Billy Jo

My Note

My highlights

834 highlights from Kindle. These are the lines I stopped at.

Good fortune? The fact is The more that you practice, The harder you sweat, The luckier you get.

How to Get Rich

Ideas? We’ve had ’em Since Eve deceived Adam, But take it from me Execution’s the key.

The money? Just pester A likely investor. To get what you need You toady to greed.

The talent? Go sign it. But first, wine and dine it. It’s tedious work With a talented jerk.

Good timing? To win it You gotta be in it. Just never be late To quit or cut bait.

Expansion? It’s vanity! Profit is sanity.

The first step? Just do it And bluff your way through it.

Why would a rich person waste time writing a book to help other people get rich?

because I believe that almost anyone of reasonable intelligence can become rich, given sufficient motivation and application.

Very, very few authors become rich. The odds against it are too steep.

“Wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things” (Ec. 9:10). Money did not make me happy. But it quite definitely improved my sex life.

Quicker than you probably deserve, but slower than you would like

Just how quickly can I become rich?

I have known it done inside five years, but there are very few “short cuts,” either in life or in this book.

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

“You can get it if you really want...” He succeeded, and so can you. But only if you really do want. And only if “you try . . . try and try . . . and try again . . .” But we’ll get to that later.

Dip in and out as you like. Make notes. Jot down points you think apply, particularly to your situation and your personality.

A book like this is a tool, not an artifact. And you do not have to agree with every point I make—one size does not suit all in the quest for filthy lucre.

I did not become rich by writing manuals telling other people how to get rich.

If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it—it’s cheaper in the long run.)

Less the debt, of course. Around $30 million of debt. Rich people always have a certain degree of debt.

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.

Luck helps—but only if you don’t seek it.

not those who want to and not those who need to, but those who are utterly determined to—whatever the cost.

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.

If you think that it can’t be done and dwell on that thought too long, then you are likely to remain poor. It’s as simple as that.

what is the most precious thing in life that riches can supply? Easy. For me, it’s Time.

To make the money to do what the hell you want.

Very much like being poor; Wealth is just a key, no more.

Many paths can lead to riches, Few in sunlight, most in ditches.

Working in America taught me to think in (US) dollars. That’s still what I do, no matter where I’m doing business.

a price probably worth paying for those who absolutely, positively—even desperately— wish to be rich.

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 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.

And rich enough to begin to worry about taxes.

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.

“If you can actually count your money, you are not really a rich man.”

John Paul Getty:

Above a certain limit, it doesn’t really matter to them how rich they are—give or take the odd miser and the odd hundred million.

Still, let me repeat it one more time. Becoming rich does not guarantee happiness. In fact, it is almost certain to impose the opposite condition—if not from the stresses and strains of protecting wealth, then from the guilt that inevitably accompanies its arrival.

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.

$30 million- $80 million (also known as “the lesser rich”). So that’s where we’re aiming. For starters, anyway.

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.

I also know that because nearly all old money has to be protected from any one generation’s carelessness, their family wealth— especially property—is tied up in trust funds and entailments.

my experience has been that money is color-blind, race-blind, sex-blind, degree-blind and couldn’t care less who brought you up or in what circumstances.

Others may conspire against you obtaining it through bigotry or prejudice. But they can only succeed if you permit them to.

Money is one of the most neutral substances on earth.

Young, Penniless and Inexperienced?

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.

consider for a moment: nearly all the great fortunes acquired by entrepreneurs arose because they had nothing to lose.

You have stamina far, far beyond those who are twenty or thirty years older— the stamina necessary for long, grinding hours of labor in the cause of getting rich.

stamina is your secret weapon.

In addition, your instinctive knowledge of modern technology gives you another edge.

And knowledge is power, at whatever age, whether earned by blood and tears or imbibed at a mother’s breast.

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.

Perhaps most important 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.)

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.

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.

If there is a single category of person for whom this book should prove the most useful, it is you: the young, penniless and inexperienced. I know. I’ve been there.

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.

Slightly Better Off and On the Way Up?

This is the point at which many people vaguely wonder about starting their own business, either on their own or with a partner or two.

They have enough experience to know how the companies they work for function. Perhaps even how their industry functions. And they see a niche—as yet imperfectly filled.

Yet they hesitate. They fear losing what they have already achieved more than they desire to enrich themselves.

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.

“Fear is the little death, death by a thousand cuts,”

In business, in the accumulation of wealth, it is an impediment, for sure. But then, so is recklessness. No, I believe that it is the fear of failure which looms largest here.

Outsiders are sometimes surprised at my reaction when people in this category, the Slightly Better Off and On the Way Up, decide to leave one of my own companies and set up on their own. I always wish them well.

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

As one who has been “the boss” for longer than many of you have been alive, I can assure you that you enjoy much greater leverage than you might believe. But you will never find that out until you go for it.

now is the time to consider whether or not you intend to continue making me (and people like me) even richer, or whether you wish to become rich yourself.

For the Slightly Better Off and On the Way Up, now is the time to consider whether or not you intend to continue making me (and people like me) even richer, or whether you wish to become rich yourself.

You have little time left in which to make up your mind. Your youth and stamina are ebbing away. You are getting too comfortable.

What the hell. Go for it!

“Dare not” is one thing. “Cannot” is another. Not everyone can be rich. But anyone can dare to. Somebody has to.

This is where we sort the wolves from the does, the prey from the predator and you from a lifetime of wage slavery.

There’s health, for a start. People in poor health usually find it difficult, no matter how clever they are, to muster the stamina that becoming rich demands.

We must also factor in disadvantage and age. Not of color, sex, race, religion, upbringing or lack of education.

But mental handicap, growing senility and the physical decline of old age—none of which need be life-threatening in the short term—virtually rule out any serious accumulation of wealth, except by inheritance or winning a lottery.

None of those present insuperable hurdles in a Western democracy.

So that leaves the relatively fit and those not old enough to call themselves old.

(If you can afford it, always get someone else to do the grunt work.

not only are there more opportunities to become a rich American than a rich European, the prevailing culture of America encourages you to make the attempt.

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.

Making money was, and still is, fun, but at one time it wreaked chaos upon my private life. It blocked me from beginning to write poetry until my early fifties.

It consumed my waking hours. It led me into a lifestyle of narcotics, high-class whores, drink and consolatory debauchery.

all the usual dreary afflictions of the seeker after wealth. These afflictions, in turn, helped to undermine my health.

But like an old, punch-drunk boxer, I couldn’t quit.

One more fight. “I can take this young punk. I know I can. Just this once, so I can go out as a winner. So I can retire as the champ. Then I’ll retire. Just this last one.”

Pathetic. I should have known better. There is no such thing as a permanent champ.

It’s no excuse, but making money is a drug. Not the money itself. The making of the money.

Because whoever dies with the most toys doesn’t win. Real winners are people who know their limits and respect them.

With hundreds of millions of dollars in assets I just could not let go. Like I said, it was pathetic.

I began doing what I wanted to do—not what I felt I had to do. After all, what did I have to prove? Except, perhaps, to myself.

There is no reason on earth why financial success should lead to personal catastrophe. Least of all the odds.

If the odds of getting rich put you off, then you deserve to stay poor. Or, to put it more kindly, whether you deserve it or not, you will stay poor.

This is the 800-pound gorilla. The King Kong of your nightmares. The reason, almost certainly, that you have not already begun to make yourself rich.

“Once begun—the job’s half done.”

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

There are so many reasons not to do anything, many of them highly persuasive, especially in the mouth of a Jeremiah.

Everywhere you look, you will find men and women who appear to take perverse pleasure in pointing out the shriekingly obvious: that if a new venture does not succeed, it may result in failure.

How many millions upon millions of man-hours are wasted annually, I wonder, in all this doom-mongering? Personally, I’ve had a bellyful of it.

the Jeremiahs will call in the big guns. “We must form a committee to investigate the possibility of proceeding. That’s the answer. A committee. Who shall we choose to chair the committee?”

In business and political jargon, this nonsense is called “collective responsibility.” In common parlance, it is “covering your backside.”

American wit: “A committee is a group of the unwilling, chosen from the unfit to do the unnecessary.”

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

All debate can do is clarify, support or contest the next step. The risks remain, however much talking is done.

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.

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.

Fear of failure and the avoidance of blame, then, is what drives Jeremiahs and haunts them. To be fair, it haunts all of us. In essence, it comprises two components. The first is our natural desire to avoid letting ourselves or others down, perhaps with calamitous financial repercussions. The second is the exposure of that failure to the outside world.

And looking back, I have to say that I regret the majority of the times I acquiesced in shilly-shallying and a retreat to safety. I would rather have tried and failed, in most cases, than have taken the safer course that so often appears to be wiser in the abstract.

That is what that well-meaning old gentleman at W.H. Smith and his long-winded advice cost me. He cost me nearly $10 million in my pocket right now. And whose fault was it? It was mine, for prevaricating and listening to a Jeremiah.

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.

Bob Dylan preached forty years ago: “When you got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”

Which, of course, is what gives the young and penniless such a huge advantage in the race to get rich.

Still, potential loss is always an important consideration. 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?

Or is it (far, far more likely) that you fear the embarrassment of failure more than the possible financial penalty.

Neither decision will involve utter financial ruin, either way. But fear of attempting something, the result of which cannot be easily hidden, weighs heavily in the balance, whether we are aware of it or not. This applies not only to getting rich, but to almost all business and career-related decisions. And, perhaps, to the majority of all important decisions we make in our lives.

The passage of time and a happy marriage have softened that regret. But it’s still there. It will always be, I think.

One of them is my 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.

But I know that she could have done it, had she been prepared for the unpleasantness, the sheer nastiness that would have been unleashed upon her if she had chosen to say: “To hell with them. Let’s go!”

They cared very much about what their neighbors thought.

Which is why so very few women from her generation— so very, very few—ever did do it.

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 enough to shrug off the inevitable sniggering and malicious mockery that will follow your inevitable failures, not to mention the poorly hidden envy that will accompany your eventual success.

Few things in life are certain except death and being taxed. But sniggering and mockery prior to any attempt to better yourself financially, followed by envy later, or gloating during your initial failures—these are three certainties in life.

It hurts. It’s mindless. And it doesn’t mean anything. But it will happen. Be prepared to shrug it off.

If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly, and even catastrophically, you stand very little chance of ever getting rich.

If you care what the neighbors think, you will never get rich.

If you cannot bear the thought of causing worry to your family, spouse or lover while you plow a lonely, dangerous road rather than taking the safe option of a regular job, you will never get rich.

If you are not prepared to work longer hours than almost anyone you know, despite the jibes of colleagues and friends, you are unlikely to get rich.

If you cannot convince yourself that you are “good enough” to be rich, you will never get rich.

If you cannot treat your quest to get rich as a game, you will never be rich.

If you cannot face up to your fear of failure, you will never be rich.

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. This is not a calling for the fainthearted. There is no shame in turning away. After all, if everyone was prepared to make the necessary sacrifices, who would be left to work for my own companies?

You either get over it, go around it, go at it, mount it, duck under it or cozy up to it. But you cannot surrender to it. That way lies paralysis, prevarication, ignominy and defeat.

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.

that the moment one commits oneself, Providence moves all.

The truth is that the vast majority of people doing the asking did not choose their own career. Either they stumbled into it or they were pushed.

But we do get to choose, if we are determined enough, what it is we want to do for a living.

Who never arrives. So is it such a terrible thing that the vast majority of us settle for what comes along rather than making a career plan and sticking with it? And how do you get to decide what career you might excel at anyway?

It’s this: none of it matters a damn if you want to get rich.

For most people, it occurs in their twenties or very early thirties. For a small number, the Search is over by their teens, either because they have a shriekingly obvious talent or because they have already spent too many hours hanging out in the wrong company.

For the rest of us, though, the Search is a lot scarier than we usually care to acknowledge.

They have provided too much choice for younger citizens.

too many of them provide a ready-made excuse for procrastination and shilly-shallying.

Not to mention fantasizing.

If you want to serve your fellow man, then go do it (and God bless you). If you want the status of being a professional—a professor or a lawyer or an economist, then go do it. If you want to be secure so that you can marry and raise kids, then choose the civil service, because bureaucrats never go out of style and pensions for senior civil servants these days appear to be gold-plated. If you want to be a world-class writer, musician or athlete or movie producer, then go do it—it won’t be that long before you discover whether you have the talent to hack it or not.

In other words, if you feel absolutely moved toward a particular vocation, then that’s exactly where you should head. But be aware that if you want to make huge sums of money, then earning a living by slowly swarming up the greasy pole is rarely the way to do it.

For a start, the salary begins to have an attraction and addictive-ness all of its own. 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.

If you want to be rich, you are not looking for a “career,” except as a launch pad or as a chance to infiltrate and understand a particular industry. A job for the rich-in-training is merely something to keep you ticking over, to put food on your plate and wine in your glass.

Additionally, it will provide excellent training in management and negotiation skills; it will supply inside market information; above all, it will act as a salutary reminder of what happens to 99.99 percent of your colleagues—the ones who buy lottery tickets and dream of becoming rich but who haven’t a hope in hell of achieving any such thing.

And, in any case, if you do the thing right, there is no reason why such a manager need ever know. Or care.

who ever heard of a rich human resources manager? Right. Neither have I.

So if you want to be rich and you are in the Search phase of your life, then get used to one thing. You are not part of a team—although you may have to pretend you are.

you may have to adopt the idea of teamwork, for the time being, to help yourself understand better how individuals, departments, companies or industries function.

You should certainly do so enthusiastically and conscientiously. But in your secret heart, however hard you work (and if you want to be rich, working a damn sight harder than the punk next to you is the only sensible option), you must not be deceived.

Working for others is a reconnaissance expedition; a means and not an end in itself. It is an apprenticeship and not a goal.

You should have no long-term, or even medium-term, requirements of the first two or three companies you work for.

Promotion is always welcome and brings with it the opportunity to learn more, but you are there to ensure that you take every opportunity to suck out the marrow of what you need to know, to understand it and place it within a greater context for a future purpose.

The purpose of getting rich.

Team spirit is for losers, financially speaking.

While lives may depend on it in a few professions, like soldiering or firefighting, in commerce it acts as a subtle handicap and a brake to ambitious individuals. Which, in a way, is what it’s designed to do.

It’s the methodology employers use to shackle useful employees to their desks without having to pay them too much.

When it comes right down to it, “team spirit” and not letting your colleagues down is a feeble reason for procrastination when opportunity comes knocking.

Nearly always, it is an excuse to avoid the possibility of humiliating failure.

Those who can never be rich may not want you to become rich.

only those who refuse to be conned by the idea of “team spirit” in the workplace can succeed—unless you come to fully comprehend and understand all this, then you will only make other people rich.

You will receive their heartfelt thanks and maybe a gold watch when you retire. But you will not get the money!

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.

It’s a selfish world out there. But, hey! when you’ve piled up your first few million in the bank, you can salve your conscience by giving generously to your relatives.

Or by promoting young managers and waffling on to them about “team spirit” in your own business. Not that the brightest of them will believe you for a moment.

One of the richest self-made men I know digs holes in the ground to dispose of household waste.

First off, forget glamorous.

While you may not necessarily want to be in a glamorous sector of any market, and they are often very crowded sectors, it helps to be in a growing one.

On the other side of the “glamorous” coin, very few of those who want their picture on the front cover of Vogue, or wish to become a movie director or to run the coolest PR company in the world, get to achieve anything.

Too many people want to make a blockbuster movie and live in Beverly Hills. Not enough people want to dig holes.

New or rapidly developing industries, whether glamorous or not, very often provide more opportunities to get rich than established sectors.

The three reasons for this are availability of risk capital, ignorance and the power of a rising tide.

Investors are drawn to emerging industries in the hope of making a fast buck.

To get rich, you will need capital, and to acquire capital you need to be where loose capital is searching for a home.

If you are quick at grasping concepts and jargon, you become an “instant expert.” The owners of capital love “experts.”

In addition, the combination of ignorance and misconception that surrounds any new market or technology works in your favor.

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.

all growth is good (as far as investors are concerned), while all decline is fatal.

I happen to believe that such sentiments are flawed. But what I believe is immaterial. It’s what the providers of capital believe that counts, no matter how illogical.

Capitalism demands that whoever takes the most financial risk calls the piper’s tune. 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.

This is the system you are pledged to both join and beat. To join because you need to get rich. And to beat because you have insufficient capital.

But never forget that no matter what promises or verbal guarantees you receive from investors during the Search, the issue will eventually come down to control. And control, even by a single percent of the shares of a business, the fabled 51-49 percent split, is often the be-all and end-all of the game. (See Chapter 6: Obtaining Capital.)

Whoever controls a business can force its sale. Whoever controls a business can implement a merger. Whoever controls a business can fire you. Whoever controls a business, even by a pitiful 1 percent, is likely to take a great deal more money out of it than the minority shareholders.

Remember, too, that in both private and public companies, not all shares are necessarily equal, either in voting power or financial value.

Choosing a growing industry, or growing sector of a static industry, can free you from such financial control freaks.

While engaged in the Search yourself, spare a thought for the software giants of today, most of which were founded in basements, spare bedrooms and garages a quarter of a century ago. They went through the Search themselves. The search for a niche. The search for funding.

Few inventors or “creative types” make very good managers or businessmen, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Ownership is power.

There are usually three factors involved in the Search: inclination, aptitude and fate.

Your inclinations really do count. You have to pay attention to them.

An understanding and passionate affinity with any subject, in combination with effective management, sales and marketing techniques, could well provide a tailor-made solution to the Search. Cherish your inclinations and affinities.

But do not fall into the error of making a fetish of your passion. You’re reading this book to get rich. Not to confirm your own prejudices regarding those talents or inclinations you may have.

Few of us are lucky enough to be born with a talent so obvious that the Search is never an obstacle to progress. Yet even here, inclination may prove a stumbling block to real wealth.

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 (often at the urging of parents, siblings or friends), and subsequently attempt to graft reality onto this image.

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.

More often than not, the graft doesn’t take and the result is bewilderment and disappointment.

Their love for you may well blind them to the harsher realities of your true abilities and potential. There are a great many doctors and lawyers who apprenticed themselves to their profession solely to please an ambitious parent—only later to regret their acquiescence at leisure.

impartiality is a better guide than parental pride.

If you do decide to ask for advice concerning your true aptitudes, then preparation shows you are serious and will be more likely to effect a serious response. As a godparent, I am always willing to discuss the matter, but only if my godchild has prepared a list of questions and suggestions, and only in private.

protect you from spending your working life making other people rich—the probable fate of nearly everyone you currently know.

people don’t pay for imitations. You gotta find your own voice or stick to editing your magazines.”

Lennon was being cruel-to-be-kind to a young man in his twenties—which is exactly what a mentor must be to anyone of that age.

If you are older, and by older I mean in your thirties, then the matter becomes far more difficult. I would say almost impossible, as far as advice is concerned.

How many of us at that age know somebody to whom we can say: “What do you truly believe my strong points to be?” and expect a meaningful answer? And even if we can find someone we feel comfortable discussing such a subject with, how many of us know anyone whose opinion is worth the potential embarrassment?

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 was my own success at selling magazines on the street that led me to begin to publish them eventually.

Which leads to fate. To chance. To serendipity. And, to a lesser extent, to the shared social delusion of the supernatural.

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.

Their ability to take chances and to subsequently exploit initial success counted more than their inclination toward a particular industry.

Their execution of a strategy trumped the subject of their obsession.

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.

Boldness? The most successful generals or admirals in military history shared one characteristic: they were willing to ignore orders and risk utter disgrace in order to exploit rapidly changing circumstances.

When the chance came, they recognized an opportunity, weighed the odds swiftly and placed their lives and careers on the line to snatch a victory.

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

Fortune favors not just the brave but the bold. Boldness has a kind of genius in it, as Goethe pointed out.

It can lead to complete failure and defeat, because conventional wisdom often proves to be at least wisdom of a kind. But should boldness succeed, should the chance be seized and sufficiently well executed, then success will surely lead to glory.

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 done, the more chance you have of succeeding. The more bold you are, the better chance you have of getting in on the ground floor and confounding the odds. The more self-belief you can muster, the more certain will be your aim and your timing. And the less you care what the neighbors think, the more likely you are to take the plunge and exploit an opportunity.

Here is the key, then, in the Search. Whatever your inclinations, your aptitude, your abilities or your preferences, never shrink when opportunities arrive.

If you have weighed the odds and find yourself convinced, ignore the protestations of sensible people and their conventional caution.

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

Chances come to everyone in life, in all shapes and sizes, often disguised, and more often radiating risk and potential humiliation.

Those who are prepared to analyze the risk, to bear the humiliation and to act in deadly earnest—these are the “lucky” ones who will find themselves, when the music stops, holding a potful of money.

But then, in reality, they made their own luck. They never stopped searching.

Perhaps they spent months or even years searching in the wrong place. Or possibly they hit upon the object of their search at the first attempt. No matter.

Having found what they needed where they needed it, and having done what they judged needed doing, their search is over. And it is they who will become rich.

More important, it really does not matter who gives birth to any particular idea. This is borne out by the laws relating to patents and inventions. You cannot patent an idea. You can only patent your own method for implementing an idea. It is for this reason that so many people have become rich despite never having had a single great idea in their lives.

True believers in a “great idea” are often obsessed with achieving a particular goal. Such an obsession, properly harnessed, can produce wealth. Sadly, that wealth rarely finds its way into the pockets of the person whose obsession created it. As far as this book is concerned, their goal was flawed even though their aim was true.

Having a great idea is simply not enough. The eventual goal is vastly more important than any idea. It is how ideas are implemented that counts in the long run.

The idea is not a passport. At most, it is the means of obtaining one.

There is another side to the subject of ideas in commerce. Stealing them. Or to put it more pleasantly, emulating them.

The error of failing to emulate a winning idea pervades every industry at all levels. Mainly this is due either to indolence or to folly.

If you want to be rich, then watch your rivals closely and never be ashamed to emulate a winning strategy.

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 it.

The story of Apple is a morality tale, a tale of the great idea wrapped in the passion of one man (once Steve Wozniak had departed), wrapped in a ball of arrogance, wrapped again in a shell of marketing genius. It’s great theater.

Even so, beware of the great idea. You must encourage great ideas and search for them diligently. But either you control and develop such ideas or the ideas will come to dominate your waking thoughts.

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.

No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions. He had money as well. —MARGARET THATCHER

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.

As Shakespeare put it: Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; The thief doth fear each bush an officer.

As to the fifth method of acquiring capital—earning it—this is a long-term game plan, although it is true that if you can demonstrate the ability to earn money early on, it does become somewhat easier to borrow from others successfully later.

For the majority of people who start with nothing and seek to be rich, borrowing money in one form or another becomes a necessity sooner or later.

Firstly, avoid sharks like the plague.

It makes for heroic reading, but it isn’t smart. Your credit rating is extremely precious.

Anyone who has borne the burden of a loan that sucks the lifeblood from you week after week, month after month, leaving you exhausted and no further forward than when you started, will tell you what a terrible price such borrowings exact from the human spirit.

Better to labor as a wage slave than as a beast of burden to a loan shark.

there is simply too much money in the world; too much capital seeking too few investment opportunities.

The only people I ever met who got insanely rich from a hedge fund operation were (you guessed it!) the managers of hedge funds.

Venture capital companies are one way to raise capital, for sure. But the price they demand is nearly always that you hand over a huge chunk of equity. More often than not, they also insist on a date by which your new venture must be sold, either back to yourself or to outsiders.

Why? Because their own funds usually come from wealthy individuals who demand a high return within a limited time frame.

They do not care who the venture is sold to (yourself or an outside party), but the return of their investment, with a massive bonus for the risk and skill they have invested, is mandatory.

Venture capital money, dolphin money, is not for the faint-hearted. Too often, it is only for the desperate—unless building a business for a quick(ish) return and a small piece of the action is your goal.

Time and again I have watched existing companies wishing to expand, or new ventures anxious to get started, mire themselves with the slippery dolphins. A few of them succeed, and succeed gloriously, it has to be said. But a great many other original owners or creators are squeezed out long before the fabled “big pay day.”

If you fail to grow your businesses swiftly enough, then flipper becomes agitated and noses in. His very survival (or at least his annual bonus) depends upon your performance that year. Flipper doesn’t care about long-term prospects.

He doesn’t even care about long-term shareholder value. He only cares about growth—and he cares about it now.

As with his co-denizen of the deep, the shark, he either keeps moving forward or he drowns—and you have no choice but to move forward or drown with him. Except it will not be his corpse spiraling down into the depths if things go wrong. He will live to fight another day. You, on the other hand, will be shark bait.

Venture capitalist short-termism, with its eye firmly glued to the sale of an enterprise within three or four years, is the hallmark of nearly all venture capital activity.

Experience has shown them that this control, combined with growth at almost any price, is the course most likely to return the profits they need to satisfy their own investors—the great fleas on their back.

Believe me, they are hard taskmasters. But they may be the only way for you to really get started.

More often, you will start up underfunded, on your own or with the fishes (we are coming to that), and only turn to the dolphins for the injection of capital you believe will propel you to the next level. That is usually the way of it. You will need a degree of success to exhibit to them. And you will need to be somewhat humble—except in your financial projections.

Be warned: with them, you may have a better than even chance of making your first million. But you will make them many, many more millions in order to do so.

But their first loyalty is to the quick buck. You do business with them at your peril.

And you are unlikely to stay in control of your own destiny with any business they invest heavily in.

Should you decide to approach venture capitalists, and by some miracle should they agree to back you, then I urge you to seek the finest legal advice that your money can buy for the ensuing negotiations. Just one sentence, even a phrase, within the initial contract can make all the difference in the world to the outcome a few years down the road.

The dolphins are consummate professionals—to them you are just another amateur in the sea trying to stay afloat, to grow, to make his or her financial dreams come true.

Amateurs are easy meat. (Real-life dolphins, by the way, are not the gentle creatures children believe them to be.

It was via the fishes that I made my own first money—the seed capital which ensured that I retained control and ownership of my own business back in the early days of Dennis Publishing.

Fishes come in all shapes and sizes. Friends, acquaintances, relatives, business colleagues, small investors, friendly bank managers of the old school, professional advisors, ex-employers, suppliers and vendors are among them.

Above all, I retained control of the company. A company I still own 100 percent of thirty-five years later. I had created capital by swimming with the fishes.

But human nature does not change and, at bottom, we are cooperative animals.

Those who wish to start a company and get rich cannot expect a free ride. But they might be surprised at the number of fishes in their particular pond willing to help them to some degree or another.

I always do my best to encourage, or to be of some practical help, to others who wish to strike out on their own.

Venture capitalists, major investors and bankers all have their part to play in providing capital for individuals and start-up companies. But if it is at all possible, give me the fish over the sharks and dolphins every time. It may take a mite longer to get there, but you’ll be far richer, or at the very least, happier, in the long run.

One last word on obtaining capital. It’s the worst part of the whole business of getting rich.

Nothing is more humiliating or debilitating than trudging the rounds with your hand out, no matter how good your project or fierce your determination.

Beware of anyone who tells you that there are short cuts to obtaining even a small amount of capital. Outside of family and friends, there are none that I ever heard of.

Everyone has to do it and everyone hates it. For a self-made man or woman there is no avoiding it.

Those lazy bastards who turn away from this odious task are going to be your employees. They are going to make you rich. In a sense, this exhausting and miserable search is what separates the wannabes from the gonnabes.

The only way through it is to keep trudging. “When going through, hell,” Winston Churchill once remarked, “keep going.”

I would not be a wage slave. I would not take “no” for an answer. I would not give in. I was going to be rich. Some how. Some way. Someday soon. And I would not retreat to the safety of a decent job until I was starved out of house and home.

What fueled me was the desperation of knowing that unless I found a way around my lack of capital, unless I could pour my energy into a venture of my own, I would be condemned to a life of wage slavery.

There is absolutely nothing more likely to dampen the prospects of becoming rich than a nice, fat, regular salary check.

My years working at OZ magazine had served as a fine apprenticeship (an apprenticeship I shall always be grateful for) and, as a result, I had met many people in the arts, the media and in politics.

So I knew I could run a business. I knew I could turn one around, if I had to. What I didn’t know was how the hell I was going to find the money to get started. In fact all I knew was—you guessed it—I would not give in.

No way was I going to spend my life making other people rich.

I would not give in. That is what it is like in the beginning.

Always. It is desperate and it is humiliating.

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.

Go buy a copy, and when the going gets rough, my friend, or appears to be rough to you at the time, think of Vincent van Gogh, tramping his way across a nightmare landscape of destitution and rejection for what he believed in. A man who believed he had failed. But a man who never gave in.

You must choose. Life is comfortable enough in the Western world for most people.

In most parts of Europe there are the safety nets of the social services and of government-subsidized medical care. There are decent jobs at decent salaries with decent colleagues and a decent retirement; and all without the heart-stopping fear of bankruptcy, of years of risk amid fears of ignominious failure.

Why do handstands on the rim of hell? Why bother to punish yourself in such a way? Nobody else does it—why should you? Go on, make everyone around you happy. Why not give in?

If you are merely a wannabe, then the siren voices will prevail, and they will be right to prevail.

If you are a gonnabe, then they will not prevail. Like Odysseus you will stop your ears with wax or bind yourself to the mast.

You will learn to walk your narrow, lonely road—and to hell with the siren voices.

You will not give in. And you will be rich.

The history of all human ideas is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. — SIR KARL POPPER, CONJECTURES AND REFUTATIONS

The Five Most Common Start-Up Errors

The First Error: Mistaking Desire for Compulsion

All error springs from flawed assumptions. If there are no assumptions, there can be no error.

Those seven words should be carved into the heart of every entrepreneur, the wealthy or the wannabe, the gonnabe or the been-there-done-that.

“Assumption is the mother of all f***-ups.”

As far as getting rich is concerned, the cardinal error is to begin such a quest in the vague belief that you would like to be rich.

Wishing or desiring to be rich is perhaps the most commonplace of human desires, other than sexual fantasy. Yet few people ever succeed in achieving it.

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.

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.

Their misery is made all the worse by the realization 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.

It is my hope that this book will cause you to consider very carefully whether you are truly driven by inner demons to be rich.

If you are not, then my earnest and heartfelt advice to you is: do not on any account make the attempt. What are riches anyway, compared to health or the peace of mind that even a modicum of contentment brings in its wake? In and of itself, great wealth very rarely, if ever, breeds contentment.

Whether the sacrifices involved—not only your own, but those you will ask of your family, present or future—are worth the tyranny that such ambition, by its very nature, exacts.

Never yet have I met a self-made rich man or woman whose family or personal relationships were not plagued by the burden of creating a fortune, even a small fortune.

A rocky marriage; lack of time spent with their children; the substitution of expensive gifts to repress guilt created by their frequent absences from home; the concern that their children have grown used to privilege and are consequently slacking in their education or lacking in ambition—all of these come as part and parcel of self-made wealth.

Is this a price you are prepared to pay?

And there is worse yet. Such an attempt, without the conviction to sustain it, can bring the worst of all worlds, for if a person does achieve wealth, at great personal sacrifice, they will have at least acquired a vast fortune in assets or in cash.

But to make the attempt without sufficient passion and commitment, knowing in your heart of hearts that you lack the conviction to succeed, risks the suffering of a self-inflicted plague without even the consolations the loot may bring.

Only you can know if you are willing to tread the narrow, lonely road to riches. No one else can know. No one else can tell you either to do it or to refrain from the attempt.

Do not mistake desire for compulsion. Only you can know the song of your inner demons.

When the going gets tough, when all seems lost, when partners and luck desert you, when bankruptcy and failure are staring you in the face, all that can sustain you is a fierce compulsion to succeed at any price.

“Better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all,” drones the old saw. But in this instance, the cliché is wrong, utterly wrong.

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.

Those that do nearly always fail, at great cost to themselves and those around them.

do not mistake desire for compulsion.

The Second Error: Overoptimism Concerning Cash Flow

The answer is that not only does lack of cash flow eventually doom any enterprise, it just as surely prizes control of any entity from its owner or majority shareholder.

it is control and ownership of a business entity which brings with it the promise of future wealth.

Lose control of a business by running out of cash and you are relegated to the status of minority investor or salaried employee.

All new ventures (and established ones, too, come to that) require positive cash flow if they are to grow and to succeed.

Cash is a serious matter. Its management is utterly vital in any enterprise.

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.

Why is it that cash flow is so often the cause of business failure? Most often, either the business is not a viable one, or it has expanded beyond its capacity to support its rate of expansion.

where inexperienced managers or owners focus only on new business coming in the door while neglecting to attend to mundane tasks like meeting payroll, rent and tax demands. Or, and this is far worse, and more common, they have refused to listen to whoever is in charge of cash flow.

I am sure of is that the bank appeared more impressed with my ability to control cash flow than they were with my company’s “growth.”

What I am sure of is that the bank appeared more impressed with my ability to control cash flow than they were with my company’s “growth.

That keen-eyed control was the key to unlocking yet more capital, via an overdraft with which to expand. It bred confidence.

You know perfectly well that smoking leads to death—but that death, however appalling, is some way off. And you need a cigarette now!

Facing up to cash-flow demands and refusing to succumb to the “ostrich syndrome” is a paramount concern in any start-up. You can delegate many tasks when creating a new business, but monitoring and forecasting cash flow is not one of them.

It’s your responsibility and your task. Nobody else’s.

Keep payroll down to an absolute minimum. Overhead walks on two legs.

Never sign long-term rent agreements or take upmarket office space.

Never indulge in fancy office or reception furniture, unless your particular business demands that you make such an impression on clients.

• Never buy a business meal if the other side offers to.

Pay yourself just enough to eat.

Do not be shy to call customers who owe you money personally

In a city, walk everywhere you can.

Check all staff travel and entertainment claims with an eagle eye.

If you’re going to be late paying, call the vendor’s boss. Give a date. Stick to it.

Always meet payroll, even at the expense of starving yourself that week.

Issuing staff credit cards, company cell phones or cars is the road to ruin.

Leaving lights, computers, printers and copiers on overnight is just stupid.

Get used to groveling.

They want your business. Play one supplier off against another. Ruthlessly.

Only enter a factoring deal in absolute extremity. Exit it fast.

Keep your chin up. It could be worse. You could be working for them.

• Keep your chin up. It could be worse. You could be working for them

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. But just as 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.

The Third Error: Reinforcing Failure

Reinforcing failure sounds so easy to avoid. If something fails, stop doing it and start doing something else, right?

when do you decide that you have a “failure” on your hands? Too late, is the answer—always too late.

What has all this to do with reinforcing failure? It is this possibility , the chance that we are onto a slow-burn winner, rather than being stuck with an out-and-out loser, that persuades so many of us (who should know better) to hang in there with a product or service in financial trouble.

Why did I continue to reinforce failure, week after week, month after month, year after year? It’s a question I have often asked myself— with no satisfactory answer.

In short, I fell in love with the project. I did not listen to my financial advisors or my long-time partners in other companies.

Four million dollars. Think about it. That’s the price of reinforcing failure. Good luck in your own attempts at avoiding it. It’s obvious that I don’t know how to!

The Fourth Error: Thinking Small and Acting Big

Thinking big. That’s the secret.

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.”

Winston Churchill again.

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.

Keeping a sense of proportion and humility.

By acting small, I mean remaining in touch. Remaining flexible. Constantly examining how your company could do better.

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.

Every day you have to hit the ground running, putting in more hours than even your most dedicated member of staff.

You have to stay flexible. You have to be willing to listen and to learn and to emulate success elsewhere.

if you think you have already made the cut, if you’re thinking “game over: time to party,” then bad stuff begins to happen very quickly.

Think big, act small.

While especially important for start-ups, it will serve you faithfully long after you have established yourself as a serious player.

It’s a recipe that never goes out of style.

A successful and naturally modest entrepreneur is an object of reverence and respect in the business world.

The Fifth Error: Skimping on Talent

If you are determined to be rich, there is only one talent you require.

You need the talent to identify, hire and nurture others with talent.

Talent is the key to sustained growth, and growth is the key to early wealth. You have to identify and hire talent. You can’t skimp on it.

Talented people want a good salary, of course, but surprisingly often they are more attracted to new opportunities and challenges.

When you come across real talent, it is sometimes worth allowing them to create the structure in which they choose to labor. In nine cases out of ten, by inviting them to take responsibility and control for a new venture, you will motivate them to do great things.

Talent is usually conscious of its own value. But the currency of that value is not necessarily a million-dollar salary. The opportunity to prove themselves, and sometimes the chance to run the show on a day-to-day basis, will often do the trick just as well.

What talent seeks, as often as not, is the chance to prove itself and the opportunity to excel.

You must nurture it, reward it properly and protect it from being poached. If necessary, dream up a new project. Better still, get the talent to dream it up.

You must identify talent. Then you must move heaven and earth to hire it.

fifties, it will have become very, very expensive.

Youth is a further factor. By the time talent is in its mid-to-late forties or early

Young talent can be found and underpaid for a short while, providing the work is challenging enough. Then it will be paid at the market rate. Finally, it will reach a stage where it is being paid based on past reputation alone. That is when you must part company with it.

Degas once said: “Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.”

Most talent does not survive undiminished through its middle forties,

Anybody wishing to become rich cannot do so without talent. Either their own, or far more likely, on the back of the talent of others.

Talent is indispensable, although it is always replaceable.

identify it, hire it, nurture it, reward it, protect it. And, when the time comes, fire it.

If you can do all these things with talent in the context of building your own company, I would be truly astonished if you did not become rich.

Because the truth is, talent does most of the work for you. Just as it has done since the beginning of recorded history.

“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.

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

Do not be afraid to change tack, alter course or make new plans with whatever you are attempting to achieve.

Especially if you sense that you are on the wrong track.

Above all, avoid banging your head against the same piece of wall. The wall will not get any softer.

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.

Without self-belief nothing can be accomplished. With it, nothing is impossible.

If you will not believe in yourself, then why should anyone else?

Doubts can and should be confronted, as should fear.

Write down your doubts and fears.

This business of piling up wealth is an easy business. Easy, that is, compared with giving birth, or raising children, or pressing on a parent’s doorbell at midnight to tell them their child has died in an accident.

If you want to be rich you must work for it. But you must believe in it, too. You must believe in yourself, if only to armor yourself against the laughter of the gods in your quest.

Your mad quest to be rich.

I am not a manager. I am not even a businessman. I’m an entrepreneur and I go with my gut.

After that, managers and bean-counters and financial advisors take over. But only afterward.

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.

if you want to get rich, trust your own judgment when it calls—and leave those whose job it is to manage your business to pick up the pieces.

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.

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.

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.

You need focused,

Once a brand is established, any attempt to mess with the name reminds the world just how weird the name is. Not good marketing.

If you have a successful monthly magazine, for instance, and then launch a weekly in the same category, you will inevitably weaken sales of your original title.

Richard has perfected one cardinal rule: he owns or part-owns more baskets than almost anyone alive.

How many baskets should you go for? As many as make sense. In the beginning, it would be best, if you can, to keep them related to your core business.

During the start-up, you concentrate on that one basket as if your life (and the life of your firstborn) depends upon it.

Just remember that this advice is not designed for your start-up phase.

But once you have something that’s working and making some money, start looking around quickly for another opportunity.

Diversifying not only ensured that I had more chances to lay more eggs and somewhere to incubate them, it also gave me the confidence to concentrate on any one egg at any one time. When one of my projects was in trouble and needed more work, or needed rethinking, the fact that I had other eggs in other baskets gave me the confidence to do what was right. Like reengineering or folding it.

One of the problems with being a start-up entrepreneur is that you tend to think of what you have created as some kind of surrogate child. It becomes your “baby,” if you’re not careful. This is dangerous and counterproductive.

You are not in the egg-laying and basket-weaving or baby business. You are in the business of getting rich.

But if I hadn’t built the second, I would never have reached the twentieth.

The biggest basket I ever built wasn’t my first or second. It was my twentieth.

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.

Talking to your own executives and senior managers is necessary, of course. But talking to people you do not know, or who work in some obscure corner of your industry (or even in your own company) , is just as necessary. More so, perhaps.

Most of your time will be wasted. But what is not wasted will make you richer. Much richer.

Courtesy is not a cardinal virtue in getting rich, I admit. But it helps.

Americans worship courtesy almost as much as they worship money.

But the courtesy of listening is not an excuse for inaction. Unfortunately, this is often the very use to which it is put.

My advice, based on thousands of such meetings over the years, is to keep them short—unless your gut tells you that you have stumbled upon a winner. Set the meeting for twenty minutes. Have somebody interrupt you after twenty-five minutes and usher the caller swiftly from your room.

It’s usually better to leave no doubt in your visitor’s mind if you’re not interested in their project or idea. In a way, it’s kinder, as well.

Ideas, by the way, cannot be “owned” by anyone. You cannot trademark or patent or copyright any idea. You can only protect the execution of the idea and trademark the name.

what about ideas put forward by a member of your own staff? What if they come up with an idea which the company then develops and which proves to be a huge success. Who owns it?

The answer is that the company does. You do, if you are the owner of the company and your employee put forward the idea in the course of working for you.

(Now do you see why you must always hire people more talented than you?)

in the ordinary course of business, you do not owe your employee a single cent for bringing his or her idea forward. That’s especially true if your money, or your company’s money, was used to test and develop the idea.

Ownership is all. When who owns what is in dispute, the only people who are going to get rich are the lawyers.

components for those of you who wish to be rich. What you choose to do with your loot is up to you.

listening continuously, listening and learning, is one of the vital

“there are no atheists in the foxholes.” In the same way, as bullets fly around our head in life, most of us are believers in luck.

Lesson No. 1: Never make your finance director or CFO the MD or president of anything!

Lesson No. 2: Never go on vacation when a deal is going down.

Lesson No. 3: When you change accounting systems (or accountants, for that matter), have the numbers checked over and over again. I’ll eat my hat if errors are not discovered in the next iteration.

Lesson No. 4: Never personally underwrite business loans for your company unless you absolutely, positively, are forced to. Even then, set limits in the agreement

so that, as the loan figure is reduced over time, you are released from your undertakings commensurately.

Lesson No. 5: Listen to people who are good with money and always invest in property with a good address—providing you can pay cash for it and will not need to sell it for a few years.

One of my favorite philosophers, the first-century Roman Seneca, coined the following: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Preparation multiplied by opportunity. Say it again. Learn it off by heart. Let it become a daily mantra. Luck is preparation multiplied by opportunity.

But Seneca’s original quote is far more profound and is worth a moment of our time. Preparation is the key. Be prepared. Do the heavy lifting and the homework in advance. Get on with the job, but remain alert enough to spot an opportunity when it arrives. Then hammer it.

And even if you have prepared, but are too busy, probably buried in the minutiae of management, or a messy divorce, or moving house, or a hundred and one other things, then luck will again evade you.

"If only...” are the two saddest words in the English language.

The only truth about luck, good or bad, is that it will change. The law of averages virtually guarantees it.

To become rich you must behave as a predator. I will go further, you must become a predator.

He thinks a little too much before he acts. He weighs the options too carefully. He is capable of imagining defeat.

Nature abhors a vacuum and if no one else is contesting a market, it may well be that no such market exists.

Very few visionaries get rich, begging the lads at Google’s pardon.

There are other differences between Albert and me. He is a great believer in partnering and share options and employee profit participation.

But such arrangements are immensely time-consuming and a distraction from the tunnel vision necessary to become rich in the first place.

He’s so good at what he does that he is unwilling to accept even slightly second-best. This means, for him, that he must do it himself.

But he is a perfectionist and his powers of delegation are stunted.

Albert’s reluctance to permit young managers to make their own mistakes has cost him dearly over the years. Not just in the time wasted, but in management turnover.

While he is fair, and sometimes more than fair, with his staff, they don’t love him. They don’t love him because they do not get the chance to grow, and if there is one good thing about a well-managed company in a capitalist society, it is the opportunity to groom talent and encourage it to grow. Apart from the money, it’s the best thing about getting rich.

In vain I have pointed out to him that we are nothing but merchant princes. Who will give a hoot whether we made $10 million or $500 million in a hundred years from now? Nobody will.

I have got drunk with him a few times—always a good way to really get to know somebody.

Having too much money isn’t important. Breaking your neck is important. Getting cancer is important. Having nothing to eat is important. Losing someone you love is important. But too much money is absolutely not important, it’s just a part of the game.

Albert doesn’t get it. He won’t laugh at himself enough;

He cares what people think about him. He cares about his gravitas. He can’t empty his mind during negotiations, stare straight through an adversary and walk away from a table with millions of dollars piled on it.

loads-a-money; if he ignored the rotten cow even when she came calling; if he cursed her out loud for every little favor she bestowed...then who knows? She’s a fickle bitch at best and making nicey-nicey is one certain way never to get a piece of her.

If Albert stopped trying to be lucky and just got on with the business of making

You do not have to read Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking to know that if you repeat something negative often enough, then you are training yourself in the ways of negativity.

If you reject any notion of the supernatural whatever, if you are a true atheist or a humanist with a capital “H,” then you must also accept that life itself on this planet arrived by luck.

“Fortune favors the brave,” says the old proverb. And that’s right enough. But it seems to especially scorn anyone who wants money too badly. And it positively appears to despise men or women who fear to lose what fortune they already have.

My advice concerning luck is to laugh in the face of the Lady when she presents herself. Take what you will of her bounty and act swiftly to take advantage of good fortune. But never thank her for it. And forget her the moment she leaves to seek another victim.

“Treat her mean to keep her keen.” Pimp her, don’t court her. And don’t go looking for her or make inquiries about her.

Prepare yourself for luck, but don’t seek her out. Let her come to you.

Make your own luck

Stay the course. Stop looking for the green grass over the hill.

Just do it. It is much easier to apologize than to obtain permission.

Never take the quest for wealth seriously. It’s just a game, chum.

“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

John F. Kennedy’

Serious negotiations, however, have everything to do with getting rich. This is both because a great negotiator can make a real difference in some situations and because many people, astonishingly, believe themselves to be great negotiators.

Most of us are rather poor negotiators.

Most negotiations are unnecessary.

“The other side” is often just as smart (or stupid) as you are.

In Greed vs. Need, the former usually “wins.”

All negotiations arise from weakness, unless you are one of that strange tribe who finds themselves intoxicated with the process of bargaining and negotiating itself.

Similarly, all organizations are a reflection of the people who start them. This sounds crazy, but history has shown it to be true.

The only “style” I assume you’re interested in developing is an efficient money-making machine which is also a great place to work.

Managers rarely become rich. Most managers are lieutenants. You, on the other hand, have to keep your eye on another ball—several other balls, in fact.

Please remember: you are not reading this book to become a successful manager.

But even if you discover that you truly have a talent for the minutiae that management demands, it’s best to abandon the role just as soon as you can afford to hire appropriate personnel.

Most people seek job security, job satisfaction and power over others far more than they seek wealth.

the world is full of aspiring lieutenants.

And thank goodness for that. If all the great managers in the world were dead set on becoming rich, and willing to take the necessary risks to do so, there would be little hope for the likes of you and me.

Serious negotiations are very different from day-to-day bargaining and should be approached differently.

The first thing to be done, perhaps the most vital thing, is to establish exactly where those weaknesses lie.

It is for this reason that small companies and individuals have sometimes managed to outnegotiate larger rivals, especially in emerging markets and technologies.

A Few Tips on Negotiating

Being rich is fine, and at the very least is better than being poor. But it shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of your life, or anyone’s life. If you can laugh in the midst of early poverty and in the face of real adversity, and if you can still laugh when you’re coining it in, then you will almost certainly continue to coin it in.

But if you chase money desperately in the earnest belief that you can never be happy without it and seriously think that the chase is a meaningful occupation, I doubt very much you will succeed.

It’s the Only Thing

Why Ownership Isn’t the Important Thing—

To become rich you must be an owner. And you must try to own it all. You must strive with every fiber of your being, while recognizing the idiocy of your behavior, to own and retain control of as near to 100 percent of any company as you can.

Never, never, never, never hand over a single share of anything you have acquired or created if you can help it. Nothing. Not one share. To no one. No matter what the reason—unless you genuinely have to.

Ownership is not the most important thing. It is the only thing that counts.

Nothing counts but what you own in the race to get rich. If you haven’t much skill, or much wit, or much talent, or much luck, and yet you insist on owning more than your fair share of any start-up or acquisition, then you can become rich. If you take what you’re given, you will probably not get rich.

—I honestly cannot remember over what. But the point is, the partnership held, and has always reflected just two principles as far as sharing the pie was concerned. These are: 1. Who is putting what capital into a venture? 2. Who is doing what work on that venture?

That’s the best part of a true partnership. You always have a brother to help carry the load. And if things go wrong, you have a built-in drinking buddy with whom to drown your sorrows!

So if this is the case, why am I so insistent upon outright ownership, or, at the very least, as much as you can wangle? It’s simple.

I could always walk away from the partnership with Peter and Bob if we fell out. I had my own company doing my own thing under my own control three thousand miles away.

If Peter and Bob had represented every iron I had in the fire, if our partnership had been the only hope I had of making real money, then I believe it might well have disintegrated almost before it began— never mind lasting for three decades.

A partnership is not a marriage. In a marriage, you should be willing to die for your partner. To share everything. To kill for them, if you have to.

But in a partnership, the making of money comes first. Friendship and affection come later—if you’re lucky, as I have been.

But my earnest advice is that you establish yourself first, retaining as much control of any start-up or acquisition as you can, and then, and only then, seek pastures new with partners in the picture.

Ownership buys you the luxury of time. Not only the luxury of occasionally considering a partnership or an investment elsewhere. Ownership means never having to waste time saying sorry that a business didn’t work out. It means not having to spend weeks and weeks trying to persuade your partners that a certain course of action is necessary.

It means that, for better or worse, you can concentrate on building the business and making money. Or losing it without the added burden of guilt.

if you want to be rich and you are forced to take minority shareholders on

board, then I guarantee that, sooner or later, you will waste weeks or even months in the attempt to obtain mutual agreement. It is unavoidable.

If you start off as equal partners with 50 percent each (and I told you not to do that!) then the “Mexican Shootout” can save months, even years of weary argument, lost sleep and soul-numbing, teeth-grinding negotiation.

In summary, unless you already own a successful business outright, then I do not recommend you enter into a partnership of any kind if you can avoid it.

It’s time-consuming and distracting. If you have any choice whatever in the matter, walk your narrow, lonely road to riches all on your little ownsome.

That’s all I know, and all I want to know, about public companies. From my perspective, they are not sane places and their share prices are not decided by sane people.

If you own a company and that company’s purpose is to make you wealthy, you will be content, delighted even, for any amount of glory to go to anyone who works there, providing you get the money. It is in your best interests to delegate whenever it makes sense in such circumstances.

If you do not own the company, or a part of it, then it is possible you are only a senior manager because you like power. It is not true of everyone, of course. But often enough.

You can’t deal with bossy, puffed-up sods who won’t train you and won’t delegate. You can only move departments or change your place of work. It isn’t worth the time to do anything else.

Office politics can be fun, as can all forms of politics, but to many people they are upsetting.

The whole point about getting rich is not to have to deal with this nonsense.

Especially in the early days of your company, delegation and promotion are among your most powerful weapons in getting rich.

Men and women with spirit will be prepared to leave safe, comfortable jobs and work for you, providing the atmosphere of the new operation is loaded with optimism, adventure, the sweet scent of delegation and the promise of promotion.

Not everyone works to get rich. In fact, most people do not. But almost everyone wishes to be respected.

If your company is young and a bit rickety, meritocracy, delegation and promotion are the bricks and mortar that will make it stronger.

Do not seek a replica of yourself to delegate to, or to promote. Watch out for this, it is a common error with people setting out to build a company.

You have strengths and you have weaknesses in your own character. It makes no sense to increase those strengths your organization already possesses and not address the

weaknesses.

It’s so easy to delegate important work to people who are similar in temperament and skill-sets to you, or to promote them. So easy and so wrong.

The work undertaken by your colleagues and employees is more important than your work. Your job is merely to lead, perhaps just to point in the right direction.

I see a young man trying too hard, but not delegating enough.

I only started to get rich when I began to delegate and to ease up on my work

Instead of attempting to stay in day-to-day control, I have devised a system where I keep overall control, but do not involve myself in running a business unless I wish to get involved for a particular reason.

To run a group of companies like this you have to trust your managers and directors. You can only do it if you have learned, by long experience, the art of delegation.

It is important to distinguish between delegation and abandonment.

And most of all, because I learned to delegate a long time ago and to accept that you must allow young managers the opportunity to make mistakes without crushing them or blaming them when things go wrong.

(You can always fire them if they make the same error over and over.)

It says you don’t trust them. It says you cannot delegate meaningfully. It says you are a meddler and a micromanager. So don’t do it! If you want to get rich, then learn to delegate. Don’t learn to pretend to delegate.

Delegation is not only a powerful tool, it is the only way to maximize and truly incentivize your most precious asset—the people who work for you.

Real delegation can help make you rich. But only if you work at it.

Despite all my hard words about establishing ownership and caution where partners are concerned, I am a great believer in sharing the annual pie around. That is, I believe in incentives that help concentrate the mind and bring a sense of competition and purpose to management.

Use the annual profits of a company to grow the business by all means. One of the ways of making it grow is to carefully craft bonuses for those who work for you to achieve margin, cost and revenue targets.

John Paul Getty put it best half a century ago: The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.

Exactly. Risk equals reward. “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” is not risk-taking.

I will do all these wonderful things in a thoughtful and consistent manner. But I will not share out the pie with you when I sell the mine and its mineral rights. Fair enough? If you don’t think it’s fair, please take a job somewhere else.

There are exceptions, of course. Important exceptions.

What about incentives from annual profits offered to senior employees? They are absolutely necessary, but they represent a problem which has vexed me all my business life.

Your aim, as an owner, is simple: it is to improve management efficiency, productivity and frugality, and thereby improve future profits while still encouraging growth.

But the balance is crucial, and many managers attempt to reach their targets simply by cutting costs. This can be fatal.

Any fool can cut costs anywhere at any time.

Keeping costs down is vital in almost any business except government (how I wish I owned a government) but it should not be the main focus of senior managers.

Instead, the balance between annual profit and investment for future growth is the key.

For whatever reason, a surprising number of first-class employees (managers or otherwise) are not overly motivated by money. They want security, or respect, or the chance to

learn or the opportunity to shine. Often they require little more than a decent salary in a company where they feel motivated and valued.

You and I, on the other hand, for the purposes of this book, are greedy little sods solely bent on the pursuit of wealth.

Love of any work, diligently undertaken, no matter what it is, brings contentment and, eventually, respect. But it will rarely bring you riches. And that is what you are reading this book for, is it not?

Sooner or later someone is going to try to steal your pie. This will not be unfair.

Competition isn’t some misty-eyed concept that should be confined to students of the “dismal science,” Economics. Competition is the heart, soul, liver, lungs and kidney of the beast we call Western capitalism.

My advice on competition is always to ensure that you want to fight, and ought to fight on a larger competitor’s ground.

If your competitor is smaller, try to hire him or buy him or join with him. If he won’t budge, take drastic action and smash him. If that won’t work, then learn to be friends and collude against the woolly mammoths together.

But don’t fight tigers, my friend. Not if you want to get rich.

Twenty-one Ways to Make More Pie

What is it you are attempting to achieve here? You are trying to become rich. This must be the main focus of your business life. Becoming rich. Not becoming one of the world’s most famous athletes, or taking on Rupert Murdoch in the newspaper publishing and television business, or having your name appear a thousand times when you type it into a Google search.

We forgot we were supposed to concentrate on getting rich and concentrated, instead, upon excelling in the first sphere we succeeded in.

And so I became a magazine publisher. That was OK, but I forgot to keep my eye on the ball. The ball was to get rich. Instead, I decided to become one of the world’s best magazine publishers. Not smart.

If you have entrepreneurial flair, then you can go into just about any business and make money. But instead of rushing to where the money was, I kept on digging in the relatively poor pit of ink-on-paper until the money, reluctantly, came to me.

If you wish to become rich, look carefully about you 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.”

It is a mature business, and few fortunes are made in mature industries, unless you are lucky enough to create a monopoly in one. I was luckier than I knew.

So this is the first lesson in the power of focus. Keep your eye on the ball if you wish to get rich. And do not forget which ball. It’s the one marked “The Money is Here.”

There is no substitute for good timing. There is always luck involved, but it’s often the kind of luck you help make yourself.

They also came from lack of focus. I was allowing my thoughts to wander toward expanding in new directions, mostly magazines, while there was still a cow in the shape of a new book bursting with milk and waiting to be milked. That was a serious error. A loss of focus.

You cannot get rich all on your own. No one can. You have to create, or work within, the right environment.

You cannot do it on your own. Getting rich is mostly sleight of hand, but if you acquire no audience but a mirror, then there is no illusion with which to get rich.

In the same way, it is almost impossible to build an individual fortune without colleagues, confederates and one or two professionals on board. You will need a lawyer, sooner or later. You will be a fool to set up in business without a qualified accountant somewhere in the picture. You will need others who believe in your idea or your talent to work with you and for you.

By focusing hard on obtaining that human capital you will vastly increase your chances of becoming rich.

Stupid people are easy to hire. The world is full of stupid people.

Believe it or not, much, much cleverer people than you will come and work for you if you ask them.

You do not need to be clever. You do not even need to be that adept. You need only a little cunning and massive determination to become rich.

Persuading them to join is not the problem, but separating the wheat from the chaff is harder. They look so much alike. This is where you have to focus your energy and concentration.

Your employees, your colleagues, your suppliers and your customers are all human capital. Choosing among them is an art form. Yet creating the right environment in which money can be made is essential.

I repeat, you can’t do it on your own.

It takes effort, experience, focus and skill. If you get it right, you will become rich with an ease that will astonish you and everyone who knows you.

If you get it wrong, you will be running around like a headless chicken for a year or so and then

you will be bankrupt. And you will deserve to be.

Focus Tips When Choosing “Human Capital”

“Better to have the world suspect you a fool than to open your mouth and put the matter beyond doubt,”

Ownership Shall Be Half of the Law; Doing an Outstanding Job Shall Be the Other Half.

There is no point in owning 100 percent of a rubbish company. Whatever it is you intend to do to get rich, get good at it. Hire people who are better than you at it. Listen and learn and get better still at it.

So focus on your business, whatever it is. It represents what you are. It should be a source of pride as well as a source of money.

Being the best, or at least striving to be, will speed up the process of getting rich. Trust me. I’m the best damn magazine publisher in England. (Well, at least I strive to be!)

Being young is greatly overrated. Any failure seems so total. Later on, you realize you can have another go. — MARY QUANT, FASHION DESIGNER

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.

So just before you dump your dream into the gutter, ensure you do the rounds of other companies in your neck of the woods. It only takes two of them to become interested and you have the chance of getting an auction going.

That has to be better than throwing your toys out of the cot in a tantrum, as I did with Stuff. But only a bit better. Failure is always a bitch.

Don’t play it like that. Play it straight. Be honest with them and show them you’re doing your best. You can’t do any more than that.

The more honest you are about your misfortune with those affected by it, the easier the comeback will be.

more you weasel and fib or tell outright lies or blame somebody else, the less likely it is that anyone will want to do business with you again.

Some people seem to think that out of sight is out of mind. That if they cheat you and a few months or years go by, you will forgive them, or, better still, forget about them. But we don’t forget and forgive people who weasel.

Screwing up isn’t criminal or deliberate or malevolent. But covering up is,

Closing down a business or going into bankruptcy is a miserable affair at any time. My advice is not to make it worse by omitting to apologize and shoulder the responsibility squarely. But don’t take it too much to heart. There’s always the chance of a comeback.

It’s your company, and therefore your money. But it isn’t, you know. That’s not how the law sees it and not how your creditors see it and not how the tax authorities see it. It took me a while to get all this straightened out in my own mind and to learn from one or two unhappy experiences.

A limited liability company or corporation is a legal entity. In theory, it is immortal. It has rights and duties just as you do. It cannot be used as a personal milk cow for you to plunder at will.

But he has a blind spot. He believes he is his company. He thinks he and his company are the same thing. Nothing will persuade him he is not. That’s a huge, potentially catastrophic, misunderstanding.

If you use your company’s money to buy yourself a fancy car or a house or a boat or anything at all of that nature without declaring it, you are a criminal.

Because he founded the company. In his mind, he took all the risk and he thinks that whatever money the company has no use for belongs to him. But it doesn’t.

Not unless it is paid as salary, or a bonus or as a dividend. This is the thing to keep in the forefront of your mind.

It’s the company’s money. Believe it or not, despite the fact that my friend is the sole shareholder in the company, he is not only stealing from the Inland Revenue by his actions, he is stealing from his own company.

Getting rich isn’t so difficult. But if you want to stay rich, then pay your taxes and don’t milk the cow without reporting it. End of lecture.

The Quest for Wealth: A Health Warning

So what is your fortress? It is your inner core, your integrity, your belief in the worth of others and the love of those dear to you. Not to mention your own worth. It arises from belief in yourself. And, for a few, from a belief in their own destiny.

Seeking substantial wealth is almost always a fool’s game. The statistics show that very few people ever succeed. Most of them should never have made the attempt in the first place.

consider the fact that the search will take up a great deal of your waking life for many, many years.

You cannot get rich without “wasting” that time.

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.

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.

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,

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.

You will be too busy keeping the sea from washing away the sand you have spent so long collecting at such terrible cost to your health and your sanity and your relationships with others.

There is no escape. You believe (I know you do) that it will be different for you. But it won’t be. It never is.

Happiness? Do not make me laugh. The rich are not happy. I have yet to meet a single really rich happy man or woman—and I have met many rich people.

The demands from others to share their wealth become so tiresome, and so insistent, they nearly always decide they must insulate themselves.

Insulation breeds paranoia and arrogance. And loneliness.

The only people the self-made rich can trust are those who knew them before they became wealthy.

For many newly rich people, the world becomes a smaller, less generous and darker place.

Please lodge one fact in your memory: that the last one thousand five hundred words was an “important bit.” In my heart of hearts, I know it was the most important bit you will read in this book.

Mark it with a bookmark and write today’s date upon it.

Then cast your mind back to a time when you were young, and you first read this book, and to the thoughts of a fool, a rich poet, long dead, who once typed these words sitting in one of the most beautiful houses on earth, staring at a turquoise sea, sipping a glass of slightly chilled Château d’Yquem.

Cut Loose You have to cut loose to get rich. There isn’t any other way.

Firstly, of course, you must break loose from your parents and family home.

No matter. As long as you have cut the parental knot, you are in good shape.

Now you must cut yourself loose from naysayers and negative influences: the Jeremiahs.

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.

If that will not work, ignore them and move on.

Do not despise these people. Seek to calm them. Or hide from them what you are about for as long as you can.

American Jewish mother, determined that her sons should become doctors or lawyers. This is all very well, but it will not make you rich, because, in its way, it is yet another attempt to slot you into a preordained path.

You must cut loose from it to become wealthy. Or to be happy, for that matter.

Fear of failure is a subject about which I have already written in this book, probably to excess. I repeat that it is the main stumbling block to getting rich for most people.

You simply have to face up to it, stare it in the eye and cut loose from such thoughts.

But I am suggesting that you must cut loose, in your mind, from your previous life. Getting rich comes from an attitude of mind. It isn’t going to happen if things drift on pretty much the way they are right now.

Cutting loose can be painful. I have heard of very few men or women who made a ton of money who did not leave, or divorce, their wives or husbands or lovers sooner or later.

Focus, determination and relentless drive are wearing in themselves—both to you and those around you. Any distraction whatever can cost you a chance that may not come again.

for the purposes of this book, family, lovers and friends are distractions, plain and simple.

There are exceptions, of course, and perhaps you will be one of them. But don’t count on it.

Lastly, it goes without saying that you must cut loose from working for other people. If you have been gainfully employed since you left school or college, this is an oddly difficult thing to do.

Now you must leave the safety of the ant colony and the hive. You are to become a loner, an outcast, cut off from the very thing that defines what many of us believe we are.

Our job defines us. But it cannot define you. Not anymore. You are a wild pig rooting for truffles.

By cutting loose, you will be free to make a whopping great fortune while your tiger scares the hell out of little old ladies.

Cut loose, my friend. Cut loose and get rich.

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

The mountain that is already making a lot of other people rich would be a good bet.

Look for new mountains where gold is being mined; or will be mined soon.

You see, you have to choose a new mine where you suspect there is money, or an old mine with a different angle to get rich. The right mountain. A great new mine right now is in telecommunications, or the Internet, or legalized gambling.

Property is always good. (You can start small in property and you can get lucky quickly. It’s a crowded market, though, for that very reason.)

It’s vital you choose a mountain which produces money that has your name on it. Your instinct should come into play here. Everything depends, just for once, on what…

One thing is for sure, you must avoid the trap of going into what you think will make you money if you have no empathy or feeling for what you are…

Avoid that trap. Don’t do anything because you feel you have to. Go for what attracts you. Go for something that…

Go to the mountain which produces money. Money that has…

Fear nothing. Another easy-to-say and impossible…

Life’s a bitch and then you die. Get used to it. It isn’t going to…

I am an insignificant little worm on an insignificant planet which circles an insignificant star in a big (presumably) bad universe. A universe I will never…

What is there to fear? Everything…

Just like everything that walks, breathes, grows, flies, crawls or swims,…

One day, my planet will die. Long, long after, the sun it still circles as a…

Armies and governments fear men or women who know they are going to die soon; and they have good reason to. Such…

You must now become that doomed man or woman. You are going to die. Nothing can alter the fact. It is immutable. Incomprehensible. Unfair. All those things. But it sets…

What does anything matter if you are going to die? Nothing…

You cannot banish fear, but you can face it down, stomp on it, crush it, bury it, padlock it into the deepest recesses of your heart…

If you want to be rich you must make a pact with yourself about…

Just try. Try for just a single day, a whole day when you refuse to acknowledge fear of failure, fear of making yourself look like an idiot, fear of losing your lover, fear of losing your job,…

Fear will creep back, usually at three in the morning. Laugh at it and…

you will instantly perceive (among many other things) just how much money there is in the world and how pitifully easy it is to obtain it.…

All that is stopping you is fear. I do not know of what kind. It may even be…

But if you want to be rich, gentle reader, and if you can read these words, then all that is stopping you is…

You have no one to blame but yourself. The world is full of gazelles with…

That is what getting rich is going to be like. You will become a predator. A killer. You will cease to be prey. You will not succumb to fear. Others will fear…

just for a heartbeat in the life of the planet, one little worm, who thinks he is a tiger, will be rich.

It is fear that rules us. Love and respect and other such emotions make it bearable, at a price. But fear rules us all, and always has.

Which is odd. Because what can there be for us to fear, when each of us knows we shall die eventually? Is it a definition of sentiency?

To be rich, if that is still your desire, you must somehow learn to harness fear to your own advantage.

you must make an accommodation with your fears if you are to succeed.

William Shakespeare: “Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.”

“Horrible imaginings” will rule all our lives if we are fools enough to let them.

You have little time to waste, gentle reader. Even as you read these words, a clock is ticking and time is streaming by, governed by the speed of light, racing toward a point where you will have no more need of clocks, or light, or money.

So many hundreds of millions of dollars to make—so little time! What are you waiting for?

On your bicycle and pedaling for all you are worth against your only true enemy. Time.

Why then are you waiting to fulfill your perfectly legitimate, if foolish, desire? If you do not start today, then when will you start? Tomorrow? Next year? The year after? You will never start unless you start NOW!

When opportunities come you must pounce. Whether you are just starting out or have been at it for a long while.

If an opportunity should arrive just as you are taking your family on vacation, for example, do not weaken. Let the family go on without you or cancel the trip altogether.

I can tell you a true story of a man who lost millions and millions of pounds that were his for the taking because he went on vacation.

You can forgive yourself for not doing something if you honestly got it wrong. But it is harder to forgive yourself when lack of impetus allows it to slip through your fingers.

Need will drive you, but you must not prevaricate. You must act at the slightest hint of a chance to make money. You must go, go, go!

If you wish to get rich, there are no reasons why you should not get rich. None at all.

For they are not “reasons”; they are excuses. For the most part they are pitiful alibis, half truths and self-serving evasions you have erected to spare yourself from the quiet terror of taking your own financial life in your hands and making your dreams concrete reality. They are the children of fear and the parents of a thousand “if onlys.”

It may well be true, should you succeed, that you will discover you are not as happy as you once believed wealth might make you. But is that a reason for not beginning?

Perhaps I will be proved wrong and you will become rich and as happy as a lark in spring. Who knows? You will never find out if you do not try, and if you do not begin trying now

The only three valid reasons for not attempting to become rich are: “I do not wish to be rich.” Or, “I wish to be rich but I have other priorities.” Or, “I am too stupid to try to get rich.”

But not many of us can lay claim to them. Most of us are ordinary Joes. We will never compose a symphony or invent the modern submarine. And a great many of us will not have children.

Which leads me to what, I suspect, will prove a controversial take on the subject of having children and getting rich. No one who has not had a child can know the depths of anguish and joy that parents endure.

“It’s OK for you, but I have responsibilities. My family comes first.” Yes, yes, yes. I am sure you feel better having got that off your chest. But how much real truth is there in it?

It is my belief that children do not care if parents are rich or poor, providing there is enough money for basic essentials like food, clothing and shelter. What they care about is unconditional love. That is the only key, the only true priority, although they neither know it, nor say so, after five or six years old.

Logically, then, the excuse “I have got responsibilities” can only refer in most cases to the unconditional love part. Young children neither know nor care if their mommy and daddy are rich. It doesn’t enter into the equation. But the unconditional love part, and especially its expression, are central to any child’s well-being.

If you want to be rich and you have young children, then do not use them as your alibi for not making the attempt.

Of course, scrabbling to get rich is harder for those with than it is for those without children. I do not deny that. But it has been done, and done thousands of times, to boot.

It is not a fatal impediment, merely another “stone in your passway,” as Robert Johnson would put it.

If you’re so smart, How come you ain’t rich?

His kids, who are fully grown, were in secret ecstasy when I played that record. Fancy having to listen endlessly to a father who, between the lines, is blaming you for his and his wife’s relative poverty. What a schmuck. What a silly man.

Watch out for blowhards. There are a lot of them out there and they are very negative influences. They can stop you from getting started, from getting going, from taking a massive running leap into the dark. Always remember that they want you to fail, just as they did. Ignore them.

The Upside-Down Pyramid for Getting Rich 1. Commit or don’t commit. No half-measures. 2. Cut loose from all negative influences. 3. Choose the right mountain. 4. Fear nothing. 5. Start now. 6. Go!

Drugs can be great, for a while, as I am forced to admit to my godchildren. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or ignorant. But they will very often kill you and wreck your life.

Making a lot of money is like piloting a ship. You cease to be a person to many others. You become, instead, a freighter loaded to the gills with ingots. They want some of that gold and they will go to any ends to get it, the worst of them.

Keep giving it away. The faster you give it away, the more money will flow back to you. Not because of “karma” or “universal cosmic forces,” but because you then spend less time defending it and more time making more of it.

Investing in private companies you think can do well is another sensible ruse for staying rich, but giving it away on a continual basis is a surer route.

By the way, when you do start giving it away, find someone to do it for you. Most of my money is given away by a lovely lady accountant called Catherine Bishop, and she does a far better job of it than I.

More angst and worry comes into the world from concern over past investments, loans or gifts than can be imagined. It’s gone. Forget it. If any of it returns to you, fine.

As soon as you’ve spent it, gifted it, loaned it or invested it, forget it.

• Never loan it to friends. If you loan money to a friend, you will lose your friend as well as your money. Give them whatever you feel like giving. Then forget it. Ditto with relatives. If you diligently follow this one piece of advice, you will be saved a sackful of misery.

Broadcast your policy loudly. This will spare you from many embarrassing demands that will otherwise vex you.

• Get “first flush” barminess out of your system as fast as possible.

You are going to buy a sodding great big house, then more houses abroad, then servants by any other name, then you are going to start misbehaving. Gambling. Credit-card abuse. Expensive clothes. Whores. Drugs. Drink. Fast cars. Private jets. Big parties. Interior designers. Gold taps. The lot. This probably can’t be avoided.

But the sooner you can work through this “barmy” phase, the better your health will stand up, and the sooner you will get your second wind.

Your oldest friends are your only friends. Sad. Very sad. But true. And not all those old friends will be comfortable with the new disparity in wealth between you and them. You’ll have to wait and see which.

They’re important to you, believe me. Only your old, trusted mates can tell you when to get off. Will dare tell you that you’re out of order.

At least that’s my experience. It isn’t that you have changed so much, (although believe me, you have), it is simply that you are now a loaded galleon, a supertanker, and all the pirates have lookouts. There just isn’t enough time in the world to deal with them all. Avoid them instead.

Avoid developing “plate-glass vision.”

I often eat at the same small restaurants I always did in London and New York. They know I’ve done well, but the staff there have no idea how well.

Develop a passion outside of making money. Fast. If I had made the time earlier to discover that I could write poetry that thousands of people would be kind enough to purchase and enjoy, I would have saved myself many torments of the pit.

People who can make money are often easily bored. That is true of me. So when the day’s work was finally done, I used to make my own entertainment.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with orgies, parties, narcotics and booze—but they will kill you in the end.

• Get your own private advisors.

The professionals who help run your company must be first class. The professionals who run your private wealth for you must be even classier.

You will get into a ton of trouble if you don’t search them out, appoint them, and make your peace with them at the earliest opportunity.

There is no substitute for a first-class lawyer, tax advisor, accountant, auditor, estate manager and business advisor. None.

Do this earlier than you think is necessary. You’ll understand why later.

• Watch out for fraud in the early days.

install good accounting systems the second you can afford it.

Do not try to be friends with your staff. When you are worth several hundred or a thousand times what a member of your staff is worth financially (do the math), then trying to be friends with them or encouraging them to be friends with you is silly.

Not being friends comes with the territory. Being fair and friendly is always cool. Trying to be “one of the boys” is pathetic.

They know it’s phony and you know it’s phony, and they know that you know.

• Do not sleep with your staff. It’s dumb. It’s unfair. And it sucks. Period.

• Choose personal aides with enormous care. You may spend more time with your PA, your chauffeur or your business manager than with your husband, wife or lover.

If a personal aide is not working out, then fire him or her just as soon as you know.

Close aides like these can become your friends, and usually do, over time. That’s understandable.

But try to keep a little distance “just in case.” Ensure they are employed under a very different contract than employees of your company. They must work for you, not your company.

Don’t abuse it.

keep your feelings about an employee’s abilities to yourself in public. Being rich doesn’t give you the right to abuse anyone.

Be safe. If you make a lot of money, then it’s foolish not to look to your security.

No need to get paranoid about it, but effective security for you and your family has to become a priority.

If you get rich enough, you will end up with your own security force, as I have. It’s a pain, and I still feel like a fraud, but the alternative isn’t worth contemplating.

Never stop looking for talent and promoting talent. This single suggestion will keep anyone rich.

No deal is a “must-do” deal. It’s easy to get carried away when you are in pursuit of a sweet deal. But more entrepreneurs get themselves in trouble by overreaching than exercising discipline.

If you cannot get the terms you know make sense, then walk away.

Listen hard. But if you are not convinced, insist they walk away.

This is one occasion when you have the right to overrule senior management in your company, if you feel strongly enough.

Lead. Do not be led. You have employed a bunch of talented boys and girls who are smarter than you. Great. But you are their leader.

Your employees and advisors are just that: employees and advisors. You are the owner. You must follow your instincts. You must lead.

Stay as healthy as you can. I have no advice to offer on this subject—and no right to offer any. I’m rich, not a hypocrite. But staying healthy long enough to enjoy your wealth must make some kind of sense.

• If you’re bored with a business, sell it.

Your lack of enthusiasm leaks out of you and infects those around you. They can sense it and they will find it hard to forgive and easy to emulate.

Then go and invest in something that doesn’t bore you.

You’re an entrepreneur. Your companies are not your “babies,” they are tools for acquiring wealth.

Try to sell before you have to.

Try to sell them before they peak.

Retirement will kill you. It’s official! Retirement kills the kind of people who make their own pile.

for most men and women who have made a lot of money, retirement is usually a living death sentence.

If you do not employ a great many people smarter than you in your company, you are either Albert Einstein reincarnated or a fool.

Remember you are only richer than them. Not smarter than them.

Making money doesn’t mean you are smart.

It’s your call. Believe in your own bullshit and grow steadily poorer, or listen to the people you employ and get richer and richer.

I tried it the first way in the early days. When that didn’t work, I got sensible and started a policy of deliberately employing men and women who were smarter than I was—and listening to them. It works every time.

guess Lao Tsu, or whoever it was wrote the Tao Te Ching back in the sixth century BC, would say that all of life, all of existence, is about balance. By seeking to make oneself richer than one’s neighbor, that balance is destroyed.

The trick to staying rich is balance. I guess Lao Tsu, or whoever it was wrote the Tao Te Ching back in the sixth century BC, would say that all of life, all of existence, is about balance. By seeking to make oneself richer than one’s neighbor, that balance is destroyed.

But it is amazing how many philosophers and academics and wise men I have ended up paying the restaurant bill for, over the years.

Fear not. For fear itself is fed by fear, And all fears pass. Did no one tell you so?

The Eight Secrets to Getting Rich

1. Analyze your need. Desire is insufficient. Compulsion is mandatory.

2. Cut loose from negative influences. Never give in. Stay the course.

3. Ignore “great ideas.” Concentrate on great execution.

4. Focus. Keep your eye on the ball marked “The Money is Here.”

5. Hire talent smarter than you. Delegate. Share the annual pie.

6. Ownership is the real “secret.” Hold on to every percentage point you can.

7. Sell before you need to, or when bored. Empty your mind when negotiating.

8. Fear nothing and no one. Get rich. Remember to give it all away.

Technology changes. Tools change. The social landscape changes. Human nature does not change.

Benjamin Jowett: “Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.”

The first step? Just do it And bluff your way through it. Remember to duck! Godspeed