Poker is a charismatic game. People who are larger than life play poker and make their living from playing games and hustling.
— James Altucher
Mistakes I've made in the past make me afraid to try new things in the future. I want to be perfect.
You can only make money doing what you love.
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.
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.
Read every book, blog, website, whatever, about what you want to be an expert in.
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.
Don't buy into the 20-hours-a-day entrepreneur myth. You need to sleep 8 hours a day to have a focused mind.
I'm invested in about 13 private companies. I've advised probably another 50 private companies.
Ultimately, the best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening.
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.
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.
Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class.
Every successful business, even Google, Facebook, Twitter, started with a combination of manual improvements and friends of the founders using the site.
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.
I saw 'Star Wars' when I was seven years old, and it changed my life.
I can tell you this: Everything in my life that I am happy about it is the product of a huge mistake.
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.
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.
Procrastination is your body telling you you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing.
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.
Become a beacon of enhancement, and then, when the night is gray, all of the boats will move towards you, bringing their bountiful riches.
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.
Products are valued higher than services.
Branding jails corporate America, but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.
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.
Do what you do with love, and success is a natural symptom.
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.
The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.
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.
How great is it to just rest and be happy and not move when you don't have to.
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.
I love being honest and intimate with people. I love building community. I love emailing with readers.
I made so many mistakes in my first successful business I'm almost embarrassed to recount them.
My feeling, based on my own experience, is that aiming for grandiosity is the fastest route to failure.
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.
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.
Whenever things are good, I always worry about what could go wrong.
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.
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.
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.
Every day, you reinvent yourself. You're always in motion. But you decide every day: forward or backward.
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.
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.
In every business I had ever started, even ones that had totally failed, I had kept good relations with the investors.
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.
