"Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill

Café 42's Book Selection

My dear beloved regulars,

When I underwent my burn-out two years ago, there were two things that were clear to me: first, that there was more to life and the Universe than meet the eye, meaning some kind of magic was at play in the physical tangible world, and, second, that I was done working my ass off for ridiculous amounts of money.

I was sure that there was a way, something I needed to change in the way I lived or thought to earn at least decent money, at best good money, without getting exhausted in the process. I refused the concept that some people were meant to be rich and other poor. I also knew that some people are blessed with the gift of easily earning money as others are with drawing, writing, fixing things, speaking foreign languages… And I wasn’t that kind of person so I had to find a way to learn that “trade” since I didn’t own it naturally and I went for it in the greatest library of all times, the Internet! As I was looking for guidance from spiritual teachers and coaches who were promoting the principles of manifestation and the law of attraction, I stumbled upon a short video from Bob Proctor who was saying that the book that truly changed his life was “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. He didn’t really explain what was in the book but the title said it all so I decided to buy it and see if it could change my life too. And, in some ways, it did for it made me look at life, money and success very differently, as something indeed achievable, still through hard work though. However, to tell the truth, for now I still think more than I grow as far as money is concerned…

Napoleon Hill was an american businessman, with lots of fortune ups and downs in his career, who, allegedly it seems, was “hired” in 1908 by Andrew Carnegie, who was an american industrialist and philanthropist of the end of the XIXth and early XXth, to write a book investigating the secret laws that govern the process of becoming rich and successful, interrogating more than five hundred wealthy people to find common links, a common laws, gather them to reveal and share them with the rest of the world. That book was released in 1935, a few years after the Great Depression, and Napoleon Hill’s point of view about the people of his time and economics is incredibly modern and still very accurate ninety years later.

In this book, regarded as the first self-development book ever written, Napoleon Hill very smartly mixes business ideas, spirituality and advertisment concepts for the latest ones were the heart of his own business. Indeed, one of his chapters is dedicated to very modern and inspiring marketing concepts to launch one’s independant business and it is still very relevant if you transpose his techniques into the digital world. In a nutshell, what he says is find your difference, your uniqueness, the way what you want to sell is different from any other similar one on the market, and advertise it to the people who you think might be interested to buy it. That’s marketing basis.

But what has made lots of people talk about that book, and make lots of money out of it as well, is Napoleon Hill’s concept, and basis of his whole theory, of “desire”… To succeed in achieving a goal, and getting rich in the process, you have to be driven by more than a dream, a burning desire. What on Earth Napoleon Hill meant by that?! I guess you have to have lived or be living it to be able to grasp it fully…