Think and Grow Rich
Napoleon Hill, 1937
Self-development Economics & business
Andrew Carnegie's fortune becomes a formula—desire, belief, persistence—in the 1937 self-help book that sold the secret of success. A brisk, aphoristic push of ambition and hope, with an undercurrent of dread about falling short.
Feels like hope and dread. About ambition.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy old-school ambition manuals and aphoristic advice about desire and persistence. The 1937 prose and the deliberately unnamed "secret" can feel dated and vague.
Why read it
It offers a compact look at an early success formula and the language of striving, useful if you want to see how ambition was sold in 1937.
A page from the book
The answer is repeated a hundred times and never once said aloud.
The secret to which I refer has been mentioned no fewer than a hundred times, throughout this book. It has not been directly named, for it seems to work more successfully when it is merely uncovered and left in sight, where THOSE WHO ARE READY, and SEARCHING FOR IT, may pick it up. That is why Mr. Carnegie tossed it to me so quietly, without giving me its specific name. Napoleon Hill.Hill was born in 1883 in a one-room cabin in Wise County, Virginia, and worked as a small-town newspaper reporter before becoming a self-help lecturer.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Think and Grow Rich for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy old-school ambition manuals and aphoristic advice about desire and persistence. The 1937 prose and the deliberately unnamed "secret" can feel dated and vague.
- What is Think and Grow Rich like?
- A brisk, aphoristic push of ambition and hope, with an undercurrent of dread about falling short. Feels like hope and dread. About ambition.
- What should I read after Think and Grow Rich?
- If you liked Think and Grow Rich, try Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell), Bad Blood (John Carreyrou) and Seabiscuit (Laura Hillenbrand).
A taste of the feed
Being brilliant is not the same as being in the right room.
The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?
Outliers · Malcolm Gladwell
Where the line between startup optimism and outright fraud gets crossed.
Mosley was stunned. He thought the results were extracted in real time from the blood inside the cartridge. That was certainly what the investors he brought by were led to believe. What Shaunak had just described sounded like a sham. It was OK to be optimistic and aspirational when you pitched investors, but there was a line not to cross. And this, in Mosley’s view, crossed it.
Bad Blood · John Carreyrou
Can a company be excellent without knowing what it stands for?
Every excellent company we studied is clear on what it stands for, and takes the process of value shaping seriously. In fact, we wonder whether it is possible to be an excellent company without clarity on values and without having the right sorts of values.
In Search of Excellence · Thomas J. Peters
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