How to Get Rich
Persistence, ambition, and risk
Description
In 2006, a British magazine publisher named Felix Dennis sat down to write a book about getting rich, and opened it with a warning most wealth authors would never risk: don't bother, unless you have to. Dennis knew what he was talking about. He had built a fortune of several hundred million pounds from a magazine empire — he launched Maxim in the US in 1997 and sold his American titles years later for a reported sum in the hundreds of millions. He had also, by his own cheerful account, wasted a large portion of that money on drugs, women, and a lifestyle that would have killed a less durable man. The book he produced was called How to Get Rich, and it remains one of the strangest entries in the genre.
Strange, because it refuses almost every convention the genre runs on. There is no seven-step ladder, no morning routine, no promise that anyone reading can do it too. Dennis instead spends chapters explaining why most people will not get rich, why they probably shouldn't want to, and why the whole pursuit cost him more than he likes to admit. He is rude about consultants, scornful of people who cling to a salary, and brutally honest about his own failures. And then, having warned you off, he tells you exactly how it is done — because he genuinely believes the mechanics are simple, even if the price is not.
That combination — a self-made rich man telling the truth about the machine that made him — is what makes the book worth reading long after the specific business advice has dated. Dennis wasn't selling a dream. He was reporting from inside one, with the detachment of someone who had already got everything he wanted and found the view stranger than expected.
The question we’re asking : What does a man who actually got rich say the process really requires — and what does he admit it costs?What we’ll see : A candid tour of the mindset, the single non-negotiable rule, the temperament it demands, and the quiet reckoning underneath it all.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The man who admits it was luck
Most people who get rich construct a story afterward that makes it look inevitable. Dennis does the opposite. He insists that getting rich requires a specific temperament, a willingness to work absurdly hard, and a large amount of luck — and that pretending luck plays no part is the first lie the newly wealthy tell themselves. His own break came in the early 1970s, publishing a Bruce Lee poster magazine and, notoriously, a kung-fu monthly at exactly the moment the martial-arts craze exploded. He caught a wave. He'll say so.
But luck, in his telling, only matters if you are positioned to grab it. That positioning is the part he thinks is teachable. It starts with what he calls the willingness to act — not to plan, not to research endlessly, but to move while others hesitate. He is scathing about people who spend years preparing a business they never launch. The ones who get rich, he argues, are usually not the smartest in the room. They're the ones who started, kept going after the first failure, and stayed hungry long past the point where comfort would have satisfied a saner person.
02Chapter 2 — Ownership, or nothing
If Dennis has one rule that towers over the rest, it is this: to get rich, you must own things. Not earn a salary, however large. Not collect stock options as a favor from a grateful employer. Own. He returns to this point so often it becomes the spine of the book. Employees, no matter how senior or well paid, are renting out their lives by the hour. The wealth is created by them but captured by whoever holds the equity — and if that isn't you, you are, in his blunt phrase, working to make someone else rich.
This is why he is so hostile to the comfortable executive career. A high salary, he argues, is one of the most effective traps ever devised: it buys a nice house, a lifestyle, and a mortgage, all of which quietly make the risk of leaving to build your own thing feel impossible. The salary keeps you loyal. Dennis wants readers to see the golden handcuffs for what they are. The only reliable path he knows to serious money is to own a stake in something that grows, and to fight — genuinely fight — to keep as much of that ownership as possible.
03Chapter 3 — The willingness to be disliked
Once a venture is moving, Dennis argues, the game shifts from starting to leading — and leading well means doing things that pleasant people find distasteful. He is candid that his own success rested heavily on hiring talent better than himself and then getting out of their way. The instinct to control everything, common among founders, is in his view a fast route to a small business that never grows. Delegate, trust, pay generously, and accept that your best people will occasionally know more than you.
But he pairs this warmth toward talent with a harder edge about money and negotiation. Dennis treats negotiation as a discipline where the person who cares less, or can convincingly appear to, holds the advantage. He advises readers to be willing to walk away, to never reveal how much they want the deal, and to remember that silence is a tool. He also insists on facing unpleasant tasks quickly — firing people who need firing, cutting projects that aren't working — because the cost of delay always compounds. A leader who needs to be loved, he warns, will make a series of soft decisions that quietly bleed a company.
04Chapter 4 — What the money never bought
The most revealing thing about How to Get Rich is what Dennis does with the last stretch of the book, once the machinery has been laid out. He steps back and asks whether any of it was worth it — and his answer is complicated enough to unsettle the entire genre he's writing in. Wealth, he says plainly, did not make him happier. It insulated him, entertained him, and gave him toys, but the years he remembers most fondly were the early, broke, striving ones, when the fortune was still ahead of him and every small win meant something.
This is where the book quietly argues something larger than its title. Getting rich, in Dennis's account, is a narrow and specialized skill — like being able to run very fast or hold your breath a long time. It correlates poorly with intelligence, hardly at all with virtue, and not at all with a good life. The people best at it are often the ones least equipped to enjoy the result, precisely because the hunger that drove them doesn't switch off when the money arrives. He watched wealthy men keep grinding, unable to stop, and recognized himself in them.
05Conclusion
Dennis died in June 2014, having spent his final years pouring money into a project that had nothing to do with wealth — planting a vast broadleaf forest in the English Midlands, one of the largest of its kind in the country. It's a fitting coda for a book that begins by telling you how to make a fortune and ends by wondering aloud what any of it was for. The man who wrote the most unsentimental guide to getting rich spent his last chapter, and much of his last decade, giving the proceeds back to the ground.
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