James Altucher

You have youth and vitality and freedom. He thought money and being a boss would buy him freedom but it’s actually you who has the freedom. He knows it but doesn’t want you to know it.

I don’t believe 99% of the advice about entrepreneurship. Because that advice is what gets you out of your heart and into your head. It makes you lost. Because you try to sell out. You try to win. You try to get rich. And you stop giving.

NYC had a huge environmental problem in the 1890s. The city was going to be buried by manure. No technology that existed could solve the problem. 20 years later cars solve the problem. Don’t try to solve every problem today.

So I went to graduate school. I failed all of my classes for three out of my first four semesters. They asked me to leave until I was more “mature.” I have not yet gone back.

And I screw up a lot. If you do a lot of things, you screw up a lot of things. You have to give yourself permission to totally humiliate yourself repeatedly. If you can do that, then happiness results.

You are expected to feed your new roommate and they have less motor control then someone with no arms and no legs.

What a time! I write this as if I have regret now. As if now I’m missing things. I’m not.

This is what I do now to “trick” myself into confidence. I hate “hacks” and “tricks”. But I need to survive also and feed people and make myself function.

I’m sick of the phrase, “KILL IT!” Or “STOP WATCHING & START HUSTLING!” Or “TO WIN THE GAME YOU HAVE TO PLAY IT!” I am sick of business inspirational slogans. They don’t work. They aren’t true.

Just make Capitol Hill a tourist attraction. The entire point of Capitol Hill was that in the 1800s there was no way to communicate other than if everyone was in the same building.

Owning Shit. I don’t like to own anything. I feel like they hold me down. I want to be like a kite, with only a strong arm and a pair of feet that love me to hold me to the Earth.

“If it wasn’t for my parents, I would have killed myself,” Michael Ellsberg was telling me. I hadn’t seen him in four years. But then he sent a random text and by coincidence he was just a block away.