Napoleon Hill

Early life and education

Hill was born in a one room cabin near Pound, in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. His mother died when he was nine, and his father remarried two years later to a stepmother, Martha, whom Hill credited with pushing him toward education and away from the trouble he had been getting into as a boy. At thirteen he began writing as a mountain reporter for his father's newspaper, and at seventeen he moved to Tazewell, Virginia, for business school before working for a time for coal magnate Rufus A. Ayers and later enrolling in law school, which he left without finishing for lack of money.

Career

Hill worked as a journalist, salesman, and promoter across a series of ventures in Alabama, Washington D.C., and Chicago that repeatedly ended in financial collapse, and later used the title Attorney at Law despite no clear record of having practiced. He claimed that a meeting with steel magnate Andrew Carnegie set the course of his career, that Carnegie challenged him to spend twenty years, unpaid, interviewing the most successful men in America to distill the principles behind their success, and gave him letters of introduction to figures including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell. That claimed research became the basis first for his sixteen volume The Law of Success in 1928, which brought him enough money for a Rolls-Royce and a large Catskills estate before the Great Depression forced their loss, and then for its far more famous, condensed successor, Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937. The later book organized his material into thirteen principles, definiteness of purpose, the mastermind principle, and persistence among them, built around the claim that whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

Legacy and death

Hill died in 1970 with an estate of roughly a million dollars, and historians have long questioned several of his central claims, including the extent, and even the occurrence, of his relationship with Carnegie and some of the other figures he said he interviewed. Despite that unresolved controversy over his own biography, Think and Grow Rich has sold an estimated 100 million copies across editions and translations by publisher's account, and its structure, definite goals, a mastermind group, sustained persistence through failure, became a direct template for the modern personal success and self help genre that followed it. The Napoleon Hill Foundation, established in 1963, continues to promote his work and maintain his papers.

Books

Each Claude Code skill above is grounded in a specific passage of a specific book. These are the primary sources we drew from for Napoleon.

Notable quotes

References

Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:

• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (1937)

Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Hill