NAPOLEON HILL

Who is Napoleon Hill??. Napoleon Hill was born in 1883 in a one-room cabin on the Pound River in Wise County, Virginia. He began his writing career at age 13 as a “mountain reporter” for small town newspapers and went on to become America’s most beloved motivational author. Hill passed away in November 1970 after a long and successful career writing, teaching, and lecturing about the principles of success. His work stands as a monument to individual achievement and is the cornerstone of modern motivation.
His book, Think and Grow Rich, is the all time bestseller in the field. Hill established the Foundation as a nonprofit educational institution whose mission is to perpetuate his philosophy of leadership, self-motivation, and individual achievement. His books, audio cassettes, videotapes, and other motivational products are made available to you as a service of the Foundation so that you may build your own library of personal achievement materials… and help you acquire financial wealth and the true riches of life.
There was a 2 day Napoleon Hill International Convention in Putrajaya, Malaysia last march 2007, which is being held outside US for the first time, where the Malaysian PM was awarded the Golobal Leadership Award bestowed by the Napoleon Hill Foundation.

To know more about Napoleon Hill and the “Law of Attraction” go to Napoleon Hill Foundation.
To read more abou his profil and his work, plese proceed to next page.

Hill was born into poverty in a two-room cabin in the town of Pound in rural Wise County, Virginia. His mother died when he was ten years old. His father remarried two years later. At the age of thirteen he began writing as a “mountain reporter” for small-town newspapers. He used his earnings as a reporter to enter law school, but soon had to withdraw for financial reasons. The turning point in his career is considered to have been in 1908 with his assignment, as part of a series of articles about famous men, to interview industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who at the time was one of the most powerful men in the world. Hill discovered that Carnegie believed that the process of success could be elaborated in a simple formula that could be duplicated by the average person. Impressed with Hill, Carnegie commissioned him (without pay and only offering to provide him with letters of reference) to interview over 500 successful men and women, many of them millionaires, in order to discover and publish this formula for success.

As part of his research, Hill interviewed many of the most famous people of the time, including Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Elmer Gates, John D. Rockefeller, Charles M. Schwab, F.W. Woolworth, William Wrigley Jr., John Wanamaker, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Allen Ward and Jennings Randolph. The project lasted over twenty years, during which Hill became an advisor to Carnegie. As a result of these studies, the Philosophy of Achievement was offered as a formula for rags-to-riches success by Hill and Carnegie, published initially in 1928 as the book The Law of Success. The Achievement formula was detailed further and published in home-study courses, including the seventeen-volume “Mental Dynamite” series until 1941.

From 1919 to 1920 Hill was the editor and publisher of Hill’s Golden Rule magazine. It was during this time he wrote a letter to Charles F. Haanel in which he praised his book The Master Key System. In the letter he writes: “..I believe I ought to inform you that my present success and the success which has followed my work as President of the Napoleon Hill Institute is due largely to the principles laid down in The Master Key System.”[1] In 1930 he published The Ladder to Success. From 1933 to 1936 Hill was an unpaid advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt.

In 1937 Hill distilled the Philosophy of Achievement and produced his most famous work, Think and Grow Rich, which is still in print in several versions, and has sold more than thirty million copies. In 1960, Hill published an abridged version of the book, which for years was the only one generally available. In 2004, Ross Cornwell published Think and Grow Rich!: The Original Version, Restored and Revised (Second Printing 2007), which restored the book to its original content, with slight revisions, and added the first comprehensive endnotes, index, and appendix the book had ever contained. (The Cornwell-Hill “collaboration” resulted from the former’s service as editor-in-chief of “Think & Grow Rich Newsletter,” published for the Napoleon Hill Foundation.)

In 1939 Hill published How to Sell Your Way through Life, and in 1953 How to Raise Your Own Salary. From 1952 to 1962 he worked with W. Clement Stone of the Combined Insurance Company of America to teach Stone’s “Philosophy of Personal Achievement”, and to lecture on the “Science of Success”. Partly as a result of his work with Stone, in 1960 he published Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. He died in 1970 in South Carolina, and in 1971 his final work, You Can Work Your Own Miracles, was published posthumously.

[edit] Thoughts are things
Hill spent most of his effort on describing to his readers and students the paradox that “thoughts are things”. In fact, the subtitle of the introduction chapter of Think and Grow Rich is “The Man Who ‘Thought’ His Way.” The ability of people to share thoughts underpins achievement, and Hill stated that this allows the success-oriented individuals to attract like-minded people in order to accomplish anything. Most of the examples in Think and Grow Rich concern the great difficulty of creating and maintaining like-mindedness, and Hill termed this concept “The Master Mind”. Hill’s numerous examples of racism, prejudice, war, poverty, discouragement, and fear illustrated the significant barriers that existed in his time (and still exist today) as the road-blocks to Achievement through the coordination of like-minded individuals.

[edit] Application of the Golden Rule
Hill stated many times in his writings that the success formula required a complete and total understanding of the spirit of giving. He named this concept “The Golden Rule”. Many times he was quoted as saying “There is no such thing as something for nothing”. Hill was a devout Christian, and did not see any conflict between his success philosophy and his religious faith. Acquiring the Carnegie Secret of Achievement, Hill said after his own books were in wide circulation, could only be had by those “ready” for it; this meant understanding the entire Philosophy including elements such as the Golden Rule, Faith, and Desire. Once ready, anyone could go on to acquire great wealth as it required only application of the formula.

The Golden Rule concerns the teachings regarding the power of giving. Hill challenges the reader to ask of themselves “what can I truly give to others?”. As Step Two in the Six Step “road to riches” described in Think and Grow Rich, this is the critical step in wealth creation that eludes 98% of those who try. To help focus the picture you cannot “give” anything away unless you don’t need it anymore, or don’t have to pay for it in the first place. Of course, the true interpretation of the Golden Rule is a function called The Success Formula, and is based on the key elements that were present at the birth of the USA itself.

[edit] The creation of the United States of America
Hill did not provide a written definition of the secret of Achievement, for he was adamant it would deprive people of the ability to learn it for themselves. Hill’s belief was that the U.S. Constitution was one of the finest living examples of the Philosophy of Achievement in existence, and the same power is available to all; to which there is no doubt just as much disbelief in our times as in Hill’s. And yet the Constitution does exist, making Hill’s claim all the more tantalizing that such a power is available to the average person; this claim alone is mainly responsible for the millions of copies of his books in circulation. There is no hard-copy record of the Carnegie Secret in existence, beyond Carnegie’s own stupendous fortune which still exists today as the Carnegie Foundation. Carnegie’s wealth was so great in his time that its share of the U.S. Gross National Product was far in excess of today’s largest fortunes, rivaling the USA so much that is was once thought Carnegie could become “an Emperor in Washington”. And yet, Carnegie achieved this wealth as an individual, and not completely without controversy; but as a historical fact it is indisputable that one man was responsible. On this basis, Carnegie’s secret formula is considered by some presently to be a long-lost secret, awaiting rediscovery. Most, however, consider it to be a combination of sheer luck and a lot of hard work..

[edit] Master Mind
Hill is also credited with coining the phrase ‘Master Mind’ (more commonly, Mastermind). The ‘Master Mind’ may be defined as: “coordination of knowledge and effort in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose.” In Think and Grow Rich, Hill discusses his creation of Master Mind groups and how these groups could multiply an individual’s brain power and continually motivate positive emotions. However, the Master Mind was a deeper and more powerful connection than mere synergetic cooperation would suggest, and requires an understanding of Hill’s belief’s about the brain and the nature of energy (particularly thought energy) within Thomas Edison’s cosmological understanding of matter and energy. In describing the Philosophy of Achievement, Hill was careful in his writings to examine the brain as a sending/receiving station for thought; and for the first time in history explained to the world that like-mindedness had a physical basis. Hence the Master Mind, governed by the laws of mutual attraction, could only exist if like-mindedness was achieved between individuals. Scientists had only recently (in Hill’s time) shown that the brain was the true source of thought, and hence like-mindedness could now have a true physical underpinning from the point of view of science.

Hill states there are two characteristics of the Master Mind principle; one is economic, the other psychic. Economic advantages arise from sharing and cooperation with others utilizing the Philosophy of Achievement. As to the other, Hill states: “No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened to a third mind.” This force, Hill reasoned, was tremendously valuable and ultimately the source of true wealth. Hill also believed that the human mind is a form of energy, part of it spiritual in nature. He states that when the minds of two people are coordinated in a spirit of harmony, the spiritual units of energy of each mind form an affinity, which constitutes the “psychic” phase of the Master Mind. For his development of the Master Mind concept and other principles of success, Hill was awarded an honorary doctor of literature degree (LittD) by Pacific International University. The Litt.D. is awarded for an original contribution (or contributions) of special excellence to linguistics, literary, philosophical, social or historical knowledge.

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