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

by Felix Dennis

As the American critic H. L. Mencken once wrote: “The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex— because it puts an unbearable burden on his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious.”

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.

In the words of the art collector and oil billionaire John Paul Getty: “If you can actually count your money, you are not really a rich man.”

consider at least the wise sentiments of the author James Baldwin in his book Nobody Knows My Name, in which he concluded: Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it, and thought of other things if you did.

No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare. —CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, MY HEART LAID BARE

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.

“Fear is the little death, death by a thousand cuts,” goes the ancient Japanese saying.

Similar to Shakespeare’s “Cowards die many times before their deaths: / The valiant never taste of death but once.”

the writer and philosopher Goethe once remarked in doggerel: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

recognizing “the realities of the present tempered by the necessities of the past and the possibilities of the future,” as the author R. G. Collingwood put it.

There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damn lies and statistics. —THOMAS CARLYLE, CHARTISM

By my earlier definition, only 0.000016 percent of 60 million British citizens, for example, are rich. That’s less than 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of the total population. If your best friend inherited one million dollars and gave you 0.000016 of their windfall, you would receive a princely sixteen bucks. “Hey! Thanks a bunch, old chum.”

“A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and quietly strangled,” as Sir Barnett Cocks, clerk of the House of Commons, once pointed out. Well, Sir Barnett should certainly have known. He served on enough of them.

Or in the words of an anonymous American wit: “A committee is a group of the unwilling, chosen from the unfit to do the unnecessary.”

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.

Working for others is a reconnaissance expedition; a means and not an end in itself. It is an apprenticeship and not a goal.

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.

Capitalism demands that whoever takes the most financial risk calls the piper’s tune. 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.

The three great quotes concerning “luck” for me are these: “Luck is preparation multiplied by opportunity.” — SENECA, ROMAN PHILOSOPHER “The harder I practiced, the luckier I got.” — GARY PLAYER, GOLF CHAMPION “Luck is a dividend of sweat.” —RAY KROC, MCDONALD’S FOUNDER

it really does not matter who gives birth to any particular idea. This is borne out by the laws relating to patents and inventions. You cannot patent an idea. You can only patent your own method for implementing an idea.

I have lost count of the number of men and women who have approached me with their “great idea,” as if this, in and of itself, was some passport to instant wealth. The idea is not a passport. At most, it is the means of obtaining one.

Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s fame, did not invent the idea of “fast food.” Humans have been stuffing their face “on the run” since the dawn of history. His genius was merely to recognize this fact and implement a simple five-point plan: standardize the food and prices, franchise the outlets, produce the food swiftly in clean surroundings, offer value for money and market the whole shebang relentlessly.

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

the phrase attributed to the American philosopher and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson: If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

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.

There are only six ways of obtaining capital. You can be given or inherit it; you can steal it; you can win it; you can marry it; you can earn it; you can borrow it.

The French socialist Pierre Proudhon had the right of it: “Property is theft!” he thundered. Aye, so it is. But it is legalized theft, the main pillar of Western capitalism, a rotten and debased system of managing human affairs, and yet the only system that has survived the demise of all rivals.

They aren’t so much sharks as dolphins—a nickname deriving from their frantic desire to “flip” every deal as quickly as possible. By “flipping, ” I mean a sale.

In the glorious lines of Jonathan Swift: So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite ’em, And so proceed ad infinitum.

And from a later poet, Augustus de Morgan: Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum. And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on; While those again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

like the poet Robert Frost: “Knowing how way leads on to way / I doubted that I should ever come back.”

The history of all human ideas is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. — SIR KARL POPPER, CONJECTURES AND REFUTATIONS

Life is not some kind of rehearsal. Why, then, do so many people punish themselves in this way?

Lose control of a business by running out of cash and you are relegated to the status of minority investor or salaried employee.

All new ventures (and established ones, too, come to that) require positive cash flow if they are to grow and to succeed. This is an elementary point, which would scarcely need reiterating if it were not for the number of times I have seen a promising venture snatched away from its founder when cash flow faltered.

Cash flow is something that any entrepreneur must fully comprehend from the get-go. Balance sheets are a matter for accountants, banks and auditors. But cash flow is the heartbeat of your company.

If cash flow is good, then no matter how badly run or poorly managed a company is, there is always a decent chance of turning its fortunes around.

Factoring is a deal with the devil, and just like Faust, you will have the worst of the bargain.

Keep payroll down to an absolute minimum. Overhead walks on two legs.

Pay yourself just enough to eat.

Do not be shy to call customers who owe you money personally . It works.

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. But just as presidents and prime ministers learn to plan for war and hope for peace, you must plan for the worst and hope for the best in all matters relating to the cash flowing in and out of your start-up company.

What has all this to do with reinforcing failure? It is this possibility , the chance that we are onto a slow-burn winner, rather than being stuck with an out-and-out loser, that persuades so many of us (who should know better) to hang in there with a product or service in financial trouble.

A very great retailer once said: “There is no victory over customers.

John Dryden’s advice. Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls must dive below.

“There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail,” wrote the novelist Aldous Huxley.

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.

The French impressionist Degas once said: “Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.”

Stubbornness is not persistence. Stubbornness implies you intend to persist despite plentiful evidence that you should not. A stubborn person fears to be shown he or she is wrong. A persistent person is convinced that he or she has been right all along, and that the proof lies just around the corner. That with just a little further effort, the veil of failure will be torn away to reveal success.

“Never give in” is a useful catchphrase. But don’t take it too literally. We must all surrender at some time, to love or desire or death. You will be forced into the last of these, and a fool if you never surrender to the first. But never give in easily. If you can, attempt one step farther along the road than appears sensible before giving in.