A fun, entertaining book about entrepreneurship by a kind of an extreme character, Felix Dennis, an English Publisher, telling his own stories, luck, and mishaps.

More importantly as a businessman he is right more often than he is wrong and his timing is very good.Explore the best books for expanding your mind, the best self-help books, the best philosophy books for beginners, books for people who don't enjoy reading, and more great books. 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. What this book will do is either help you throw off the psychological and social constraints, especially fear and the carping negativity of others, that hold you back if you are on the cusp of entrepreneurship (and oh how I could have done with that sort of support in my deadly family circumstances of thirty years ago). Canny, infuriating, cynical and generous by turns, How To Get Rich is an invaluable guide to 'the surprisingly simple art of collecting money which already has your name on it'.

A humorous, crass, but honest approach to giving advice on how to make money, but more importantly how to figure out what you want in life. Conventional wisdom will then be revised by those around you and the next generation will be taught that what you did can always or often be done - only to discover, when they attempt it themselves, that in reality you missed every landmine by pure, dumb luck. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would come his or her way. My advice is not to make it worse by omitting to apologize and shoulder the responsibility squarely. While some planning and debate can help you reduce the risk of a business venture, this often leads people to avoid the most important step of making things happen and getting rich — taking action.

The assumption that you might be able to achieve some goal if you only wished hard enough is not just a f***-up. Dennis is brutally clear that getting rich is horribly hard work and you shouldn't undertake it unless you really are committed, since it will probably ruin your marriage, friendships and health. You can own equity in a product or a piece of intellectual property (IP) like a book, script, or other artwork. 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. The first is our natural desire to avoid letting ourselves or others down, perhaps with calamitous financial repercussions.

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. It taught me that I'm not willing to sacrifice what it is necessary to sacrifice to get rich, at least not in the way Felix did anyway. Particularly when he tells the moral tale of two publishing executives, he admits more talented than him, who made only one per cent of his fortune. Their ability to take chances and to subsequently exploit initial success counted more than their inclination toward a particular industry. It would have been nice to have the author explain that paradox in the book, but, strangely, he appears not to see it.New or rapidly developing industries, whether glamorous or not, very often provide more opportunities to get rich than established sectors. The time spent attempting to acquire wealth will mount up and cannot be reclaimed, whether you succeed or whether you fail. By the time one is a senior manager or professional , probably with a decent house, a mortgage and children, it is the risk to the security and happiness of the latter (and maybe to a spouse), plus the usual lack of capital, which are most often cited as insuperable difficulties to taking the plunge. Felix Dennis (born 1947 in Kingston-upon-Thames, United Kingdom) was a British magazine publisher and philanthropist. Page 105 is also pretty daft when the author suggests that replacing Pete Best with Ringo Starr in The Beatles, all those years ago, was almost unnecessary.

Felix Dennis, an eccentric legend in the magazine publishing world, uses stories from his life of building businesses and chasing money to show the good, bad, and ugly of such pursuits. This is one of the most useful and certainly most entertaining books I have ever read in this genre. This isn't a perfect book - parts of it could probably be condensed, and I'm not sure he really succeeded in his attempt to explain that key point of how to know when you need to persevere and when it's really time to throw in the towel - but despite these flaws, I think it's quite useful reading for anyone who is thinking about starting or who has recently started a business. Over the last 20th some years of reading many books, manly autobiographies, better still biographies, and also various forms of psychology etc, every so often I come across a gem of a book.It’s the only way you can disconnect your inputs from your outputs by owning a piece of a business or product. Conventional wisdom daunts initiative and offers far too many convenient reasons for inaction, especially for those with a great deal to lose.