Everyone knows Napoleon Hill from his classic personal development book, ‘Think and Grow Rich’.
He’s one of the father’s of the modern personal development world.
He’s sold millions of books worldwide and he’s basically a legend.
What made him special was his access to some of the most successful and powerful people of all time.
He worked with the who’s who of successful people of the time – Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell.
I can’t even comprehend that.
He literally met with the person who invented the telephone, the lightbulb, multiple US presidents and the titans of industry.
I’ve read Think and Grow Rich a number of times and decided to check out one of his other works.
‘In His Own Voice’ is not an official book, but a collection of lectures Hill did.
It’s fricken long, almost 11 hours long.
There are so many lessons, but I’m going to distill the 3 big things I got out of this audio:
- Create a mastermind – A strong trend amongst literally the most successful people of all time is they all had an inner circle. Who is in your inner circle? Do you have an inner circle? Hill defines a mastermind as a group of highly-screened, hand-picked people who you respect working together as one unit to achieve all of their goals in life. You can achieve success without it, but it will be significantly slower. Assembling a group of talented, driven people you know will dramatically accelerate your success. Shared networks, shared knowledge, shared motivation and shared skill-sets.
- Your focus is the only thing you can truly control – This was my favourite lesson from the book. At the end of the day, one of the only things you can fully control in your life is your focus. What you choose to do and not do. Every single day you will make decisions that will either get you closer or further away from what you want in life. When you get to the end of the Friday at a workshop, you have a choice to have 1 or 2 drinks, a quick chat then go back to your home / hotel and implement what you’ve learnt. Even if you’re completely exhausted. Or you could have a bunch of drinks, get pissed and stay out late. You’ll likely forget most of what you learnt the previous day and you’ll have a poor attention span the next day. You chose to do that. And you make thousands of little decisions like this every day of your life. It’ll be obvious in a few years what decisions you made. It’s okay if you’ve got a track record of making shitty decisions. The good news is every day you wake up again, you get an opportunity to make some better decisions.
- Positivity is a choice – Which space do you choose to live in. Positive or Negative? You may experience the same amount of ups and downs as someone else, but how you respond is your choice. If you stay in that negative space and think ‘Why me?’ all the time. Hill attributes much of his personal success to having a positive mental attitude. Not letting negativity take up ‘rent’ in his mind. It’s not as if he ignores bad things happening. But he CHOOSES to find the positive, because ultimately moping around doesn’t help him move forward. It never has and never will serve him. You deserve to achieve all the success you want in life, so why sit in a negative space looking for why stuff doesn’t work. The biggest person it impacts is you. You can complain and moan and whinge all you want about negative circumstances, but at the end of the day you’re only slowing your own progress down.
Review how you went yesterday.
Did you choose to live in a positive space?
Or did you dwell on the negatives?
Did you focus your attention well?
Or did you focus your attention on unimportant or frivolous things?
How could you make better use of your focus today?
Enjoy your week,
Ray
Leave a Reply