How to Get Rich

by Felix Dennis

Even though I was not so foolish as to use company money for this idiocy, my business still suffered and my health suffered. Some good people I trusted stopped working with me. It was absolutely the stupidest thing I have ever done. And it very nearly killed me. Eventually, I was hospitalised. When the doctors there heard how much cocaine and booze I had been imbibing over the past few years, they went ballistic. In brutal words of one syllable at a time, they warned me that either I was through with drugs and booze or they were through with me. One of them, a young doctor with a stutter, summed it all up: ‘M-M-Mr Dennis, you are ac-ac-acting as if you ha-ha-have a one-way ticket to ga-ga-gaol or the mo-mor-morgue. Wh-wh-which do you wa-wa-want it to be?’ He’d got that right. Acting big. Eventually I wised up and began to straighten out my life. I escaped by the skin of my teeth from the consequences of acting big. Almost as if by magic, the business began to make progress again. I hurled myself back into the fray, gave up all narcotics (probably the hardest thing I have ever done), stuck to wine as far as the booze went and told the whores to take a hike. And I have been a far, far happier man ever since. And probably a nicer man. The scars are still there and the damage is done, no getting away from that. But with every passing year it all feels more like it happened to someone else.