Meine Buchnotizen – Reinvent Yourself von James Altucher

Das Buch Reinvent Yourself von James Altucher liest sich wie eine Sammlung von Blogbeiträgen. Wahrscheinlich weil es so ist. Enthält aber trotzdem interessante Ideen.


Gelesen im März 2017.
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You need to figure out the variables for a simple equation: PLUS: Who are the people you can learn from? Real mentors, virtual mentors. EQUAL: Who are the people who can challenge us? We can’t get better unless we are constantly challenged and then get feedback from our mentors. MINUS: Who are the people we can teach and share with and make an impact on? Without this, one can never truly become a master.

Have humility. Learn from everyone you can. Even if it’s just one takeaway.

Be grateful for the lessons you get, and realize that everything is a lesson.

Only be around people you love and who inspire you.

Life is a billion times smaller than the point of a needle. Don’t waste it doing things you were told to do. Do the things you love to do.

Health is the most important thing, else your body today won’t let you enjoy tomorrow.

Every day, be creative. Creativity is a muscle.

You’re going to make mistakes, but 80% is always good enough. Keep learning the next thing.

Life will constantly hit you until you are senseless. Don’t forget these are lessons.

Children laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults on average five times a day.

The average multi-millionaire has seven different sources of income.

When you have one source of income (a job) you are falling into the trap. So you constantly have to be on the lookout for the other sources of income.

The greatest artists (Picasso) reinvented themselves every five years. The best businesspeople (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Richard Branson) reinvented themselves every few years. Five years and you need to start learning new skills, practicing new efforts, trying on new careers for size.

You need to find well-being from within. And here is what it is: FREEDOM RELATIONSHIPS COMPETENCE. Increase those every day and you will find well-being.

If all you do is the same thing every day, you will never increase those three things in your life.

Reinvention occurs every day. It’s not something you wake up every five years and say, “OK, today is Reinvention Day.”

Define freedom in different ways: reduce expectations, increase sources of income so no one source controls you.

Improve relationships. Plus, minus, equal: Find mentors to teach you. Find the next generation to teach. Find friends who build you up and challenge you.

Habits – it’s the 5×5 rule. You are not just the average of the five people around you. You’re the average of the five habits you do, the things you eat, the ideas you have, the content you consume.

How to find a mentor:
RESEARCH – do heavy research on their bios, their histories, everything. Read all the books they like and have spoken publicly about. Read all the analysis on the books so you can discuss it with them. Read all of their books. Read about people they’ve previously mentored and what happened.

VALUE – send ideas for how they can improve their businesses.

QUANTITY – some people are simply too busy and will never be a mentor. They already have their mentees. Or they just don’t want to. That’s fine. Provide updates every three to four months. This has worked for me in about two or three cases where they have eventually gotten back in touch.

AVAILABILITY – fly out (even to another country where they might be) and then tell them, “I’m in the neighborhood, happy to discuss the ideas more.” Make yourself available for whenever they are available because, by definition, they are less available than you are.

DIVERSITY – always be on the lookout for more than one, at the same time.

VIRTUAL – Believe it or not, sometimes it’s just as good (often better) to read all of their materials rather than be directly mentored.

DELIVER – It’s not just ideas. Drive business their way or introduce them to people who can provide value for them, etc.

OVER-DELIVER – This is your only chance. And your mentor has plenty of people around him. Over-deliver on everything.

Everything I do, everyone I meet, I try to find at least one takeaway. THE PLUS. Then I write it down. I try to remember everything. I talk to my friends about the takeaway. THE EQUAL I share the takeaway. With the MINUS, I try to solidify what I’ve learned from everyone I meet.

Seven aspects of influence:
1. Reciprocity – if you give someone a Christmas card, they will want to return the favor.
2. Likability – make yourself trustworthy. For instance, outline the negatives of dealing with you.
3. Consistency – ask someone for a favor. Now they will say to themselves, “I am the type of person who does James a favor.”
4. Social Proof – if you are trying to get someone to do X, show them that “a lot of your peers do X.” For instance, if you are at a bar and you are a guy trying to meet women, bring your women friends and not your guy friends with you.
5. Authority – “four out of five dentists say…”
6. Scarcity – “only 100 iPhones left at this store!”
7. Unity – you and I are the same because: location, values, religion, etc.

Negotiation
The most important question in negotiation is „How?“. You always want to get more information in a negotiation with as little commitment as possible on your side. If one side says, “Show up with $1 million tomorrow,” you can say, “How am I supposed to get you $1 million by tomorrow?”. Outsource the hard things they are asking right back to them. They will keep talking.

One side says, “We can only go as low as $36,000 on this car,” you can say, “I can’t go higher than $30,000. How am I supposed to come up with the $36,000?” And just see what they say.

Ask “open-ended questions” starting with “how” or “what.” Ask a lot of them. Be prepared in advance with your “how” questions.

There can be more open-ended things that need to be discussed and put down on paper, like, “How can I best succeed at this job so I get a promotion/raise within a year?” Or, “How can we work this out so I get an extra week vacation?” In every situation there are extra terms and conditions that need to be worked out.

Start with No – A lot of people think you get people to say easy “yeses” so that when the situation gets more difficult, they are more primed to say “yes.” “Not true,” Chris told me. “People are too primed now to say ‘yes.’ They know what you are up to. Get them to say ‘no’ first. That’s the starting point.” How can I do that? “Ask them a question like, ‘Do you want this project to fail?’ or ‘Is this situation not going to work out for either side?’” They don’t want to fail, so they will say “no.” Now you can start to find common ground.

Powerless – Nobody wants to feel powerless. If the negotiation is not going your way you can say to them, „Sounds like there’s nothing you can do“. This will make them feel powerless. They will say ‘no’ to that and now they will try to do something for you to prove they are not powerless.

List the negatives – You can start to get empathy with the other side by listing the negatives on your side. Then they start to agree with you. For instance, you can say, “I know you might not trust me. I know you have had bad dealings in the past.“ They will say, “That’s right.” And once you have empathy with them, you can be a little more insistent on what it is you want.

Specific numbers – If someone says, “This car is $36,000,” then come back with something like, “Listen, I know it’s very difficult to go below $36,000. I know you are doing the best you can here. But the most I can afford is $32,157.” Then it appears (and it can also be true) that you are doing the homework and preparation to come up with an exact number that you can afford. This is, of course, better if you have done the work to back up that specific number.

Mirror – Whatever they say, repeat the last one to three words. Do this as much as possible. If they say, “We can’t go higher than $100,000 on salary because that’s what everyone else is making,” just say, “That’s what everyone else is making,” and see what they say next. They will always say more.

Silence – Don’t be afraid to go silent. Mirror and then have the confidence to go silent. Nobody wants the negotiation to end. They will keep talking and give you more information.

Deadlines don’t matter – They need you as much as you need them. Most people don’t realize that in the heat of a negotiation. That’s why they are in the negotiation in the first place. If they put a deadline on, don’t feel obligated to meet it. The negotiation won’t end. They still need you.

Late-night FM DJ Voice – use your “late-night FM DJ voice” when you negotiate to show people you are solid and serious. Get your voice about half an octave deeper and slow down a bit between each word.

Who throws out a number first? – Let them throw out a number first. For one thing, your number might be so high that they stop trusting you. And as far as anchoring, know what your range is and if their number is too low, don’t let it anchor you. Also, if their number is too low, you can get back to the open-ended “how” questions. Like, “If everyone else in my industry is paid ‘X’ then how can I go with the number you suggest?”

Preparation – Get your “how” questions ready. Your “no” questions. List your negatives down on a piece of paper. Figure out your terms and conditions in advance. Do some basic work so when you come up with specific numbers, you can back it up.

I don’t worry about how I’m doing, I just do what I’m doing. Doing my best in any situation is all I can do. If I worry about it while I’m doing it, I won’t do my best.

“The less art there is in painting, the more painting there is.” – Picasso

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, has an incredible world record: he’s missed over 13,000 shots — more than any other player in professional basketball. So taking action is more important than anything else.

Every time Picasso felt comfortable, he changed styles completely. His blue period is nothing like cubism is nothing like his surrealism.

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

Reinvention is scary. And it’s risky. But it is unavoidable.

“I am always doing things I can’t do — that’s how I get to do them.” – Picasso

My daughter lost a tennis match the other day at school. I asked her, “What did you learn?”

Compounding 1% a day in X, makes X 38 times better in a yea

“When I ran 50 hotels, hospitality was my main focus. For each hotel, I had the hotel managers come up with five adjectives for what that hotel would be. Maybe the adjectives might be: funky, hip, modern, clean, rock ’n’ roll. “Every employee, even the housekeepers, would keep those adjectives in mind in whatever they did. And, if possible, we even made sure the five senses the customers would experience in the hotels would match the five adjectives.”

Remember the equation from Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. “Despair = Suffering – Meaning. Find the things that bring you meaning. Suffering is always there in this world. But if you have meaning, you will have less despair. You will find your calling.

When you compare, you despair. When you are humble, you learn. When you get curious, you get better.

Continually investing in the success of others is what will eventually lead to success for yourself.

When I worked at HBO, I only started to feel like I was accomplishing something when my language changed from “they” (referring to HBO) to “we.”

My contribution was big enough that other companies started to approach me and ask me if I could help them also. So I started my first company. I haven’t had a job since.

When we were kids, we laughed and asked question. As adults, we cry and shout answers.

“Going from PayPal, I thought: ‘Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?’ Not from the perspective, ‘What’s the best way to make money?” – Elon Musk

“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.” – Elon Musk

When something bad does happen, rather than blame, I try to think about what I learned. I don’t want to make the same mistake again. It takes practice. I am very trusting. But I hope to learn a little each day.

The media only writes about the sinners and the scandals, but that’s normal, because a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows.

Many studies show that the key to contentment and confidence is three things:
Growing competence in a pursuit you love
Strengthening every day the relationships around you
Increasing your freedom of choices

If we start without confidence, already we have lost half the battle and we bury our talents.

Look at direct marketing letters you get in email. They all spend pages and pages addressing your concerns. This is one of the most important techniques in direct marketing.

Many studies have shown that when you compliment children on “growth” versus specific accomplishments, they perform better in the long run.

Someone asked me recently where I expect to be in five years. I never think about it. Not ever. I only try every day to improve 1% my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. The results will take care of themselves. This is the ONLY way today to plan for a successful tomorrow.

A spark maybe lit the fire. But only that 1% growth every day is the fuel to keep the fire going. Else, I burn out.

“Nothing comes to a sleeper but a dream.” Dreams are in the head. But action creates growth, creates skill, creates excellence. Edison didn’t dream about a light bulb. He tried 10,000 experiments before one worked.

Ask this every morning about your friends, your lovers, your employees: how can I help them just a little bit more, with the simple resources I have?

A pyramid is built by first building a solid base. No matter what I do now, I always make sure I understand all the pieces that make up the base.

Try to get the people working for you to be more successful than you.

“I had to show by example how to manage, so the people underneath me would know what to do instead of me being always involved.”

Only do the essential – Rick Ross arranged the top level contacts between his sellers and his buyers. Then he stepped back. Everything else had to be dealt with by the people who worked for him and the people who worked for them. “Everyone knew what they had to do.” And if they didn’t, they stopped being part of the chain.

It always seems the good player gets lucky more than the bad player.

Tony Robbins method:
At first you don’t know anything.
You find five people who are the experts in the world.
You extensively interview them.
You figure out the simplest things they have in common with each other. You do that simple thing over and over and over and over (repetition).
You succeed.

If each employee can say, “Who did I help today?” and have an answer, then that is a good leader.

Money is a side effect of trying to help others. Trying to solve problems. Trying to move beyond the “good enough.”

So many people ask, “How do I get traffic?” That’s the wrong question. If you ask every day, “How did I help people today?” then you will have more traffic and money than you could have imagined.

The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job — that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.

You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we’ve come up with doing that is through companies.

Every idea has to be sustainable. Profitability is proof that an idea is sustainable.

Google is great. But it can be better. Having this mindset always forces you to push beyond the comfort zone.

„You may think using Google’s great, but I still think it’s terrible.“ – Larry Page

Technology should do the hard work — discovery, organization, communication — so users can do what makes them happiest: living and loving, not messing with annoying computers!

Mick Ebeling went to Intel and others and said, “We’re already doing this. Are you in?” Too many people say, “I have an idea. Now I need funding.” Don’t do that anymore. Stop it! Say instead, “I’m already doing this. Here are the 10 or 20 things I’ve done so far. Here are the results. Are you in?”

We had many failures while trying to figure this out. But each failure was simply a way to show us what we should do, what we could do better. Every time we failed we knew at least one thing we could do better.

Never start with a blank page. Find all the things closest to what you want to be possible and use those ideas as starting points to find the next generation of possible.

Mick didn’t know anything about prosthetics. But he knew that if he brought together the man who made the cheap, mechanical hand, with experts in 3D printing, with experts in prosthetics, then something good could happen. Even if you aren’t an expert, give yourself permission to be a producer. Produce!

Listen more than you talk. Nobody learned anything by hearing themselves speak.

Start making suggestions for how to improve your workplace. Don’t be a shrinking violet, quietly getting your job done adequately. Be bold, and the sky is the limit.

Always look forward. The moment you rest on your laurels is the moment your competition overtakes you.

My grandma told me there are only two types of decisions: decisions made out of fear and decisions made out of growth. Do you stay in your job because you are afraid you won’t get another job? Or do you stay in your job because you are excited about the growth potential there?

A growth-based decision becomes the story of your life later. A fear-based decision turns into regret.

Don’t be sad when you fail and happy when you succeed. Both are going to happen again and again at every new level.

How to get better at any skill game:
Read as many books as you can that were written by players better than you.
Study hands and the analysis of those hands.
Study and think about your mistakes. Don’t regret your mistakes. You’ll always make mistakes. The better you are, the fewer mistakes you make. The only way to get better is to thoroughly analyze your mistakes. So the more mistakes you have, the more opportunities you have to get better. Of course, this applies to everything you do in life.
Talk to people smarter than you. Try to learn from them anything you can.

You have to play and be willing to lose in order to learn more. This is the same as anything. You get better at sales and management from studying from the best, reading and re-reading thousands of examples, and understanding the subtleties in the history of what you love.

Talent is a spark that lights the fire. But the fire needs constant fuel to get bigger.

Never let a good loss go to waste. The only way to learn is to study something you never knew before. Losses are the maps that point you to what you never knew before.

Five Years to reinvent yourself:
1.    Year One: you’re flailing and reading everything and just starting to DO.
2.    Year Two: you know who you need to talk to and network with. You’re Doing every day. You finally know what the monopoly board looks like in your new endeavors.
3.    Year Three: you’re good enough to start making money. It might not be a living yet.
4.    Year Four: you’re making a good living
5.    Year Five: you’re making wealth

Sometimes you get frustrated in years 1-4. That’s okay. Just keep going. Or stop and pick a new field. It doesn’t matter. Eventually you’re dead and then it’s hard to reinvent yourself.

By year three you’ve put in 5,000-7,000 hours. That’s good enough to be in the top 200-300 in the world in anything. The top 200 in almost any field makes a living. By year three you will know how to make money. By year four you will scale that up and make a living. Some people stop at year four. By year five you are in the top 30-50, so you can make wealth.

How to network
Make concentric circles. You’re at the middle.
The next circle is friends and family.
The next circle is online communities.
The circle after that is meetups and coffees.
The circle after that is conferences and thought leaders.
The circle after that is mentors.
The circle after that is customers and wealth-creators.
Start making your way through the circles.

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