The Secret to Success

The Secret to Success PLB — summary

A pilot who refused to go home

In 1944, a young American fighter pilot was shot down over occupied France. His name was Chuck Yeager. He spent days dodging German patrols, then dragged his wounded navigator across the Pyrenees mountains into Spain. By the time he made it back to his squadron, the Army Air Corps had a plane ticket waiting for him. The rules were simple. Pilots who escaped from behind enemy lines went home. War over for them.

Yeager refused. He insisted on staying. He kept flying combat missions until the end of the war. A few years later, in 1947, he climbed into the Bell X-1 and became the first human being to break the sound barrier. He said something later that explains a lot about how lives bend toward greatness or away from it. He said that without realizing it, that was the moment he took charge of his own life. If he had quietly accepted the ticket home, he doubts the Air Force would have kept him around at all.

That tiny choice. That refusal to drift. That is the entire subject of this book.

Napoleon Hill spent half a century studying what separates the people who get what they want from the people who do not. He interviewed Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, and hundreds more. He distilled what he found into a system he called Positive Mental Attitude, or PMA. Years after his death, his foundation, working with his longtime collaborator Michael Ritt and the businessman W. Clement Stone, packaged the heart of that system into a short, brutally practical guide called Keys to Positive Thinking. Ten steps. No fluff. The promise on page one is direct: anyone of average intelligence and average circumstances can reach what any other person has reached, if they are willing to take possession of their own mind.