How to Get Rich

by Felix Dennis

JUST HOW QUICKLY CAN I BECOME RICH? Quicker than you probably deserve, but slower than you would like – there are too many variables for a definitive answer.

Knowledge learned the hard way combined with the avoidance of error, whenever and wherever possible, is the soundest basis for success in any endeavour.

HOW RICH ARE YOU, ANYWAY? I don’t know. Neither does any rich person know. I haven’t cashed in all my assets yet and I’m not certain what they will fetch. Let’s say between $400 million (US dollars) and $900 million of net worth before tax. I honestly cannot fix a number any closer than that.

Five homes. Three estates. Fancy cars. Private jets. (The jets are always rented. If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it – it’s cheaper in the long run.) Thousands of acres of land. Art on the walls and libraries stuffed with first editions. Bronze statues littering up the garden. Chauffeurs, housekeepers, financial advisors and other personal staff coming out of my rear end.

Oh, and thousands of bottles of fine wine in the cellars. Never forget the wine. Less the debt, of course. Around $30 million of debt. Rich people always have a certain degree of debt. Apparently it helps to reduce taxes – but I’m not so hot on the bean-counting side. In fact, I still h...

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 unshakeable 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 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.

WHY START A BOOK LIKE THIS WITH A POEM? DID YOU WRITE IT? Yes I wrote it – but that particular poem is more in the way of a nursery rhyme. And I began this book with a poem to demonstrate that becoming rich has given me the most precious thing in life. And just what is the most precious thing in life that riches can supply? Easy. For me, it’s Time. Time. Time to read and write poetry if I want to. Or to write a book if it takes my fancy. Time to travel on the slightest whim, to walk in the woods, to think, to commission art, to read, to drink, to hang out with friends and loved ones … to do just about anything really, as long as it does not involve day after grinding day making money in an office or a factory for somebody else.

No, this book is about becoming one of the common or garden rich – world-class footballer rich; or J. K. Rowling rich; or rich enough to stop looking at the price of almost anything that takes your fancy. Rich enough to retire, or to work eighteen hours a day, or drink yourself into oblivion every night – if that’s what you want. Rich enough to smile sweetly or sneer at bank managers, depending on what you had for breakfast that morning; to turn your relatives green with poorly concealed jealousy while they creep around with their hands out; rich enough to buy a massive yacht (I don’t advise it, though) and sail away into the sunset like the Owl and the Pussycat for years on end. Rich enough to live where you want, to go where you want, to do what you want, to meet who you want. Rich enough to buy the only two things apart from health and love worth fussing about in life. Time. And the option of not having to be in any particular place on any particular day doing any particular thing in order to pay the rent or the mortgage.

Ask yourself this: is there a single person of your acquaintance you could be certain would refuse a bequest of £10 million? Personally, I cannot. And I’m willing to bet you can’t either.

So let’s ignore all that and plump for ‘purchasing power’ in the last quarter of a century as a rough-and-ready guide. Since 1980, the purchasing power of $1 million in the US has decreased by more than half. In Britain, the purchasing power of £1 million in 1980 has decreased by over 60 per cent. To put it another way, £760,000 in hard cash back in 1980 would equate to the spending power of £2 million today. While you might not have been a millionaire technically back then, you would certainly have been the equivalent of one by today’s standards.

few rich people can know their true net worth until all their major assets are sold off.

It sounds crazy, but the richer you are and the more financial advisors you employ, the less likelihood there is that you can ever discover what you are really worth. It’s a nice problem to have, but it is still a problem.

This is why so many rich people distrust the ‘rich lists’ and league tables of wealth published every so often in newspapers and magazines. We know that if we cannot calculate our true net worth, and if our paid armies of accountants cannot agree upon a figure, then compilers of lis...

In the words of the art collector and oil billionaire John Paul Getty: ‘If you can actually count your money,...

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 B

You stand by far the best chance of becoming as rich as you please. You have an advantage that neither education nor upbringing, nor even money, can buy – you have almost nothing. And therefore you have almost nothing to lose.

nearly all the great fortunes acquired by entrepreneurs arose because they had nothing to lose.

Not knowing that something cannot be done, you are likely to waltz into uncharted minefields where angels before you have feared to dance. Astonishingly, you may be fortunate enough to succeed, to some degree or another. Conventional wisdom will then be revised by those around you and the next generation will be taught that what you did can always or often be done – only to discover, when they attempt it themselves, that in reality you missed every landmine by pure, dumb luck.

Nor is a propensity for risk-taking your only advantage. You have stamina far, far beyond those who are twenty or thirty years older – the stamina necessary for long, grinding hours of labour in the cause of getting rich. Stamina enough to party all night and go straight back to work for a twelve- or sixteen-hour day. I remember such stamina fondly. You have no idea how much the stamina of the young is envied by the rest of us. Along with a degree of callousness and enviable powers of speedy recuperation from reverses, stamina is your secret weapon. Its attributes will see you through a raft of catastrophes that would virtually annihilate older men and women. In addition, your instinctive knowledge of modern technology gives you another edge. (All those hours spent playing computer or video games might not have been such a waste after all.) At least you know the difference between an iPod and a JPEG. And knowledge is power, at whatever age, whether earned by blood and tears or imbibed at a mother’s breast.

Perhaps most importantly of all, as a young and penniless and inexperienced person, you are not an ‘expert’. Thus you are more willing to learn than those in their thirties, forties or fifties. You are not afraid of making mistakes, admitting them when you do and getting right back on track. (Speaking of tracks, you have no track record to defend, either.)

Here is a pearl beyond price and – Glory Hallelujah! – it cost you nothing to obtain. 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.

Ambition, fearlessness, self-belief, stamina, a degree of callousness, a willingness to learn. These are your advantages over the middle-aged and the old. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may!’ Could you turn the clock back for me by forty years, I would willingly swap you every penny and every...

The way will most likely be hard, your failures many. It will be fun and it will get a little hairy, even scary, at times. But the earlier you start and the more risks you are prepared to run, tempered by listening hard and choosing the right mountain (we’ll come to that later), the more certain it is that, sooner or later, you will find yourself with a small success on your hands.

And one success, with luck, will lead to another.

I employ a great many people smarter than I am. That’s not false modesty, that’s a stone-cold fact. The only two reasons such geniuses continue to work for me and put money into my pocket are that, on the positive side, they enjoy their work, and on the negative side, they fear losing what they have already gained – challenging work, congenial colleagues, a certain status and the promise of promotion and pay rises.

They know this as well as I do. (They are far from fools, otherwise I would hardly employ them.) But fear holds them back, with the exception of those rare individuals who are content with their lot.

And what is fear? ‘Fear is the little death, death by a thousand cuts,’ goes the ancient Japanese saying. Nifty, but ultimately unhelpful. Similar to Shakespeare’s ‘Cowards die many time before their...

Boldness attracts applause, as 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

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.

I would use, instead: ‘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

If a committee is formed and eventually makes its recommendations, then future blame for either action or inaction cannot be laid at any one person’s door. In business and political jargon, this nonsense is called ‘collective responsibility’. In common parlance, it is ‘covering your backside’

‘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.’

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Just so. And they do it so brilliantly well. Whether in a college dorm, or in the walnut-panelled boardroom of an international conglomerate, or around your own kitchen table.

It is for this reason that committees are discouraged on the battlefield. A commander may be proved wrong. He may be proved right. But prompt decisions and orders, right or wrong, are far healthier than endless debate and prevarication. This applies equally to a debate within one’s own mind. Fretting is counter-productive at any level.

And so is lack of action. Knowing that fear of failure is holding you back is a step in the right direction. But it isn’t enough, because knowing isn’t doing.

Let’s return to the two components of fear of failure. Firstly, letting others or yourself down and the consequent financial calamity. My response is: so what? You may let others down if you act. You may let yourself down if you do not act. And just how calamitous will utter failure prove to be, in any case? Which, of course, is what gives the young and penniless such a huge advantage in the race to get rich. They instinctively know what Bob Dylan preached forty years ago: ‘When you got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose’.

Everything will depend on the degree of desire and belief you bring to an enterprise.

What are you willing to sacrifice to achieve it? How great is the sacrifice in reality, as opposed to your nightmarish fears at 3 o’clock in the morning? Does such a venture really risk utter destitution? Or is it (far, far more likely) that you fear the embarrassment of failure more than the possible financial penalty.

This nastier, stickier second component, the ‘broadcasting’ of our misjudgements or errors to the rest of the world, and especially to our...

Whether I am sitting around with colleagues at Dennis Publishing trying to figure out if we should invest millions of pounds to launch a new car magazine, or whether a young woman, an only child not long out of college, is considering whether to take over her father’s used-car business or invest another two years of her life in obtaining a Ph.D. in bio-engine...

But fear of attempting something, the result of which cannot be easily hidden, weighs heavily in the balance, wh...

This applies not only to getting rich, but to almost all business and career-related decisions. And, perhaps, to the majority of all imp...

The board of directors that runs Dennis Publishing will talk earnestly and sensibly about the effect on morale for the rest of the company (usually forgetting to mention their own morale) in the event our proposed new magazine bombs. (Nobody ever mentions the loss to my personal bank balance or my morale.) In reality, Dennis Publishing staff working, say, on The Week or Maxim or Computer Shopper won’t give two hoots if the company’s new car magazine is a sensational flop. But by discussing the matter in such ter...

On a less corporate level, the young woman mentioned above believes she would like a career in car sales management, especially as a part-owner. She even believes that she might be able to expand her father’s business a tad more aggressively than he has done in the past. On the other hand, a Ph.D. would add status to her life and offers the prospect of a fulfilling career in science.