Napoleon Hill: Key Ideas, Methods and How to Apply Them
By DailyDestiny Editorial Team
The short answer
Napoleon Hill was an American author known almost entirely for that one book, published in 1937. He held no degree in psychology or economics, and his life story is a lot shakier than the legend. Some of his methods are still useful; his authority is the part to question.
Ever written a big goal down and watched it fade by Friday? Napoleon Hill built Think and Grow Rich on fixing that. Here is what he taught about the definite chief aim, the mastermind and autosuggestion, a practice for this week, and the problems with his story.
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Who was Napoleon Hill?
Imagine you are stuck in a job that covers the bills and not much else. A friend, a podcast host or a YouTube video swears that one old book, Think and Grow Rich, changed everything for them. Before you hand your hopes to it, you want to know who actually wrote it.
He was born on October 26, 1883 in Pound, Virginia, and died on November 8, 1970 in Greenville, South Carolina.
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 had no training in psychology, statistics or any research discipline, and his method was journalistic, not scientific: he interviewed, or claimed to have interviewed, people who had already succeeded and looked for common traits. The credential he claimed instead was access: he said Andrew Carnegie commissioned him around 1908 to spend two decades interviewing successful people and turn what he learned into a teachable philosophy. That claim has never been documented.
Between the 1900s and the 1950s he ran a string of businesses, schools and magazines. Several collapsed, and several drew fraud allegations from state authorities.
The gap between what Hill wrote and how he lived is not a footnote. He spent his career explaining how to acquire wealth, while the documentary record shows repeated business failures, bankruptcy, warrants issued in his name, and long stretches of money trouble. It is a bit like taking swimming lessons from someone the lifeguards keep pulling out of the pool.
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.
Hill matters not because his life proved his method. 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.
What did Napoleon Hill do before he wrote Think and Grow Rich?
Before 1937 he worked as a newspaper writer from his teens, ran a lumber business in Alabama in the late 1900s, and operated correspondence and trade schools including the Automobile College of Washington and the George Washington Institute in Chicago.
He 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?
If you have ever wanted something badly and felt it slipping away, Hill's whole system is built around that wanting.
He 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 covers what he called the six ghosts of fear: the fears of poverty, criticism, ill health, loss of love, old age and death.
The sequence has a logic. Desire is the raw material. Faith and autosuggestion keep the desire alive when nothing visible is happening. Specialized knowledge and organized planning turn it into a workable route. Decision and persistence carry you through the long middle stretch. The mastermind supplies the intelligence and pressure one 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 described a sixth sense that delivers hunches from outside ordinary reasoning.
Two claims sit under all thirteen Napoleon Hill principles, and only one holds up.
The defensible claim: attention is the scarce resource. If you have decided precisely what you want, written it down and made yourself look at it every day, you will notice openings that a person with vague intentions walks straight past. That is about perception and follow-through, and it fits what is known about goal setting.
The stronger causal claim: thought reaches the subconscious and from there shapes outcomes through a mechanism Hill never specified.
He slid between the two constantly, which is part of why the book has sold so well: you can take whichever version you find believable. He also insisted the philosophy only worked when applied whole, which conveniently lets any failure be blamed on incomplete application rather than on the method.
What did Napoleon Hill mean by sex transmutation?
In his tenth principle, sex transmutation was the 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. 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?
Poverty, criticism, ill health, loss of someone's love, old age and death.
Hill argued these are learned rather than innate, that indecision is the seedbed they grow from, and that you have to name them before you can work on them. Which one shows up loudest for you?
What is a definite chief aim in Napoleon Hill's system?
If your goals sound like more money or a better life, this part of Hill will make you usefully uncomfortable.
A definite chief aim is 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:
Fix the exact thing you want, as a definite quantity, not a wish for more.
Decide exactly what you will give in return, since nothing comes without payment of some kind.
Set a definite date by which you intend to have it.
Create a definite plan and start at once, whether or not you feel ready.
Write it all out as one clear statement covering the objective, deadline, payment and plan.
Read that statement aloud twice a day, on waking and before sleep, and while reading, see and feel yourself already in possession of it.
Hill was emphatic that the aim must be one thing, not a list.
The strongest part is the second step, and it is the one readers skip. Naming what you will 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?
Write down an income you want, then the specific service, skill or volume of work you will supply for it, and you will usually find 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. That is where the method starts asking you to treat a fantasy as a fact.
You can separate the two halves. Keep the written statement, the deadline and the stated price, and treat the daily reading as a review of a commitment rather than a psychic operation. Think of it as a ship's course plotted on a chart: worth checking every morning, but it does not move the ship by itself.
How is a definite chief aim different from a definite major purpose?
Hill used definite chief aim mainly in The Law of Success and definite major purpose more often in his later writing, and he drew no sharp technical line between them. Both mean a single dominant objective, written down, with a deadline and an intended contribution attached.
If there is a shade of difference, definite major purpose leans toward a life direction, while definite chief aim can apply to a defined project.
Should a definite chief aim always be about money?
No. 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 said the same procedure applies to any definite objective.
The real requirement is that the aim be measurable enough that you could tell an outsider whether you had reached it. That rules out aims like becoming more confident.
What is the mastermind principle?
Ever made more progress in one honest talk with a friend than in a month alone? That is the idea here.
The mastermind is Hill's ninth principle: the coordination of knowledge and effort between two or more people, in a spirit of harmony, aimed at a single definite purpose. He argued such an alliance produces something beyond the sum of its members, and gave two explanations.
The ordinary one holds up: several people pooling knowledge, contacts and criticism will out-think one person, and having to report progress to others changes behavior.
The mystical one involves an energy generated between minds in harmony, and Hill never made it precise.
His conditions were strict: a definite, shared purpose, not a general interest in improvement; harmony, because he believed friction cancels the effect; and a fixed schedule, not meetings when convenient.
Hill cited Henry Ford as his standing example of a man with limited formal education who gathered specialist knowledge around himself. He also claimed to have run masterminds of his own, though as with much of his account the corroboration is thin.
The mastermind has traveled furthest of all Hill's ideas, now the standard structure for peer accountability groups in business and writing, and watered down almost beyond recognition.
Paid programs sold as masterminds are often one expert broadcasting to a paying audience: 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 when you have to say out loud whether you did what you said you would. You'll notice it the night before the meeting, when you suddenly finish the task you have dodged all week. The value fades as the group grows, because airtime per member falls and the reporting obligation weakens.
How many people should be in a mastermind group?
Hill did not fix a number, saying only two or more, but the format works best at two to six.
The limit is arithmetic: in a ninety minute meeting, six people get fifteen minutes each, and beyond that the session becomes an audience. Hill's rule that every member pursue 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 from the chapter on the sixth sense. Hill held nightly meetings in his mind with historical figures including Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Edison, asking each for advice in character.
He acknowledged the figures were creations of his own imagination. It is a perspective-taking device, not a mastermind, since no outside information enters the room.
What is autosuggestion in Think and Grow Rich?
Ever repeated a goal to yourself and wondered if it was doing anything? This principle is about exactly that.
Autosuggestion is Hill's third principle, the mechanism he proposed for moving a definite chief aim from conscious intention into what he called the subconscious mind.
The instruction is concrete. Read the written statement of your aim aloud twice daily, on rising and before sleep, with feeling rather than mechanically. Hill said words alone do nothing: the subconscious, he held, responds only to thoughts mixed with emotion, and repeating a statement you do not feel is wasted effort. So he paired the reading with visualization, telling readers to see themselves already holding the object of the aim while speaking it.
He also argued this process runs whether or not you direct it. In his view, a mind left unsupervised feeds itself the material of the six ghosts of fear, so autosuggestion is simply taking the wheel of something already moving.
He placed it third, right after faith, because in his structure faith is not a starting condition but the product of sustained autosuggestion.
Here the evidence cuts both ways.
Rehearsing a commitment daily plausibly helps. 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 linked with lower effort and worse results, apparently because the fantasy delivers some of the reward in advance. It is like eating dessert first and losing your appetite for the meal.
Her alternative pairs the wished-for outcome with a clear look at the obstacle in the way. That suggests a modification, not 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?
Hill's version is narrower. An affirmation is usually a general statement about identity or worth, repeated in the present tense. His autosuggestion repeats one specific written aim containing a quantity, a deadline, a stated payment and a plan.
The specificity matters. A statement precise enough to be false tomorrow behaves differently from one that can never be checked.
How long did Napoleon Hill say autosuggestion takes to work?
He 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 stop have simply failed at persistence, his eighth principle.
Because there is no point at which the method could be judged to have failed, the original instruction is unfalsifiable. 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?
Wondering which Hill book to pick up first? Start here.
Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937 by The Ralston Society, condenses the thirteen principles into one volume aimed at ordinary readers during the Depression. It is the book to start with.
Hill presented it as the distillation of a twenty-year study begun at Andrew Carnegie's request. The text is built from anecdotes about named industrialists and inventors, most of which cannot be independently verified. It moves fast, repeats itself on purpose, and closes each chapter by pushing you toward action.
The other Napoleon Hill books:
The Law of Success (1928): the fuller statement of the same philosophy across sixteen lessons, first issued in multiple volumes and several times the length. It opens with the definite chief aim and covers the mastermind, imagination, initiative and self-control at length. Think and Grow Rich is the compressed version, and part of its success came from being short enough to finish.
How to Sell Your Way Through Life (1939): applies the material to selling, more practical and less cosmic.
The Master-Key to Riches (1945) and Grow Rich! With Peace of Mind (1967): by then Hill was recasting the philosophy in gentler terms.
Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude (1959), with W. Clement Stone: the most readable of the later titles.
One practical warning: with 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 make sense. Look for an edition presented as the complete original text if you want to know what Hill actually wrote.
Outwitting the Devil deserves its own note. Hill wrote the manuscript in 1938 as a framed dialogue in which he interrogates a personified Devil about how people are kept passive. It went unpublished for decades until the Napoleon Hill Foundation released an annotated version in 2011. It has his sharpest writing on drift and his least defensible writing on schooling. Treat it as a curiosity, not a starting point.
How many copies has Think and Grow Rich sold?
The figure is disputed. 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 the real figure was considerably lower, based on historical bestseller records. No independently audited number exists, so treat any specific total as a claim, not a fact.
What Napoleon Hill practice can you try this week?
You can test the useful core of Hill in seven days: his six-step definite chief aim, plus one modern correction.
Day one: on a sheet of paper, write four things. The exact outcome you want, as a number or a checkable fact, not a mood. The specific date you intend to have it by. 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.
Days one to seven: read that paragraph out loud twice a day, once within ten minutes of waking and once right before bed. Hill's instruction is to feel it while reading, so do not mumble it.
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 targets the specific failure that pure visualization produces.
Act within twenty-four hours of writing the plan, even if the step is small and obviously not enough. Hill's fourth step says to begin at once whether or not you feel ready, and a written aim with no action attached fades into a wish within days.
Tell one person. If you can find someone working on something comparable, agree to talk at a fixed time next week and hold each other to what was promised. That is the smallest workable version of the mastermind.
At the end of the seven days, do not judge the aim. Judge what you can observe. Did reading the statement change what you noticed? Did the sixty seconds on obstacles produce action you would not otherwise have taken? If neither happened, no amount of persistence language should override that reading. You deserve a method that earns its place in your mornings.
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.
Hill required the objective, the deadline, what you will give in return and the plan, and none of those needs elaboration. A statement that feels like an essay will not survive twice-daily reading, and length usually means the aim has not really been decided.
What if you cannot decide what your definite chief aim should be?
Then the indecision is the first thing to work on, a point 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 an 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 wrong.
What criticism has Napoleon Hill faced?
Before you trust a teacher with your ambitions, you deserve to know where his story does not check out.
The strongest criticism: the central biographical claim behind Hill's authority appears to be false.
The Carnegie story. 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.
The presidents. 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.
The legal record. Decades of failed ventures and legal trouble are documented: 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 in connection with the George Washington Institute in Chicago, and federal complaints about advertising linked to his magazine publishing around 1919. Reporting drawn from newspaper archives and court records documents it.
A 2016 Gizmodo investigation by Matt Novak described him as a con man.
The method criticism would apply even if every anecdote were true.
Hill studied people who had already succeeded and inferred causes from what they shared, without looking at people who did the same things and failed. This is survivorship bias in its clearest form. It means the thirteen principles cannot separate traits that produce success from traits that merely come along with it. Imagine studying only lottery winners and concluding that buying tickets makes you rich.
The system is also built so 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 puts the cause of wealth entirely in the individual mind implies 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. If money has been hard for you, that history is worth remembering.
Does the Napoleon Hill Foundation acknowledge the disputed claims?
The Foundation, which holds and licenses the rights to Hill's work, still presents the Andrew Carnegie commission as history in its publications. Independent researchers, including the Carnegie biographer David Nasaw, have not found supporting evidence.
Worth noting: the friendliest accounts of Hill's life come from parties who publish and sell his books.
Does the criticism mean Think and Grow Rich has no value?
No, but it changes what you can use the book for. The parts that survive are procedural: writing a single specific aim with a deadline and a stated price, reviewing it daily, and gathering a small group of peers around it.
What does not survive is the book's authority as reporting on how Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford or Thomas Edison actually worked, since Hill's access to them is undocumented.
How is Napoleon Hill different from Dale Carnegie and the New Thought writers?
If you own a few classic success books, this shows which ask you to do something and which ask you to believe something.
Hill differs from Dale Carnegie, the nearest neighbor, in where he puts the cause of success. Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936, a year before Think and Grow Rich, is about observable behavior toward other people: remembering names, avoiding argument, taking a genuine interest in someone before asking anything of them. Every instruction 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 often confused, and neither was related to the other or to Andrew Carnegie.
Hill's other lineage is New Thought, the American movement holding that thought exerts direct causal force on circumstances. Its voices include 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 came before him, but the packaging: he attached the New Thought premise to named industrialists and a stepwise procedure.
W. Clement Stone took the material into corporate sales training and rebranded the attitude part as positive mental attitude. Earl Nightingale boiled the core idea down 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. That is why it is the purer and weaker version.
In the other direction sit writers who kept Hill's structure and dropped his metaphysics. Stephen Covey's habit of beginning with the end in mind is a recognizable descendant of the definite chief aim, minus the subconscious machinery. If you want Hill's practical residue, that branch will serve you better.
Did Napoleon Hill invent the law of attraction?
No. The idea that thought attracts matching circumstances predates Hill by decades and belongs to nineteenth century New Thought, with Prentice Mulford, Wallace D. Wattles and Charles F. Haanel among those who set it out before him.
Hill's distinctive move was fusing 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. Hill was not related to Dale Carnegie or Andrew Carnegie, and the two Carnegies 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 came out one year before Think and Grow Rich, in the same market.
Questions people ask
Is Think and Grow Rich still worth reading?
Yes, as a primary source more than as instruction. Hill's book set the template most later success writing follows, so it explains where much of today's 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 he did. Hill's central 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. Think and Grow Rich rests its authority on that claim.
What are Napoleon Hill's 13 principles?
As set out in Think and Grow Rich: 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 as the raw material and the later principles as 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 is singular, priced and rehearsed. You hold one at a time, not a list. You state what you will give in return, not only what you want to receive. And you read it aloud daily instead of reviewing it now and then. 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?
Find two to six people working on something of comparable scale, agree a fixed meeting time, and give every member the same share of airtime. Hill required harmony among members and a single definite purpose, which rules out loose networking. A workable format gives each person a few minutes to say 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 refers to. The Law of Success, published in 1928, holds the same philosophy across sixteen lessons and many more pages, and suits you afterward if you want the fuller version. 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?
No research has tested Hill's system as a system, and the evidence on its parts 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 stressed 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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