex was the impregnation of that achievement.

I) People say ideas are a dime a dozen and that execution is everything. Is this true?

No. Ideas are a dime for 3. A dozen ideas are hard. Try it.

And execution, of course, is the key to making something happen in the real world. But the purpose of this exercise is to just stay healthy in a creative way.

Ultimately, execution ideas are a subset of ideas.

Here’s one experiment to try: make two columns. The first column might be “10 new business ideas”. The second column might be “10 first execution steps”.

So if my business idea is “make an Isreali-Cuban fusion restaurant” (bad idea). And my first execution step might be: “Cook an Israeli-Cuban meal and invite 10 friends over and charge them $30 and see if they like it.”

Always start with easy execution steps. MVEs. Minimum viable execution steps.

J) Are the ideas usually about starting new businesses?

No, usually not. It’s really hard to come up with 3,650 business ideas a year.

Money is just a side effect of being an idea machine.

I try to make it about anything. “50 alternatives to college” was created this way.

Or “10 Ways I’d improve self-publshing” which I sent to Amazon and they invited me to come out there and see what they were working on.

Or “10 ideas for a novel” or “10 pairs of people I should introduce to each other”. And on and on. “10 things I can cook for Claudia tonight” (that one was REALLY hard for me. I’m not a good cook).

K) I keep coming up with good ideas but then I go out drinking with my friends on Friday night and tell them my ideas and they all laugh at me. What should I do?

Stay home on Friday night.

L) I’ve been doing this for three months and I haven’t seen any difference in my life?

Do it for three more months and you will. Every day.

In order to build a house, the foundation has to be strong.

The foundation gets strong when you focus on all areas of the daily practice. Physical health, emotional health (be around people you love), and spiritual health.

Anger, envy, self-pity, regret, anxiety are all fires that burn the foundation. Gratitude and surrender washes away those fires.

Then you can build your house. Then you can live in it.

M) I have no time to do this. What should I do?

Simplify your life. The simpler every part of your life is, the more power you have to make significant changes in the world.

The first thing is: do you really have no time? I’ve now spoken to or read about two different people who have written best-selling novels on their train commutes to work.

Another key is to avoid meaningless gossip at work. Or to stop watching bad TV at night. Or to wake up a half hour earlier than usual. Or to spend 15 less minutes surfing on Facebook.

Heck, make a list of the 10 ways you waste time every day.

I have found in my own life that these fragments of time often add up to hours a day.

The other thing is to do what I call the simple daily practice.

Do tiny things. Maybe don’t snack today (Physical), maybe write a thank you email to someone you love (emotional), come up with 10 ideas (mental), spend 10 minutes feeling grateful (spiritual).

There’s always time. Nobody starts off at the top. Which leads to…

N) I have an Idea. How do I get money for it?

You don’t. You have to implement it. You have to have other people who like it. You have to get money from customers who like it. You have to build up so that it can support yourself.

For my first business, I started it, got customers, got employees, had an office, and then, 18 months into it, I quit my fulltime job, and went to my startup fulltime.

That’s how business works in the real world.

We live in an entitled world now where people think ideas are enough now to get funding and make billions.

Go old school. Deliver proven value to others, charge money for it, get testimonials about how good your product is, and then you’ve widened the horizon of your decisions. That’s the path to success.

O) How do I know if an idea is good?

Well, chances are it’s pretty bad. The key again is to expand the abilities of your brain so you are a non-stop idea machine. This way you are more likely to come up with a good idea.

A great story is the story of the company, Odeo.

They created software for podcasting. They got professional venture capitalists investing. The CEO previously sold a company to Google so he knew what he was doing. He had the top software programmers working for him.

But nobody wanted his software. On the side, Odeo’s programmers had a side project going, but it only had 10,000 users. Smaller audience than most good blogs. And yet…

The CEO told all of his investors, “we give up. We’re going to work on this side project. If you want to stay in, good. If you want out, I will buy all of your shares so you wont’ lost any money.”

The result: 100% of the top, most professional investors in the business took their money back. The CEO renamed the company and focused on the tiny software project.

A few years later Twitter became public and is worth tens of billions of dollars.

Nobody can predict the outcome of an idea. And usually people are wrong. That’s why quantity is important.

The key is to every day stay physically emotionally mentally and spiritually healthy.

Then you can trust that you have built the inner foundation for outward success.

The outer world that you face every morning is always a reflection of the inner world that only you can create.

P) What if I have more than 10 ideas a day? Should I save some of them for the next day?

No, write them all down. THIS POST is my idea list of the day. I just wrote down 16 items Yesterday was 10. The day before was about 12.

What’s going to happen if you do this for six months?

You’re going to be a mutant superhero.

You’re going to have fun creative ideas for every situation. You’re going to be able to see which ideas set your brain on nuclear.

You’re going to meet the right people who can help you execute on ideas. You’re going to turn into a fountain of giving.

You’re going to be the sort of person that understands that less effort leads to greater accomplishments.

You’re going to be immortal because you will begin to lead a life that is worth remembering forever.

Read More: How To Be The Luckiest Guy On the Planet in 4 Easy Steps. 

The post FAQ On How To Become An Idea Machine appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

The way to have good ideas is to get close to killing yourself. It’s  like weightlifting. When you lift slightly more than you can handle, you  get stronger.

In life, when the gun is to your head, you either figure it out, or you die.

When you cut yourself open, you bleed ideas. If you’re broke and close to death, you have to start coming up with ideas.

If you destroy your life, you need to come up with ideas to rebuild it.

The only time I’ve been FORCED to have good ideas is when I was up  against the wall. My life insurance policy was like a gun to my head:  “Come up with good ideas… OR ELSE your kids get your life insurance!”

At an airport when I realized a business I had been working on for four years was worthless.

Or when I was sitting in the dark at three in the morning in the living  room of the house I was going bankrupt and losing my home, my brain figuring out how to die without anyone knowing it was planned.

Or when I was getting a divorce and I was lonely and afraid I wouldn’t  make any money again or I wouldn’t meet anyone again. Or my kids would  hate me. Or my friends would be disgusted by me.

The problem is  this: you’re NOT in a state of panic most of the time. States of panic  are special and have to be revered. Think about the times in your life  that you remember – it’s exactly those moments when you hit bottom and  were forced to come up with ideas, to get stronger, to connect with some  inner force inside you with the outer force.

This is why it’s important NOW to strengthen that connection to that idea force inside of you. This post is about HOW.

Nothing you ever thought of before amounted to anything – that’s why  you are exactly where you are at that moment of hitting bottom. Because  all of your billions of thoughts have led you to right there. You can’t  trust the old style of thinking anymore. They came, they saw, they lost.

You have to come up with a new way of thinking. A new way of having ideas. A new ways of interacting with the outside universe.

You’re in crisis. Time to change. Time to become an IDEA MACHINE.

People know what “runner’s high” is. It’s when you are running for a  long time, at the point of exhaustion, and then something kicks in and  gives you a “second wind”.

400,000 years ago people didn’t jog for exercise. They didn’t even have jogging shorts. Or sneakers.

400,000 years ago people need to eat and live. And either you’re  running to catch a prey, or you are running from a lion. You’re the  prey! And you need that second wind in both cases or you DIE.

The same thing happens in the brain. When you are about to die, a second  wind kicks in. Ideas, experiences, opportunity, and probably hidden  forces and neurochemicals we don’t understand.

But you can’t get runner’s high unless you’re ALREADY in good shape. Unless you are already able to run long distances.

This is why it’s important to exercise the idea muscle right now. If  your idea muscle atrophies, then even at your lowest point you won’t  have any ideas.

How long does it take this muscle to atrophy?  The same as any other muscle in your body: just two weeks without having  any ideas. Atrophied.

If you lie down in a bed for two weeks and don’t move your legs you will need physical therapy to walk again.

Many people need idea therapy. Not so that they can come up with great  ideas right this second (although maybe you will) but so that people can  come up with ideas when they need them: when their car is stuck, when  their house blows up, when they are fired from their job, when their  spouse betrays them, when they go bankrupt or lose a big customer, or  lose a client, or go out of business, or get sick.

IDEAS ARE  THE CURRENCY OF LIFE. Not money. Money gets depleted until you go broke.  But good ideas buy you good experiences, buy you better ideas, buy you  better experiences, buy you more time, save your life. Financial wealth  is a side effect of the “runner’s high” of your idea muscle.

Whoah! That was a big intro. Depending on where I post this, some people  will write “tl;dr” which I had to look up and it means “too long,  didn’t read.” I encourage those people to stop reading here and save  yourself the trouble. It’s ok. I’m not mad at you. I’ll write smaller  articles also. I’ll even draw cartoons.

I’ve often written  about the idea muscle as part of what I call my “daily practice”. Every  day I have to check the box on physical, emotional, mental, and  spiritual health.

And I get a lot of questions about it so I  will try and answer them here. If you have more questions, ask in the  comments and I will answer.

Sometimes people ask, “did you only start coming up with ideas because you already had it made?”

ANSWER: I was on the floor crying because I was dead broke and dead lonely and had no prospects so that’s why I had to do it.

So now, 1000 words in (“tl;dr”) The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Becoming an Idea Machine

The below is what I do and what works for me. If you have anything to  add, please add them in the comments, I need all the help I can get.

Read More: How To Be The Luckiest Guy On the Planet in 4 Easy Steps. 

A) WHAT DO YOU MEAN – “IDEA MACHINE”?

You will be like a superhero. It’s almost a guaranteed membership in the Justice League of America.

Every situation you are in, you will have a ton of ideas. Any question  you are asked, you will know the response. Every meeting you are at, you  will take the meeting so far out of the box you’ll be on another  planet, if you are stuck on a desert highway – you will figure the way  out, if you need to make money you’ll come up with 50 ideas to make  money, and so on.

After I started exercising the idea muscle,  it was like a magic power had unleashed inside of me. It’s ok if you  don’t believe me. Or maybe you think it’s bragging. There are many times  when I don’t have ideas. But that’s when I stop practicing what I am  about to advocate.

Try it for yourself. I’m not selling  anything here. I have no reason for you to try this. I just want to  share my exerience. It’s like part of your brain is opened up and a  constant flow of stuff, both good and bad, gets dropped in there.

From where? I don’t think about it and I don’t care. But I use it.

In early 2009 was one of those times when I desperately needed to do  this. I was fulltime either trying to find a girlfriend or I was trying  to start a business or both. I was also going broke in the stock market  and losing my home  (until I personally saved the entire stock market –  see my book).

Every night, I’d have waffles for dinner and a  bottle of wine and start writing ideas down. This is before I went paleo  (no waffles!) and stopped drinking alcohol (five years sober!) and I  was writing 10-20 of the most ludicrous ideas a day down.

And you know what ? It worked.

B) HOW DO I START EXERCISING THE IDEA MUSCLE?

Take a waiter’s pad. Go to a local cafe. Maybe read an inspirational  book for ten to twenty minutes. Then start writing down ideas. What  ideas? Hold on a second. The key here is, write ten ideas.

C) WHY A WAITER’S PAD?

A waiter’s pad fits in your pocket so you can easily pull it out to jot things down.

A waiter’s pad is too small to write a whole novel or even a paragraph.  In fact, it’s specifically made to make a list. And that’s all you  want, a list of ideas.

A waiter’s pad is a great conversation  starter if you are in a meeting. Someone at the meeting will eventually  say, “I’ll take fries with my burger” and everyone will laugh. You broke  the ice and you stand out.

A waiter’s pad is cheap. You can  get about 100 for $10. This shows you are frugal and don’t need those  fancy moleskin pads to have a good idea.

Oh, and I just found  out another reason for a waiter’s pad while I was writing this. Someone  with alcohol on his breath, a bottle in hand, looking like he could  crush me with one hand, just came up to me in the cafe I’m sitting at  and asked for money. I held up my waiter’s pad and said, “Can I take  your order?” and he said, “OH!” and he walked away.

D) WHY TEN IDEAS?

If I say, “write down ten ideas for books you can write” I bet you can  easily write down four or five. I can write down four or five right now.  But at six it starts to get hard. “Hmmm,” you think, “what else can I  come up with?”

This is when the brain is sweating.

Note that when you exercise in the gym, your muscles don’t start to  build until you break a sweat. Your metabolism doesn’t improve when you  run until you sweat. Your body doesn’t break down the old and build the  new until it is sweating.

The poisons and toxins in your body don’t leave until you sweat.

The same thing happens with the idea muscle. Somewhere around idea  number six, your brain starts to sweat. This means it’s building up.  Break through this. Come up with ten ideas.

E) WHAT IF I JUST CAN’T COME UP WITH TEN IDEAS?

Here’s the magic trick: if you can’t come up with ten ideas, come up with 20 ideas.

F) BUT IF I CAN’T COME UP WITH TEN, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO COME UP WITH 20?

For the obvious reason. You are putting too much pressure on yourself.  Perfectionism is the ENEMY of the idea muscle. Perfectionism is your  brain trying to protect you from harm. From coming up with an idea that  is embarassing and stupid and could cause you to suffer pain.

We like the brain. But you have to shut the brain off to come up with ideas.

The way you shut the brain off is by forcing it to come up with bad ideas.

So let’s say you’ve written 5 ideas for books and they are all pretty  good. And now you are stuck. “How can I top this brilliant list of  five!?”

Well, let’s come up with some bad ideas. Here’s one:  “Dorothy and the Wizard of Wall Street”. Dorothy is in a hurricane in  Kansas and she lands right at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street in  NYC and she has to make her way all the way down Wall Street in order to  find “The Wizard of Wall Street” (Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman  Sachs) in order to get home to Kansas. Instead, he offers her a job to  be a high frequency trader instead.

What a bad idea! Ok, now go  onto the next 15 ideas. (and it anyone wants to buy the movie rights to  “The Wizard of Wall Street” please contact Claudia.)

G) HOW DO I KNOW IF AN IDEA IS A GOOD IDEA?

You won’t. You don’t. You can’t. You shouldn’t.

Let’s say you come up with ten ideas a day. In a year you will have  come up with 3650 ideas (no breaks on weekends by the way if you want to  get good at this). Maybe more if you are trying to do 20 ideas a day.

It’s unlikely that you came up with 3,650 good ideas (after you become  an idea machine your ratio goes up but probably in the beginning your  ratio of bad ideas to good is around 1000:1).

Don’t put  pressure on yourself to come up with good ideas. The key right now is  just to have good ideas. When Tiger Woods is practicing he doesn’t get  disappointed himself if he doesn’t hit a hole in one every shot. You’re  just practicing here.

Practice doesn’t make perfect. But  practice makes permanent. So that later on when you do need good ideas  to save your life, you know you will be a fountain of them.

When there’s a tidal wave of good ideas coming out of you, you only need a cup of water out of that to quench your thirst.

H) HOW DO I EXECUTE ON MY IDEA

Here’s what I do often when I am writing down ideas that I think I might want to act on.

I divide my paper into two columns.

On one column is the list of ideas. On the other column is the list of  “FIRST STEPS”. Remember, only the first step. Because you have no idea  where that first step will take you.

Imagine you are driving  100 miles to your home late at night. You turn on your headlights so you  can see in front of you. All you can see is about 30 feet in front of  you but you know if you have the lights on the entire time, you’ll make  it home safely, 100 miles away.

Activating the idea machine is how you turn the lights on so you can get home. But you don’t need to do any more than that.

One of my favorite examples: Richard Branson didn’t like the service on  some airline he was flying. So he had an idea: I’m going to start a new  airline. How the heck can a magazine publisher start an airline from  scratch with no money?

His first step. He called Boeing to see if they had an airplane he could lease.

No idea is so big you can’t take the first step. If the first step  seems to hard, make it simpler. And don’t worry again if the idea is  bad. This is all practice.

For instance, let’s say one of my  ideas is: “I want to be a brain surgeon”. My first step: I would buy a  bunch of books on how to do brain surgery. I don’t have to plan my whole  way through medical school.

Wait!? Did I just say I would be a  brain surgeon without a medical degree? No. I simply had a bad idea and  the first step I would take if I was going to “execute” on that idea.  And,  yes, I’m absolutely confident I would be able to do successful  brain surgery before someone throws me in jail (hence, the bad idea  aspect of it).

A real life example: In 2006 I had ten ideas for  websites I wanted to build. I knew how to program but didn’t want to.  So my first step was to find a site like Elance and then put the spec up  and find programmers in India who could make the websites for me. One  of them I paid $2000 to develop and sold for $10,000,000 9 months later.  (this is not bragging – I went dead broke about 2 years after that).

Nine of the ten ideas were BAD. But you only need one.

I) BUT IF I’M COMING UP WITH BUSINESS IDEAS, HOW DO I KNOW IF I’M ON THE RIGHT TRACK?

There’s no way to know in advance if a business idea is a good one. For  instance, Google started around 1996 but didn’t make a dime of money  until around 2001.

Here’s my favorite example. A company called  Odeo was a software company to help people set up podcasts. Since I do a  podcast now this seems like a great idea to me. So they raised a ton of  money from professional venture capitalists.

Then one of their  programmers started working on a side project. The side project got a  little traction but not much. But the CEO of Odeo decided to switch  strategies and go full force into the side project without having a clue  if it would work.

He felt bad since this isn’t what the  investors invested in. So he called up all of the investors, some of the  best investors on the planet, and described the side project to them  and all the traction they were getting, etc and then made an offer,  “Since this is a different direction, I’d be willing to buy all of your  shares back so nobody will lose any money.”

100% of his  investors said, “YES! GIVE IT BACK!” and so he bought all of his  investors’ shares back. Now, Ev Williams, the founder of Twitter (which  was the side project), is a billionaire as a result.

Nobody  knew. Nobody knows. You have to try multiple ideas and see which ones  gets the excitement of customers, employees, and you can see that people  are legitimately using it and excited by it.

When I started  Stockpickr someone once wrote me and said, “please block me from the  site. I’m too addicted to it and it’s ruining my life.” That’s when I  had a sense that I had a halfway decent idea. And that was one of ten  ideas I was trying simultaneously. The rest failed.

So don’t be  afraid to test, fail, test, fail, try again, repeat, improve, test,  fail again, and keep improving. The way to keep improving? Keep coming  up with ideas for your business and for other new businesses.

As your idea muscle improves, so will your ability to “fail quickly”.  Failing quickly is a better skill than executing quickly.

J) WHEN DO I SHUT DOWN AN IDEA?

In 2009, I started The Leading Love Site on the Net. It was going to be a dating website  where your twitter feed was your profile. Everyone I spoke to say,  “that’s a great idea!” I had already raised money and was raising more.

Then, on the day I was going to close the fundraising round I woke up  shaking. I had this vision of myself a year from now explaining to all  of the investors why it wasn’t going to work. I returned all the money. I  was out the money I had spent to create the website.

I can  guess why it was a bad idea (people on dating sites want to be  anonymous, for instance) but I didn’t really know. I just knew I had to  return the money.

When your idea muscle is developed and the  other legs of the daily practice are fully developed (Phyiscal,  Emotional, Spiritual) you’ll have a better idea when you should shut  things down. When you are shutting them down for the right reasons. When  you are “failing quickly” as opposed to self-sabotage or fear of  success or you’re just stupid.

That was the last time I tried  to start a business. Since then I’ve done very well by not starting  businesses. Starting businesses is not the only way to make money in  this world. There are many ways.

K) HOW DO YOU KEEP TRACK OF YOUR IDEAS?

I make a list of ideas and then I usually just throw them out.

The whole purpose is to exercise the idea muscle. I know most of the  ideas are bad ideas so I there’s no sense keeping them around.

If one of the ideas is good then I will probably remember it and build  on it for the next day. Sometimes it’s kind of funny when I come across  an old list of ideas to see what I was thinking. Every now and then I  think I find a good idea in my old lists but it’s rare.

And then what do I do with that rare good idea? Probably nothing.

L) ARE ALL OF YOUR IDEAS BUSINESS IDEAS?

No. Almost never. It’s hard to come up with over 3000 business ideas a year. I’m lucky if I come up with a few business ideas.

The key is to have fun with it. Else you don’t do it. People avoid things that are not fun.

Here’s some types of lists I make:

• IDEA SEX. Combine two ideas to come up with a better idea. Don’t  forget that idea evolution works much faster than human evolution. You  will ALWAYS come up with better ideas after generations of idea sex.  This is the DNA of all idea generation.
• OLD TO NEW: 10 old ideas I can make new. (Dorothy, Wall Street, etc). Similar to idea sex.
• 10 ridiculous things I would invent (the smart toilet, etc).
• 10 books I can write (The Choose Yourself Guide to an Alternative Education, etc).

• 10 business ideas for Google / Amazon / Twitter / you
• 10 people I can send ideas to
• 10 podcast ideas I can do. Or videos I can shoot. (“Lunch with  James”, a video podcast where I just have lunch with people over Skype  and we chat).
• 10 industries I can remove the middleman.
• 10 Things I Disagree With that everyone else assumes is religion  (college, home ownership, voting, doctors). Or, for any one of those  ideas. 10 ideas why!
• 10 ways to make old posts of mine and make books out of them
• 10 ways I can surprise Claudia. (Actually, more like 100 ways. That’s hard work!)
• 10 items I can put on my “10 list ideas I usually write” list
• 10 people I want to be friends with and I figure out what the next  steps are to contact them (Azaelia Banks, I’m coming after you! Larry  Page better watch out also.)
• 10 things I learned yesterday.
• 10 things I can do differently today. Right down my entire routine  from beginning to end as detailed as possible and change one thing and  make it better.
• 10 chapters for my next book
• 10  ways I can save time. For instance, don’t watch TV, drink, have stupid  business calls, don’t play chess during the day, don’t have dinner (I  definitely will not starve), don’t go into the city to meet one person  for coffee,  don’t waste time being angry at that person who did X, Y,  and Z to you, and so on.
• 10 Things I Learned from X. Where X  is someone I’ve spoke to recently or read a book by recently. I’ve  written posts on this about the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Steve Jobs,  Bukowski, the Dalai Lama, Superman, Freakonomics, etc.
• Random: 10 Things Women Totally Don’t Know About Men. (that turned into a  list of 100 and Claudia said to me, “uhhh, I don’t think you should  publish this”).
• Today’s list: 10 More Alternative to College I can Add to my book: “40 Alternatives to College”.
• 10 Things I’m Interested in Getting Better At (and then 10 ways I can get better at each one).
• 10 things I was interested in as a kid that might be fun to explore  now. (Like, maybe I can write that “Son of Dr. Strange” comic I’ve  always been planning. And now I need 10 plot ideas).
• A  problem I have and ten ways I might try and solve it. This has saved me  with the IRS countless times. Unfortunately, the Department of Motor  Vehicles is impervious to my super powers.

This is just a  sample. Every day, 10 ideas. The other day, “10 ways I can release more  endorphins into my body”. Today is, “10 ways I can help people build  their idea machine”. Tomorrow is “10 Ways I can turn my next book into a  webinar for Oprah.” The day after that: “10 things I can talk about in  my next talk on May 3″ (which means, developing an entire standup comedy  act from scratch since I have a rule, “if it’s not funny, then a tree  fell in the forest and it didn’t make a sound.”)

M) IS THE IDEA MUSCLE THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF WHAT YOU CALL “THE DAILY PRACTICE”?

No! They are all EQUAL.

Imagine you’re sitting on a stool. By the way, I only see stools in  bars because you have to be drunk to sit on a stool. It’s so  uncomfortable. And then invariably, someone falls off a stool and then  half the people laugh and half the people say “is he ok?” but everyone  crowds around because we smell blood.

So, now you’re on a stool  with four legs. If someone pulls away one of the legs you might still  balance and the stool stays up but it’s tricky. If someone pulls two  legs off, you’re down for the count.

The Daily Practice is to be: Physically, Emotionally, Mentally (the idea muscle), and Spiritually healthy.

If you aren’t physically healthy you won’t come up with ideas. You’ll be coughing and vomiting.

If you are around people who hate you, you won’t come up with ideas.  Because they will be yelling at you while you are trying to think.

And if you aren’t feeling grateful and calm in your life on a regular  basis, then you will be anxious and it will be harder to come up with  ideas.

So all four parts of the Daily Practice work together to come up with great ideas.

N) DO I REALLY DO THIS EVERY DAY?

Let’s say you get tired for a day of writing ideas. Try something  different. The key is to keep activating parts of your brain that have  atrophied.

Sometimes if I don’t feel like writing down a list of ten ideas I’ll do something else.

Like I’ll draw ten eyes.

Or I’ll make a collage.

Or I’ll take photographs of the ten most beautiful women I see today.  Or the ten ugliest men (if I take picture of the ten most handsome men  then I might get jealous and that’s a whole other thing I’d have to deal  with).

Or I might come make ten prank calls (well, when I was a kid I did that. I never do that now! Maybe).

O) IS IT IMPORTANT TO READ BEFORE WRITING?

I don’t know. But I do. Here’s what I do:

At any given point I have about 10-20 books on my “to go” list. Books that I can just pop in and continue reading.

Every day I read at least 10% of a non-fiction book that gives me tons  of new ideas, an inspirational book, a fiction book of high-quality  writing, and maybe a book on games (lately I’ve been solving chess  puzzles). And then I start writing.

Right now the inspirational  book is “The Untethered Soul”. The non-fiction book is “Antifragile”.  The fiction book is “Blind Date” (Kosinski) and the games book is  actually my chess app (“Shreder”) which has non-stop puzzles. But this  list changes almost every day.

P) HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE?

It takes at least six months of coming up with ideas every day before you are an “idea machine”.

Then your life will change every six months. I’ve said this before but  my life is completely different than it was six months ago, and six  months before that, and so on. So different there is no way I could’ve  predicted the differences.

Six months ago I had no podcast. Now  it’s a big part of my day. Six months before that, “Choose Yourself”  had not come out. Six months before that, several I had not yet gone on  several board seats that have done well for me. And so on.

Q) DO I GIVE MY IDEAS AWAY FOR FREE?

When you come up with ideas for someone else, always give ALL the ideas  away for free if you think they are good ideas (remember: six months).

I read recently one person said to give HALF of your ideas away for free and make them pay for the other half.

This is very bad. This guarantees you will only come up with bad ideas.  Because you will hoard your ideas. You will develop a SCARCITY COMPLEX  around your ideas.

Ideas are infinite. But once you define your  capacity of good ideas (“half”) then they instantly become finite for  you. Not for anyone else. But just for you, your ideas will be finite.

If you stick to an abundance mentality, and be grateful for the ideas  that are flowing through you, then they will be infinite. Where they  come from, nobody knows. But they will be infinite and lucrative for  you.

So give ideas for free, and then when you meet, give more  ideas. And if someone wants to pay you and your gut feels this is a good  fit, then give even more ideas.

R) I KEEP COMING UP WITH IDEAS AND THEY KEEP FAILING. WHAT DO I DO?

There’s this “cult of failure” that has popped up recently. That you need to fail to succeed.

This is not true. Failure really sucks. You don’t want to fail. There  is an easy way to solve this. Take the word “fail” out of your  vocabulary.

Everything we do in life is a success. We breathe,  we love, we practice kindness, we deal with other human beings. We  improve. We have experiences. This is magnificent and abundant success.  Just even being able to try new things is something to celebrate every  day. To smile at another person. To play.

Most things I try to  do don’t work out as I planned. But who am I to predict the outcomes of  my preparation. My only job is to prepare.

Everybody,  EVERYBODY, is a poor predictor of outcomes. From the weatherman, to the  stock analyst. But we can all be good at preparation.

And once  I prepare, I show up at the starting line. Then the whistle blows, the  race begins, I try my hardest with the most amount of integrity, and the  results are not up to me.

Then I go back and learn from the  race, I prepare more, I love more, I celebrate more, and I shop up for  the next race. The whistle blows, and eventually good things happen.  Preparation leads to Faith in yourself.

I used to think good  things never happen. I saw my father die without anything good happening  to him. I thought my fate was going to parallel his. But every moment,  this moment while you are reading this, you get to choose abundance,  gratitude, kindness, integrity, “goodness”. Only you get to choose what  is in your universe.

When you don’t choose, you excuse.

S) IS IT REALLY WORTH IT TO BECOME AN IDEA MACHINE?

Every day I come up with ideas. I haven’t had a business since 2009. And it failed, as mentioned above.

Since then I’ve made more money than I know what to do with because I  come up with ideas for people, for companies, for me, for people who  have no idea who I am, for random anonymous things.

I then get  invited to share my ideas. Sometimes I get paid for them. Sometimes I  give them for free. Sometimes I get more introductions to people and  sometimes I get a chance to advise companies that do well and make me  money. And sometimes I write books.

When you’re an idea  machine, everything you look at breaks down into a collection of ideas,  just like physical objects ultimately breakdown into collections of  particles if your eyes were subatomic microscopes. Your eyes and brains  become sub-idea microscopes that see the ideas that become the building  blocks for everything in society.

See them, build them, change  them, seed them, birth them, love them, live them. Ideas are the dark  matter of the universe. We know it’s there but only those “in the know”  can see them.

– – –

What do you do once you become an idea machine?

This is what I don’t know the answer to because you are the master of your life.

Now you have super powers. Now you’re ready to take your unique place  in the world. You will know how to get to the Justice League satellite  that orbits the Earth and solves problems at a moment’s notice.

You will know what to do. I don’t know. Nobody else knows. You’ll do it and the world won’t be the same.

Read More: How To Be The Luckiest Guy On the Planet in 4 Easy Steps. 

The post The Ultimate Guide for Becoming an Idea Machine appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

It doesn’t matter what the economic data says, what the stock market does, or how long you’ve been at your company. Every day people are getting fired and it’s fast and swift and unexpected like a stray bullet that hits a 4 year old by accident in a drive-by.

Now it’s an economic drive-by. I see the fallout and the tears every day as we’ve moved from 10% underemployment to over 30% underemployment.

One time I was so broke, and it felt so bad for me, that I wanted to kill myself. I thought my kids would do better with my life insurance policy than with me.

But, as I told my 11 year old many years later, “there’s no painless way to kill yourself”. I’ve done the research. There’s nothing.

I’ve been fired so many times I can’t list them all. I’ve had to reinvent my career when entire industries exploded. Reinvention is a hard and brutal process but it is possible and I describe how I specifically do it in my post, “the ultimate guide to reinventing myself”. 

But sometimes the stress is too much and it’s too early to think about following that dream of being a ballerina or an acrobat or a world-famous writer/entrepreneur.

I would pace at three in the morning. “I’m going to lose this house. My kids are going to switch schools. I have three months to live. I’m going to lose this house. I’m going to this and that and this/that.” The chatter doesn’t stop and its nightmarish at three in the morning. And at four, and at five, and it doesn’t stop when the kids wake up and they don’t know anything is different but I cry then because everything is different. Because the house is a prison. Because my head is a mental asylum.

No advice helps. You can’t meditate. You can’t exercise. You can’t eat healthy. You can’t shave. Or bathe. You can’t even take deep breaths. They feel like bullshit breaths. Shit breathes in and shit breathes out. You can’t pray or read spiritual texts. None of that stuff helps, you think. None of that immediately deposits money in the bank. None of that brings back your self-esteem which was so randomly stolen from you by faceless bureaucats living on the outskirts of cubicles.

So here’s advice that helps. I hope you follow it because I know it worked for me:

Do just one thing today.

And then do one thing tomorrow. And the next. That’s all. Just one thing a day. If you do your thing, then feel good. You did it. Tomorrow you do the next thing. THAT’S ALL YOU NEED TO DO.

Some preliminaries: First, you need to sleep. Make sure you sleep 8 hours a day, every day. And you can’t drink. Delete your news-intake. You don’t need news now. Things are bad. But they aren’t as bad as they seem. The media lies every day about how bad things are. Trust me.

And then do one solid thing each day.

Here are some possible “one things”:

–          Schedule a lunch with someone you haven’t seen in three years. Could be anyone. But it has to be someone you haven’t seen in at least three years. This injects new blood into the system. You need a total transfusion to get rid of the infected old blood.

–          Ideas. Find your “customers.” Treat yourself like a one-man business. Make a list of customers (i.e. places or people you might want to work with) Then come up with a list of 10 ideas for each customer/place you might want to work. Ideas that can make them money. This way you keep your idea muscle intact.  Don’t let your idea muscle atrophy! Pitch your ideas to that customer if you can. If you can’t , move onto the next customer. But wait until tomorrow. You did your thing for today. Be proud. THIS TECHNIQUE WORKS. Its worked for me.

–          Gratitude. Make a list of the people you’ve worked with over the past ten years that you are grateful you worked with. Email them and tell them why you were grateful you worked with them. Ask them sincerely how they are doing. This is one of the most important things on this list.

–          Wake up early, exercise, take a shower, wear a suit, go into the city, and walk around. Smell that freshness on you. It makes you feel as if you are ready for anything. And you are. That’s all you need to do that day. Heck, go to a museum. You won’t have this opportunity for freedom forever.

–          Slash. Make a list of all expenses you can slash. Make your runway as long as possible. There are plenty of sites to advise how to do this. Picture your worst-worst case scenario. Its never as bad as you think. Write it down. Write down the plan for the worst-case scenario. Then take a nap. You just had a hard day. You need to rest.

–         Lunch, part II.  Have lunch with one person in your industry. Have your ideas ready for that person. Have him critique your ideas. Learn.

(lunch can be fun)

–          Reconnect. Contact other people who used to work at your old company. Maybe they even worked there ten years ago. Reconnect. Come up with ideas for them.

You know what a fun thing for me is. Sometimes I go back to my emails from 2007 or 2008. I find an email I never responded to for whatever reason. And then I respond as if they had just sent the email. It’s amazing the results I have gotten from that simple exercise.

–          Write. Write a book in the next three days. You can write a 30 page book about dieting (“100 ways to Lose 100 pounds”) and put it on sale on Amazon in one day. Why not? The traditional book industry is over. Write the book “100 things to do the day after you are fired”. Make it funny. Time to dominate the publishing industry while you are unemployed. Today make a list of all the possible 30 page books you can do. Then tomorrow start one of the books. You think this is not possible? I have one friend who just self-published a book. He was dead broke before that after being fired from his job. He made $200,000 in 90 days. No joke. This was about a month ago.

–          Resentment. You are going to feel resentful about people at your old job. They wronged you. But listen closely: they are just trying to survive also. They aren’t different from you and me, no matter how much you feel they wronged you. You need to make a list of all the good qualities that person has and send them an email why you think they are good at what they do. Thank them.

–         Brainstorm.  Go completely in a different direction. What other industry can you work in? What other location can you live in? Make up the wildest fantasies about what you can do. Keep going until there is one possible direction you can execute on today. Brainstorm what blog you can do (and what products you can sell on the blog). Brainstorm about photography (anyone need a photographer this weekend?) Brainstorm about ecommerce (check out penny auction sites where you can buy stuff for pennies and resell on Ebay). I don’t know. I’m making stuff up. But brainstorm for an hour and some little slice of reality might peak through.

Remember: just one thing a day at first. Some of these things above seem crazy. But I’m not recommending anything that I haven’t done and made money doing. All of them.

If you are feeling better, go for the full Daily Practice I describe in many posts. But don’t stress it. The Daily Practice has always worked for me when I’ve hit my low points on repeated occasions. But first do “one thing a day”. No pressures.

Anyone who is fired today, feel free to email me and tell me what is going on. Or sign up for my email list where I give out a free copy of my new unreleased book (“The Choose Yourself Stories”), which I don’t intend to release for another month.

But no matter what, do that one thing. Get the blood moving. Get the heart moving. Then the rest will follow and you will be ok.

The post ONE Thing You NEED to Do If You Are Fired Today appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

I gave my 11 year old daughter important advice the other day: there’s no painless way to kill yourself.

“What about with a gun?” she said.

I told her about a friend of mine who shot himself in the mouth. He put the gun in his mouth and pointed upwards towards the brain.

He missed.

He shot off half his face, he went blind in one eye, and he is now in a wheelchair.

If you type in “I Want to Die” into google, my website is the first result.

My first business I sold for $15 million. We built websites for entertainment companies. Bad Boy Records, Miramax, Time Warner, HBO, Sony, Disney, Loud Records, Interscope, on and on. Oh, and Con Edison.

Mobb Deep would hang out in my office. Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails would stop by. RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan would want to play chess. We even made a website for a brothel in Nevada.

Then I saw that kids in junior high school were learning HTML. So I sold the business.

I bought an apartment for millions. I rebuilt it. Feng Shui! I bought art. I played a lot of poker. I began investing in companies. A million here. A few hundred thousand there.

Then I started more companies. Then I bought more things. Then I became an addict. The worst kind of addict.

From June 2000 until September, 2001 I probably lost $1 million a month.

I couldn’t stop. I wanted to get back up to the peak.

I wanted to be loved. I wanted to have $100 million so people would love me.

Writing this now I even feel like slitting my wrists and stomach. I have 2 kids.

I felt like I was going to die. That zero equals death. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been.

I lost all my friends. Nobody returned calls. I would go to the ATM machine – from $15 million to $143 left.

There were no jobs, There was nothing.

One weekend when I had $0 left in my bank account I called my parents to borrow money but they said “no”. “College was enough” they told me, even though I had ended up paying for every dime of college. That was the last time I spoke to my dad, who had a stroke six months later.

I tried meditation to calm down but it didn’t work. I never slept. I lost 30 lbs. I’m 5’9″. I went from 160 to 130. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t move. I stopped having ideas. I cried every day.

There was never a moment when I didn’t feel sick. I had let my kids down. I would die and they would never remember me.

We moved 80 miles north of NYC with the tiny bit of money we took out of our apartment after being forced to sell at a million dollar loss.

I couldn’t leave the house for three months. I was depressed. I gained back all my weight and then another 30 lbs.

Finally I had to either die or feed my family. I was forced to choose myself.

– I started to exercise every day. I started to eat better. One item for breakfast. A healthy lunch. Tiny dinner. No snacks.
– I started to sleep 9 hours a day.
– I started to only be around people who loved and supported me. I broke off all ties with anyone who I felt bad to be around.
– I wrote down ideas every day of articles I could write and about businesses I could start. Bit by bit I started to get paid to write. If you don’t exercise the idea muscle it atrophies.
– I decided I wanted to help people every day and be honest every day. I was grateful for my daughters. I was grateful for what I had. I didn’t fight reality or regret. This was my reality and I had to make the best of it.
– Every day I came up with ideas for new businesses. I had a waiter’s pad. I would go to a cafe at 6 in the morning with about 4 books and read for an hour or two and then start writing down ideas for new businesses, articles, etc.
– I started a hedge fund. I started a fund of hedge funds. I started a newsletter. I did deals. I made introductions every day, expanding my brand new network from scratch. At least 5 introductions a day.
– I got involved in a mental health company I sold for $41 million.
– I started a website, Stockpickr! which got millions of unique users. I found advertising for it. I sold it to thestreet.com
– I had made millions again from scratch.

Then I stopped using the fundamental techniques I described above. Every time I’ve lost money it’s because I squandered my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

I was really bad. I did everything you should not do. I was like an addict. Picture the worst abuses. That was me. Again.

And then I lost it all again. Everything. Agh!

I had to start over. I couldn’t even believe I had to start from scratch atgain.

Every day without fail I focus on physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. And it’s worked. I hope. I hope I don’t squander again.

People say it’s not about the end, it’s about the journey.

This is total BS.

It’s not about the journey and it never was.

It’s about right now.

Right now is the only place you’ll ever be. Choose yourself not to waste it.

Read More: How To Be The Luckiest Guy On the Planet in 4 Easy Steps. 

The post THERE’S NO PAINLESS WAY TO KILL YOURSELF appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

Dear James in 2050,

I kind of hope you are not alive in 2050 but I’m going to write to you anyway. If you read this I hope you have already done what I am going to suggest here.

I hope you forgive yourself for not always being there when your kids were growing up. You were working hard (I know, not an excuse, but still) and you weren’t always happy and didn’t know how to deal with it. And your kids are so far turning out great. I hope.

I hope you forgive yourself that you lost a lot of money at various points. Imagine what a jerk you would’ve been if you had just gone from “success to success”. When you lost that money it taught you about shame and imperfection and how to get over it. I hope you never lost that feeling of blissful imperfection. Life is a fractal and not a straight edge.

I hope you have forgiven yourself for your relationships with almost all of your family members. Sometimes the family you grow up with is not always the family you end up with.

If you are alive in 2050 it probably means you are relaxed inside your body. Check for me for a second. Do you feel relaxed in your body – in your stomach, your head, your heart? That relaxation ripples out to the outside body and to outer health. If family or friends or ambitions are making you upset then your inner body won’t be relaxed.

Forgive yourself for the people you didn’t call back that you wanted to. One day goes by, then two, then you feel bad, then you say, “I will call them tomorrow,” and then you don’t and then years later you feel bad. You don’t need to do that. They are good people and so are you. I don’t know the answer. It’s too bad you didn’t call them. But life goes on and it’s good you loved them enough to care.

Forgive yourself for all the things you tried to force happen. Sometimes you can’t force  things. You can’t force the girl to like you, the job to hire you, the deal to go through. You can watch the sun set every day though. And eat food that digests easily.

Finally, forgive yourself for all the other people you disappointed. Maybe also they had too high expectations of you. You had a hard enough time lowering your own expectations for yourself, so you ended up forcing everyone else to lower theirs. Ok. It’s over now. They moved on. If they are gone, maybe they didn’t love you in the first place.

I don’t know, there’s not much else I hope you forgive yourself on. I hope you are still doing what you set out to do in 2010:

Physical – eat well, sleep well, don’t drink, exercise, be hygienic. You tend to get caught up in your head. Never forget the body. If you can’t be healthy you won’t be happy.

Emotional – only engage with people who support and love you and who you genuinely like. NOBODY else. Why spend one second on someone who causes stress on your inner body. You are what you eat (food, people, thoughts, environment).

Mental – be creative every day. Come up with ideas every day. I hope you still do that special trick: where you make one list of ideas, then another list of completely different ideas in a different topic, and then combine them. It still works for me!

Spiritual – Do you still do this every day, every moment when you can: I hope you are grateful for what you have. I hope you still look for abundance in the things around you, even when things appear to be lacking. I hope you still take a step back and figure out if your thoughts are happy or sad. I hope you surrender still.

Surrender to who?

To me.

The post Dear James in 2050 appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

Claudia and I led a retreat a few weekends ago about yoga and some of the other things I’ve written about this blog: specifically “the daily practice” that I talk so much about. There was a lot of Q&A and I got an opportunity to tell some stories. Here’s a few of them. First, a preview (if you are reading this via RSS, turn on “display images”):

A) Jealousy. I was out for breakfast with a friend of mine who manages some money. About three billion dollars. He’s done very well and written a book about his success. Nice guy.

At the breakfast he told me that the day before he had had breakfast with XY [Insert top billionaire’s name who runs a multi-billion dollar private equity fund]. My friend was describing that breakfast to me, “the entire time he was going on and on about what bastards ‘those Google guys’ are. As in ‘why should those google kids be worth $18 billion each and I’m only worth $2 billion?’

People think a billion dollars will solve their money-envy issues.  But having a billion dollars could actually make it WORSE. You never develop the muscle for “I-will-never-have-a-billion dollars”.

When you have a well developed “i-will-never-have-a-billion-dollars” muscle you maybe find other things in life aside from money that will fulfill you – having positive people in your life that you love, being healthy, being kind, not taking things so seriously, giving up control over things you can’t control, and so on.

(Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and the man who turned me into the FBI)

B) Enough. Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, once was at a party in the Hamptons. A guy came over to him and pointed at a young, 25 year old standing in the party who worked for a big hedge fund. Heller’s “friend” said to him, “see that guy over there? He made more money last year then you will ever make with all of your books combined.”

Joseph Heller said, “Maybe so. But I have one thing that man will never have.”

His friend was skeptical. “Oh yeah, what?”

Heller said, “Enough.”

I think this is beautiful. What is enough? It’s not a number. Look around you this second. Do you really need anything else then the feeling you have this second? If you say “money” or even “sex” or “love” those answers might be true for future seconds. But right this very moment do you really need more money in your pocket? You might be on a train reading my blog. How would you be having sex anyway? Often we get absorbed in the things we want in the future. As if we are unhappy now but there’s some complicated journey that can take us to happiness. The currency of unhappiness will never buy us happiness.

Often to get to happiness, we can skip the journey part and just choose to enjoy this moment. This moment we can have “enough”. Why not? Who can stop us?

(it doesn’t look like George Soros is getting enough here)

C) Blood. A friend of mine was a professional dominatrix (see picture at top). I have more about her and how I met her in an upcoming post (she was girlfriends with my neighbor at the Chelsea Hotel).

She and her girlfriend once gave me a tour of the dungeon that she worked at. In one room was a coffin. She said, “we have one client here that likes to get in the coffin and then get it filled up with cement while he is in there and he’s wearing a mask he can barely breathe out of.” Ok, to each his own. That’s not what this story is about.

But if you are a professional dominatrix and you meet me, trust that I am going to ask you to tell me a story. Here’s one story she told me, “I had a regular client who was a famous movie director. Everyone in the world knows his name.”

“He has a huge Park Avenue apartment he stays at when he’s not in LA. HUGE. I got there with all my equipment, including a knife. All he wants is for me to cut him all over his body until he is bleeding. By the time I was finished, his entire foyer was covered in blood. I was even worried he might die. But, of course, he didn’t. I just saw his latest movie.”

There’s more to this story which I’ll describe in my post specifically about Veronika.

But one thing that this shows me is that a billion dollars doesn’t mean  you can buy an expensive apartment. You don’t need a billion for that. And you dont’ even need an expensive apartment. But what a billion dollars does do is allow all of your qualities to be magnified. Bad qualities and hopefully good qualities.

I don’t judge this guy for wanting to be cut. Or the other billionaire for being jealous of Larry Page. Heck, I’m jealous of Larry Page.

But its just clear that not having a lot of money is just an excuse people give when they feel frustrated, or not at the right place they feel they should be in their lives, or stuck somehow (“if only I had a lot of money, I could do this great idea I have”). Giving someone a lot of money will only remove that one excuse they had. Then they will find other excuses for the reasons they are unhappy. (e.g. “I need to almost bleed to death to be happy”).

Veronika tried to explain this guy’s motives to me. “He has to make decisions all day long. That’s all he does is make decisions and have total control over the people in his life. For the short while he is with me, he gets to lose his sense of total control. I take control.”

My guess is there are other ways to give up the feeling that you need to control everything in your life. We want to control but we can’t. Most of the time we resist the thing that life throws our way.

“Why is this happening to me?” is a common question asked since the dawn of time and there is only one answer: “Because!”

If you can find, this second, ten things to be happy for or to be grateful for then you will finally achieve what 99% of the population never achieves, at least for this single moment: Enough.

The post Three Stories About Billionaires appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

Once you do this, oxytocin will explode through your body, lighting up all of your pleasure centers. But don’t think about that now. Worry instead about the end of the world.

If you don’t do this in twenty four hours the world will be obliterated. The aliens will come. The good aliens are long dead. Moved on to another dimension because of superior technology that we can’t understand. The only things they left behind were you and the six people around the world out of seven billion that you must find. Please find them today. For the sake of all humanity, PLEASE! Write their names in a notebook. Preferably a waiter’s pad.  

Then do it again tomorrow.

1) Someone to love. Write the name and why you love this person.

2) Someone to thank. You must call them and thank them. If you can’t call them, just write their name down.

3) Someone to be grateful for (but you can’t thank directly. Maybe they are dead. Or long gone from your life.)

4) Someone to forgive (you don’t have to physically forgive them. It turns out the same amount of oxytocin is released if you write their name down on a piece of paper and forgive them).

5) Someone to forget (no need to be angry anymore, my sweet baby. Forgetting and moving on, even if their actions were unforgivable).

6) Someone to admire. We can often rewire the brain by thinking about the people we want to admire and emulate.

I do this every morning. It works. I’m not trying to write a long post with a catchy story here. There’s nothing revealing here. I simply do this. At the end of a month of doing this, your waiter’s pad will be a work of art. Your life will be better. You’ll be happier.

There! Claudia, I just proved I can do a short post.

The post The Six People You Must Find Today appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

Answer:

Then the IRS wrote me wanting to know a lot of information about me. Then my dad got sick. Then my father in law got sick. Then I wasn’t getting along with my now ex-wife and we got divorced. Then a lot of people got angry at me for reasons I don’t even know why. Then I was living in a hotel, by myself on Thanksgiving. Then I was crazy and almost went to jail. A step-ladder of thens until I got HERE, the present moment, but for a long time I didn’t know it was the present moment. I thought it was THEN. Or SOON. And SOON was unavoidably bad.

This has been a hard year. Everyone wants to break free from it. Heck, it’s been a hard decade. As the year closed, by far the most popular search term that got people to my blog was “I Want to Die” by a much wider margin than it usually is. Nobody wants to see 2013 and what disasters it brings. 2012 was enough. Waking up to tragedy after tragedy. Wars that don’t seem to end. An economy that won’t seem to get off the respirator.

My kids said to me the other day, “When are we going to get out of this recession” I said, the US hasn’t been in a recession since 2009 and the stock market is near decade highs.” But they won’t believe me. “That’s impossible,” they said. Because life feels really bad now. Little kids get shot just a few miles away. That means it can happen to anyone. And everyone is either unemployed or underemployed. Or worried about being shot or underemployed.

Anything can happen. And nobody is entitled to anything. In my worst fears over the past few decade I would just stare at a paper trying to add up numbers over and over again. Do they add up? What if the IRS calls here? What if this deal falls through? What if I never do anything anywhere of value to anyone? Then that number goes away. All of this complicated mathematics would happen at three in the morning, the time when math happens in our nightmares. I would wake up and see paper after paper on the table and none of the numbers would add up in the morning. What was I even thinking?

And the self-help books give platitudes that don’t make sense. It’s one thing to be Eckhart Tolle, who lived on a park bench, and say, “Live only in the Present”. It’s one thing to be Tony Robbins and force yourself to stand straight and be confident. It’s another thing to think to yourself: in exactly seven months I will run out of money and I can’t get a job and I will not be able to feed my kids. “Live life like you might die tomorrow!” says a bumper sticker, facebook quote, pinterest photo.

But it doesn’t work. I have to work tomorrow. I have to buy a diaper tomorrow or Eggos or fill up a car with gas. My gas runs out tomorrow.

Well, why can’t you get a job? Because, one might think… all the jobs are gone. Or…I lost the last two jobs. Or…I had money once before and I messed it up. I was STUPID and I HATE MYSELF. Or…I am too old. Or…I am not pretty or handsome or charismatic enough. Or…Or…. Or….: excuses, fears, regrets, anxieties and I open a book and it says, “live in the NOW”. But what if “NOW” sucks. What if it’s really really awful.

And yet, every spiritual book in history, every self-help guide, says the same thing. Focus on the NOW. How come?

Because this is where all the help is. This present moment is where all the money is. It’s where all the opportunity is. It’s hidden from us, because we have an ongoing film in our heads of everything we regret, everything we’re afraid of, everybody we want to get pleasure from, everyone we are sure is betraying us, everyone we are angry at, everything we are afraid of. It’s the Zapgruder film of the JFK shooting, playing over and over, was that three bullets or one? Was his head splattered on Jackie’s dress? Was there another gun right there in the grassy knoll? Play it again? Do it slide by slide! We can find something here. Play it again. Play it again. Play it again. In the shower. Daydreaming of disaster. Can I kill myself? Can I shoot myself in the now?

The present moment is all we have. It’s not, “do nothing in the present moment”. It’s live in the only moment we will ever have. Wherever we are, whenever we are, we are always NOW. Unless I’m afraid to repeat my pattern of ten years ago. Unless I’m afraid of what happens six months from now. Unless I’m afraid of a knock at the door, unknown people taking from me on the other side.

There’s the metaphor of Jesus walking on water. (Uh-oh. Here the Jew goes again). The miracle is not that he walked on water. The miracle is always when we don’t drown in our fears and regrets. Those are the only things that prevent us from walking above the water.

What happens then? You start to think of the ideas that will deliver the most value to others. You start to make decisions that benefit you the most right now. You start to clear your head of the shitmares that stink up the system inside of you, the universal moment of NOW that only you exist in. You surrender to what you have in the present moment.

In 2004 the IRS wrote me. They wanted to know what had happened to me 1997-2003. They wanted an update on my life. How have I been? What have I been up to? And, by the way, how much money did you make? I was near broke. But I had made a lot of money and then lost it. I wanted to live in the NOW but the IRS was asking me about 1998, the year I sold my company! 2002, the year I sold a house. And soon 2004 would come up, the year I sold another company But show me the money?

I added it all up. I was worth negative million. Or negative two million. Or maybe even an imaginary number. Somewhere where numbers don’t exist for respectable people. I was beyond respectable. I was a piece of shit. I was afraid. “Nothing will ever get good for me again.”

The only time you can stack the odds in your favor is right now. Here is a right-now-checklist: Are you breathing? Are you eating well? Did you sleep enough last night? Did you exercise? Did you avoid the people who put you down or stress you out? Did you come up with ideas? Did you laugh? Are you grateful for what you have? Can you surrender to the universe, to the angels that anchor you to your fears, just for a moment, and say, “Who today do you want me to help?”

And only by being focused on that checklist, will you ride fearlessly into the future. I know this because here I am in the future, right now.

The post How do you live in the present? appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

Answer

I’m going to call bullshit on you, Dominic. Only because I’m also calling bullshit on myself. A lot of times the day starts off, “ugh, I feel so overwhelmed, I have so much to do.” And then the day ends, “Damn, I had so much to do and I did none of it.” It’s a shit sandwich and I ate it. As a society we eat shit sandwiches all day long.

Three things:

1) Think back to the five greatest moments in your life. Did any of them occur while you were staring at a screen or talking on the phone? Can you say, “wow, the number 3 most impactful moment in my life was that time I was crossing Main Street while talking on the phone with my buddy and it was just AMAZING!” No, you won’t say that. Nor will it be the time you were playing online scrabble with friends or surfing that little website, “jamesaltucher.com” although that last one might make the top 10. Let’s be disciplined and stick to five.

2) Your computer screen overstimulates the pineal gland. If you cracked open your forehead and drilled a whole through the center of the skull, and suck out what’s underneath with a straw you’d drink your own pineal gland.

Don’t do that.

The pineal gland, among other things, regulates the melatonin in the body. When it’s overstimulated, like when you stare at a computer screen all day, the melatonin in your body is suppressed and your sleep and rest periods will be automatically more difficult. You won’t get into a deep sleep, for instance, or you will wake up at 3 in the morning, anxious about all the things you have to do and the cycle repeats. The pineal gland stops functioning well as we age, which is why older people get less sleep. They don’t NEED less sleep, as is commonly thought, but they get less quality sleep because the pineal gland calcifies and less melatonin is produced in the body, resulting in less sleep as well as more age-related diseases such as cancer.

So basically, when you stare at a computer screen all day, particularly at night, your body is going to think you are a 90 year old man. When you are a 90 year old man, not only is it harder for you to get sleep but it’s harder for you to get basic tasks done, so you have to stay at the computer screen longer. The famous shit-sandwich-cycle (as seen on Oprah, etc) repeats.

3) Staring at a computer screen releases dopamine in the body. The dopamine hormone is the “reward hormone”. It tells the body,”Job well done”. Normally you want that hormone only released when you actually do a good job at something. Unfortunately, lots of drugs also trigger it. Which is why we become psychologically addicted to many drugs. Guess what? Staring at a computer screen also triggers it. So we become an addict. And even when we have nothing do, we still feel this need to stare at a computer screen.

Part of your feeling, “I never get enough done” has nothing to do with getting enough done. It’s actually a withdrawal symptom of the addiction of looking at the computer screen. So we must remove our addictions.

By the way, if someone talks to you about hormones say, “Hmm, I never heard a whore moan.”

Ok, back to work:

I want to sleep better. I want to rest better. I also want to be more creative in my life and help more people. So we are going to do this shit-sandwich diet and accomplish this.

A) Make a To-Don’t List. Not a To-Do list. But this morning I’m going to make a list of all the things I don’t want to do. Here’s part of my list: I’m not going to play online chess for more than five minutes today. I’m an addict and can play for hours. Five minutes is basically five games. That’s enough. I’m not going to read news online. What’s better – to read a poorly researched, opinionated, poorly written news article or to get up and read a good book. The latter is better (I felt the need to answer that question just in case there were doubts). The news is always lies. What happened to radiation in San Francisco because of Fukishama? What happened to Avian Flu? Where is Greece already? Nothing in the news comes true. No news! Which means, no cat pictures!

No random surfing. No responding to hatemail. No returning emails you don’t have to. No junk food. Junk food prevents you from sleeping because it’s hard to digest.

No alcohol. Alcohol has sugar. Right when you need to rest it spikes up and you’re completely awake even when you don’t want to be.

And finally, no screen time after 6pm. It doesn’t matter what you have to do. You will get more done in the long run if you turn off the computer after 6pm.

B) Do something EXTRA for each client. This might seem counter-intuitive. You have a hard enough time getting things done – this is why you asked the question in the first place. How will doing something extra help.

Every client is asking you to accomplish a list of tasks. Always keep in mind, “What extra task can I do for this client that they did not ask for?” This will result in several benefits:

– You will get through the main tasks so you can get to the extra task

– It”s pleasant to surprise people. It’s like a classic Steve Jobs talk. He gives an entire talk, showing all of the amazing new Apple products and everyone cheers and then finally he says, “oh I forgot to tell you, we also MADE A TIME MACHINE!” And the crowd goes crazy. We came to expect that in Steve Jobs talks, which is why they became so famous, such a source of pleasure to watch.

– Give and you will receive. Clients remain loyal when they know you are standing out on the ledge for them. They will also cut you slack when you need it so you dont’ have to feel overwhelmed all the time. They will become your partners instead of your clients.

– While you are doing the extra task for the client, you won’t be doing the mindless stuff, like surfing the web, looking at “cat pictures” (I put in quotes because we all know what that really means. Err, at least for me). Doing extra for a client will cut down on your “random” time, which will ultimately result in more rest time.

– By the time you are done with the extra task it’s time to rest.

C) Take a 20 minute walk. Try to do this every 90 minutes. I’m going to tell you a secret. The mind isn’t creative. Your emotions are not creative.

When was the last time you were panicking or afraid or anxious and suddenly you came up with the greatest idea you’ve ever come up with? I’ll answer for you: NEVER. When our mind is filled with thoughts, it crowds out the inner silence that is the source of ALL creativity.

We have a mind in order to get food. Our competitors for food were all bigger and stronger than us so we needed to come up with a brain that could outwit them. But your true source of creativity comes when the mind slows down and you connect to the deeper parts of you.

This happens when you take a walk. You get some exercise. Your eyes enjoy new input. You get away from the screen. And guess what, your subconscious, or superconscious, or whatever you want to call it, gets a chance to be creative.

D) At the end of the work day: return all emails. Set aside that time to return all non-immediate emails.

E) Finally, at the very end of the work day, list everything you did that day. This isn’t a “To Do” list. This is a “I Did” list. You will be surprised how much you got done.

So, to summarize, here is the “get more rest” cheat sheet:

– no screen time after 6pm

– take walks

– you know perfectly well what is “bad screen time” versus “good screen time” so be strict about that.

– do an extra task each day for each client

– make an appointment with yourself each day to return emails. This way you won’t feel anxious about them during the day. Don’t do anything during that time other than return emails.

– No junk food. No alcohol. No coffee after 9am (coffee stays in the system for 12 hours). No online games. If you want to do social facebook time, set a limit of 5-10 minutes a day on it.

– If you really wanted to rest: don’t eat dinner. Breakfast and lunch is enough. It’s not like you are going to die of starvation. The 90 minutes of dinner can be rest time.

– No TV past 8pm. For shows you love you can always download to the ipod later and watch them on your commute. Go to sleep instead. What happens after 8pm is you forget that you used to only watch the shows you love and you start watching, “Keeping up With the Kardashians” (if you happen to love that show, please stop).

– Wake up an hour early for exercise and/or reading. Since you just went to sleep early, you should be able to do that. Even 2 minutes of exercise is good.

Try this: Doing the above list, try to work only four hours a day instead of eight. You will be surprised how easy it is. You will be surprised how guilt you will feel (because of screen withdrawal symptoms).

It’s hard to do this list. We’re all addicts to the screen. If we all did the above, here’s what will happen: we will get more work done, we will be more creative, we will get more rest, our children would see us more, we’ll have more sex, we’ll get more exercise, we’ll sleep deeper, we’ll live longer, we’ll look better.

Sounds pretty good.

The post How do I rest without really taking a break from work or going away from work? appeared first on Altucher Confidential.