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

By Felix Dennis

**There is some excellent advice on business, entrepreneurship and getting rich from Felix in this book but his life seemed to be rather miserable. Take the useful information and use the negatives of Felix’s life as a guide of what not to do as well.

“Absorb what is useful. Reject what is useless. Add what is essentially your own.”- Bruce Lee

Eight Secrets to Getting Rich

Analyze your need. Desire is insufficient. Compulsion is mandatory.
Cut loose from negative influences. Never give in. Stay the course.
Ignore “great ideas.” Concentrate on great execution.
Focus. Keep your eye on the ball marked “The Money is Here.”
Hire talent smarter than you. Delegate. Share the annual pie.
Ownership is the real “secret.” Hold on to every percentage point you can.
Sell before you need to, or when bored. Empty your mind when negotiating.
Fear nothing and no one. Get rich. Remember to give it all away.

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

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 unshakable belief it can be done and that you are the one to do 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.
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.
John Paul Getty: “If you can actually count your money, you are not really a rich man.”
Of course, all measurements are arbitrary. They are just an attempt by humans to make some kind of order out of a chaotic universe. In and of themselves, they are meaningless.
Never trust the vast mountain of conventional wisdom. It contains great nuggets of wisdom, it is true. But they lie alongside rivers of fool’s gold. Conventional wisdom daunts initiative and offers far too many convenient reasons for inaction, especially for those with a great deal to lose.
The first few million pounds I ever trousered were a direct result of trusting instincts entirely at odds with conventional wisdom of any sort.
Conventional wisdom is usually right. But when it is wrong, it can offer quite extraordinary opportunities for those too stubborn or inexperienced to pay attention to well-meaning naysayers.
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.

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 raises.

Shakespeare’s “Cowards die many times before their deaths: The valiant never taste of death but once.”

Goethe once remarked in doggerel: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
And the only way to deal with fear is to cozy up to it. To look it in the eye and pump its hand. To translate its negative energy into adrenaline. To harness it. To laugh with it, rather than at it.
Because whoever dies with the most toys doesn’t win. Real winners are people who know their limits and respect them.

Lastly, in any list of reasons not to get rich, we must come to philosophy and the benefits of hindsight. If I had my time again, knowing what I know today, I would dedicate myself to making just enough to live comfortably (say $60 or $80 million), as quickly as I could—hopefully by the time I was thirty-five years old. I would then cash out immediately and retire to write poetry and plant trees.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.

Mother- She will be furious (if she ever reads this) that I have mentioned her in such a book and such a context. But I know my mother well. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything I have achieved I owe not just to care and love, but to her genes. She could have built herself a fortune had she wished. Her personality combines the resilience, the drive and the restless energy of so many people who become rich. Like her eldest son, for instance. And that resilience and restless energy was always there with my mother. As it was with me. Right from the beginning.

To sum up then,

If you wish to be rich, you must grow a carapace. A mental armor. Not so thick as to blind you to well-constructed criticism and advice, especially from those you trust. Nor so thick as to cut you off from friends and family. But thick.
The Germans have a superb word for the (secret) pleasure humans obtain from the misfortunes of others. It is schadenfreude—from schaden meaning “harm” (from which we get the word “shadow”), and freude meaning “joy.” Those of you who are definitely going to be rich will recognize it often enough in the faces and body language of idiots around you. It is the price you must learn to pay for any attempt to raise yourself in the world. And I suspect that was as true ten thousand years ago as it is today.
The truth is that getting rich means sacrifice. And the worst of it is, it isn’t always you that’s doing the sacrificing. You must get used to that, or give up the quest.

After a lifetime of making money and observing better men and women than I fall by the wayside, I am convinced that fear of failing in the eyes of the world is the single biggest impediment to amassing wealth. Trust me on this.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy; the chance to draw back; always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative and creation. There is one elemental truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one commits oneself, Providence moves all. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would come his or her way. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Growing Industries

As a general rule of thumb, then, growing industries with relatively low start-up costs offer more opportunities for those who want to get rich than declining industries, or those that require huge start-up investment.
More important than any particular industry are the sectors within each industry. A sizable fish in a growing sector, however small, is more attractive to prospective purchasers and investors than the same size fish in a diminishing or static pond.

The biggest rewards go not to those individuals who came up with the idea, nor to those individuals who built the empire. They go to those entities or individuals who funded the enterprise and own the most stock. Always bear this in mind during the Search.

Your inclinations really do count. You have to pay attention to them. Cherish your inclinations and affinities. Though not infallible, they may well lead you in the right direction. But do not fall into the error of making a fetish of your passion.
So how do you judge your own aptitudes? Trial and error is the only way I ever heard of. The problem is that we create an image of ourselves in our childhood and youth
Far better to ruthlessly analyze what your particular aptitudes are and act upon them rather than attempt to graft an oak tree onto a dandelion.
Inclinations are easy to list. Aptitude is far less so. Trial and error, combined with fierce determination and a willingness to discard cherished perceptions about ourselves, is the best that I can suggest.
A small success, though—even a tiny success—can provide a clue.
It is the instinct to seize an opportunity when it presents itself that perhaps sets apart the self-made filthy rich from the comfortably poor, the willingness to ignore conventional wisdom and risk everything on what others consider to be folly.
To put it less fancifully, they were lucky in the Search and skillful in their follow-up. Boldness helped. Conquering fear of failure helped. Persistence helped. But, without some luck, no one can get anywhere in the search to discover the exact arena in which to do battle, the arena that suits an individual’s aptitudes and inclinations.

“Luck is preparation multiplied by opportunity.” — SENECA, ROMAN PHILOSOPHER

“The harder I practiced, the luckier I got.” — GARY PLAYER, GOLF CHAMPION

“Luck is a dividend of sweat.” —RAY KROC, MCDONALD’S FOUNDER

Fortune favors not just the brave but the bold. Boldness

If you want to be rich, then watch your rivals closely and never be ashamed to emulate a winning strategy.
The problem with the great idea is that it concentrates the mind on the idea itself. This is fine as far as it goes. But unless the idea is executed efficiently and with panache and originality, then it doesn’t matter how great the idea is, the enterprise will fail. Ideas are certainly of immense importance, but I have seen so many people attempting to create a start-up company become obsessed with proving that their idea is “right” rather than obsessed with making money. And I have watched them wasting years doing it. Nobody really cares if an idea is “right,” except the person who came up with
- Similar to Frank Slootman’s Advice

If you never have a single great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas of others, you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Seek them out and make them work. They do not have to be your ideas. Execution is all in this regard. If, on the other hand, you spend your days thinking up and developing in your mind this great idea or that, you are unlikely to get rich. Although you are likely to make many others rich. That is usually the way of it. Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.

Obtaining Capital

There are only six ways of obtaining capital. You can be given or inherit it; you can steal it; you can win it; you can marry it; you can earn it; you can borrow it.
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 you were born with a rich mommy or daddy or uncle. 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.
I am told that during the Vietnam War, a sign was kept nailed on a wall above a particular marine commander’s desk which said: “Assumption is the mother of all f***-ups.” Those seven words should be carved into the heart of every entrepreneur,
Wishing for or desiring something is futile without an inner compulsion to achieve it. Such lack of compulsion, if not frankly acknowledged, can lead to great personal unhappiness.
What are riches anyway, compared to health or the peace of mind that even a modicum of contentment brings in its wake?
Better to have chosen a different life, a quite different path, than have placed yourself and those you love in harm’s way when early reflection and thought could have advised you differently. I repeat: do not mistake desire for compulsion. Those that do nearly always fail, at great cost to themselves and those around them.

The Second Error: Overoptimism Concerning Cash Flow

Cash flow is something that any entrepreneur must fully comprehend from the get-go. Balance sheets are a matter for accountants, banks and auditors. But cash flow is the heartbeat of your company. If cash flow is good, then no matter how badly run or poorly managed a company is, there is always a decent chance of turning its fortunes around.
presidents and prime ministers learn to plan for war and hope for peace, you must plan for the worst and hope for the best in all matters relating to the cash flowing in and out of your start-up company. Regular, even obsessive, monitoring is the key.

Think Big/ Act Small

But the corollary of thinking big is to act small. Just because you have a success or two under your belt doesn’t mean you have it made. “Success is never permanent; failure is never fatal. The only thing that really counts is to never, never, never give up.” That’s that old windbag Winston Churchill again. But he was bang on the money there. Once you begin to believe that you are infallible, that success will automatically lead to more success, and that you have “got it made,” reality will be sure to give you a rude wake-up call. Believing your own bullshit is always a perilous activity, but never more fatal than for the owner of a start-up venture.
By acting small, I mean remaining in touch. Remaining flexible. Constantly examining how your company could do better. Keeping a sense of proportion and humility. Not throwing your weight around playing the great “I Am.” Remembering that much of your success so far has been achieved by dumb luck. Acting small in the early days of your business sets an example to those around you. Most of the worst errors I have made in my life came from forgetting to act small.
The French impressionist Degas once said: “Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.”

9 Cardinal Virtues

Persistence

Stubbornness is not persistence. Stubbornness implies you intend to persist despite plentiful evidence that you should not. A stubborn person fears to be shown he or she is wrong. A persistent person is convinced that he or she has been right all along, and that the proof lies just around the corner. That with just a little further effort, the veil of failure will be torn away to reveal success.
“Never give in” is a useful catchphrase. But don’t take it too literally. We must all surrender at some time, to love or desire or death. You will be forced into the last of these, and a fool if you never surrender to the first. But never give in easily. If you can, attempt one step farther along the road than appears sensible before giving in.
“Persistence” is a vital attribute for those who wish to become rich, or who wish to achieve anything worthwhile for that matter. As is the ability to acknowledge that one has made a mistake and that a new plan of action must now be made. Any such acknowledgement is not a weakness, it is a sign of clear thinking. In its way, it is a kind of persistence in itself. 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. You must keep the faith. 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 which has already failed.

Self-Belief

This is the core of it. 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.
Self-belief is a priceless asset. As Eleanor Roosevelt once remarked: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” We may detest arrogance, yet isn’t it true that we admire it a little, too? Even though arrogance is a poor, shabby thing compared with rooted self-belief. It is an imitation of the real thing.
Why do we covertly admire such attributes? 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.
I am not asking you to be Winston Churchill. None of us could be, or would necessarily want to be. He was a child of his time. But I do ask that you begin, right now, right at this very moment, to ask yourself whether you believe in yourself.
Truly. Do you believe in yourself? Do you? If you do not, and, worse still, if you believe you never can believe, then by all means go on reading this book. But take it from me, your only chance of getting rich will come from the lottery or inheritance.
If you will not believe in yourself, then why should anyone else?
Without self-belief nothing can be accomplished. With it, nothing is impossible. It is as brutal and as black and white as that. If you take no other memory from this book, then take that single thought. It was worth a damn sight more than the price you paid for it.
There is nothing wrong with doubt, or with fear. They are immensely useful tools. But you either learn to incorporate them into your thinking and your life, or you will be ruled by them. There is no “middle way.”
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.
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.

Trust Your Instincts

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. You cannot do this in a deliberate, considered manner. You can’t get rich painting by numbers. You can only do it by becoming a predator, by waiting patiently, by remaining alert and constantly sniffing the air and by bringing massive, murderous force to bear upon your prey when you pounce.

Make More Baskets: Diversify! 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.

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.
Take any business and any idea. You need focused, tunnel vision to get it on the road and to begin making some money. You can expand it, maybe franchise it or take it to other cities or even other countries. But, in reality, it is still the same basket with a lot more eggs in it.
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.
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. And maybe, just maybe, I have a couple more baskets yet to build.

Listen and Learn

But when you stop listening, you stop learning. And if you stop learning, it’s time to get out of the kitchen and let someone else do the cooking.
Listening is the most powerful weapon after self-belief and persistence you can bring into play as an entrepreneur.

15 The Power of Focus

If you wish to become rich, look carefully at the prevailing industries where wealth appears to be gravitating. Then go to where the money is! That is where you should focus your efforts. On the ball marked “The Money is Here.”

Timing

There is no substitute for good timing. There is always luck involved, but it’s often the kind of luck you help make yourself.
We acted with extraordinary speed. We put ourselves in the right places at the right time, and we never slowed down.
And what did it all add up to? It added up to focus, following a stroke of luck in the shape of perfect timing.
Focus on Creating the Right Environment You cannot get rich all on your own. No one can. You have to create, or work within, the right environment.

PART FOUR TROUBLESHOOTING AND ENDGAME

Past failures are not pleasant to contemplate. But if you intend becoming wealthy by owning a company or some similar entity, then, sooner or later, you will encounter failure. It would be wise, at that time, to figure out just what went wrong.
If you can off load your share of a failing company on them and shimmy out the door, then you should certainly do so. Firstly, you must see how much time is left.
What Americans wanted, as they traveled vast distances across interstate highways, was consistency, cleanliness and fast service. They didn’t care if the burger was a mediocre burger. All they cared about was being certain they would be served the same burger they consumed in the last McDonald’s they visited, perhaps hundreds of miles away. Swift service, a clean environment and consistency. That was the secret of one of the most astonishing business success stories in American history. Kroc was viewing an existing product in a different light.
His genius lay not in producing a burger, but in allaying Americans’ fears that the next place they stopped at for fast food might poison them, or charge exorbitant prices, or make them wait an instant longer than was necessary.

17 A Recap for Idlers

Ask me what I will give you if you could wave a magic wand and give me my youth back. The answer would be everything I own and everything I will ever own. In The Odyssey we read: And Achilles replied, “Do not speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I would rather live on earth as a bondsman to the meanest peasant, than be king of all the shadows.”

If you are young and reading this then I ask you to remember just this: you are richer than anyone older than you, and far richer than those who are much older. What you choose to do with the time that stretches out before you is entirely a matter for you. But do not say you started the journey poor. If you are young, you are infinitely richer than I can ever be again.
Money is never owned. It is only in your custody for a while. Time is always running on, and the young have more of it in their pocket than the richest man or woman alive. That is not sentimentality speaking. That is sober fact.
And yet you wish to waste your youth in the getting of money? Really? Think hard, my young cub, think hard and think long before you embark on such a quest. The time spent attempting to acquire wealth will mount up and cannot be reclaimed, whether you succeed or whether you fail.
Wealth makes many demands and, by the time you have acquired it, you will be prey to certain habits. You will fear to lose it and must spend a great deal more time to defend it.
Giving money away when you are dead takes no guts. No courage. But to divest yourself of hundreds of millions of dollars, or the greater part of your fortune, before your death? That would be something to be proud of, don’t you think?

Cut Loose

Now you must cut yourself loose from naysayers and negative influences: the Jeremiahs.
They will tell you, if you listen, about the impossibility (not the foolishness) of trying to make yourself wealthy. In doing so, they drain confidence and optimism from you. Such people often include your parents, your lover, your husband or your wife, and your “friends.” Which is not surprising. It’s not that they do not care about you. They may well do so, in their own way. But two cardinal fears rule their concern.
Firstly, they fear that you are placing yourself in harm’s way—and, to them, that cannot be a good thing. Secondly, they fear that if you should succeed, you will expose their own timidity to the light of day.
Do not despise these people. Seek to calm them. Or hide from them what you are about for as long as you can. If that will not work, ignore them and move on. That is a hard thing to say and a harder thing to do, but it is necessary. You cannot spend your life assuaging the fear of failure (and success) that is the common lot of the risk-averse.
But I am suggesting that you must cut loose, in your mind, from your previous life. Getting rich comes from an attitude of mind. ( a small line but a line of vital importance)

I recently attended a funeral. These days, I attend too many of them. The elderly mother of one of my girlfriends at school was there.

The old lady looked me up and down in a disquieting way and I had a vision of a much younger woman cutting me a slice of cake and pouring me a cup of tea. “So you did it,” she said, her thin lips half smiling, but compressed in a disapproving line.

“Uh-huh,” I replied, not knowing what the hell she was talking about. “I hope it was worth it?” “What was worth what, ma’am?” “You used to frighten me, did you know that? Oh, I was frightened you would marry Sally. But I was frightened of you. I was a mother and thirty years older than you. But you scared the hell out of me. I told Sally to stay away from you.” “Yes, I remember. Why?”

“Because when you first began coming around after Sally, I asked you what you were going to do when you left school. You looked me in the eye. Your eyes weren’t like any teenager I ever knew. They were fierce, like a tiger’s. You were insolent and arrogant and frightening. I told my husband so.” “I’m sorry for that.” “You told me you were going to get rich. Not that you were going to university or were after this or that job. Just that you were going to be rich. I never forgot it.”

THE WORLD IS FULL OF MONEY. SOME OF IT HAS MY NAME ON IT. ALL I HAVE TO DO IS COLLECT IT.

Fear Nothing Fear nothing. Another easy-to-say and impossible piece of advice. Tough luck, chum. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Get used to it. It isn’t going to change anytime soon.
All that is stopping you is fear. I do not know of what kind. It may even be fear of succeeding. But if you want to be rich, gentle reader, and if you can read these words, then all that is stopping you is fear of one kind or another. You have no one to blame but yourself. The world is full of gazelles with diamonds in their guts.
Come take my hand, my friend, and we will peer Into this fear’s abyss. And jump! And know. There are secrets and mysteries in the world. I doubt, however, that many of them are of much consequence to the subject of this little book. Looking for the “secret” to getting rich is not a sensible exercise. If there are such secrets, then I have never discovered them. But, as humans love lists and “secrets,” here is my best shot at a very short list. A kind of “secret” recap. The essence, if you will, of what I have learned along the way. (Strangely, compiling such a list is rather like writing a poem. You have to strip out any word not absolutely essential. Like the word “absolutely,” for instance!) The

Eight Secrets to Getting Rich

Analyze your need. Desire is insufficient. Compulsion is mandatory.
Cut loose from negative influences. Never give in. Stay the course.
Ignore “great ideas.” Concentrate on great execution.
Focus. Keep your eye on the ball marked “The Money is Here.”
Hire talent smarter than you. Delegate. Share the annual pie.
Ownership is the real “secret.” Hold on to every percentage point you can.
Sell before you need to, or when bored. Empty your mind when negotiating.
Fear nothing and no one. Get rich. Remember to give it all away.