Napoleon Hill and my comments on the book The Law of Success.

Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883 – November 8, 1970) was an American author in the area of the new thought movement who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal-success literature. He is widely considered to be one of the great writers on success.  His most famous work, Think and Grow Rich (1937), is one of the best-selling books of all time (at the time of Hill's death in 1970, Think and Grow Rich had sold 20 million copies).  He became an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1936. "What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve" is one of Hill's hallmark expressions.  How achievement actually occurs, and a formula for it that puts success in reach of the average person, were the focal points of Hill's books. 

According to his official biography, Napoleon Hill was born in a one-room cabin near the Appalachian town of Pound, in Southwest Virginia.  Hill's mother died when he was nine years old, and his father remarried two years later. At the age of 13, Hill began writing as a "mountain reporter" for small-town newspapers in the area of Wise County, Virginia. He later used his earnings as a reporter to enter law school, but soon he had to withdraw for financial reasons.

Hill considered the turning point in his life to have occurred in the year 1908 with his assignment, as part of a series of articles about famous and successful men, to interview the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. At the time, Carnegie was one of the most powerful men in the world. Hill discovered that Carnegie believed that the process of success could be outlined in a simple formula that anyone would be able to understand and achieve. Impressed with Hill, Carnegie asked him if he was up to the task of putting together this information, to interview or analyze over 500 successful men and women, many of themmillionaires, in order to discover and publish this formula for success.

As part of his research, Hill claimed to have interviewed many of the most successful people of the time in the United States. In the acknowledgments section of his 1928 multi-volume work The Law of Success, Hill listed 45 of those studied by him during the previous twenty years, "the majority of these men at close range, in person", like the three to whom the book set was dedicated, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Edwin C. Barnes, an associate of Thomas Edison. 

(Previous information taken directly from Wikipedia.)

So I am attempting to let you know my thoughts about The Law of Success. chapter by chapter.

Chapter 1:  A Definite Purpose - This is the major goal that you have set for yourself as to where you want to be in life.  Be careful what you pick as your Definite Purpose since once you select it, and start concentrating on it, your subconscious mind will do everything that it can to get your body into physical action to get you toward that purpose.  This is an established principle of psychology.  "Any definite purpose that is deliberately fixed in the mind and held there, with the determination to realize it, finally saturates the entire subconscious mind until it automatically influences the physical action of the body toward the attainment of that purpose."  

Hill uses the concept of Auto Suggestion to make this happen.  This is the process of using affirmations and setting goals to get to the object of your main desire.  You need to see the end result, feel the end result, touch the end result in order to get the fulfillment of that end result firmly planted in your brain using conscious thought.  Conscious thought will, with repetition, eventually become a part of your subconscious mind.  Once it is in the subconscious mind, the emotion of that fulfillment will provide the stimulus the body needs to spring into action and the action will, with time, bring you to your Definite Purpose.

AND your definite purpose is limited only by your imagination!

BUT you have to be very specific about your Definite Purpose.  What is YOUR goal?  If you can see it, feel it, touch it, etc. with every emotion that goes with it then be very specific in defining it.  Now, if your goal is to find a mate, I don't think that you should pick,for example, a specific movie star, celebrity or the boy/girl that sits next to you in Math class.  What I do suggest that you do is pick the qualities of the person that you see as your perfect mate and start concentrating on finding that person, then I believe that if you set that as you goal, then you will attract that person to you.  Through the desire to have that in your life.

Your desire to have something is what leads you to set that Definite Purpose.  The actions that you take as part of the emotion attached to that Definite Purpose are then what make you achieve the result.

Begin today by creating your Definite Purpose.  Then create the affirmations that you will repeat or read every day to set that goal into your subconscious.  Get into the habit of doing the things to make your Definite Purpose a reality.  Develop the ability to direct your thoughts and efforts in an organized manner.  Every thing you do every day should be directed toward your Definite Purpose.

A caveat (warning) - your Definite Purpose should be within your scope of expertise!  If it is outside your scope of expertise then you need to gain the expertise you need to get to that Definite Purpose.

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