Transcription
Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought. Chapter 2.
Thoughts are things. The man who thought his way into partnership with Thomas A. Edison truly, thoughts are things, and powerful things when they are mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire for their translation into riches or other material objects.
Some years ago, Edwin C. Barnes discovered how true it is that you really can Think and Grow Rich. His discovery did not come about at once sitting. It came little by little, beginning with a burning desire to become a business associate of the great Thomas Edison. One of the chief characteristics of Barnes' desire was that it was definite. He wanted to work with Edison, not for him. Pay close attention to the story of how he turned his desire into reality, and you'll have a better understanding of the principles that lead to riches.
When this desire, or this thought, first flashed into his mind, he was in no position to act upon it. Two problems stood in his way. He did not know Mr. Edison, and he did not have enough money to buy a train ticket to West Orange, New Jersey, where the famed Edison laboratory was located. These problems would have discouraged the majority of people from making any attempt to carry out the desire. But his was no ordinary desire.
The inventor and the Edwin C. Barnes presented himself at Mr. Edison's laboratory and announced that he had come to go into business with the inventor. Years later, in speaking about that first meeting, Mr. Edison said about Barnes, "He stood there before me looking like an ordinary, but there was something in the expression of his face which conveyed the impression that he was determined to get what he had come after. I had learned from years of experience with men that when a man really desires a thing so deeply that he is willing to stake his entire future on a single turn of the wheel in order to get it, he is sure to win. I gave him the opportunity he asked for because I saw he had made up his mind to stand by until he succeeded."
Subsequent events proved that no mistake was made. It could not have been the young man's appearance that got him his start in the Edison office. That was definitely against him. It was what he thought that counted. Barnes did not get his partnership with Edison on his first interview. What he did get was a chance to work in the Edison offices at a very nominal wage.
Months went by. Nothing happened to bring nearer the goal that Barnes had set as his definite major purpose. But something important was happening in Barnes' mind. He was constantly intensifying his desire to become the business associate of Edison. Psychologists have correctly said, "When one is truly ready for a thing, it puts in its appearance." Barnes was ready for a business association with Edison, and he was determined to remain ready until he got what he was seeking. He did not say to himself, "Ah, well, what's the use? I guess I'll change my mind and try for a salesman's job." But he did say, "I came here to go into business with Edison, and I'll accomplish my goal if it takes the remainder of my life." He meant it.
What a different story people would tell if only they would adopt a definite purpose and stand by that purpose until it had time to become an all-consuming obsession. Maybe young Barnes did not know it at the time, but his Bulldog determination and his persistence in focusing on a single desire was destined to mow down all opposition and bring him the opportunity he was seeking.
When the opportunity came, it appeared in a different form and from a different direction than Barnes had expected. That is one of the tricks of opportunity. It has a sly habit of slipping in by the back door, and often it comes disguised in the form of misfortune or temporary defeat. Perhaps this is why so many people fail to recognize opportunity.
Mr. Edison had just perfected a new device known at that time as the Edison dictating machine. His salesmen were not enthusiastic about the machine. They did not believe it could be sold without great effort. Barnes saw his opportunity. It had crawled in quietly, hidden in a queer-looking machine that interested no one but Barnes and the inventor. Barnes knew he could sell the Edison dictating machine, and he told Edison so. Edison decided to give him his chance, and Barnes did sell the machine. In fact, he sold it so successfully that Edison gave him a contract to distribute and market it all over the nation.
Out of that business association, Barnes made himself rich in money, but he did something infinitely greater. He proved that you really can Think and Grow Rich. How much actual cash that original desire of Barnes was worth to him, I have no way of knowing. Perhaps it brought him two or three million dollars.
Editor's comment: Three million dollars in the early years of the 20th century would be comparable to more than 50 million dollars in terms of buying power at the beginning of the 21st Century. This is the end of the editor's comment. But the amount becomes insignificant compared with the greater asset he acquired: the definite knowledge that an intangible impulse of thought can be transmuted into material rewards by the application of known principles. Barnes literally thought himself into a partnership with the great Edison. He thought himself into a fortune. He had nothing to start with except knowing what he wanted and the determination to stand by that desire until he realized it.
Three Feet from Gold
One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when you're overtaken by temporary defeat. Every person is guilty of this mistake at one time or another. During the Gold Rush days, an uncle of my friend, R.U. Darby, was caught by a gold fever and he went West to Colorado to dig and grow rich. He had never heard that "more gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has ever been taken from the earth." He staked a claim and went to work with pick and shovel. After weeks of labor, he was rewarded by the discovery of the shining ore. He needed machinery to bring the ore to the surface. Quietly, he covered up the mine and returned to his home in Williamsburg, Maryland. He told his relatives and a few neighbors about the strike. They got together the money for the machinery and had it shipped. R.U. Darby decided to join his uncle, and they went back to work the mine.
The first car of ore was mined and shipped to a smelter. The returns proved they had one of the richest mines in Colorado. A few more cars of that ore would clear their debts, then would come the big killing in profits. Down went the drills, up went the hopes of Darby and uncle. Then something happened. The vein of gold ore disappeared. They had come to the end of the rainbow, and the pot of gold was no longer there. They drilled on desperately, trying to pick up the vein again, all to no avail. Finally, they decided to quit. They sold the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars and took the train back home.
The junk man called in a mining engineer to look at the mine and do a little calculating. The engineer advised that the project had failed because the owners were not familiar with fault lines. His calculations showed that the vein would be found just three feet from where the Darbies had stopped drilling, and that is exactly where it was found. The junk man took millions of dollars in ore from the mine because he knew enough to seek expert counsel before giving up.
Long afterward, Mr. Darby recouped his loss many times over when he made the discovery that desire can be transmuted into gold. The discovery came after he went into the business of selling life insurance. Never forgetting that he lost a huge fortune because he stopped three feet from gold, Darby profited by the experience. In his newly chosen field, he simply said to himself, "I stopped three feet from gold, but I will never stop because men say no when I ask them to buy insurance." Darby became one of a small group of men who sell over a million dollars in life insurance annually. He owed his stick-ability to the lesson he learned from his quit-ability in the gold mining business.
Before success comes in anyone's life, that person is sure to meet with much temporary defeat and perhaps some failure. When defeat overtakes a person, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what the majority of people do. More than 500 of the most successful people this country has ever known told me their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them. Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping you just when success is almost within reach.
Editor's comments: Napoleon Hill's Creed: "Every failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent success." was the inspiration for entrepreneur and motivational speaker Wayne Allen Root to write his book, "The Joy of Failure," published in the late 1990s. It not only tells Wayne's personal story of using his failures as stepping stones to success; he also recounts stories from other successful people which prove that the rich and famous got to be that way only because of what they learned from their failures. People such as Jack Welch, the hugely successful CEO of General Electric, who early in his career failed dramatically when a plastics plant for which he was responsible blew up. Billionaire Charles Schwab was a failure at school and university, flunking basic English twice due to a learning disability and then failed on Wall Street more than once before he thought of the idea that grew to make him very rich indeed. Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Clinton, Stephen Jobs, Donald Trump, and a host of other equally well-known achievers all had to fail in order to learn the lessons that ultimately made them successes. Every one of them was a failure, but none of them was defeated. Charles F. Kettering, who patented more than 200 inventions, including the automobile ignition, the spark plug, Freon for air conditioners, and the automatic transmission, said, "From the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college, he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails, maybe a thousand times. If he succeeds once, then he's in." These two things are diametrically opposite. "We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work. Failures are just practice shots." This is the end of the editor's comment.
A 50-Cent Lesson in Persistence
Shortly after Mr. Darby received his degree from the University of Hard Knocks, he witnessed something that proved to him that "no" does not necessarily mean "no." One afternoon, he was helping his uncle grind wheat in an old-fashioned mill. The uncle operated a large farm on which a number of sharecropper farmers lived. Quietly, the door was opened, and a small child, the daughter of a tenant, walked in and took her place near the door. The uncle looked up, saw the child, and barked at her roughly, "What do you want?" Meekly, the child replied, "My mom says to send her 50 cents." "I'll not do it," the uncle retorted. "Now, you run on home." But she did not move. The uncle went ahead with his work, not noticing that she did not leave. When he looked up again and saw her still standing there, he said, "I told you to go on home. Now go, or I'll take a switch to you." But she did not budge.
The uncle dropped a sack of grain he was about to pour into the mill hopper and started toward the child. Darby held his breath. He knew his uncle had a fierce temper. When the uncle reached the spot where the child was standing, she quickly stepped forward one step, looked up into his eyes, and screamed at the top of her voice, "My mom's gotta have that 50 cents!" The uncle stopped, looked at her for a minute, put his hand in his pocket, took out half a dollar, and gave it to her. The child took the money and slowly backed toward the door, never taking her eyes off the man whom she had just conquered.
After she had gone, the uncle sat down on a box and looked out the window into space for more than 10 minutes. He was pondering with awe over the whipping he had just taken. Mr. Darby too was doing some thinking. This was the first time in all his experience that he had seen a child deliberately master an adult. How did she do it? What happened to his uncle that caused him to lose his fierceness and become as docile as a lamb? What strange power did this child use that made her master of the situation? These questions flashed into Darby's mind, but he did not find the answer until years later, when he told me the story.
Strangely, the story of this unusual experience was told to me in the old mill, on the very spot where the uncle took his whipping. As we stood there in that musty old mill, Mr. Darby repeated the story and finished by asking, "What can you make of it? What strange power did that child use that so completely whipped my uncle?" The answer to his question will be found in the principles described in this book. The answer is full and complete. It contains enough details and instructions for you to understand and apply the same force that the little child accidentally stumbled upon. Keep your mind alert, and you will learn exactly what strange power came to the rescue of the child. You may catch a glimpse of the power in this chapter, or it may flash into your mind in some later chapter. If you stay alert to the possibility, somewhere you will find the idea that will quicken your receptive powers and place at your command this same irresistible power. It may come in the form of a single idea, or it may come as a complete plan or a purpose. It may even cause you to go back over your past experiences of failure or defeat, and in doing so, it may bring to the surface some lesson by which you can regain all that you lost through defeat.
After I had explained to Mr. Darby the power unwittingly used by the little child, he mentally retraced his 30 years as a life insurance salesman. As he did so, it became clear to him that his success was due in no small degree to the lesson he had learned from the child. Mr. Darby pointed out, "Every time a prospect tried to bow me out without buying, I saw that child standing there on the old mill, her big eyes glaring in defiance, and I said to myself, 'I've got to make this sale.' The better portion of all sales I have made were made after people had said no." He also recalled his mistake in having stopped only three feet from gold, but he said, "That experience was a blessing in disguise. It taught me to keep on keeping on, no matter how hard the going may be, a lesson I needed to learn before I could succeed in anything."
Mr. Darby's experiences were commonplace and simple enough, yet they held the answer to his destiny in life. In fact, to him, the experiences were as important as life itself, and he was able to profit from these two important experiences because he analyzed them and found the lesson they taught. But what if you don't see the events of your life as being experiences of such profound significance? And what about the young person who doesn't yet have even minor failures to analyze? Where and how will they learn the art of converting defeats into the stepping stones to opportunity?
That is exactly why this book was written. To answer those questions, to convey my answer, I have constructed 13 principles. These principles work individually or together as catalysts. The specific answer that you are looking for may already be in your own mind. Reading these principles may be the catalyst that causes your answer to suddenly come to you as an idea, a plan, or a purpose. One sound idea is all you need to achieve success. These 13 principles contain the best and most practical ways and means of creating ideas and success consciousness.
Before I go any further in the description of these principles, you should know this: "When riches begin to come, they come so quickly and in such great abundance that you will wonder where they've been hiding during all those lean years." This is an astounding statement, especially when you take into consideration the popular belief that riches come only to those who work hard and long. When you begin to Think and Grow Rich, you will observe that riches begin with a state of mind, with definiteness of purpose, with little or no hard work. What you need to know now is how to acquire the state of mind that will attract riches. I spent 25 years researching the answer to that question because I too wanted to know how wealthy men become that way. What you will learn is that as soon as you master the principles of this philosophy and begin to apply those principles, your financial status will begin to improve. Everything you touch will begin to transmute itself into an asset for your benefit. Impossible? Not at all.
One of the main weaknesses the average person suffers is too much familiarity with the word "impossible." We know all the rules that will not work. We know all the things that cannot be done. This book was written for those who seek the rules that have made others successful and are willing to stake everything on those rules. Success comes to those who become success conscious. Failure comes to those who allow themselves to become failure conscious. The object of this book is to help you learn the art of changing your mind from failure consciousness to success consciousness.
Another weakness is the habit of measuring everything and everyone by your own impressions and beliefs. Some of you reading this will have trouble believing that you can Think and Grow Rich because your thought habits have been steeped in poverty, misery, failure, and defeat. This kind of thinking reminds me of the story about the man who came from China to study at the University of Chicago. One day, President Harper met this young man on campus and stopped to chat with him for a few minutes. He asked what had impressed him as being the most noticeable characteristic of the American people. "Why," the student exclaimed, "the unusual shape of your eyes!" It's all a matter of perspective and habit. The same is true of your belief in what a person can achieve. If you have formed the habit of seeing life only from your own perspective, you may make the mistake of believing that your limitations are, in fact, the proper measure of limitations.
The Impossible Ford V8 Motor
When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block. Ford instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was drawn up on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine block in one piece. "Ford said, 'Produce it anyway.'" "But they replied, 'It's impossible.'" "'Go ahead,' Ford commanded, 'and stay on the job until you succeed, no matter how much time is required.'" So the engineers went ahead. Six months went by; nothing happened. Another six months passed, and still nothing. The engineers tried every conceivable plan to carry out the orders, but the thing seemed out of the question—impossible. At the end of the year, Ford again checked with his engineers, and again they told him they had found no way to carry out his orders. "Go right ahead," said Ford. "I want it, and I'll have it." They went ahead, and then, as if by a stroke of magic, the secret was discovered. The forward determination had won once more.
Henry Ford was a success because he understood and applied the principles of success. One of these principles is desire—knowing clearly what you want. Remember this Ford story as you continue reading this book. Pick out the lines in which the secrets of his stupendous achievement have been described. If you do this, if you can put your finger on those particular principles that made Henry Ford rich, you may equal his achievements in almost any calling for which you are suited.
Editor's comments: To those readers who may interpret Ford's actions as nothing more than obstinacy, the editors would point out that he was employing a technique that has become a common part of strategic planning in many industries, including aerospace, computers, medicine, and the military. When launching large, complicated, long-term projects, the planners often know that at certain points along the way, they will need components that simply do not yet exist. The fact that at the beginning there was no way to get from A to B does not deter them. There are many parts of the project they can get started on now, and they just assume that by the time they get to the point where they will need a technology or a device, they will have solved the problem of making it, and they have been proven right time and again. Stated simply, the technique is to clearly know what you want to accomplish, have faith in your ability to do it, and persist until you have accomplished your goal. This is the end of the editor's comment.
Why You Are the Master of Your Fate
When the famed English poet William Henley wrote the prophetic lines, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul," he should have informed us that the reason we are the masters of our fate, the captains of our souls, is that we have the power to control our thoughts. He should have told us that it is because, in some way, our brains become magnetized with the dominating thoughts that we hold in our minds, and it is as though our magnetized minds attract to us the forces, the people, and the circumstances of life that are in sync with our dominating thoughts. He should have told us that before we can accumulate riches and great abundance, we must magnetize our minds with intense desire for riches; that we must become money conscious until the desire for money drives us to create definite plans for acquiring it. But being a poet, Henley contented himself by stating a great truth in poetic form, leaving those who followed him to interpret the philosophical meaning of his lines.
Little by little, the truth has unfolded itself until I have come to know with certainty that the principles described in this book hold the secret of mastery over our economic fate—principles that can change your destiny. We are now ready to examine the first of these principles, and as we do, I ask you to maintain a spirit of open-mindedness. Remember, as you read, that these principles are not my invention, nor are they the invention of any one person. These principles have worked for literally millions of people. You too can put them to work for you and your own enduring benefit. You will find it easy, not hard, to do.
Some years ago, I delivered the commencement address at Salem College in Salem, West Virginia. I emphasized with so much intensity the need to have a burning desire that one of the members of the graduating class became completely convinced and made it a cornerstone of his own philosophy. That young man became a congressman and an important factor in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. He wrote me a letter in which he so clearly stated his opinion of the principle of desire outlined in the next chapter that I have chosen to publish his letter as an introduction to that chapter. It gives you an idea of the rewards to come.
"My dear Napoleon,
My service as a member of Congress having given me an insight into the problems of men and women, I am writing to offer a suggestion which may become helpful to thousands of worthy people.
In 1922, you delivered the commencement address at Salem College when I was a member of the graduating class. In that address, you planted in my mind an idea which has been responsible for the opportunity I now have to serve the people of my state and will be responsible, in a very large measure, for whatever success I may have in the future. I recall, as though it were yesterday, the marvelous description you gave of the method by which Henry Ford, with but little schooling, without a dollar, with no influential friends, rose to great heights. I made up my mind then, even before you had finished your speech, that I would make a place for myself, no matter how many difficulties I had to surmount.
Thousands of young people will finish their schooling this year, and within the next few years, every one of them will be seeking just such a message of practical encouragement as the one I received from you. They will want to know where to turn, what to do to get started in life. You can tell them because you have helped to solve the problems of so many, many people. There are thousands of people in America today who would like to know how they can convert ideas into money, people who must start from scratch, without finances, and recoup their losses. If anyone can help them, you can.
If you publish the book, I would like to own the first copy that comes from the press, personally autographed by you.
With best wishes, believe me,
Cordially yours,
Jennings Randolph"
Since that time in 1922, I watched Jennings Randolph rise to become one of the nation's leading airline executives, a great inspirational speaker, and a United States Senator from West Virginia. Thirty-five years after I made that speech, it was my pleasure to return to Salem College in 1957 and deliver the Baccalaureate sermon. At that time, I received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Salem College.
Editor's comments: As you begin the next chapter, the editors would like to reinforce the earlier statement that what you are reading is not just a collection of theories out of which you can cherry-pick what you like. The 13 principles of success were proven by the real-life experiences of the long list of famous successful people cited earlier by Napoleon Hill. His techniques are also practiced and endorsed by the contemporary experts and authors whom the editors mentioned following Hill's list. More than 60 million people have purchased copies of the book that you are now holding in your hands. If this book has proven to be that successful, surely you owe it to yourself to give it every chance to work for you too. Read it. Don't question it. Do it. If you don't, if you think that you know better than Napoleon Hill, if you decide to pick and choose the parts that you will believe or follow, then if you don't succeed, you will never know if your failure lies with this book or with you. This is the end of the editor's comments.