How to Get Rich

by Felix Dennis

Such lack of compulsion, if not frankly acknowledged, can lead to great personal unhappiness. We have all met deeply unhappy souls muddling along in professions or careers for which they are patently unsuited. Worse still, by continually wishing and never delivering, you risk denting your confidence, beginning a vicious downward spiral that appears to draw misfortune like a magnet. The assumption that you might be able to achieve some goal if you only wished hard enough is not just a f***-up. It’s a potential personal tragedy. Life is not some kind of rehearsal. Why, then, do so many people punish themselves in this way? The answer, in almost every case, is that they were ‘persuaded’ or hectored into becoming a banker or a lawyer when, in reality, they would have preferred to do something else entirely. Their misery is made all the worse by the realisation that had they acknowledged their lack of enthusiasm early on and stuck to their guns, their lives might well have taken a far more congenial course.