The Laws of Success


Everyone's heard of "The Secret" by now which discusses the whole theory of the Law of Attraction and how to make it work for you. It's been said that this book is actually a skimmed down version of Napoleon Hill's earlier work, Think and Grow Rich. Napoleon Hill, for those of you who don't know is considered, by many, the father of self-help books. An American author born in 1883 he had the good fortune of meeting Andrew Carnegie in 1908.

The story goes that Carnegie had given Napoleon Hill an assignment that lasted almost 20 years. The assignment was to interview in depth 500 of the most successful people Carnegie knew (at least a hundred of them were self made millionaires) and compile the results of those interviews into a universal road map for success. Some of the people interviewed were : Franklin D. Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie himself, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Schwab, Theodore Roosevelt, pretty much the most influential men and women of the early 20th Century whose influences are still relevant now in 2010. The result of this compilation of interviews lead to a 15 course study called the Laws of Success in 1925.

To avoid sounding like the guy in that infomercial about this particular edition I will skip past all the conspiracy theories on how "the book was so powerful they never released this edition to the public blah blah blah". Here are the facts as I know them. The original edition was released in 1925 to only a hundred people, many of the same people I mentioned earlier were in this list. In 1928 the Law of Success was changed to 16 Lessons (I believe they added the lesson about personal finance and saving money) and released to the public. Reportedly, the 1928 version is a lot longer than the 1925 version which I have read is more to the point. Up to this point the Laws of Success were physically 16 different volumes (and wikipedia says there's a 17th volume called Mental Dynamite. I'll post more as I find out more) released as an at home study guide like an encyclopedia for success. So in 1937 Mr. Hill condensed the concepts into a book known as Think and Grow Rich which 73 years later is the sixth best-selling book of all time.

This blog is going to provide my notes on the Laws of Success, course by course, and my wish is that with some interaction from you, the reader, we will all benefit from the knowledge contained in this wonderful book. This is officially part one of the Self-Evolution Blog Journey so therefore this series gets its own page.


Without further ado:
Click Here to Download The Laws of Success By Napoleon Hill in PDF


The Lessons
This list will be updated regularly so check back often.

Lesson One: The Mastermind 
Lesson Two: A Definite Chief Aim