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Napoleon Hill helped fill the ranks of the earliest success and self-empowerment writers. He brought a dream to life in his self-help success guide, Think and Grow Rich, paving the way for countless wealth creation success stories.

Who Was Napoleon Hill?

At birth, probably no one who knew Napoleon Hill would have guessed that he could become on the most famous self-success writers of all time. No one would have thought he’d have the experience and success that he did; there was nothing in his upbringing that predisposed home to wealth creation and success. Of course, if intuition and curiosity could be visualized, perhaps Napoleon Hill’s future could have been foretold, but absent of that, there was nothing grand about Hill’s beginnings.

Napoleon Hill was born in 1883 in the United States. His biography states that he was born poor in a two-room cabin. From there, a series of events, both unfortunate and opportune, led to his becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time (for Think and Grow Rich).

Napoleon Hill’s mother died when he was just 10 years old. His father did remarry a couple of years later, but the family remained poverty-stricken. When he was 13, Napoleon Hill began to write for a local newspaper as a “mountain reporter”. Hill managed to save money from his job as a writer and enroll in law school. Unfortunately, Hill could not finance his way through college, and he left law school and returned to work as a reporter.

Hill was given an assignment to interview and write a series of articles about famous men. On the list of subjects was steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. It is the chance meeting with Carnegie that forged Napoleon Hill’s future and set his ultimate success.

What Was Hill’s Wealth Creation Message?

When Hill met with Mr. Carnegie he presented a challenge to the young writer; Carnegie challenged Hill to interview 500 of the most successful and wealthy people on earth, and use their experiences and tactics to extract a formula for wealth creation. Carnegie believed, as Hill came to prove, that there were certain characteristics that all successful people employed to make money and create wealth.

Hill accepted Carnegie’s challenge, and spent years interviewing a variety of successful men and women. He studied the similarities and deduced that there are 13 principles that are employed by those who create wealth of their own.

Although Napoleon Hill refrains from naming the principles and the “secret to success” specifically (because he believed it was best for the reader to learn these things for him or herself), there is a very notable overriding theme in his works that support the accepted belief that the proper mindset is the key to wealth creation and financial success. Hill believed that “thoughts are things” and sets off in his book to explain how (much in the same manner as his peer, Wallace Wattles); it is from Hill that we have come to embrace the term “Master Mind”. These two tenets should serve as some indication of what Hill believed to be the key to successfully creating wealth.

Napoleon Hill’s works, his book Think and Grow Rich in particular, were an important contribution to the field of wealth creation. Never before, or since, has there been a collective study of so many successful creators of wealth. Napoleon Hill spent half a lifetime studying what it takes to make great financial success. Napoleon Hill gave the world of wealth creation a timeless guide that is as applicable to money making today as it was in the early part his century.