Coaching, Self-Help

From the Publisher
Napoleon Hill, maker of millionaires, adviser to the titans of business and industry, and confidant of presidents, started out a long way from the executive boardroom or the White House. He was born into poverty in a one-room log cabin in the mountains of southwest Virginia. Like most who achieve positions of power and influence, his rise to success was the result of many factors. However, unlike most, Napoleon Hill analyzed each key event, identified the lesson learned, reduced the lessons to basic principles, and organized the principles into a philosophy of personal achievement that could be used by anyone as a guide to creating their own success. The first significant influence on Hill was after his mother's death when he was but eight years of age. Young Nap was fast becoming a gun-toting hell-raiser, when his father remarried and his new stepmother came into his life. Martha Ramey Banner was a woman of such clearly defined purpose and positive attitude that she altered the fortunes of the entire Hill family. Her influence on Napoleon would echo throughout his life.

By the age of fifteen the former troublemaker had become a contributing writer for the local newspapers. By nineteen he had made himself the youngest manager of a coal mine, then quit to study law, became a partner in a lumber business, got wiped out by the market, went into the automobile business, then reinvented himself as a business journalist -- all before he was twenty-five. The second major influence on Napoleon Hill -- and the creation of his philosophy -- came when he was assigned to write a profile of the famed steel baron Andrew Carnegie. Their three-hour interview turned into a three-day marathon. It concluded with Carnegie proposing that he would introduce Hill to the most powerful men in America so that Hill could learn from them their secrets of success. But he would do so only if Hill agreed to use those secrets to write a philosophy of success that would be made available to, and could be understood by, the average person.