The Room in Florence

Some rooms you forget by the following weekend. This one I have been thinking about for over a year.

Last year I sat around a table in Florence with a group of accomplished people. Real businesses, real careers, the kind of lives that photograph well. The conversation was supposed to be about growth: plans, offers, next levels. And for a while it was, until one person said something honest instead of something impressive, and the temperature of the room changed. Then they went around the table. I have changed every detail that would identify anyone, and some of what follows is a composite, but the sentences themselves I have kept, because I have never heard the interior of this way of life spoken more plainly. I'm not sure what I'm worth, so I price low, because at least then they say yes. Maybe some people are just built for this, and maybe I'm not one of them. I'm busy every single day, so why is nothing actually moving? I've built a good career, so why does it feel like someone else's?

Thirteen sentences, by the time the table had finished. And here is what struck me hardest, listening: not one of them was about the market. Nobody confessed a pricing model problem or a pipeline problem, though every one of them had arrived believing that was what they had. Each strategy question, held up to the candlelight and turned slowly, dissolved into a permission question. Am I allowed. Am I enough. Is it too late. These were people with every competence their businesses required, and the blocks were all underneath the competence, because nobody around that table lacked knowledge.

I wrote the thirteen sentences down, and I carried them around for months, because I recognised every one of them. From clients, from colleagues across three decades of banking and boardrooms, and, in more cases than I would have admitted at that table, from myself. Then something unexpected happened: I found them answered, nearly point for point, in a book written in 1910. Wallace D. Wattles' The Science of Getting Rich, a hundred pages, in print for over a century, making one audacious claim: that getting rich is not a matter of talent, luck, location or capital, but of doing things in a certain way, a way that can be learned. I read it, then read it again, then listened to it more times than I can count, and what struck me was not that it was new. It was that it described, with uncomfortable accuracy, the pattern I had been watching across thirty years of wealth made and lost.

So I rebuilt it. The Science of Getting Rich and How to Apply It is now in the world: Wattles' system untouched, his sequence kept, the language brought to the world you operate in now, and his metaphysics translated into what I have actually observed about how a clear picture, held daily, changes attention, decisions and behaviour under pressure. Each chapter opens with one of the thirteen sentences from that table, in italics, at the door. Each chapter closes with the practice that answers it. I will not ask you to believe anything to use it.

And for the next three weeks, this library is going to walk through those thirteen fears, one essay at a time, because a fear named plainly loses most of its stealth, and most of these have been running operations in capable people for decades precisely because nobody says them out loud. These essays are not excerpts; the book does its own work. These are the fears as I meet them in the people I work with, taken one at a time, with the tools that move them.

One more thing from that evening, and it is the thing the whole book is built on. By the end of the night, the room was not heavy. It was lighter than any business dinner I can remember, because on the other side of every one of those fears, once it was said aloud, you could see the dream wearing it as a disguise. The pricing fear hid the wish to be paid what the work is worth. The built-for-this fear hid the wish to find out. Thirteen fears, thirteen dreams, one table. The conditions do not decide. You do.

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The book: The Science of Getting Rich and How to Apply It →