Napoleon Hill's Secret

by Don Green

Overview

“What the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.” —Napoleon Hill

A user's guide to applying Napoleon Hill's success principles! 

In this breakthrough new book, the world's foremost expert on Napoleon Hill, Don M. Green, distills the essence of Hill’s world-famous success principles:NAPOLEON HILL'S SECRET.  

In a word, that secret is “Action.” 

According to Don Green, who is also the Executive Director of the Napoleon Hill Foundation, if you can master this concept, you truly can achieve the success in your life that you envision. NAPOLEON HILL'S SECRET will teach you how. 

For Napoleon Hill, it all starts with a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA), and Don Green provides you with the tools that will help you develop and maintain this confident state of mind. The book is filled with: 

• Exercises 
• Practical tips for putting Hill’s concepts into action 
• Motivational truths that will help you stay on track as you strive for reaching your goals, whatever they may be

Covering important topics such as: 

• Surviving disappointments 
• Taking risks 
• Thinking like a boss
• Creating harmony 

NAPOLEON HILL'S SECRET will lead you to discover what you define as success, develop a plan for creating that success, and then follow through on your plan. And if you do, you won't feel like the same person anymore. Other people will notice that you have changed. They'll change the way they react to you, and their ideas about who you are and what you can do will change as well.

If you read NAPOLEON HILL'S SECRET your life is going to change. Nothing will ever be the same.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630062439
Publisher:	Humanix Books
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Pages:	275
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

DON GREEN is executive director of the Napoleon Hill Foundation and president of the foundation board at the University of Virginia-Wise. He became CEO of Black Diamond Savings Bank at 41 and studied under personal development master W. Clement Stone. He travels extensively, lecturing worldwide for the Foundation. Most recently, Mr. Green was featured in a United Nations forum on the importance of entrepreneurship within the national economy.

Green's first youthful business venture was charging admission to see his pet bear—yes, the living, growling kind! Since 2000, Green has traveled worldwide and used his finance skills to grow the Napoleon Hill Foundation’s funds in order to continue the Foundation’s educational outreach to prisons. Green has both modeled leadership skills as a CEO and taught them through the PMA Science of Success course at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. Don specializes in discussing his personal experiences in leadership and providing audiences with proven methods of applying Dr. Hill’s success philosophy to business.

Green brings nearly 45 years of banking, finance, and entrepreneurship experience to his role as Executive Director of the Napoleon Hill Foundation, and is the author of Everything I Know About Success I Learned from Napoleon Hill, Napoleon Hill My Mentor, Napoleon Hill’s Your Millionaire Mindset and The Gift of Giving. He lives and works in the Wise metro area.

naphill.org

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE of NAPOLEON HILL'S SECRET by Don Green

Being Positive

“A positive mental attitude is the foundation of all success, and to be maintained the mind must be fed with positive thoughts.”—Napoleon Hill

Let's pretend for a moment that you're in trouble. You stand on the street in a big city owning nothing more than the clothes you are wearing. Your wallet is empty. You have no job, no home. There are no friends or family to help you. What do you do?

It's a bewildering predicament, isn't it? Do you look for work, for shelter? Do you try to find some kind of assistance? Do you beg from passers-by? What is going to happen to you? You have nothing to call your own but the clothes on your back.

Or do you?

You bet you do. You have the most valuable possession in the world:

Your mind.

I'm not talking about skills you have learned. Reading and writing, knowledge of interstate commerce law, how to change the oil in your car. These things are useless to you—unless you first recognize that you still have an incredible power: you alone can control how and what you are thinking. If you do control your thinking, you'll be able to cope with the situation you're in. If you don't take hold of yourself and your thoughts, you're finished. Because if you find yourself broke and alone, your first reaction is likely to be a mixture of fear, despair and panic. It's only human.

If you have control of your mind, you won't let all those negative emotions push you over the edge. You'll realize that you need to make a plan and do something fast. You'll know that you still have the ability and the freedom to do something, to make choices and decisions. And in that moment of knowing that you have the power of your mind, you will understand that you can change the circumstances you are in.

Your mental attitude makes all the difference in the world between whether things get better or worse. And even in great situations, your mental attitude will determine whether things get better or worse. Your mental attitude always determines what is going to happen to you in the long run.

Deciding to Make a Difference

You'll need an attitude that says, it can be done! I can do it! And you need to think that way even if at that very moment you haven't got a clear idea of what needs to be done or how it can be accomplished. So much cynicism runs through our culture these days that it's easy to scoff at such a bare essentials description of PMA. PMA alone won't get you to your goal. You need many other skills to get someplace in this world. But if you don't have a Positive Mental Attitude, it will be like trying to swim across a lake while tied to a tree on the shore. You'll be holding yourself back.

There's no such thing as a Neutral Mental Attitude. There are only PMA and its opposite, Negative Mental Attitude. Unfortunately for most of us, a Negative Mental Attitude is the default mode–unless we train ourselves otherwise. And a Negative Mental Attitude can take hold of you even if you don't wake up each morning and say, "Something's gonna go wrong today and I'm only gonna make it worse."

How and why does a Negative Mental Attitude creep into your life?

For most of us, it begins when we're kids. Children have a natural curiosity about the world, which is great, because that's what impels us to learn. But during those impressionable, vulnerable years, two forces are at work which begin to curb our natural exuberance: our own bad experiences and the actions of the people around us.

There isn't a child born who doesn't take a few nasty falls while learning to walk, get bumped or cut exploring new territory, or discover that something cute and fun-looking is also hot, sharp, or loud. It's an essential part of growing up that we discover the need to be cautious. And after we've had a few scares, and inflicted a little terror on the grownups who discover us yelling our lungs out after getting a finger pinched in a door, we become suspicious of new things, new people and new situations.

Grownups help reinforce this suspicion. No parent wants to find baby playing with something sharp or sticking a pen into an electrical socket. We may not understand exactly what it is that Daddy is saying when he takes the fun thing away, but we do know that he's upset. And we don't like grownups to be upset.

All this continues as we grow up. We retain enough spark to be interested in new things, but we still stumble, and along with our parents, we have friends, classmates, teachers, television, movies and computers to remind us that life is full of peril. Once we're away from home and on our own, raising a family, building a career, the stakes are higher and we're still bombarded with messages about how devastating failure can be. 

The result is that we expect bad things. And so we create bad things.

A Positive Mental Attitude is not an instant cure for all that ails you. It is, however, an essential first step in changing things that you are unhappy with. The following is a system for creating PMA in yourself.

Identify the Negative

To begin, you need to recognize negative ideas you have about yourself. It is not pleasant to spend a lot of time dwelling on the negative, but you cannot remedy these thoughts until you are conscious of them.

Get a notebook, preferably something small and portable because you'll want to have it with you. You'll use this notebook for other things as well, so choose something you find pleasant to work with. Make sure it has a cover, for your privacy's sake. You'll want to feel safe being honest with yourself and not worried about other people reading what you write.

Draw a line down the middle of the first page. On the left, begin making a list of what you consider your faults. If ugly words occur to you, write them down. It is important that you recognize your own thinking patterns. If you think you're fat, write "fat," not "overweight." "Overweight" is not the word that pops into your mind when you're mentally beating yourself up. You want to really understand your own negative thinking.

Don't spend more than five minutes working on the list right now. It's too easy to wallow in all these awful ideas about yourself. If you finish sooner, fine. Don't strain for negative ideas.

Next, go through the list and cross off any words that repeat the same ideas.

Now, on the right side of the line, write down the opposite idea to the negative thoughts you've discovered.

 

Spend the next day or two paying attention to how often you make a decision based on one of these negative ideas. Do you avoid offering a suggestion because you think it and you are not smart enough? Do you not start a project because you think you're lazy? Do you eat something you don't need because you already "know" you're fat?

My guess is you'll be overwhelmed by how often you're limiting yourself. You'll probably also discover that out of all the things on your list, there are two or three that pop up most often. You'll quickly see that a few negative ideas are at the root of many of the others

Don't revel in the agony of these realizations. Because every time you think one of these terrible things about yourself, you're going to reinforce that idea. What you need to do immediately is begin replacing these negative impressions of yourself with positive ones.

Transformation

Now that you're aware of your self fulfilling negative ideas, it's time to begin purging them from the way you think.

This will not happen overnight. It will not happen automatically. It will take conscious, regular, vigilant action from you. You are going to be altering mental habits that you have spent a long time acquiring. But it will be satisfying, very satisfying.

Tear your list out of your notebook. (It will feel good, getting rid of those hateful ideas.) Now, on a fresh page, for each one of your old, bad ideas, write down a short, concrete statement of its positive opposite. Make these statements emphatic. Don't be shy, cautious or modest about them. Don't insert qualifying words or phrases like "sometimes," or "many people." Use the word "I" in everyone. And state things positively, not negatively. Write "I am friendly," not "I don't hate anyone."

Be aggressive about these affirmations. Don't censor yourself by thinking that you aren't really smart. Don't settle for mildness. Write out something great that you would really like to be true about yourself. It won't take long for you to find out they are all true.

Once your list is complete, choose the negative idea that pops up most often in your thinking. For the next day, every time you find that idea has entered your thoughts, immediately and forcefully repeat the positive affirmation three times. Think it if you have to, but if you can say it, and say it determinedly, then say it!

The next day, add a second statement to your list of quick responses. By the third day, you'll have the hang of it and you can begin using them all.

If you're like most people, you'll quickly find that the affirmations start popping into your head in another set of circumstances: when you act in complete accordance with the idea you're expressing. 

Your capacity for positive thinking never dies. It can be overwhelmed by negative thinking, but it is there, eager to reassert itself. When you take control of your mind by reining in negative thoughts, your positive side will be liberated. While you're experiencing the excitement of a positive mental attitude, examine your life for ways in which you have already been acting just as you imagined yourself being when you wrote your list of affirmations.

Most people find that there are already circumstances in which they are all the things on their list of affirmations. Are the situations all that different? Maybe you're a strong leader at church but find yourself unassertive at work. If you ironed out last fiscal year's budget for your department, perhaps that same eye for money and detail can be applied to managing the renovation of your house. You'll find a lot of possibilities pretty fast.

Don't be shy or hesitant about expressing these realizations you make about yourself. Yes, there may be some bumps. People may be surprised; they may resist the "new" you. You may have to feel your way a little. But remember, you're acting in a positive, admirable way, and even if things don't work out right the very first time, you'll still be better off than if you let yourself stay in the same old rut that had you so unsatisfied with your life that you bought a book on how to change it

In a short time, you'll have completed your transformation. You'll have removed a bunch of limiting, negative ideas about yourself from your brain, and replaced them with exciting, positive and true ideas.

The Price of Admission

Have you ever seen the musical play, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying? A vapid young man vaults up the corporate ladder with the help of an inane advice book. The show spoofs some popular ideas about personal motivation, and it is funny. Another play, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, is a wrenching tragedy about the failure of the American Dream for a family that thought it was doing everything it needed to do in order to be rich and happy. Unfortunately, they were fooling themselves.

Both of these plays raise some good questions about the ability of the power of positive thinking alone to achieve your definite major purpose. They both make the following point: Just because you want something and tell yourself that you can have it, doesn't mean you're going to get it.

Positive Mental Attitude is not about fantasizing. It isn't about deceiving yourself or other people. In fact, it requires accuracy and truthfulness, with yourself and other people. It's not about asking the universe for a small personal fortune and expecting to find it in your dresser drawer the next morning.

PMA is realistic, optimistic and constructive. Each of those qualities depends on the other. Different people in the same circumstances, all using PMA, may respond to those circumstances in very individual ways, but they will always be realistic, optimistic and constructive. Only when you are all three of these things will PMA really be able to do something for you.

Being realistic requires that you acknowledge your circumstances for what they are. At this point, you don't need to make any judgment about whether things are good or bad, but you can't be afraid to admit that things aren't what you want. Optimism means that you operate on the assumption that things can be improved. And being constructive means that you are going to be willing to do something concrete about your circumstances.

It will work only if you plan on giving people something even more valuable for whatever you get from them. That "something valuable" may be goods, services, feelings, knowledge, but it has to be real and you have to give them more than you're getting from them.

That may sound like a paradox, but it's a requirement. It's the essence of being constructive because it means you are adding value to the world, making it a better place. You do not have to be like Mother Teresa, with a world changing mission, but you must be prepared to improve things for the people you deal with.

What matters is that you're willing to give more than you get.

If you are, then PMA will work for you.

Growing PMA

Working with PMA can be a heady experience. You'll value those moments when you feel yourself overcoming an obstacle or trying something you were afraid to do. Good things will happen to you and those good times will be a great reinforcement to your new mental attitude.

But, there will be some bumps. Your PMA skills are still fresh and vulnerable, and things can happen that interrupt your progress. Somebody may make a passing comment that just offends you. A realistic, optimistic and constructive plan may be ambushed by a chance occurrence that blows you out of the water. And there you'll be, wondering if you've been fooling yourself.

Here are two ways to strengthen your PMA so that you start off with some resiliency. These exercises are great for bolstering your mental attitude, whether you're just beginning with PMA or you're a veteran user who has already known many triumphs. The nature of your mental attitude is something you choose, and you can do conscious, deliberate things to reinforce that attitude. Every time you make a choice about your attitude—even when there's nothing around to threaten it—you're strengthening your choice, underlining your decision.

Write a creed. A creed is a statement of beliefs. Many organizations have them because they give people something to turn to when they need help staying true to the goals and ideas that unite the organization's members. They might call it a mission statement or a slogan, but it does the same job, You can create the same kind of statement for yourself. Think of it as a promise to yourself about what you want and who you are.

Your creed should be written with the same kind of emphatic, concrete, positive language that you used for the positive affirmations earlier in this chapter. It doesn't have to be long or poetic: you just need to make sure it touches on all the issues you've decided to tackle. It doesn't have to be written in stone, either. You can adapt it as your life changes, inserting exciting new ideas about yourself.

After you've written out a creed that you like, put a copy of it somewhere where you can read it over every day. You can tape it to the bathroom mirror, put it inside your date book, make it pop up on your computer, or just keep it folded up in your wallet or purse. Anywhere will work as long as you see it early in each day. Take a moment to read it each time you see it. You'll be reinforcing your belief in your creed every time you read it. If you want to put it all over your home or office, feel free.

But don't share it with anyone yet. There are two reasons for this. First, other people may not understand at all why you're doing this. They might laugh, ask you embarrassing questions, or try to make you ashamed. You don't owe anyone an explanation of what you're doing, especially not someone who feels jealous that you know exactly what your strong points are. Remember how you felt before you discovered PMA: wouldn't you be threatened by someone who seemed to have such a clear idea of himself? For the moment, let your creed be a private thing.

Second, give yourself time to discover things about your creed and yourself. You might find that there's still an important aspect of your strengths that you've overlooked and are not reinforcing. You may decide to change the order of your sentences, to emphasize things in a different way or to state them in a manner that is even more concrete and powerful. Feel free to make changes like this, a week after you've written your creed or years down the line. The only person who has to be satisfied with it is you.

Before long, you'll find that you've memorized your creed. Keep reading it daily anyway. Let the reading become a ritual, a signal to yourself that you believe in your creed and that it is something worthwhile. Make the reading a part of your everyday life. Don't skip it on weekends or vacations either. Stay with it.

But once your creed is memorized, it will be a super-affirmation. It will be there in your mind in moments of crisis and decision making. It will help you find your path over new territory and out of old problems. If it is playing in your mind when you're confronted by uncertainty or opportunity, it will clarify your thinking and help guide you to the choices that bring you closer to your goal.

The second exercise I call “fill in the blanks”. When you're in the middle of fighting off a sense of looming doom, your mind will tend to keep covering the same ground over and over. You'll obsess about the bad things you're afraid are about to happen or will follow as a result of something bad that has already happened. This is not PMA.

The solution? Force yourself to concentrate on the good things that can happen.

I keep a little card with me, a sort of 2-part essay question that I ask myself when I need to give PMA a boost. It reads like this:

• The best outcome that could happen in response to the challenge of …. is
• That best outcome will happen if I ....

Try answering both those questions. It might seem impossible when you first look at them, but make an effort! You're trying to take control of your thinking in a case like this, and just because your first thoughts are full of disaster doesn't mean you can't replace those thoughts with something better. Feel free to think big. Your thoughts of disaster weren't calm and rational and measured, so don't feel the need to be that way in counteracting them. Once you feel your positive mind set has reasserted itself, you can trim your sails a little–if you need to. But stay open to the possibility that you've actually found a way to turn a negative situation around.

Having PMA is a blessing you confer on yourself. No one else can really ever take it away from you, either. If you find that you've let your PMA get weak–or you've lost it altogether–do not despair. You can decide at any moment, no matter where you are and what you are doing, to recreate it. It can fill you to bursting in an instant and put you back in control when things seem completely off course.

Of course, PMA is far more valuable if you work at maintaining it all the time. It buoys you up, keeps you from being overwhelmed and gives you the energy to do what needs to be done. You're going to be very pleased with PMA as it grows stronger for you—and pleasantly surprised by how it starts to influence the people around you. 

After all, one motivated, positive person can light up a whole room and give everybody a glow.

What do you think would happen if your PMA were to overlap with the PMA of someone else? And what if you and that person were trying to do the same things, traveling the same road…

Are you sensing the potential for something very powerful and exciting? 

You better believe it.

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS to NAPOLEON HILL'S SECRET: by Don Green

Contents

Introduction

1. Being Positive 
2. Thinking in Sync
3. Understanding What You Want
4. Making Your Plan
5. Starting the Fire
6. Surviving Disappointment
7. Staying the Course
8. Taking Some Risks
9. Dreaming Big and Small
10. Putting the World on a String
11. Living a Value Added Life
12. Thinking Like a Boss
13. Becoming Mentally Fit
14. Creating Harmony
15. Managing Your Resources
16. Living Smart
17. Making the Great Connection

Preface

INTRODUCTION to NAPOLEON HILL'S SECRET by Don Green

You can't have everything in life.

However...

You can have everything you really want.

Sound impossible? It isn't. Is there a trick to it? No, no tricks. But there is a method and I'm going to try to show you how it works. It's not an overnight technique. You'll have to invest time and energy and you won't have everything you want tomorrow. There aren't three simple steps to happiness. On the other hand. no prescription is required, no coupons need to be redeemed, and no one will call on you at home.

Just what do you want, anyway?

Wealth? Happiness? Love? Authority? Respect? Fame? Independence?

They can be yours.

If they are what you really want.

Do you know what you really want?

The key to your answer will lie in discovering what you define as success, and then developing a plan for creating that success and following through on it.

Think and Grow Rich

Think and Grow Rich was written by Napoleon Hill in 1937. In the midst of the Great Depression, it became an immediate national bestseller. It still continues to influence hundreds of thousands of new readers, maybe millions, every year. A USA Today survey of business leaders ranked it among the top ten inspirational works of all time.

One of the appeals of Think and Grow Rich lies in its ability to help you understand yourself and what you want out of life. One of the first popular books to apply the ideas of modern psychology to everyday life, despite its catchy title it doesn't assume to know what your definition of "rich" is, only to help you make that idea real. Countless people have written testimonials to its power. Many have told me it is the most important book they read, after only the Bible. 

Think and Grow Rich was based on a massive earlier work by Napoleon Hill called The Law of Success, published in 1928, another national bestseller, but one which was simply too expensive for most people in Depression era America. The Law of Success, in turn, grew out of a conversation that Napoleon Hill had with the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. A novice reporter, Hill had blithely asked Carnegie what made people successful. Carnegie turned things around and asked Hill if the young man could figure out the answer to that question himself.

Hill spent twenty years studying successful people in many walks of life. He interviewed the likes of Thomas Edison and Woodrow Wilson, Henry Ford and Luther Burbank, trying to find out what distinguished them from ordinary folk. He also studied great figures of history, and became acquainted with the work of leaders of the human potential movement like William James and Emil Coue.

All that he discovered, he distilled into The Law of Success, and then even further into the powerful Think and Grow Rich. Though times have changed, human nature has not, and the ideas in those two books are as practical and as useful as they ever have been.

I hope in this book to present helpful suggestions and guidance as to how to apply the principles in these two books. Realizing what you want and following through on a concrete plan for making it happen are the keys to getting what this book promises you. Being able to do this will require some honest soul searching on your part. You will probably have to confront some uncomfortable truths about your life. You will certainly have to work hard. You will likely have to give up some things that are familiar, some of which you may miss for a while. Others you will probably be very happy to get rid of.

All of these changes will begin in one place: your mind.

Mental Power

One of the most liberating and frightening phrases that Napoleon Hill coined is: Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

It's liberating because it tells you that anything is possible as long as you can work out a plan for attaining it and then follow through on that plan with conviction. Note an important caveat there: you must be able to come up with the plan. A world changing goal is possible with a plan; even the most modest ambition won't come true without one.

It's frightening because you have to ask yourself what happens if you don't actively conceive of a plan. The answer is, nothing you want. Your life will be patternless. You won't be doing much more than responding to one problem after another, never getting a chance to do what you want to do. Does this sound familiar already? Worse, unless you assign your mind a task, it may end up actually creating problems for you. Remember, whatever you can conceive and believe, you can achieve. If your mind is occupied with worrying, it's going to create more things to worry about. It will conceive, believe and achieve things you do not want. 

How exactly does this power of your mind work? The human mind—your mind—is something unique in the known universe. While many life forms have some kind of consciousness, the human mind alone is capable of dreaming and long term planning. Other creatures may build, as beavers do, or use strategy to complete tasks, the way wolves do when they hunt in a pack. But humans alone can think in terms of next week or next month or next year. We have the ability to envision another time and imagine what it might be like and what we need to do to prepare for that time.

Because we do this kind of planning automatically, we sometimes take it for granted. But we do it every time we undertake a task. We do tasks because we anticipate a need of some sort, whether for food, shelter, or retirement money.

Sometimes we hope for things without really planning for them. We all know what it's like to fantasize about how life would be if we got a big raise, published that novel to great acclaim, or bought a vacation home. When we dream like this, we gloss over the details of how we get there—or imagine shortcuts like our boss's moving to Borneo, a burst of creativity over a rainy weekend, or a wise stock market investment.

Those little shortcuts are why we don't have those things we dream about, no matter how much we dream about them. We aren't using both powers of our mind together. We can imagine something, but we don't plan for it to become real. In essence, this book will teach you to link the powers of your mind and put them to work.

Reclaiming Your Own

Napoleon Hill was fond of saying that your mind is the only thing you can truly call your own. Money and property can be lost or taken from you. Loved ones can die or leave you. You can be imprisoned so that even your life itself is not really yours. But your mind is something that can always be yours. You can choose what it thinks about, and how it thinks.

Yet most people do not exercise this fundamental right.

Your first reaction to this statement is probably to scoff. After all, you don't live in a totalitarian state, you aren't a member of a cult. You know you make your own decisions all the time, some of them pretty darn good. And even when you do have to do something you don't want to, you know it and you aren't happy about it.

But let me ask you: why, then, are you reading this book?

Because you don 't have what you want most in life.

If you truly had full control of your own mind, you would have what you wanted or be so obviously on the road to it that you wouldn't be seeking help. The truth is, you haven't begun to control your mind and your thoughts.

Let me give you a little list of things that would be happening to you if you had full control of your thoughts:

1. Every day you would be doing something that brought you closer to your goal.
2. Every time you had to do something you didn't want to do, you'd be finding a way to make it pay off for yourself.
3. Every time you got bad news, you'd be finding good news along with it.
4. Every person around you would be a source of inspiration.

Does all that sound impossible? It's not, and this book can teach you how to make all of them happen.

The first step is to realize that you cannot control everything that happens to you in life. The company you work for may be sold, or the economy may change, accidents take place, other people's goals and needs take new turns, illness arises. You cannot prevent these things from happening, even though they throw a monkey wrench into your plans for your own life.

What you can control is the manner in which you react to them. They can be disasters which paralyze your decision making, fill you with rage, awaken your worst fears, or sink you into depression. Or, they can serve as challenges, opportunities, and wake up calls. You can decide to take control of the situation you're in, and use your mental powers to find a way to turn the bad news into an advantage.

Taking charge of your life this way depends completely on taking charge of your mind. And since you're the only one with that power, no one else is going to do it for you.

What Lies Ahead

Let me outline briefly what you're going to learn from this book and how it will help you.

Being Positive

The key technique for controlling your thoughts is to learn to maintain a Positive Mental Attitude, or PMA. PMA is a term that Napoleon Hill used that has since entered into the general vocabulary of inspirational writing. You'll find it, or the ideas it expresses, in the works of many leading writers, people like Og Mandino, Anthony Robbins, Zig Ziglar and Susan Jeffers.

Napoleon Hill defined PMA as a confident, honest, constructive state of mind which you create and maintain by methods of your own choosing. Hill's longtime associate W. Clement Stone added, "A Positive Mental Attitude is the right honest thought, action, or reaction to a given situation or set of circumstances."

I'll provide you with a whole list of exercises for developing and maintaining PMA. PMA will give you the mental control you need to pursue your objective, and with it will come emotional clarity, increased planning ability, dogged persistence, and the joy of going the extra mile.

Thinking in Sync

Maybe there are people who get exactly what they want out of life without help from anybody else, people who always have every resource they need, all the knowledge they require, and all the time in the world, all by themselves, but I have no idea who they are.

You're going to need help, and you can get it through an arrangement that Napoleon Hill called the Master Mind. It's a way of getting a special group of people—maybe two, maybe twenty—working toward the same goal. Each shares their expertise, time, dedication, and anything else they can bring to the table. You can start a group like this and use it to help you achieve your goal.

Understanding What You Want

As this introduction has repeatedly emphasized, you can't have everything, but you can have what you want. The trick is discovering just what it is that you want from life. You can't proceed on any front until you know this for certain. Napoleon Hill often said, “First, know what you want.” 

One reason the PMA concept precedes the one on defining your major purpose in this book is that with PMA, you'll have the freedom to cast off any negative ideas about just what you are capable of doing. Maybe you'll want to make big changes in your life–PMA will help you see that those changes are possible. Maybe you'll have to give up some old ideas about what you are and are not able to accomplish. You can do exactly that.

And even if you already know precisely what it is you want to accomplish, you'll find that this principle will illuminate the specifics that have eluded you so far, the roadblocks that have stood in your way. That knowledge will be essential to moving on to the next concept.

Making Your Plan

Even the clearest goal will lie forever in the distance unless you know how and when you are going to reach it. You absolutely must have a plan for getting what you want out of life, and that plan must be loaded with specifics.

A central idea in this book is that you control your plan: it does not control you. You don't need to worry about trapping yourself in the pursuit of something that ceases to matter to you, or finding yourself making sacrifices that render your ultimate goal worthless. Remember, this entire process is about finding success as you define it.

Starting the Fire

With your definition of success complete, you'll need to begin fueling your determination to achieve it. The most powerful source of energy for your work ahead is your own enthusiasm for what you want. Properly used, enthusiasm will be a dynamo that will propel you forward and make the things you want happen.

Enthusiasm is something you can create in yourself. It is easiest to create when you're working for something you desire, but you can also call upon it when you're facing tasks that seem incredibly trivial or endless. It is strongly tied to PMA, and the two forces together amplify each other in a never ending circle.

Once you learn to harness this chain reaction, you'll find you possess incredible reserves of energy. You'll be able to infect other people with that energy—and they'll appreciate you for it. You can actually develop mental triggers that unleash a burst of enthusiasm when you most need it, so that no matter how dull or unpleasant an obstacle you confront, you'll be able to tackle it and make progress.

Surviving Disappointment

You're going to take some knocks as you pursue your definite major purpose. There is absolutely no way to avoid setbacks and reversals. The world is not going to hand you what you want just because you ask for it—the world is not made that way.

What separates successful people from failures is how they respond to bad news. Once again, PMA will be crucial to your efforts, but forget any idea that it will simply allow you to overlook the things you don't want to acknowledge. It will require you to look them full in the face, understand them, and then do something about whatever caused them.

You'll also find out how to look back at disappointments you have already experienced and understand just how they happened to you. Some of them may have been your fault, and you'll have to accept that and decide how to prevent that from happening again. Some of them may have been completely beyond your control. Even so, it will be crucial for you to discover whether they are still affecting the way you live your life and then decide what to do about that.

Equally important will be recognizing that every negative thing that has ever happened to you can be turned into something positive. That may seem impossible from where you sit today, but you can extract something good and worthwhile from every disappointment you've faced. Once you've learned to do that, you will have gained enormous power over your life.

Staying the Course

Sometimes we get bogged down in details. There are so many different things that need to be done, dull, repetitive tasks that offer almost no short term or long term gratification. No one's life offers one triumphant victory after another, and it's easy to become distracted by things which give us at least a momentary set back or diversion.

Self-discipline is the key to making sure that you keep working toward your goals and don't become stuck in a rut. You can train yourself to make daily progress—progress that you can see and recognize—toward the things you want. Just as important, you'll find that self-discipline will be another tool you can use when you face down disappointment—or when you decide to expand your ambitions and strive for even more than you first believed possible.

Don't think that this will mean becoming a mindless robot. Self discipline is not so much about denial as it is about pursuing your goals. Self discipline can liberate you, excite you, and give you a feeling of control, not only over yourself, but of every aspect of your life.

Taking Some Risks

You're going to have to make yourself vulnerable if you want success. Even if security is a key element in how you define happiness, you are going to have to take some chances, make changes in your life that could discourage, even frighten you. You may have to put some money on the line, give up a comfortable situation, or alter the dynamics of relationships that are part of how you define yourself.

To do this, you'll need something Napoleon Hill called Applied Faith. This is the willingness to act on the assumption that things will turn out the way you want while at the same time doing everything you can to make that result possible. Applied faith isn't the same as religious faith, though if you have it, you'll probably see some similarities. 

Applied faith is finding the courage to act on the belief that your goals are worthy and attainable.

Applied faith gives you the strength to undertake challenges you may have avoided in the past. It lets you decide that past mistakes and failures don't have to be repeated. 

It frees you to look at something that is already good, see how it could be better, and then make it better. Acting on applied faith can be intimidating. But every time you do it, you'll experience a sense of satisfaction that will be worth any fear that you had to face down.

Thinking Big and Small

From the moment you began trying to define your goal, you were drawing on your imagination, the creative power of your mind. Your imagination is always active, but it isn't always doing what you want. You can change that.

It's almost impossible to overstate what you can accomplish with imagination as your ally. You can discover opportunities, build motivation, and convey your excitement about your objectives to the people you work with, or the people you love. But you can also solve little problems, eliminate distractions, and discover entirely new paths to getting what you want.

You can use many different techniques to inspire your imagination and train it to support you. Every time you put your imagination to work, it will become stronger, more flexible and more creative. Most of these techniques can be applied anytime, anywhere, and you can easily teach them to other people. When you do that, you'll surround yourself with an amazing wealth of creativity and insight that you'll be able to draw on again and again as you advance toward your major purpose.

Putting the World on a String

At the risk of sounding like a popular magazine article, I'll promise you that you can become more influential by making yourself a compelling, inspiring person that people want to know. I'm talking about improving your personality. You can have a vision of yourself as a confident person who projects resolve, wins cooperation, demonstrates reliability, and is a pleasure to be around. There are proven, reliable, and authentic ways to express these aspects of yourself, and you can master every one.

One immediate benefit is that you'll build self respect. You'll gain faith in what you're trying to do and be able to express that faith. And you'll also find that you'll start gaining more allies in your quest. People will want to help you because they'll take pleasure in seeing you succeed. It will be an astounding transformation that will immediately increase the pleasure you get out of life.

Living a Value Added Life

Napoleon Hill called this "going the extra mile." It means doing more than you are expected to do in a pleasant manner. It doesn't mean being a doormat or a wimp. It's a way of living and working that can become part of every relationship you have for the rest of your life. 

Exceeding other people's expectations is incredibly rewarding. You'll constantly reinforce your sense of self confidence. You'll be proud of the work you do—even if some of the time you don’t enjoy it. You'll also discover that people are inspired to return your good deeds in kind, especially the people who are most likely to be able to help you reach your goal.

Yes, some people will take advantage of this. This is inevitable. Rest assured though, that if you offer those people more than they offer you, you'll be preparing yourself to move on and away from them sooner than if you resent them and begrudge them every moment of your work. And in the meantime, you'll be happy with yourself, which is one of the most valuable states of being.

Thinking Like a Boss

If you want to take control of all the things in your life, you'll need to think and act like you are the person in charge. This has to happen long before you achieve your goal, and it has to apply to things large and small. It's called "showing initiative."

Initiative requires recognizing a goal, making a plan and following through. Imagine what would happen if you were taking positive action in every one of your relationships at home and at work, taking concrete steps to pursue your mutual goals, demonstrating that you can accomplish what you set out to do. You'd become more valuable in that relationship, admired and trusted. You'd gain a bigger voice in what was happening and going to happen.

Initiative can become a thrilling, exciting habit. It can begin in the smallest details of the things you do and grow quickly to encompass everything you're involved in. It empowers you, even in situations where you are working for someone else. It will make you shine in a world full of people who are just getting by. And it will give you the satisfaction of accomplishing things every day.

Becoming Mentally Fit

Like your body, your mind can become efficient and toned, capable of hard work with great stamina. You'll need twin mental abilities for this to happen: accurate thinking and controlled attention.

Accurate thinking is the ability to sort things out, set priorities, and recognize fact from fiction, as well as knowing when you don't have enough information to make that distinction. Controlled attention means having the willpower to avoid distractions. The two qualities are closely related, and they also have a strong relationship to your ability to harness your imagination.

Mental Fitness will have an impact on almost every other aspect of what you're learning from this book. It gives you self discipline, organizes your initiative and controls your enthusiasm. Most important, though, it's part of being in control of how you think and thus who you are. Having Mental Fitness means you are in charge of your life.

Creating Harmony

Attaining your major definite purpose depends entirely on yourself. However—and this is a big "however"—it will be almost impossible to have the life you want without some cooperation from other people. Your journey will be smoother, faster and more enjoyable when you understand how to get people to help you.

The basis of cooperation is the intersection of personal interests. While it might seem that any two or more people who have a common goal would naturally work together, this often does not happen. Personality conflicts, disagreements about methods, lack of a common frame of reference: these things and more sabotage many potential cooperative relationships.

This doesn't have to happen to you. You can become a person who creates the kind of harmony that lets cooperation take place. You have to be deliberate and painstaking about it, and you need many of the skills you'll have learned in earlier chapters to do it effectively: imagination, enthusiasm, clear thinking, a winning personality. But if you combine all these qualities in the pursuit of harmony, you can enlist many people in your quest for your goal.

Managing Your Resources

For most of us, time and money always seem to be in short supply, and there are hordes of people making demands on them. You can't always increase your supply of either, but if you pay close attention to how they are spent and saved, you'll find it at least seems as if you have more of both.

There are many simple techniques that can give you real control over how you spend time and money. Being aware of your own unconscious ideas about how to use them is the first step toward initiating changes in the way you deal with these crucial resources.

Making habits of good time and money management will take an enormous burden off your shoulders, even when it seems that all you have of either is going to other people. If you learn to control their flow in your life, you gain important power. The sooner you begin asserting some authority over them, the more you'll find is available for yourself.

Living Smart

Staying healthy is essential to being able to pursue and enjoy whatever it is you want most in life. Most of us, though, don't explicitly think of it when we imagine where we want to be. As a consequence, we ignore our health or decide that taking care of our minds and bodies is something we can sacrifice in the pursuit of our goals.

It's a big mistake. You need a sound body and a sound mind to get where you want to be. Forget about enjoying the fruits of your labor: you'll drop in your tracks if you treat yourself like an overworked farm animal. You'll have to make clear decisions about taking care of yourself if you ever want to be successful.

Making the Great Connection

Finally, you're going to need to put all the ideas you've learned in this book together. Along the way, you'll have seen how they're related, but the glue that binds them all into a coherent philosophy is an amazing idea about how the world and the universe work. I'm not going to say much about this idea here, partly because I'd like you to be looking for the connections yourselves, partly because it will all make so much more sense to you when you've read each of the chapters and started to apply them in your own life. There is more to this book and the ideas of Napoleon Hill than reading alone can reveal to you. You'll need some experience putting them into practice to fully appreciate what you can do to change your life.

Taking the Plunge

Are you ready to have what you want most in life? I’m sure that you are. 

But let me offer you a word of caution.

It will never be enough to just read this book. You're going to have to act. You're going to have to follow all the little suggestions—and the big ones—and incorporate them into your life. Action is absolutely essential.

And it will have consequences.

Your life is going to change. You won't feel like the same person anymore. Other people will notice that you have changed. They'll change the way they react to you, and their ideas about who you are and what you can do will change as well.

Nothing will ever be the same.

But then, that's part of what you wanted, isn't it?

Let's get started!

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Everything I Know About Success I Learned from Napoleon Hill: Essential Lessons for Using the Power of Positive Thinking by Don Green

"This book is proof that dynamite comes in small packages." — Les Brown, noted author and motivational speaker

"Life lessons come in two forms: theoretical lessons and life experiences. In Everything I Know About Success I Learned from Napoleon Hill, Don has married the theoretical and the practical into one powerful tool. He weaves the timeless truths from the master, Napoleon Hill, with his own life's experience of overwhelming success." — Jim Stovall, bestselling author of The Ultimate Gift

"[Don Green] shares his brilliance and lifelong formula for success with you in Everything I Know About Success I Learned from Napoleon Hill." — Sharon Lechter, coauthor of the Rich Dad Poor Dad series and editor, Napoleon Hill's Outwitting the Devil

"Don Green has walked in the footsteps of, and sat in the chair of, Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone. That alone would not make him successful, were he not the consummate student, the tireless worker, and have the burning desire to succeed. Combine that with his wisdom and his ability to maintain the highest level of ethics. Don Green's career has been a book that has finally come to life—a book that will inspire you to a thousand new thoughts, and a million new dollars." — Jeffrey Gitomer, bestselling author of The Little Red Book of Selling

"Don has a simple way of sharing meaningful insights that make you want to stand up and cheer." — Ron Glosser, former bank CEO and CEO of Hershey Foundation

From the Publisher