The Law of Success (1928)
The Magic Ladder To Success (1930)
Think and Grow Rich (1937)
How to Sell Your Way through Life (1939)
Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude (1960)
You Can Work Your Own Miracles (1970)
Napoleon Hill's Keys to Success: The 17 Principles of Personal Achievement
Grow Rich!: With Peace of Mind
The Master-Key to Riches
Succeed and Grow Rich Through Persuasion
Mr. Hill has been described as the first 'Personal Success/Development' or 'Rags to Riches Guru' and, by an extraordinary coincidence, one of his above comic-books, 'Think and Grow Rich,' also has apparently sold 20 millions copies around the world.
In brief, as a young man, Mr. Hill got a job working for the once-ruthless, multi-millionaire steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, who after suffering an attack of conscience in his later years, had decided to give most of his fortune away to educate the masses, whom he'd previously exploited without mercy. As part of this philanthropic campaign, starting in 1908, Hill (aged 25) was paid by Carnegie to interview hundreds of the most famous, and rich, men and women of the day (many of whom were Carnegie's ruthless business rivals), to discover their own secrets of success so that these could be passed on to humanity. Strangely, not one interviewee suggested that he/she had become wealthy as a result of any lack of morality. Hill then spent the rest of his life trading off all these widely-respected celebrities' names and reputations whilst peddling essentially the same fiction as
fact. In a series of never-ending publications, recordings and pay-to-enter meetings, Hill steadfastly pretended
moral and intellectual authority. He posed as a
philanthropic, autodidact scientist and philosopher who had conducted years of selfless research from which he had discovered the secret magic formula by which anyone (no matter what their sex, race, creed or colour), could lawfully achieve wealth, health, happiness, freedom, etc.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4mo0pz8oi4 .
In accurate terms, what Hill was actually peddling was a dissimulated religion, or a non-rational belief system, based on a closed-logic pseudo-science. Hill called his dissimulated religion, 'The Philosophy of Personal Achievement' or 'The Science of Success.' Thus, Hill taught his followers that they could only achieve their dreams and goals (i.e. paradise on Earth) through excluding all negative influences and by developing 100% positive thinking (i.e. unquestioning faith).
Obviously religions, or non-rational beliefs, and closed-logic pseudo-sciences are not dangerous in themselves, but the propagation of one form of exploitative non-rational belief (popularly known as a pyramid scam or dissimulated money circulation scheme) is forbidden by law. Unfortunately, if racketeers apply co-ordinated devious techniques of persuasion designed to shut-down individuals' critical and evaluative faculties in order to perpetrate a dissimulated money circulation scheme and prevent victims from facing reality and complaining, then the result can only be described as evil. However, as James Ray has again recently proved, when taken to extremes by narcissistic charlatans, these techniques (which are, in fact, impermissible experiments on humans) can cause serious physical, and/or psychological, damage, and even death, to the ill-informed persons upon whom they are inflicted.
Once you know what Napoleon Hill was actually doing, it becomes immediately obvious that this narcissistic charlatan really had hit upon a secret magic formula, but only to benefit himself. Indeed, it would have been far more accurate for Mr. Hill to have entitled his best-selling comic-book : 'Stop Thinking and Make me Rich.'
The latest generation of narcissitic 'Personal Success/Development' or 'Rags to Riches' gurus, like James Arthur Ray, are no different. They have simply worked out how Napoleon Hill's age-old, blame-the-victim fraud functioned, and they have tailored it to fit the spirit of the times. But then L. Ron Hubbard, set up essentially the same unoriginal fraud in the early 1950s, which he also first peddled as the 'Science of Certain Success'.
David Brear (copyright 2011)