Principle and Fashion

Four weeks ago I published my adaptation of a book from 1910. This week I published the book itself, every word as Wallace D. Wattles wrote it, with my foreword and notes alongside. A reasonable question is why anyone would republish a text that is already free, and the honest answer has two parts. The first is a promise. My adaptation ends by telling the reader that the original is freely available and worth reading, and a promise like that deserves to be kept properly rather than left as a sentence at the back of a book. The second part is the reason this essay exists.

Most of the business reading I see people doing is new. The book of the year, the framework everyone on the conference circuit is quoting, the method with a name and a diagram. There is nothing wrong with any of it, except for one thing that is very hard to see from inside it. When every example in a book is alive, you cannot tell which parts are principle and which parts are fashion. The case studies are current, the companies are still trading, the language is the language of this quarter, and so the whole package arrives with a single, undivided authority. You absorb the method and the moment together, and you have no way of separating them afterwards.

I spent nearly two decades writing technology research inside investment banks, and I watched this happen to serious people with serious money on the line. A way of thinking would arrive wrapped in the examples of the day. The examples would date, sometimes within a couple of years, and the thinking would be thrown out with them, even where the thinking had been perfectly sound. Then a new book would arrive with new examples and the cycle would begin again. The cost of this is not that people read the wrong books. It is that they never find out what they actually believe, because each belief is replaced before it has been tested against anything.

That is the problem, and it is why I keep going back to a book whose examples have all died.

The Science of Getting Rich was written in 1910, and reading it now is a strange experience. The trusts are gone. The railway barons are gone. A sewing machine appears as the object of a family's longing, and Rockefeller walks through the pages as the live villain of the age rather than a name over the door of a foundation. Not one example in the book survives. You could not borrow a single case study from it and use it in a meeting.

And yet the argument underneath has not moved an inch. Decide precisely what you want. Hold the image steadily. Act now, where you are, on what is in front of you. Deliver more value than you take. Four lines, and nearly every business I have sat inside that lost its way lost it on one of those four, whatever the strategy document said at the time.

This is the lesson only an old book can give. When you watch a method hold its shape while everything around it dates, you learn the difference between principle and fashion, and once you have learned it you can see it in new books too. You stop mistaking the case study for the claim. You start asking of every framework the one question that matters, which is what would be left of it if all its examples were dead. A surprising amount of current business writing fails that test. The parts that pass it are nearly always restatements of something much older.

So the notes in this edition do three things. They tell you who the names were, because the names are the fashion, and knowing that lets you read straight past them. They show where Wattles' 1910 metaphysics translates into mechanism you can watch in your own working week: attention, decisions, behaviour under pressure, the things a clear picture held daily actually changes. And they leave standing, in print, the one place where Wattles and I disagree, because an honest pair of books is worth more than a tidy one.

If you are going to read the pair, read them in either order; they were built for that. But read the old one at some point, and read it for the method rather than the examples. Then notice which of the four lines you have quietly been treating as optional. In my experience that is the one worth working on this week, and it is rarely the one you expected.

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The books: The Science of Getting Rich and How to Apply It, and the Original 1910 Text (Annotated) →