How To Make Money

The following excerpt is from a special series I’m running on “Ahead of The Curve,” which documents tales and experiences from a two-year journey at the Harvard Business School. Learn more here.

A senior journalist of the Financial Times once told me that the real secret to making money was wanting to make money. Not in the sense of “oh, I’d like to make a bit more money.” But every day waking up and thinking, right, look at all the money sloshing around out there. How am I going to divert as much of that as possible into my bank account? He, of course, had become rich by marrying a European heiress and was marking his retirement by building a large house overlooking the Mediterranean. But his point was the business success, all other things being equal, was a question largely of motivation. His proof lay in the range of people who made great fortunes, from Mafia bosses to Stanford computer science Ph.D.s, from men selling vegetable peelers on late-night television to the quantitative geniuses who traded derivatives. People who are barely literate can do much better than those with an alphabet soup of graduate degrees. Business in this sense is not like law or medicine, where every practitioner needs to know a certain body of facts. At most levels, it is a ore primal pursuit, requiring character, guts, instinct, leadership, and the application of pure common sense. The last thing it is about is frameworks, spreadsheets, and academic papers. These are just tiny props in a bigger drama. Consequently, many people have argued that business cannot be taught, only experienced and learned.