Yoshiro Nakamatso would suffocate himself underwater in order to come up with ideas. He invented the floppy disk when he was within 1/2 second of his death, about to drown. He has 4000 patents. He also has photographed every meal he’s ever taken for the past 34 years. He claims he’s the most prolific inventor… Continue Reading
The general dissatisfaction that accompanies my burning desire to be successful means I often lose sight of the fact that some pretty amazing stuff happens around me. A few weeks ago my friend, entrepreneur Frank Giustra invited me to lunch with the Dalai Lama. As a well known business leader, Frank gets roped into a… Continue Reading
Claudia is a little upset at me. She doesn’t like when I give out my phone number. “You’re going to get too many calls,” she said. Ok, but I want people to text me with questions for our “Ask Altucher” podcasts. But sometimes I pick up the call. Last night I got a call from… Continue Reading
My daughter is reading my favorite book. “I’m on page 112,” she says, “of The Choose Yourself Stories”. This is my collection of more personal stories about my life. I never marketed it. Just put it out there. But she found it. Now she has a lot of questions like, “Why did you always want… Continue Reading
90% of the feedback I got about “Choose Yourself” was about one thing: How to bridge harsh reality with the world of imagination: how to become an Idea Machine. For my whole life I felt like a stray dog, dashing around until I could survive in the jungle. But I was lost and it took… Continue Reading
On Quora someone asked, “should answers be categorized by expert / non-expert?” My response: There is no such thing as an expert. First, a couple of anecdotes. In 1799, George Washington caught a cold. He was coughing and he had a fever. This was considered an emergency. The greatest American alive was sick! Blood was… Continue Reading
I have an amazing tool/app that makes my work 100x more productive. It’s called a phone. That sounds sarcastic. I’m not being sarcastic. It’s the truth. A lot of times people send me emails and then I forget about them or I never respond to them or I respond to them weeks later. I now… Continue Reading
I felt as though my head was going to explode. It was only Tuesday, but I was already way behind on the week’s promises for meetings, proposals, interviews, and writing. My phone had been buzzing since 5:15 am, and I was, admittedly, suffering from the headache resulting from the prior evening’s libations, a habit that… Continue Reading
$70 million was a lot of money for me at the time. And I couldn’t sleep at night until I gave back every dollar to the people who gave it to me. I was running the sort of fund where people gave me money and then I invested it in other funds. The only problem… Continue Reading
“This is a three billion dollar class action lawsuit. In the morning, I have to call my board. I have to tell them that the architect of our defense was arrested for running naked in the street.” – Karen Crowder, Michael Clayton You’ve heard of the “overnight success.” One thing anyone who has been labelled… Continue Reading
In 2002 I was driving to a hedge fund manager’s house to hopefully raise money from him. I was two hours late. This was pre-GPS and I had no cell phone. I was totally lost. If you’ve never driven around Connecticut you need to know one thing: all the roads are parallel and they all… Continue Reading
It’s a typical morning, no different than any other. You wake up, drive to the office and look to slowly ease yourself into your day with a cup of coffee. You begin to work your way through the zillions of emails that have amassed overnight when you are summoned into the corner office. You walk… Continue Reading
BusinessWeek has a short piece out profiling Gerry Schwartz who left Bear Sterns a few months after Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis and George Roberts in 1976 (founders of private equity giant KKR). Schwartz, a Canadian, brought the same LBO platform home to Canada and founded Onex which has returned over 28% annually over the past 30… Continue Reading
My first night in my first apartment I woke up with cockroaches everywhere. I went to the bathroom and the entire floor was swarming with them. I panicked and screamed because I was a little baby and never saw this before. I should’ve just called Terminix michigan to get rid of the pests, but I… Continue Reading
Time is not money. All the slick guys in their suits, peppering their lingo with “time is money!” Hurry! Money! It’s not true. I feel bad for them. Cheapening their time like that. I know this because I’m the master at losing money. I have very clever ways of making my money explode into dust.… Continue Reading
