How to Get Rich

by Felix Dennis

Knowledge learned the hard way combined with the avoidance of error, whenever

and wherever possible, is the soundest basis for success in any endeavour.

Tunnel vision helps. Being a bit of a shit helps. A thick skin

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.

thrall.

Money is one of the most neutral substances on earth. Others may conspire against you obtaining it through bigotry or prejudice. But they can only succeed if you permit them to.

You have an advantage that neither education nor upbringing, nor even money, can buy – you have almost nothing.

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.

The result was dubbed a ‘poster-magazine’ and sold millions of copies around the world. Nobody had told me it couldn’t

Ambition, fearlessness, self-belief, stamina, a degree of callousness, a willingness to learn.

You are suffering from nothing more than excusable confusion and a lack of experience, conditions that will pass with time, and whose passing can be expedited by fierce determination and application.

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

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

unpalatable

These are excuses. They are nothing but a smokescreen. An alibi. Convenient camouflage to prevent you from accepting that you will probably never be rich.

debauchery.

This is the death knell, in nine cases out of ten, for any new venture. What lies behind it is the desire to apportion blame that may accrue later as widely as possible. 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 group of the unwilling, chosen from the unfit to do the unnecessary.’

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.

calamitous

That is what that well-meaning old gentleman at W.H. Smith and his long-winded advice cost me. He cost me nearly $8 million in my pocket right now. And whose fault was it? It was mine, for prevaricating and listening to a Jeremiah.

A regular paycheck and crack cocaine have that in common. In addition, and more to the point, working too long for other people can blunt your desire to take risks. This last factor is crucial, because the ability to live with and embrace risk is what sets apart the financial winners and losers in the world.

It’s the same with close friends and family members. Consciously and outwardly they may want you to succeed beyond your wildest dreams. But subconsciously, often without being aware of it themselves, they might be far happier if you failed or only succeeded to a limited degree.

Plus the ability to sell, which is usually nothing more than a talent for hype and keeping a straight face as you demand a fifty times mark-up from potential buyers who wouldn’t know a Damien Hirst

To put it less fancifully, they were lucky in the Search and skilful in their follow-up.

Boldness helped. Conquering fear of failure helped. Persistence helped.

All around us, every day, opportunities to get rich are popping up. The more alert you are, the

more chance you have of spotting them. The more preparation you have

Seize Lady Luck by the forelock and hang on for your life.

That is what it is like in the beginning. Always. It is desperate and it is humiliating. As you will find, in your own way, unless

For the rest of us, if you want to be rich, then you must walk a narrow, lonely road to get the capital to make it so.

Off in the wings, there are always the gentle, siren voices of friends, parents and employers, of reasonable and sensible people, torn between concern for your welfare and the secret fear that you might succeed. A harsh reading of such concerns, I admit. But a true one.

In one of the finest such books in the world, Letters to My Brother by the artist Vincent van Gogh, collected and published long

scourged

I do not believe anyone can be ‘improved’ by buying and reading a book. They can only be ‘improved’, if that is the word, by their own actions.

As is the ability to acknowledge that one has made a mistake and that a new plan of action must now be made.

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

Belief in yourself and faith in your project can move mountains.

But not if you insist on trying to scale the mountain by an impossible route w...

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.

Because such people often have what the ancients called ‘the look of eagles’ about them, which has little to do with their appearance. Single-handedly, individuals with ingrained self-belief (and, usually,

a dollop of arrogance) have changed the destiny of nations.

Without self-belief nothing can be accomplished. With it, nothing is impossible. It is as brutal and as black and white as that.

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

No other human was ever born, or will ever be born, with the same combination of upbringing, flaws and qualities that you possess. Why should you not believe in yourself?

Trust your instincts. Do not be a slave to them, but when your instincts are screaming, Go! Go! Go! then it’s time for you to decide whether you really want to be rich or not.

Eggs being what they are and the world being what it is, they will sometimes break. No matter how good your idea, how fierce your resolve and how lucky you are in the early days, you must prepare for that eventuality. It will come. It always comes.

But things do not stay the same. Either you learn to go with the flow and change as rapidly as you are able, or you will be left stranded, like the last dinosaur, by the last warm lake, on the last continent the ice age has yet to reach.