1631: How to Steal and Get Rich by James Altucher on How to Discover New Business Ideas

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[00:00:30] This is Optimal Work Daily. How to Steal and Get Rich by James Altucher of jamesaltucher.com My 8-year-old daughter is crying right now. She's trying to draw manga-style comic book figures. The eyes look stupid, she says, and the arms look flimsy. My oldest tries to calm her down. Molly, I'm 3 years older than you. That's why my characters look so good, she says. But somehow that doesn't work and it doesn't help when my oldest says, Molly, guess what?

[00:00:59] I finished drawing on the whole pad. Aren't these pretty? I tell my youngest, Molly, look on the internet and see how other artists do their eyes and arms. I bet there are some manga artists who even have videos on how to do it. She says, but that's copying. I don't want to copy. I refuse. So I tell her my favorite quote from Picasso. Good artists copy, great artists steal.

[00:01:21] And my oldest says, that would mean he stole. And I tell her that's right, but still my youngest refuses to listen. She says, I don't want a copy. I want to do something completely original. But that's impossible. Just about every idea worked on now is a result of the following recursive formula.

[00:01:39] NI x equals NI1 plus NI2 plus NI3 plus MI. Where NI equals new idea and NI1, NI2, etc. equals various new ideas as of yesterday. And MI, which could be a tiny component of the whole equation, is my improvement, which again might be minimal or zero at best. Examples. Telescope.

[00:02:06] Galileo stole the telescope. He took the original invention by Hans Lippershey, made it a bit longer and more powerful, and gets full credit 400 years later for the invention. Telephone. Telephone. Who invented the telephone? Well, Alexander Graham Bell, of course. But only after he looked at the failed patent Antonio Miucci filed in 1874, Miucci was too poor to send in the $10 patent charge. So, patent denied. Enter Bell. Relativity.

[00:02:35] Einstein stole part of the theory of relativity from Poincaré. Poincaré published countless papers on relativity that Einstein had studied before his own first book on relativity. Einstein cited hundreds of sources, but didn't mention Poincaré once. Do the research, but there are several instances of direct plagiarism in his initial book on relativity. Search. Google.

[00:02:59] Not quite a steal in the sense of these others, but the entire concept of a search engine was dead and over by the time Google hit the scene. My little story on this? A company called Oingo came calling one of my partners one day in 2000 or 2001. I forget which year. That's how little impact it made on me. They were working on some algorithm for matching ads with web pages on search engines or something like that, and they needed funding badly. We almost could have named our price. I said, because I was the resident genius,

[00:03:28] No way. Isn't the entire search engine business dead? Well, somehow they survived, changed their name to Applied Semantics, and were bought by a tiny search engine company with no revenues called Google. The Oingo algorithm became AdSense, which accounts for 99% of Google's revenues. The Applied Semantics deal would have been worth about $1 to $2 billion by now. Suffice to say, Google built on the backs of everyone from Lycos to Oingo to Alta Vista, etc. Superman

[00:03:57] Captain Marvel, which was first put out by Fawcett Comics in 1940, was of course a direct ripoff of Superman and yet became very successful. And Superman himself may have been a plagiarism of sorts too. Five years before the first Superman came out, Jerry Siegel, Superman's creator, reviewed the book Gladiator, about a boy growing up in rural America who had superpowers. Siegel claimed in 1940 that Gladiator had not been an inspiration. He did not, at that point, note his 1932 review of the book.

[00:04:27] Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson directly plagiarized John Locke when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. James Madison even admitted later, Chess Bobby Fischer learned Russian when he was 14 years old so he could steal ideas from the Russian chess players in the magazine 64. He used those opening ideas to win the U.S. championship at the age of 15 in the mid-1950s. Art

[00:04:57] Roy Lichtenstein directly stole from the cartoon strip True Romance to repackage and then resell for what would now be millions. Star Wars Whether you call it inspiration or plagiarism, George Lucas took ideas from everything from Taoism to Asimov's Foundation series to Joseph Campbell, Greek mythology, King Arthur, etc. Vonnegut

[00:05:21] Kurt Vonnegut said he, quote, cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World for his novel Player Piano, and Aldous Huxley, in turn, stole it from Eugene Zimation's We. Groupon And Every Other Business Almost all current successful internet businesses are the result of lifting and improving the ideas from past businesses. Groupon is a direct descendant of the failed Paul Allen company Mercada, remember?

[00:05:48] Facebook? Remember GeoCities? Or, heaven forbid, Tripod? And why didn't the World Wide Web worm succeed? That's the first search engine that I can think of. Comedy In stand-up comedy, stealing or improving on routines has been common. Robin Williams was constantly accused of this early in his career, and his reply was that he was so stream of consciousness, he sometimes had no idea where the ideas were coming from. In other words, they were coming from his friends, even minutes after their acts.

[00:06:17] Bill Cosby has admitted stealing some jokes from George Carlin. Rosie O'Donnell was known to borrow from Jerry Seinfeld early in their careers. Sam Kinison has accused Bill Hicks of joke thievery, who, in turn, has accused Dennis Leary of stealing parts of his routine. 3AM I personally think Comedy Central's show Insomnia is somewhat of a rip-off of my 3AM idea for HBO, particularly since I pitched the idea to Comedy Central first.

[00:06:44] Unfortunately, stealing is not a shortcut to success. Stealing is the only path to success. How do you steal? Try this. 1. Pick a field you are passionate about, whether it's blogging, romance novel writing, comedy, internet entrepreneurship, art, cooking, cancer research, whatever. 2. Read everything you can about the field. Here's what you have to read minimally. At least the history of that field from 1800 on. Try to read at least 10 different sources on the history.

[00:07:14] All of the latest blogs in the field. Try to have 100 different sources here. And all the basic techniques that current leading experts in the field use. Read all of their biographies or autobiographies. 3. Pick your 5 favorite sources in the field. For instance, if I wanted to write a novel, I'd pick my 5 favorite novelists. If I wanted to start a business in local internet, I'd pick my 5 favorite local internet companies. If I wanted to blog, I'd pick my 5 favorite bloggers.

[00:07:43] If I wanted to be a management consultant, I'd steal directly from Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, etc. 4. Get one element that you like from each source. What element do you think stands out that makes them a success? 5. Add your own improvement. Or not. You can even start out with a direct copy and throw in your twist at the end. And 6. Ignore all the haters. The more people hate you, the more money you will make. Trust me on that.

[00:08:10] I'm hoping Molly grows up and learns how to be just as good a thief as her dad. You just listened to the post titled, How to Steal and Get Rich by James Altucher of jamesaltucher.com. And thank you to James for letting us share his work. A little bit more about him. He's an entrepreneur, writer, investor, trader, and podcaster. You could definitely call him a jack of all trades, which I guess many entrepreneurs are, and maybe you can relate.

[00:08:40] And on his podcast, he has interviews with a bunch of talented people from many different backgrounds. That podcast is called The James Altucher Show, and it's always in the top charts of the business category of Apple Podcasts for good reason. He's also written a bunch of books, and you can find all of them at jamesaltucher.com. Some additional fun facts about him, he's a national chess master as well as a seed investor in Buddy Media, which later sold to salesforce.com for $745 million.

[00:09:08] And if that's not enough, he's also co-owner of Stand Up New York, where he occasionally performs stand-up comedy. So again, a really wide range of skills and life experience from James, and you can learn more by coming to jamesaltucher.com. But that should do it for today here on the podcast. Hope you're having a great week, and thanks as always for being a subscriber to the show, and for sharing it with others if you get a sec. So have a great rest of your day, and I'll see you right back here tomorrow, where your optimal life awaits. Thank you.