Meet My Mentor

Meet my mentor... Napoleon Hill (1883-1970)

Welcome to our mentoring program! This is a mentoring program where we invite you to read the inspiring writings of Napoleon Hill and Charles F. Haanel free of charge, and where we provide insight into our business success as a team of self-motivated individuals. So what better way to start than by introducing you to Napoleon Hill (1883-1970).

Napoleon Hill has made more millionaires and inspired more successes than any other person in history. Back in the 1960s and 1970s his work was already shaping the minds of modern day business gurus such as Dr. Stephen R. Covey and motivational speakers such as Jim Rohn.

Around 1976, Dr. Stephen R. Covey began an extensive study of the 'success literature' in America and its evolution. With Mr Napoleon Hill being one of the foremost and first authors of the 'personal-success' genre in America, this is when and where Dr. Covey came in contact with his work.

Jim Rohn bought Napoleon Hill's book, Think and Grow Rich while in his mid-twenties. It along with the Bible and a couple of other key books were major influences in his success.

Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883-November 8, 1970) was an American author who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal-success literature. His most famous work, Think and Grow Rich, is one of the best-selling books of all time.

According to his official biographer, Hill was born into poverty in a two-room cabin in the town of Pound in rural Wise County, Virginia. His mother died when he was ten years old. His father remarried two years later.

At the age of thirteen he began writing as a "mountain reporter" for small-town newspapers. He used his earnings as a reporter to enter law school, but soon had to withdraw for financial reasons. The turning point in his career is considered to have been in 1908 with his assignment, as part of a series of articles about famous men, to interview industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who at the time was one of the most powerful men in the world. Hill discovered that Carnegie believed that the process of success could be elaborated in a simple formula that could be duplicated by the average person. Impressed with Hill, Carnegie commissioned him (without pay and only offering to provide him with letters of reference) to interview over 500 successful men and women, many of them millionaires, in order to discover and publish this formula for success.

As part of his research, Hill interviewed many of the most famous people of the time, including Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Elmer Gates, John D. Rockefeller, Charles M. Schwab, F.W. Woolworth, William Wrigley Jr., John Wanamaker, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Allen Ward and Jennings Randolph. The project lasted over twenty years, during which Hill became an advisor to Carnegie. The formula for rags-to-riches success that Hill and Carnegie formulated was published initially in 1928 in his book The Law of Success. The formula was later published in home-study courses, including the seventeen-volume "Mental Dynamite" series until 1941.

From 1919 to 1920 Hill was the editor and publisher of Hill's Golden Rule magazine. It was during this time he wrote a letter to Charles F. Haanel in which he praised his book The Master Key System. In the letter he writes: "..I believe I ought to inform you that my present success and the success which has followed my work as President of the Napoleon Hill Institute is due largely to the principles laid down in The Master Key System."

In 1930 he published The Ladder to Success. From 1933 to 1936 Hill was an unpaid advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt.

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In 1937 Hill elaborated his success formula in his most famous work, Think and Grow Rich, which is still in print, in several versions, and has sold more than thirty million copies. In 1960, Hill published an abridged version of the book, which for years was the only one generally available. In 2004, Ross Cornwell published Think and Grow Rich!: The Original Version, Restored and Revised, which restored the book to its original form, with slight revisions, and added the first comprehensive endnotes, index, and appendix the book had ever contained. (The Cornwell-Hill "collaboration" resulted from the former's service as editor-in-chief of "Think & Grow Rich Newsletter," published for the Napoleon Hill Foundation.)

You owe it to yourself to get a copy of Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. It's available in just about every library, but we recommend buying the new "The Original Version, Restored and Revised" version that has a comprehensive index and material that was left out of the smaller, condensed version that was the only one available for the last few decades. We've read this book many times and we invariably give our copies to someone else when discussing it. The last copies we had were heavily underlined and highlighted. We're sure the next ones will be, too.

More than a self-improvement book, Think and Grow Rich offers you a complete philosophy of personal achievement. It will teach you methods to create success consciousness within yourself, and it will provide you with a detailed blueprint for achieving that success. Think and Grow Rich is a book that will not just change what you think, it will change the way you think.

In 1939 Hill published How to Sell Your Way through Life, and in 1953 How to Raise Your Own Salary. From 1952 to 1962 he worked with W. Clement Stone of the Combined Insurance Company of America to teach Stone's "Philosophy of Personal Achievement", and to lecture on the "Science of Success". Partly as a result of his work with Stone, in 1960 he published Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. He died in 1970 in South Carolina, and in 1971 his final work, You Can Work Your Own Miracles, was published posthumously.