Napoleon Hill was a notorious Scam artist before writing Think And Grow Rich, arrested many times.

[Real Deal Denver]

By adopting this mindset you'll be able to learn from anything and everything.

Wow. So few ever reach THIS level. I've had a bad week, as I have been doing exactly that - learning why to not work with smucks. Painful. But still a valuable learning experience.

I read Think & Grow Rich, and after reading about Napoleon Hill's several bankruptcies, questionable business practices, and the fact the he died broke, I was left with a fairly sour taste in my mouth. He discovered a secret that can make anybody rich, but he couldn't do it himself? That's a tough hurdle for me to get over.

This one kind of stings. I have mastered several industries. Mastered them inside and out. I am not doing that work today because they went extinct. Through no fault whatsoever of me, they just don't exist. Sometimes fate just craps on you, and what can you do about it? Well, pick up and try to do better. But there's only so much a person can do. I was in the same position as three people at one time in the 70's that made them all super successful - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Cuban. I didn't have "quite" the reach and vision they did - but I could have, if I had only known more and had a few more doors opened for me. So close. But it didn't work out - and I'm sure there are many more that were also so close. I can't remember his name, but a guy invented all on his own a very good operating system (CP/M) that could have given him the success that Bill Gates has - maybe even more. Circumstances zigged when he zagged, and the rest in history. Or how about the first drummer for the Beatles, who was replaced with Ringo. Sooooo close to fame. Being that I have been so close a few times is bittersweet. Could have, should have. I don't fault anyone for missing the brass ring. Sometimes things just go left, when they are going right. You have no way of knowing that at the time. That's just life. You're being way too harsh in your judgement.

Regardless of what his background was, a lot of successful people will swear on these points as their business bible.

AMEN brother. Can I get another AMEN? AMEN! Thank you for pointing that out!

There are people today who say Jesus was a shitbag, and maybe he was, but his message resonated with people, or you wouldn't still be hearing it.

Did you say that? Maybe he was? Oh wow. You better get some religion and find out real quick what's important. I'm calling you out on this because if I don't, I will be just as guilty as you. I read it and did nothing? That's sure not going to happen! No Sir - not today - not by me - not ever. I stop and take a stand on this right here, right now. For your sake, you can plead stupidity. But you better do some searching and find out just exactly where you are standing - and it's not a good place to be at all. If you need more info, PM me. People die for the cause you just pissed on. I'm not here to step on your toes - only to inform you.

 

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[ChrisV]

Yea I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to call Jesus a ‘shitbag’ lmao... some of the things christians have done is another story but Jesus was cool lol

 

[loop101]

I'm not here to step on your toes - only to inform you.

I'm here to discuss Napoleon Hill.

 

[loop101]

Yea I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to call Jesus a ‘shitbag’ lmao... some of the things christians have done is another story but Jesus was cool lol

Did I say that? No I did not. I said maybe he was, because I don't know if he was or not. I don't really know anything about him. My point was that the message attributed to him must have a certain amount of truth to it, because the message has survived for 2000 years. If anything, it was a compliment. It was an allegory to the point that even if Napoleon Hill was a shitbag, as suggested by you, there must still be some truth to what he said. Otherwise he would not have sold 100M copies of his book, and be thanked by countless entrepreneurs for more than half a century. You're misunderstanding me, misquoting me, and your "lmao", is not convincing me that your The Smart Guy. At least the Denver guy, for his own sake, can plead zealotry.

 

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[ChrisV]

I mean it does have the reputation for creating more millionaires than essentially any other book.

 

[ChrisV]

Did I say that? No I did not.

I didn’t say you called him a shitbag. Relax bro lol.
You said ‘there are people that say Jesus was a ‘shitbag'

Yea I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to call Jesus a ‘shitbag’ lmao... some of the things christians have done is another story but Jesus was cool lol

 

[rogue synthetic]

Sometimes things just go left, when they are going right. You have no way of knowing that at the time. That's just life. You're being way too harsh in your judgement.

Nassim Taleb doesn't get mention very much around here even though he's got a good bead on this kind of wrinkle.

Selection bias makes it real easy to look at the top performers... the winners of the day... as if they got there only through personal talents of hard work, ingenuity, and creating value.

Sure. Nobody thinks the guys at the top are defectives. But it also means that you can't just copy what they did and get what they got.

And if history had gone just a little bit differently, you wouldn't know who they were. Funny thing is, the no-names could do the EXACT same things, follow the same processes, even have the same or better talents... and you have no idea who they are.

Some gawking spectator might even come along on a web forum 50 years later and call you mean names. Satisfaction is a much better feeling than accomplishment for some folks. (5 out of 5 Kardashians agree!)

 

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[Guest6814]

“There are only so many times that a man can be arrested for the sale of unlicensed stock, altering checks, and outright theft, before you have to question the official history.”​

It starts.

Naploeon Hill. One of the most beloved Gurus of all time had very humble beginnings. One of his first business ventures succeeded when Hill would purchase lumber on credit and sell it to suppliers at cut rate prices. How was he able to turn a profit this way? Simple, he just never paid the lumber companies who gave him the lumber and skipped town.

From Gizmodo’s 2016 research on Hill:

Hill was involved in countless scams over the years. One of his earliest involved buying lumber on credit, never paying his suppliers, and selling the lumber to others for cash at rates well below market value. This, as you can guess, didn’t last very long before Hill went on the run.

Hill tried his hand at a number of businesses with varying degrees of legitimacy. He was an executive at a lumber company, he was part owner of a candy company, and he made a go of it as a magazine publisher. But at every turn, there was some kind of shady dealing that would cause his business ventures to crumble. Promoters of Hill claim that it was all a matter of bad luck, and Hill’s naivety. According to his biographers, Michael J. Ritt Jr. and Kirk Landers, Hill’s greatest flaw was that he was too trusting. His business associates would take advantage of him by stealing tremendous amounts of money and later pointing the finger at Hill as the thief.

Napoleon Hill was a deeply troubled soul, suffering bouts of depression and loneliness as he struggled to become a financial success. Constantly on the move, he believed that success came through confidence and visualization. But behind every upbeat quote and promise of future riches, Hill had a darkness that could not be contained. With every breath he uttered there was a kind of intellectual and spiritual impotence underneath; a cacophony of buzzwords echoing through the skyscrapers of Chicago and the airwaves of Hollywood. And it was his words that would both render him a prophet, and destroy the lives of those closest to him.​

I’m really busy but I wanted to post this. Napoleon Hill was really the grandfather of what you see in Self Help these days. “The Secret is to just be positive, visualize success and riches will come to you.”

Reporters who investigated were able to find no evidence that Hill's claims of a meeting between him and Andrew Carnegie were true, and couldn’t even find any evidence that they had ever met.

From Hill’s book:

IN EVERY chapter of this book, mention has been made of the money-making secret which has made fortunes for more than five hundred exceedingly wealthy men whom I have carefully analyzed over a long period of years.

The secret was brought to my attention by Andrew Carnegie, more than a quarter of a century ago. The canny, lovable old Scotsman carelessly tossed it into my mind, when I was but a boy. Then he sat back in his chair, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, and watched carefully to see if I had brains enough to understand the full significance of what he had said to me.

When he saw that I had grasped the idea, he asked if I would be willing to spend twenty years or more, preparing myself to take it to the world, to men and women who, without the secret, might go through life as failures. I said I would, and with Mr. Carnegie’s cooperation, I have kept my promise.

This book contains the secret, after having been put to a practical test by thousands of people, in almost every walk of life. It was Mr. Carnegie’s idea that the magic formula, which gave him a stupendous fortune, ought to be placed within reach of people who do not have time to investigate how men make money, and it was his hope that I might test and demonstrate the soundness of the formula through the experience of men and women in every calling.​

From the article:

I contacted Andrew Carnegie biographer David Nasaw about the alleged meeting between Carnegie and Hill, and he told me he “found no evidence of any sort that Carnegie and Hill ever met.” I pressed Nasaw about whether there was any chance at all that Hill’s book could be based on real events. Nasaw replied, “Let me put it this way. I found no evidence that the book was authentic.”
​

He apparently didn’t start making these claims until after Carnegie died.

Think about it. Let’s say I came on this forum and said. “Hey… before Steve Jobs died he gave me the task. He wanted me to interview hundreds of the worlds most successful men and uncover the magical secret to riches."

You would be like “ummmmm who the f*ck are you, how do you know Steve Jobs, and why would he pick YOU instead of a reputable journalist. He picked Walter freaking Issacson to do his biography. Why would he choose you?”

In my opinion, Hill's entire premise is laughable. “Andrew Carnegie picked ME, some random guy off the street and gave me the task of interviewing hundreds of (what would be) billionaires (in their time) and finding THE SECRET OF WEALTH. And the Secret? Positive thinking!” Nothing about creating market value, or great customer service. Just pure positivity!

From Wikipedia:

Hill left his coal mine management job soon afterwards, and began law school before withdrawing for lack of funds. Later in life, Hill would use the title of "Attorney of Law," although Hill's official biography notes that "there is no record of his having actually performed legal services for anyone," [9]
​

Business ventures:

During May 1909, Hill relocated to Washington D.C. and initiated the "Automobile College of Washington," where he instructed students to build, chauffeur and sell motor cars.[12]

During April 1912, the automobile magazine Motor World accused Hill's college of being a scam relying upon on misleading marketing materials that would be "a joke to anyone of average intelligence”​

It can’t be all bad, right?

During September 1915, Hill established and served as the dean of a new school in Chicago, the "George Washington Institute of Advertising," where he intended to teach the principles of success and self-confidence. On June 4, 1918, the Chicago Tribune reported that the state of Illinois had issued two warrants for the arrest of Hill, who was charged with violating blue sky laws for fraudulently attempting to sell shares of his school with a $100,000 capitalization, despite the school's assets only being appraised at $1200.[17] The school ended soon afterwards.​

What did he day he was doin during those years around 1918 he was (allegedly) selling fraudulent stock and evading warrants? He was advising Woodrow Wilson, of course.

Later in his life, Hill would say that he spent the years of 1917-1918 advising president Woodrow Wilson amidst World War I. [18]​

During 1922, Hill also initiated the Intra-Wall Correspondence School, a charitable foundation intended to provide educational materials to prisoners in Ohio. The foundation was directed by, among others, the check forger and former convict Butler Storke, who was later himself to be sent back to prison during 1923. [19] According to Hill's official biography, this period was also when hundreds of documents associating Hill with various famous figures were destroyed in a Chicago storage fire.[20]​

But then he published Laws of Success (the unabridged version of Think and Grow Rich) and the rest is history!

During 1928, Hill relocated to Philadelphia and convinced a Connecticut-based publisher to publish his eight-volume work The Law of Success. The book was Hill's first major success, allowing Hill to adopt an opulent lifestyle. By 1929, he had already bought a Rolls-Royce and a six-hundred acre property in the Catskill Mountains, with the aid of some lenders.[21]​

And of course, there’s this gem:

At the age of 17, Hill graduated from high school and went to Tazewell, Virginia to attend business school. During 1901, Hill accepted a job working for the lawyer Rufus A. Ayers, a coal magnate and former Virginia attorney general. The author Richard Lingeman said that Hill received this job after arranging to keep confidential the death of a black bellhop, whom the previous manager of the mine had accidentally shot while drunk.[6]​

Anyway, read the piece Gizmodo did in 2016:

https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-greatest-self-he-1789385645

The very title, “Think and Grow Rich,” just sounds too stupid to be true.

How many people ever got rich by sitting in a room and saying, “money” over and over again while thinking positively?

There was a scam in late ‘60s that actually involved people sitting in a room, listening to a lecturer tell them stories of a homeless guy who got rich buy selling bananas. (Who would buy them?) During the story, several people in the audience (plants) would start humming together. Their “mmm...” got louder and louder until it became, “Mmmmoney!”

So sad.

 

[The Abundant Man]

It’s an opinion, there is no wrong or right...right?

 

[babyballer]

There was this guy Kevin Trudeau that was completely obsessed about Napoleon Hill and his books. He even went to look for the original manuscript that was supposedly banned by Henry Ford because it revealed too much of the rich secrets. Look where he is now. In jail.

Never believe crazy.

 

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[babyballer]

Just because he's old and dead and claimed to interview American titans of industry doesn't mean he's immune to the same scrutiny we apply to today's gurus. Who knows, in 100 years Tai Lopez might be regarded as the business visionary of our time...

I hate to break it to you but Tai will never ever be a business visionary when all he does is just teaching people how to get rich. Even that teaching of his is questionable at best. Tai has no good track record of having a real business whatsoever. A real business visionary is like Steve Jobs who actually did something great in his lifetime.

 

[lludwig]

There was this guy Kevin Trudeau that was completely obsessed about Napoleon Hill and his books. He even went to look for the original manuscript that was supposedly banned by Henry Ford because it revealed too much of the rich secrets. Look where he is now. In jail.

Never believe crazy.

The fact of the matter is Napoleon lost the copyrights to it and that is why you have many versions of it. Any can publish it and typically does.

I have an original book originally purchased by my dad.

 

[Real Deal Denver]

I don't really know anything about him.

That much is perfectly totally and unequivocally clear. Ignore.

 

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[Bishop]

Presumably his wife Bonnie "Sage" Robbins

 

[Merging Left]

I hate to break it to you but Tai will never ever be a business visionary when all he does is just teaching people how to get rich. Even that teaching of his is questionable at best. Tai has no good track record of having a real business whatsoever. A real business visionary is like Steve Jobs who actually did something great in his lifetime.

But that's the whole point. Neither did Napoleon Hill.

 

[Merging Left]

This one kind of stings. I have mastered several industries. Mastered them inside and out. I am not doing that work today because they went extinct. Through no fault whatsoever of me, they just don't exist. Sometimes fate just craps on you, and what can you do about it? Well, pick up and try to do better. But there's only so much a person can do. I was in the same position as three people at one time in the 70's that made them all super successful - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Cuban. I didn't have "quite" the reach and vision they did - but I could have, if I had only known more and had a few more doors opened for me. So close. But it didn't work out - and I'm sure there are many more that were also so close. I can't remember his name, but a guy invented all on his own a very good operating system (CP/M) that could have given him the success that Bill Gates has - maybe even more. Circumstances zigged when he zagged, and the rest in history. Or how about the first drummer for the Beatles, who was replaced with Ringo. Sooooo close to fame. Being that I have been so close a few times is bittersweet. Could have, should have. I don't fault anyone for missing the brass ring. Sometimes things just go left, when they are going right. You have no way of knowing that at the time. That's just life. You're being way too harsh in your judgement.

I may have been too brief. What I was trying to say is that there is considerable evidence to suggest Hill did not practice what he preached. Why should we treat Hill differently than other gurus on the forum?

If it's acceptable to say "Sure, he didn't do what he taught, but his lessons still helped many people," isn't it also acceptable to say the same about other gurus who we, as a forum, normally pick on?

 

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[ApparentHorizon]

I may have been too brief. What I was trying to say is that there is considerable evidence to suggest Hill did not practice what he preached. Why should we treat Hill differently than other gurus on the forum?

If it's acceptable to say "Sure, he didn't do what he taught, but his lessons still helped many people," isn't it also acceptable to say the same about other gurus who we, as a forum, normally pick on?

Have you seen how some football coaches, can't play football? Yet they can lead a team to victory. (I'm stretching the example, but its for illustration purposes.)

Totally agree, Tai Lopes has some decent advice. But nowhere close to what Hill gave us. I'd wager Tai practices more of what he preaches than Hill, if the allegations are true. It's your job to see if what he says works for you. Simply saying Tai bad, Hill good, is lazy.

 

[babyballer]

Have you seen how some football coaches, can't play football? Yet they can lead a team to victory. (I'm stretching the example, but its for illustration purposes.)

Totally agree, Tai Lopes has some decent advice. But nowhere close to what Hill gave us. I'd wager Tai practices more of what he preaches than Hill, if the allegations are true. It's your job to see if what he says works for you. Simply saying Tai bad, Hill good, is lazy.

Coaches like Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho are all about strategies, it is not about skills. You're not using a good analogy.

 

[ApparentHorizon]

Coaches like Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho are all about strategies, it is not about skills. You're not using a good analogy.

So if he wrote a book titled, The Perfect Kick, you'd dismiss it because he's not on the field himself?

 

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[MTEE1985]

Coaches like Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho are all about strategies, it is not about skills. You're not using a good analogy.

I think your comment shows @ApparentHorizon is using a perfect analogy. He is simply stating that you don’t have to have been a top player to be a top coach. You need to have a combination of some skills and some strategies.

There’s dozens of these same threads going around the forum and the underlying theme is there is no “right” answer. There is no factual basis to judge who is more helpful than who because it ultimately comes down to the individual. I don’t agree with 100% of what anybody writes, MJ included. Would that offend him? Of course not, he constantly talks about how what works for person A will not work for person B. I’d be cautious to be that committed to the teachings of any one person/book/program.

 

[Real Deal Denver]

Have you seen how some football coaches, can't play football? Yet they can lead a team to victory. (I'm stretching the example, but its for illustration purposes.)

Great example.

Using that logic, I also know a LOT about many subjects from reading books, even though I have never undertaken the work myself. Makes perfect sense to me, especially when you consider that the greatest invention of all time is widely considered to be the printing press as it allowed us to accumulate and build upon our knowledge. No longer did we have to learn everything by doing it ourselves.

So someone may not have actually done what they write about - I'd never consider them a fraud for that.

I judge the message, not the author. That's not a bad thing. My books (in progress) are a accumulation of many things I've learned from other people, and I certainly haven't done a lot of what I discuss, nevertheless I am an authority on some topics. I think everyone falls into that category somewhat.

 

[garyfritz]

So someone may not have actually done what they write about - I'd never consider them a fraud for that.

No. But if he claims to be an expert and wasn't (beyond writing books), if he claims to have been personally taught by Andrew Carnegie and evidence says he wasn't ... that starts to leak into fraudulent territory.

 

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[babyballer]

So if he wrote a book titled, The Perfect Kick, you'd dismiss it because he's not on the field himself?

Yes. You got that right.

 

[Silver Silk]

I remember Dan Kennedy saying that, even though Hill inspired him and many other entrepreneurs, you couldn't ignore the fact he died broke.

As a bonus, Kennedy suggested you check Clement Stone's The Success System That Never Fails. Stone became a billionaire and when he read Think And Grow Rich, he was surprised to find inside it a lot of the principles he had personally used. Personally, I enjoy Stone's writing way more than Hill's.

Just bought clemont stones book, hopefully ill gain more wisdom!

 

[Roli]

“There are only so many times that a man can be arrested for the sale of unlicensed stock, altering checks, and outright theft, before you have to question the official history.”​

It starts.

Naploeon Hill. One of the most beloved Gurus of all time had very humble beginnings. One of his first business ventures succeeded when Hill would purchase lumber on credit and sell it to suppliers at cut rate prices. How was he able to turn a profit this way? Simple, he just never paid the lumber companies who gave him the lumber and skipped town.

From Gizmodo’s 2016 research on Hill:

Hill was involved in countless scams over the years. One of his earliest involved buying lumber on credit, never paying his suppliers, and selling the lumber to others for cash at rates well below market value. This, as you can guess, didn’t last very long before Hill went on the run.

Hill tried his hand at a number of businesses with varying degrees of legitimacy. He was an executive at a lumber company, he was part owner of a candy company, and he made a go of it as a magazine publisher. But at every turn, there was some kind of shady dealing that would cause his business ventures to crumble. Promoters of Hill claim that it was all a matter of bad luck, and Hill’s naivety. According to his biographers, Michael J. Ritt Jr. and Kirk Landers, Hill’s greatest flaw was that he was too trusting. His business associates would take advantage of him by stealing tremendous amounts of money and later pointing the finger at Hill as the thief.

Napoleon Hill was a deeply troubled soul, suffering bouts of depression and loneliness as he struggled to become a financial success. Constantly on the move, he believed that success came through confidence and visualization. But behind every upbeat quote and promise of future riches, Hill had a darkness that could not be contained. With every breath he uttered there was a kind of intellectual and spiritual impotence underneath; a cacophony of buzzwords echoing through the skyscrapers of Chicago and the airwaves of Hollywood. And it was his words that would both render him a prophet, and destroy the lives of those closest to him.​

I’m really busy but I wanted to post this. Napoleon Hill was really the grandfather of what you see in Self Help these days. “The Secret is to just be positive, visualize success and riches will come to you.”

Reporters who investigated were able to find no evidence that Hill's claims of a meeting between him and Andrew Carnegie were true, and couldn’t even find any evidence that they had ever met.

From Hill’s book:

IN EVERY chapter of this book, mention has been made of the money-making secret which has made fortunes for more than five hundred exceedingly wealthy men whom I have carefully analyzed over a long period of years.

The secret was brought to my attention by Andrew Carnegie, more than a quarter of a century ago. The canny, lovable old Scotsman carelessly tossed it into my mind, when I was but a boy. Then he sat back in his chair, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, and watched carefully to see if I had brains enough to understand the full significance of what he had said to me.

When he saw that I had grasped the idea, he asked if I would be willing to spend twenty years or more, preparing myself to take it to the world, to men and women who, without the secret, might go through life as failures. I said I would, and with Mr. Carnegie’s cooperation, I have kept my promise.

This book contains the secret, after having been put to a practical test by thousands of people, in almost every walk of life. It was Mr. Carnegie’s idea that the magic formula, which gave him a stupendous fortune, ought to be placed within reach of people who do not have time to investigate how men make money, and it was his hope that I might test and demonstrate the soundness of the formula through the experience of men and women in every calling.​

From the article:

I contacted Andrew Carnegie biographer David Nasaw about the alleged meeting between Carnegie and Hill, and he told me he “found no evidence of any sort that Carnegie and Hill ever met.” I pressed Nasaw about whether there was any chance at all that Hill’s book could be based on real events. Nasaw replied, “Let me put it this way. I found no evidence that the book was authentic.”
​

He apparently didn’t start making these claims until after Carnegie died.

Think about it. Let’s say I came on this forum and said. “Hey… before Steve Jobs died he gave me the task. He wanted me to interview hundreds of the worlds most successful men and uncover the magical secret to riches."

You would be like “ummmmm who the f*ck are you, how do you know Steve Jobs, and why would he pick YOU instead of a reputable journalist. He picked Walter freaking Issacson to do his biography. Why would he choose you?”

In my opinion, Hill's entire premise is laughable. “Andrew Carnegie picked ME, some random guy off the street and gave me the task of interviewing hundreds of (what would be) billionaires (in their time) and finding THE SECRET OF WEALTH. And the Secret? Positive thinking!” Nothing about creating market value, or great customer service. Just pure positivity!

From Wikipedia:

Hill left his coal mine management job soon afterwards, and began law school before withdrawing for lack of funds. Later in life, Hill would use the title of "Attorney of Law," although Hill's official biography notes that "there is no record of his having actually performed legal services for anyone," [9]
​

Business ventures:

During May 1909, Hill relocated to Washington D.C. and initiated the "Automobile College of Washington," where he instructed students to build, chauffeur and sell motor cars.[12]

During April 1912, the automobile magazine Motor World accused Hill's college of being a scam relying upon on misleading marketing materials that would be "a joke to anyone of average intelligence”​

It can’t be all bad, right?

During September 1915, Hill established and served as the dean of a new school in Chicago, the "George Washington Institute of Advertising," where he intended to teach the principles of success and self-confidence. On June 4, 1918, the Chicago Tribune reported that the state of Illinois had issued two warrants for the arrest of Hill, who was charged with violating blue sky laws for fraudulently attempting to sell shares of his school with a $100,000 capitalization, despite the school's assets only being appraised at $1200.[17] The school ended soon afterwards.​

What did he day he was doin during those years around 1918 he was (allegedly) selling fraudulent stock and evading warrants? He was advising Woodrow Wilson, of course.

Later in his life, Hill would say that he spent the years of 1917-1918 advising president Woodrow Wilson amidst World War I. [18]​

During 1922, Hill also initiated the Intra-Wall Correspondence School, a charitable foundation intended to provide educational materials to prisoners in Ohio. The foundation was directed by, among others, the check forger and former convict Butler Storke, who was later himself to be sent back to prison during 1923. [19] According to Hill's official biography, this period was also when hundreds of documents associating Hill with various famous figures were destroyed in a Chicago storage fire.[20]​

But then he published Laws of Success (the unabridged version of Think and Grow Rich) and the rest is history!

During 1928, Hill relocated to Philadelphia and convinced a Connecticut-based publisher to publish his eight-volume work The Law of Success. The book was Hill's first major success, allowing Hill to adopt an opulent lifestyle. By 1929, he had already bought a Rolls-Royce and a six-hundred acre property in the Catskill Mountains, with the aid of some lenders.[21]​

And of course, there’s this gem:

At the age of 17, Hill graduated from high school and went to Tazewell, Virginia to attend business school. During 1901, Hill accepted a job working for the lawyer Rufus A. Ayers, a coal magnate and former Virginia attorney general. The author Richard Lingeman said that Hill received this job after arranging to keep confidential the death of a black bellhop, whom the previous manager of the mine had accidentally shot while drunk.[6]​

Anyway, read the piece Gizmodo did in 2016:

https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-greatest-self-he-1789385645

I must admit I was sorely disappointed by the book, kind of left me with the same sinking feeling as that other vastly overrated tome; Catcher In The Rye.

 

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[MTEE1985]

Yes. You got that right.

Now my curiosity has the best of me. I’m not disagreeing but genuinely interested in your point of view.

From a simplistic standpoint it reads like saying MJ has no business writing about anything besides running a lead generation site in the limo market. Or any other book must be extremely specialized to have any credence.

Am I interpreting wrongly?

 

[SteveO]

2. You have to believe you can succeed. Imagine rock climbing a mountain, and the entire time you're telling yourself you can't make it.
3. Using your conscious mind to influence your subconscious mind. (This should be up your alley with the neuroscience)

The difficult step for people is that they feel that "thinking" is the tool. It is not. Perception is the key.

Your conscious mind and subconscious are already linked. The real power comes in when you can connect that link at will. That is where your instincts are. That is where you can access your intuition. That is where you become what some call psychic.

I use the concept of "let it go... believe that it will happen... and pay attention to what YOU are telling YOURSELF" in each and every moment.

We are in control of what we create by our perception. Not by what we see as controlling everything physical and all of those around us.

 

[SteveO]

Have you seen how some football coaches, can't play football? Yet they can lead a team to victory.

I have never played soccer. Coached my daughter's team though. We won our division and the league awarded me the opportunity to put an all star team together to play tournaments. It has been a number of years but I think the players were 10 and 11 year olds.

We won our first tournament which was a large one. We then signed up for another that was mixed with boys and girls teams. Won that as well. The boys teams were powerful and fast. We were cunning. We spread the field and played teamwork. The team of boys that we played in the finals had one player that dominated. I assigned an aggressive girl to stay with him and not let him control the ball. He fell on the ground crying at the end of the game.

 

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[Fox]

The book is over 80 years old. Find me a workout book or technical guide that also hasn't become outdated in that time too. Some of the language used is goofy but so would a book written today be in another 80 years.

Its one of the first books on mindset, self belief, and visualisation. It was an early non scientific take on some pretty in-depth topics.

I think its aged well and is a good beginner read on success principles. You don't have to take on board everything but the overall concepts are sound.

As for did he meet these people or not - I don't really care. He definitely studied them one way or another and distilled some good overall principles people can use. A lot of people much more successful than me have recommended it. Its not like the book is recommending compound savings or "doing what you love". Its think its well rounded for its time.

 

[babyballer]

Now my curiosity has the best of me. I’m not disagreeing but genuinely interested in your point of view.

From a simplistic standpoint it reads like saying MJ has no business writing about anything besides running a lead generation site in the limo market. Or any other book must be extremely specialized to have any credence.

Am I interpreting wrongly?

Well, anyone has the right to write anything about anything. I am all about free speech. He could write books about business and I will read them while keeping in mind that he his business background was running a lead gen site in the limo market.