Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2016. The original title gave Altucher’s age as 47, which was true in January 2016, and the linked Tony Robbins article refers to him at 55 (2015).
“I’m 20 or 25. What advice would someone who is 50 give me so I can avoid many of the mistakes they made, and what should I do to achieve personal and financial success?” This is a very common question on Quora, and one that James Altucher loves to answer.
As most of you already know, Altucher knows what it feels like to be rich and to be poor. He has an unusual talent for making a million dollars in a short space of time, and he has done it on several occasions. He also has an unusual talent for ending up broke.
After admitting that he came close to suicide so that his daughters could collect the insurance, he came to understand that money comes and goes. It’s just money. Money is only a side effect, a by-product. Whether we have more or less of it depends on what really matters: our habits.
If you focus only on making money, you won’t make money, because although people talk about the power of attraction, money actually arrives indirectly. There has to be something more:
1. Avoid death every day
This means avoiding the things you know are bad for you. You should be a little healthier every day because, as great businesspeople say, you can’t get rich from a hospital bed or from the grave.
Many people believe that metabolism slows down sharply at a certain age. That isn’t entirely true. What changes is that we sit more and become more sedentary. We look after ourselves less and think we’re too old to do certain things, when in fact it’s not doing those things that makes us age faster and lose energy.
2. Solve problems with gratitude
When you’re stressed or overwhelmed, always find something to be grateful for. It may seem hard, but it’s a practice, and a more important one than we think.
As we’ve said on several occasions, our mood depends on where we focus our attention. Some people focus on what they have (and are happy), and some focus on what they lack (and are rarely happy). You can focus on the good things that happened to you today or on the bad ones. As long as you’re grateful for the good things, you won’t suffer other negative emotions, because the two can’t coexist in your brain at the same time.
See also: 18 inspiring quotes on the importance of gratitude
3. Plant many seeds
The real key is to plant many seeds, because 1% of the seeds will become 50% of the flowers. For Altucher, success is like a garden of mathematics, where we can plant the seeds of the plant many people call luck. Which seeds does he mean?
Send a thank-you note, build a website, make yourself known, develop an idea, talk to people about your ideas, write an article about them, read some good books. You never know which seed will sprout, and sometimes success comes from where you least expected it. So plant seeds every day.
4. Don’t make excuses
Blaming others drains your energy and potential. Complaining drains you too. Many people say they don’t have time to do something. Funnily enough, the people with the most free time are the ones who say they have the least.
5. Follow Warren Buffett’s 5/25 rule
6. Follow up (and keep going)
You have to cultivate the habit of building and maintaining relationships. If you’ve been to an event or a party and met interesting people, don’t let that connection fade. Sometimes all it takes is a thank-you email or a simple “It was a pleasure to meet you”.
On the other hand, many people make the first effort and get some results, but then stop trying, losing what they gained or failing to move forward. This is another discipline we need to adopt: the discipline of being consistent.
7. Be the dumbest person in the room
The only way to grow is to be an eternal apprentice, so you should surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. Steve Jobs did it with Wozniak.
Being the smartest person in the group means your personal and professional growth is already over.
8. Ask lots of questions
Asking questions is the most effective way known so far to get answers. Brian Grazer, the well-known producer of Apollo 13 (and some 100 other films), used to call anyone (the Dalai Lama, Jobs, Gates…), explain who he was and ask them questions. That’s how he met Ron Howard, “the smartest person in his room”, who helped him achieve many successes.
9. Say “no”
Altucher says he used to travel a lot to attend meetings, and that none of them ever made him any money. Not a single one.
To succeed you have to say “yes” to many things: yes to new opportunities, yes to new risks… but you also have to learn to say “no” to others: distractions, unproductive activities, time-wasters…
10. Do a little every day
If you want to write a novel, don’t think about it as a whole, because you may get frustrated. Just think about writing a little every day. Day by day, your body will ask for more.
11. Don’t be in a hurry
Altucher says he has interviewed about 150 successful people and that, once again, money was only a by-product for them.
Don’t chase the quick jackpot. Few people pull it off. Success is a long-term thing, although along the way you’ll find many small successes to celebrate.
12. Now
Altucher’s reflection goes like this: every time he got stressed about a possible future problem, it almost never came true. Every time he dwelt on a regret from the past, the regret kept him stuck in the mud.
The cards are being dealt right now. The game is now. No card will help you before or after; it will only help you at this very moment. So now is the only moment you should focus on.
Will these habits bring you financial success?
Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe not the first time, maybe the third. As Altucher says, following these habits will only make you the person who has these habits. They won’t spare you from failure or guarantee success, but they will at least give you a different philosophy of life: less centred on the by-product that is money, yet better focused than that of people who aim at money directly.
See also: The 32 rules for becoming a successful entrepreneur
Featured image: Chooseyourself-altucher, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
