Download Choose Yourself PDF book summary below:

In the Choose Yourself PDF summary you will learn:

  • How James Altucher started from scratch and rebuilt himself to start 20 companies and write 18 books
  • The single best and simplest way to accelerate success in life
  • A simple yet solid and tested Daily Practice for a happy, rich, and successful life
  • 5 essential things that should be on your daily checklist
  • How to find your “plus-minus-equal”
  • How to reinvent yourself

This book teaches how to stop the thought that others have the right to succeed more than you do. James Altucher shows a path. If you want to delve deeper into all the ideas from Choose Yourself, make sure to listen to or download my podcast interview with the author James Altucher above. ⇑

About the Author

James Altucher is a serial entrepreneur who had started 20 businesses and written 18 books. His book Choose Yourself! Be Happy, Make Millions, Live the Dream talks about how he built himself back up again after losing around $15 million.

(Click here to listen to our podcast where James shares with us about some of the lowest moments in his life and how he eventually turned things around.)

  • James had a good business back in the dotcom crash days, but he made many mistakes and got stuck in a cycle. He reached the point of being dead-broke and depressed.
  • Then he equated net worth with self-worth. This came after a certain point when he felt he was losing everything — his marriage, his kids, his houses, and his money again. He thought his life was worthless.
  • As he reflected on what he could be doing wrong, James started to really pay attention, and he wrote it down. He was writing every day and became good at it. He started seeing what was working and what wasn’t working.
  • It all came down to a very simple way of living life that he decided to switch to. James started applying a Daily Practice to his life, and because of that his bounce-back time had become incredibly fast. He discovered what works on the way up and what doesn’t work on the way down and shared his practice to other people.

‘Choose Yourself’ Key Ideas and Summary:

I. 5 Key Things for Daily Practice

It’s better to be healthy than unhealthy if you want to achieve something great in your life or if you want to bounce back from a failure or a learning experience.

What James realized when he was at the bottom and while moving up was that whether it’s making money or writing a book or whatever he always had to do, he had to check the boxes at the end of the day on the following 4 things — and he adds a 5th thing at the end.

1. Physical health

Every day, do something for your physical health.

To achieve this, James follows a Sleep, Eat, Move pattern or guide.

Maintain your sleep hygiene

woman sleeping

According to scientific research, getting 8 hours of sleep allows spinal fluids to wash through our brain and clean out protein plaque that builds on the brain. It’s a good way for preventing Alzheimer’s, which is caused by too much protein plaque on the brain.

An example of how important sleep is to successful people

Arianna Huffington started The Huffington Post, sold it for 300 million, and for 40 years has been a successful woman, but she did not want to talk about any of that when she joined James on his podcast. All she wanted to talk about were the benefits of sleeping well. She even wrote a book about it.

Eat well

  • Don’t start eating the second you wake up and the second you go to sleep. Figure out how you could take a break from eating.
  • Don’t consume most of your calories in snacks.

If you just do these 2 things, you’re already eating better than 99% of the population. And then you could follow whatever diet you want — just avoid snacks and avoid eating all day long.

Suddenly your nutrition will be a lot better. You’ll have a lot more energy.

Do something that involves strenuous movement

We all move all day long, but it’s not like movement helps us. Notice that there’s so much obesity in this world.

What James says is we have to move to a point where it’s strenuous, where we feel like, “I don’t really feel like moving anymore, I’m kind of tired now.”

We have to push yourself. In James’ case, he tries to do something where he’s either taking a good walk or something that’s ‘play’.

2. Emotional health

In life, you will find yourself around people who put you down or people that you argue with. You might have bad conversations in your head with somebody that you don’t like.

2 good pieces of advice:

  • “You’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn
  • “Always stand next to the smartest person in the room.”

Therefore, be around people who love you and who you love.

a close group of friends

Obviously, that’s much better than being around people who hate you or who you hate. The less toxic people in your life, the better your life is.

But there are many situations in life where you feel like you’re forced to spend time with people whom you don’t really like that much. These could be in settings such as:

  • School
  • Job
  • Relationships

You spend not just a little bit of time with those people but all day long, for years.

But you only have one life, so you might as well be around people who would help make you a better person.

Although emotional health is so much about being around the right people, there’s a lot to it. You also have to be a good person to attract good people around you.

How do you make this happen?

  • By being honest
  • Networking

The way to really network:

Introduce 1 person to another person and try to do good things for both of those people. (More of this idea in the last section of this summary)

Every day, James tries to introduce people to each other, and that idea alone has significantly helped him in the past 20 years. 

“I can’t even think of a time when it hasn’t helped me — that idea of introducing 2 people in your network to each other, without expecting anything in return.”

For example, James has been introducing a friend of his from when they were 9 years old to other people ever since. That led James to keynote his friend’s conference, and his friend has had other people introduced to him by James speaking at his conference. These kinds of things compound.

As to whether James gets paid by anybody to speak at conferences, he says he’s not getting paid. It’s all favors.

3. Mental health

Mental health is just creativity. Do one thing that’s creative every day. This could mean:

  • Taking a photograph that you think is creative
  • Writing a post that’s creative

Examples of a daily creative exercise:

  • Morning Pages

In the book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron talks about doing something called Morning Pages. The idea is just to write 3 pages every morning without lifting your hand off the paper. You won’t get writer’s block doing it because you could just write anything.

The Morning Pages is an easy way to get to do something creative every day.

In general you can write about:

– things that you like
– what happened to you yesterday
– what’s happening now, ideas
– lessons you learned from your first business, etc.

  • Photography

Getting better at photography every day is another easy way to try.

Some people take pictures of food. Some take pictures of the sunset. What James does is he would try to walk up to somebody looking sad, talk to them, and then ask them if he could take their photograph.

He likes putting himself into an interesting experience and then taking a photograph out of it.

  • Writing down ideas every day

an idea book

The basic thing that James likes to do, which he has been doing every day for more than 15 years now, is writing 10 ideas a day.

Examples:

  • 10 books I can write
  • 10 businesses I could start
  • 10 ideas that this company can be a better one

The idea muscle is a muscle like any other. If you don’t come up with new ideas every day, your idea muscle will atrophy in a couple of weeks.

Most of us have atrophied our idea muscles. It’s just a general state of society that we live in.

But James says that’s great news because if you just write down 10 ideas a day, within a few weeks you’ll start to notice that you’re coming up with ideas all over the place. Within 3-6 months, or less, you will literally be an idea machine.

Life is not all about competition, but if there’s anybody who tries to compete with you and is not an idea machine — you’ll just leave them in the dust. There’s no comparison.

People often ask what James does with those ideas and if he starts executing them right away. His answer is no, because he’s writing 3,650 ideas a year.

“You’d go crazy if you try to execute on all those ideas. Maybe one idea. I just throw the ideas out.”

You can’t execute unless you’re an idea machine because execution ideas are a subset of ideas.

So when James thinks a particular business is good to try —

  • The next day he’ll come up with 10 execution ideas
  • They’ll be very easy execution ideas because:
      • he wants to experiment easily if a business idea is good
      • he doesn’t really know yet if the idea is good

You have to be an idea machine to come up with execution ideas.

Ideas are the currency of the 21st century. James says it is the most important currency in your life. Money is just a byproduct of that.

4. Spiritual health

At the very minimum, what James likes to do every day — which is almost the first thing he does when he wakes up in the morning — is send his accountability partner 3 things he’s grateful for right that moment.

His partner also sends back to him 3 things he’s grateful for. They do this every day and they’ve been doing this for a long time.

Gratitude Muscle Exercise: “Difficult Gratitude Problems”

When something bad happens in your life, try to find the silver lining in it. James calls this “difficult gratitude problems.

He thinks of at least 1 easy thing to be grateful for. Just doing that makes you a spiritual person.

Understand that gratitude, anger, and fear can’t be in your brain at the same time. This is a wonderful practice to do every day.

Daily meditation practice

Create your own and add it into your routine. (Download my free guided meditation audio here.)

❑ 5. The 1% daily improvement

The 5th thing James adds to the list is to try to improve at those 4 legs of the daily practice — 1% a day.

The math of course is compounding. If improved at anything 1% a day, we’ll be 38 times better in a year.

1% is a small, almost immeasurable, amount better today than yesterday.

Just ask yourself: At the end of the day…

  • Did I make an attempt to be 1% better at these things?
  • Are my ideas a tiny bit better today than they were yesterday?
  • Was my physical health a tiny bit better today?  
  • Did I really think about gratitude a little bit more today than I did yesterday?
  • Was my anger turned into compassion?
  • Did I improve my spiritual health just a tiny bit today than yesterday?

The 4 things are the building blocks where we can start to choose ourselves to do whatever career and dream we want.

Reinvent yourself every 6 months

Reinvention is related to this 1% rule because it’s also a constant process.

Even if you become twice as good at a sport, you’re going to have to reinvent yourself.

  • Are you going to play the sport with different people?
  • Will you upgrade your teachers?
  • Are you going to start writing about the sport?
  • Will you start combining things you’re already good at the sport?

Again, reinvention is a constant process, and 6 months is a little arbitrary. It would take you around 5 years if you, from knowing nothing about golf, decided you want to be a great golf player and have some career and even some wealth related to that sport.

You can make this reinvention work if —

  • you know you’re coming up with 10 ideas a day
  • you’re physically and spiritually healthy
  • you’re surrounded with good people and other people interested in golf

Combination is also important

EXAMPLE: Writing and golf

Some things you can do if you’re a good writer and you get good at golf:

  • start writing on golf blogs
  • join a community of passionate followers of golf where it adds to your pleasure in life

II. How to Get Fast to the Next Level

If you are a starting entrepreneur, here are ways you can accelerate your business to the next level.

1. Maintain the Daily Practice

The first layer to do that is again the Daily Practice. So many people lost their health while building a business because they figured they’d be healthy after the business is a success. And then their business is not a success.

So you can’t stop ever this daily practice. You have to keep doing it.

Again, the Daily Practice is the foundation that you build the house on.

☑ Physical
☑ Emotional
☑ Mental
☑ Spiritual health
☑ 1% daily improvement

2. Only do things you enjoy

This might seem obvious to you, but it isn’t to most people. Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, these will happen:
• you will resent people
• you will do a bad job
• you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on
• you will make less money
• yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again.”

3. Find your plus-minus-equal (+ / – / =)

Next, you want to get better at something. James suggests doing what he calls the + / – / =.

This is the greatest key to accelerating your success in any field.

  • Your plus +

Your plus means your real and virtual mentors.

James’ real mentors were people like Jim Cramer (writing/finance side) and Victor Niederhoffer (hedge fund side). There were other people who became his mentors.

He also has virtual mentors. He reads books. Any book on finance written in the past 400 years — he’s probably read it.

James considers Warren Buffett his biggest virtual mentor. He has never met him, spoken to him, nor emailed with him, but he has read so many things Warren Buffett has written and so many books about him. James has studied so much about him. He even wrote a book about him in 2005.

James had probably a hundred virtual mentors. That’s his +.

Find your plus + first thing. Next find your equals =.

  • Your minus –

This doesn’t mean you find people who are worse than you to feel you’re better than them. Rather, this means finding somebody you can teach.

The best way to learn something is to teach something.

When James reads a book, for example, he only remembers maybe 1 or 2% of what’s in the book. (1-2% is about the average of what people remember and retain from a book or a podcast or other sources.)

James’ practice is writing 10 things he learned immediately after a podcast. He’ll write it down right away, and then he’ll write it as an article. That way, it confirms for him that he’s writing things that are important enough that could be put out as an article.

“I want to be able to teach what I’m learning, and that’s how I learned the best.”

That process of article writing and sharing with an audience was like finding the minus  – group. They’re not necessarily worse, or better, than him, but he just wants to share with them what he could teach.

  • Your equals =

These are the people who challenge you.

Find people whom you can talk to as an equal. If they are your equals in finance, for example, find other people who are day traders, other people who are writing software about the markets, and so on.

In James’ case, he found other people who were working for Jim Cramer or for Victor Niederhoffer and other hedge fund managers. They talked about how they were building their success.

James grew up in the business together with other young people at the time, and they still keep in touch with each other on a daily basis. He felt like they were in the trenches together. His investing partner from back then is still his investing partner.

So find the good people who are going to grow with you. They’re going to challenge your thinking and your theories about the world you live in.

3. Reinvent

Now that we’ve built a house, we want to design the house.

Even James’ first business, which was a multi-million dollar business, took time to build. It also took time to build the skill set.

The idea is you can’t stop anything you’re doing.

  • You have to always find your + / – / =.
  • You have to keep coming up with 10 ideas a day about your business.

EXAMPLE: Airbnb

Airbnb was started in 2007. Now it’s more than 10 years later. This is not an overnight success. Even though they were successful early on, it takes years to build an amazing multi-billion dollar business.

Many years after Airbnb was started by software guys, they realized they were competing with hotel chains and hence they needed to reinvent Airbnb to be a bit more in the hospitality business. Initially that was where they were getting some negative feedback.

So they hired a head of hospitality, Chip Conley, who had previously owned a chain of 50 hotels. In Chip Conley they found their + to transform Airbnb into a much more hospitality-oriented company. They’ve evolved in that area.

These are people who really understood at a deep level the concept of + / – / = and 1% improvement every day. And that’s really how you build a business and get better.

III. How to Connect with Influencers and Work with Them

When James lost all his money, he realized he needed to learn about money and finance. So he started reading lots of books and writing software to model the stock markets.

He also realized very quickly that the best in the world of finance were the best hedge fund managers, investors, and authors and so on. He decided to connect to them.

  1. Initially wrote emails to influencers, offering to buy them a cup of coffee

James wrote around 40 emails to people, saying, “Hey, can I buy you a cup of coffee and pick your brain?”

He got zero responses and thought, “Of course, you will never ever get a response if you try that tactic.”

People just don’t have that much time. Eventually he understood why people didn’t respond to him.

  1. Started thinking about how he could help them without wanting anything in return

James then started telling people something like, “Hey, I don’t want anything from you. You never have to talk to me. You never have to respond to this email, but here are 10 ideas to improve your life in some way…”

Or, “Here are 10 stock ideas and here’s why I think they’re good.”

Or to another hedge fund manager he’d write, “Here are 10 software ideas for your programmers. Here’s even the code for it. Why don’t you implement this and try it out? It’s worked for me and here’s my track record. You never have to respond to me. You can have this code for free.”

  1. Influencers began to respond

Again, he wrote 40 of these emails. And again, most people didn’t respond. They’re very busy and important people.

But this time, 3 people responded — 2 of them he responded to right away and the third one he responded to 12 years later.

  • Jim Cramer of TheStreet.com

The first one who responded was Jim Cramer of the TV show Mad Money. He runs TheStreet.com and and has written a lot of finance books.

People have their own opinions about him but to James, he’s a genius.

He said, “Jim, here are 10 article ideas you should write, and if you write these you never have to give me any credit. I will definitely subscribe and tell all my friends to subscribe and I would love to see your viewpoint on these 10 ideas.”

James researched hard. At this point he knew a lot about finance because he had read hundreds of books, including all of Jim’s books and articles.

Jim wrote back within minutes and said, “These ideas are great. How about you write them?”

And that’s when James started writing for TheStreet.com.

A few years later, his editor at TheStreet.com became an editor at the Financial Times. James then started writing for the Financial Times.

A few years after that, one of his editors at TheStreet.com became an editor at The Wall Street Journal. James started writing for The Wall Street Journal. And then he started writing books about finance.

When James created a finance website (Stockpicker.com), TheStreet.com run by Jim Cramer bought it for $10 million.

That’s the power of exercising the idea muscle.

  • Victor Niederhoffer

Meanwhile, Victor Niederhoffer, who was running a $300 million hedge fund, told James, “These ideas are great. Why don’t you come over for lunch?”

James lived nearby and he got to Victor’s enormous house. They talked for hours about finance. A few weeks later Victor allocated some of his personal money to James to manage.

Victor was the first person to give James money to manage, and from there he was able to start a hedge fund. He put into the website the ideas from that hedge fund.

Just exercising his idea muscle for months was able to help James come up with ideas for these 40 people, of whom 3 responded. He was able to create 2 different careers out of that, which led to combining those careers and his prior career building websites.

He was also able to use his prior interest in writing and to add to his ability as a writer because he had been reading out every single day since that moment.

  • Nassim Taleb

The third person who responded was one of James’ favorite writers and heroes in the finance world. Nassim Taleb also found James’ ideas great. However, James didn’t immediately respond to him because he was busy enough responding to Jim Cramer and Victor Niederhoffer.

Finally, in 2014 James wrote to him. He told Nassim all the things he loves about his book, Anti-Fragile, and some questions he had for his podcast. Nassim, despite not being fond of giving interviews, joined James’ podcast — the first and only one he ever did that year.

“That was 12 years later and again, I never would’ve been able to reach out if I had initially reached out to him in 2002. He was one of my first podcasts I did in person.”

IV. How to Introduce People Every Day: ‘Permission Networking’

a handshake

This is another thing that James does every day. The idea is to think of 2 people who would be good for each other.

Let’s say the 2 persons’ names are Mike and Paul. Here’s how James would do it.

He’ll say, “Mike, here’s why I think you should meet Paul. Is it okay if I make the intro?”

Then he’ll say to Paul, “Here’s why I think you should meet Mike here. Is it okay if I make the intro?”

If they both say yes, they’ve given him permission. He now can do permission networking. He’ll reiterate the reasons why he thinks they should meet. And then he’ll say, “Remove me from the email chain. Good luck, you guys.”

Sometimes things happen, sometimes they don’t. But more often than not, things happen. Sometimes things happen 5 years later.

When you plant seeds in the garden, you never know when they’ll start growing.

Also, there’s the 80/20 rule: 20% of the seeds you plant will create 80% of the ultimate value. That’s where all of the flowers bloom in their garden.

When you introduce people to each other, you don’t have to be in the middle. Let them help each other and benefit. You’ll benefit next time, or the time after that — even if it means giving up opportunities for yourself.

Think of it this way: There’s the “linear effect” and there’s the “network effect.”

Linear Effect – If you live life linearly, your value and resources only go up every time you meet someone new and the list of people you know becomes bigger. This is not good enough anymore. You must create your own empire. And you can’t do it one at a time. That’s not an empire, that’s a list.

Network Effect – This has been well known on the internet since its early days. The premise is that the value of a site goes up exponentially depending on how many people are using it. The more people using the site who don’t know each other or didn’t learn about the site from each other, the stronger the network effect.

And that’s the empire builder. How does this apply to you? How many people are “using you”?

The value of your network goes up exponentially when you view your contacts and resources not as a list but as a network of nodes on a graph. Think of the number of connections that can connect 2  different nodes on that graph. It’s exponential compared to the number of items in a list that connects directly to you.

Other strategies, techniques, and platforms, including building an email list, marketing, and copywriting, change all the time.

If you’re doing the 10 ideas a day, you’re going to learn these things very quickly anyway, because it’s just going to become part of your idea machine.

If you’re doing a + / – / =, you’re also gonna learn these things because:

  • you’re going to find people to teach you
  • you’ll study people and similar businesses

This is the full tool chest James uses.

 

Visit the author’s website www.jamesaltucher.com to know more about him. His other book, Reinvent Yourself, covers a lot of these topics as well.

 

Related Readings:

  1. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
  2. Mini Habits by Stephen Guise
  3. The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz
  4. The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
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