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Think and Grow Rich
What It’s About
The 1937 book that launched the modern self-help industry. Napoleon Hill's 13 principles of success were distilled from 20 years of interviews with Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison. Mastermind, definite chief aim, organized planning. The single most influential personal-development book ever written.
Three Key Ideas
Desire as Directed Obsession
Wealth begins with a specific, burning desire held with the same intensity through years of apparent setbacks, not vague wishing or passive hoping.
The Master Mind Alliance
Coordinating multiple minds in harmony toward a shared purpose generates collective intelligence and power no single individual can match alone.
Conquering the Six Fears
Fear of poverty, criticism, and loss quietly erode ambition over years, and the only antidote is a clear, sustained decision to act despite them.
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Think and Grow Rich
*Napoleon Hill*
In the winter of 1908, by his own account, a young journalist named Napoleon Hill sat across from Andrew Carnegie, notebook open, pencil in hand. He had been granted the interview, he said, to write a profile. What he got instead changed his life, and, Hill would argue, the trajectory of American ambition itself. In Hill's telling, 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? Hill says Carnegie had already embedded the core idea into the conversation, watching to see if Hill would notice. Hill says he recognized it and said yes before a minute had passed. No independent record confirms the meeting, and historians doubt it took place.
What followed was, by Hill's account, more than twenty 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 millions of 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.
Who It’s For
- Anyone who wants a foundational framework for turning a specific goal into a concrete plan of action.
- Anyone who keeps stopping short of major ambitions and wants to understand why persistence matters more than circumstances.
- Anyone building a business or career and looking for principles on organizing people, knowledge, and effort effectively.
- Anyone whose thinking has drifted toward fear and resignation and who wants a disciplined method for reversing that pattern.
About the Author: Napoleon Hill
Napoleon Hill was an American author and advisor who spent decades researching what separates people who build lasting success from those who do not. He conducted hundreds of interviews with some of the most prominent industrialists and public figures of his era, including Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.
His work sits at the foundation of the modern personal-development genre. Think and Grow Rich, first published in 1937, remains one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century and continues to influence entrepreneurs, executives, and readers around the world.
