Male: This next speaker, I'm super excited about and I'll tell you why. Raise your hand if you've ever felt like you're not sure if you have the credentials to be doing what you're doing. A lot of you, right? Well, our next speaker is James Altucher. He is an American hedge fund manager, entrepreneur and author. He's founded or co-founded over 20 companies, including Reset Inc. and StockPicker. He's published 11 books and is a frequent contributor to publications like the Financial Times, The Street, Tech Crunch, Seeking Alpha, and the Huffington Post.

Now, why I'm so excited about having him here today is because he recently had a new book come out on Amazon called Choose Yourself. And this is all about skipping that whole credential thing and just picking yourself as the answer. So I'm really happy to invite him to come speak and share his story with you and talk about this whole idea of Choose Yourself. So James, come on up. Okay, thank you.

James Altucher: This is a very small stage and I've been known to actually fall off stages. So just in case I do, watch out in the front. I'll try to aim this way if I fall. So Derek told me where this was going to be . . . I almost got worried about, falling backwards . . . Derek told me where this was going to be and I'm like, "Motivo," I just love that name. It's like a super-villain that I've never heard of, like the Great Motivo.

So I'm about to come over here. I'm getting up to go, and my wife says, "Where are you going?" I'm going over to Motivo. Motivo is crushing New York City. I've got to be a superhero and battle Motivo now.

So early on in life, I learned all of the things I was really horrible at and how I had to compensate for them. I was really horrible at negotiating, for instance. I was really horrible at . . . and I never got better. I'm a horrible negotiator. If I'm selling a car and I say, "It's $10,000," and you say, "Oh I'll pay you $2000." Done deal. You can take it.

I never get better, I don't know why. People don't really change that much, in general. You can change in increments but it's hard to go from $10,000 to $2000 and make a big change. So it's hard for me to get better at negotiation. I'm also really horrible . . . I'm not very organized, so I always need help with details. I've run a bunch, of business; I cannot get details straight. I'm really bad at follow-up. Fortunately, this conference was right after Derek asked me to speak at it or else I would not have been able to follow up properly and there would just be nobody here right now. So Derek is good at following up, so he kept following up and he was very good.

So I'm bad at that. But one thing I learned I was good at very early on-and this totally has to do with sex-is that I was really good at sales. Because when you look like this, you have to be good at salesmanship. And then closing the deal once you have your foot in the door, and then providing additional services. I learned all of this at the age of 12.

So I had to keep improving on it and that's fortunately how I built all kinds of business and I've done all sorts of sales. And when I was thinking about this talk, I realized there was a lot in common . . . even though the types of sales I was doing were all different, there was a lot in common. And I'm going to talk about some of that commonality.

But I had a web-design business, for instance, in the '90s, so I had to be able to sell our services to people who didn't even know what a website was at that point, like '94, '95, '96.

I had a B to C site where I had to sell to millions of consumers but also sell to advertisers, so I sat on both sides of that. I've had to sell companies, which is a whole different type of sales process. I've had to sell myself in the sense that I was at one point starting a hedge fund so I had to convince people that it's safe for them to put money with me.

I had to interrupt myself for a second. I've had to sell books; I've had to sell my services to places I wanted to write for. So I've had to do all types of selling but they've all had a common component, which is that I started off from scratch.

People always tell me, I get emails every day, like today, yesterday, the day before, tomorrow, somebody will say, "I'm 22 years old," or, "I'm 21 years old. I don't know what to do with my life and I'm messed up, because I don't have a college degree yet, what should I do? Am I totally lost, because I don't have a degree yet, or I didn't have a graduate degree or haven't sold a company like you have," or whatever? And I tell these people, you've got to back off completely, because none of these things . . . you know, the one thing they never taught me in school was how to sell.

Did anyone ever take a class in school . . . I mean, some of you might have, if you have MBAs maybe you, have taken a class from some nobody who taught you how to sell. Has anybody actually taken a class on how to sell, and did it actually teach you how to sell? Were you actually able to use those techniques? Yeah, some of them. So I've never had a class in how to sell and I was a computer science major, so all I knew how to do was stare at a computer screen and do the opposite of selling. I would run the other way when people would talk to me except for girls.

So one time I was in a really bad shape. I had sold a business . . . I'm going to skip right into the part where I not only had zero credentials; I had negative credentials. So I had sold a business and this was my web- design business. And then another thing that I was really bad at was money. I know absolutely nothing about money and suddenly, I had all this money. So what did I do? I spent all of it, every single dime.

So there was one point, this was the summer of 2001. And I'm not even bragging because of the final outcome of this story, but cash, I lost about a million dollars a week for the entire summer. And at the end of that summer I was like, "This sucks. This is really bad. I have about $143 in my ATM account and I used to have $15 million." And I had won the lottery. I'm never ever going to make this money back.

And I called my parents to borrow $1000 because I was losing my house; I had to sell my house. And my parents said, "No, we paid for college, we're not . . ." And I said, "We need diaper money for my kids," so I hung up. I was upset, I hung up the phone and six months go by. They tried calling, I never spoke to them I was really upset. And my dad had a stroke and died. So it was a little bit of a joke but not funny.

So I lost all this money and I was really upset and I said to myself, "You know what? Okay." Here's another thing I know how to do which is write software. That was what my training was. So I wrote this software to model the stock market and I wrote all these computer programs to trade a little bit.

And so I decided, "Okay, I lost $15 million in the stock market. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to make a business managing other people's money. Perfect!" Perfect thing. So not only did I have no credentials, I had negative credentials. So what am I possibly going to say to somebody who says, "Tell me about your track record." I have nothing good to say at all.

So I did start managing my own money and I was doing okay. And then I tried the worst selling technique of all: I read every book I could find on the stock market, I studied everything, and I was trading. I decided I was really going to try to get good at this. I read the history of every stock exchange, read all this economic stuff. I knew nothing. So I was giving myself a really intense graduate course in the stock market on my own. There was no school I could go to, there was no job that would accept me where I could learn. Literally, I couldn't. I was completely unemployable. After having sold a business, I was completely unemployable because of what had happened.

So at this point I built up a list of people I wanted to meet who I thought maybe could mentor me in this completely new business for me. Again, I was completely new. So I wrote 20 emails out to my 20 heroes in the industry and I said, "I'd really like to have 20 minutes of your time. Could I buy you a cup of coffee?" Which is the absolute worst sales technique you can do. These guys were billionaires; do you think they really needed a cup of coffee? They're like, "Hold everything! James Altucher is going to buy me a cup of coffee. I've never heard of this guy at all and I'm going to go downstairs right now and have a cup of coffee with him. Stop the whole business."

So nobody responded to me, zero. And I did it again. And I'm like, "Why didn't anybody respond to me?" I did it again. I wrote 20 more emails to 20 new people and, again, nobody responded to me. So finally I did something, which always works now, and I do it until this day. It always works. I wrote down 10 ideas for each person I was going to write. "So here are 10 ideas for you to improve your business." "Here are 10 ideas for you to improve your business." "Here are 10 ideas for you to improve your business."

Like for instance, Warren Buffett. "Here are 10 businesses you should buy." He never responded to me. But, that's okay he didn't respond to me. I sent out 20 emails again, and again I thought long and hard. I wanted to have good ideas. I thought long and hard and I really researched every person. Here are 10 ideas for each person. And I sent those ideas out and I said, "I just want you to do this. I'm not asking for anything." I didn't even ask for the cup of coffee, nothing.

So two people responded. And the two people really changed my life. And this, by the way, I say they changed my life. My life now changes every six months because I'm always doing this. Every day I'm doing this. So one person who responded was Jim Cramer. I gave him 10 ideas for articles he should write. I didn't say anything; I said I started this little web design business. I don't know anything else, but here are 10 ideas I would love to read if you wrote. And he wrote back and said, "Why don't you write these ideas for us? These are great ideas. Why don't you write them for us?"

So I started writing for thestreet.com, which led to . . . I had my foot in the door all of the sudden. So I didn't get any money writing for them but then a few years later, I started writing more for them. And I held my hand out and I started pitching more ideas to them, more types of articles I should write. Then they started paying me per article. Then they started paying me to do a newsletter, so I had subscribers. Then I built a business that they partnered in, and I'll get to that later if we have time. And eventually, four months after launching that business, I sold it to them for $10 million, which was a whole story. Maybe we'll get to it.

But it was that initial letter, though, where I got my foot in the door. I got somebody to say yes to me and by just giving as much as I could. These 10 ideas, he could've written a book on each one of them and would've done well. So I started writing for them, started building a fan base of readers at thestreet.com, people really liked stocks and stuff. And then I continued building a fan base as the editors went to the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal; I started writing for all of these places. Yahoo Finance started building the brand. And then, again, more and more getting in the door, offering more and more services and then eventually building a business that I partnered with them on and then they had to buy the business.

So it started with giving, getting to yes, offering more services, and then really building wealth. So you kind of can't do that in reverse. You can't start with wealth and "yes" at the end and giving at the end. You have to start with the giving.

The other person who responded to me was a very well known hedge fund manager. And what I did was I gave him 10 software programs and I said, "I've been successfully trading these software programs. I know you trade based on software, so here's all of my code for free. I'm wiping myself out; I'm putting myself out of business by giving you this code for free. So feel free to use it, do whatever you want, have your guys test it, anything."

And so, he invited me out to his house. And when I say his house, it was like the Ewing compound from Dallas or something. So you go into his house, there's a basketball court in the house. There's another room, a Ping-Pong room, a tennis court literally in the house. And one room was a room filled with toys from 1848. It was a little weird museum. Then another room had all these weird artifacts, like he had the Ted Kennedy's police testimony of the day at Chappaquiddick in 1969. All this weird stuff was hanging on the walls.

So I started to build a relationship with this guy. He started basically trading on my ideas. I would email him all my trading stuff every morning, and eventually he took me out to dinner to meet his wife and another dinner to meet his mistress. It was all good. And I read every book that I knew was his favorite book. So I was quoting from his favorite books. They actually were good books; I wasn't being disingenuous. I liked the books, too. I found academic papers he had written in the '60s that I was referring to, and I would write software around his papers to prove his points with modern day software.

So I was really providing above and beyond service for nothing, and eventually he gave me money to manage. And he said, "I want you to manage my money and I don't want to pay you anything." So I did my typical negotiation strategy, which was I said yes. So that was it. I got to the yes with him. If he said, "I'll pay you a billion dollars," I would've said yes to that. If he said, "I'll pay you zero," I said yes to that. I just wanted to get to yes.

Now my foot's in the door. So now I was trading the personal money of this famous hedge fund manager. So now I'm able to call every other hedge fund manager and say, "Here's my track record trading for this guy. Do you want to meet?"

And the typical thing would happen which is that for every 20 emails, roughly-I kind of have this complicated ratio- but for every 20 emails, six people would respond, four people would want to meet, one to two will actually want to do business with you. And that ratio tends to hold up over time. And so I was sending emails out constantly, and I was starting to manage more and more money until I built up a hedge fund.

One thing led to another and I gave up that business completely, but that was an example of sales. So I'll tell you one story with this guy. So one time, right after my dad died, I'll get into that story again, this guy calls me up. And he sort of felt paternal to me at this point because he knew what I was going through. And so he invited me to dinner at the Four Seasons, and his mistress was going to be there, his daughter was going to be there, a couple of other people were going to be there.

And I was really upset and in a bad place because of my dad's situation. I had just dropped off his car at the car dealership and explained what happened and gave them back the keys. And so I started drinking a little too much at this dinner. And so at one point, I'm sitting right next to the mistress and across from me is the daughter. So I say to the daughter, "Well, what do you think of the fact that your dad and the mistress are out in the open now?" Which I don't know what I was thinking would be the response here.

And so the daughter turns to the mistress and says, "Well, I think she's a money-hungry slut." And the daughter gets out and walks out of the Four Seasons. The mistress starts crying, the hedge fund manager is like, "What happened here?" And that was the beginning of the end of my relationship with that hedge fund manager.

So that was an example of bad sales. Actually, that was anti-sales. You've you always got to cultivate a relationship all the way through. So I don't' drink alcohol anymore. But I can just go on and on but for me, those two instances, Jim Cramer and this guy, were the base cases where I had no credentials at all. No one ever asked me my credentials, either. It's not like anyone came back to me and said, "Oh, did you go to a community college, or did you graduate high school, or anything like that?"

No one came back and asked me that. No one asked me if I ever worked at Goldman Sachs or anything or an investment bank. No one asked me anything, actually. I was giving so they were taking. They were happy. I was giving so much that there was no time for them to ask. And it's repeated over and over again.

So I'll tell you about thestreet.com and the business I started and selling that. And again, it's a similar type of process. So the CEO of thestreet.com calls me up and says, "Let's have our annual breakfast." This was several years later. "Let's have our annual breakfast and share some ideas." We scheduled it out for two weeks form then.

So I went out that day, and I always carry waiter's pads. You can buy them on the web at any kind of restaurant supply website. It's 10 cents a pad. It's really hard to right extensive. You can't write a novel on a waiter's pad; it's just made for lists. So it's a really great tool for just writing down ideas. Plus, I'm really, bad at remembering names so at the top, you can't really see, but there are the different shapes of tables with numbers. So if I'm at a meeting, I could write down, oh, the table looks like this diagonal here, and here's who's sitting around the table. So it's really good for that. So I have thousands of these, because you can buy them for 10 cents a pad.

So I made this appointment with the CEO of thestreet.com, and I started thinking, "What am I going to come up with?" I already told him I had tons of ideas but I had none. So I started coming up with ideas. And one idea I thought was really good. It was a social network for finance. And at that point, MySpace had just gotten bought for $500 million by NewsCorp. Facebook was on the rise.

So I went to meet him. Oh, no. No. I didn't go to meet him yet. So that afternoon I called up some programmers in India. How did I meet them? Craigslist. So I called up some programmers in India and I said, "I'm totally spec'ing this out, I don't want you to write any software. I just need screenshots within four days." And I spec'd out the whole site. They sent me screen shots for everything. I didn't like them.

They sent back a new batch and I said, "If I like them, I'll hire you to program it up." So I liked them. Then I went to go meet Tom, who's a very good friend of mine now. He was the CEO of thestreet.com then. And he said, "So what are you working on?" And I said, "Well, I'm done with this site practically. I'm curious what your opinion is, but it's already off the ground practically."

And so I showed him those screenshots. And he's like, "James, how could you do this without us? We're like family?" So I said, "Okay, I would really like to do this with you. But you have to..." I wasn't horrible at negotiating here.

I said, "Look, what I really need is I need to have every single page of your site linked to this new site that I'm developing. It's going to be a really great benefit for your users. And I need to have ads. I have four spots for ads on this site. You have a really good ad sales team; I have no ad sales team. I need your ad sales team to fill up all of the inventory on my site from day on when we launch."

And he said, "Okay, done." And so I knew I'd be profitable from day one, so I had no problem paying to build the website.

And then I'm like, "Okay, so I was thinking you guys could own 3% of the company." And he said, "Nah, I'm thinking 50%." And I did my typical negotiating technique. "Yes." Which turned out to be really smart. You know what's funny? I actually had an employee at the time that, when he heard that, he quit. He wrote me this big, four-page letter. Are you in the audience, my ex-employee? He wrote me this big, four-page letter. And he said, "Not only am I quitting your company, I'm quitting you." He was really angry.

But there were blogs even that came out because the deal got announced, and they had to do an SEC filing. The deal got announced and people were really wondering, "Why, did James give up 50%? Was that smart?" And it turned out, actually, it's incredibly smart to give up 50% as opposed to 3% because once a big company owns 50% of your company, they're involved. It's their reputation at stake. If they only own 3% and it doesn't work out, all right, big deal." And I actually saw lots of instances of this.

So we announced that we did this partnership, and immediately I needed to do something, which was sell the company. Because I really hate running any kind of company. It really sucks running companies. So I immediately said, "Okay, well, my 50% of this company is for sale." I went to AOL, Google, Yahoo, Forbes, Reuters, IACI, and I went to all the heads of M&A.

And I said, "Look, I've got the best site. We're profitable, we've got millions of users," this was all true. "We've got millions of users. We're profitable. We're the only site kind of like MySpace meets finance." I know MySpace, you make fun of it, but back then that was the word. And I couldn't' say Facebook meets social finance yet because that was just college students, or just transitioning from college students.

So I met with everybody, and it was really exciting to meet everybody. I particularly loved Google. I had to sign this document as soon as I entered into Google headquarters like, "You're never allowed to talk about what you see here again." So I'm extending that signature to you guys here. I can trust you all. But they didn't buy the company, though, because I didn't have enough programmers.

But I did start creating an auction environment. And literally, Jim Cramer said, "Look, we can't have AOL buy half this company that we own, so we have to buy the other half." So right away they just bought the other half. I worked there for a few years as an employee after they bought the company, and then left. Or was fired.

But that's a long story, too. So in general, again, they did very well with it. They sold all the ads on it. We did have millions of users. I think they're still running it. I don't know. I haven't been to the site in years. It's funny actually-not so funny-but the biggest user of the site, and he was always begging either me or Cramer to hire him, just got convicted of murder. So fortunately, I never hired him. But it was interesting actually. He admitted to killing someone in 1991, and he said-I saw the news clippings-he said he had completely gotten away with it but it was weighing too much on his conscious. He turned himself in, and now he's got 30 years to life. So good.

So I don't know what time it is, because I know there's a time limit. I'm just going to check my phone for the time. 2:40. Good.

So, again, these were examples. There were similarities between all these types of sales, which is you give, then you get someone to say yes so your foot is in the door. You do anything you can to get the yes. And then I would always over-deliver. I kind of left this part out. I would always over-deliver at least initially. I would work so hard to over-deliver. Just do something that they didn't expect.

So for instance, I'll just tell you on StockPicker as an example, the day the deal was announced, the day we officially launched our partnership, I released a whole new section of the site that they weren't even expecting, which was a Q & A. Almost like a Quora-like sub-site within the site. And that doubled our traffic almost overnight. They were completely not expecting it. So I always made an attempt when I was first building a relationship... and all through the relationship really, but it's easiest to do when you're first building the relationship is to surprise and delight. Always give extra services.

So when I was in the web design business in the 90's, we did Miramax.com, New Line, Fine Line, Warner Brothers, we did all the movie studios that were based in New York. We did all the record labels based in New York. So our sector was the entertainment industry. No matter what, we always over-delivered on every site that we spec'd out. Every time we had a meeting with the client, there were always extra things. So nobody could ever complain, "Oh this isn't what we asked for," because we always delivered more. And so that was an important part of being a trusted source so that people would continue to use our services on the next site.

The great thing about entertainment companies is that they never had just one client. Like a record client didn't have just the Wu-Tang Clan, they also had Mobb Deep. So I would do the Wu-Tang Clan, then Mobb Deep would sort of show up in my office. And literally guns out to here, pants down, guns out to here, and then we would do their website. Trent Reznor would stop by and we would do his website. We did all the websites of every musician. We did every Interscope Records group, everything.

And as Michael was saying earlier, once a guy would leave one company and go to the next record label, because there was enormous churn in that industry, suddenly we would be doing all of their websites as well. It was all about relationships. And in the record industry, it was all about giving bribes, which is really true. I hired everybody's cousin in the industry. They were all working in some room in the back doing something, but I hired them all. That was part of the sales effort as well, the extra service that you offer to the client. So I'll hire your cousin. I'll hire your sister, that was HBO. I'll hire your cousin, that was Loud Records. I'll hire I-don't-know-who-the-hell-he-is- to-you, but that was Death Row Records. Con Edison, I'll hire your brother.

So I always used Miramax.com and HBO to get Con Edison. So Miramax.com, we did that website for $1000 bucks. Con Edison, we would do it for $250,000. Same size website, but it was always the entertainment sites that would keep my employees happy, and the customers would say, "We want it just like that." because they all want to be cool in the entertainment industry. So Con Edison, American Express, all these corporate websites we were also able to do because we did for almost nothing all of these entertainment websites. And trying to get a record label to pay you at the end of the day is almost impossible. So we had to make our money somewhere.

So again, more examples of sales. Yeah, I do have a website at jamesaltucher.com. And then also I have a lot of . . . I just released a book on Monday called, Choose Yourself. So you should read that. You should all by it right now. That's a bad sales technique. So another question.

Female: This doesn't really pertain to sales, but I was wondering if you've ever done stand-up or have considered doing stand-up comedy because you're really funny.

James Altucher: Thank you. And I have, actually, but one part that's very important to me...and Michael before was referring to this, is health. And I go to sleep at about 8:30pm every night. And I stay very disciplined about that. I was at a dinner last night. A friend of mine had his 50th birthday party. It was a surprise party and he was late. And it was getting to be about 8:00, 8:15pm. Finally, he shows up and I shook his hand and I'm like, "I got to go," because I go to sleep at 8:30pm. And his wife was very upset that I was going because everything was catered, and I don't know what. They're never going to talk to me again now.

So he has an interesting story. This guy wrote Freakonomics, actually. Very good guy, very good book. I highly recommend that book. That's a better sales technique. And I'll tell you why that's a better sales technique. What I try to do always is emulate people or even things that are better than me. So one thing that is a lot better than me is Google.

Google is so smart and great and cool that I can't even compare myself to Google. But I will for a second. This is a very powerful sales technique, and Google does it a billion times a day. So if I go to Google and I say, "Google, I want you to tell me everything about motorcycles." Google will say, "I'll be honest with you, I'm just a blank page with an entry form in it. I don't' know anything about motorcycles. But here's 10 other competitive websites-because I'm a website, these are my competitors-here's 10 other websites you, should go to as quickly as possible, and they're going to be so much smarter about motorcycles than I am. You should really check them out. And by the way, here are three other sites about motorcycles. But I'm just going to be honest, they're paying me to tell you that."

So Google is fantastic. If you just did that in every sales meeting, you'll be like a mini-Google. Google is worth $200 billion. So if you could be even a mini-Google, it really works. And I'm telling you for a fact, it really works.

So I had a company recently come to me and say, "We're a staffing company. We do temporary staffing, and we don't know anything about technology or being a public company and so on." And I said, "Well, that's great. I don't know anything about your industry." They were light industrial, which means mostly factory workers. It turned out upon questioning that they were more than that.

So I started questioning them and I realized they were positioning their business completely wrong. And I said, "I'm happy to give you free help on this phone call, because you're positioning your whole company completely wrong, which is why nobody knows who you are." I said, "Who is your bank?" They said, "We keep our money at XYZ bank."

And I'm like, "No, who's your investment bank?" And so I said, "I'll introduce you to an investment bank. I'll introduce you to a top law firm." And they said, "This is phenomenal. Can we talk to you again about this?" And I said, "No. Just go to these guys. They'll help you out with everything." So a week later, they called me up again and they said, "We really want to continue the discussion we had with you. We wrote down everything, we learned so much." And I said, "No, really, you're downtown. I don't' really want to go over there."

So we talked some more though, and I gave them some more ideas. I introduced them to the founder of some job site, and he's helping them. And I introduced them to the ex-CEO of thestreet.com. He went on their board. And they called me again and they said, "Look, you've given us so much. We'd really like to put you on our board." And I said, "Look, I'll help you but you're going to have to negotiate with this other guy because I can't negotiate." So I introduced them to a guy who's a good negotiator. He's an asshole, but he's a good negotiator. So he got us a phenomenal deal after on the third time I said no. And that was another example of a sales technique where I was trying to be a mini-Google. And that really worked.

So again, all of these things I'm telling you, I don't' know whether or not they'll work for you, but they work for me really, really well. And throughout all of this time, I kept going bankrupt. I kept losing all of my money. It's like I'm a functional idiot. So after I sold StockPicker, I had all this money again, and within less than a year, I was again dead broke. And I'm not only dead broke but I lost the house again.

I was getting divorced and I decided I was lonely. So I did what I usually do, which is I put an ad on Craigslist. And I said specifically, "I'm a psychic," which is a lie, "and if anybody has any problem at all, just for the next six hours, I will answer your questions with my psychic powers." And I should mention it was Thanksgiving. So I got a turkey sandwich because I was totally blah. I got my turkey sandwich and I got hundreds of emails. I ignored all the emails from men, only focused on the female emails, the femails. And I still have some lasting friendships from that. So you might wonder, though. So whenever I tell this story, people always ask me, "Well, did you have sex with any of these women?" And I'm like, "Look at me. No, of course not." But more Q & A. Yes?

Female: [Inaudible 00:36:18] creation of random genius. What gets you in the flow of channeling the randomness?

James Altucher: Okay. So how do you come up with ideas is very critical to the sales process because of what I mentioned about giving as part of the sales process. Giving ideas just to get to a yes, because that's the first step. You just want someone to say yes to you, but if people are ignoring you they're not going to say yes.

So the idea muscle...you ever read Stephen King's book, On Writing? It's a great book about writing. Stephen King, that's his best book, actually. His best-written book is his book on writing. So he talks about how he was in a car accident and two things: one is he was in the hospital bed for two weeks and he needed physical therapy after that to even walk again. Just two weeks, your leg muscles atrophy. The other thing is he said he tried writing again after two weeks of stopping writing and he couldn't write. He said it specifically, "I couldn't put words together." This is Stephen King, the best-selling author of all time.

Ideas are the same way. If you're not coming up with 10 ideas a day, that's why I have this thing. If I'm filling up this page every single day, then my idea muscle will atrophy. I started this in 2001, and I still do it every single day. You have to come up with ideas every single day or the idea muscle atrophies. The good news is after about six months of doing that, you're a machine. People get surprised at how many ideas you can just have anywhere. You're car breaks down in the middle of the desert, suddenly helicopters are picking you up because you had an idea how to signal through outer space or something to get it. You'll have ideas all the time. It's great. I highly encourage people to do that, and to build the idea muscle is the first part of that sales process. Yes?

Male: Simple. I've been thoroughly brainwashed to follow social norms and conventions. How can I unlearn those things to become more successful?

James Altucher: Okay. So every rule, every rule we've ever been taught is completely fake. So for instance, my 11-year-old comes up to me, "Don't you need to go to college to get a job?" And I'm like, "Who even told you this?" And she said somewhere she absorbed it, her teachers, whoever. I'm not going to put that on my ex-wife. So of course you don't need college. A lot of people think also owning a home is the best investment. There are all these rules that we've been taught. They're all man-made. They're all fake. The phrase, "The American Dream," for instance, comes from a 1960s ad campaign put out by Fannie Mae to convince people to buy homes. So that was the American Dream, the white picket fence, which is actually a prison so you can't be mobile to work at multiple jobs. So if you're stuck in one place, your income automatically is going to go down.

So how do you unlearn the rules, how do you write your own rules? And again, Michael said something very strong in the last talk, which is it really starts with the basics-and this is really important-which is being physically healthy, which means sleeping well, eating well and so on. Being emotionally healthy and people underestimate this, but you really can't be around negative people or people who are going to put you down. Who's going to put you down? It's not the neighbor down the street; it's your mother. It's true. Or it's your friend or your colleague. And if they want to engage with you in the negativity, you can't argue with them. You're like, "Okay. I hear you. I'm going to eat my food now," or whatever.

So it's like for instance, I did a Reddit AMA. You know, one of those things; it's like a Q & A thing. And you see all the time people are trying to say negative stuff just to get you sucked in. You see it on the Internet all the time. They call it Internet trolls. You never, ever respond to any of that. Nothing ever good, no life will ever be saved by responding to someone who's negative to you. This is very important.

Then the next step obviously is to surround yourself with completely positive people who are inspiring to you or supportive of you. That works very well. Then building the idea muscle; that is extremely important because you start to realize, "Hmm, I had these ideas that go against conventional norms." Well, that's because these are good ideas and conventional norms are almost, by definition, bad ideas. Every breakthrough in the history of mankind, somebody did something completely unobvious the second before that breakthrough. So you have to change your mind set to come up with the unobvious all the time. It's a practice.

And then spiritual. Michael defined his spiritual practice. Mine is every day I wake up and literally just list all the things I'm grateful for. Because then your body just feels good, and it's a good way to wake up. And it's better than thinking, "Oh my gosh, I only have $143 in the bank." When you think about whom you're grateful for, I don't give a shit about them. I just care about how my body is feeling while I'm thinking about it. And it feels better than being anxious, which happens all the time when you wake up at 3:00 in the morning or whatever.

So also the other thing is when I wake up at three in the morning and I am anxious, because my mind is playing, it's the only time it's allowed to come out and play. Is I say, "Listen, you might be right, mind, but let's schedule an appointment for 3:00 pm today instead of 3:00 am because I'm not really awake yet. And at 3:00 pm, I'll talk to you about it." And at 3:00 pm, I'm never worried about what I was worried about at 3:00 am. It works like clockwork. So that's the start of that. So I have one minute left, so time for one more question. Yes.

Male: Once you get a deal made, how do you go about making sure that you've pleased your client and that you make sure you don't miss any deadlines or that you make sure that everything is kept on track?

James Altucher: Why didn't you ask me this at dinner the other night?

Male: I should've. I ran out of time.

James Altucher: So how do you execute basically?

Male: Yeah.

James Altucher: So it's like your brother, you have a team. You have people who help you. You know this as well as I do. I just had a book come out Monday, so I'm good at the writing part. I don't know how to design a hardcover. I don't know how to do the interior design. I'm not actually that good at picking the title of a book. I'm not that great at marketing. I didn't know how to make an audio book. I didn't know how to do anything, so I outsourced every single piece of that.

And, by the way, I also got a pre-order of 5000 copies of the hardcover to completely pay for all of the expenses I had on the book. So the book itself, to publish it, I self- published, cost $30,000 about, give or take. I completely pre-ordered to get more than that and then on top of that, I also made more than that just from the marketing that I outsourced. So to Mr. Ryan Holiday, whom you know well. So does that answer?

Okay, thank you very much. I didn't recognize you were in the audience. Thank you very much.

Male: This next speaker, I'm super excited about and I'll tell you why. Raise your hand if you've ever felt like you're not sure if you have the credentials to be doing what you're doing. A lot of you, right? Well, our next speaker is James Altucher. He is an American hedge fund manager, entrepreneur and author. He's founded or co-founded over 20 companies, including Reset Inc. and StockPicker. He's published 11 books and is a frequent contributor to publications like the Financial Times, The Street, Tech Crunch, Seeking Alpha, and the Huffington Post.

Now, why I'm so excited about having him here today is because he recently had a new book come out on Amazon called Choose Yourself. And this is all about skipping that whole credential thing and just picking yourself as the answer. So I'm really happy to invite him to come speak and share his story with you and talk about this whole idea of Choose Yourself. So James, come on up. Okay, thank you.

James Altucher: This is a very small stage and I've been known to actually fall off stages. So just in case I do, watch out in the front. I'll try to aim this way if I fall. So Derek told me where this was going to be . . . I almost got worried about, falling backwards . . . Derek told me where this was going to be and I'm like, "Motivo," I just love that name. It's like a super-villain that I've never heard of, like the Great Motivo.

So I'm about to come over here. I'm getting up to go, and my wife says, "Where are you going?" I'm going over to Motivo. Motivo is crushing New York City. I've got to be a superhero and battle Motivo now.

So early on in life, I learned all of the things I was really horrible at and how I had to compensate for them. I was really horrible at negotiating, for instance. I was really horrible at . . . and I never got better. I'm a horrible negotiator. If I'm selling a car and I say, "It's $10,000," and you say, "Oh I'll pay you $2000." Done deal. You can take it.

I never get better, I don't know why. People don't really change that much, in general. You can change in increments but it's hard to go from $10,000 to $2000 and make a big change. So it's hard for me to get better at negotiation. I'm also really horrible . . . I'm not very organized, so I always need help with details. I've run a bunch, of business; I cannot get details straight. I'm really bad at follow-up. Fortunately, this conference was right after Derek asked me to speak at it or else I would not have been able to follow up properly and there would just be nobody here right now. So Derek is good at following up, so he kept following up and he was very good.

So I'm bad at that. But one thing I learned I was good at very early on-and this totally has to do with sex-is that I was really good at sales. Because when you look like this, you have to be good at salesmanship. And then closing the deal once you have your foot in the door, and then providing additional services. I learned all of this at the age of 12.

So I had to keep improving on it and that's fortunately how I built all kinds of business and I've done all sorts of sales. And when I was thinking about this talk, I realized there was a lot in common . . . even though the types of sales I was doing were all different, there was a lot in common. And I'm going to talk about some of that commonality.

But I had a web-design business, for instance, in the '90s, so I had to be able to sell our services to people who didn't even know what a website was at that point, like '94, '95, '96.

I had a B to C site where I had to sell to millions of consumers but also sell to advertisers, so I sat on both sides of that. I've had to sell companies, which is a whole different type of sales process. I've had to sell myself in the sense that I was at one point starting a hedge fund so I had to convince people that it's safe for them to put money with me.

I had to interrupt myself for a second. I've had to sell books; I've had to sell my services to places I wanted to write for. So I've had to do all types of selling but they've all had a common component, which is that I started off from scratch.

People always tell me, I get emails every day, like today, yesterday, the day before, tomorrow, somebody will say, "I'm 22 years old," or, "I'm 21 years old. I don't know what to do with my life and I'm messed up, because I don't have a college degree yet, what should I do? Am I totally lost, because I don't have a degree yet, or I didn't have a graduate degree or haven't sold a company like you have," or whatever. And I tell these people, you've got to back off completely, because none of these things . . . you know, the one thing they never taught me in school was how to sell.

Did anyone ever take a class in school . . . I mean, some of you might have, if you have MBAs maybe you, have taken a class from some nobody who taught you how to sell. Has anybody actually taken a class on how to sell, and did it actually teach you how to sell? Were you actually able to use those techniques? Yeah, some of them. So I've never had a class in how to sell and I was a computer science major, so all I knew how to do was stare at a computer screen and do the opposite of selling. I would run the other, way when people would talk to me except for girls.

So one time I was in a really bad shape. I had sold a business . . . I'm going to skip right into the part where I not only had zero credentials; I had negative credentials. So I had sold a business and this was my web- design business. And then another thing that I was really bad at was money. I know absolutely nothing about money and suddenly, I had all this money. So what did I do? I spent all of it, every single dime.

So there was one point, this was the summer of 2001. And I'm not even bragging because of the final outcome of this story, but cash, I lost about a million dollars a week for the entire summer. And at the end of that summer I was like, "This sucks. This is really bad. I have about $143 in my ATM account and I used to have $15 million." And I had won the lottery. I'm never ever going to make this money back.

And I called my parents to borrow $1000 because I was losing my house; I had to sell my house. And my parents said, "No, we paid for college, we're not . . ." And I said, "We need diaper money for my kids," so I hung up. I was upset, I hung up the phone and six months go by. They tried calling, I never spoke to them I was really upset. And my dad had a stroke and died. So it was a little bit of a joke but not funny.

So I lost all this money and I was really upset and I said to myself, "You know what? Okay." Here's another thing I know how to do which is write software. That was what my training was. So I wrote this software to model the stock market and I wrote all these computer programs to trade a little bit.

And so I decided, "Okay, I lost $15 million in the stock market. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to make a business managing other people's money. Perfect!" Perfect thing. So not only did I have no credentials, I had negative credentials. So what am I possibly going to say to somebody who says, "Tell me about your track record." I have nothing good to say at all.

So I did start managing my own money and I was doing okay. And then I tried the worst selling technique of all: I read every book I could find on the stock market, I studied everything, and I was trading. I decided I was really going to try to get good at this. I read the history of every stock exchange, read all this economic stuff. I knew nothing. So I was giving myself a really intense graduate course in the stock market on my own. There was no school I could go to, there was no job that would accept me where I could learn. Literally, I couldn't. I was completely unemployable. After having sold a business, I was completely unemployable because of what had happened.

So at this point I built up a list of people I wanted to meet who I thought maybe could mentor me in this completely new business for me. Again, I was completely new. So I wrote 20 emails out to my 20 heroes in the industry and I said, "I'd really like to have 20 minutes of your time. Could I buy you a cup of coffee?" Which is the absolute worst sales technique you can do. These guys were billionaires; do you think they really needed a cup of coffee? They're like, "Hold everything! James Altucher is going to buy me a cup of coffee. I've never heard of this guy at all and I'm going to go downstairs right now and have a cup of coffee with him. Stop the whole business."

So nobody responded to me, zero. And I did it again. And I'm like, "Why didn't anybody respond to me?" I did it again. I wrote 20 more emails to 20 new people and, again, nobody responded to me. So finally I did something, which always works now, and I do it until this day. It always works. I wrote down 10 ideas for each person I was going to write. "So here are 10 ideas for you to improve your business." "Here are 10 ideas for you to improve your business." "Here are 10 ideas for you to improve your business."

Like for instance, Warren Buffett. "Here are 10 businesses you should buy." He never responded to me. But, that's okay he didn't respond to me. I sent out 20 emails again, and again I thought long and hard. I wanted to have good ideas. I thought long and hard and I really researched every person. Here are 10 ideas for each person. And I sent those ideas out and I said, "I just want you to do this. I'm not asking for anything." I didn't even ask for the cup of coffee, nothing.

So two people responded. And the two people really changed my life. And this, by the way, I say they changed my life. My life now changes every six months because I'm always doing this. Every day I'm doing this. So one person who responded was Jim Cramer. I gave him 10 ideas for articles he should write. I didn't say anything; I said I started this little web design business. I don't know anything else, but here are 10 ideas I would love to read if you wrote. And he wrote back and said, "Why don't you write these ideas for us? These are great ideas. Why don't you write them for us?"

So I started writing for thestreet.com, which led to . . . I had my foot in the door all of the sudden. So I didn't get any money writing for them but then a few years later, I started writing more for them. And I held my hand out and I started pitching more ideas to them, more types of articles I should write. Then they started paying me per article. Then they started paying me to do a newsletter, so I had subscribers. Then I built a business that they partnered in, and I'll get to that later if we have time. And eventually, four months after launching that business, I sold it to them for $10 million, which was a whole story. Maybe we'll get to it.

But it was that initial letter, though, where I got my foot in the door. I got somebody to say yes to me and by just giving as much as I could. These 10 ideas, he could've written a book on each one of them and would've done well. So I started writing for them, started building a fan base of readers at thestreet.com, people really liked stocks and stuff. And then I continued building a fan base as the editors went to the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal; I started writing for all of these places. Yahoo Finance started building the brand. And then, again, more and more getting in the door, offering more and more services and then eventually building a business that I partnered with them on and then they had to buy the business.

So it started with giving, getting to yes, offering more services, and then really building wealth. So you kind of can't do that in reverse. You can't start with wealth and "yes" at the end and giving at the end. You have to start with the giving.

The other person who responded to me was a very well known hedge fund manager. And what I did was I gave him 10 software programs and I said, "I've been successfully trading these software programs. I know you trade based on software, so here's all of my code for free. I'm wiping myself out; I'm putting myself out of business by giving you this code for free. So feel free to use it, do whatever you want, have your guys test it, anything."

And so, he invited me out to his house. And when I say his house, it was like the Ewing compound from Dallas or something. So you go into his house, there's a basketball court in the house. There's another room, a Ping-Pong room, a tennis court literally in the house. And one room was a room filled with toys from 1848. It was a little weird museum. Then another room had all these weird artifacts, like he had the Ted Kennedy's police testimony of the day at Chappaquiddick in 1969. All this weird stuff was hanging on the walls.

So I started to build a relationship with this guy. He started basically trading on my ideas. I would email him all my trading stuff every morning, and eventually he took me out to dinner to meet his wife and another dinner to meet his mistress. It was all good. And I read every book that I knew was his favorite book. So I was quoting from his favorite books. They actually were good books; I wasn't being disingenuous. I liked the books, too. I found academic papers he had written in the '60s that I was referring to, and I would write software around his papers to prove his points with modern day software.

So I was really providing above and beyond service for nothing, and eventually he gave me money to manage. And he said, "I want you to manage my money and I don't want to pay you anything." So I did my typical negotiation strategy, which was I said yes. So that was it. I got to the yes with him. If he said, "I'll pay you a billion dollars," I would've said yes to that. If he said, "I'll pay you zero," I said yes to that. I just wanted to get to yes.

Now my foot's in the door. So now I was trading the personal money of this famous hedge fund manager. So now I'm able to call every other hedge fund manager and say, "Here's my track record trading for this guy. Do you want to meet?"

And the typical thing would happen which is that for every 20 emails, roughly-I kind of have this complicated ratio- but for every 20 emails, six people would respond, four people would want to meet, one to two will actually want to do business with you. And that ratio tends to hold up over time. And so I was sending emails out constantly, and I was starting to manage more and more money until I built up a hedge fund.

One thing led to another and I gave up that business completely, but that was an example of sales. So I'll tell you one story with this guy. So one time, right after my dad died, I'll get into that story again, this guy calls me up. And he sort of felt paternal to me at this point because he knew what I was going through. And so he invited me to dinner at the Four Seasons, and his mistress was going to be there, his daughter was going to be there, a couple of other people were going to be there.

And I was really upset and in a bad place because of my dad's situation. I had just dropped off his car at the car dealership and explained what happened and gave them back the keys. And so I started drinking a little too much at this dinner. And so at one point, I'm sitting right next to the mistress and across from me is the daughter. So I say to the daughter, "Well, what do you think of the fact that your dad and the mistress are out in the open now?" Which I don't know what I was thinking would be the response here.

And so the daughter turns to the mistress and says, "Well, I think she's a money-hungry slut." And the daughter gets out and walks out of the Four Seasons. The mistress starts crying, the hedge fund manager is like, "What happened here?" And that was the beginning of the end of my relationship with that hedge fund manager.

So that was an example of bad sales. Actually, that was anti-sales. You've you always got to cultivate a relationship all the way through. So I don't' drink alcohol anymore. But I can just go on and on but for me, those two instances, Jim Cramer and this guy, were the base cases where I had no credentials at all. No one ever asked me my credentials, either. It's not like anyone came back to me and said, "Oh, did you go to a community college, or did you graduate high school, or anything like that?"

No one came back and asked me that. No one asked me if I ever worked at Goldman Sachs or anything or an investment bank. No one asked me anything, actually. I was giving so they were taking. They were happy. I was giving so much that there was no time for them to ask. And it's repeated over and over again.

So I'll tell you about thestreet.com and the business I started and selling that. And again, it's a similar type of process. So the CEO of thestreet.com calls me up and says, "Let's have our annual breakfast." This was several years later. "Let's have our annual breakfast and share some ideas." We scheduled it out for two weeks form then.

So I went out that day, and I always carry waiter's pads. You can buy them on the web at any kind of restaurant supply website. It's 10 cents a pad. It's really hard to right extensive. You can't write a novel on a waiter's pad; it's just made for lists. So it's a really great tool for just writing down ideas. Plus, I'm really, bad at remembering names so at the top, you can't really see, but there are the different shapes of tables with numbers. So if I'm at a meeting, I could write down, oh, the table looks like this diagonal here, and here's who's sitting around the table. So it's really good for that. So I have thousands of these, because you can buy them for 10 cents a pad.

So I made this appointment with the CEO of thestreet.com, and I started thinking, "What am I going to come up with?" I already told him I had tons of ideas but I had none. So I started coming up with ideas. And one idea I thought was really good. It was a social network for finance. And at that point, MySpace had just gotten bought for $500 million by NewsCorp. Facebook was on the rise.

So I went to meet him. Oh, no. No. I didn't go to meet him yet. So that afternoon I called up some programmers in India. How did I meet them? Craigslist. So I called up some programmers in India and I said, "I'm totally spec'ing this out, I don't want you to write any software. I just need screenshots within four days." And I spec'd out the whole site. They sent me screen shots for everything. I didn't like them.

They sent back a new batch and I said, "If I like them, I'll hire you to program it up." So I liked them. Then I went to go meet Tom, who's a very good friend of mine now. He was the CEO of thestreet.com then. And he said, "So what are you working on?" And I said, "Well, I'm done with this site practically. I'm curious what your opinion is, but it's already off the ground practically."

And so I showed him those screenshots. And he's like, "James, how could you do this without us? We're like family?" So I said, "Okay, I would really like to do this with you. But you have to..." I wasn't horrible at negotiating here.

I said, "Look, what I really need is I need to have every single page of your site linked to this new site that I'm developing. It's going to be a really great benefit for your users. And I need to have ads. I have four spots for ads on this site. You have a really good ad sales team; I have no ad sales team. I need your ad sales team to fill up all of the inventory on my site from day on when we launch."

And he said, "Okay, done." And so I knew I'd be profitable from day one, so I had no problem paying to build the website.

And then I'm like, "Okay, so I was thinking you guys could own 3% of the company." And he said, "Nah, I'm thinking 50%." And I did my typical negotiating technique. "Yes." Which turned out to be really smart. You know what's funny? I actually had an employee at the time that, when he heard that, he quit. He wrote me this big, four-page letter. Are you in the audience, my ex-employee? He wrote me this big, four-page letter. And he said, "Not only am I quitting your company, I'm quitting you." He was really angry.

But there were blogs even that came out because the deal got announced, and they had to do an SEC filing. The deal got announced and people were really wondering, "Why, did James give up 50%? Was that smart?" And it turned out, actually, it's incredibly smart to give up 50% as opposed to 3% because once a big company owns 50% of your company, they're involved. It's their reputation at stake. If they only own 3% and it doesn't work out, all right, big deal." And I actually saw lots of instances of this.

So we announced that we did this partnership, and immediately I needed to do something, which was sell the company. Because I really hate running any kind of company. It really sucks running companies. So I immediately said, "Okay, well, my 50% of this company is for sale." I went to AOL, Google, Yahoo, Forbes, Reuters, IACI, and I went to all the heads of M&A.

And I said, "Look, I've got the best site. We're profitable, we've got millions of users," this was all true. "We've got millions of users. We're profitable. We're the only site kind of like MySpace meets finance." I know MySpace, you make fun of it, but back then that was the word. And I couldn't' say Facebook meets social finance yet because that was just college students, or just transitioning from college students.

So I met with everybody, and it was really exciting to meet everybody. I particularly loved Google. I had to sign this document as soon as I entered into Google headquarters like, "You're never allowed to talk about what you see here again." So I'm extending that signature to you guys here. I can trust you all. But they didn't buy the company, though, because I didn't have enough programmers.

But I did start creating an auction environment. And literally, Jim Cramer said, "Look, we can't have AOL buy half this company that we own, so we have to buy the other half." So right away they just bought the other half. I worked there for a few years as an employee after they bought the company, and then left. Or was fired.

But that's a long story, too. So in general, again, they did very well with it. They sold all the ads on it. We did have millions of users. I think they're still running it. I don't know. I haven't been to the site in years. It's funny actually-not so funny-but the biggest user of the site, and he was always begging either me or Cramer to hire him, just got convicted of murder. So fortunately, I never hired him. But it was interesting actually. He admitted to killing someone in 1991, and he said-I saw the news clippings-he said he had completely gotten away with it but it was weighing too much on his conscious. He turned himself in, and now he's got 30 years to life. So good.

So I don't know what time it is, because I know there's a time limit. I'm just going to check my phone for the time. 2:40. Good.

So, again, these were examples. There were similarities between all these types of sales, which is you give, then you get someone to say yes so your foot is in the door. You do anything you can to get the yes. And then I would always over-deliver. I kind of left this part out. I would always over-deliver at least initially. I would work so hard to over-deliver. Just do something that they didn't expect.

So for instance, I'll just tell you on StockPicker as an example, the day the deal was announced, the day we officially launched our partnership, I released a whole new section of the site that they weren't even expecting, which was a Q & A. Almost like a Quora-like sub-site within the site. And that doubled our traffic almost overnight. They were completely not expecting it. So I always made an attempt when I was first building a relationship... and all through the relationship really, but it's easiest to do when you're first building the relationship is to surprise and delight. Always give extra services.

So when I was in the web design business in the 90's, we did Miramax.com, New Line, Fine Line, Warner Brothers, we did all the movie studios that were based in New York. We did all the record labels based in New York. So our sector was the entertainment industry. No matter what, we always over-delivered on every site that we spec'd out. Every time we had a meeting with the client, there were always extra things. So nobody could ever complain, "Oh this isn't what we asked for," because we always delivered more. And so that was an important part of being a trusted source so that people would continue to use our services on the next site.

The great thing about entertainment companies is that they never had just one client. Like a record client didn't have just the Wu-Tang Clan, they also had Mobb Deep. So I would do the Wu-Tang Clan, then Mobb Deep would sort of show up in my office. And literally guns out to here, pants down, guns out to here, and then we would do their website. Trent Reznor would stop by and we would do his website. We did all the websites of every musician. We did every Interscope Records group, everything.

And as Michael was saying earlier, once a guy would leave one company and go to the next record label, because there was enormous churn in that industry, suddenly we would be doing all of their websites as well. It was all about relationships. And in the record industry, it was all about giving bribes, which is really true. I hired everybody's cousin in the industry. They were all working in some room in the back doing something, but I hired them all. That was part of the sales effort as well, the extra service that you offer to the client. So I'll hire your cousin. I'll hire your sister, that was HBO. I'll hire your cousin, that was Loud Records. I'll hire I-don't-know-who-the-hell-he-is- to-you, but that was Death Row Records. Con Edison, I'll hire your brother.

So I always used Miramax.com and HBO to get Con Edison. So Miramax.com, we did that website for $1000 bucks. Con Edison, we would do it for $250,000. Same size website, but it was always the entertainment sites that would keep my employees happy, and the customers would say, "We want it just like that." because they all want to be cool in the entertainment industry. So Con Edison, American Express, all these corporate websites we were also able to do because we did for almost nothing all of these entertainment websites. And trying to get a record label to pay you at the end of the day is almost impossible. So we had to make our money somewhere.

So again, more examples of sales. Yeah, I do have a website at jamesaltucher.com. And then also I have a lot of . . . I just released a book on Monday called, Choose Yourself. So you should read that. You should all by it right now. That's a bad sales technique. So another question.

Female: This doesn't really pertain to sales, but I was wondering if you've ever done stand-up or have considered doing stand-up comedy because you're really funny.

James Altucher: Thank you. And I have, actually, but one part that's very important to me...and Michael before was referring to this, is health. And I go to sleep at about 8:30pm every night. And I stay very disciplined about that. I was at a dinner last night. A friend of mine had his 50th birthday party. It was a surprise party and he was late. And it was getting to be about 8:00, 8:15pm. Finally, he shows up and I shook his hand and I'm like, "I got to go," because I go to sleep at 8:30pm. And his wife was very upset that I was going because everything was catered, and I don't know what. They're never going to talk to me again now.

So he has an interesting story. This guy wrote Freakonomics, actually. Very good guy, very good book. I highly recommend that book. That's a better sales technique. And I'll tell you why that's a better sales technique. What I try to do always is emulate people or even things that are better than me. So one thing that is a lot better than me is Google.

Google is so smart and great and cool that I can't even compare myself to Google. But I will for a second. This is a very powerful sales technique, and Google does it a billion times a day. So if I go to Google and I say, "Google, I want you to tell me everything about motorcycles." Google will say, "I'll be honest with you, I'm just a blank page with an entry form in it. I don't' know anything about motorcycles. But here's 10 other competitive websites-because I'm a website, these are my competitors-here's 10 other websites you, should go to as quickly as possible, and they're going to be so much smarter about motorcycles than I am. You should really check them out. And by the way, here are three other sites about motorcycles. But I'm just going to be honest, they're paying me to tell you that."

So Google is fantastic. If you just did that in every sales meeting, you'll be like a mini-Google. Google is worth $200 billion. So if you could be even a mini-Google, it really works. And I'm telling you for a fact, it really works.

So I had a company recently come to me and say, "We're a staffing company. We do temporary staffing, and we don't know anything about technology or being a public company and so on." And I said, "Well, that's great. I don't know anything about your industry." They were light industrial, which means mostly factory workers. It turned out upon questioning that they were more than that.

So I started questioning them and I realized they were positioning their business completely wrong. And I said, "I'm happy to give you free help on this phone call, because you're positioning your whole company completely wrong, which is why nobody knows who you are." I said, "Who is your bank?" They said, "We keep our money at XYZ bank."

And I'm like, "No, who's your investment bank?" And so I said, "I'll introduce you to an investment bank. I'll introduce you to a top law firm." And they said, "This is phenomenal. Can we talk to you again about this?" And I said, "No. Just go to these guys. They'll help you out with everything." So a week later, they called me up again and they said, "We really want to continue the discussion we had with you. We wrote down everything, we learned so much." And I said, "No, really, you're downtown. I don't' really want to go over there."

So we talked some more though, and I gave them some more ideas. I introduced them to the founder of some job site, and he's helping them. And I introduced them to the ex-CEO of thestreet.com. He went on their board. And they called me again and they said, "Look, you've given us so much. We'd really like to put you on our board." And I said, "Look, I'll help you but you're going to have to negotiate with this other guy because I can't negotiate." So I introduced them to a guy who's a good negotiator. He's an asshole, but he's a good negotiator. So he got us a phenomenal deal after on the third time I said no. And that was another example of a sales technique where I was trying to be a mini-Google. And that really worked.

So again, all of these things I'm telling you, I don't' know whether or not they'll work for you, but they work for me really, really well. And throughout all of this time, I kept going bankrupt. I kept losing all of my money. It's like I'm a functional idiot. So after I sold StockPicker, I had all this money again, and within less than a year, I was again dead broke. And I'm not only dead broke but I lost the house again.

I was getting divorced and I decided I was lonely. So I did what I usually do, which is I put an ad on Craigslist. And I said specifically, "I'm a psychic," which is a lie, "and if anybody has any problem at all, just for the next six hours, I will answer your questions with my psychic powers." And I should mention it was Thanksgiving. So I got a turkey sandwich because I was totally blah. I got my turkey sandwich and I got hundreds of emails. I ignored all the emails from men, only focused on the female emails, the femails. And I still have some lasting friendships from that. So you might wonder, though. So whenever I tell this story, people always ask me, "Well, did you have sex with any of these women?" And I'm like, "Look at me. No, of course not." But more Q & A. Yes?

Female: [Inaudible 00:36:18] creation of random genius. What gets you in the flow of channeling the randomness?

James Altucher: Okay. So how do you come up with ideas is very critical to the sales process because of what I mentioned about giving as part of the sales process. Giving ideas just to get to a yes, because that's the first step. You just want someone to say yes to you, but if people are ignoring you they're not going to say yes.

So the idea muscle...you ever read Stephen King's book, On Writing? It's a great book about writing. Stephen King, that's his best book, actually. His best-written book is his book on writing. So he talks about how he was in a car accident and two things: one is he was in the hospital bed for two weeks and he needed physical therapy after that to even walk again. Just two weeks, your leg muscles atrophy. The other thing is he said he tried writing again after two weeks of stopping writing and he couldn't write. He said it specifically, "I couldn't put words together." This is Stephen King, the best-selling author of all time.

Ideas are the same way. If you're not coming up with 10 ideas a day, that's why I have this thing. If I'm filling up this page every single day, then my idea muscle will atrophy. I started this in 2001, and I still do it every single day. You have to come up with ideas every single day or the idea muscle atrophies. The good news is after about six months of doing that, you're a machine. People get surprised at how many ideas you can just have anywhere. You're car breaks down in the middle of the desert, suddenly helicopters are picking you up because you had an idea how to signal through outer space or something to get it. You'll have ideas all the time. It's great. I highly encourage people to do that, and to build the idea muscle is the first part of that sales process. Yes?

Male: Simple. I've been thoroughly brainwashed to follow social norms and conventions. How can I unlearn those things to become more successful?

James Altucher: Okay. So every rule, every rule we've ever been taught is completely fake. So for instance, my 11-year-old comes up to me, "Don't you need to go to college to get a job?" And I'm like, "Who even told you this?" And she said somewhere she absorbed it, her teachers, whoever. I'm not going to put that on my ex-wife. So of course you don't need college. A lot of people think also owning a home is the best investment. There are all these rules that we've been taught. They're all man-made. They're all fake. The phrase, "The American Dream," for instance, comes from a 1960s ad campaign put out by Fannie Mae to convince people to buy homes. So that was the American Dream, the white picket fence, which is actually a prison so you can't be mobile to work at multiple jobs. So if you're stuck in one place, your income automatically is going to go down.

So how do you unlearn the rules, how do you write your own rules? And again, Michael said something very strong in the last talk, which is it really starts with the basics-and this is really important-which is being physically healthy, which means sleeping well, eating well and so on. Being emotionally healthy and people underestimate this, but you really can't be around negative people or people who are going to put you down. Who's going to put you down? It's not the neighbor down the street; it's your mother. It's true. Or it's your friend or your colleague. And if they want to engage with you in the negativity, you can't argue with them. You're like, "Okay. I hear you. I'm going to eat my food now," or whatever.

So it's like for instance, I did a Reddit AMA. You know, one of those things; it's like a Q & A thing. And you see all the time people are trying to say negative stuff just to get you sucked in. You see it on the Internet all the time. They call it Internet trolls. You never, ever respond to any of that. Nothing ever good, no life will ever be saved by responding to someone who's negative to you. This is very important.

Then the next step obviously is to surround yourself with completely positive people who are inspiring to you or supportive of you. That works very well. Then building the idea muscle; that is extremely important because you start to realize, "Hmm, I had these ideas that go against conventional norms." Well, that's because these are good ideas and conventional norms are almost, by definition, bad ideas. Every breakthrough in the history of mankind, somebody did something completely unobvious the second before that breakthrough. So you have to change your mind set to come up with the unobvious all the time. It's a practice.

And then spiritual. Michael defined his spiritual practice. Mine is every day I wake up and literally just list all the things I'm grateful for. Because then your body just feels good, and it's a good way to wake up. And it's better than thinking, "Oh my gosh, I only have $143 in the bank." When you think about whom you're grateful for, I don't give a shit about them. I just care about how my body is feeling while I'm thinking about it. And it feels better than being anxious, which happens all the time when you wake up at 3:00 in the morning or whatever.

So also the other thing is when I wake up at three in the morning and I am anxious, because my mind is playing, it's the only time it's allowed to come out and play. Is I say, "Listen, you might be right, mind, but let's schedule an appointment for 3:00 pm today instead of 3:00 am because I'm not really awake yet. And at 3:00 pm, I'll talk to you about it." And at 3:00 pm, I'm never worried about what I was worried about at 3:00 am. It works like clockwork. So that's the start of that. So I have one minute left, so time for one more question. Yes.

Male: Once you get a deal made, how do you go about making sure that you've pleased your client and that you make sure you don't miss any deadlines or that you make sure that everything is kept on track?

James Altucher: Why didn't you ask me this at dinner the other night?

Male: I should've. I ran out of time.

James Altucher: So how do you execute basically?

Male: Yeah.

James Altucher: So it's like your brother, you have a team. You have people who help you. You know this as well as I do. I just had a book come out Monday, so I'm good at the writing part. I don't know how to design a hardcover. I don't know how to do the interior design. I'm not actually that good at picking the title of a book. I'm not that great at marketing. I didn't know how to make an audio book. I didn't know how to do anything, so I outsourced every single piece of that.

And, by the way, I also got a pre-order of 5000 copies of the hardcover to completely pay for all of the expenses I had on the book. So the book itself, to publish it, I self- published, cost $30,000 about, give or take. I completely pre-ordered to get more than that and then on top of that, I also made more than that just from the marketing that I outsourced. So to Mr. Ryan Holiday, whom you know well. So does that answer?

Okay, thank you very much. I didn't recognize you were in the audience. Thank you very much.

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