How to Get Rich

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

will you dare to try? If you will, then you are one in a million. Or two million or three. Your chances are slim, but they are not impossible. My earnest advice is to get yourself a young and fearless partner with tons of stamina. Choose him or her with care. It’s your best chance to get rich.

Anyone not busy learning is busy dying.

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

In nearly forty years of doing business, I know of only six senior managers or professionals between forty and fifty who struck out on their own. And two of those were lawyers. One did very well indeed with his own law firm. Two of them did fairly well. One went belly up and never recovered financially. One threw in the towel and owns a tiny bar on

Few of us have the courage to nurse dying children or to spend decades in prison fighting tyranny. And we do not envy those who can do such things, even as we look up to them. On the other hand, nearly all of us want money. We feel free to envy the rich.

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

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.