THINK AND GROW RICH
Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
T
hink And Grow Rich was written in 1937 and sold 70 million books before its author, Napoleon Hill, died in 1970. Who knows how many copies since. Talk about a best seller. It’s still in print.
It’s about the science of personal achievement; the philosophy of success. There’s a lot in it for you.
Andrew Carnegie, the philanthropist of U.S. Steel and Carnegie Hall fame (the BillGates/Warren Buffet of the day), wanted to leave the masses a timeless formula for prosperity. He challenged a young buck, a West Virginia reporter by the name of Napoleon Hill, to research and write it. He didn’t pay Hill – Carnegie just introduced Hill to the players of the time – writers, inventors, business people, presidents, royalty, socialites, clergy, sports & entertainers.
Hill spent 20 years studying the secret of what makes people successful. He identified 17 common principles and wrote a heady book titled The Philosophy of Success. It didn’t sell well, so he modified it as The Science of Personal Achievement. That didn’t do so good, neither.
Napoleon Hill didn’t quit. He condensed it with a catchy cover and a slick title: Think and Grow Rich.
P
eople wanted to get rich, so they bought up his book and, when everybody started talking about it, they told their friends, who wrote their pen-pals, who dialed-up others, who lettered-the-editor, …
Napoleon Hill spew pure truth. He got it bang-on and his secret has stood the test of time. Read it. Modern updates are available if you can’t handle the male vernacular of the time.
Here’s Napoleon Hill’s 17 principles of success. Think about how they can work into your writing… or whatever you need.
1. Definiteness of Purpose
2. Positive Mental Attitude
3. Self Discipline
4. Personal Initiative
5. Enthusiasm
6. Creative Vision
7. Accurate Thinking
8. Controlled Attention
9. Learning From Adversity and Defeat
10. Maintenance of Sound Health
11. Budgeting Time and Money
12. Pleasing Personality
13. Applied Faith
14. Teamwork
15. Going The Extra Mile
16. Master-Mind
17. Cosmic Habit-Force
These principles are of no particular order, but follow a pattern. To achieve something, you must first conceive what you want – your definite purpose – knowing where you want to go. Then, you must have a positive mental attitude to go with it. In other words – you must believe that you are going to achieve your definite purpose – and then you must build your world around it – using all these principles – especially the mastermind.
Go
read, or re-read, Think And Grow Rich. And I’ve already given you a spoiler… the Napoleon Hill secret is –
Whatever The Mind Can Conceive And Believe, It Can Achieve
YOUR BRAIN IS WIRED FOR STORY
You have to read ‘Wired For Story‘ by Lisa Cron.
It’s the writer’s guide to using brain science to hook readers from the very first sentence. Download it, or go right out and buy it at a brick & mortar place. It’s just that good. Even if you aren’t a writer – as a reader it’ll make you appreciate what a story is.
And, as Lisa tells us, we’re all wired for story.
We’re humans. Story is crucial to our evolution – more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs lets us hang on; story tells us what to hang on to. Story is what enables us to imagine what might happen and prepare for it. Story is what makes us human.
Brain science and story. Right brain. Left brain. Common sense.
No matter how you cut it, we’re hardwired for story. We need story to make sense of things. We need story to tell us things. We need story so we don’t have to find out things by ourselves.
TV. Facebook. Twitter. Emails.
They’re all story.
Just like letters, and print books, and smoke signals used to be.
Technology changes, but the human attraction to story doesn’t. That’s because we’re hardwired by our creator to tell and listen to stories.
We get a dopamine rush from wanting to know what happens next… and that dopamine rush lets us learn. It keeps us up late at night… turning the page. It’s the rush of intoxication. Being captivated by a good read. Meeting our hardwired expectations that the story will tell us something about life that we don’t have to risk learning on our own.
Hey Lisa, I’m gonna quote you without permission…
‘Evolution dictates that the first job of any good story is to completely anesthetize the part of our brain that questions how it is creating such a compelling illusion of reality. After all, a good story doesn’t feel like an illusion. What it feels like is life. Literally. A recent brain-imaging study reported in Psychology Science reveals that the regions of the brain that process the sights, sounds, tastes, and movement of real life are activated when we’re engrossed in a compelling narrative. That’s what accounts for the vivid mental images and the visceral reactions we feel when we can’t stop reading, even though it’s past midnight and we have to be up at dawn. When a story enthralls us, we are inside of it, feeling what the protagonist feels, experiencing it as it were indeed happening to us, and the last thing we’re focussing on is the mechanics of the thing.”
