• I am in Mustique, a tiny island in the Windward Islands of the Caribbean. More specifically in my ‘writer’s cottage’, a new study-cum-library some distance from the main house, built solely for one purpose – to permit me to write whatever I damn please in peace and quiet. Which is usually poetry, by the way.

• Nor will you have to chant incantations or tie healing crystals round your neck – let’s leave that malarkey to footballers’ and politicians’ wives, shall we?

• People who grow rich almost always improve their sex life. More people want to have sex with them. That’s just the way human beings work.

• If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it – it’s cheaper in the long run.)

• Tunnel vision helps. Being a bit of a shit helps. A thick skin helps. Stamina is crucial, as is a capacity to work so hard that your best friends mock you, your lovers despair and the rest of your acquaintances watch furtively from the sidelines, half in awe and half in contempt.

• And just what is the most precious thing in life that riches can supply? Easy. For me, it’s Time.

• Time. Time to read and write poetry if I want to. Or to write a book if it takes my fancy. Time to travel on the slightest whim, to walk in the woods, to think, to commission art, to read, to drink, to hang out with friends and loved ones …

• You have no idea how much the stamina of the young is envied by the rest of us. Along with a degree of callousness and enviable powers of speedy recuperation from reverses, stamina is your secret weapon. Its attributes will see you through a raft of catastrophes that would virtually annihilate older men and women.

• In addition, your instinctive knowledge of modern technology gives you another edge. (All those hours spent playing computer or video games might not have been such a waste after all.)

• knowledge. I still own half of the personal computing magazines in Britain – PC Pro, Computer Shopper, Computer Buyer, MacUser, Custom PC – in part because of an early addiction to pinball and electronic arcade games.

• Anyone not busy learning is busy dying. For as long as you foster a willingness to learn, you will ward off sclerosis of the brain and hardening of the mental arteries. Curiosity has led many a man and women into the valley of serious wealth.

• Ambition, fearlessness, self-belief, stamina, a degree of callousness, a willingness to learn.

• So what does the future hold for a young man or woman determined to become far wealthier than their parents? Here is how I see it: The way will most likely be hard, your failures many. It will be fun and it will get a little hairy, even scary, at times. But the earlier you start and the more risks you are prepared to run, tempered by listening hard and choosing the right mountain (we’ll come to that later), the more certain it is that, sooner or later, you will find yourself with a small success on your hands.

• And one success, with luck, will lead to another.

• And what is fear? ‘Fear is the little death, death by a thousand cuts,’ goes the ancient Japanese saying.

• Goethe once remarked in doggerel: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

• Boldness? The most successful generals or admirals in military history shared one characteristic: they were willing to ignore orders and risk utter disgrace in order to exploit rapidly changing circumstances. When the chance came, they recognised an opportunity, weighed the odds swiftly, and placed their lives and careers on the line to snatch a victory.

• ‘Luck is preparation multiplied by opportunity.’ SENECA, ROMAN PHILOSOPHER ‘The harder I practised, the luckier I got.’ GARY PLAYER, GOLF CHAMPION ‘Luck is a dividend of sweat.’ RAY KROC, MCDONALD’S FOUNDER

• Fortune favours not just the brave but the bold. Boldness has a kind of genius in it, as Goethe pointed out.

• The more preparation you have done, the more chance you have of succeeding.

• If you never have a single great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas of others, you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Seek them out and make them work. They do not have to be your ideas. Execution is all in this regard.

• Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.

• For the majority of people who start with nothing and seek to be rich, borrowing money in one form or another becomes a necessity sooner or later. Let’s explore the various options on the borrowing front.

• The interest rates on credit cards or similar instruments are beyond the capacity of nearly any legal business to sustain, and while bankruptcy laws have become more generous to creditors in recent years, a history of bankruptcy will plague and hinder you when you seek to return to the fray.

• Never give in! Never give in! Never, never, never, never – in nothing great or small, large or petty. Never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. WINSTON CHURCHILL

• ‘Set thy heart upon thy work but never upon its reward. Work is not for a reward: but never cease to do thy work.’

• Competition is the heart, soul, liver, lungs and kidney of the beast we call Western capitalism. How you react to it, how you face up to it, defines whether you can stay rich, and probably whether you can get rich at all.

• Encourage senior managers to go over annual results with you one-on-one. You will learn more from off-the-cuff remarks and opinions expressed at one-on-one meetings while looking over financial results than you will in a dozen board meetings. This tactic never fails to produce food for thought, often on both sides.

• Back up your managers. With delegation comes responsibility. Back up your managers, in public, whenever and wherever you have to. If they do not perform, speak seriously in private to them. If they still do not perform, fire them. But do not undercut them or engage

• Set a bounty on talent among managers. When you find it, test it. Groom it. Work it until it’s ready to drop. Load it with more work and responsibilities. Praise it. Reward it. It will make you loads-a-money.

• Interview your rivals’ talent. I have never known a single person in a rival organisation, however well paid or cosseted, who has refused to meet me for a quiet drink after work. I have discovered more about what my rivals are up to in this manner than any other. In addition, I have often been so impressed with the people I met in this way that I poached them later. No intelligence-gathering exercise is ever entirely wasted in business. There is only so much pie. Talent bakes that pie.

• Sell early. Real money rarely comes from horsing around running an asset-laden business if you are an entrepreneur. You are not a manager, remember? You are trying to get rich. Whenever the chance comes to sell an asset at the top of its value, do so. Things do not keep increasing in value for ever. Get out while the going is good and move on to the next venture.

• Enjoy the business of making money. The loot is only a marker. Time cannot be recaptured. There is no amount of pie in the world worth being miserable for, day after day. If you find you dislike what you are doing, then sell up and change your life. Self-imposed misery is a kind of madness. The cure is to get out.

• What is it you are attempting to achieve here? You are trying to become rich. This must be the main focus of your business life. Becoming rich.

• You want to get rich. And you want to do it legally and as quickly as you can.

• I even learned that by dressing up one or two girlfriends in the shortest skirts they owned and instructing them to approach every guy under thirty with a big smile and the following words: ‘Hi! Have you got your copy of OZ this month yet?’ I could triple my earnings.

• Why wasn’t it smart? It took me way too long, for one thing, and it cut me off from more lucrative endeavours for another. I became a multi-millionaire in 1982. By then I was thirty-five years old. Barmy! By thirty-five I was already half dead.

• If you have entrepreneurial flair, then you can go into just about any business and make money. But instead of rushing to where the money was, I kept on digging in the relatively poor pit of ink-on-paper until the money, reluctantly, came to me.

• THEN GO TO WHERE THE MONEY IS! That is where you should focus your efforts. On the ball marked ‘The Money is Here.’

• So what businesses should I have gravitated towards? Computer software, technology and dot com start-ups, cable and satellite television, property, environmental waste clean-up, alternative energy services

• So this is the first lesson in the power of focus. Keep your eye on the ball if you wish to get rich. And do not forget which ball. It’s the one marked ‘The Money is Here.’

• I believed that our biography was a great biography. What nonsense.

• You cannot do it on your own. Getting rich is mostly sleight of hand, but if you acquire no audience but a mirror, then there is no illusion with which to get rich.

• Stupid people are easy to hire. The world is full of stupid people. Many of them are extremely pleasant and will give you a lovely smile every morning. But such people will not add to your wealth. In the early days, you should avoid them like the bubonic plague. What you need are clever, cunning and adept people.

• Simple. There are many clever, cunning and adept people who are risk averse. You are not risk averse because you are dedicated to becoming rich. Believe it or not, much, much cleverer people than you will come and work for you if you ask them.

• You do not need to be clever. You do not even need to be that adept. You need only a little cunning and massive determination to become rich. Providing you can pay much cleverer but risk-averse people properly, and promote them and lead them in such a way that they are all rowing in the same direction, they will sign on to your little ship.

• ‘Better to have the world suspect you a fool than to open your mouth and put the matter beyond doubt,’ as the old saying has it.

• Bonuses should be more than competitive, they should be tempting, generous and based ruthlessly on meritocracy and delivery. That’s the way to get employees to really focus. You don’t want people to apply to work for you because of the salaries on offer – they should be driven by other desires.

• Hire winners or people you believe will become winners. Fire whiners and moaners swiftly. That’s contagious, too.

• The order in the ‘pack’ from which you spring, the family grouping, will be shattered. Should you become rich you will become the number-one dog in the pack, and their own order will slip accordingly. Above all, they do not wish to be faced with the mess and chaos that accompanies strenuous effort. They want the familiarity and sense of false security that comes with things staying as they are.

• determined that her sons should become doctors or lawyers. This is all very well, but it will not make you rich, because, in its way, it is yet another attempt to slot you into a preordained path. You must cut loose from it to become wealthy.

• It isn’t the money, you see. It is because you have humiliated them, in their minds anyway, both by succeeding and by valuing the time it took for you to succeed over their part in your life. And that, in a nutshell, is why it is so important to cut loose, especially in the early days.

• Now you must leave the safety of the ant colony and the hive. You are to become a loner, an outcast, cut off from the very thing that defines what many of us believe we are. What is the first question usually asked by strangers of each other?

• But it cannot define you. Not any more. You are a wild pig rooting for truffles. You are a weasel about to rip the throat out of a rabbit. You are an entrepreneur. You are going to be rich, and you don’t much care, within the law, how you are going to do it.

• You will do anything it takes, short of larceny, fraud, blackmail and murder. You will cut yourself loose, but the tiger chained to your ankle will come right along with you. He will always be with you, until the day you turn him loose by an effort of will.

• That is what getting rich is going to be like. You will become a predator. A killer. You will cease to be prey. You will not succumb to fear. Others will fear you. Especially gazelles bearing diamonds.