How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets

by Felix Dennis

Whatever qualities the rich may have, they can be acquired by anyone with the tenacity to become rich. The key, I think, is confidence. Confidence and an unshakable belief it can be done and that you are the one to do it. Tunnel vision helps. Being a bit of a shit helps. A thick skin helps. Stamina is crucial, as is a capacity to work so hard that your best friends mock you, your lovers despair and the rest of your acquaintances watch furtively from the sidelines, half in awe and half in contempt. Luck helps—but only if you don’t seek it. The answer to the question, then, is perhaps this: not those who want to and not those who need to, but those who are utterly determined to—whatever the cost.

The follow-through, the execution, is a thousand times more important than a “great idea.” In fact, if the execution is perfect, it sometimes barely matters what the idea is. If you want to get rich, don’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. Just get busy getting rich.

Many paths can lead to riches, Few in sunlight, most in ditches.

Becoming rich does not guarantee happiness. In fact, it is almost certain to impose the opposite condition—if not from the stresses and strains of protecting wealth, then from the guilt that inevitably accompanies its arrival.

Money is one of the most neutral substances on earth.

you have almost nothing. And therefore you have almost nothing to lose.

Anyone not busy learning is busy dying. For as long as you foster a willingness to learn, you will ward off sclerosis of the brain and hardening of the mental arteries. Curiosity has led many a man and women into the valley of serious wealth.

They fear losing what they have already achieved more than they desire to enrich themselves.

You have little time left in which to make up your mind. Your youth and stamina are ebbing away. You are getting too comfortable.

My earnest advice is to get yourself a young and fearless partner with tons of stamina. Choose him or her with care. It’s your best chance to get rich.

“Once begun—the job’s half done.” Because taking that first, irrevocable step has proved to be the most difficult part of nearly every venture I have been involved in. In the memorable words of the American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson: No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.

committee is a group of the unwilling, chosen from the unfit to do the unnecessary.” Just so. And they do it so brilliantly well. Whether in a college dorm, or in the walnut-paneled boardroom of an international conglomerate, or around your own kitchen table.

What is undesirable, however, is the pretense that any such debate can resolve the risks involved in advance. It cannot. All debate can do is clarify, support or contest the next step. The risks remain, however much talking is done.

If you are not prepared to work longer hours than almost anyone you know, despite the jibes of colleagues and friends, you are unlikely to get rich.

you cannot convince yourself that you are “good enough” to be rich, you will never get rich. • If you cannot treat your quest to get rich as a game, you will never be rich. • If you cannot face up to your fear of failure, you will never be rich. The truth is that getting rich means sacrifice. And the worst of it is, it isn’t always you that’s doing the sacrificing. You must get used to that, or give up the quest. This is not a calling for the fainthearted. There is no shame in turning away. After all, if everyone was prepared to make the necessary sacrifices, who would be left to work for my own companies?

After a lifetime of making money and observing better men and women than I fall by the wayside, I am convinced that fear of failing in the eyes of the world is the single biggest impediment to amassing wealth. Trust me on this.

But choices are confusing. They take time to consider, to sample, spit out and reject. And too many of them provide a ready-made excuse for procrastination and shilly-shallying.

the ability to live with and embrace risk is what sets apart the financial winners and losers in the world.

The laws of supply and demand are absolute—and they apply not only to commodities, but to people. Too many people want to make a blockbuster movie and live in Beverly Hills. Not enough people want to dig holes.

New or rapidly developing industries, whether glamorous or not, very often provide more opportunities to get rich than established sectors. The three reasons for this are availability of risk capital, ignorance and the power of a rising tide. Investors are drawn to emerging industries in the hope of making a fast buck. To get rich, you will need capital, and to acquire capital you need to be where loose capital is searching for a home.

As a general rule of thumb, then, growing industries with relatively low start-up costs offer more opportunities for those who want to get rich than declining industries, or those that require huge start-up investment. This is not an iron-clad rule, however. While magazine and newspaper sales have been in slow decline in the Western world for decades, this “declining” industry is where I made a great deal of my own money.

A small success, though—even a tiny success—can provide a clue. It was my own success at selling magazines on the street that led me to begin to publish them eventually.

It is the instinct to seize an opportunity when it presents itself that perhaps sets apart the self-made filthy rich from the comfortably poor, the willingness to ignore conventional wisdom and risk everything on what others consider to be folly.

Their ability to take chances and to subsequently exploit initial success counted more than their inclination toward a particular industry.

All around us, every day, opportunities to get rich are popping up. The more alert you are, the more chance you have of spotting them. The more preparation you have done, the more chance you have of succeeding. The more bold you are, the better chance you have of getting in on the ground floor and confounding the odds.

Whatever your inclinations, your aptitude, your abilities or your preferences, never shrink when opportunities arrive.

Good ideas are like Nike sports shoes. They may facilitate an athlete who possesses them, but on their own they are nothing but an overpriced pair of sneakers.

If you want to be rich, then watch your rivals closely and never be ashamed to emulate a winning strategy.

If you never have a single great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas of others, you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Seek them out and make them work. They do not have to be your ideas. Execution is all in this regard.

For the majority of people who start with nothing and seek to be rich, borrowing money in one form or another becomes a necessity sooner or later.

Letters to My Brother by the artist Vincent van Gogh, collected and published long after his death, you will find unbearable heartbreak, madness, rejection, hunger, passion, nightmare terrors and a tale of a man who never gave in. Who would not give in, though it cost him his life.

“Assumption is the mother of all f***-ups.”

Every day you have to hit the ground running, putting in more hours than even your most dedicated member of staff. You have to stay flexible.

Talent is the key to sustained growth, and growth is the key to early wealth. You have to identify and hire talent. You can’t skimp on it.

people want a good salary, of course, but surprisingly often they are more attracted to new opportunities and challenges.

My advice on this subject was contained in the second paragraph of this section. You must identify talent. Then you must move heaven and earth to hire it. You must nurture it, reward it properly and protect it from being poached. If necessary, dream up a new project. Better still, get the talent to dream it up.

After all, who built the pyramids? The pharaohs or the engineers? Think about it. Then go hire some talent—just like they did.

If anything, How to Get Rich is something ever-so-slightly new in the world, or at least I have tried to make it so. It is an “anti-self-improvement” book—because it admits openly that the chances of anyone reading it and then becoming rich are minuscule. The vast majority of you are far too nice. And comfortable. And sensible.

If you will not believe in yourself, then why should anyone else? Without self-belief nothing can be accomplished. With it, nothing is impossible.

If you take no other memory from this book, then take that single thought. It was worth a damn sight more than the price you paid for it.

You are not in the egg-laying and basket-weaving or baby business. You are in the business of getting rich.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Winston Churchill’s “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Failure quote

Despite what you will read in many self-improvement tomes, “partnering” and “symbiotic evolution” are no way to get rich. They may be a way to a better world. They may make you a happier person and a better manager. But they will not make you rich— except, perhaps, in spirit. To become rich you must behave as a predator.

He does not make his own luck. He is much too much in love with the green, green grass just over the next hill.

there is a downside to all this intelligence and imagination. He thinks a little too much before he acts. He weighs the options too carefully. He is capable of imagining defeat.

Who will give a hoot whether we made $10 million or $500 million in a hundred years from now? Nobody will.

If we lived in a world where seaweed was overestimated, I would collect tons and tons of it. And I would enjoy doing it. But I wouldn’t kid myself it was all that important. It’s just seaweed.

Be bold. Be brave. Don’t thank your lucky stars. The stars can’t hear you. • Stay the course. Stop looking for the green grass over the hill.

Don’t try to do it all yourself. Delegate and teach others to delegate. • Remember that most predators are lucky most of their lives, unlike their prey. • Whiners and cowards die a hundred times a day. Be a hero to yourself. • If being a hero isn’t your style, then fake it. Reality will catch up eventually. • Just do it. It is much easier to apologize than to obtain permission. • Never take the quest for wealth seriously. It’s just a game, chum. • Next time you bump into Lady Luck, giver her a whack on the rump from me. • Be lucky. Get rich. Then give it all away. (We’ll get to that bit later.) • Don’t call your son “Albert.” (Just joking!)