Book excerpt: Over a billion people globally were lifted from extreme poverty between 2010 and 2020. This is an all-time record, both in outright numbers and per capita growth, constituting nothing short of an economic miracle. Yet the narrative about worsening hardships for the poor prevails, contrary to all evidence. Why? Few topics are more contentious than money. Yet when weighed against empirical data, most of us would be amazed to discover how embarrassingly wrong our assumptions are, and how badly they have impaired our capacity for growth. Wealth is intimately linked to belief systems, and that presents us with choices. Which ones lead to prosperity, and which, predictably, cause ruin? After a century of trial and error, the answers are clear, and they are fascinating. And they are in this book. The problem is that they do not always agree with the accepted narrative. In fact, the things we are glibly told about wealth and poverty are so demonstrably wrong as to be baffling in their endurance. Sifting through a world of tired clichés and trite truisms, can we separate the useful from the merely politically expedient, the true from the endlessly repeated yet baseless? Can we transcend gloomy platitudes like ‘from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations’? Can we clear out the clutter in our thinking and, as a result, be better equipped to prosper? How to Grow Rich identifies every bad idea about wealth and explains why we don’t have to accept them, and how each one of us can overcome these thought hurdles in order to prosper and grow rich. Start by getting the thinking right, and the money will follow.