James Altucher quotes:

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

We are incredibly poor predictors of our future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most people don't have the power of persuasion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Products are valued higher than services.

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

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

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

If you try to get 1% better each day at your health, at your relationships and the way you treat people, at your creativity, and at turning despair into gratitude, then that 1% compounds into an amazing person. Do that 1%. Take one action. Even if the actions is for one minute. The 1/1/1 strategy.

Branding jails corporate America, but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.

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

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

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

Rejection-and the fear of rejection-is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves.

The six people you must find today... Someone to love. Someone to thank. Someone to be grateful for. Someone to forgive Someone to forget Someone to admire.

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

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

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

Everything that happens in your future is a direct result of what you do today.

The only way to learn new things is to ask questions and be curious. Find the people who inspire your curiosity because those are the ones you will most learn from.

Being grateful is the bridge between the world of nightmares and the world where we are free to say no. It's the bridge between the world of delusions and the world of creativity.It's the power that brings death back to life, the power that turns poverty to wealth and anger to compassion.

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

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

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

Don't do something just for the money. Money is a side effect of persistence. You persist in things you are interested in. Explore your interests. Then persist. Then enjoy all the side effects.

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

What you need to do is build the house you will live in. You build that house by laying a solid foundation: by building physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

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

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

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

Quantity and persistence will get you the outcomes you need.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every tomorrow is determined by every today.

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

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

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

Robots are the new middle class. And everyone else will either be an entrepreneur or a temp staffer.

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 dont support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck.

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

Life is a series of failures punctuated by brief successes

When you get in the mud with a pig, you get dirty and the pig gets happy.

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

People build up a life, it becomes unsatisfactory, and they want to figure out how to change it like an outfit on a doll. But you can't change life from the outside. We all know this now.

If you don't live in the world of choosing, you live in the world of excusing.

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

If you act like the river, you ultimately flow past all the rocks along the way.

Sometimes it's better to just be quiet, to not think of anything at all. Out of silence comes the greatest creativity.

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

Nobody can tell you what to do. No matter what they pay you. No matter what obligations you feel you owe them. Every second defines you. Be who you are, not who anyone else is, or who anyone else wants you to be.

Teaching how to think is better than lecturing how to do it.

Don't Time travel into the past. You can't change it. Today it starts all over again. Every tomorrow is determined by every day.

Do as many ideas as possible. The right idea will pick you.

The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.

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

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

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.

Purpose is a man-made fiction. Nobody on their deathbed gets a plaque that says "he focused on only one thing for his entire life!" Those are counterfeit thoughts in a counterfeit society.

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

Your bosses simply hate you. You created more and more value. They paid you less and less. That's the definition of disdain in my book.

Being fearless precisely when you are most scared is the best hack.

Success, in every case, comes from the alchemy of your health, your mind, your positive energy, and the real world situations you persistently improve for yourself.

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

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

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