A whole book in James Altucher’s typical style. 

Packed. Informative. Entertaining. A little chaotic. Jumping quickly between styles, digressing, then getting back on track. Interlaced with stories illustrating his points.

Do expect the “rich” in the title to be taken literally. Although the book offers monetary advice, the “rich” mostly relates to a mindset.

And it is not just aimed at employees either.

Typical James. Very commercially smart title to broaden the audience for the book. It suggests richness is also achievable for the employees. And of course there are many more employees than non-employees (probably implying entrepreneurs). And these employees are craving to be rich. In many ways.

I am thinking how you would summarize his main idea. Independence comes to mind. Make yourself independent from your employer. Make your value independent from where you work. Make sure you have plan B and C. Prepare for disaster.
Become antifragile, comes to mind (Nassim Taleb).

Even become independent of your own streams of thought, I mean do not let them dominate you. Get on top of them.
That is probably a very buddhist idea

If you have read James’ post you may have seen a lot of the content already.

Start a business on the side.

Refers to Cialdini a couple of times. Read that one some time ago. Influence. Recommend that too.

Read about this idea muscle, how important it is to train it. And then how lazy i am writing down the stuff racing through my mind during the day. Ideas I then forget because I don not write them down. I think starting to even write down ideas you have even how stupid they may sound is a great idea.

One of these is an idea for an internet media company. Any media but video. Well, also video, but not just. Podcasts, radio, whatever.
I do not understand why cable companies do not heavily invest in this. The carrier is commodity. Content is king. That is what they said in 2000 about the internet, refering to web sites, when the carier was still important (or rather: limited. It was important because badnwidth was so scarce). And today it is even more true, now all deregulation of cables has been realised. Sorry, I mean with the disappearance of the big state owned telephone / cable companies.
That was one of my ideas today.
It probably exists already, but I am too lazy to go find out now.

Another idea, for Amazon kindle. You can put books purchased elsewhere on your Kindle (using Calibre for that great stuff), but notes will not be sync-ed with your kindle.amazon.com. Provide it. I guess it is a stupid measure to make sure you purchase your books on amazon. Is there already a service extracting notes from your kindle? O I googled and found Calibre might be able to. Will check that out.

Another one: be able to search books and add to wishlist from Kindle.

Another one: integration with Evernote (typing this in evernote).

James tosses the idea of choose yourself meetups. Chooseyourself.me. AA type gatherings. Might work, but definitely not for me. Nor James I am sure. Too shy.

References in the back great: to Fedora training creation – O now I have a new business idea for courses. I can turn any business problem from my job, generalise it and create a (micro) course out of it. In the media company too? Was just talking to my wife last night how out of date the current system for higher education is, with all the new media courses (for free) coming online.

That’s it.

Nice read.