# Read the first page of How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis Read the opening of How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis free, no signup. A candid account of building wealth through ownership, risk, focus, and persistence. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/how-to-get-rich-felix-dennis - Genre: Entrepreneurship - Year: 2006 - ISBN: 9781446490624 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781446490624&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781446490624 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781446490624 ## The opening @@CHAP@@ INTRODUCTION @@CHAP@@ HOW RICH? @@CHAP@@ What’s a thousand dollars? Mere chicken feed. A poultry matter. GROUCHO MARX, THE COCONUTS This is a thin(ish) book with a hefty(ish) price. But a price probably worth paying for those who absolutely, positively – even desperately – wish to be rich. Not super-rich, mind you. Not filthy, stinking rich. This book cannot assist anyone who aspires to the Bill Gates or Duke of Westminster leagues. No book can do that and that is not our concern here. Bill’s vast fortune, I would suggest, did not arise simply from the implementation of good ideas or the fulfilment of any single vision. It derives from deep within Bill Gates – and we’ll come on to that later. The duke, of course, inherited his massive fortune. Today, he is apparently worth the best part of £5 billion. His job is to safeguard that fortune for succeeding generations of dukes, especially from the predations of greedy tax collectors and spendthrift governments. I do not envy him such a task. It must be weary work, labouring for descendants he will never meet. The duke, then, is massively asset rich and relatively cash poor. Relatively, mind. (No pun intended.) We’ll come on to that later in this chapter. Relative wealth is a fascinating subject. No, this book is about becoming one of the common or garden rich – world-class footballer rich; or J. K. Rowling rich; or rich enough to stop looking at the price of almost anything that takes your fancy. Rich enough to retire, or to work eighteen hours a day, or drink yourself into oblivion every night – if that’s what you want. Rich enough to smile sweetly or sneer at bank managers, depending on what you had for breakfast that morning; to turn your relatives green with poorly concealed jealousy while they creep around with their hands out; rich enough to buy a massive yacht (I don’t advise it, though) and sail away into the sunset like the Owl and the Pussycat for years on end. Rich enough to live where you want, to go where you want, to do what you want, to meet who you want. 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. And rich enough to begin to worry about taxes. To begin the process of employing that vast army of lawyers, accountants, advisors and estate planners who will descend upon you like uninvited vultures after a battle. A group to whom, even though you pay them tens and tens of thousands of pounds a year, you will be forever in thrall. (That large yacht and the sailing-away plan is looking better by the minute, isn’t it!) Certainly rich enough for people to respect you – but in a peculiar way. Not in the way we respect people who do really tough, worthwhile jobs – those who nurse dying children or teach for a living. And certainly not the respect earned by heroines and heroes like Marie Curie or Nelson Mandela. Money in sufficient quantities garners a different kind of respect for its owner, a difference rooted in the nature of envy. 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. And most of us believe, rightly or wrongly, that we would be perfectly able to cope with the pressures associated with acquiring too much money. The more thoughtful among us might conclude that we would be able do a lot of good with it, as well as making ourselves and our families secure. ## Books with a similar feel - [The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-hard-thing-about-hard-things-ben-horowitz.md) - [The Millionaire Master Plan by Roger James Hamilton](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-millionaire-master-plan-roger-james-hamilton.md) - [Zero to One by Peter Thiel & Blake Masters](https://uncovered.ink/read/zero-to-one-peter-thiel-and-blake-masters.md) - [The Lean Startup by Eric Ries](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-lean-startup-eric-ries.md) - [Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson](https://uncovered.ink/read/rework-jason-fried-and-david-heinemeier-hansson.md) - [A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson](https://uncovered.ink/read/a-short-history-of-nearly-everything-bill-bryson.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). 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