Napoleon Hill

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all Think and Grow Rich (1937), The Law of Success (1928) and Outwitting the Devil.

The thirteen steps, in short

The steps of Think and Grow Rich are taught in full in the branch Where it comes from of Imagination and intention: a burning desire for one definite aim, faith, autosuggestion, specialised knowledge, imagination, organised planning, decision, persistence, the master mind, the transmutation of sex, the subconscious mind, the brain and the sixth sense; with the six steps for turning desire into its equivalent, a written statement of the aim read aloud on rising and before sleep. What follows is the rest of his teaching.

The invisible counsellors

In the chapter on the sixth sense Hill tells of a practice of his own. Each night before sleep he held an imaginary council meeting with nine men whose lives he admired: Emerson, Paine, Edison, Darwin, Lincoln, Burbank, Napoleon, Ford and Carnegie. He sat them round a table in his mind, put his questions to them, and imagined their answers, each in his own character, so as to build into himself the qualities he most wanted from each. The meetings grew so vivid, he says, that he grew alarmed and stopped them for several months; he insists that they were purely imaginary, and that their value lay in what they did to his own character.

The sixth sense itself he describes as the part of the subconscious that he calls the creative imagination, a receiving set through which ideas, plans and thoughts flash into the mind as hunches. It is the last of the steps and, he says, can be understood only by one who has mastered the others.

The six ghosts of fear

Before any part of the philosophy can work, a person must clear the mind of three enemies, indecision, doubt and fear, and Hill names the six basic fears from which all others grow: the fear of poverty, of criticism, of ill health, of the loss of someone's love, of old age and of death. Each has its symptoms, which he lists so that the reader may recognise them in himself, and each is a state of mind, which can be controlled and changed. He adds a seventh evil, the susceptibility to negative influences, and tells the reader to guard against it by choosing his companions and keeping his mind busy with his definite aim.

The law of success

His first course, The Law of Success, sets out its teaching in sixteen lessons: the master mind, a definite chief aim, self-confidence, the habit of saving, initiative and leadership, imagination, enthusiasm, self-control, the habit of doing more than paid for, a pleasing personality, accurate thought, concentration, co-operation, profiting by failure, tolerance and the golden rule.

Two of these he returned to all his life. The habit of doing more than paid for, which he later called going the extra mile, is to give always more and better service than one is paid for, so that the law of increasing returns works in one's favour and one's worth becomes plain. Profiting by failure rests on his conviction that every adversity carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit, which the one who looks for it can find.

Drifting

Outwitting the Devil, written in 1938, is an imagined interview in which the Devil confesses his methods. His chief tool is drifting: the habit of letting others do one's thinking, of never deciding, of moving with whatever current is nearest; the drifters, he boasts, are nearly all of humanity, and they are his. Habits of thought, in Hill's teaching, are fixed by a law he calls hypnotic rhythm, which makes any thought held long enough permanent, for good or ill, so that drifting, kept up, becomes a prison.

Against it he sets seven principles: definiteness of purpose; mastery over oneself; learning from adversity; control of the influences of one's surroundings and companions; time, which makes habits permanent; harmony; and caution, the habit of thinking before acting.

A positive mental attitude

In his last years, with W. Clement Stone, he gathered the teaching under the name of a positive mental attitude. Every person, they wrote, carries an invisible talisman with PMA, a positive mental attitude, on one side, and NMA, a negative one, on the other; the side that is turned up decides what a life attracts. They taught short self-starters to be said at the moment of decision, the best known being do it now.

Hill offers his philosophy as a sure road to riches. The house teaches it as a discipline of one written aim, steady effort, good company and persistence after defeat; no method makes money certain, and the riches it promises are his promise.