Napoleon Hill's Success Masters

by Napoleon Hill

  Well, the coach was a wise, old man and put his arms around this little boy, a slender, little shriveled up kid. And he said to him, “That’s right, Jesse, have a dream.” You’ll never go any higher than you can dream, and you’re through when you lose your dreams. So, have a dream. But said he, in order to reach your dreams, you’ve got to build a ladder through your dream. And the first rung of that ladder, he said, this ladder to your dreams, is determination. And the second rung on the ladder to your dreams is dedication. And the third rung on the ladder to your dreams is discipline. And the fourth rung is a creative, positive attitude. You see yourself as achieving your goal. You put the goal into the conscious mind and hold it there as an image, until, by a process of osmosis, it sinks into the subconscious and thereby becomes a part of you.

  There is a deep tendency for the human being to become precisely like that which he imagines himself as being. That is to say, you hold the image of what you intend to be and do in your mind and never let it go. You have the attitude that you can. You have to think you can.

  Well, now a lot of those kids went out of that meeting that day and they forgot all about this ladder to your dreams and everything. But there came a day in Berlin when Jesse Owens got a whole handful of gold medals. He ran the 100-meter faster than any human being in history. Likewise, he ran the 200-meter at a speed that nobody had ever achieved. His broad-jump record stood for 25 years. And when they established the American Hall of Athletic Fame, whose name was inscribed at the top? None other than the little, skinny kid from Cleveland, Jesse Owens, who had the attitude.

  ENTREPRENEUR TIP

  Check your attitude! Cultivating a positive attitude toward change can help you better tackle the tasks necessary to see the results of your hard work. Set some achievable, measurable goals for yourself, then set your attitude toward success. Approaching those tasks with the attitude that you can do it will help you actually DO it. So whether it’s improving your exercise habits or working toward being more assertive in meetings, believe you can … and you WILL.

  THINK POSITIVELY

  Now I know you get discouraged at times; you get frustrated. You get so you don’t believe in yourself. Sometimes you even come to the point almost where you’re willing to chuck it all and try something else, the heck with it, and so forth. And you might walk up to me and say, “Let me tell you the problem I’ve got.” Now you don’t need to do that, because I know what human problems are. And let me tell you this, there is no problem, no difficulty so tough that you—and I mean this with all my heart—that you can’t handle it, if you believe in yourself and if you believe that you can.

  So, the next thing that the positive thinker has to do is simply to think positively. Now broadly speaking, there are two ways in which you can think. Either you can think negatively or you can think positively. Now the negative thinker does a very dangerous thing. He constantly pumps out into the world around him negative thoughts, and he activates the world around him negatively.

  There is a law known as the law of attraction. Light attracts light. Birds of a feather flock together. Thoughts of a kind have a natural affinity. So if you constantly send out negative thoughts, in the very nature of the case, you draw negative results back to yourself. Like a man I met on the airplane the other day; I was flying from LaGuardia to O’Hare. And there was a guy, and I sat down next to him. He had a sour look on his face. I said to him, “How are you?”

  He said, “So what.” He said to me, “Well, I’ve got to ask how you are?”

  I said, “Well, I’m fine.”

  “Oh,” he said, “don’t talk that way, it makes me feel worse.”

  And I thought I’m going to have a very inspiring conversation, but finally he clammed up. So I picked up the paper and began to read it, and suddenly, I was interrupted by this man saying to me, without any introduction whatsoever, “Why does everything go wrong with me?” Well, now how in the world did I know? I had never even seen him up until that minute.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll tell you, my friend, why don’t you talk to me for 15 minutes so that I can get the color of your mind and maybe then I can give you a wise judgment on why everything goes wrong with you?” And he began to talk, not for 15 minutes, but for 40 minutes, and I never in all my life heard such a mass of negativism, inferiority, inadequacy, hate, and every old other kind of thing as poured out of this fellow’s mind.

  And I was about to give him a prescription to help him, when all of a sudden, he said, “Hold it, hold it.” Well, I wasn’t holding anything. I wasn’t saying anything. He said, “Hold it. I know why everything goes wrong with me.” He said, “I just saw it as clear as can be. I know why everything goes wrong with me.” I asked why. He said, “Because I am wrong myself.”

  I said, “Brother, you have had what is known in the trade as an insight.”

  It is a fact that in thinking never produces right results. It’s impossible. Only right thinking produces right results. Well, now the positive thinkers on the other hand, they are a great breed of human being. They are filled with hope, expectation, and optimism. They are a believer, and a believer always sweeps everything before themselves. And a positive thinker pumps out positive thoughts and attitudes into the world, and on the basis of the same law of attraction, draws back positive results.

  Now if you’re not a positive thinker, it’s perfectly possible to become one by reading positive literature, by associating with positive people, by practicing the techniques of belief and faith. You can do anything with yourself that you want to do, provided you want to do it badly enough. And when you become a positive thinker, you become a clear thinker and you become a person who knows that they can handle their difficulties.

  Like a boy, a friend of mine, he’s 16. He is some boy. He is the son of a friend of mine. Last spring when the vacation came along, he went to his father and he said, “Look, Dad, I don’t want to sponge on you anymore; I want to get a job of my own and make some money.”

  The father, after he recovered from his shock, said, “Well, son, that’s great, but the job market for boys your age is pretty tough right now. I don’t think you can get a job.”

  The boy said, “Dad, I have learned to be a positive thinker, and I have learned one thing, that where there is a desire, there is out there the satisfaction of that desire. And I have a desire for a job, therefore, there is a job out there that has a desire for me, and all I have to do by positive thought, is bring them together.”

  The father, despite himself, was impressed. He said, “Let’s see you work it.”

  So the boy got out the newspaper, and he read the want ads, and they found an ad that suited his specifications, and the advertisement said, “Wanted: A boy, 16.” That was his age. It read, “Show up at a certain address on 42nd Street tomorrow morning at eight o’clock and be prompt.” The boy was down there the next morning, certainly not at 8:15, not even at 8:00. He was down there at 7:45, only to find that there were 20 boys lined up, leading to the secretary of the man doing the hiring, which made him the 21st kid in line. He looked the boys all over and had to admit to himself they were good boys. He said if he were the boss, he would hire any one of them. But he didn’t want any one of them hired; he was a competitor out of the American free-enterprise system. This was his competition—this was his problem—how to get from the lowly 21st position over the heads of 20 good boys and get the boss’s attention. I said, “What did you do?”

  He said, “I thought, and I thought positively,” and he said, “I got an idea.” And when you do that, you’ll always get an idea, inevitably, indubitably. So, he took a piece of paper and he wrote something on it. He folded it up neatly, and he walked over to the secretary of the man doing the hiring. He bowed respectfully to her, and he said, “Miss, it is very important that your boss get this note immediately.”

  Now she was an old, hardened hand, and had he been an ordinary boy, she would have said, “Forget it, sonny, don’t bother me, get back in t
he 21st position where you belong.” But intuitively, she picked up the consciousness that here was an unusual boy and so grudgingly she said, “Show me the note.”

  He showed her the note, and she smiled. She immediately got up from her place, and she walked into the boss’s office, and she put the note down on his desk. He read it and he laughed out loud, for this is what it said, “Dear Sir, I am the 21st kid in line. Don’t do anything until you see me.”

  HARNESS THE POWER OF ENTHUSIASM

  So that’s it. First of all, you’ve got to know that you can change. I’ve got to know that I can change. I’m not satisfied with myself, not at all. I’m working at it, and I keep telling myself I can do better. And I believe I can. So can you.

  Then the next thing is, you’ve got to be a philosopher and a student of this thing known as the problem and to know that a problem is good for you, because it grows you strong.

  And then in the next place you develop an attitude that you can, if you think you can, provided you have the goal and hold the image. And then you become a positive, not a negative thinker.

  And then there’s just one more thing: You’ve got to be enthusiastic. What did you say when you got up this morning? “It’s going to be a great day?” Do you love your job? Now you’re probably not going to go back to work until tomorrow. But can you hardly wait to get there?

  Then there’s enthusiasm! Somebody asked me the other day, as though I knew anything about it, what is the greatest word in the English language? Well, I thought a minute and being a minister, I had to fall back on the Bible, so I said, “It’s love, because the Bible says, ‘And now abideth faith, hope and love, these three. But the greatest of these is love.’” And that makes faith and hope second and third. So, then what would be number four? Well, my nomination of the words in the English dictionary is the word enthusiasm. It sweeps everything before it, overcoming every resistance and difficulty, if you really got it. And it lifts a human being up and makes them really alive.

  You see, when a baby is born, it is full of enthusiasm. Did you ever see a negative baby? Well, how do they get to be negative? Because they live with negative people. The best thing you can do for your children is be positive and enthusiastic.

  Tomorrow morning when you wake up, throw back the bed covers with a majestic gesture of self-assertion and leap out of bed and say, “I feel wonderful.” Then go into your shower and as you take your bath, sing. Sing because it will wash out of the mind the old, tired, dead, listless, negative thoughts of yesterday as you wash your body with soap and water.

  Then getting out of that shower, get dressed and feel alive to your fingertips. Go downstairs to the dining room and sit down to breakfast.

  Then when you put a good breakfast under your belt, go out into your terrace or your breezeway or whatever you got out there and stand tall, reaching for the sky with the crown of your head and drink in the good old, crisp October air.

  Then standing there in the morning air, say, “Do you know who I am? Well, I’m going to tell you, I am an American businessperson. I am an American salesperson. I am an American professional, and I’m going downtown today in this great community of Bloomington and Minneapolis and St. Paul, and I’m going to deal in goods and services all day long; and I’m going to have the time of my life doing it.”

  Do these things and you’ll be a positive thinker who gets positive results, and you’ll have the time of your life, all your life.

  ENTREPRENEUR ACTION ITEM

  Use Six Principles for Overcoming Entrepreneurial Adversity

  Problems and adversity can be motivational, as Dr. Peale explained in this chapter. Why? Because, as he said, “it grows you strong.” In other words, a life lived without some adversity is going to be a stunted one. Make that adversity work for you. Every entrepreneur knows what it’s like to face problems and adversity. It comes with the territory, and includes cash flow challenges, fickle customers, belligerent investors, and unpredictable economic downturns. The best entrepreneurs tackle these one at a time without losing their stride or their passion and many secretly get their highest satisfaction from overcoming an impossible problem.

  For example, you probably didn’t know that one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs, Bill Gates, found that his first venture, Traf-O-Data, failed to make money because he couldn’t solve the technical problems quickly enough and selling to municipalities was a nightmare. Instead of making excuses, he credited his later success with Microsoft to the lessons he learned with Traf-O-Data.

  Also, most people don’t realize that Richard Branson has dyslexia, which made him a poor student, so he faced adversity well before his first startup effort. Yet he was able to use his dynamic and powerful personality to drive him to success. Today, Branson is known for over 400 companies, many technologically advanced, and he is one of the richest people in the United Kingdom.

  Adversity can often energize some people, almost to the super-human level, while others are driven to despair. It may start with a strong survivor instinct, rather than reverting to a victim mentality. Beyond this, here is a set of principles we recommend for every founder in the face of adversity.

  Maintain a Positive Attitude and Learn from Failure

  Thomas Edison called every failure an experiment (now it would be a pivot). He made no excuses for 10,000 light-filament failures. Challenged by his contemporaries, Edison soberly responded: “I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” He then succeeded.

  Build Relationships with Others

  An isolated position is hard to defend in the face of adversity. Successful entrepreneurs are not afraid to reach out and ask for help from peers and advisors. They communicate their goals, fears, and challenges without excuses and listen to feedback and guidance.

  Surround Yourself with Smarter People

  The best entrepreneurs get past the need to control every aspect of their business and make every decision. They solicit people who are strong, have more expertise in a specific area, and trust them to make decisions there. Adversity will melt away.

  Prioritize Your Health

  In the natural world of survival, unhealthy and unbalanced people most easily succumb to adversity. Smart entrepreneurs always find time for rest, outside physical activities, or even meditation. Working 20 hours a day, seven days a week does not solve all problems.

  Accept Adversity as a Norm Rather Than an Exception

  Some adversity is inevitable in every business, so it must be treated as any other unknown, rather than a crisis or the end of the world. Many entrepreneurs thrive in adversity and get satisfaction from solving challenges, compared to the relative boredom of business-as-usual.

  Practice Resilience By Refocusing on Your Strengths

  Researchers have concluded that human beings are born with an innate self-righting ability or resilience, which can be helped or hindered. Obsessing about problems and weaknesses hinders resilience, while identifying and building on individual strengths increases resilience and leads to success.

  One of the biggest myths that aspiring entrepreneurs tend to believe is that they can be successful doing only fun things. In reality, experienced leaders and entrepreneurs will tell you that it’s how you anticipate and handle the inevitable tough challenges that determine long-term happiness. If you try to avoid any risk and competition, you won’t be happy with the outcome.

  The entrepreneur lifestyle isn’t for those who can’t deal with risk and adversity. We can all benefit from the experiences of others. The best entrepreneurs don’t succeed by dodging challenges, but because of how they handle them.

  APPENDIX

  A Reader’s Guide to Napoleon Hill’s Success Masters

  From advice on habits to meditations on mindfulness, the writers and thinkers featured in Napoleon Hill’s Success Masters have shared some of the most evergreen advice on success with you. As you’ve likely noticed, their classic writings on what creates, supports, and sustains success all approach the topic
differently. But one narrative thread connects them all in a tapestry that gives you, the reader, a comprehensive road map to success: the thread of personal development. What makes you successful is … you. And you are the architect of your own success story.

  Now that you have had a chance to hear from some of the world’s foremost experts on success, you can start to apply those lessons to your own journey. To help you do that, the editors at Entrepreneur have designed a reader’s guide that will help you revisit the stories, anecdotes, and lessons from these Success Masters and think about them more deeply. The discussion questions below are designed to help you identify what speaks to you most in this book while, at the same time, help you identify what is most important to you about your own success journey. Feel free to use these discussion questions not just once, but often, as you move toward your own goals. Why often? Because everyone’s mileage may vary on the journey to success. What’s important to you today may be replaced by a new goal, idea, or priority down the road. That’s why the lessons here are timeless, and these questions are created to travel with you every step of the way.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  What author speaks to you the most at this particular moment in time?

  What advice can you apply to your own journey right now? Do you envision your answer changing over time? How about in the next year, or five years?

  What Success Master speaks to your own experiences? Why?

  If you could identify three key takeaways from each essay, what would they be? How do they apply to your own success journey?

  What is your favorite quote or concept in this book? Why?