Perhaps in graduate school or soon after you sought out seasoned and successful people in your field and took them to lunch. You told them candidly that you’d appreciate their advice regarding your career. You hoped to hear their war stories, their secrets and their opinions about opportunities seized, missed chances and what they’d do differently the next time around. You wanted to learn from what they had to say and to infer even greater insights from what they kept to themselves.

Felix Dennis, the British publisher of several computer magazines and lad mags like Maxim, estimates his net worth at between $400 million and $900 million. He has been listed in The Guardian newspaper as one of the most powerful media people, and the 2007 Sunday Times Rich List ranked him 95th with an estimated fortune of £750 million. He enjoys five homes, three estates, and numerous cars and private jets. “If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it—it’s cheaper in the long run” is a sample of Dennis’ distinctive advice.

He left home at 16 and did not graduate from a college or university. Today he uses his money to buy time for writing poetry, to commission art, to drink fine wine and to plant the Forest of Dennis in Warwickshire, England, with 50,000 to 150,000 saplings each year. If you really wanted to get rich, Felix Dennis would be just the kind of person you’d take to lunch. And he’d make sure you paid.

“How To Get Rich” was first conceived as an anti-self-help book. Dennis was familiar with the endless stream of books promising fortunes by those who never seemed quite able to amass one for themselves. He decided to write this to offer an honest, candid, warts-and-all explanation of how he got really rich.

Dennis offers several ideas to live by on the path to wealth:

• If you can’t get over your fear of failure, you’ll never be rich.
• Understand balance sheets, and remember that growth is nice but profits are money.
• Remember that truly wealthy entrepreneurs think differently than company directors.
• Hire people brighter than you because their human capital will make you rich.
• Protect and promote your best employees, and build your plans around them.
• Be honest with your suppliers, and pay them promptly; they’ll help you in bad times.
• Never retire: It’s a living death sentence.

But here’s why, according to Dennis, you’ll never get rich. To get rich, you must have a lust for lucre that is insatiable, constant and the full focus of your every thought, word and deed. That makes for a fairly dull soul. You must abandon friends and family and personal interests and seek out money and more money. “Why am I a magazine publisher? It’s because I had a tiny success back in 1967 selling a hippie magazine on King’s Road and I could make more money than as an R & B drummer.” Dennis thinks he would have been much richer than he is today if he had looked across all the available endeavors for making money instead of sticking with magazine publishing. That’s a powerful insight and reveals a worldview that few successful professionals or business owners have or want to have.

If you’re happy and reasonably comfortable, count your blessings, rich or not.

Brooks C. Sackett is president of Chief Capital Management Inc. and a registered investment advisor. He can be reached at 509-448-2680 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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