What I've Been Reading

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher. Altucher made an offer to his readers that if they read his book, he will pay them the cost of the book - immersed by that  confidence, I had to check out his book.

This is modern version of self help books; very sensible than those "How To Win" series or the nonsense of "The Secret". Of-course, I was disappointed with massive distillation (he covers most of the labels on this blog) and no mention of stoicism and meditation.

There are always few things one can learn from a writer; it helps especially when the author is genuine and brutally honest (and for that reason I am not going to ask him to pay me):

• The key is to make money off the grid, to make money outside the imprisonment of corporate America and out of the reach of the powers that choose or reject us. To be able to work from any location. As we move toward the employee-less society, where ideas become currency and innovation gets rewarded more than manual or managerial services, you will have the opportunity to live a life you want to.
• Male a lot of money. A lot of money. Let’s be real. That’s the main reason to be an entrepreneur. “But the economy?” someone might say. There is more money floating around than ever before. And a lot of that money is buried and hidden from you. Time to reach out and touch it. The stock market has a capitalization of several trillion dollars. There’s another $2 trillion in private equity funds. There’s $50 trillion in transactions in the global economy every year. If you make money, someone will buy your company. Or, even better, you’ll make so much money so fast you don’t have time to sell your company.
• Corporations don’t like you. This is not a surprise to capitalists and entrepreneurs or even artists. The entire idea behind a corporation is to set up a legal structure that takes advantage of cheap labor. The cheap labor makes something for you for less than you sell it. I’m not saying this isn’t unfair. It is what it is. But you have to make sure if you are being exploited that you learn how to exploit back. You use the corporate job as a rest stop on the way toward being healthy, on the way toward figuring out how to innovate and take advantage of the mythical safety net to move onto bigger and better things.
• This is not true. Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.
• If you can’t start a business, then you end up being a temp staffer somewhere. Don’t say this is heartless. This is the way the world is going. That’s why the middle class is disappearing. Robots are the new middle class. And everyone else will either be an entrepreneur or a temp staffer. Don’t shoot the messenger here. It’s already happening. I’m just trying to figure out a way that we can actually accept the 40 percent unemployment or “underemployment” (already at 20 percent) that is coming.

If you have an idea, don’t focus on the money. Don’t focus on how you will make a living. Do this: 

1. Build your product 
2. Sell it to a customer 
3. Start shipping 
4. Then quit your job