James Altucher

Quantity and persistence will get you the outcomes you need.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Every tomorrow is determined by every today.

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

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

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

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

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

Most people don't have the power of persuasion.

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are incredibly poor predictors of our future.

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.

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

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

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.

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.