Napoleon Hill spent 20 years studying the richest men in America. What he found changed how the world thinks about success.

Published June 2026  ·  6 min read  ·  Personal development

In 1908, a young journalist named Napoleon Hill sat down with Andrew Carnegie — the steel magnate worth what would today be several hundred billion dollars — and came away with a commission that would consume the next two decades of his life. Carnegie wanted Hill to interview the most successful people in America and distill their secrets into a philosophy anyone could use.

The result, published in 1937, was Think and Grow Rich. It has sold over 100 million copies. It has been cited by business leaders, athletes, and entrepreneurs across nine decades as a turning point in their lives. And yet most people who pick it up are surprised by what they find — it is far stranger, and far more profound, than its self-help reputation suggests.

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

The central premise is both simple and radical: wealth does not begin with money, strategy, or even hard work. It begins with a thought held with sufficient intensity and belief. Hill’s argument is that the subconscious mind, when properly directed, connects a person to opportunities, people, and resources that cannot be accessed through conscious effort alone.

The 13 principles

Hill organised his findings into 13 interconnected principles. They are not a checklist — they build on each other, and Hill intended them to be studied in sequence.

01

Desire

A burning, specific obsession — not a wish

02

Faith

Belief so complete it becomes expectation

03

Auto-suggestion

Feeding goals to the subconscious by repetition

04

Specialised knowledge

Deep expertise, not general education

05

Imagination

Both creative (new) and synthetic (combining)

06

Organised planning

Desire made concrete through action steps

07

Decision

Decide fast, change your mind slowly

08

Persistence

The most underrated success factor of all

09

Master Mind

A circle of aligned minds amplifies your own

10

Sex transmutation

Channelling intense energy into creative work

11

The subconscious

Plant goals through emotion and repetition

12

The brain

A broadcasting and receiving station for thought

13

The sixth sense

Intuition developed after mastering the rest

What makes it different

Most success books tell you what to do. Hill is interested in what to become. His argument is that the people Carnegie pointed him toward — Edison, Ford, Rockefeller, Schwab — were not simply harder workers or smarter planners than everyone else. They had developed a particular relationship with their own minds. They had learned to hold a goal so vividly and emotionally that their subconscious began working on it around the clock, surfacing ideas and drawing in the right people almost as if by magnetism.

The chapters that most readers return to are not the mystical ones but the practical ones — Persistence, Decision, and Organised Planning. Hill’s observation that successful people decide quickly and reverse themselves rarely has been validated repeatedly in business psychology. His point that most people give up precisely at the moment they are closest to success is haunting in its accuracy.

“Every failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent advantage.”

The chapters that raised eyebrows in 1937

Then there are the chapters that puzzled readers in 1937 and still do today — particularly his treatment of the brain as a literal transmitter and receiver of thought, and his concept of the Master Mind as a genuine merging of mental energies. Hill was writing before neuroscience existed as a discipline, and he reached for the most exciting technology of his era — radio — to explain what he had observed.

What is remarkable is how much of what he described as metaphor has since been confirmed as mechanism. The idea that minds in close collaboration produce something qualitatively greater than the sum of their parts is no longer philosophy — it is measurable. But that is a story for another post.

The verdict: Think and Grow Rich is not a book about money. It is a book about the architecture of a mind that attracts results. Read it for the chapters on desire, persistence, and decision-making. Approach the metaphysical chapters as the intuitions of a careful observer who lacked the scientific vocabulary to fully explain what he was seeing. That vocabulary now exists — and it largely proves him right.