Think and Grow Rich

Think and Grow Rich

*Napoleon Hill*

In the winter of 1908, a young journalist named Napoleon Hill sat across from Andrew Carnegie in the steel magnate's Pittsburgh study, notebook open, pencil in hand. He had been granted the interview to write a profile. What he got instead changed his life -- and, Hill would argue, the trajectory of American ambition itself. Carnegie, the canny Scotsman who had built the largest steel empire in the world, leaned forward and posed a question that was really a challenge: would Hill be willing to spend twenty years -- without pay, living on his own resourcefulness -- interviewing the most successful people in America and distilling their philosophy into a form any ordinary person could use? Carnegie had already embedded the core idea into the conversation, watching to see if Hill would notice. Hill recognized it. He said yes before a minute had passed.

What followed was twenty-five years of research, hundreds of interviews with the likes of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John D. Rockefeller, Charles M. Schwab, and F. W. Woolworth, and ultimately a book published in 1937 that would sell over one hundred million copies and become one of the most influential texts on success ever written. Hill's central claim was audacious: that wealth is not primarily a function of capital, connections, or luck, but of thought. That the invisible impulse in your mind -- if properly directed and sustained -- is more powerful than any amount of starting money or family advantage. That before a man ever deposits a dollar in a bank, he has already deposited it in his mind.