The Science of Getting Rich and How to Apply It

“I’m not sure what I’m worth. So I price low, because at least then they say yes.”

Whatever may be said in praise of poverty, the fact remains that it is not possible to live a fully rounded life without money.

Wattles opened his book with almost exactly that sentence in 1910 (his wording, lightly modernised here), and it was provocative then for the opposite reason it is provocative now. His readers had been raised to believe that wanting wealth was vulgar, that virtue lived in going without. Many of my readers have been raised on a subtler version of the same idea: that wanting wealth is fine for other people, the brash ones, the lucky ones, but that decent, thoughtful people should want “enough” and feel slightly embarrassed about the rest.

Both versions produce the same result. A person divided against their own ambition.

I want to show you what that division looks like up close, because it does not look like laziness or lack of talent. It looks like the opposite.

The room in Florence

Earlier this year I spent several days in a room in Florence with a group of business owners. Accomplished people, every one of them. Businesses that worked, clients who valued them, skills that had taken decades to build. On paper, none of them had anything to prove.

And yet, as the days went on and the conversation deepened, the same confessions kept surfacing, in different accents and different industries. I am not sure what my work is actually worth. I price low because I am afraid of the silence that might follow a proper number. I avoid looking too closely at my own economics because I suspect they would tell me something I would have to act on. I want to scale, but some part of me flinches at the size of my own ambition, so I keep the plans modest enough not to be embarrassing if they fail.

Not one of those sentences is about strategy. Every one of them is about permission.

Here is what struck me most, sitting in that room. These were not people who lacked the desire to be wealthy. The desire was plainly there; you could hear it underneath every hedge. What they lacked was the settled conviction that the desire was legitimate. One part of each person was building. Another part was quietly apologising for the building. And a person cannot act cleanly while half of them is arguing with the destination.

I recognised the pattern instantly, because I have watched it for thirty years in rooms far grander than that one. And because, as I will admit shortly, I have lived it.

Wattles’ answer

Wattles’ first move is to dissolve the division at its root, and his argument deserves a slower reading than most people give it.

His claim: the desire for riches is really the desire for a richer life. You are not built to want less. Every living thing seeks the full expression of what it is; a seed does not apologise for becoming a tree. And a human life, he says, expresses itself through three channels: body, mind and soul. No one can live fully while any of the three is starved.

To live fully in body, you need food, rest, warmth, health, and freedom from grinding overwork. To live fully in mind, you need ideas, books, travel, art, time to think, the company of interesting people. To live fully in what Wattles called soul, and what you might simply call meaning, you need the capacity to be generous: to give your children opportunities, to support the people and causes you love, to be useful at a scale beyond your own two hands.

Every one of those requires money. Not as an end. As the means by which a full life is purchased in the world as it actually operates.

I can vouch for the three channels from my own ledger, and I offer this not as boasting but as evidence, because the argument is easy to nod along to and harder to feel. Money bought my body things my grandparents’ generation could not have imagined: the gym, the spa recovery, the wearables that track my sleep and heart, the rowing machine in the corner, the hot tub that has repaired more stressful weeks than any medicine. Money bought my mind the world: decades of travel through cultures that rearranged how I think, shelves of books, subscriptions to more knowledge than any library I grew up near, rooms full of people at events I would never otherwise have met. And money bought meaning: the freedom to give my daughters experiences and options, to support people I love, to spend my time on work I choose rather than work I must accept.

None of that made money the point. All of it made money the means. That is Wattles’ entire opening argument: the desire for riches is the desire for that, for fuller life across all three channels, and it is therefore not a vice to be managed but an ambition to be honoured.

And let me be precise about the target here, because it is not modest ambition. Some people have honestly weighed what they want and chosen enough: a sound, profitable business, fewer hours, a full life at a deliberate size. That is a settled picture, and everything in this book serves it exactly as well as it serves a larger one. This chapter is written for someone else: the person who wants more and has never granted themselves permission to say so, who negotiated themselves down without ever admitting there was a negotiation, and who then taught the people around them, their teams, their children, their clients, to do the same.

A very British disease

Wattles was American, writing for Americans, and even he felt the need to defend ambition. He never met the British version of the problem.

I have spent my career in and around British finance, and I can report that we have refined money-embarrassment into a national art form. Talking about money is vulgar. Wanting it openly is grasping. Succeeding visibly is showing off, and showing off is the cardinal sin. The safest social position is to have done well while implying it was mostly accidental and slightly regrettable. We even have a liturgy for it: “we’re very lucky”, “it’s nothing special”, “we do alright”.

Understand what this culture does to a business owner. It does not remove the desire for wealth; the desire is human and it stays. It drives the desire underground, where it cannot be examined, calibrated or committed to. The ambition leaks out sideways, in envy, in restlessness, in the strange guilt of the person in Florence pricing low to avoid the silence. What cannot be admitted cannot be aimed.

So let me say the quiet part in plain English, since Wattles said it in plain American: you are allowed to want to be rich. Openly. On purpose. Without the apologetic cough. Not because greed is good, but because the fully lived life is good, and in this world it is purchased.

What undivided looks like

Now let me show you the other end of the spectrum, because I had the privilege of watching it from the closest possible seat: the research desk.

For years I covered technology companies for investment banks, and two of them taught me what undivided ambition actually looks like. ASML, the Dutch company building lithography machines, the machines at the heart of the world’s most advanced chipmaking. And ARM, the Cambridge company designing the processor architecture that would one day sit in essentially every phone on the planet.

Here is what people forget about both. For long stretches, the market did not believe. The share prices flatlined for years. Investors were sceptical, analysts lukewarm, the consensus politely unconvinced that these strange, patient, singular strategies would amount to anything commensurate with the effort. I was bullish, writing strong buy after strong buy, and I remember the eye-rolls.

And through all of it, the leadership teams of both companies did something remarkable: nothing different. No pivot to please the market. No apology for the scale of the intention. No trimming of the ambition to a size the sceptics would find plausible. They had a clear picture of what they were building, world-defining positions in lithography and processor architecture, and they held it, undivided, through years in which the scoreboard said they were wrong. The market eventually repriced both companies so dramatically that the earlier scepticism now looks absurd. It did not feel absurd at the time. It felt like consensus.

Notice the contrast with the room in Florence. The difference was not talent, work ethic or opportunity. The people in Florence had all three. The difference was that ASML and ARM were not arguing with their own destination. Their ambition had no internal opposition, so it could survive external opposition. That is the practical cash value of settling this chapter’s question. Undivided ambition is not arrogance. It is structural integrity, and it is what allows a person or a company to keep acting cleanly when the world withholds its applause, which the world always does, for longer than anyone expects.

My own confession

I said I recognised the pattern in Florence because I have lived it, and you should hear this before we go further, because this book will not pretend its author learned these lessons anywhere but the hard way.

Here is my strange, instructive split. In other people’s businesses, I have always been clear-eyed about money. Advising a company, sitting on a board, negotiating on someone else’s behalf, I could price boldly, argue value without flinching, hold a number in silence. In my own businesses, the same man struggled. Pricing my own work, sitting in my own sales conversations, stating my own worth out loud: harder, sometimes absurdly so. The skill was identical. The permission was not. Which tells you everything about where the real problem lives. It was never a knowledge gap. It was a worthiness gap, and no spreadsheet fixes those.

And I have carried money-guilt of the more expensive kind too. There was a period when I over-invested, spending as though money already committed to me had arrived, confident the equity value beneath me would keep rising. It did not. I watched my holding in one company, dotdigital, collapse in value while my obligations stood exactly where I had built them. Other bets on startups went to zero the ordinary way. The financial damage was real, but the deeper damage was the story I told myself afterwards: that the losses were a verdict, that wanting more had been the sin, that the safe response was to want less and apologise more.

It took years of deliberate inner work to unwind that story, and the unwinding is, in a sense, why this book exists. What I eventually understood is the thing Wattles states on his first page and I resisted for decades: the desire itself was never the problem. My relationship with the desire was. Wealth, I came to see, is first a state of mind, a settled, unapologetic relationship with wanting and having, and only afterwards a number. Get the relationship wrong and no number ever feels like enough or arrives without guilt. Get it right and you can act cleanly at any number, including zero, which is where every builder starts.

The right, settled

So this is the first act of the method, and everything else in this book depends on it. Not the picture, not the practice, not the action. First, the settling of the question: is my ambition legitimate?

Wattles answers yes, without qualification. The desire for riches is the desire for fuller life, and the desire for fuller life is the nature of everything alive. You have a right to be rich. Not a guarantee; a right, in the sense that the ambition needs no defence, no apologetic cough, no British throat-clearing, and is worthy of your full, undivided commitment.

Settle it, because the divided person cannot follow a way of thinking and acting with precision. Half of them is always negotiating a surrender. And notice, finally, what settling it does to your view of everyone else. If wealth is created and the desire for it is the desire for fuller life, then your ambition takes nothing from anyone, and theirs takes nothing from you. We will make that argument properly in Chapter 3. For now it is enough to lay down the guilt at the door, because you cannot carry it and the method at the same time.

The practice. This week, two acts. First, write down, privately and honestly, what genuine wealth would fund across the three channels: body, mind, meaning. Not the number, the life, specific enough to recognise on arrival. Second, run the apology audit: notice every moment you catch yourself apologising for ambition, in your pricing, in conversation, in plans trimmed before anyone sees them, in the reflexive “we’re very lucky”. Do not fix anything yet. Just count. Most people are startled by the number, and the startling is the beginning of the settling.