That was a terrible waste of time. After reading this guy's articles, I just get the feeling how the author (James Altucher) has had a miserable life. Either that is true or he is making up sad stories to get the attention of readers. The series of articles he has written are mostly long and could have instead been written down in a few sentences if not a few words. One thing I would like to thank the author is that he once referred to a book called 'never eat alone', which I am reading right now and is definitely enjoyable than his articles.
I don't understand how meaningless waffle life this gets published. As billpatrianakos said where does this 500% figure come from? But apart from the article itself, the thing I really don't get are all the obsequious platitudes within the comments (within TC).
IMHO the best way to increase productivity is to stop pissing about reading pointless nonsense on how to increase productivity, and actually start doing the work.
"This is, of course, the path of insanity, and not the good kind of insanity." - from Paul Buchheit's 'I am Nothing'. Mr Altucher's persona of his past self is a caricature of seeing the world through a lens of self-identity and ego.. walking boldly down the path of insanity.
Not surprisingly, I think that PB's way of modeling the 'gmail labeler' is more efficient than JA's. Specifically, 'use these emotions as a cue to remember, "I am nothing"'. This frees you up to put an appropriate labeler for accomplishing your goal without bias.
Cool article though, I really enjoy JA's candor, experiences and insights.
Some stuff about not feeling sad, as if that's something that can only ever be caused internally. The usual neo-victorian, crypto-calvinist story that these people feel the need to tell in order to justify themselves, even though nobody asked them.
Same here. I'm routinely in the habit of not reading TechCrunch articles on HN anymore. Straight to comments and unfortunately have no ability to downvote articles.
I expect downvotes for this comment, but seriously why do people upvote these TC stories...?
You make a decent point but there's a good reason for the downvotes. Downvoting before reading is not in the spirit of this community (though sometimes, in rare cases it may be okay). You should not be here to collect karma like some sort of street cred so you can play god with the comments. There's a lot of karma policing going on lately where people think that button is there so they can push down stuff they don't agree with. That isn't the point. Up and down votes should be to everyone's benefits and unfortunately there are ton of people lAtely using them on some power trip. Don't be one of the "Karma Police". Use the buttons judiciously.
Right, but why can't I downvote overall submissions? I understand there is a karma threshold for downvoting comments, but I'm unaware of any mechanism for submissions.
Well, think of it this way: if you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all. The cream always rises. I think it's great that all submissions have an equal chance of getting noticed. If enough like it, it goes up while inevitably surpassing the crap that languishes at the bottom. Most unpopular articles don't need any help getting ignored.
There's some decent points about how negativity and pessimism can be debilitating. And that applies to everyone, not just entrepreneurs. But it's hard to see that through the rambling.
If you're more interested in how negativity and pessimism have measurable effects on success, I suggest reading Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism. I found it pretty eye opening.
What the hell was that? That sounded like self important self help advice. And it rambled.
I will not set up Gmail filters for my thoughts and I'm still wondering where that 500% number is coming from.
Everyone's got their productivity booster but this one sounds silly. The 500% claim makes me want to stay away from it from the get go. Sounds like bullshit to me.
Edit: I was pretty harsh in my criticism and then I thought about how I'd feel if someone said that stuff about me after I posted something sincerely. So I'll try to add so,etching more constructive here:
I hope those sad stories were from when he was very young, like 18. Don't make outrageous claims like "500% productivity boost". A lot of TC audience will want some proof of that besides anecdotal evidence. Then, inevitably, almost everything on TC ends up on HN where we're far harsher so please think of who will read this before writing it. I think this article belongs somewhere else, not on TC.
Ugh – I feel like showering after that horrible article. What gets me most is that he implies you have to be enlightened to be a success, while the truly interesting part of successful people is in the management of their humanity.
