Book Review: Think and Grow Rich -Napoleon Hill

think grow rich


Here’s my second book review for you! I heard good things about it from the last book I read. When I walked thought the B&N the door, I saw it on my left side, and it was asking me to pick it up. It was a sign, so I bought it on sale!

Think & Grow Rich is not just a book that guides people into developing wealth, it is about becoming rich in your mind. It’s a classic nonfiction book written in response to the Great Depression by Napoleon Hill, the adviser to president Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was friends with major business owners such as Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman, and studied their and 500 other extremely successful individuals’ methods of achievement. Napoleon studied their states of mind in creating million and billion dollar businesses. Hill put their main mental strategies into this book! The ultimate purpose of this book was to help people suffering from the Great Depression to get back on their feet. He helped to rebuild the economy through this book, and is still doing so for us!

I summarized this book, so I’ll save you 292 pages of reading.

If you’re interested in how successful business people made their desires a reality, read on!

Each chapter goes in depth on a specific tool for attaining wealth in the mind, and how to make it happen in real life. First, you must begin with a thought or IDEA that you must breathe life into. The idea can be an item to offer people, essentially a service. He tells how a simple old kettle and a secret ingredient (IDEA/imagination) created the enterprise that is Coca-Cola.

“Nature’s building blocks are found in thoughts. Everything begins as a thought, and they should be treated as things.”

Second, you must have a burning desire and persistence to make it happen. AND, do not give up when adversity hits you. Most people stop at adversity.

“Anybody can wish for riches, and most people do, but only a few know that a definite plan, plus a BURNING DESIRE for wealth are the only dependable means of accumulating wealth.”

Next, you also need to devise a thought-out plan in how to make your idea come to life. Think of that plan everyday and recite it to yourself in the morning and at evening. This helps with focusing your thoughts.


In Hill’s research of 500+ individuals, he concluded the formula for attaining achievement is:

burning desire + faith + definite plan + persistence = success


Here I go deeper into a what Napoleon calls auto-suggestion. Get ready, we’re delving into a universal concept that many will not believe! I actually couldn’t believe I found this in here, but I also thought of course this is what these people used!!

Auto-suggestion is a concept that our THOUGHTS create our REALITY. If you have control over your thoughts, you have control over your life, because thoughts create your reality. If you think and feel that you are in poverty, then you will get more poverty. If you are scatterbrained and simply drifting above water in rough waters by life’s circumstances, you will attract more powerlessness by auto-suggestion. But if you think you are wealthy, you will get more abundance by auto-suggestion. Emotions intensify what you attract. So whatever you think, say or feel , eventually will attract into your reality. (Like a placebo effect). I’ve known this for a few years, and hearing this from this book is reassuring because it confirms that major business owners follow the same concept: that what happens in your state of mind happens in your environment. It’s crazy but also not surprising that a book about achieving wealth delves into the “thoughts create reality” concept.

The Great Depression – Getting and not Giving

Napoleon mentions that before the Great Depression, people were consuming and consuming while not thinking about its repercussions. They weren’t giving anything in return. Eventually the economy collapsed because people were taking and taking. In order to receive, we need to give. Whatever you reap you sow, and if you don’t plant seeds and water them, you don’t get any crops. Just like tithing, we need to give to where credit is due.

“It [life] cannot promise something for nothing. You can’t get without giving.”

Being Decisive and Trusting Hunches

Going deeper now, the book mentioned that the sixth sense is a skill that we need to tap into to make valuable decisions. This is intuition, or “hunches” that we get that guide us to make correct decisions. It’s information that we get through our imagination. It is wisdom from what Hill calls “Universal Intelligence”. Hill mentioned he uses it at night before bed to create a Cabinet to help him make decisions. For instance, he brought in Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Ford, Darwin, Lincoln, and Carnegie into his Cabinet, and they would sit and make decisions together. I thought it was clever to call his role models and have their wisdom, even if it was in his imagination.

That was my skeletal summary, of course the book is more comprehensive with stories of success and overcoming adversity. I recommend purchasing it.

I cannot rate this book because it is a classic, with 20 million copies sold. It is worth more than 5 stars to me and the $8.00 that I got it for. I hope this review gave you a glimpse into how thoughts come into companies, and how you can use your imagination to create services to serve people.

What did you think of my review?
Should I change the format, did it make sense?

Comment below!


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