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

by Felix Dennis

Try, try, try again, does not mean doing what has already failed, over and over again.

Quitting is not dishonorable. Quitting when you believe you can still succeed is.

Do not be afraid to change tack, alter course or make new plans with whatever you are attempting to achieve. Especially if you sense that you are on the wrong track.

Above all, avoid banging your head against the same piece of wall. The wall will not get any softer.

Persistence is not quite as important as self-belief. I have known people who believed in themselves, who acted on that belief, got lucky quickly and got rich. Persistence merely offers a second or third bite at the cherry. Your belief in yourself brought you to the cherry bowl in the first place.

Without self-belief nothing can be accomplished. With it, nothing is impossible.

Which does not mean that you should trample on doubt. Doubts are like pain. If pain was to be eliminated from humankind, how would we receive warning that something was happening to our body requiring urgent attention?

It is doubt multiplied by the fear of failure, unconfronted, which leads to the creation of a vicious cycle where self-belief is eroded and nothing is achieved.

Doubts can and should be confronted, as should fear. This is best done in daylight, under rigorous examination. (Three o’clock in the morning is a difficult time to confront any such messengers.) Write down your doubts and fears. Examine them. Hold them up to the light. Suck the wisdom out of them and discard their husks in the trash.

I am one of the richest self-made men in Britain for two reasons. I own my company outright, and I began to make more baskets the minute the first had a few eggs in it.

One of the problems with being a start-up entrepreneur is that you tend to think of what you have created as some kind of surrogate child. It becomes your “baby,” if you’re not careful. This is dangerous and counterproductive.

The biggest basket I ever built wasn’t my first or second. It was my twentieth. But if I hadn’t built the second, I would never have reached the twentieth.

Courtesy is not a cardinal virtue in getting rich, I admit. But it helps. It works. It greases wheels where force will not prevail.

If someone comes to see you with an idea you’re already considering or are already working on (no matter how loose the connection), then stop them abruptly and tell them the situation. That’s only fair.

When who owns what is in dispute, the only people who are going to get rich are the lawyers.

I’m fully aware that this isn’t a book about becoming a worthwhile human being. As I keep attempting to drum into you, riches aren’t particularly worthwhile in themselves in any case. They don’t make anyone a better person, at least as far as I have seen. But listening continuously, listening and learning, is one of the vital components for those of you who wish to be rich. What you choose to do with your loot is up to you.

The only truth about luck, good or bad, is that it will change. The law of averages virtually guarantees it.

This “flight not fight” behavioral trait is the sign of a prey animal, not a predator.

To become rich you must behave as a predator. I will go further, you must become a predator.

But 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.

Uncontested markets are usually uncontested for a reason. Nature abhors a vacuum and if no one else is contesting a market, it may well be that no such market exists.

He is a visionary, I guess. Very few visionaries get rich, begging the lads at Google’s pardon.

As H. L. Mencken put it: “The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.”

No one can pretend that luck—or chance, at least—does not exist: in life, in love, in business and in the getting of money. If you reject any notion of the supernatural whatever, if you are a true atheist or a humanist with a capital “H,” then you must also accept that life itself on this planet arrived by luck. You can’t have it both ways.

Most of us are rather poor negotiators. • Most negotiations are unnecessary. • “The other side” is often just as smart (or stupid) as you are. • In the end, “the balance of weakness” almost always decides the issue. • In Greed vs. Need, the former usually “wins.”

Take no notice of management manuals that tell you to leave passion and emotion out of the negotiating room. If you are emotional or passionate about something, then let it show. But leaven emotion with courtesy, and, if possible, with wit. If you’re not the witty type, then flattery and self-deprecation are good substitutes.

Listen when engaged in serious negotiations. Then listen some more. You are in no hurry. Nobody ever got poor listening.

Whatever you agree to during a negotiation, fulfill the bargain. Nobody wants to do business with a weasel or a chisler. Written in the Zoroastrian Scriptures two-and-a-half -thousand years ago was this: “Never break a covenant, whether you make it with a false man or a just man of good conscience. The covenant holds for both, the false and the just alike.”

As the author G. K. Chesterton puts it in one of his Father Brown stories: “To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.”

To become rich you must be an owner. And you must try to own it all. You must strive with every fiber of your being, while recognizing the idiocy of your behavior, to own and retain control of as near to 100 percent of any company as you can.

Ownership is not the most important thing. It is the only thing that counts.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. —BERTRAND RUSSELL, "IN PRAISE OF IDLENESS”

Do not seek a replica of yourself to delegate to, or to promote. Watch out for this, it is a common error with people setting out to build a company. You have strengths and you have weaknesses in your own character. It makes no sense to increase those strengths your organization already possesses and not address the weaknesses.

Without my express permission: 1. They may not vote anyone on or off the board. 2. They may not physically move the headquarters of the company. 3. They may not dispose of, or shut down, any substantial asset. 4. They may not purchase, or launch, any substantial new product or business. 5. They may not award themselves bonuses or salary increases.

If you want to get rich, then learn to delegate. Don’t learn to pretend to delegate. Delegation is not only a powerful tool, it is the only way to maximize and truly incentivize your most precious asset—the people who work for you. Real delegation can help make you rich. But only if you work at it.

What is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank? —BERTOLT BRECHT, DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER

In most of mankind, gratitude is merely a secret hope for greater favors. —DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, MAXIMES

Use the annual profits of a company to grow the business by all means. One of the ways of making it grow is to carefully craft bonuses for those who work for you to achieve margin, cost and revenue targets.

The financier John Paul Getty put it best half a century ago: The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.

Risk equals reward. “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” is not risk-taking.

Too much water under the bridge and wine through the arteries.

Keep costs down. Always. “Overhead walks on two legs” and will eat you out of house and home. No company, new or old, can avoid stealth growth in overhead. It occurs, as it were, by osmosis. Prune overhead regularly.

There is only so much pie. Talent bakes that pie.

Enjoy the business of making money. The loot is only a marker. Time cannot be recaptured. There is no amount of pie in the world worth being miserable for, day after day. If you find you dislike what you are doing, then sell up and change your life. Self-imposed misery is a kind of madness. The cure is to get out.

But why would clever, cunning and adept people work for a mug like you? Simple. There are many clever, cunning and adept people who are risk-averse. You are not risk-averse because you are dedicated to becoming rich. Believe it or not, much, much cleverer people than you will come and work for you if you ask them.

As to speaking little yourself, remember you are being interviewed, too. It is impossible for the other side to tell that you are not as clever as they are if you keep your mouth shut. “Better to have the world suspect you a fool than to open your mouth and put the matter beyond doubt,” as the old saying has it.

Pay employees well. Bonus better. Even young children know what you get when you pay peanuts. Monkeys! Your company’s salaries must be competitive.

Bonuses should be more than competitive, they should be tempting, generous and based ruthlessly on meritocracy and delivery. That’s the way to get employees to really focus.

an external candidate, a candidate from outside the company looking for a senior position, had better be at least 30 percent better than any internal candidates to get the job.

Don’t leave senior employees in any job too long. If this happens, as it has in my companies occasionally, it means you are not focusing on that business. You will get the most out of any senior employee in their first year or two in a new position. After that, they enter a “comfort zone.” Do you really want them to be comfortable? If a man or woman heads up one of your companies and has been there too long, consider asking them to create a new division or company for you. But do not leave them to quietly go to seed—they will get bored and resign anyway, if they’re any good.