The Law of Success

The Law of Success Napoleon Hill — The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons (1928) English Summary | KönyvKlub

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Opening: The Story Hill Told for Thirty Years

In 1908, a young journalist named Napoleon Hill sat down with Andrew Carnegie for what was supposed to be a magazine profile. According to Hill's own account, the interview that began at four in the afternoon did not end at eight o'clock. Carnegie kept talking. They went through the night. Sometime before dawn, the steel magnate put a direct question to his young visitor: would Hill be willing to spend twenty years of his life, at his own expense, researching what makes people successful, interviewing the great industrialists of the age, and organizing those findings into a philosophy that any ordinary person could use?

Hill claims Carnegie held a stopwatch behind his back. He gave Hill exactly sixty seconds to decide. Hill said yes before the time ran out. Carnegie then, Hill says, smiled and revealed that if the answer had not come within the minute, he would have withdrawn the offer entirely. Hesitation, Carnegie believed, was evidence of weak character.

This story became the founding myth of Napoleon Hill's career. He told it at lectures across the United States, printed it in promotional material, and embedded it in the opening pages of the 1928 edition of The Law of Success. It is a great story. It is almost certainly not true, or at least not true in the form Hill told it.

Contemporary historians and Carnegie scholars have found no documentary evidence of any formal agreement between Carnegie and Hill. No letter of endorsement survives from the steel magnate. Carnegie died in 1919, more than two decades after the alleged meeting, and Hill never produced a single piece of paper bearing Carnegie's signature or his authorization. Some biographers classify the encounter as pure invention. Others think a real but ordinary meeting grew, over years of retelling, into something unrecognizable. What is documented: Hill did dedicate the 1928 book to Carnegie, also acknowledged Henry Ford and Edwin C. Barnes, and listed over one hundred prominent Americans whose lives he had studied. Judge Elbert H. Gary, then chairman of U.S. Steel, genuinely reviewed the material and was preparing to license the course for delivery to the Corporation's entire workforce at an estimated cost of $150,000. That plan collapsed when Gary died, but the endorsement was real. The intentions were real.