Napoleon Hill was probably the first author to write about self-improvement and success. And he wrote Think and Grow Rich under the guidance of Andrew Carnegie, who was perhaps the most successful and influential person of his time.
Many of the identified psychological tools and tactics are applied to trading and investing. It’s the psychological framework and a lot of information about applying it in life.
Think And Grow Rich Book Summary
No matter which tracks you choose to follow to get rich: becoming a trader, a value investor, a real estate pro, a chief executive, or an entrepreneur, you must have the correct mindset. This is a top-five takeaway summary of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. What does it take to get rich? There’s no magic recipe. But after interviewing more than 500 wealthy and successful people, Napoleon Hill identified vital characteristics that the most successful people share.
One, think success by default. If you want to achieve significance, you need to think big. You need to be more success conscious and a lot less failure conscious. It is so simple that most people miss it. You must focus on one purpose, have an all-consuming desire, be persistent, and never give up. The book gives us an example of a man who aimed to find gold.
After discovering some gold, the person raised money. He bought machinery and labor to extract more gold. Unfortunately for him, after much work, the effort came up empty. So he quit and sold the machinery he had bought to a junk man. Now, this man had the machinery to sell. Still, before doing so, he hired an engineer who told him the gold was three feet from where the first man had stopped drilling. Ultimately, the “junk man” made a fortune because the first man failed to persist.
Looking back, it seems obvious that the first man should have never stopped drilling. Talking about obvious things, you should smash that like the button to help this summary reach even more people. There are several hurdles to success, such as our tendency to believe that difficult things are impossible. It makes poor people believe that they’ll never be rich. The key to overcoming these hurdles is to take control of your mind by occupying it with your defined purpose.
The second thing that Napoleon Hill discovered had an all-consuming desire. One of the essential steps to achieving greatness is to have an all-burning desire. Hopes or wishes aren’t enough. You need to go so far that you burn so many bridges that there’s no way for you to go back. However, the best snipers in the world need a clear target to shoot, and you need a clear goal.
The next step is visualization, or as the author calls it, autosuggestion. This technique consists of telling yourself that you will succeed and envisioning it will give you the confidence to tackle the next challenge. Start by visualizing the goal itself.
Where are you? Where are you when you succeed? What are the challenges you’re likely to face? Then imagine that you already have everything you desire. If it’s money, for instance, imagine you already have it in your bank account. You open a bank account, and the money’s there. This will trigger your subconscious mind to deliver the plans to achieve the goal.
The subconscious mind is the guiding force of your entire life. Still, most people ignore it. Its power is so strong that it begins to execute an idea when it accepts it. It can collect negative information and block your creative imagination from functioning even if you don’t control it. The good news is that your subconscious mind cannot simultaneously hold positive and negative emotions. So it’s up to you to ensure that your subconscious mind is filled with your all-burning desire, which will be your first step to changing lives.
The next piece of the puzzle is overcoming Fear. Everyone fears something. Regardless of what challenges you have, Fear is natural to human nature. Fear will often lead to doubt and indecision, stopping you from acting. The fears you don’t face become your limits. Therefore, controlling and eliminating them is crucial if you can achieve the goal.
Book Specification
Think and Grow Rich is an original classic book. This book was first written in 1937, nearly 100 years old.
Author: Napoleon Hill
Average Review: (4.1 out of 5, on Goodreads)
Category: Business & Money, Personal Finance (Best Seller in Entrepreneurship)
Position 1 in Budgeting & Money Management
Paperback: 320 pages
Think And Grow Rich Book Review
Think and Grow Rich is a book boiled down to 13 steps to the riches of wealthy and successful people, from studying over 500 self-made millionaires. Warren Buffett has said that the intelligent investor is the Bible for investing. In that case, it’s safe to say that this book is the Bible for anyone who wants to become rich and successful.
If you want wealth and someone wants to become rich, stick around longer. Think and Grow Rich is an essential book filled with key information and actionable advice about how you can achieve success.
Chapter: Burning Desire
Napoleon Hill’s first lesson in the book is that you must have a burning desire. The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desire brings weak results, as a small fire makes a small amount of heat. I think it’s fair to assume that many of us wish to become wealthy. But it’s critical to understand that wishing is different from desiring. As Napoleon has said, wishing will not bring riches but desiring riches with the state of mind.
If you want to accomplish greatness, take Thomas Edison, for instance. Even after failing more than 10000 experiments, it didn’t stop him from achieving his goal of inventing an electric light source. He indeed had a burning desire to make his dream come true. Now we’re not all born with a burning desire like Thomas Edison. So here are six practical steps you can follow to achieve the wealth you desire.
- Fixed in your mind the exact amount of money you desire.
- Determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the money you desire.
- Establish a definite date when you intend to possess the money you desire.
- Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you’re ready or not, to implement this plan.
- Write a clear, concise statement of the amount of money you intend to acquire. Name the time limit for its acquisition state.
- Read your written statement aloud twice a day.
Chapter: Faith
Nothing is impossible to the person who backs desire with enduring faith. If you have unshakable faith in yourself, that’s a way to ensure you will achieve your goals and dreams. You have to understand Gandhi didn’t have access to any power tools like money or the military. He used faith as his source of power to be transplanted into the minds of 200 million people. He managed to withstand the British colonial power and lead his country to freedom. Faith is power and is crucial to achieving any major things in life.
Chapter: Autosuggestion
Anybody can acquire faith through the power of auto-suggestion. The ultra suggestion is a psychological technique developed in the early twentieth century. It uses the placebo effect by imprinting your goals into self-fulfilling prophecies in your subconscious mind. Hill states that all successful people have this unwavering belief in themselves and their goals in general.
Also, a suggestion consists of persuading yourself through the subconscious mind. Your thoughts can be transformed into reality. You can use affirmation by telling yourself repeatedly that you can achieve your goals and dreams. The key is that the more you use or suggest, the more likely you will succeed. If your unconscious mind only focuses on goals and dreams, it will lead all your thoughts and actions toward making them come true. But remember that your subconscious mind will only act.
Chapter: Specialized knowledge
Knowledge becomes power if organized into definite plans of an action directed to a certain end. Andrew Carnegie was one of the richest men in history. He was in the steel industry but knew little about making steel himself. Carnegie surrounded himself with men who could do all he could not do. People who have and went to university don’t stop being knowledgeable. Henry Ford didn’t make it to high school but established an industrial empire and made World War millions.
If you want to succeed, you don’t necessarily need to clutter your head with too many facts. Gaining experience and knowledge in a field where you grow strengths is far more essential. Essentially, it’s building a network of people with specialized knowledge in a field so you don’t have to learn everything yourself.
Chapter: Imagination
If you can imagine, you can achieve. It has been said that man can create anything which he can imagine. If you want success, you have to know how to achieve it. Behind every idea is imagination. Imagination can be split into two parts: Creative imagination and synthetic imagination. The synthetic imagination creates nothing. It takes old concepts and ideas and makes new combinations with them. On the other hand, the creative imagination is where the limited mind of man has direct communication with infinite intelligence.
In other words, this is where we can come up with entirely new things and ideas that the world has never seen before. Using creative and synthetic imagination together as a catalog is not uncommon. Who is the founder of Coca-Cola? He didn’t come up with the Coca-Cola recipe himself but bought it from a pharmacist for around two thousand dollars.
He created a genius marketing strategy that advertised Coca-Cola as a drink. That relief, mental and physical fatigue, and cure of headaches were huge successes. If you don’t feel like your imagination is in the best form, you must work it out and challenge it like anything else. If you want to become more powerful, the more you use it, the more active it will become. It’s like working a muscle.
Chapter: Organized planning
No one has ever succeeded without having some plan. Goal setting and detailed planning are the basis of every achievement. Every success story begins with people who know what they want to achieve. To accomplish your goals, you have to have concrete goals and plans. You need goals because otherwise, you don’t have a direction to move in, and you need plans. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know what concrete actions to take.
First, write down your goals and plan for achieving them. Writing down something forces you to think to define it clearly. Then put your notes somewhere where you can see them daily, and read them every morning and every night.
Chapter: Decision
Procrastination is the opposite of a decision. An analysis of 25000 men and women who had experienced failure listed that the lack of decision was near the top of the thirty major causes of failure. Being stubborn can be good, but always stick to your decisions unless proven otherwise. When Henry Ford decided to keep manufacturing the Model T, the world’s ugliest car, even though all his advisors told him otherwise, he knew this would be for the long haul. Maybe you should change the Model T sooner, but it still provided him a vast fortune.
Everyone has one, and most people dispense them like paper towels. They only clutter your mind with negative energy. So be careful with who you share your goals and dreams. Make sure they’re only close friends and mass-mind people in complete sympathy and harmony with your purpose.
Chapter: Persistence
A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits. A common trait among successful people is the ability to persist. The stronger your desire is, the more persistent you will be. If you decide never to give up, you have the insurance of never losing. Even when facing failure, you will get back up and keep grinding. So be persistent no matter how slowly you move towards your goals because success will come when you add persistence and time together.
Chapter: Power of the Mastermind
No individual has sufficient experience, education, native ability, and knowledge to ensure the accumulation of great fortune without the cooperation of other people. Achieving great things requires being smart and surrounding yourself with intelligent people. Napoleon defines the mastermind group as the coordination of knowledge and effort of two or more people working towards a definite purpose in harmony.
The main benefit is that by combining the brainpower of two or more people to solve problems, the result is more than the sum of its parts. People have different experiences, ideas, and skills that could never be achieved without working independently. By sharing all these things, it becomes power. That’s why masterminds are so powerful.
The most important thing to note when discussing Master Mind is that the ideas generated when combining more people’s brains are exponential. If two or more people who work well with one another combine their skills, talents, specialized knowledge, and experience and use them to accomplish the same shared goal and purpose, the result will be more than the sum of its parts. It’s surplus with which you can achieve things you could never have achieved alone.
Chapter: The Mystery of sex transmutation
All men who have achieved the highest level have had highly developed sexual natures. The transmutation of sex energy to energy and creativity in other endeavors is a primary source of genius. “The energy must be transmuted from desire for physical contact into some other form of desire and action before it will lift one to the status of a genius.”
According to a new poll on the five most powerful desires globally, our friendship, music, money, love, and the most powerful desire of them all are sex. Napoleon says men become gifted with a superpower for action when driven by this emotion, which is critical to success. As written in the book, Destroy the Sex Glands, you have removed the primary source of action, whether in man or beast. I found this part of being very interesting.
Chapter: The subconscious mind
The subconscious mind works day and night, whereas the conscious mind only works when you’re awake. You cannot control your subconscious mind entirely, but Cab influences and points it in the right direction. Remember, only emotionalized thoughts have any active influence on the subconscious mind. Positive and negative emotions cannot occupy the mind. At the same time, this means one or the other must dominate. Therefore, it’s critical to form the habit of applying and using positive emotions to dominate your mind with positivity.
The major positive emotions are desire, faith, love, sex, enthusiasm, romance, and hope. On the other hand, there are negative emotions like Fear, jealousy, hatred, revenge, greed, superstitions, and anger. It must be avoided because you will attract what you feel. So to accomplish positive outcomes, we must think positively or influence our subconscious minds. So by increasing all positive impulses, such as faith and desire, you will achieve positive things with time.
Chapter: How to Outwit the six ghosts of Fear
In general, there are six categories of Fear. Category number one is poverty. The Fear of poverty can stop you from taking a risk that might lead you to that poverty. Society feeds this Fear by idolizing rich people. Those who display their riches tend to have millions and billions of followers on social networks. Is this your biggest Fear? Some symptoms of Fear of poverty include lack of ambition, indecisiveness, or worry about financial means.
Number two is criticism. The Fear of criticism will not only stop you from acting, but it can stop you from changing your bad decisions. For instance, someone who marries the wrong person could fear other people’s criticism if they change their decision. Remember that we all criticize other people. Still, nobody likes to be criticized, and our loved ones can often be the worst offenders.
Number three is illness. The Fear of illness is natural to human beings. It is an obvious fear. However, the negative thoughts associated with the Fear of illness can damage your health. Doctors and scientists agree that one’s attitude can positively or negatively impact your health.
Number four, Fear is the loss of a loved one. The Fear of losing a loved one is the most emotionally painful and can manifest in jealousy. The next Fear is old age. The Fear of being old is associated with losing physical and economic freedom and sexual attractiveness. This Fear leads many people to slow down and not enjoy their youth, even when they have it. Like most fears, this is irrational. In reality, some of our most useful years are later in life.
Lastly, the Fear of death, even though fearing death, is pointless. The reason why most people fear death is because of the unknown of the afterlife. That will come regardless of whether you think about it or not. So don’t let this stop you from living your actual life.
Thankfully, these fears are states of mind, and you can control or eliminate them. It’s up to you to replace these fears with alternative thinking. For instance, if you fear illness, focus on what you can do to stay healthy, like exercising, not smoking, or eating well. Or, if you fear criticism, decide not to care what other people think because your decision is ultimately the one that matters the most.
Is It Worth Reading Think and Grow Rich?
This classic personal development and self-help book is based on Hill’s research and interviews with over 500 successful individuals, including Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford. The book has sold millions of copies worldwide and has influenced countless people to achieve success in various aspects of life.
The book focuses on the importance of mindset, goal setting, and personal development in achieving success. It presents the “13 principles of success” and provides numerous examples and anecdotes to illustrate these principles. Whether “Think and Grow Rich” is worth reading depends on your interests and preferences. If you are looking for a book that offers timeless wisdom, practical advice, and insights into the mindset of successful people, you may find this book valuable. However, some readers might find the writing style difficult to follow.
Is Think and Grow Rich still relevant?
Yes, “Think and Grow Rich” is still relevant today, despite being written in 1937. The book’s core principles, such as the power of a positive mindset, goal setting, and personal development, remain applicable to modern life. Many successful entrepreneurs and individuals still cite the book as a significant influence on their success.
To make the most of “Think and Grow Rich,” consider these points:
- Adapt the principles to your own life and circumstances.
- Look past any outdated or culturally biased content and focus on the core principles and concepts.
- Combine the wisdom from the book with other personal development resources to create a more comprehensive and modern approach to success.
10 Important Points From Think and Grow Rich
Here are 10 important points from “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill:
- The power of thought: Your thoughts are powerful, and what you focus on can influence your actions and outcomes.
- The importance of a burning desire: Having a strong passion for success and a clear goal is crucial for achieving it.
- The role of faith: Believing in yourself and your abilities, even when faced with challenges, is essential for success.
- The significance of specialized knowledge: Acquiring specialized knowledge in your field can give you a competitive advantage.
- The power of imagination: Visualizing your desired outcome can help you achieve it.
- The importance of persistence: Persistence in pursuing your goals despite setbacks and failures is key to achieving success.
- The value of a mastermind group: Surrounding yourself with a supportive and knowledgeable group of individuals can help you achieve your goals.
- The impact of Fear: Fear can hold you back from success, but you can overcome it through courage and action.
- The significance of decision-making: Making clear and definite decisions can help you achieve your goals faster.
- The importance of taking action: Taking consistent and purposeful action is crucial for achieving success.
Personal Review
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill is one of the most recommended readings for people who have achieved great things today. At the beginning of the book, Napoleon Hill speaks about the secret of success. This book achieved a bestseller position and sold massive copies. That way, people get excited about the book.
So it tells us exactly what to do. It’s a little piece of treasure. If you haven’t read it, I highly suggest it. It’s cool because you’re trying to discover Napoleon’s secret from beginning to end. Once you have read and used the 13 principles of this book, you will find out the secret to success.
Personal rating: 4.7/5
The book focuses on your mind and how to focus on being positive and looking for opportunities by having this mindset. In my opinion, these are the best chapters in the book. The number one best chapter is the desired chapter, whose main idea is that the desire to achieve your goal will carry you.
Learn more: 15 Study Notes From Think And Grow Rich
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Table of Contents
