Napoleon Hill published Think and Grow Rich in 1937. Since then 100 million copies have been sold worldwide and counting. So why has this book been so successful and what does Napoleon Hill have to teach about wealth? Well Napoleon spent his life researching the principles of wealth and he was able to talk to and write down the principles that made the titans of his day successful. He compiled all his research in to Think & Grow Rich. The following are some of the principles from that timeless book.

The Principles

A strong burning desire to be successful is the foundation of virtually all financially wealthy people. When someone truly wants something, not just hopes or wishes for it, they are compelled to act towards the thing that they want. To inspire this burning desire Napoleon Hill gives five steps we must take to light this fire.

Step 1: Define your exact financial goal. The target must be specific, clear, and easily understood. For example I desire to purchase a $500,000.00 luxury home here in Houston, TX. This means I will have to create an asset class that generates for me the $500,000.00 in order to purchase this home.

Step 2: Decide what you will give in exchange to acquire your financial goal. This is key, because in order to reach your financial goal you will need to give time, energy, focus, and value to other people. What are you good at? What are you interested in providing? The best advice I can give you is to follow your intuition and your curiosity. You are going to fail various times over and over again trying to provide that value that people are willing to pay you for. Consider it a science experiment and every time you fail you get one step closer to figuring out the puzzle.

Step 3: Set a deadline for your goal. For example in my case I have given myself six months to figure out how to get that $500,000.00 that I need. I do this to push myself and bring out the best in me. If I fail to meet this deadline I just add another 6 more months. Its important to push yourself and place yourself in an environment of controlled stress. What I mean by controlled stress is that you are pushing yourself in a healthy manner, like when you do push ups, you will go through growing pains but instead of the stress harming you it will help you grow.

Step 4: You must create an action plan to reach your goal. Like step 2, you may have to revise and revisit this action plan over and over again as you take action and fail, but this is where the growing happens. Successful people, companies, etc. all have a strategic plan and this is what you are going to be learning to do. If you don’t plan and take ownership of your life in its entirety you won’t be as successful as you like. I good way to see what is working and what isn’t working is to keep a journal. Writing at the end of the day to analyze the progress that you are making will allow you to reflect and see how things are going.

Step 5: Create a statement with your goal. Basically summarize steps 1 through 4 in a piece of paper and read it everyday. This is a way to focus your attention and desire every single day because as we all know, it is extremely easy to lose focus in a world of constant information.

Now that you have a desire and a way to achieve it you have to believe. Faith, confidence, self belief, this is necessary in order for you to follow through on your desire because if there is doubt within yourself you will not give the energy necessary to manifest your desire. We can see self belief and confidence in all the greatest people in history. They believed that they could create, build, conquer, manifest whatever was inside of them. Just take the founders of the constitution and the United States of America, or more recently Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, these are all people who believe that they can bring about their deepest desires in to reality.

Now that you know the importance of confidence in self you need to know how to develop it if you don’t have it. One of the best ways is to surround yourself with other people who have done what you want to accomplish. But how can I get around Elon Musk you may ask? Simple, the internet. The internet allows you access to all the successful people in the world. There are hundreds of thousands of hours of very successful people who have given interviews, lectures, on their success and you have access to all of this!

Napoleon Hill talks about autosuggestion which is basically being able to influence your subconscious mind by curating what thoughts or outside stimulus we receive. For example if you hang around people who constantly complain, or watch negative news, your outlook on life will also become negative. Your thoughts, words, and eventually actions will be detrimental because you have allowed yourself to become contaminated by these people. Let’s take COVID-19 for example, we all know the dangers of being exposed to someone who has the virus because the consequences are almost immediate. Well, the same applies to being exposed to negative people and information, the only difference is that the consequences are not immediate, they take longer to develop but the result is similar to that of a virus, it hurts the host. So what you want to do is use that podcast app on your iPhone, use YouTube not just for entertainment and funny videos, use it for getting to know Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet!

Many successful people naturally visualize themselves achieving their goals. Visualization is another important element to success. Being able to see one attaining the goal in ones mind’s eye is important. There is power in this because it is another level of belief. If you look around the room everything that you own was first a thought, a visualization in someone’s mind of that product. Everything that has ever been created on planet earth by human beings first started as an idea, a picture of what could be.

In order to achieve high levels of success it is also important to gain high levels of specialized knowledge. Research your industry, be passionate about it, find mentors. Its important to note that specialized knowledge will always outperform general knowledge. So for example if you want to start a technology company, you will have to do your due diligence to learn all the ins and outs of that industry. This will take time and lots of research but this will help you understand the environment you will be going in to. This is part of being strategic. Specializing in your endeavor will help you face the many challenges that will arise along the way.

Highly successful people are also highly imaginative, they imagine the reality they want to create. There are two types of imagination. Synthetic imagination is arranging all concepts, ideas, plans and utilizing this information to combine them in a unique way to create a new invention. Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, are ideas that have existed for many years but they were re-created in a new and unique way. Creative imagination is a higher level of consciousness. When we talk about creative imagination we are talking about creating something that has never existed before. For example take in to account the industrial revolution and all the new technology and systems that were developed that had never been seen before. People like Dale Carnegie, Rockefeller built empires thanks to their creative imagination of what could be. Elon Musk is currently a great example ushering a new wave of technology and seing the world. This is the power of creative imagination.

Decision is a major part of success. Most people make a decision slowly and change their minds quickly. Successful people make decisions fast and change their minds slowly. Steve Jobs had a burning desire to create a technology to change the world and he didn’t quit until he achieved it. Steve Jobs didn’t let temporary failure slow him down. He built NEXT and Pixar and went back to Apple and forever changed the cell phone industry, and the music business with the iPhone.

This bring us to the next point, persistence is so important to success because you will face so many set backs and failures. A never quit attitude, keep going until you win is necessary. Persistence is fueled by belief and desire and if you can keep re-generating those two things, persistence will continue to be by your side.

Lastly, when two or more individual put their minds together a third and more powerful mind is created. The mastermind. This mastermind can take an idea and create an empire. For example Jobs and Wozniak. High achievers focus their time on developing a network of other highly intelligent individuals with a variety of skills to add value to one another. Your network is your net worth. Websites such as LinkedIn offer a great platform for professionals to connect. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook are all tools that can you give you access to many amazing people, take advantage of this.

Think & Grow Rich is a must read that I highly recommend. This is but a short summary of a book that contains so much knowledge. Use this as a small guide and all the best of luck to your success.

Research & Additional Resources

Think & Grow Rich