I asked Claudia if she would still love me in 40 years. I don’t know why I asked. Maybe because she was making me coffee. If every morning someone asks you to make coffee, how can you love him? Maybe she would get tired of it. To be blunt: I would not like making her… Continue Reading
Louis CK turned down $500,000 a year from Conan in the early 90s so he could go broke instead. Conan wanted to hire him as head writer of his show. Every step of the way in the 20 years since he put a challenge in front of himself that seemed impossible and it was until… Continue Reading
The woman had tattoos etched beautifully over her arms and told me the story of each one. Her husband owned the rights to 14,000 songs and told me the 20 year roller coaster ride of how he had acquired them. He owned the rights to almost all my favorite songs. I learned an immense amount… Continue Reading
I’ve given up right before the finish line. It’s not as bad as people say really. It even has a nice ring to it. French. “I’m a self-saboteur”. Maybe I’m a spy. Like, right when you are about to make a lot of money, or finish a book, or get a job, or whatever, you… Continue Reading
Imagine self-publishing 500,000,000 books. It happened and I’m going to tell you how. Everyone says that technology right now gives more opportunity than ever to “choose yourself”. That only now we have the opportunity to escape the cubicle and live a life of freedom. This is not true. Freedom starts with the choice inside yourself.… Continue Reading
The best negotiator I knew always acted like an idiot. He acted so well that I thought he was really stupid. I also thought at the time that he was my best friend. That was probably an act also. Just two years later he stopped talking to me forever. I ran into him in the… Continue Reading
I have never met a person who suddenly became happy simply by “finding their passion”. If my passion had come crawling across my bed during any of my lowest 50 moments in life and started nibbling on my ear I would’ve just pushed it away. Usually I wanted money or sex and I felt passion… Continue Reading
Gordon Gekko was right. Lunch is for wimps. So is breakfast, for that matter. Anyone who wants to master their weight, health and fitness, and save time and money by literally doing nothing should explore the world of fasting. But unlike Gekko’s propensity for making big bucks on the backs of hard working, salt of… Continue Reading
“You interrupt too much,” people email me. “Let your guests finish talking.” But I can’t help it. I get curious. I want to know! Now! Over the past year I interviewed about 80 guests for my podcast. My only criteria: I was fascinated by some aspect of each person. I didn’t limit myself by saying… Continue Reading
“Wise investors won’t try to outsmart the market. They’ll buy index funds for the long term, and they’ll diversify.” That’s what Jack C. Bogle says. He is the pioneer of low-cost index investing and founder and former CEO of Vanguard which now manages over $3.3 trillion in assets globally. Bloomberg has a new interview with him… Continue Reading
I was fired. I asked for one more week to finish what I was working on but my boss said, “No. Clear out of here in the next hour.” I don’t know why I was fired. Other people weren’t. But I think my boss didn’t like me. So I got depressed. I was going to… Continue Reading
Robbie Abed wanted to have coffee with me in 2011. Then in 2012 and 2013 and this year. I kept saying No. Robbie told me he has 250 coffee meetings a year. So in one way of thinking about it, I’m one in 250. And over a period of four years, I’m one in a… Continue Reading
I lost $15mm cash in one summer. It was about a million a week and then it picked up speed. Ugh, I’m like reading the newspaper twice. I know I’ve written about this before. But bear with me. I bought a house. I invested in bad companies. I started worse companies. I bought art. I… Continue Reading
When I met with Bernie Madoff to see if he would put money into my hedge fund I had no idea he had a scheme. Everyone said later, “We always knew”. But on the way to the meeting, those same people were calling me and saying, “ask him if we could invest.” They would deny… Continue Reading
When AD broke up with me and cheated on me I thought I would die. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t have ideas. I cut loose my friendships. The vault in my chest sealed shut. Which, of course, brings me to the earthquake of 1906. 10,000 buildings collapsed and fires started to spread all over San… Continue Reading
