The Library/Key I
The 13 principles of Think and Grow Rich, and what each one assigns
Hill numbered thirteen principles and then buried the instructions inside the anecdotes. Here is each one stated as the work it asks of you.
- Source
- Napoleon Hill · Think and Grow Rich (1937)
- min read
- 3
Why the list matters more than the stories
Most people finish Think and Grow Rich remembering Edwin Barnes and the man who quit three feet from gold. They remember almost none of the thirteen principles in order. That is a structural problem with the book, not with the reader.
Hill wrote for a 1937 audience that read a chapter a week and discussed it. Read straight through in two evenings, the anecdotes crowd out the assignments. Stated plainly, the thirteen are a sequence, and the order is not decorative.
The thirteen, in Hill's order
1. Desire. Fix one definite aim, in writing, with an amount and a date. Hill gives six steps for this and they are the only place in the book he writes out a procedure.
2. Faith. Repeat the written aim aloud until you believe it. Hill is describing repetition acting on belief, not a request made to the universe.
3. Autosuggestion. The mechanism behind principle two: what you say to yourself with attention and feeling is what takes hold.
4. Specialised knowledge. General knowledge does not pay. Decide what specific knowledge your aim requires and where you will get it.
5. Imagination. Two kinds: synthetic, which recombines what exists, and creative, which does not. Most plans need the first.
6. Organised planning. Turn the aim into a plan with named people and dated steps. Hill expects the plan to fail and be rebuilt, repeatedly.
7. Decision. Decide quickly, change slowly. Hill's study of wealthy men found this habit more consistently than any other.
8. Persistence. Weak desire produces weak persistence. The remedy is not willpower but a definite aim you actually want.
9. The Master Mind. Two or more people in harmony on a definite purpose. Hill treats this as an engineering requirement, not networking.
10. The mystery of sex transmutation. Redirect strong drive into work. Read past the period language and the point is the redirection of energy.
11. The subconscious mind. It accepts what is repeated. Guard the input because you cannot supervise the output.
12. The brain. Hill's broadcasting analogy, the weakest chapter, and safely read as metaphor.
13. The sixth sense. Available, Hill says, only after the other twelve are practised. Read it last and expect nothing from it early.
What the sequence is really doing
Principles one to three set what you want and drive it inward. Four to six turn it into a plan. Seven and eight govern conduct once the plan meets resistance.
Nine and ten supply the fuel and the company. Eleven to thirteen are Hill's account of why the first ten work, and they are the chapters people quote most and use least.
Read that way, the book is a syllabus with one exercise per principle. Ninety per cent of readers never do the exercises, which is the entire reason the book has been reread for eighty years without changing much.
There is a difference between wishing for a thing and being ready to receive it.