I like Napoleon Hill – he tends to give one sentence answers to any excuses I have. The one goal he probably had with spending decades in writing Think and Grow Rich was to inspire action. My goal in writing this article is to give you a flavour of the book and share his wisdom. What follows are some of my favourite quotes, selected and structured in such a way as to take you from unmotivated to taking action.

The first quote is a disclaimer from Napoleon Hill himself:

I’m going to talk a lot about achieving goals in this article so let’s first consider what’s worth achieving in the first place. When I think of grand achievement what comes to mind is something related to money or business. When I ask myself “who are the most successful people” the first image I have is of businessmen that would rank in the Richest People in the World.

Therefore, I put this quote first.  To me the experiences listed in the quote are even more valuable than being a billionaire. Keep in mind that when I use the terms goals or achievements, these can be something other than financial.

With this quote Napoleon Hill tells me that regardless of our goals, all achievement begins with a humble idea. Something accessible to all of us. What is it that we desire? Our goals share exactly the same beginning as any grand riches. It all starts from an awareness.

Now that I am aware of what it is that I want, the very next thought I have is “Yeah but…” It is the part of me saying it’s unrealistic, unlikely or that I am not worthy of having it. Just because we’ve not had something before, doesn’t mean we are unable to have it in the future. That’s what this quote tells me. All great fortune is firstly dreamed, hoped, wished; they were firstly aware of the of difference between where they are now and where they want to be. Whether that’s money, health or the relationship – your unfulfilled (yet!) desire is exactly what anyone who achieved great fortune also had. They all started from the same starting point.

Where I often go wrong is having that desire as something vague in my head. It makes sense in the back of my head and it seems that is enough. Napoleon Hill urges us to define it. It must be specific, with all beautiful details that we can talk at length about. How it feels, how it looks like, what it does for us. The more specific it becomes, the better chances we have of achieving it. How can a ship reach its destination without specific co-ordinates? My idea to you is write your desire down, or practise speaking it in a single sentence. What’s the summary of it? When we summarise it, we bring out what’s important and key about our desire. And then having it in short means it’s easy to remember and easy to move towards.

This is important because we learn wishing is not enough. Even taking action is not enough. We must actively believe that the achievement of our desire is possible. This reminds me of a Queer Eye episode where a rapper was regularly putting work in the studio, but his attitude said: “It’s not possible.” It’s easy to disregard optimism and positive thinking – but how is it possible to achieve our goals if we self-sabotage ourselves by not believing in them? The lesson I take from this quote is that we must be aware of our attitude. Does our attitude support the achievement of our goals or go against them?

I hope my article on identity was able to impress on you that we are not a specific thing but a collection of our most repeated thoughts and behaviours. This is why it’s easy to think we are our habits, job or environment because they are the most repeated impressions we have given ourselves. To achieve our goals, we must impress upon ourselves that we have the ability to achieve them. One of my favourite ways for creating an impression upon myself is to print out things which inspire me and post them in places which I often look. My bathroom and the area above my desk are covered!

Nothing inspires faith like action does. What I take from this quote is that getting into the habit of working towards my goals means there is no energy left to doubt their achievement. I think our brains are incredible. They are thinking machines and they are at their best when given a challenging puzzle to solve. If I don’t give myself enough stimulus to work through, my energy will go elsewhere such as doubt or overthinking. We can drown out those voices by the commitment of our resources to the achievement of the goal.

A turning point for me was reading a book called The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. From it I learned a bitter truth. Things that are worthwhile take time. It’s only by sacrificing my leisure time that it is possible to make the time necessary to achieve them. Fortunately, it is not as a bad as it seems. I once had a job where I had to commute for two hours to the office, and that was in only one direction. The strange thing that happened is that once I got back home, I truly appreciated my time off. I remember relaxing felt different. Like I had truly earned it.

This is my favourite. It tells me by showing bravery and commitment to my goal, the outside world will be impressed by my action and start to arrange itself in a way to support the overcoming of that goal. We call it coincidence but notice how often have things arranged themselves in exactly the way we needed them to.

This is what I meant in the introduction. I take his word for it. I would do better to spend that time and energy towards my desires rather than misuse my imagination with worry.

This I’ve seen true in my own experience. Sometimes I would be working on a technical IT project all day, uncertain if I will solve it, if I’m even making progress at all. But I keep at it and more often than not, the solution appeared itself around 17:50 just as the work day is ending. Somethings only work out at the 95% mark. I need to be comfortable with all the other percent’s that take to get there. Napoleon Hill is saying we are only defeated if we do not take the next step forward.

What is your next step?

Napoleon Hill is one of the granddaddies in the self-help space (I only know James Allen to be older). Originally published in 1937 I find it mythical how it can be so relevant even today. It appears certain truths are timeless. A benefit of the book being so old is that it’s now widely available for less than a single Euro and is also translated in 40 languages. The language used in the book has aged however so it’s probably not a good fit for anyone who doesn’t like reading books.