Napoleon Hill: Think and Grow Rich Principle: FAITH
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
The Principles of Napoleon Hill
Think and Grow Rich
When Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich! in the 1930′s he expected the book to be a success and he expected to change the lives of many people, but he probably did not expect to change the entire personal success genre. From the book’s initial publication in 1937 until Napoleon Hill’s death in 1970, Think and Grow Rich! sold over 20 million copies. Since then sales have multiplied many times over. The book frequently hits best-seller lists, even in the 21st century. More importantly, however: the teachings have multiplied. Napoleon Hill’s philosophy can now be found repackaged in books, e-books, audio, video, and blogs, by the numerous authors who have taken Hill’s philosophy, expanded on it or scaled it down, and made it their own.
It is not surprising. More than 70 years after its first publication, Hill’s lessons are as timely as ever. In Think and Grow Rich! he has divided them into 13 principles to be mastered: Desire, Faith, Auto-suggestion, Specialized knowledge, Imagination, Organized planning, Decision, Persistence, the Power of the master mind, the Mystery of sex transmutation, the Subconscious mind, the Brain, and the Sixth sense.
Napoleon Hill was not a religious man, but he saw the value of Faith and considered it next only to Desire in achieving success.
What Hill calls Faith is in fact a type of self-confidence that borders on religiosity. It was a principle that he once learnt from his mentor, the steel magnate millionaire Andrew Carnegie.
“What happens when a man knows what he wants, has a plan, puts it into action and meets with failure?” a young and inexperienced Hill once asked Carnegie. “Doesn’t that destroy his confidence?”
Carnegie replied: “I believe that every failure carries within it—in the circumstances of the failure itself—the seed of an equivalent advantage. If you examine the lives of truly great leaders, you will discover that their success is in exact proportion to their mastery of failures. Life has a way of developing strength and wisdom in individuals through temporary defeat.”
“Most people aren’t going to believe that every failure has an equivalent advantage when they are overcome with the adversity,” Hill said.“What does one do if the experience destroys one’s self-confidence?”
“The best way to guard against being overwhelmed by failure,” said Carnegie, “is to discipline the mind to meet failure before it arrives.”
To this end, disciplining the mind to meet failure before it arrives, Hill developed a self-confidence formula in five steps to be committed to memory and repeated aloud. But, more importantly, Hill felt that Faith would come on its own two whomever mastered the other twelve of his principles.
Whether that is true or not, the importance of psychology, in the shape of self-confidence, encouragement and positive language, for achievement is well-known today.