#45 Losing It All | A Prodigy Chessmaster goes $10M to 0... Twice - StockPickr: James Altucher

Today we are talking to James Altucher and we start just after James went broke. This wouldn’t be the last time he lost money, and we’ll learn that James has an interesting relationship with risk, in fact we’ll talk a lot about risk in this episode. Regardless, James has been incredibly successful. He’s published 25 books and founded over 20 companies, many of which failed. But it seems that failure is something that has defined James.  His entire career, and for that matter his personality, is incredibly erratic. One year he’ll have 10s of millions of the dollars in the bank, the next close to nothing. And he oscillates between these two extremes frequently. Yet every failure, every challenge is met with resiliency. Every challenge presents an opportunity to learn. From training with the homeless to become a chess-master, to an obsession with computer science, to getting sucked into poker, to making large bets in angel investing, each of these experiences forced James to learn and grow. Some of the lessons took years to integrate, but some were learned in 1970s suburban New York.

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