About Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill is one of the first to consider the idea that a person could learn the secrets of success and apply a formula to self development. The impact on the world of his self development lessons and positive thinking positive were the forerunner of today’s self help and motivational leaders.

If it was not for this book and the many that followed the self help genre would not be where it is today.

Who was Napoleon Hill

He was a writer and the author of the famous book Think and Grow Rich. He was one of the pioneers of wealth creation, the power of positive thinking, and one of the original motivational authors. His work was a forerunner to  some of the most proven and prolific self-help leaders of today.
The work that Napoleon Hill has given us, makes it appropriate that we acknowledge his accomplishments and his role in pioneering an entire industry. It has been the foundation of the self help genre for some 30 years.

The Early Life of Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill was born into poverty. He was forced to give up his law degree because he could not afford to attend university. He work led him to discover the secrets of success from others, to teach them and then apply them himself.

Born in 1883 in Pound, Virginia, his home was described as an “impoverished, one-room cabin”. Hill’s family struggled financially throughout his childhood and early adulthood.

Hill’s mother passed away when he was only nine years old, and his father remarried two years later. Not long after that, at the very early age of thirteen, Napoleon Hill went to work for several small-town newspapers, working as a “mountain reporter”.
His writing career was to help him fund his way through college. He used what he earned as a teenage newspaper reporter to pay for law school, but was forced to withdraw when he did not have the funds to continue. The financial struggles of Napoleon Hill proved to be the  driving force for his search for answers.
His Return
After leaving law school, Napoleon Hill returned to journalism as a means of support. It was a move that was the start of a journey that he followed for the rest of his life. It was also a journey followed by  millions of others who came to be influenced by his works.
His Mentor - Andrew Carnegie
The turning point in the his writing career occurred in 1908 with his assignment, as part of a series of articles about famous men, to interview the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, one of the most powerful and richest men in the world. Hill discovered that Carnegie believed that success could be achieved by applying a simple formula that could be duplicated by the average person.

Impressed with Hill, Carnegie asked him if he was up to the task of putting together this information with only reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses, to interview or analyze over 500 successful men and women, many of them millionaires, in order to discover and publish this formula for success.

Hill, of course, accepted Carnegie’s challenge and rose to it and beyond. In the course of researching the formula for success that any man or woman could follow, he interviewed no less than 500 of the most successful and wealthiest people in the world at the time. His research put him into contact with many hugely famous names in a wide variety of professions, including the political arena (where Napoleon Hill would also later serve, going on to become the advisor to two American Presidents).
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, Sr., Charles M. Schwab, F.W. Woolworth, William Wrigley Jr., John Wanamaker, William Jennings Bryan, Joseph Stalin, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Jennings Randolph. Hill was also an advisor to two presidents of the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Deducing The Formula

For all time Andrew Carnegie believed strongly that any person could become wealthy and successful. He also strongly believed in a formula for success and wealth; he believed that formula, once discovered, would prove to be a basic, timeless strategy based on a core set of principles. He believed that those core principles would become readily apparent after interviewing, researching, and analysing the lives, beliefs, and actions of those whom he considered to be true successes. Proving this and deducing the formula was the task that he set Napoleon Hill to.
This formula, in simple terms, was to Think And Grow Rich. Readers of Napoleon Hill’s books know this to be the common thread of the super successful. The nay-sayers, who deny this formula to work – are predominantly not wealthy people. That surely says something in itself!

Napoleon Hill – In His Own Words

Napoleon Hill speaks of his meeting with Andrew Carnegie and of, possibly his most famous saying: “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve”

Think and Grow Rich

It took Napoleon Hill some twenty years before the first fruits of his labor were produced. The first introduction to Hill and Carnegie’s formula did not come in Think and Grow Rich, but in a home-study course called “The Law of Success“. The research and information that he gathered in the formation of that course did, however, serve as the foundation for Think And Grow Rich, the book that is known as the “cornerstone” of financial success literature and which has launched numerous careers, and countless numbers on to success and wealth.

Reproduced (as edited) from the web site of SEAN RASMUSSEN and  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.