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

by Felix Dennis

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.

Wealth Measured by Cash-in-Hand or Quickly Realizable Assets

“If you can actually count your money, you are not really a rich man.”

Wealth Measured by Total Assets (True Net Worth)

According to my tables of wealth, “rich” starts at a total asset value of $30 million- $80 million (also known as “the lesser rich”).

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.

There is no such thing as a permanent champ.

It’s no excuse, but making money is a drug. Not the money itself. The making of the money.

There is no reason on earth why financial success should lead to personal catastrophe. Least of all the odds.

But prompt decisions and orders, right or wrong, are far healthier than endless debate and prevarication.

“OK. Let’s do it.” Or even: “OK. Let’s forget it.”

The biggest rewards go not to those individuals who came up with the idea, nor to those individuals who built the empire. They go to those entities or individuals who funded the enterprise and own the most stock. Always bear this in mind during the Search.

Ownership is power.

inclination, aptitude and fate.

Which leads to fate. To chance. To serendipity. And, to a lesser extent, to the shared social delusion of the supernatural.

Trial and error to any success to fate to chance to serendipity to supernatural

they were willing to ignore orders and risk utter disgrace in order to exploit rapidly changing circumstances.

“Luck is preparation multiplied by opportunity.”

You cannot patent an idea. You can only patent your own method for implementing an idea.

Having a great idea is simply not enough. The eventual goal is vastly more important than any idea. It is how ideas are implemented that counts in the long run.

He was just the publisher.

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

beware of the great idea. You must encourage great ideas and search for them diligently. But either you control and develop such ideas or the ideas will come to dominate your waking thoughts. And that would not be such a great thing. Not unless you are Steve Jobs.

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.

Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.

However we may feel about it, capitalism is the only system under which readers of this book are likely to labor. And as its name implies, it requires capital for those who wish to play the game and succeed.

Thus it was that the first issue of Cozmic Comics was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. It barely made a cent, but it provided the framework for yet more publishing ventures.

I licensed Kung-Fu Monthly to numerous foreign publishing companies.

Thinking big. That’s the secret.

the corollary of thinking big is to act small.

“Success is never permanent; failure is never fatal. The only thing that really counts is to never, never, never give up.”

At one time, there were no less than fourteen “mistresses” depending on a regular stipend from my personal bank account.

You have to identify and hire talent. You can’t skimp on it.

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

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.