Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich

!?Napoleon Hill’s Mastermind Principle

Nine years before Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich, he identified and explained the character traits, behaviors, and beliefs that came to be known as the “17 Principles of the Science of Success.”

Napoleon Hill was born in 1883 in Wise County, Virginia. He began his writing career at age 13 as a “mountain reporter” for small town newspapers and went on to become America’s most beloved motivational author. His work stands as a monument to individual achievement and is the cornerstone of modern motivation. His most famous work, Think and Grow Rich, is one of the best-selling books of all time. Hill established the Foundation as a nonprofit educational institution whose mission is to perpetuate his philosophy of leadership, self-motivation, and individual achievement.

“Whatever success I may have attained I owe, entirely, to the application of your 17 fundamental principles of the Law of Success. I believe I have the honor of being your first student.” — William Wrigley, Jr., Founder, The Wrigley Company

“By applying many of the 17 fundamentals of Law of Success philosophy we have built a great chain of successful stores. I presume it would be of no exaggeration of fact if I said that the Woolworth Building might properly be called a monument to the soundness of these principles.” — F.W. Woolworth, Founder, Woolworth stores

Below are the 17 fundamental principles of the Laws of Success in PDF form for individual download.

Principle 1: Definite Major Purpose

The Value of Goals

His success has come from setting them, reaching them and setting them again.

Bill Lee is a handsome, personable, energetic man of 48 who set his goal to be worth a million dollars by age 40. He achieved his goal at 39. Today he is rich by most people’s standards. And he has good things to say about money.

The thing that’s beautiful about wealth is that it offers you so many more options in life,” he says. “If you’re generous, you can be more so. If you have strong social values, you can support projects that help other people and your community.”

He believes that almost anyone can stop being a “slave” and can gain financial independence by learning to set goals. As a management consultant and teacher extraordinaire, he emphasizes this point in seminars and conferences all over the country, as well as in his national newsletter for the builders supply industry, People and Profit$.

Lee, a Georgia native, graduated from Emory University in Atlanta with a degree in psychology. He got a taste for teaching entrepreneurship on his first job out of college, working for Atlanta Newspapers, Inc.

His office taught young carriers the principles of free enterprise and trained them to keep their buying, selling and collecting records accurately and to deliver the best possible service to the customers of the Atlanta Journal.

Looking for Success:

Also during that time he was introduced by a friend to a dynamic seminar speaker who stressed the power of setting goals for success in life.

“I couldn’t sleep all night after attending that seminar,” Lee says. His mind was opened to the possibilities of increasing his own productivity and income, and soon he had moved to another company, one where he could work on commission.

Bill Lee had had a truck-driving acquaintance with his father’s hardware and building supply company as he was growing up, but the new company he joined, GAF Corp., was his real career introduction to the building supply industry.

The GAF job began for Lee a long term relationship with the people who own, manage and work in that industry. And he found a special love-with the Smaller, independent supply houses which continues today. Lee recalls that GAF didn’t offer their salespeople training at that time, other than to show them the products and prices, so he read everything he could find-Napoleon Hill and others-that would help him succeed in his new selling position.

He moved from Mobile, Ala., to Baltimore, doubling his income as he moved, and then back South again to become sales manager of the company’s Savannah (Ga.) district.

One of his best customers was a young company called Builder Marts, based in Greenville, S.C. He and GAF had given them superb service, and the president asked if he’d be interested in buying into the newly-formed company.

Lee jumped at the chance and calls Clarence Bauknight, Builder Marts founder, an extraordinary influence on his career.

“He was brilliant at goal setting,” Lee says, and he let every one of us know what the carrot looked like. Working with him was like getting a Ph.D. in finance.”

Bauknight used the team approach and understood the power of the reward system. When the company did well, everybody did. The pay of all his corporate officers was based on the same numbers.

Builder Marts in those early days added value to their products by providing seminars to teach their customers how to be better business people and to teach small independent building supply dealers how to compete with the national chains.

Teaching Others

The company began growing rapidly, and by 1986, when Lee left to pursue his own private consulting goals, sales had reached $650 million.

Since leaving Builder Marts to form his own company, Lee Resources, Inc., Bill Lee has concentrated on teaching other people to do the things he’s learned will work through the years.

His company teaches sales and management seminars, offers management consulting and develops highly creative training and educational materials.

Lee says he was influenced by Napoleon Hill’s searching out “keys” and “clues” to success through his interviews with successful men.

“It motivated me to start looking for that kind of thing in my own work,” he says. Now he shares what he has learned with his clients.

One of his favorite experiences is getting 30 people in a room and talking with them about taking care of their customers. He thinks the pendulum has swung as far as it can in the wrong direction when it comes to serving customers, and now it’s coming back.

He believes customer satisfaction is highly measurable. During his 18 years with Builder Marts, five of which were spent in the computer division, he fell under the spell of measuring progress of all kinds.

Some people talk of “intangibles.” Lee believes almost everything positive can and ought to be counted and rewarded. In his seminars he teaches managers that it’s possible to quantify the “right” employee behavior — the kind you want to see more often in your place of business — such as:

• A salesperson calling a customer by name
• Suggestions for complementary products — “We have your paint. Do you need brushes, rollers, drop cloths, or a ladder?” — that decrease the number of one-item tickets
• Walking, not pointing, a customer to a product he or she can’t locate in the store
• Sensitivity to a customer’s feelings about smoking and other personal habits

It’s hard for employees to exhibit “right” behavior, though, if managers don’t let them know what they expect from them. Too many employees, he says, don’t know what to do to get a feather in their caps.

He tells managers to “Tell your people what you expect. Then Inspect what you Expect-and celebrate together when things go right … When you meet your goals, give out bonuses or throw a party.”

(Rewarding “right” behavior is another area where Lee follows Napoleon Hill’s precepts. Another method he suggests to managers is using a “token” system for rewarding effective employees. They can earn a half day or more off, or a cash bonus, by collecting enough of them.)

Lee’s firm gives managers who attend its seminars an unusual opportunity to hear what their customers think of the service they get in their stores. After the seminar, Lee will contract with a third party firm to interview a company’s customers and ask them to rate the service they received on their last visit and tell why they rated it. Lee says follow-up by the managers themselves is essential when they attend seminars.

“In the seminar itself, a leader can take students from ignorance to knowledge. But they’ve got to take it from knowledge to practice and from practice to habit.”

Lee’s interest in the conceptual part of selling and the validity of setting goals, meeting them and then setting new ones hasn’t dimmed through the years. And his belief that you can make a million-or two or three-if you set that as your goal is as strong as ever.

Principle 2: Mastermind Alliance

A mastermind alliance involves two or more people who work in perfect harmony for the attainment of a definite purpose.

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_2.pdf

Principle 3: Pleasing Personality

Your personality is your unique trademark. It determines your success or your failure in selling yourself. It consists of more than 30 factors, all under your control. The most important factor is your mental attitude, which must be positive to attract others to you. (PDF; 288 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_3.pdf

Principle 4: Applied Faith

Faith is awareness of, belief in, and harmonizing with the universal powers. A state of mind which must be active not passive, to be useful in achieving lasting success. Close the door to fear behind you and you will quickly see the door of faith open before you. Fear is nothing more than a state of mind, which is subject to your own direction and control. Faith will not bring you what you desire, but it will show you the way to go after it for yourself. (PDF; 100 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_4.pdf

Principle 5: Go the Extra Mile

Render more and better service than you are paid for, and sooner or later you will receive compound interest from your investment. It is inevitable that every seed of useful service you sow will sprout and reward you with an abundant harvest. (PDF; 409 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_5.pdf

Principle 6: Create Personal Initiative

One of the biggest benefits from going the extra mile is the emphasis it requires you to place on personal initiative. This chapter will round out your understanding of personal initiative, and through example it will show you how to multiply that quality in yourself. (PDF; 317 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_6.pdf

Principle 7: Build a Positive Mental Attitude

A positive mental attitude is the single most important principle of the science of success. You will depend upon it in everything you do. You can’t get the maximum benefit out of the other sixteen principles without understanding and employing PMA. (PDF; 317 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_7.pdf

Principle 8: Control Your Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm changes lives. Enthusiasm bears the same relationship to your PMA and your progress toward success as gasoline to a car’s engine; it is the fuel that drives things forward. In working on your PMA, you will learn to control your mind. (PDF; 410 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_8.pdf

Principle 9: Enforce Self-Discipline

The power of the will. Earlier chapters have placed heavy emphasis on the importance of taking control of your mind. This control is pivotal to your personal initiative, positive mental attitude, and controlled enthusiasm. Self-discipline is the process that ties all these efforts together for you. (PDF; 424 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_9.pdf

Principle 10: Think Accurately

Think of your mind as a piece of land. Through diligent, planned work, it can be cultivated into a beautiful and productive garden. Or it can lie fallow, overrun by weeds sprouting from seed carried by passing birds and the wind. (PDF; 329 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_10.pdf

Principle 11: Control Your Attention

By adopting a definite major purpose, you have selected an object on which you have to focus your controlled attention. Forget the old saying “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” You have to put all your eggs in one basket and concentrate your attention on protecting that basket and getting it to the market. (PDF; 402 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_11.pdf

Principle 12: Inspire Teamwork

Teamwork as a model for business. Cooperation, like love and friendship, is something you get by giving. There are many travelers on the road that leads to happiness. You will need cooperation, and they will need yours. (PDF; 320 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_12.pdf

Principle 13: Learn from Adversity and Defeat

Your attitude toward defeat. Throughout this book I’ve reminded you to look for the seed of an equivalent benefit in every defeat you experience. This isn’t always easy when you’ve suffered a setback, but it is an important part of the science of personal achievement. (PDF; 413 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_13.pdf

Principle 14: Cultivate Creative Vision

Creative Vision Is Needed Today

Creative vision requires you to stimulate your imagination to work toward your definite major purpose and to put the results of that imagination to work. Expressed by people unafraid of criticism, creative vision is responsible for the shape of civilization today. It has brought every advancement in thought, science, and mechanics that allows our current standard of living. It inspires you to pioneer and experiment with new ideas in every field. It is always on the lookout for better ways of doing things. Creative vision belongs only to people who have the habit of going the extra mile, for it recognizes no nine-to-five working hours and it isn’t concerned with monetary rewards. Its aim is doing the impossible.

This chapter will give you great examples of creative vision and show you how to understand the process by which it works so that you can apply it in your own life.

Synthetic Imagination

Imagination, like reasoning, takes two forms: synthetic and creative imagination. Each can contribute to the betterment of your own life and the world around you through creative vision. Synthetic imagination combines previously recognized ideas, concepts, plans, or facts in a new way or puts them to new use. An excellent example of synthetic imagination is Edison’s invention of the light bulb. He began with one recognized fact that other people had discovered: A wire could be heated by electricity until it produced light. The problem was that the intense heat quickly burned the wire out. The light never lasted more than a few minutes.

Edison failed more than ten thousand times in his attempt to control this heat. When he found the method, it was by applying another common fact which had simply eluded everyone else. He realized that charcoal is produced by setting wood on fire, covering it with soil, and allowing the fire to smolder until the wood is charred. The soil permits only enough air to reach the fire to keep it burning without blazing. When Edison recognized this fact, his imagination immediately associated it with the idea of heating the wire. He placed the wire inside a bottle, pumped out most of the air, and produced the first incandescent light. It burned for eight and a half hours. Edison’s creative vision depended on several important principles of the science of personal achievement. He applied the habit of going the extra mile because he labored without immediate pay. He worked with definiteness of purpose and was inspired by applied faith to carry on with his work though an incredible number of failures that would have broken most people.

Finally he applied the mastermind principle by assembling a team of skilled chemists and mechanics to perfect his invention, finding the right kind and thickness of wire, the right quantity of air to leave in the bulb, the best way to construct the bulb, so that his invention took on the most efficient form possible. Synthetic imagination does not depend on having tremendous personal advantages. Edison had spent only three months in grade school, had supported himself for many years as a telegrapher, and was fired from almost every job he held. He began to lose his hearing early on and eventually became almost completely deaf. But he turned his life around through definiteness of purpose, the habit of going the extra mile, and applied faith.

Thomas Stemberg was a successful executive in the grocery business. Working with a Connecticut-based chain, he opened a string of high-volume mega supermarkets that offered consumers huge selections at low prices. The stores were very successful, and Stemberg was building a sterling reputation in his business. But he wasn’t satisfied. He saw the prosperous grocery megastores and wondered if the megastore concept couldn’t be applied to something else. He wanted to start a large business in a big market underserved by modern distribution methods, offering customers a good value. He formed a mastermind alliance with Leo Kahn, the man who had pioneered the grocery megastores, and in 1986 he opened Staples, the first mega-business-supply store.

Stemberg’s idea was so smart, so right that it immediately inspired competitors like Office Depot and OfficeMax, to revolutionize the business supply industry. Despite the competition, Staples surpassed even Stemberg’s ambitious expectations. In just seven year’s sales exceeded one billion dollars. Thomas Stemberg didn’t invent the superstore idea, but he applied it to a market that had been quiet and humdrum for decades. He developed a definite plan for attaining his goal; he formed a mastermind alliance with Kahn, the man who understood the concept best; he put his plan into action with applied faith; and he went the extra mile by offering customers more and better service than they could get anywhere else. Synthetic imagination puts the entire sum of human knowledge at your disposal, but like any other part of the science of success, it requires your dedication to making your vision into reality.

Creative Imagination

Creative imagination has its base in the subconscious. It is the medium through which you recognize new ideas and newly learned facts. All your efforts to impress your definite major purpose on your subconscious work to stimulate your creative imagination. F. W. Woolworth was working as a clerk in a hardware store. He was, at that point, simply determined to be a good and valuable employee. When his boss complained about piles of out-of - date goods that weren’t selling, Woolworth’s imagination went to work. “I can sell those items,” he told his boss, and with his employer’s permission, he set up a table in the store, laid out all of the dud merchandise, and priced everything at ten cents. The stock sold remarkably fast, and soon the owner was searching for anything he could lay his hands on to put on that table, which became the most profitable spot in the store. Woolworth had the faith to apply his new idea to an entire store; his boss didn’t. The Woolworth chain of five-and-dimes quickly spread across the nation, earning him a fortune. His former boss once commented, “Every word I used in turning that man’s offer down has cost me about a million dollars I might have earned.” Woolworth was so committed to his then-modest purpose of being a valuable employee that his imagination was ready to back up his commitment with powerful ideas. He certainly went the extra mile for his boss, but because that man didn’t have the vision that Woolworth had, other investors formed Woolworth’s mastermind alliance and profited from it.

Creative Vision Goes Beyond Imagination

Creative vision is more than an interest in material things; it is a commitment to a better future. Synthetic imagination springs from experience and reason; creative imagination springs from your commitment to your definite purpose. Creative vision depends heavily upon creative imagination, but it is also more than that. Imagination recognizes limitations, handicaps, and opposition; creative vision rides over these as if they did not exist, for it has its base in Infinite Intelligence.

One of the purest examples I know of creative vision is illustrated by the story of Dr. Elmer Gates. Gates was an inventor who worked at the same time as Edison, but his methods and background were very different. He was a highly trained scientist, and his patents actually outnumbered Edison’s two to one. Gates applied creative vision in a remarkably simple process. He would enter a soundproof room, sit down at a table with pencil and paper, and turn off the lights. He then concentrated his thoughts on a particular problem and waited for the ideas that he needed for its solution.

Sometimes ideas flowed to Gates immediately; sometimes he had to wait for as much as an hour before they came. Occasionally nothing happened. At other times he perceived solutions to other problems that he hadn’t even been thinking about.

Dr. Gates’s creative vision transcended imagination because he had developed it into a faculty he could call upon at will. Creative vision produces results, not alibis.

Creative Vision Is Needed Today

There are countless calls for creative vision in the world today.

• We need forms of energy that do not pollute or drain our environment.
• We need schools that capture the attention of our young people and teach them to better themselves.
• We need cures and vaccines for terrible diseases that threaten the earths people.
• We need people who can show small business how to use and profit from rapidly changing technology.
• We need plans for controlling the cost of health care and making it affordable for every honest worker without destroying the incentive of the professionals who provide it.

There is both challenge and opportunity in these needs, and I raise them only to start you thinking about the scope of the possibilities for creative vision. There is a place in America for every person who can render any type of useful service and is willing to render it with the right mental attitude. If you have creative vision, you will recognize this and profit from it. You will never complain of a lack of opportunity. Great leaders of every generation in this country began their careers in humble occupations. Andrew Carnegie was a bobbin boy in a textile mill. W. Clement Stone was a newsboy. Harry Truman was a haberdasher. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had to become a law secretary when she graduated from law school because judges couldn’t imagine hiring a woman clerk, yet now she sits on the Supreme Court. It makes little difference where you begin. The important thing to ask is: Where are you going? What motive inspires you to give your best? Are you willing to go the extra mile? Are you a clock-watcher, eager for the day to end? Or do you look for the opportunity to make yourself indispensable to others?

These are the questions you must ask yourself. If you have creative vision, you can answer them. You know where you are going, you know what you desire, and you know that life never lets you get something for nothing without eventually forcing you to pay more for it than it is worth.

When you have creative vision, you know that you can succeed only by helping others to succeed, and you know that it isn’t necessary for anyone to fail in the process.

Creative vision lets you make decisions quickly. And it lets you change those decisions as soon as you realize a mistake has been made. It frees you from fear of others, for it makes you feel at peace with yourself in your knowledge that you are fair and honest. It’s a common human trait to envy people who have attained success, looking at them only in the moments of their triumph and forgetting the prices they had to pay. Often we suspect that they owe their success to some sort of pull, luck, or dishonesty.

But creative vision makes you keenly aware of the price of personal achievement because you yourself know its labors. You understand the benefits of sharing your blessings, experiences, and opportunities with others; you know that your success actually depends on it. If you feel the need for a creative vision in your life, you can begin to develop it by getting on better terms with your own conscience, inspiring yourself with greater self-reliance, providing yourself with a definite major purpose, and keeping your mind so busy with that purpose that you have no time left for fear and doubt. Nothing will happen in your life that you do not inspire by your own initiative. Creative vision is the power which inspires the development of that personal initiative.

Principle 15: Maintain Sound Health

Effective mind-body stimulants. You want to get the greatest vigor and fullest use from your body. You can do this if you understand two important points: 1. Your body and mind are one, effectively a mind-body. 2. Your mind-body is, in turn, at one with nature. (PDF; 340 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_15.pdf

Principle 16: Budget Your Time and Money

Time and money are precious resources, and few people striving for success ever believe they possess either one in excess. Understanding how you use them is an important part of evaluating your progress toward success and analyzing what may be holding you back. (PDF; 433 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_16.pdf

Principle 17: Use Cosmic Habitforce

You are where you are and what you are because of your established habits. The aim of this book has been to force you to examine those habits and to teach you ways to change them. To do this, you need to understand and apply a universal principle I call cosmic habitforce. (PDF; 433 KB)

SEE: http://worldclassadvisors.com/pdf/napoleon_hill_principle_17.pdf