How to Get Rich

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.

As the American critic H. L. Mencken once wrote: ‘The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex – because it puts an unbearable burden on his meagre capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unin

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.

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.

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.

am in Mustique, a tiny island in the Windward Islands of the Caribbean. More specifically in my ‘writer’s cottage’, a new study-cum-library some distance from the main house, built solely for one purpose – to permit me to write whatever I damn please in peace and quiet. Which is usually poetry, by the way.

I began this book with a poem to demonstrate that becoming rich has given me the most precious thing in life. And just what is the most precious thing in life that riches can supply? Easy. For me, it’s Time. Time. Time to read and write poetry if I want to. Or to write a book if it takes my fancy. Time to travel on the slightest whim, to walk in th

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.

There are so many reasons not to do anything, many of them highly persuasive, especially in the mouth of a Jeremiah. And the world is full of Jeremiahs. They infest our planet. In the living room, in the pub, in the office, at the boardroom table. Everywhere you look, you will find men and women who appear to take perverse pleasure in pointing out