Yet all this chasing after money took a toll. He never learned to drive, and when he was young told friends, “You don’t understand. Mere desire is useless.ĭennis enjoys five homes, three estates, luxury cars and uses private jets (he does not own them because, “If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it – it’s cheaper in the long run”), has an art collection, a valuable library, cellars of fine wine and chauffeurs. So, the odds are better than you think, but you have to consciously intend to be rich. Plenty of people are ambitious, but this drive is usually channelled into career success, not on amassing money per se. He asks: among the people you socialize with, see on the street, work with – are any of them really dedicated to becoming rich? Only maybe one or two per cent ever are. For the rest, their only hope of getting rich lies in winning the lottery. None of them – barring winning the lottery – are ever likely to be rich on their civil servant wages. Five million people in the UK (out of 60 million) work for the government in some way. Not as bad as the lottery, but not that encouraging either.īut don’t let this get you down, because large chunks of the population (and this applies to most countries) “…either have no desire to be rich or have chosen professions that rule them out of the race”. To be included in the Sunday Times Rich List of the wealthiest thousand people in the country, in terms of population you have only 25 chances in a million. What are the odds of actually getting rich? Dennis notes that only a tiny percentage of people in his native Britain could be considered really wealthy. Though at some points written in a ‘stream of consciousness’ style, the points made are in fact razor-sharp, and in the tradition of John Paul Getty’s How To Be Rich, his book will be inspiring and educating potential entrepreneurs for years to come. Dennis never went to university, but the text is littered with quotes from great thinkers and doers such as Bacon, Shakespeare, Churchill and Kipling, along with his own excellent verse on money and life. How To Get Rich is an entertaining, rollicking read that many people (even those not much interested in money) finish in a day or two thanks to its humor and fast pace. Usually, he goes there to compose poetry, but felt it worth his time to put forth his wisdom at what had made him one of Britain’s wealthiest (and most colourful) business people. To write it, he retreated to a writer’s cottage on his estate on the Caribbean island of Mustique. Dennis is very clear that he has not written a ‘self-improvement tome’ that whips the reader into an inspired frenzy – and yet, it is an inspiring book. The book devotes as many words to his mistakes and disasters as to his triumphs, and rather than being about how to get rich quick, it concerns ‘Knowledge learned the hard way’. With all this money, what was his purpose in writing a book? Amid a plethora of rosy ‘you can do it!’ type motivational books, he felt there was an absence of honest insights into what entrepreneurs really think and feel on their way to the top - and the costs that are incurred in reaching it. With interests on both sides of the Atlantic, he had a fortune estimated at $1 billion. Felix Dennis was best known as the British owner of magazine titles including ComputerShopper, PCWorld, Maxim and The Week.
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