Lola F.'s Key Ideas from Choose Yourself!
by James Altucher

Remember this: You have to make yourself the only person who controls your dreams.

If financial freedom is your dream, then you have to control your income, which means creating products, freelancing, making passive income from affiliate marketing, selling books, courses, teaching seminars – do any one, or even better, all of these.

Why aren’t you the only one who controls your dreams already? Because you’re afraid.

• Afraid of what our family will think if we leave our “stable job”.
• Afraid of what friends might say.
• Afraid of our customers rejecting us.

Rejection—and the fear of rejection—is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves.

Avoiding rejection is a powerful motivator. But it makes us miserable.

As long as you choose to live with that fear, instead of acting in spite of it, you are giving others the power to make your choices for you.

There’s a saying, ‘The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again’.

This is about a new phase in history where art, science, business, and spirit will join together, both externally and internally, in the pursuit of true wealth.

What you need to do is build the house you will live in. You build that house by laying a solid foundation: by building physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health

Only think about the people you enjoy. Only read the books you enjoy, that make you happy to be human. Only go to the events that actually make you laugh or fall in love. Only deal with the people who love you back, who are winners and want you to win too.

The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.

Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again

Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically. Always ask yourself, what can I improve? Who else can I talk to? Where else can I look?

Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again’.

• Rodney Dangerfield didn’t succeed in comedy until his forties.
• Ray Kroc was a milkshake salesman into his fifties. Then he stumbled onto a clean restaurant that served a good hamburger run by two brothers with the last name McDonald. He bought McDonald’s when he was fifty-two.
• Raymond Chandler, the most successful noir novelist of all time, wrote his first novel at age fifty-two.

Think of two people in your network who don’t know each other but you think can add value to each other’s lives. Introduce them. Do this every day. Get better and better at it. The more value you bring to the people in your network (even if it doesn’t directly bring value to you in an immediate way), the greater the value of your network. And then the greater value you will have

• If you have an idea, don’t focus on the money. Don’t focus on how you will make a living. Do this: Build your product. Sell it to a customer. Start shipping. Then quit your job.
• Often the real reason someone buys from you is not for your product, but for you
• If you want to be successful, you need to study success, not hate it or be envious of it. If you are envious, then you will distance yourself from success and make it that much harder to get there.
• As yourself: What’s the lifetime value of the customer? What are the ancillary benefits of having this customer?

What to do when struggling with idea topics:

Search phrases on social media like: ‘I wish I had’, ‘I just paid someone to’, ‘is the worst product’, ‘is a horrible company’, ‘has a terrible website’, ‘is my favourite website’, ‘does anyone know how...' 

This will expand your thinking and provide you with puzzle pieces to connect.