Think and Grow Rich

Napoleon Hill published Think and Grow Rich in 1937, laying out thirteen principles he drew from years of studying industrialists, inventors, and salesmen. Its most durable idea is definiteness of purpose: a wish is not a goal until it is written down in specific terms, given a deadline, and read back often enough that it stops sounding strange. The second is the Master Mind, Hill’s term for two or more minds working in deliberate harmony toward a single aim, which treats a working group as equipment you assemble on purpose rather than a friendship that happens to be useful. The Henry Ford story Hill tells, in which Ford responds to an attempt to prove him uneducated by pointing out that he can summon people who know, carries the book’s real argument about specialized knowledge: knowing where knowledge lives beats trying to hold all of it yourself. It is worth reading with some skepticism, though. The prose is period motivational writing, Hill’s claim that Andrew Carnegie commissioned the project has never been documented, and the book asserts far more about thought shaping outcomes than it ever demonstrates. What holds up is the mechanical part, a written aim, a chosen group, and repetition as a way of installing something in a mind, and that is the part worth taking seriously here.