The Most Important Article I’ll Ever Write About Investing

There was a church across the street from where I lived.

In the middle of a bad investing day, when my heart was pounding so bad I thought I would die, I would go to church.

It was always empty. I’d get as close as possible to the statue of Jesus. I would touch his leg. I would pray.

I would ask for a world that made sense. I would ask to be delivered from the nonstop pain of loss I was in. I would ask and ask and only a little bit would I offer to give.

I’m Jewish.

I wish I had someone to help me just a little bit so long ago. Maybe there might have been an easy way.

Nobody helped me. And I had no experience. And I made a lot of mistakes. And Jesus didn’t grant me my prayers.

—

I’ve been investing professionally now for 20 years. I’ve spent a lot of that time scared and addicted to anti-anxiety pills.

I’ve been a day trader, a venture capitalist, a hedge fund manager, I’ve invested in other hedge funds, I’ve invested in private companies, I’ve been a trader for a bank, and on and on.

I’ve written five or six books on investing and thousands of articles for the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, CNBC, Forbes, etc. I was a spokesperson for Fidelity.

I learned the hard way.

Since 2007, I’ve had a return of about 70% per year on money I’ve invested.

I started off very small and now it’s turned into a good amount.

Many people tell me they want to be an investor and I’m always surprised how little they want to work.

They want to do it because they think it’s the way to be free. And they are partially right. I wanted to be free also.

And I wanted people to like me.

But they want it to be easy. I don’t know. I wish I had had an article like this as a starting point.

Maybe I would know my children better.

—

A) KNOW YOUR HISTORY

Study the history of investing. The history of money. Where did it come from? When were the first exchanges created? Study all the bubbles.

Study modern investing. Why did the Great Depression occur? What was volatility like in the 1930s? In the 1960s?

What caused the recessions in the 1970s? What caused the market to rise and then crash in the ’80s?

What were the actual bubbles in 2000 and 2006–07 that then led to massive crashes. Note: the answers are NOT “the internet” and “housing.”

What are common features in every recession? In every bear market?

Studying the history of investing is studying the history of world psychology.

The world is mentally ill. And investors take advantage of that

—.

B) READ BIOGRAPHIES

Start with Warren Buffett. Then Bernard Baruch.

Then read Greg Zuckerman’s new book on Jim Simons. Read Ray Dalio’s “Principles.” Read about Jesse Livermore.

Carl Icahn. Jim Cramer. Victor Niederhoffer. Michael Milken. Charlie Munger. George Soros. Read all the Market Wizards books. Read about John Templeton, Peter Lynch, every investor you can find a biography of.

I give a little bibliography in point Z.

After you read each book, write down 10 things you’ve learned from each investor.

The other day I was watching a video called “The 5 best investors of all time.” It was awful and shocking to me.

I was surprised how little the four professional investors debating this question knew about the history of the people they were debating about.

Everyone wants to be called “smart.” But nobody stops and says, “You know, I’m actually pretty stupid.”

—

C) STUDY EVERY TYPE OF INVESTING

Because I didn’t go to business school, and I never worked at a bank or a hedge fund, I was never force-fed one particular style of investing.

Through studying and trial and error I had to learn each style and then figure out which ones worked for me the best.

Each style is the best style given certain conditions and at different times.

To truly understand investing you have to know all of the styles. Here are some:

• Value investing
• Growth investing
• Merger arbitrage
• Convertible arbitrage
• Options investing (understanding the “Greeks”)
• Private equity investing
• Venture capital investing
• Investing in bonds (muni, corporate, junk, govt, etc.)
• Activist investing
• Bitcoin
• Commodities
• Closed-end fund investing
• Investing in special situations (spinoffs, secondaries, insiders -buying, stocks moving onto indices, etc)
• Trade finance, investing in liens, venture debt investing, buying credit card debt, etc.
• Country arbitrage (i.e., when Canada goes one way and the U.S. goes another, under what conditions will they “snap” together?)
• PIPE investing
• Micro-cap investing (and how it differs from buying larger companies)
• Hedging

—

D) READ ABOUT ENTREPRENEURS

Understand basic accounting and how companies often scam investors.

Read about how to value a company. It’s more art than science but important to know.

To understand a stock, you have to understand how the underlying company is run and if it will be run well.

You have to understand the CEO and if he/she is good or bad. If you can, you should spy on the CEO.

—

E) UNDERSTAND WHAT TRENDS ARE HAPPENING IN SOCIETY

Automation, genomics, marijuana, AI, Big Data, plant-based foods, energy, etc.

What does society need, what will it need five years from now, who is working on it?

There is a quick way to do this…

—

F) THE MOORE’S LAW TECHNIQUE

In 1966, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, predicted that computing power would double every 24 months.

Computing power was very tiny then. The computer that launched Apollo 11 to the moon had less power than a calculator.

But computing power has been doubling every 24 months since he made that prediction.

Investing in an industry that is doubling every X months will lead to huge wealth.

The computer/internet industry went from being in the tens of millions in value to the multiple trillions.

Some industries doubling or more every year or so: computers (still), genomics, solar power, data, AI, automation, etc.

Find as many “Moore’s Law” industries as possible, avoid the scams, and invest in the rest.

—

G) STATISTICS

If you can, find an easy-to-use statistics package for testing out ideas.

For instance, what usually happens if the market goes down five days in a row? Or if Microsoft goes down five days in a row? What usually happens on a Monday if Friday was down?

What happens on days that Trump tweets more than five times?

There are thousands of questions you can ask the data. It helps to get a feel for the market.

—

H) IGNORE “TECHNICAL ANALYSIS”

People say things like, “There’s a resistance at $12 a share so if the stock hits there it should bounce. But if it doesn’t bounce it could go the next level of resistance at $6.”

In other words, “The stock could go up or down”.

I’ve tested out every technical analysis theory. None of them work.

—

I) DON’T READ OR WATCH THE NEWS!!

By the time an article is in the Wall Street Journal or on CNBC, you’re the last investor to have learned the news.

News is a scam.

The entire purpose of “news” is to get you to look at ads. Not inform you.

—

J) ALWAYS ASK, “WHAT IS MY EDGE?”

You have no edge.

If you think the iPhone is great and you say, “I’m investing in Apple,” what makes you think you have an edge over the hundreds of hedge funds that have studied every phone on the market, have figured out every detail of the next five phones to be released, etc.?

You might get lucky. Or you might not.

It’s very hard for the average investor to find an edge. Warren Buffett gets an edge by doing deals directly with the company.

Big hedge funds find an edge by doing some form of insider trading or high-frequency trading where they skim dollars from you because they have wires going straight into the exchange.

Billions of dollars are spent every day subtly manipulating the market without regulators being aware of it.

Every day the market is manipulated illegally. Every day.

You don’t have an edge over those people.

How do you get an edge?

—

K) RESEARCH STOCKS THAT HAVE COLLAPSED

If a company misses earnings by two cents, often retail investors get scared and the stock collapses.

Ask, “Did it collapse irrationally?” This is one of the few times you might be able to get an edge.

Note: Most stocks collapse for rational reasons.

—

L) FOCUS ON MICRO-CAP OR SMALL STOCKS.

Stocks that are worth less than $1 billion.

These stocks are ignored by the news, they are ignored by banks, and they are often too small for the big hedge funds to research them.

They are also not in the big indices that have all the major funds following them.

Note that Warren Buffett made his first million only by investing in micro-cap stocks (look up “cigar butt stocks”).

The problem with micro-cap stocks is that many of them are either scams or are in industries with no real interest by investors.

So use the Moore’s Law technique above to find growing industries and the stocks in them. And do the research to make sure the stock is not a scam.

Even ONE RED FLAG (i.e., the CEO used to work for another company that went to zero) is enough to say, “I’m not going to invest.” NO RED FLAGS ALLOWED.

You can have an edge on small stocks but it’s still hard.

—

M) CLOSED-END FUNDS

These are like mutual funds but they trade like stocks. Look it up. I can’t explain in detail.

Find the closed-end funds that trade below the added-up value of all of their assets.

For instance, a closed-end fund might have $100 worth of stocks but is trading for $90. Meaning you can buy up the entire company for $90 and liquidate it for $100 and make money.

Why do they do this? Study closed-end funds.

There’s often a good reason they are trading low but they are pretty safe and usually pay good dividends.

—

N) IMPORTANT RULE THAT NOBODY KNOWS!!

The less you invest in a company, the more you will make.

This is the most important rule on this list.

This doesn’t sound right and it doesn’t work for everyone.

But I know for me, I have a problem: If I invest a big percent of my net worth in one company, then I will obsess on it.

I won’t be able to sleep.

And as soon as it has a reasonable profit (or loss) I will get rid of it.

If I invest a SMALL amount and it starts to go up, I am more willing to sit on it for the entire ride and I will make more money.

This has happened to me again and again. The less I invest, the more I make.

I tend to invest only 1–2% of my net worth in any one investment.

—

O) PRIVATE COMPANIES ARE USUALLY BETTER THAN PUBLIC COMPANIES

Companies only go public when great investors no longer want to put money in.

The “public” is considered the MOST STUPID of investors.

This is why the initial investors in Uber made millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars but the people who bought when it went public are now losing money.

This is why the investors in WeWork were desperate to have it go public but this time people were ready.

How do you find good private companies?

Fortunately, more private companies than ever are being listed on crowdfunding sites like AngelList and Republic.

—

P) SOME SMALL PUBLIC COMPANIES ARE AS GOOD AS PRIVATE COMPANIES

—

Q) PIGGYBACK THE GREAT INVESTORS

Pick your 20 favorite investors.

Use a website like J3SG to see what stocks your favorite investors are currently buying.

If you can buy the same stocks around the same price or lower then it’s an OK investment.

For instance, if Warren Buffett suddenly buys a stock like IBM, then it’s probably a good buy at the same price.

Buffett tends to hold for long periods of time so your edge over Buffett is that you can be more nimble.

—

R) CHECKLIST

• The CEO has built and sold a company before
• Other good investors are invested in the company
• The company does not need to raise money for a long time.

This checklist is good for both public and private companies. For a private company it helps to add one more item:

• Do they have any customers?

—

S) ALWAYS ASK, “WHY ME?”

If you feel you’ve found a good investing opportunity, always ask, “Why?”

In the history of humans, the phrase, “I want to make James Altucher rich today,” has been said ZERO times.

If something is actually a good opportunity, then it should be long gone before you even know about it.

Figure out why you have an edge over everyone else in the world. Be brutally honest with yourself or you will lose money.

One time someone said to me, “We just need $50,000 to close this round and then Bill Clinton and George Soros are going to invest.”

Are you serious? Clinton is waiting anxiously by his phone? When it rings he’ll grab it and say, “DId James Altucher invest?”

There has to be a really good answer to “why me?”

—

T) DIVERSIFICATION IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK

Diversification 1.0 was: “Buy Exxon and Microsoft”.

One is oil and the other is tech. Now, those two stocks are no longer diversified. Most large stocks tend to move up and down as a group.

Diversification 2.0 was: “Buy bonds, gold, and stocks”.

Now this is not true. Bonds and stocks also tend to move as a group.

Diversification is to play multiple strategies that are independent of each other and independent of the economy.

An example diversified portfolio:

• Some private companies
• Some closed-end funds (for the dividends) that focus on municipal bonds
• Micro-caps that are independent of the economy and each other
• Real estate in foreign countries with great GDP growth where:
  • Housing prices have not caught up
  • Arbitrage situations (i.e., shorting Canada and buying the U.S. if the U.S. has gone down several days in a row and Canada has gone up several days in a row)
• Peer-to-peer lending
• Statistical arbitrage
• Put selling on value stocks
• Some growth investing (but keep investments small)
• Investing in a basket of stocks owned by other great investors
• Special situations

Note that I did not put Apple or Google or any big stock on this list. The average investor has zero edge on those stocks.

—

U) DON’T DAY TRADE

Day trading is mostly for idiots.

There are millions of algorithms working every day on the markets. How can you have an advantage over them?

There are strategies that work. But it’s a full-time job to play those strategies and you have to know them and really study them.

And you have to be younger than 40. Else you’ll die.

—

V) SIT ON YOUR HANDS

Some people put stop losses on a position.

This means if they buy a stock at $20, they may decide at $16 to sell it for a loss.

Don’t do that.

I’ve tested out every strategy using software I’ve written. In every case, the use of stop losses makes less money in the long run.

The key to sitting on your hands is to invest only a small amount in every investment.

The path to wealth is to have good investments that grow very big.

My best current investment right now is a stock I bought at ten cents for a tiny amount and now the stock is over $6.

If I invested too much I would’ve probably sold at 20 cents. Or I would’ve sold when it went from $10 all the way back to $3 before bouncing back to $6.

I put a “story stop” on my investments.

I buy because I like the story. If the story changes, I get out. For instance, if I buy because Warren Buffett just invested, then I am in until he exits.

If I buy because it’s a genomics stock and I think genomics is going way up, I sell if they fail every FDA trial they are in.

—

W) THE AVERAGE HOLDING PERIOD IS A LONG TIME

Buffett says the average holding period is “forever.”

He is lying.

Almost everything Buffett says is at least a small lie.

He’s afraid smaller investors will be more nimble than him.

BUT… most companies I own I will own for 5–15 years. I am in some investments right now I’ve been in since 2009.

People say investing is like gambling. This is sort of true. But the longer you hold something, the less it is like gambling and the more it is that you researched an industry and a company and are investing in the growth of both.

It takes a long time for a small company in a small but fast growing industry to reach its full potential.

Also, if a company is growing 20–50% per year or more, where else are you going to get that kind of return on your money? Keep the stock. Don’t take profits.

Again, this is why I keep initial position sizes low and I never double down.

—

X) KEEP MOSTLY CASH AROUND

I mentioned above that I’m up around 70% a year or more.

This is only on money I’ve invested. I started off very small and kept most of my portfolio in cash.

I still have most of my net worth in cash. This allows me to sleep at night, not sweat my investments each day.

And I have cash if I need it.

Good opportunities happen only two or three times a year on average.

So over the past 12 years, counting some exits that I’ve had along the way as well as some disasters, I’m in about 20 investments.

This past year I got into three new investments and I had no exits this year at all.

—

Y) RISK VS. REWARD

I invest in two types of opportunities:

1) SAFE: I am very risk-averse. It’s rare an investment comes along that is “safe.”

It’s usually some situation where for various reasons I can buy shares at a discount from people who need the cash.

Or it’s in a period like 2009 where everyone is scared.

2) HIGH RISK, HIGH REWARD: I like to invest in companies that I think I will make at least 1000% on or more.

This sounds ridiculous but this is why I only invest in a few opportunities per year.

This is why I don’t buy shares of Google. Maybe it goes up a little more than the market. Like 20–30% per year some years.

But it also can go down a lot. This is not good risk/reward for me even if I love the company.

—

Z) BIBLIOGRAPHY. KEEP READING

Here are a few books that I think are fairly simple to read and will give a basic understanding of most of the above.

• “Buffett” by Roger Lowenstein
• “My Story” by Bernard Baruch
• “The Money Game” by Adam Smith
• “You Can Be a Stock Market Genius” by Joel Greenblatt
• “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis
• “The Man Who Solved the Market” by Greg Zuckerman
• “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley
• “Hacking Darwin” by Jamie Metzl
• “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel
• “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Taleb
• “Tools of the Titans” by Tim Ferriss
• “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari
• “A Man for All Markets” by Ed Thorp
• “Famous First Bubbles” by Peter Garber
• “Confessions of a Street Addict” by Jim Cramer
• “Essays of Warren Buffett” by Lawrence Cunningham

—

This is a long way of saying, only do this if you love it.

I wish I had done something else. I’m happy where I am, I ended up doing OK, but I was so depressed for so long.

That depression damaged me. It’s a constant battle to not slip back.

Which is why I had to reinvent myself. Pursue other interests.

Even now, writing this, I just noticed I can’t see out of my right eye.

For the first time in years, I have a migraine.

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Shake Things Up Every Day

“My boss came in and told me the police were waiting for me,” he said.

He was very political and I thought, as these things go, that the police maybe didn’t like his politics. He was from another country if that counts.

We were at breakfast. I didn’t know him too well and figured, OK, I can eat bacon and get to know him.

“Were you scared?”

“Would you be?”

I guess I would be. I don’t know why. I thought back to the one time the police asked to see me. It was 17 years earlier.

“I guess so.”

At first they said they were police. But when I let them in they took out their badges.

“FBI!”

But that was a long time ago.

—

“My boss was pointing to the back and there was a guy there waiting for me. He was in plain clothes. Like an undercover detective.”

“What did he want?”

“He says, ‘Have a seat.’ I sit down. And then he said to me, ‘I’m your brother.'”

I didn’t quite understand. I wasn’t expecting this.

“He told me that there were four of us. Him, me, and two sisters. He told me that our biological parents separated all of us and we were adopted by different families.”

“Holy s***. Were you surprised?”

“I don’t know. I realized he looked like me and we just started talking and getting to know each other.”

“Do you still talk to him?”

“Every single week. And we met our sisters also. I had a whole new family.”

“How did he even find this out?”

My friend ate some of his breakfast. He smiled at me.

“Everyone always asks this exact question! But the answer is so obvious. I already told you he was a police detective! He researched himself and found out he was adopted and then the rest of the research showed him all of us.”

“This is incredible. You went from having no siblings to suddenly having a whole family.”

I was jealous. Not for the family. That could be more trouble that it’s worth.

But because life suddenly life can turn from routine to conspiracy so quickly.

—

I couldn’t imagine. What if someone told me all of a sudden that my entire life was different?

I did that 23andMe test. I had heard that many people found out their fathers were not who they thought.

I was kind of disappointed when I realized my father was my real father. I felt like I wanted something new.

Like I wanted my past to be a new gift I could unwrap.

But to have someone tell me I suddenly had three more siblings!

Just imagining it for a second made me feel more free. I wish I could recreate that feeling at will. To look around and see everything as if for the first time.

But my friend gave me a clue how to make that happen.

I asked him, “Did your life completely change after this?”

He thought about this for a second.

“Your life completely changes after everything that happens.”

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You Can’t Do That

“You can’t do that,” she told me.

Cindy was a VP in the marketing department.

I was on my way to see the CEO of HBO. I was a junior analyst programmer in the IT department.

A very exciting job. I made $40,700 per year. It was 1995.

I lived on a foam futon and shared a room with a chess hustler from Washington Square Park. The toilet only worked randomly.

I had one suit, which I kept in a garbage bag next to my futon and took it out every morning.

I was very popular with the ladies.

She said, “You can’t just walk into his office!”

The CEO was my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss.

People say “can’t” when they wish they could. Or something cliche and smart like that but not that.

—

I had an idea I wanted to tell him. If you can make original TV series on HBO, why not an original web series?

This was 1995.

He said, “Go for it.” So I did it. I did a web series called, “III:am” on HBO for the next three years and even shot a pilot for HBO.

I used that first idea to launch my first company. My first clients were AmericanExpress.com and TimeWarner.com.

Parents say “Don’t!” to little kids.

And sometimes people say “shouldn’t” when they don’t really know but they think they know better than you.

But if someone says “can’t” it’s at least worth a “screw you” to try to do it just a little bit. Why not?

It’s so worth it to just drive one person crazy.

At the very least it’s a story 23 years later.

It reminds me of this football play.

This quarterback shouldn’t! No he didn’t! No he won’t!

But he did.

To watch the video I made for this article, click below.

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Most People Are Evil Idiots. Now What?

You decide to plagiarize one of the most successful books ever.

You take a book that won the National Book Award and you retype it from scratch and pretend it’s yours.

You submit it to 20 publishers. You put a fake name on it.

100% of the publishers send back rejection letters. They hated it!

Two things strike you:

A) ZERO of the publishers realized they rejected a National Book Award winner

B) ALL of them thought the book was horrible. A book that had won the highest award.

This happened.

—

A freelance writer named Chuck Ross was curious.

He took the book “Steps” by Jerzy Kosinski, which had won the National Book Award for fiction in 1969, and decided to have some fun.

He rewrote the entire book and then submitted it to every publisher using a fake name.

Not only did every publisher reject it but even Random House, the publisher that actually published it, rejected it with a form letter.

The book has been compared to “Kafka at his best.” It’s a short, brutal book. One of my favorites. I highly recommend it.

Does this mean most people are idiots? Maybe.

It means:

• Most people who have an opinion are probably wrong.
• If people don’t know who you are, they are more likely to reject you.
• Nobody wakes up and says, “Today is the day I make some unknown person a superstar!”
• Most people don’t care about their jobs. Which is fine. But don’t rely on them for your success.
• Even successful people don’t want you to skip the line. I always hear, “You have to pay your dues.” This is BS. It means:
• You have to take control of your own career and opportunities.
• You have a first book? Self-publish it. You have an indie movie? Load it up on Amazon. You have an idea for a radio show? Do a podcast.
• You have an app you want to build? Don’t raise money. Save money and build it and get customers.
• You want to be a movie star? Write your own script or shoot your own movie (i.e., Sylvester Stallone in Rocky).

Most people can’t be entrepreneurs or creatives. Don’t believe anyone who says everyone can be an entrepreneur.

They are lying.

Most people can’t handle nonstop rejection and the anxiety and depression that comes with it.

I’ve been so depressed so many times. It really hasn’t been worth it, to be honest.

It’s a catch-22 because in order to be good, you have to be unique. In order to be unique, nobody will know you. And nobody does favors for the unknown.

Dr. Seuss’ first book was rejected 27 times. “Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling,” wrote one top editor.

Harry Potter was rejected by every publisher until the 7-year-old daughter of one publisher begged her father to publish it.

If Moses wrote the 10 Commandments today, he’d be rejected by every publisher and probably give up. I would if I were him.

Even 50 Shades of Grey started off self-published.

It sold 250,000 copies on Amazon and still was rejected by many publishers. Amazon’s in-house publisher rejected it.

Finally Simon & Schuster published it. It sold over 125 million copies.

Don’t trust anyone. Don’t listen to anyone. Ignore them.

Either give up or go around the gatekeepers.

So I did an experiment:

I took 50 Shades of Grey and hired someone in India to take a thesaurus and change every word in the book.

For instance, “She hurried to her tests” became “Brenda rushed to get to the exams on time.”

I used a fake name, changed the title, made a book cover and uploaded it to Amazon. It’s now a published book.

It’s EXACTLY 50 Shades of Grey but with every single word changed, sentence by sentence. Maybe… just maybe… I was hoping it would also sell a lot of copies.

It sold about 80 copies. It’s a piece of s***.

But it cost me about $200 in total and two hours of my time. It was an experiment.

Why did 50 Shades of Grey sell so well? What did E.L. James do? Doing my failed experiment forced me to learn.

Why did “50 Shades” succeed?

• She had a platform. She probably had about a million people following her Twilight fan fiction on various fan fiction websites.
• 50 Shades of Grey came out around the same time the Kindle was getting popular. So people could read her soft-core porn book in public without anyone seeing what they were reading. Avoiding the stigma.
• It was unique.

She had a platform. And technology and timing were just right. But she would never know that unless she had experimented, built a platform, wrote her own book without “permission,” and self-published.

Good for her.

—

This is not about self-publishing. This is not about how people are stupid (well, it is a little).

This is about not waiting for permission.

This is about doing experiments with everything you care about.

And from every experiment you will learn. There’s no other way to learn.

A billion people are standing in the way of what you want to do.

Stupid people, mean people, people who hate you, people who don’t want you to get ahead. People who will even sabotage you.

People who are frustrated in their own lives, dealing with their own problems, sad, anxious, fearful.

Experiment with how to get around them. Every day. It’s not their fault. But that doesn’t matter. You have to go around them.

You have to experiment every single day.

I’m doing another experiment right now. I am loving this experiment. So far, over three million people have seen this experiment.

It’s not really working the way I expected. But we’ll see. It’ll probably fail. But I’ve stopped caring.

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The Thanksgiving When I Lied to Thousands of People

The first Thanksgiving that I spent alone was right after I separated from my wife.

By the end of that day I experienced: fear, loneliness, lying to thousands of people, and enjoying it.

I woke up and I imagined my kids saying, “Is Daddy going to be with us?” They were tiny still. They didn’t know.

My sadness was bottomless, thinking of them going to Thanksgiving at their aunt’s, asking, “Where’s Daddy?”

That’s when I put an ad on Craigslist.

—

I don’t like when people say what they are grateful for on Thanksgiving.

When I do that it feels like taking out the garbage only one day a year.

It’s also a cliche to say, “You should be grateful every day.”

Who cares? Nobody cares. I don’t care what people are grateful for. Life is hard. It’s difficult to just make it through.

Reminding ourselves to be grateful is a mean trick. It’s self-hypnosis to make it through another one of these days. These mean days.

I’m looking at a Christmas tree right now. It’s beautiful.

—

I wrote this Craigslist:

ASK ME QUESTIONS. I’M PSYCHIC

I recently had a bike accident and I went into a coma. When I got out of the coma I suddenly could see the future. On this day, send me an email and I will answer any questions.

—

The day before, my friend Lisa asked me to come to her house for Thanksgiving. I said yes.

But then she called me later and said she couldn’t invite me.

Her daughter looked me up and said, “Mom! Why are you always inviting over guys who are married?”

“But I’m separated,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

—

I went out to a diner. Almost to spite myself I ordered the turkey sandwich.

Believe it or not, I thought to myself that one day this would look good in a story. To say I had a turkey sandwich in a diner on Thanksgiving day.

The waitress had served me dozens, maybe hundreds (who can even count events like this?), of times. For 10 years maybe I had a crush from her from afar.

I say maybe so as to not seem like a dirtbag.

I said, “Why aren’t you home on Thanksgiving?”

She answered a different question: “This is my last day here.”

After all this time. This was the first conversation I’d had with her.

“Where are you going?”

“I got my degree,” she said, “so next week I start teaching at a school for little kids.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s really great. Good luck.”

I finished my sandwich and went home.

I had 300 or more emails waiting for me. All from people responding to my Craigslist ads.

“I have a crush on my boss but he’s married. What should I do?”

“I’m trying to figure out what I should do with my career. Can you see what I will do next? Do you think I will be an actress?”

“My boyfriend and I have been dating for seven years. I want to have a baby. Do you think I will get married to him?”

On and on. I only looked at the emails from women. Why not? Who was going to accuse me?

I responded to each one. I gave answers that I thought were best but I also said, “I don’t need psychic powers to answer this. I’m just answering from the gut.”

When people asked me if I was really psychic I said no. I also asked several women if they wanted to have a drink that night.

All of them said no.

—

I like to practice solving what I call “difficult gratitude problems.”

A difficult gratitude problem is going broke and losing my home and family.

Another difficult gratitude problem is being stuck in traffic when you’re late for an important meeting. A meeting that can change your life.

Difficult gratitude problems can be very big or very, very tiny.

I could get upset and say, “Ugh, this is my luck to be stuck in traffic on today of all days!” I could get upset and feel like nothing good will ever happen to me.

Or I could solve the problem. It takes two steps:

A) RECOGNIZING that I am in the middle of a difficult gratitude problem rather than getting sucked into the vortex of anxiety and self-pity.

B) The SOLUTION. Like in this case saying, “I’m grateful I live in a city with so many opportunities that everyone else wants to be here, wants to go to meetings, causing the traffic I am in. What a wonderful place to be.”

Does it help? I can say yes. Because when I get to the meeting, it’s as if the dust in the attic is swept clean.

Everywhere I look I see the opportunity instead of the problem. I see the hope instead of the fear. The person I’m meeting I see as “friend” instead of “enemy.”

Every day I have difficult gratitude problems. I try to solve them.

It feels like practice.

—

For eight straight hours, I responded to emails. This was in 2006. I made Facebook friends with some of them.

I realized how happy I was helping people. Was I helping them?

Probably not. But it felt like it. Who was I to help people? I was on the floor of a hotel room on Thanksgiving having just eaten a turkey sandwich in a diner.

But it’s fun to connect. It’s fun to reach out through the ether and find other people abandoned on their lonely islands, sending out smoke signals to whomever can see them and respond.

In the years after, I’ve tried doing that ad again but it never seems to get any response.

But it did that day. And it lifted me from my grave. I had solved my difficult gratitude problem that day.

I’m still Facebook friends with many of these people from that day.

Several times after, in the next 13 years, I felt such despair that I didn’t know if I would live.

So many horrible things happened. So many Thanksgivings.

Difficult to picture what the next day would look like. Blackness.

I went to sleep that night, 13 Thanksgivings ago, and I was happier than when I woke up.

At that moment, suddenly everything became clear.

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How to Lose Friends and Not Influence People

“He beat his wife to the point where her face was split open,” our friend told us at lunch.

“Then they called a private doctor who came over to the house to sew up his wife’s face.”

I was having a hard time picturing it.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I spoke to the doctor. I spoke to the wife.”

At the time I was good friends with him and had been for five or so years. We had both helped each other out in various situations. Life-changing situations.

I didn’t understand what it meant, “her face was split open.” It all seemed unbelievable.

“When the doctor came over and saw the wife, she told the wife, ‘Either you leave him or I am telling everyone.'”

My friend was fairly well known and was up for a big position in government. This is why they had called the private doctor.

“The wife told her husband what the doctor said. He then called the doctor’s husband and using a fake voice, he said the doctor was cheating on him. He also used fake accounts at various online cafes around the city to post negative reviews of the doctor at her hospital. Then he called the doctor and said, ‘I am known to do things to people who try to harm me.'”

I couldn’t believe all of this. It seemed not true. And yet, my friend had no reason to lie to me.

I was with another friend of mine.

She was shocked. She often wrote articles about feminism and couldn’t believe that this person who she knew and trusted was so despicable.

I stopped talking to the guy. We had been in various email discussions and we often saw each other.

I immediately stopped responding to everything.

He even wrote me and said, “Why are you not responding?” He wrote me again, “Did I do something?? Why don’t you respond?”

But I never responded to that. I heard later he started trashing me behind my back afterwards but I didn’t care.

He got divorced. He had to withdraw from the job he was being considered for. He left another prominent and public-facing job.

I never spoke to him again.

—

A few months later, I ran into my friend who was with me when we first heard this story.

She told me she had been corresponding with the guy and he was helping her find a job.

“How can you let him help you? And you don’t need his help. You heard what Q. said about him.”

“But he’s always been loyal to me and I am a loyal friend. I want to be loyal back. He’s been good to me.”

“He hit on you while he was married and then he told his staff what he was going to do to you if he ever went out with you.”

“I don’t know if that’s true.”

“You’re the one who told me that!”

“Still,” she said, “he was good to me and gave me opportunities and I want to be loyal.”

“But how can you say you are a feminist? He beat his wife and then threatened the woman who sewed her up.”

“I can’t talk about this anymore.”

So my friend and I never spoke again.

To this day he says things about me behind my back. He’s very upset at me because I simply stopped talking to him.

Maybe I could’ve reacted better. Done something.

—

I hear the most insane stories all the time. Every day.

The world is a scary place when you peel just one layer away.

My father had a mental breakdown in 1988. I guess that’s what you call it.

He started crying all the time. In the middle of a grocery store. Out at lunch. While playing chess with me.

He would listen to music all day. For the last 17 years of his life, he was permanently depressed.

When I was a kid he told me the only important thing in business is to be honest. And then he went broke when he was ripped off by the people he was closest to.

I follow his advice.

I lose friends because of this advice. I say things people get upset about. And it’s hard to know what the truth is sometimes.

And then I don’t always know how to act on the truth. I do my best.

But still.

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Why Colleges Are Going Down the Drain: A True Story

FIRST… THE THREAT!

Her college sent this email to me and my daughter at the end of her second year.

---

Dear [X],

This in an IMPORTANT email reminding you of your debt to [ABCD College] in the amount of $16.92!

This amount is your damage fee you were assessed back in May.

It is VERY important that you submit payment in full as SOON as possible to insure your debt is not assessed further finance fees/late fees or WORSE… go off to a COLLECTION AGENCY the end of SEPTEMBER.

I would HATE for your debt to go off to a collection agency or ATTORNEY, which would cause you harm, so if you would like to call me and discuss possible payment plan arrangements I’m willing to help.

Please contact me ASAP!!

---

What? I thought. Cause her “harm”? Send to an attorney? Payment plan for $16.92?

A collection agency on my daughter? Would they really “hate” to do that?

Coincidentally, they had just called me the day before, asking for a donation.

What did she do?

So I wrote back, reminded them they asked me for a donation just the day before.

And I asked them what she damaged that cost $16.92. She would certainly pay.

I also reminded them of the $132,000 she had already paid for her education there and reminded them they should take that into account before threatening to ruin her credit.

They wrote back that they don’t know what the damage was and would ask the facilities department for a “detailed assessment.”

MY RESPONSE:

---

Dear [College]:

I look forward to seeing your detailed assessment.

At 5’1″ my daughter is known to cause quite a lot of damage wherever she goes.

I would keep in mind, though, your overall standards for sending out a communication like your earlier one demanding $16.92 “ASAP” or you would be forced to report her to an “attorney” or “collection agency.”

Those standards should take the following into account (my suggestions):

A) DONATION: You asked me for a donation yesterday
B) TUITION: She has spent $132,000–140,000 all in
C) HER OTHER OPTIONS: Your school has the same tuition as Harvard despite a faculty/student ratio of 9:1 versus 6:1 at Harvard.

Given you are spending less on education and facilities, your email underlines the question: WHAT ARE YOU SPENDING THE MONEY ON?

D) COMPARISONS: I took a similar college, with similar tuition, located close to you.

Franklin & Marshall College – average salary two years after graduation: $46,000.

Average salary two years after your school: $44,300.

The national median is $50,200.

Not that it’s all about the money but 70% of students say salary is their first consideration for post-college employment.

E) Your post college employment rate at 92% is also lower than the employment rate for adults WITHOUT A HIGH SCHOOL DEGREE (94.4%).

And there are no details, no documentation, no due process, and your messaging doesn’t seem aligned with your wish for more donations from me, etc.

Thanks very much,

-James Altucher

---

DAMAGES REVEALED!

They wrote back:

---

Mr. Altucher,

Your daughter was charged a community damage charge that included all students on her floor.

The microwave on the floor was damaged and needed to be replaced.

Her portion of the overall charge was $16.67.

Thank you,

---

I wrote:

---

Thanks for this.

Do you have the receipt?

By the way, you said $16.92 earlier and now $16.67. Why the difference?

When are you reporting this to an “attorney”?

She will pay.

Please see my prior email. Your note says you value all feedback. I look forward to hearing from you.

– James Altucher

---

The college wrote back:

---

Mr. Altucher,

Facilities Management lists their costs on the website. Below is a link to those prices.

[link]

---

I clicked on the link.

They charged her floor $250 for the microwave.

The average microwave on Amazon is about $60.

So I wrote, “Thanks,” and paid.

CONSEQUENCES:

This year she did NOT go back to college for her junior year.

She found a job related to her passion and also a valuable internship. She has made friends.

She refused to use my connections to get her a job.

She is using money from her job to get an apartment with roommates.

She is learning.

I am a very proud father.

The college has a brand new microwave.

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