The Art of Money Getting
P. T. Barnum · 1880
4.8 · 8 ratings
About the book
The greatest showman on earth turns out to be the soberest adviser on it: pick the right vocation, stay out of debt, persevere, advertise, and don't blab. Barnum delivered this lecture hundreds of times, and it out-earned some of his circuses.
Try the short course
Part 1 · Work you were built for. The first six slides, free.
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A father sits down with five sons and hands out their futures. Billy will be a clergyman, John a lawyer, Tom a doctor, Dick a farmer. That leaves Sammy, so the father goes into town, looks around, and comes home with an answer: watchmaking seems “a nice genteel business.”
Barnum tells this as an ordinary scene, and in his day it was. Nobody in it is cruel. The father is being practical about the one question he thinks matters, which is how the trade will look.
What he never asks is what Sammy is like. Barnum’s verdict is a single flat phrase: the choice was made “regardless of Sam’s natural inclinations, or genius.” That omission is the whole mistake, and it has a name worth keeping: a trade chosen by how it looks.
Inside the course
12 parts- Don't mistake your vocationFree above
- Select the right location — the museum as proof
- Avoid debt: the habit that eats a man's spirit
- Persevere: how the showman survived his own bankruptcy
Questions
Is The Art of Money Getting free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
12 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. The Art of Money Getting is waiting in the app’s library.
