You have a choice. You can be a victim or you can be rich.

See uncertainty and failures as input to redirect efforts, not reasons to quit. Comfort with uncertainty enables agility. View setbacks as resonant signals of where to improve.

Embracing Uncertainty

Ruthlessly eliminate ideas, activities, information, media sources, and people that do not truly serve your goals or enrich your life at this time. Be extremely rigorous about protecting your focus, energy levels, and positive mindset. Say no to most things. Stay laser focused only on executing priorities rather than indulging every curiosity.

Relentlessly Focusing by Tuning Out Distractions

Honestly identify and challenge self-limiting beliefs you carry like “I’m not creative enough” or “I could never do that” that undermine your potential. Actively alter your inner narrative to open yourself up to possibilities versus shutting them down. Our habitual self-talk shapes our possible actions. Give yourself unconditional permission to think freely outside your normal box.

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs About Yourself

<ul><li>Exercise your idea generation muscle constantly by making it a habit to brainstorm new ideas every single day. </li><li>Creativity is like a muscle that thrives when used regularly. </li><li>Many ideas will lead nowhere, but volume ultimately leads to promising new opportunities. </li><li>Capture every idea without censorship initially. Let judgments come only after. </li><li>Note concepts in a journal to clarify thinking. Ideas are the seeds of change.</li></ul>

Exercising Your Idea Generation Muscle

Look for ways to add value to other people’s lives without directly expecting anything in return. Help people in small ways whenever you can. Generosity, service, and goodwill towards others often create unexpected abundance directly or indirectly. Adding value builds relationships and goodwill that enrich life beyond money.

Adding Value for Others to Create Abundance

<ul><li>Develop wide-ranging skills and competencies by saying "yes" to new experiences and opportunities to learn outside your comfort zone. </li><li>Diverse interests and capabilities make you anti-fragile to handle a chaotic world. </li><li>Be a perpetual learner, adopting a beginner's mindset. Pursue mastery across multiple disciplines.</li></ul>

Building Wide-Ranging Skill Sets

Develop the radical mindset of relying on yourself over institutions for success. Build skills, offer value, and generate options proactively versus waiting to be chosen. Take ownership of your decisions and path.

Choose Yourself Mindset

<ul><li>Avoid negative people who drain energy.</li><li>Be with inspirational doers taking ownership.</li><li>Environment influences mindset.</li><li>Community reinforces boldness.</li></ul>

Surrounding Yourself with Doers

Pitch ideas constantly to everyone in your network to rapidly iterate and get feedback. Flex your idea generation muscles. Most ideas will go nowhere, but put your ego aside. Through volume some ideas will eventually resonate at the right time and with the right person. You only need one winning idea.

Relentlessly Pitching Ideas to Rapidly Iterate

In Choose Yourself, James Altucher advocates taking control of your career and life trajectory rather than waiting for institutions and systems to choose you. He provides principles for self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and creating opportunity on your own terms.

The world is changing. Markets have crashed. Jobs have disappeared. Industries have been disrupted and are being remade before our eyes. Everything we aspired to for "security," everything we thought was "safe," no longer is: College. Employment. Retirement. Government. It's all crumbling down. In every part of society, the middlemen are being pushed out of the picture. No longer is someone coming to hire you, to invest in your company, to sign you, to pick you. It's on you to make the most important decision in your life: Choose Yourself. New tools and economic forces have emerged to make it possible for individuals to create art, make millions of dollars and change the world without "help." More and more opportunities are rising out of the ashes of the broken system to generate real inward success (personal happiness and health) and outward success (fulfilling work and wealth). This book will teach you to do just that. With dozens of case studies, interviews and examples-including the author, investor and entrepreneur James Altucher's own heartbreaking and inspiring story-Choose Yourself illuminates your personal path to building a bright, new world out of the wreckage of the old.

JAMES ALTUCHER

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