There’s no single trick to making money — just resist a noble calling

‘Beauty is pain,’ the model Gigi Hadid asserts. She’s one of the successful, rich people quizzed by William Leith in The Trick: Why Some People Can Make Money and Other People Can’t. We all know a few of the tricks of getting rich. You start by avoiding noble, important professions that benefit everyone but pay poorly: primary school teacher, nurse, book reviewer. Those of my friends and family who’ve made money (although none has made it to rich) went into banking and business. Those who haven’t went into teaching, academic research and museum curating. That much is obvious. Has Leith unearthed a magic formula?

His book is part Hunter S. Thompson, part Montaigne: a blend of gonzo journalism and rambling reflection interspersed with learned references. In this marriage of memoir and essay, Leith is a sort of stoner Marx contemplating money — which is ‘weird’. He argues it isn’t real, but is, ‘because we think it’s real’. I don’t get the impression he’s done any profound research into the nature of money, unlike Marx — most crypto-currency advocates have more to say on that subject. What he has done as a journalist is to conduct lots of interviews with the rich over the years.

The Trick is a hodge-podge of these meetings, with great (astonishingly great) detail about Leith’s travels to and from them, his own financial woes and anxieties and the messy state of his home. The bulk of the book comprises interviews with Jordan Belfort (the Wolf of Wall Street), the publisher Felix Dennis, the successful financier and guru Nassim Taleb, the designer Leon Max and the former Northern Rock supremo Matt Ridley.

Leith certainly has a knack for grilling people, but he has just reheated these five old interviews. He’s sliced them finely first, mixed them up and added some spicy wit and unexpected ingredients (there are asides on a wide range of subjects, from evolutionary biology to the film Pretty Woman).