Creative Engineer - "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill

Think and Grow Rich! by Napoleon Hill is a classic motivational book inspired by Andrew Carnegie. It was published in 1937, at the end of the Great Depression.

Think and Grow Rich! is founded on The Law of Success, an earlier work that was the result of more than twenty years of research. Hill was in close association with high achieving individuals with great wealth - people worth taking the time to study.

At Carnegie's insistance, Hill studied the characteristics of these great achievers and developed fifteen "laws". Anyone could achieve great success if they studied and mastered all fifteen laws.

According to one publisher, the book has now sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. The newest version of Think and Grow Rich has been on the BusinessWeek Best-Seller List for paperback business books for seventeen consecutive months as of September 2006.

Available on this site to all members is the original 1937 version of Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich" in PDF format. There are 260 pages of fascinating reading that will undoubtedly take you light years closer to your ultimate goals.

I did find a few elements of the book somewhat refreshing, and as a woman, highly amusing. Hill uses the word "ether" to express his understanding of a spiritual universal intelligence. It's a concept with a great deal of depth and mysticism so I was surprised to be reading this in a book that's 70 years old. Surprised, but not disappointed.

"Ether", as defined in Dictionary.com in Physics, it's described as, "An all-pervading, infinitely elastic, massless medium formerly postulated as the medium of propagation of electromagnetic waves." Napoleon Hill believes we are all spiritually connected through the Ether. There are newer and just as fantastic (as in out of this world) scientific theories which corroborate his theory - something I'll tell you about in detail in the near future.

Hill did try really hard not to be too much of a chauvenist. I'm quite sure he was ahead of his time in his consideration of where women fit. As an example, here is an excerpt from Chapter 16 which best expresses his attitudes as they fit with his time:

"Bald-headed men, for example, are bald for no other reason than their fear of criticism. Heads become bald because of the tight fitting bands of hats which cut off the circulation from the roots of the hair. Men wear hats, not because they actually need them, but mainly because 'everyone is doing it.' ... Women seldom have bald heads, or even thin hair, because they wear hats which fit their heads loosely, the only purpose of the hats being adornment."