How to Get Rich

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. This applies equally to a debate within one’s own mind. Fretting is counter-productive at any level.

Anyone not busy learning is busy dying.

‘A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and quietly strangled,’ as Sir Barnett Cocks, clerk of the House of Commons, once pointed out.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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