Skip the Line: The 10,000 Experiments Rule and Other Surprising Advice for Reaching Your Goals

The entrepreneur, angel investor, and bestselling author of Choose Yourself busts the 10,000-hour rule of achieving mastery, offering a new mindset and dozens of techniques that will inspire any professional—no matter their age or managerial level—to pursue their passions and quickly acquire the skills they need to succeed and achieve their dreams.

We live in a hierarchical world where experience has traditionally been the key to promotion. But that period is over! Straight, clear-cut career trajectories no longer exist. Industries disappear, job descriptions change, and people’s interests and passions evolve. The key to riding this wave, entrepreneur James Altucher advises, is to constantly be curious about what’s next, to be comfortable with uncertainty so you can keep navigating the rough waters ahead, and most important, to pursue the things that interest you.

In Skip the Line, he reveals how he went from struggling and depressed to making his personal, financial, and creative dreams come true, despite—and perhaps due to—his many failures along the way. Altucher combines his personal story with concrete—and unorthodox—insights that work. But Skip the Line isn’t about hacks and shortcuts—it’s about transforming the way you think, work, and live, letting your interests guide your learning, time, and resources. It’s about allowing yourself to do what comes naturally; the more you do what you love, the better you do it. While showing you how to approach change and crisis, Altucher gives you tools to help easily execute ideas, become an expert negotiator, attract the attention of those around you, scale promising ideas, and improve leadership—all of which will catapult you higher than you ever thought possible and at a speed that everyone will tell you is impossible.

James Altucher is a successful entrepreneur, angel investor, prolific writer, podcaster, standup comedian, and chess master. He has started and run more than twenty companies and is invested in over thirty. He is the author of eighteen books, including the bestsellers The Power of No and Choose Yourself. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Observer, Financial Times, Huffington Post, and TechCrunch. He also writes a popular blog and hosts a successful podcast, The James Altucher Show, that has had over 80,000,000 downloads. An eight-episode docuseries based on Choose Yourself and produced by DNA Films was released on Amazon in 2020.