Napoleon Hill ... The Original Motivation & Personal Success Author

Napoleon Hill, the author of Think and Grow Rich, is the dean of American personal-success authors. Born in a two room shack in 1883, in rural West Virginia, his mother died when he was ten, and he was forced to become a reporter at the age of 13 for several regional weekly newspapers. At the age of twenty-five, he got his first major break, when, in the course of interviewing famous magnates of business, he interviewed Andrew Carnegie (who, at the time, had the largest fortune ever accumulated in the United States, and, as a percentage of the nation's GDP, held a percentage that has never been exceeded.).

Carnegie espoused the idea that the secret to success was a simple formula that could be replicated by common people, with a small amount of effort. Impressed by Hill's hard work and dedication, Carnegie gave him nothing but letters of introduction to five hundred of the richest and most successful people in America, and set him to interviewing them to find out the commonalities of what made them successful. This process took twenty years, but was instrumental in defining Hill's philosophy of life, and both he and Andrew Carnegie referred to the results as the Philosophy of Achievement, which would, with proper implementation, give the reader the secret to success in life, and the ability to rise from rags to riches on their own merits.

The first public formulation of this philosophy was published in 1928 as the book The Law of Success, and was later expanded on in numerous home study courses, including the Mental Dynamite series published during World War II. The Laws of Success, and the Philosophy of Achievement were later extrapolated into Napoleon Hill's most famous work, Think and Grow Rich.

After World War II, Hill wrote several books on salesmanship techniques and on professional and personal growth, and for a decade, was a paid instructor and motivational speaker for the Combined Insurance Company of America, where he enumerated on the Science of Achievement and the Philosophy of Success, which came about with his work with W. Clement Stone, another self made billionaire, who attributed success in life to having a positive mental attitude...

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"Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe,
it can achieve"

Napoleon Hill

Hill continued to write self help and motivational books, emphasizing goal planning, his thirteen principles of success, and how to plan and build a successful future, throughout the rest of his life, and at multiple points in his career, ran his own publishing venture. His second edition of Think and Grow Rich, published in 1960, was a condensed version of the original, and reformulated to the time it was written in. At various points, an entrepreneur, author, teacher, advisor to millionaires and advisor to presidents, Hill was a personal embodiment of the Horatio Alger story. He died in 1970, and his last book, You Can Work Your Own Miracles, was published after his death.

Throughout his life, Hill emphasized the self-made man, and the need for self confidence and religious faith. His religious faith was quite important to his life, and defined a great deal of his existence. He felt that only those who had faith in a higher power could be receptive to the ideas of the Philosophy of Achievement, which he alludes to in each of the sections of his books, most prominently in Think and Grow Rich, but never states in clear language. His assertion that only those who were ready for the Law of Achievement would be able to discern it is one of the chief criticisms leveled at his body of work.

Much of Hill's work boils down to straightforward goal setting, and visualizing success in the present tense. Hill is a firm believer that the whole of a group of like minded, positively focused individuals is vastly greater than the sum of their parts, and this is born out by his interviews with the industrial magnates of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nearly every single one of them attributes their success to being able to see opportunities, and most importantly, to finding people who can be directed to exploit them. It is not enough to work hard, one must also find like minded people, and inspire them to work hard on getting things done.

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"Your big opportunity may be right where you are now"

Napoleon Hill

Hill also makes a strong point in his philosophy on the importance of adversity. Nobody ever accomplished greatness with great ease is one of his favorite truisms, and as a child who grew up in the poorest part of the country, he had little sympathy for people who couldn't, like himself, see the opportunities abundantly provided to them by being in America, and seizing them to the fullest. He was a firm believer that education is distinct from learning, and that the best place to learn was by actually doing, as the industrialists he idolized did.

Hill's work influenced several motivational and self help writers who came on to follow him, such as Zig Zeigler, Dale Carnegie and Harold Robbins. His work has been most recently reformulated by Bob Proctor in the DVD "The Secret", which reformulates the Law of Success as the Law of Attraction. Proctor's version of the Law of Success removes many of the faith elements of Hill's original materials, and the similarities between Proctor's work and Hill's have resulted in a lot of renewed interest in Hill's "Original Material".

Think and Grow Rich! is one of the most widely read and important motivational books ever written. Written by the American author Napoleon Hill, it is one of the first examples of the now popular 'personal success' genre of popular books.

If you expect life's rewards to suddenly appear on a plate in front of you with no effort ... this is not the book for you! (and good luck, as you're in for a long wait!)

On the other hand, if you believe that true effort bring's just rewards ... you can download your free copy of Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich! here:

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill - Free eBook download

Napoleon Hill is the founder of the "motivational book" publishing industry in the United States. Born in rural West Virginia in 1883, Hill's life is a personal embodiment of the Horatio Alger story he lionized throughout his writings. While he'd originally saved up his money from being a "mountain reporter" as a teenager to go to law school, Hill met with financial difficulty and stepped back into journalism. A series of assignments turned into interviews with the wealthy industrialists of his age, and he parlayed that into a working relationship with the greatest of them all, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie described the principal of success to Hill, and charged him with interviewing five hundred of the most influential and wealthy Americans of turn of the 20th Century. Over the course of the next twenty years, Hill worked on this project - unpaid - conducting interviews and recording anecdotes, which eventually became the core of The Law of Success, and later, the core of the best selling book Think and Grow Rich, published at the end of the Great Depression in 1937. Think and Grow Rich has never been out of print since its initial publication, seventy years ago, and is, in many ways, the fundamental text of the American "motivational self help" industry..

The Principles of Achievement are built on a number of principles enumerated by Napoleon Hill in his book. While he never flat out states what the Carnegie formula is in plain terms, he alludes to it in every chapter. Napoleon Hill was adamant that the only way to learn the Carnegie formula was to figure it out for yourself - that, in his own words, it's the power of an idea, and a concept in two parts. If the reader already carries the first part within themselves, the spiritual connection needed to perceive the needs of others, and to make the connections needed to understand that your needs and theirs coincide, the second part would come to you in a flash of insight as you read chapters of the book, and took inspiration from the examples enumerated therein. Think And Grow Rich is an exercise book to work you towards that "flash of insight"

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"What you think, so you will become."

Napoleon Hill

 

Napoleon Hill builds his examples in Think and Grow Rich along keywords, listing them in terms of Faith in a higher power, Desire, auto-suggestion, specialized knowledge, imagination, organized planning, decision-making, persistence, the Master Mind, the mystery of Sex Transmutation, the Subconscious Mind, the Brain, and the Sixth Sense. Much of the medical terminology of the book has grown severely dated as neuroscience has advanced considerably from the state it was in during the time the book was written.

The chief lessons to take away from Think And Grow Rich can be summed up in a number of aphorisms, such as "Failing to plan is planning to fail", "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve" and "A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits."

Examining each of these in turn, plus the examples given of various highly successful people, the reader is left to discern the commonalities and the patterns linking all these people and bits of received wisdom. A reader will learn that the key to success comes from thinking positively, of being constantly on the lookout for new opportunities, and taking full advantage of them.

The purpose of success is to increase not just your wealth, but your personal satisfaction with your life, and your sense of inner peace and harmony. Wealth is merely a side effect of thinking and growing rich - it's hard to cultivate a harmonious existence when you're living hand to mouth, or paycheck to paycheck.

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"If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way."

Napoleon Hill

 

The practical lessons in Think and Grow Rich revolve around making plans, and finding a group of people who think similarly to you, and making those plans happen. Napoleon Hill was, and is, a firm believer that the captains of industry, indeed all successful people, were successful because they were able to find people who thought as they did and who could be brought into the task, where their abilities and enthusiasm could be harnessed for everyone's mutual benefit. In modern parlance, it means "don't hang out with people who don't think like you do".

It also focuses heavily on goal setting and making sure that important decisions are carried through. In the realm of responsibility, it means that you're responsible for your own outcomes, but that failures are nothing to dwell on. Everyone makes failures, and everyone should learn from them, including what caused them to happen. Most failures are a failure of vision, or a failure to plan to take advantage of the situation that has developed. An individual focused on achievement should not dwell on failure, other than as a learning opportunity.

Napoleon Hill was a devoutly Christian man, and his devotion to religion infuses his entire work. A man needs to believe that God holds him in high regard to take on the tasks that will beset him in making his own fortune; while it will require hard work, and overcoming adversity, God will send challenges to him to test his faith, and to make sure that he is, in fact, attained a level suitable for receiving this key to knowledge, this key to making thoughts turn into opportunities, and opportunities for harmonious relations with others.

In summary, Think and Grow Rich is still pertinence in today's culture as when it was written, seventy years ago. Anyone who is looking for guidance on how to turn their life around, how to take control of their own existence, and is willing to put some thought into spirituality into it, can benefit from this marvelous book. It is one of the cornerstones of the "motivational book" publishing segment and deservedly so.

Think and Grow Rich!
By Napoleon Hill

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Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill - Audio MP3