I just finished this book and I encourage people to read it. Altucher calls into question most of the myths we have been taught concerning our roles in the modern industrial world (or is it a post-industrial world?). He points out how our world is simply not what we expected it to be. Those cushy corporate jobs for life with generous benefits and retirement packages are gone. Those jobs have been replaced by outsourcing to foreign workers, robots, or temp workers.
But we have choices. We don’t have to go from one temp job cubicle to the next only to roll over and die a pointless death after a pointless life. You can Choose Yourself.
This means taking a leap of faith and working to build yourself. Make yourself resilient and strong, and not dependent on any job or career. He emphasizes first getting a handle on your personal life: your mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Only then will you be able to pursue a life that is worth living, whatever that may be for you.
That said, some of the ideas Altucher expresses are controversial.
He is against any type of group or public education, particularly higher education as it only wastes time and indoctrinates people to pursue jobs that no longer exist. It is not that he is against “wasting time” only that you should do it in a more pleasant and creative manner; a manner that might actually provide some mental, spiritual, and emotional benefits. Write a novel, learn to play chess, travel the world, start a business, volunteer to work in a charity, whatever it is you want to do. Not what some guidance counselor in school tells you to do.
He is also against owning homes on an almost fanatical basis, and favors renting. I think this makes sense for those who live a semi-nomadic corporate existence going from job to job or business and business in different cities; where Altucher prefers to live: high end expensive East or West Coast cities where only the uber rich can really afford to buy a home, and anyone else who tries will be putting all their wealth at risk in trying to obtain one. But not everyone lives in NYC, LA, etc. For some there are economic advantages to buying a home if you resist the impulse to buy more than you can afford as compared to renting a place for the same amount.
He also he shows a remarkable, and I suspect to some strange, ability to avoid emotional attachments to businesses he starts or invests in. He really only starts a business for the sole purpose of later selling it, preferably not that much later. He shows no pride in the companies he created or worked in, a valuable trait I suppose in a business environment where employees are nothing more than economic units that can and should be set aside when they are no longer needed. He has no interest in creating something long lasting or enduring. At least not in business.
All the same a good book. His writing is both clear and sharp, yet wandering from subject to subject, but with a clear focus upon a theme that always becomes apparent. This is probably because the book is made up of blog posts cleverly glued together by Altucher. No shame in that. He uses potty words from time to time, but that adds to his appealing conversational style. At least for him it is appealing. It is as if you are sitting next to a really smart guy in a bar who has had too much to drink, but not enough to keep from launching into long and interesting rants about the nature of the universe, and his old girl friend, and his last boss, and how he lost his house, and that movie he saw that he really liked… I usually do not like authors who use that style, but he pulls it off. Probably because it is who he really is.
So give it a read if you like, and let me know what you think.
https://www.amazon.com/Choose-Yourself-James-Altucher/dp/1490313370
Sounds interesting, but since I have a backlog of around 30 books left to read, I doubt that I will get around to reading it anytime soon, I am currently reading this book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Economics-Good-Evil-Economic-Gilgamesh/dp/0199767203
Interesting. Sort of the same situation here. I am currently reading a technical book on tabletop game design. Then I think I will read some really frivolous science fiction or fantasy.
In regards to my book backlog and design, there are two such books among those 30 or so, one on making applications for smartphones (https://www.amazon.com/App-Empire-Make-Money-Technology/dp/111810787X) and one on setting up an internet business (https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Your-Computer-Money-Machine-ebook/dp/B0185Z29LY/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1496670507&sr=1-1), the only fantasy books I have are by Tolkien, so the only fantasy book in my backlog is his “new” book (https://www.amazon.com/Beren-Lúthien-J-R-Tolkien-ebook/dp/B01M6YNE52/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1496670753&sr=1-1&keywords=Beren+and+Lúthien).
Beren and Luthien was sad but a good.
I am currently reading this book: https://www.amazon.com/Fortune-Makers-Leaders-Creating-Companies/dp/1610396588
So far it seems to be a good book.
This is a good book on living in South Korea: https://www.amazon.com/Seoul-Man-Unexpected-Hilarity-Corporate/dp/0062405241
I have read several books in the “Culture smart!” (this is about Georgia for example: https://www.amazon.com/Georgia-Culture-Smart-Essential-Customs/dp/1857336542) series and they are generally well written, and I think it’s a good idea to read such books before going somewhere (even as a tourist) to avoid unnecessary cultural misunderstandings.
I will have to look into this.
Another good thing is that they are generally short, for example the one I have about the UAE is about 150 pages long, so you can read it all in one go.
I am currently reading this book: https://www.amazon.com/Hungarian-Verbs-Essentials-Grammar-2E/dp/0071498028
So far It seems like a good book for learning Hungarian grammar to me.
Hahaha! I am focusing on Russian and Spanish.
I think that I will be able to write you whether or not Hungarian really is as hard of a language to learn as it appears to be or if that just a facade in a month or so, which could also have implications for learning other languages, for example if it turns out that agglutination is something (relatively) easy, that would make learning Turkish for example a breeze for me.
If I manage to master Hungarian and definitely decide to move to Hungary, then I think I will try to master German next. because that would appear to me to be the most useful foreign language to know in Hungary in regards (and even if English was more important, I obviously already speak it fluently, so that would be no problem) to business, since Germany and Austria are Hungary’s main trade partners, also Germans are by far the most numerous tourists in Hungary, and one of the Hungarian cities I am considering moving to is relatively close to the Austrian border and German companies have a strong presence there.
If I manage to master both Hungarian and German and decide to permanently settle in Hungary, I am not sure that I would decide to learn any new languages after that (at least not fluently), because I feel that knowing Hungarian, Croatian, English and German fluently would be more than enough business-wise for somebody living in Hungary and I wouldn’t need any other language other than Hungarian for everyday living, the various Asian languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, etc.) are something I would only really consider learning if I decided to move there (which is unlikely), Arabic and Hebrew don’t interest me, the Romance languages don’t interest me either, I have no interest in doing business with Russians or visiting Russia, so Russian is not a language I am interested in picking up, I don’t like the modern Greeks at all, neither do I find Greece interesting business-wise, so I really don’t see the point in learning Greek, learning Polish fluently would only make sense if I decided to move there, which at the moment is not my plan, Persian is an interesting language to me and Iran an interesting country, but until those mullah loons get removed from power, I don’t see the point in learning Persian, so what language does that leave? Only Turkish I think, because I have already mastered a lot of the vocabulary, if I master Hungarian, that will mean that I will have mastered agglutination, which should make Turkish (relatively) easy to master, plus Hungary and Turkey are growing their business ties and Turkey is a very interesting tourist destination, on the other hand the fact that the loon Erdogan is trying to turn Turkey into a Sunni version of Iran really dampens my enthusiasm for both Turkish as a language and Turkey as a country.
I don’t know from where you plan to learn Russian from, but be aware that the letter o in Russian is sometimes pronounced as an o and sometimes as an a (so Moskva (Moscow) is actually pronounced Maskva in Russian for example), and there is no rule behind this, you just have to learn the proper pronunciation for each word (which should be marked with an asterix or something over the o in textbooks and dictionaries so that you know when the o is pronounced as an a, but on the odd chance that it isn’t, I am warning you about it now).
Watching movies in that language is also a good idea when learning new languages, I mean I must have learnt 10% of Turkish words (not counting the ones that are the same or similar in both languages) just by watching Turkish movies with Croatian subtitles, haha.
Even though watching movies is a good way to learn a language, it has occurred to me thinking about it now that even though the translation in the subtitles might correctly convey the general meaning of what somebody has said, it doesn’t necessarily follow the litteral meaning of the words said, to use an example from Turkish, the phrase “çok şükür (pronounced chok shukur) ” will almost always get translated as “thank God”, but neither does çok mean thank(s) (teşekkürler is the word used when thanking somebody in Turkish), nor does şükür mean God (Allah is the word the Turks use to refer to God), çok means a lot/plenty/big/great, while şükür means thankfulness/gratitude, so a litteral translation of the words used would be “a great gratitude”, so that is another thing to look out for.
Well I am not a huge fan of movies or TVs, and from what limited shows I have seen in Russian most are either soap operas or overly melodramatic semi-fantasy history shows. So I think I will stick to talking to people.
Nowadays I mostly watch Turkish and Korean movies, modern American and British movies are mostly full of “liberalism” and “diversity”, so I don’t want to waste my time by watching them.
Russia has a bad cinematography (but not as bad as Croatia, if it were up to me, banning the showing of Croatian movies and TV series to prisoners of war would be added to the Geneva conventions, haha) that is true, I can’t think of a single good Russian movie I have ever watched.
This writing about movies reminds me, I have to check out Hungarian cinematography, it is a total mystery to me.
I understand that Hungary has a thriving porn industry.
I don’t know whether that is true or not, but those are not the kind of movies I am interested in either way, and in any case those are not the kind of movies that help with learning new languages.
After over a week of studying Hungarian, I am sad to report that it being a hard language is not just a facade/false impression, rather it is actually a harder language than it appears to be:(, both the grammar and the words themselves really are alien to me, so as I predicted originally, language really is an issue in regards to Hungary.
Good luck. I am still working on my Russian and Spanish. Making some slow progress.
Thanks, I will definitely need it if I am to learn this Klingon-like language, because trying to remember Hungarian words and grammar rules is literally giving me a headache.
I am really starting to think that my brain just isn’t wired for non-Indo-European languages, or at least not for the Ugro-Finnic ones, so I think that I will move my focus to Italian and/or German until I do my tour of Europe, because learning Hungarian obviously requires a very large amount of time and effort, and if I don’t decide to move to Hungary, that time and effort would be wasted, since Hungarian is basically useless outside of Hungary (it isn’t even mutually intelligible with Finnish), while Italian and German are major European languages, so they would be of at least some use no matter where I ended up moving to, and I think that I would learn to speak both of them fluently (Italian especially) way faster than I would be able to bring my Hungarian to even an intermediate level.
I am not sure about outside of Budapest, but my experience suggested that English is the only language you really need to know.
For basic things like asking if they have certain items in their store, asking for directions, etc., yes, I am sure that English is enough for such things in Budapest, but I really wouldn’t feel confident signing contracts written in Hungarian and serious things like that, plus if you want to integrate, you have to learn the local language, I don’t want to be like those Britons in Spain, who have lived there for over 10 years, but who still aren’t able to order a cup of coffee in Spanish.
https://external-preview.redd.it/BfFx4W2O12cSSZdAeallNDL8dQIyRTSfEaFsKVyqbwM.png?auto=webp&s=b0d425e09e3c1276fa4d27ea4c3e5827312058c2
https://www.catchbudapest.com/hungarian-meg-mini-lesson/