Napoleon Hill spent 25 years studying self-made winners and distilled their method into 13 principles anyone can practice.
Principle 1, Desire. Hill's six steps: name the exact result you want, what you will give in return, and the deadline - then write it down and start. Wishing changes nothing; a definite desire is the starting point of all achievement.
Principle 2, Faith. Belief comes from repeatedly feeding your goal to your subconscious, with emotion, until conviction runs on its own and starts steering your actions.
Principle 3, Autosuggestion. Read your written goal aloud every morning and night, seeing and feeling yourself already in possession of it. Hill is blunt: plain, unemotional words have no effect at all.
Principle 4, Specialized Knowledge. What pays is know-how organized toward a definite purpose - and you do not have to hold it all yourself. It can be hired, learned, or borrowed through your Master Mind.
Principle 5, Imagination - the workshop of the mind. Synthetic imagination rearranges old ideas into new combinations; creative imagination produces genuinely new ones. Hill says both grow stronger with use.
Principle 6, Organized Planning. When a plan fails, throw out the plan, not the goal. Hill treats every failed plan as temporary defeat and information - never as a verdict on the aim.
The rest of this summary — and the one thing to do this week — is in the PDF.
Download the free PDFThe big idea: success follows a method, and the method can be learned. As a young reporter, Napoleon Hill was challenged by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie to study how successful people succeed. Hill spent the next quarter-century interviewing more than 500 of them - including Henry Ford and Thomas Edison - and distilled what they shared into 13 principles. His opening claim sets the tone: thoughts are things, and 'whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.'
The engine is desire made definite. A burning desire for a specific goal, stated in writing with what you will give in return and by when. Faith and autosuggestion feed that statement to the subconscious daily, until belief becomes automatic and starts directing your actions.
