Helping others helps yourself. The document discusses how James Altucher was able to pull himself out of bankruptcy and despair by focusing on helping others through sharing ideas and starting businesses to meet other people's needs rather than his own. He advised that even those with multiple jobs and responsibilities can start thinking of small ways to help others, such as coming up with ideas within their own companies, to improve their situation and security amid economic uncertainties that are affecting many. The key is to start practicing focusing on others' needs now through small steps rather than waiting or relying only on current jobs and circumstances.

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Helping Others Helps You
James Altucher and Glenn Beck
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWYrHeaE2WM
BECK: You’re kind of an enigma, becauseyou’re very focused on business,but you’re alsofocused
on love, and you have a lot of ‘god stuff’ in there without ‘god language’. Do you know what I
mean?
ALTUCHER: Well—
BECK: You’re focused on… You want to make money. I guess that’s what… You’ve got to love.
ALTUCHER: Yeah, because money is not… Money is only going to be a side effect of providing
value for others. So, when I was at the bottom… And I was just really bad. Again, I was thinking
of killing myself. I stopped talking to my parents, and then my father died. I never got a chance
to talk to him again, and I had to say, “This is really just not working out.” So, I had to do a
complete reversal and say… OK, instead of me trying to help me every day, I started donating my
efforts, my time to charity. When I had free time, I started writing down ideas. I got a waiter’s
pad. I would write down twenty ideas a day, not for me but for other businesses that I can help,
businesses that I could start. If you start a business because you’re helping other people, it’s
you’re satisfying some other person’s demand other than your own, and then, if you’re lucky,
you can charge for it. Everyone can write these ideas down. You could be at any level of life and
write ideas down. That’s the only thing I needed to do at first, because I had nothing, and I was
being foreclosed on, I was bankrupt, and nobody was talking to me. I had nobody to talk to. So, I
had to start from somewhere—and this is after I had millions—so I had judged my self-worth by
my net worth, and I needed a new way now to judge myself, because I was a zero. In fact, my
self-worth probably was zero, but I was able to start helping people more and more, and I would
contact people, and I would give them ideas, and what that would do was I would exercise my
idea muscle. So, I’m doing this as if I’m crazy, but as your idea muscle develops, you get crazier,

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and so you come up with crazy ideas, and eventually you start coming up with good ideas. And I
would share them with other people, and bit by bit I would pull myself up off the carpet and try
to survive.
BECK: So, if you’re money, how do you get people to go? Because what people kept focusing on
in the meeting today was you can’t make… There are alot of people that are working, and they’ve
got two jobs, and they’ve got the kids, and I get that, but I don’t think your solution is not about
abandoning any of that; it’s about starting to think differently.
ALTUCHER: Right. So, obviously I’m not a single mother with two kids—
BECK: Right.
ALTUCHER: —who is juggling five jobs or whatever, and I’ll never fully understand that
experience, but… I’ll give you an example. I’m on the Board of Directors of a billion-revenue’s
staffing company, so I see what’s happening all across the economy, and that woman, the single
mother, the company does not care about you. The Fortune 500 does not care about you. Every
company is thinking about their bottom line, and these people… No matter what job you have,
what your background is, you’re going to be fired, or you’re going to be downsized, or you're
going to be demoted, or you're going to have to beg your boss for scraps for the next income
raise, and you might even an income decrease in order to keep you, and you’ll be happy with it.
So, it’s not like I’m saying, again, “Take this job and shove it. I have three kids, and we’ll figure it
out somehow.” I’m saying start today. Conserve your energy. Be healthy. Be around people who
love you. Be grateful for what you have. And start coming up with ideas on how to help other
people, even within your own company, because you could be an ‘entremployee’. You can
become indispensable within your own company and forestall the fate in store. So, again, this is
not like I’m telling people, “Quit your job right now!” I’m saying this is happening all across the
economy. It’s nobody’s fault. I don’t know what the economic issue is. I don’t know what the
political issue is. It’s just happening. Incomes are going down. Inflation is going up. There’s 20%,

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30%, 40% underemployment, depending on what month it is. This is a way of thinking that you
have to start practicing now, no matter who you are. And I say this because it worked for me,
and I hope it works for others.