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The Trick: Why Some People Can Make Money and Other

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The Trick: Why Some People Can Make Money and Other THE TRICK To my parents Contents 1 2 3 4 5 Coda Acknowledgements A Note on the Author 1 It’s like I actively want to be poor. Like I’d rather be poor. Like everything I do, consciously or unconsciously, is to say: hey, poverty, come over here, I love you. These are my waking thoughts on the day I discover the secret of making millions. Fifty miles away, in Chelsea Harbour, Jordan Belfort is waiting for me in a hotel I have never seen, but which I imagine as white, with big glass panels. Yes, that’s right – Jordan Belfort. The man who calls himself, or at least his book about himself, The Wolf of Wall Street. I’m not sure about that title. If I were him, and if I wrote a book about how I made millions, and then realised that having millions makes you feel poor, if I wrote a book like that, about feeling poor and devising a fraud and getting caught and going to jail, I can’t see myself calling it The Wolf of Wall Street. I’d call it something else. I don’t know what, exactly. But the point is, the book is about how some people can make money and some people can’t, a subject that fascinates me, and injects pure cold anxiety directly into my stomach. I’ve never told anyone this, but I have a mental disorder in the area of finance. I am driven by a mechanism designed to prevent me from being rich; worse, it masquerades as a mechanism designed to do exactly the opposite. It is an enemy agent, it lies deep in the wiring of my brain, and I don’t know how it works. I know I need to dismantle this mechanism and replace it with a new one, before I die a pauper’s death. But I’m terrified of doing this, because I suspect that the mechanism is, actually, me. Money is weird, anyway. We’re supposed to instinctively understand it. But we really don’t. For instance, most people think it’s real. It’s not. But because we think it’s real, it’s real. It somehow emerged from the early murk of human interaction. It trumps God, because you can’t make God exist just by thinking he exists. He either exists or he doesn’t. But money is different. It is us. It’s our masterpiece. It’s killing us. So anyway, how can a guy whose relationship with money is, basically, that it destroys him, it’s even on the cover of his book, ‘how money destroyed a Wall Street superstar’ – how can a guy like that call himself the Wolf of anything? Particularly Wall Street, the Hub of Money. Because he wasn’t the Wolf of the Hub of Money, was he? If you went in the ring with Mike Tyson, and Tyson destroyed you, would you then call yourself the Wolf of Mike Tyson? These are my second, third and fourth thoughts on the day I find the secret of how to make millions. As you can see, they are not, so far, positive thoughts. I’m thinking that maybe the Wolf is not Jordan Belfort. Maybe it’s not a person at all. Maybe the Wolf is money itself. I should ask him. Or I should ask Martin Scorsese. I know that Scorsese is making a film about Belfort, and I know he’s calling it The Wolf of Wall Street, and I can see it, can see what he’ll do with the story, can see the arc of aspiration, the nervous and vicious laughter, the bad words, the dirty words, the fast talk, the money talk. Leonardo diCaprio, with the charisma of a fallen angel, will play Belfort. As these sparks rise and fall through the dark sky of my half-alert mind I’m stretching my arm out and batting my fingers around, trying to locate my alarm clock, which is bleeping. Being late today would be ruinous. There are two things I must remember this morning, because I wrote them down on a piece of paper, and put it on my bedside table. I’m interviewing Belfort for a magazine. That’s how I make money. I interview people – almost exclusively the rich and the super-rich. (Mostly men, by the way, for about a million reasons.) I persuade these people to talk about themselves – not as easy as it sounds. My mission is always to extract their secrets, to reveal their modus operandi, to travel upstream into the darkness of their hearts, and then to assassinate them – not quite with extreme prejudice, but in a nuanced sort of way. To reveal their inner pain. Tears are my pot of gold. Anyway, before I meet the people I interview, I try to understand what motivates them. I think about what it’s like to be them. I take notes. I edit the notes. I boil everything down to the basics. Hence the piece of paper. I peer at it in the half-light of my room. It says: 1 How he made the money 2 Why he turned to crime Rolling the paper into a ball, and aiming it at the far wall of my bedroom, I slump back down on my pillow. The ball falls short. My other hand finds the clock. The bleeping stops. I must dismantle the mechanism before it’s too late. But I think the mechanism might be me. What if it’s me? *** In the silence, I consider my own financial situation. Just thinking about it, I am sick with dread, icy dread spreading up from my stomach into my chest and neck, and now I can’t stop thinking about it, the bad thoughts and feelings are seeping out and getting everywhere, it’s like a crime scene I must clean up before I can even begin to get away, and the more I try to clean it, the dirtier it gets. But I must not think like this! OK. My financial situation. Like most nation states, I’m currently running a deficit – in other words, my life is costing me more money than I make. A deficit – it’s not the same as a debt. A deficit is from the spending you’re doing now, and will be punished for in the future. A debt is from the spending you did in the past. It’s the punishment you’re already taking. I’m aware that I’ve asked for this punishment – this abuse. It is happening to me because, on one level, I must want the abuse to happen to me. I hate it. I can’t even think about it. But I have to. But I can’t. But I must. I am being abused by secured and unsecured loans, unpaid bills and taxes, fines, penalty fees, pending court cases, and cases I have already lost, or not contested, or forgotten about. The cases come back as different types of letters, with this or that tone, and then as actual people, again mostly men, not well dressed, they particularly have no idea about shoes.When they come, these men (and occasionally women), I am very polite indeed. I serve tea and offer food. I think it makes a difference. I am driven by a desire to spend more money than I have, so I borrow money, from banks and corporations and individuals, and I don’t pay it back promptly, because in truth I never had a strong desire to pay it back, I just wanted the money. The money actually makes me feel younger and healthier. It buys me time. Do you think I want to pay it back? I know I have an obligation to pay it back. I should pay it back. But I’m not sure I must pay it back. Why must I pay it back? To be clear: I intend to, but I don’t want to. And so people come to my house. We talk, and all is quiet for a while. Give me time, I tell them. *** Look, I’m not a money kind of person. Growing up, I was too privileged to think very much about money. Now things have changed – now the tide has gone out – I’m not privileged enough not to. I have fallen through the cracks. It’s nobody’s fault. Yes it is. It’s mine. It’s my fault. *** My work. I sell stories to magazines. But, when I do this, I’m not exactly selling the story to the readers. I’m actually selling the readers to advertisers – a dirty trick. A further abuse. What I’m selling, to be exact, is the attention of my readers. That precious thing. When I tell a story, I’m actually priming my readers for the main event – getting them ready for the moment they cast eyes on the beautiful, shiny ads. I’m saying, I know you’ll be interested in this person I’ve talked to. But also: why not check this out, over here! Look at these amazing cars. The chrome and steel. The fat tyres. Look at these watches. Look at this white sand beach, this crystal sea. And look at the pictures of women. Sifted and selected by money’s cruel artistry. The point of view is not male or female, not his or hers. It’s money’s. Just for a moment, let these images penetrate your field of vision.
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