Napoleon Hill: Key Ideas, Methods and How to Apply Them
Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich in 1937. What he taught about definite chief aim, the mastermind and autosuggestion, a practice to try this week, and the evidence problems with his biography.
Who was Napoleon Hill?
Napoleon Hill was an American author born on October 26, 1883 in Pound, Virginia, who died on November 8, 1970 in Greenville, South Carolina, and who is known almost entirely for one book, Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937 by The Ralston Society. Hill began writing for local newspapers in his early teens, worked for the Virginia lawyer and businessman Rufus Ayers, attended a business school in Tazewell, Virginia, and enrolled in law school but withdrew because he could not afford it. He held no degree in psychology or economics, and the credential he claimed instead was access: he said Andrew Carnegie commissioned him around 1908 to spend two decades interviewing successful people and reduce what he learned to a teachable philosophy. That claim has never been documented. Between the 1900s and the 1950s Hill ran a series of businesses, schools and magazines, several of which collapsed and several of which drew fraud allegations from state authorities. He published The Law of Success in 1928, Think and Grow Rich in 1937, How to Sell Your Way Through Life in 1939, The Master-Key to Riches in 1945 and Grow Rich! With Peace of Mind in 1967, and co-wrote Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude with W. Clement Stone in 1959.
The gap between what Napoleon Hill wrote and how he lived is not a minor detail, and an honest account has to put it near the front. Hill spent his career explaining how a person acquires wealth, while the documentary record shows repeated business failures, bankruptcy, warrants issued in his name, and long stretches of financial difficulty. His most productive periods came when someone else was paying: W. Clement Stone, who had built a large insurance company, funded and promoted Hill's later work in the 1950s and 1960s. After Hill's death the Napoleon Hill Foundation, a nonprofit, took over the copyrights and still publishes and licenses the material, including Outwitting the Devil, written in 1938 and released in 2011. What makes Hill significant is not that his life proved his method. It is that Think and Grow Rich arrived in the middle of the Great Depression, told a demoralized readership that the cause of wealth was internal rather than structural, and supplied a vocabulary the self-improvement industry still uses.
Was Napoleon Hill a psychologist or a trained researcher?
No. Napoleon Hill had no training in psychology, statistics or any research discipline, and he did not complete law school. His method was journalistic rather than scientific: he interviewed or claimed to have interviewed people who had already succeeded and looked for common traits. He never used a comparison group of people who followed the same practices and failed, which is the step that would have made the exercise informative.
What did Napoleon Hill do before he wrote Think and Grow Rich?
Before Think and Grow Rich appeared in 1937, Napoleon Hill worked as a newspaper writer from his teens, ran a lumber business in Alabama in the late 1900s, operated correspondence and trade schools including the Automobile College of Washington and the George Washington Institute in Chicago, published Hill's Golden Rule magazine from 1919, and issued The Law of Success in 1928. Several of these ventures ended in collapse or in accusations of misrepresentation.
What did Napoleon Hill actually teach?
Napoleon Hill taught that a specific, emotionally charged desire, held constantly and acted on persistently, is the origin of material achievement. Think and Grow Rich organizes this into thirteen principles: desire, faith, autosuggestion, specialized knowledge, imagination, organized planning, decision, persistence, the power of the master mind, the mystery of sex transmutation, the subconscious mind, the brain, and the sixth sense. A closing chapter deals separately with what Hill called the six ghosts of fear, which he listed as the fears of poverty, criticism, ill health, loss of love, old age and death. The sequence has a logic. Desire supplies the raw material; faith and autosuggestion are the methods for keeping the desire alive when nothing visible is happening; specialized knowledge and organized planning convert it into a workable route; decision and persistence handle the long middle stretch; and the mastermind supplies the intelligence and pressure a single person cannot generate alone. The later principles move from procedure into metaphysics, and this is where most modern readers get off. Hill treated the subconscious as a receiving station that acts on repeated instruction, and he described a sixth sense that delivers hunches from outside ordinary reasoning.
Two claims sit underneath all thirteen of the napoleon hill principles, and they are worth separating because one is defensible and one is not. The defensible claim is that attention is the scarce resource: a person who has decided precisely what they want, written it down, and forced themselves to look at it every day will notice openings that a person with vague intentions walks past. That is a claim about perception and follow-through, compatible with what is known about goal setting. The other claim is causal in a stronger sense, that thought reaches the subconscious and from there influences outcomes through a mechanism Hill never specified. He moved between the two constantly, which is part of why the book has held up commercially: readers can take the version they find plausible. Hill also insisted the philosophy only worked when applied whole, which conveniently makes any failure attributable to incomplete application rather than to the method.
What did Napoleon Hill mean by sex transmutation?
Sex transmutation, in Napoleon Hill's tenth principle, was his claim that sexual energy can be redirected into creative and commercial output, and that successful people are usually those who learned to channel a strong sex drive rather than spend it. Hill offered no evidence and it reads today as period pseudoscience with dated assumptions about men and women attached.
What are the six ghosts of fear in Think and Grow Rich?
The six ghosts of fear that Napoleon Hill named in the closing chapter of Think and Grow Rich are the fear of poverty, the fear of criticism, the fear of ill health, the fear of loss of someone's love, the fear of old age and the fear of death. Hill argued these are learned rather than innate, that indecision is the seedbed they grow from, and that they have to be identified by name before they can be worked on.
What is a definite chief aim in Napoleon Hill's system?
A definite chief aim is Napoleon Hill's term for one specific, written objective with a stated deadline and a stated price, held to the exclusion of competing ambitions. Hill introduced it as the first lesson of The Law of Success in 1928 and carried it into Think and Grow Rich, where it appears in the chapter on desire as a six-step method. The six steps are precise. Fix in your mind the exact thing you want, expressed as a definite quantity rather than a wish for more. Decide exactly what you intend to give in return, on the principle that nothing is obtained without payment of some kind. Set a definite date by which you intend to possess it. Create a definite plan and begin acting on it immediately, whether or not you feel ready. Write the whole thing out as a single clear statement covering the objective, the deadline, the payment and the plan. Then read that statement aloud twice a day, once on waking and once before sleeping, and while reading it see and feel yourself already in possession of the thing. Hill was emphatic that the aim must be one thing, not a list.
The strongest part of the definite chief aim is the second step, and it is the one readers skip. Naming what you intend to give in return forces a question most goal setting avoids: what is the actual exchange, and do you have anything the market wants at that price? A person who writes that they want a certain income and then has to write down the specific service, skill or volume of work they will supply for it usually discovers within a paragraph that the plan is missing. Hill's framing puts that discovery on day one instead of month six. The weakest part is the sixth step, where the instruction shifts from planning into feeling already in possession, which is where the method starts asking you to treat a fantasy as a fact. The two halves can be separated. You can keep the written statement, the deadline and the stated price, and treat the daily reading as a review of a commitment rather than as a psychic operation.
How is a definite chief aim different from a definite major purpose?
Napoleon Hill used definite chief aim mainly in The Law of Success and definite major purpose more often in his later writing, and he did not draw a sharp technical line between them. Both refer to a single dominant objective, written down, with a deadline and an intended contribution attached. If there is a shade of difference it is that definite major purpose carries more of the sense of a life direction, while definite chief aim can apply to a defined project.
Should a definite chief aim always be about money?
No. Napoleon Hill framed the six steps around a sum of money because Think and Grow Rich was written for that audience during the Depression, but he stated that the same procedure applies to any definite objective. The requirement is not that the aim be financial. It is that the aim be measurable enough that you could tell an outsider whether you had reached it, which rules out aims like becoming more confident.
What is the mastermind principle?
The mastermind principle is Napoleon Hill's ninth principle, defined as the coordination of knowledge and effort between two or more people, in a spirit of harmony, directed at a single definite purpose. Hill argued that such an alliance produces something beyond the sum of the members, and he offered two explanations for why. The first is ordinary and defensible: several people pooling knowledge, contacts and criticism will out-think one person, and the obligation to report progress to others changes behavior. The second is mystical, involving an energy generated between minds working in harmony, and Hill never made it precise. He was strict about the conditions. The purpose has to be definite and shared rather than a general interest in improvement. The relationship has to be harmonious, because he believed friction cancels the effect. And it has to be regular, meeting on a fixed schedule rather than when convenient. Hill cited Henry Ford as his standing example of a man with limited formal education who assembled specialist knowledge around himself. He also claimed to have operated masterminds of his own, though as with much of his account the corroboration is thin.
The mastermind principle is the part of Napoleon Hill's system that has traveled furthest, and it is now the standard structure for peer accountability groups across business and writing. It has also been diluted almost beyond recognition. Paid programs sold as masterminds are frequently one expert broadcasting to a paying audience, which is a seminar with better branding and the opposite of what Hill described. He specified a small group of rough equals, each with their own definite aim, meeting to apply their combined attention to one member's problem at a time. The mechanism that plausibly does the work is unglamorous: a fixed date at which you have to say out loud whether you did the thing you said you would do. The value degrades as the group grows, because airtime per member falls and the reporting obligation weakens.
How many people should be in a mastermind group?
Napoleon Hill did not fix a number, saying only two or more, but the format he described works best at two to six. The constraint is arithmetic: in a ninety minute meeting, six people get fifteen minutes each, and beyond that the session becomes an audience. Hill's requirement that every member be pursuing a definite aim of their own also breaks down in larger groups, where most attendees become spectators.
What made Napoleon Hill's Invisible Counselors different from a real mastermind?
The Invisible Counselors were an imaginative exercise Napoleon Hill described in the chapter on the sixth sense, in which he held nightly meetings in his mind with historical figures including Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Edison, asking each for advice in their character. Hill acknowledged the figures were creations of his own imagination. It is a perspective-taking device rather than a mastermind, since no external information enters the room.
What is autosuggestion in Think and Grow Rich?
Autosuggestion is Napoleon Hill's third principle, and it is the mechanism he proposed for getting a definite chief aim from conscious intention into what he called the subconscious mind. The instruction is concrete. Take the written statement of your aim and read it aloud twice daily, on rising and before sleep, and do it with feeling rather than mechanically. Hill was specific that words alone accomplish nothing: he held that the subconscious responds only to thoughts that arrive mixed with emotion, and that repeating a statement you do not feel is wasted effort. He therefore paired the reading with visualization, telling readers to see themselves already in possession of the object of the aim while speaking it. He also argued that this happens whether or not you direct it, that a mind left unsupervised feeds itself the material of the six ghosts of fear, and that autosuggestion is simply taking control of a process already running. Hill placed the principle third, immediately after faith, because in his structure faith is not a starting condition but the product of sustained autosuggestion.
Autosuggestion is where the honest reader has to make a decision about Napoleon Hill, because the evidence cuts both ways. Rehearsing a commitment daily plausibly does something useful: it keeps the aim in working memory, primes you to notice relevant openings, and makes drift harder to ignore. But the instruction to feel yourself already in possession runs into a documented problem. Gabriele Oettingen's work on mental contrasting has repeatedly found that indulging in positive fantasies about a desired future is associated with lower effort and worse results, apparently because the fantasy delivers some of the reward in advance. Her alternative pairs the wished-for outcome with a clear-eyed look at the obstacle in the way. That suggests a modification rather than an abandonment: read the aim aloud, then name the obstacle that will show up today and what you will do when it does.
Is autosuggestion the same as positive affirmations?
Autosuggestion as Napoleon Hill described it is narrower than the modern affirmation. An affirmation is usually a general statement about identity or worth, repeated in the present tense. Hill's autosuggestion is the repetition of one specific written aim containing a quantity, a deadline, a stated payment and a plan. The specificity matters, because a statement precise enough to be false tomorrow behaves differently from a statement that cannot be checked.
How long did Napoleon Hill say autosuggestion takes to work?
Napoleon Hill gave no timetable, which is one of the method's weaknesses. He wrote that the practice must continue until the aim is achieved and that people who abandon it have simply failed at persistence, his eighth principle. Because no interval is specified at which the method could be judged to have failed, the instruction is unfalsifiable in its original form. Setting your own review date is a sensible correction.
What is Think and Grow Rich about, and which Napoleon Hill book should you read first?
Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937 by The Ralston Society, is Napoleon Hill's condensation of the thirteen principles into a single volume aimed at ordinary readers during the Depression, and it is the book to start with. Hill presented it as the distillation of a twenty-year study begun at Andrew Carnegie's request, and the text is built from anecdotes about named industrialists and inventors, most of which cannot be independently verified. It moves fast, repeats itself deliberately, and closes each chapter by pushing the reader toward action. Of the napoleon hill books, The Law of Success from 1928 is the fuller statement of the same philosophy across sixteen lessons and runs to several times the length. How to Sell Your Way Through Life from 1939 applies the material to selling and is more practical and less cosmic. The Master-Key to Riches followed in 1945 and Grow Rich! With Peace of Mind in 1967, by which point Hill was recasting the philosophy in gentler terms. Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, written with W. Clement Stone in 1959, is the most readable of the later titles.
One practical warning about Think and Grow Rich: the edition you buy matters more than with most books. The work has been in and out of copyright, and many publishers issue versions that are abridged, modernized, silently edited or padded with someone else's commentary. Some strip the dated material, which removes the historical context that makes the book comprehensible. Look for an edition presented as the complete original text if you want to know what Hill actually wrote. Outwitting the Devil deserves a separate note. Hill produced the manuscript in 1938 as a framed dialogue in which he interrogates a personified Devil about how people are kept passive, and it went unpublished for decades before the Napoleon Hill Foundation released an annotated version in 2011. It contains his sharpest writing on drift and his least defensible on schooling. It is a curiosity rather than a starting point.
How many copies has Think and Grow Rich sold?
The sales figure for Think and Grow Rich is disputed. Napoleon Hill's biographers have claimed around twenty million copies over fifty years, and much larger numbers circulate in promotional material today. The writer Richard Lingeman argued that the real figure was considerably lower, on the basis of historical bestseller records. No independently audited number exists, so any specific total quoted for the book should be treated as a claim rather than a fact.
What is The Law of Success and how does it relate to Think and Grow Rich?
The Law of Success, published in 1928, is Napoleon Hill's earlier and much longer presentation of the same philosophy, organized as sixteen lessons and originally issued in multiple volumes. It opens with the lesson on a definite chief aim and covers the mastermind, imagination, initiative, self-control and other principles at length. Think and Grow Rich is essentially the compressed version, and its commercial success came partly from being short enough to finish.
What Napoleon Hill practice can you try this week?
The practice to try is Napoleon Hill's six-step definite chief aim, run for seven days with one modern correction added. On day one, take a sheet of paper and write four things: the exact outcome you want, expressed as a number or a checkable fact rather than a mood; the specific date by which you intend to have it; what you will give in return, named as a concrete service, skill or quantity of work; and the first plan, however rough. Then compress all four into one paragraph you can read aloud in under a minute. From day one to day seven, read that paragraph out loud twice, once within ten minutes of waking and once immediately before bed. Hill's instruction is to feel it while reading, so do not mumble it. Here is the correction. After each reading, spend sixty seconds naming the single obstacle most likely to block you that day and the exact response you will make when it appears. This is Gabriele Oettingen's mental contrasting bolted onto Hill's rehearsal, and it addresses the specific failure mode that pure visualization produces.
Two additions make the week more useful. First, act on the plan within twenty-four hours of writing it, even if the action is small and obviously insufficient, because Napoleon Hill's fourth step says to begin at once whether or not you feel ready, and because a written aim with no action attached decays into a wish within days. Second, tell one person. If you can find someone working on something comparable, agree to speak at a fixed time next week and hold each other to what was promised, which is the smallest workable version of the mastermind principle. At the end of the seven days, do not judge the aim. Judge what you can observe: whether reading the statement changed what you noticed, and whether the sixty seconds on obstacles produced action you would not otherwise have taken. If neither happened, no amount of persistence language should override that reading.
How long should a definite chief aim statement be?
Short enough to read aloud in under a minute, which in practice means one paragraph of roughly sixty to a hundred words. Napoleon Hill's requirement was that it contain the objective, the deadline, what you intend to give in return and the plan, and nothing in that list needs elaboration. A statement long enough to feel like an essay will not survive twice-daily reading, and length usually indicates the aim has not been decided.
What if you cannot decide what your definite chief aim should be?
Then that indecision is the first thing to work on, which is a point Napoleon Hill made directly: he treated indecision as the root the six ghosts of fear grow from and made decision his seventh principle. A workable interim step is to pick the aim you can commit to for ninety days rather than for life, run the practice on that, and let the shorter horizon lower the stakes of choosing wrongly.
What criticism has Napoleon Hill faced?
The strongest criticism of Napoleon Hill is that the central biographical claim behind his authority appears to be false. Hill said Andrew Carnegie commissioned his research and opened doors to the industrialists he wrote about. David Nasaw, author of a major Carnegie biography, has said he found no evidence of any sort that the two men ever met, and Hill does not appear in Carnegie's extensive papers. Hill also claimed to have advised Woodrow Wilson during the First World War and Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, including a claim to have contributed to Roosevelt's line about fear itself. White House records contain no reference to his presence, and historians have found little to support either account. Alongside this sits a documented record of failed ventures and legal trouble spanning decades, including a lumber company in Alabama that ended in bankruptcy and mail fraud charges, trade schools accused of misrepresentation, warrants issued for his arrest in 1918, and federal attention to advertising claims around his magazine. A 2016 Gizmodo investigation by Matt Novak described him as a con man.
The methodological criticism is independent of the biography and would apply even if every anecdote were true. Napoleon Hill studied people who had already succeeded and inferred causes from what they had in common, without examining people who did the same things and failed. This is survivorship bias in its clearest form, and it means the thirteen principles cannot separate traits that produce success from traits that merely accompany it. The system is also structured so that failure never counts against it: Hill held that the philosophy works only when applied completely and persistently, so any unsuccessful reader can be told they stopped too early. The social criticism follows from the same logic. A doctrine that locates the cause of wealth entirely in the individual mind implies that poverty is a mental failure, which erases labor markets, discrimination, illness and inherited capital. Hill published that message to an audience living through mass unemployment they had not caused.
Was Napoleon Hill ever charged with a crime?
Napoleon Hill's business record includes multiple encounters with authorities. Reporting drawing on newspaper archives and court records documents mail fraud charges connected to his Alabama lumber venture, fraud allegations against trade schools he operated, warrants issued for his arrest in 1918 in connection with the George Washington Institute in Chicago, and federal complaints about advertising linked to his magazine publishing around 1919.
Does the Napoleon Hill Foundation acknowledge the disputed claims?
The Napoleon Hill Foundation, which holds and licenses the rights to Napoleon Hill's work, continues to present the Andrew Carnegie commission as history in its publications. Independent researchers, including the Carnegie biographer David Nasaw, have not found supporting evidence. Readers should note that the friendliest accounts of Hill's life originate with parties who publish and sell his books.
Does the criticism mean Think and Grow Rich has no value?
No, but it changes what the book can be used for. The parts of Think and Grow Rich that survive the criticism are procedural: writing a single specific aim with a deadline and a stated price, reviewing it daily, and organizing a small group of peers around it. What does not survive is the book's authority as reportage about how Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford or Thomas Edison actually operated, since Napoleon Hill's access to them is undocumented.
How is Napoleon Hill different from Dale Carnegie and the New Thought writers?
Napoleon Hill differs from Dale Carnegie, the nearest adjacent figure, in where he locates the cause of success. Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936 a year before Think and Grow Rich, is a book about observable behavior toward other people: remembering names, avoiding argument, taking a genuine interest in someone before asking anything of them. Every instruction in it can be tested by doing it and watching what happens. Hill's book is about internal states, and its central mechanism, the subconscious acting on emotionalized instruction, cannot be observed at all. The two men are frequently confused and were not related to each other or to Andrew Carnegie. Hill's other lineage is New Thought, the American movement holding that thought exerts direct causal force on circumstances, represented by Wallace D. Wattles in The Science of Getting Rich in 1910 and Charles F. Haanel in The Master Key System in 1912. Hill's contribution was not the metaphysics, which predates him, but the packaging: he attached the New Thought premise to named industrialists and to a stepwise procedure.
Following the line forward makes Napoleon Hill's position in the field clearer. W. Clement Stone took the material into corporate sales training and rebranded the attitude component as positive mental attitude. Earl Nightingale reduced the core proposition to a recorded talk in the 1950s that spread through sales organizations, and Bob Proctor built a long career teaching from Think and Grow Rich specifically. Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, released in 2006, kept Hill's causal claim and dropped his emphasis on organized planning and persistence, which is why it is the purer and weaker version. In the opposite direction sit writers who kept Hill's structure and discarded his metaphysics: Stephen Covey's habit of beginning with the end in mind is a recognizable descendant of a definite chief aim, stripped of the subconscious machinery. A reader who wants Hill's practical residue is better served by that branch.
Did Napoleon Hill invent the law of attraction?
No. The idea that thought attracts corresponding circumstances predates Napoleon Hill by decades and belongs to nineteenth century New Thought, with Prentice Mulford, Wallace D. Wattles and Charles F. Haanel among the writers who set it out before him. Hill's distinctive move was to fuse that premise with a procedural system of planning, decision and persistence, which makes Think and Grow Rich more demanding than most law of attraction material.
Was Napoleon Hill related to Dale Carnegie or Andrew Carnegie?
No. Napoleon Hill was not related to Dale Carnegie or Andrew Carnegie, and Dale Carnegie and Andrew Carnegie were not related to each other either. Dale Carnegie was born Dale Carnagey and changed the spelling. The confusion is common because Hill claimed Andrew Carnegie as his patron and because Dale Carnegie's bestseller appeared one year before Think and Grow Rich, in the same market.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Think and Grow Rich still worth reading?
Think and Grow Rich is worth reading as a primary source rather than as instruction. Napoleon Hill's book set the template most later success writing follows, so it explains where a large amount of modern motivational language came from. The practical core is small: write a specific aim with a deadline and a stated price, review it daily, and recruit a few people to think about it with you. That much survives scrutiny. The material on the subconscious and the sixth sense does not, and Hill's account of how he gathered his evidence is unsupported.
Did Napoleon Hill really work with Andrew Carnegie?
There is no evidence that Napoleon Hill worked with Andrew Carnegie. Hill's central biographical claim was that Carnegie met him around 1908, challenged him to spend twenty years documenting the philosophy of achievement, and supplied introductions to leading industrialists. David Nasaw, who wrote a major biography of Carnegie, has said he found no evidence of any sort that the two men ever met, and Hill does not appear in Carnegie's extensive papers. The claim is the foundation on which Think and Grow Rich rests its authority.
What are Napoleon Hill's 13 principles?
Napoleon Hill's 13 principles, as set out in Think and Grow Rich, are desire, faith, autosuggestion, specialized knowledge, imagination, organized planning, decision, persistence, the power of the master mind, the mystery of sex transmutation, the subconscious mind, the brain, and the sixth sense. The book closes with a separate chapter on the six ghosts of fear: poverty, criticism, ill health, loss of love, old age and death. Hill presented the thirteen as a sequence, with desire supplying the raw material and the later principles the machinery. In practice the first eight carry almost all the usable content.
What is the difference between a definite chief aim and an ordinary goal?
A definite chief aim, in Napoleon Hill's usage, is singular, priced and rehearsed. You hold one at a time rather than a list, you state what you intend to give in return rather than only what you want to receive, and you read it aloud daily rather than reviewing it occasionally. Hill introduced the term as the first lesson of The Law of Success in 1928 and carried it into Think and Grow Rich under the heading of desire.
How do you start a mastermind group using Napoleon Hill's method?
To start a mastermind group on Napoleon Hill's model, find two to six people working on something comparable in scale, agree a fixed meeting time, and give every member the same share of the airtime. Hill's requirements were harmony among the members and a single definite purpose, which rules out loose networking. A workable format gives each person a few minutes to state what they committed to last time, whether it happened, and the one problem they want the group's attention on.
Which Napoleon Hill book should you read first?
Start with Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937 by The Ralston Society. It is the shortest, the most organized and the one everything else references. The Law of Success, published in 1928, contains the same philosophy across sixteen lessons and many more pages, and suits readers who want the fuller version afterward. Outwitting the Devil, written in 1938 but not published until 2011, is a framed dialogue and the wrong entry point. Editions vary widely, so check whether your copy is the complete original text.
Is there scientific evidence that Napoleon Hill's methods work?
There is no research testing Napoleon Hill's system as a system, and the evidence on its components is mixed. Written, specific, time-bound goals have reasonable support in the goal-setting literature. The part with the weakest support is the one Hill emphasized most. Gabriele Oettingen's research on mental contrasting found that vividly imagining a desired outcome, on its own, tends to reduce the energy people put into pursuing it. That runs against Hill's instruction to feel yourself already in possession of what you want.
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