This governs what happens between wanting money and having a plan that survives contact with the world. Hill's usable claim is narrow and testable: vague wanting produces nothing, a want converted into a number, a date, a price, and a written plan behaves completely differently, and the people who reach the goal are the ones who rebuild the plan after it fails rather than abandoning the goal. The book also carries a large metaphysical apparatus, Infinite Intelligence, brains as broadcasting stations, a nightly council of imagined counselors, that none of the rules below rest on; Hill himself calls the counselors imaginary, useful for the paths of thought they opened.

Do

Convert the want into a number, a date, a price, and a plan, on one page. Hill's six steps: fix the exact amount, decide exactly what you will give in return since there is no such reality as something for nothing, set a definite date, write a definite plan and start on it immediately whether you feel ready or not, put the whole thing in one written statement, and read it aloud twice a day. The number and the date are what separate this from a wish. [Source: "Desire"]

Read it with feeling or don't bother reading it. Hill's warning about auto-suggestion is blunt: a formula like Coué's repeated a million times without emotion mixed in leaves the subconscious untouched, because it only acts on thoughts well mixed with feeling. The practical version is holding the image until you can actually see yourself in possession of it rather than reciting a figure. [Source: "Auto-Suggestion"]

Decide quickly and reverse slowly. Analyzing several hundred people who had accumulated fortunes past a million dollars, Hill found every one of them shared the habit of reaching decisions promptly and changing them slowly if at all, while the pattern in failure was deciding slowly, if ever, and reversing often and fast. Lack of decision sits near the top of his thirty causes of failure. [Source: "Decision"]

Treat defeat as evidence about the plan, never about the goal. The chapter's core claim is that anyone following this method should expect temporary defeat, and that defeat means only that the plan was unsound. Edison ran roughly ten thousand failed attempts before the working lamp; Samuel Insull rebuilt a hundred-million-dollar fortune once and lost it again when the newer plans proved unsound. Build the next plan, keep the destination. [Source: "Organized Planning"]

Assemble the people who hold the knowledge you lack, and state up front what each of them gets. Hill's four instructions for a Master Mind alliance: ally with as many people as your plan requires, decide in advance what you will give each of them for their cooperation, meet at least twice a week until the plan is finished, and keep the group in harmony. Carnegie said openly that he knew nothing of the technical side of steelmaking and did not need to, because the knowledge was available through his group. [Source: "Organized Planning"]

Buy the specific skill the moment the old one stops paying. Hill separates general knowledge, which accumulates and does nothing on its own, from specialized knowledge organized toward a definite plan. Stuart Austin Wier, a construction engineer whose market vanished in the Depression, went back to school past forty, took only targeted courses, finished a law degree in two years, and built a corporate practice in Dallas; a laid-off grocery salesman took an accounting course and built a bookkeeping service for small merchants. [Source: "Specialized Knowledge"]

Let the document do the selling. Hill's brief of qualifications is a written case for your own services, including an offer to work an unpaid trial period if you are confident of the value. The most extreme corpus example is a woman who built a nearly fifty-page prepared plan for marketing her unemployed son's services, which got him hired at the first interview at a salary he set himself. [Source: "Organized Planning"]

Bind yourself to finishing where your own discipline will not. Hill enrolled in a home-study advertising course, quit after eight or ten lessons, and only completed it because the school kept billing him regardless. He credits the skills from that forced completion, driven by a collection department rather than his own resolve, with real money he later earned. [Source: "Specialized Knowledge"]

Keep the plan inside the group. Hill's advice is to say nothing about your plans outside your Master Mind, on two grounds: other people's discouraging opinions will override your own judgment, and someone may act on the idea before you do. [Source: "Decision"]

Audit yourself against a written list once a year. The Thirty Major Causes of Failure covers lack of a defined purpose, lack of self-discipline, procrastination, lack of persistence, wrong choice of business associates, over-caution, egotism, and guessing instead of thinking, and is paired with a twenty-eight question self-analysis meant to be answered honestly, ideally with someone else checking the answers. The point of the second person is that you will not catch your own alibis. [Source: "Organized Planning"]

Don't

Don't leave the goal in the form of a wish. Barnes never told himself he would try to get a job with Edison; his framing was that he would end up Edison's partner, with no way to retreat, and he rode a freight train as a stowaway to say so in person. Hill pairs this with the general who burned his own ships on landing so that winning was the only remaining option. [Source: "Desire"]

Don't quit at the point where the result is nearest. Darby's family drilled a rich Colorado vein, watched it vanish, gave up, and sold the machinery to a junk dealer for a few hundred dollars; the dealer hired a mining engineer who calculated the fault line and found the vein three feet from where the Darbys had stopped. Darby spent the rest of his selling career telling himself he would not stop three feet from gold again. [Source: "Introduction"]

Don't leave the fear of criticism unnamed. Hill puts it at the head of his symptom list for absent persistence precisely because it usually runs from the subconscious, unrecognized. His own version, when Carnegie proposed he spend twenty years organizing a philosophy of success, was a flood of questions about what his relatives would think and whether people would decide he was crazy. Naming it is the whole move; unnamed it just gets called realism. [Source: "Persistence"]

Don't collect opinions from people who have not done the thing. One of Hill's four steps for building persistence is a mind deliberately closed against negative and discouraging influence, and he specifies relatives and friends as the usual source rather than strangers. The people most invested in your safety are the least useful counsel on a risk. [Source: "Persistence"]

Don't expect a price you have not been quoted. Hill states flatly that there is no such reality as something for nothing, and applies it to his own method as well as to money: the price of an auto-suggestion practice that actually works is everlasting persistence in applying it, and no shorter version is on offer. [Source: "Auto-Suggestion"]

Don't keep the alibi. The book closes with Fifty-Seven Famous Alibis, each beginning with "IF": if I had money, if I had a good education, if I were only younger. Hill's diagnosis is that people defend their favorite excuse the way they would defend a child, and that the defense is what makes the underlying weakness permanent. [Source: "How to Outwit the Six Ghosts of Fear"]

Don't let indecision sit and turn into worry. Hill defines worry as sustained fear rooted in indecision, and puts the argument in an unusually stark scene: interviewing a condemned man two hours before execution, calm and eating heartily, who explained he had made his peace the moment the outcome became certain. What was unbearable was the open question, not the answer. [Source: "How to Outwit the Six Ghosts of Fear"]

Don't take the metaphysics as an instruction. Hill's later chapters describe the brain as a broadcasting and receiving station, ideas arriving from Infinite Intelligence, and a sixth sense he says rarely becomes usable before fifty. None of the operational material above depends on any of it, and treating a promised flash of inspiration as a step in a plan is how the method turns into waiting. [Source: "The Sixth Sense"]

Hold

Who you are around sets what you think is normal. Hill traces Ford's rise past poverty and a limited education partly to his friendships with Edison, Firestone, Burroughs, and Burbank, arguing that people take on the habits and thinking of those they spend time with. Held, your choice of company becomes a decision rather than an accident. [Source: "Power of the Master Mind"]

The downward direction requires no plan; the other one does. Hill's closing image is a river with two currents, and his summary line is that poverty is bold and ruthless and needs no help, while riches are shy and timid and have to be deliberately attracted. Held, the absence of a plan is not neutral, it is a choice of direction. [Source: "Power of the Master Mind"]

Hill's own most famous exercise is an imagination exercise, and he says so. He convened a nightly imagined council of nine figures, Emerson, Paine, Edison, Darwin, Lincoln, Burbank, Napoleon, Ford, and Carnegie, asking each for the specific trait he wanted in himself, and describes them acquiring distinct personalities over months of repetition. He also states plainly that he regards the whole practice as imaginary, valuable for the paths of thought it opened rather than as literal contact. Read the rest of the book's metaphysics with the same discount he applied to his own. [Source: "The Sixth Sense"]

The one line

Write the exact amount, the exact date, and what you will give for it, then rebuild the plan every time it fails and keep the goal untouched.