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Altucher eventually let me out of the cage and we chatted for 90 minutes. A conversation with him can really span the gamut: We talked about everything from family court to Spanx, Ohio University, networking, the word "because," badminton and failure.

I'll spare you the Spanx talk. Here are the 7 things I learned from James Altucher about failure – things that help you learn, grow and move on, not stay locked in a cage feeling sorry for yourself.

Just admit it.
"I started a hedge fund and it didn't work out. One of my investors was calling me constantly and I never returned the call," Altucher said. "Finally he caught me and said, 'Look I'm pulling my money-- not because you're failing (poor performance) but because you won't return my calls."

Of course, it sucks to admit you failed. But just get over yourself and do it. Accountability represents honor and integrity and it's the only way you're going to get a repeat investor – not by dodging their calls when you're holding their money.

You wanna try that again?
Ninety percent of your well-being depends on how you choose to deal with a situation rather than the situation itself. So frame your failure. I explained that I'd written a novel in 2010 that was rejected by 12 publishers. It felt like a failure. Altucher told me to reframe it.

So, I said, "I wrote a book that helped me stay sober, got me a literary agent and opened the door for me to write 'The Buy Side,' which became a New York Times best-seller."

Life is more like tennis than biology.
Altucher's daughter was getting really frustrated while practicing tennis. She couldn't get the serve in every time. He asked her what grade she was getting in biology class. She said she had a 102 average. That's not real life, he explained. Tennis is teaching you more about real life than biology.

Baseball players make the Hall of Fame if they get a hit 1 out of every 3 at-bats. You have to get used to a real-life batting average – which would be much lower than that. "Most of the time, what people call failure is just normal life," Altucher said.

Even if you wind up in jail …
"You can consider life as a series of failures punctuated by some successes," Altucher explained. "You can always focus on those punctuations and transform what seems like a failure into a normal situation where things get worked out." Some people might not agree—what if you go to jail? "Well, most people I know who went to jail get to read a lot and get in really good shape. When they got out they were able to transform their lives."