Back to “Think And Grow Rich”

I feel that it is valuable for a human being to re-think their life a couple of times a year. I’m choosing New Years, and the beginning of summer.

One thing that strikes me is that it is time for me to go back to the very first “Self Help” book that really captured my imagination. My mom used to play records of THE STRANGEST SECRET, THE GOLDEN KEY, PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS, ACRES OF DIAMONDS, and on and on. But the king of them all was and is THINK AND GROW RICH.

The story is that Andrew Carnegie enlisted Napoleon Hill to study success for decades, giving him letters of introduction to captains of industry like Ford and Edison. Hill said that over those decades he interviewed and studied hundreds of such people, boiling down their reported methods of success. This led to a series of best-selling books, most notably TAGR.

Is the story true? Hard to say. SOMETHING happened. The book was published while some of these people were still alive, and its hard to believe that one of them wouldn’t have said “I never met this guy” if it was a total lie. I’d also have to explain something even more critical:

In my opinion, and the opinion of countless successful people in different fields, from Octavia Butler to Bruce Lee and others, the principles work. Just…work. Could Hill have formulated it on his own? Possible. Why might he lie about it? Plausibly for the same reason that so many other brilliant people have created systems of thought, martial arts, philosophy, yoga and so on and attributed them…