That Hill's book did not stop at poverty avoidance, but dared to be about becoming fabulously rich, may have forever classified it in some minds as a greed manual, but this is precisely what gave it its huge attraction. This was in the America of the 1930s, still scarred by the Depression, when most people were focused on avoiding poverty rather than getting rich. Near the end of Think and Grow Rich, Hill admits that the main reason he wrote it was 'the fact that millions of men and women are paralyzed by the fear of poverty'. Try to resist that! The book has no shadows or complications it is philosophically clean, setting out the things 'which work', and leaving others, rightfully, to the realm of mystery. Hill suggests we 'stop for a moment when it presents itself, and turn down a glass, for that occasion will mark the most important turning point in your life'.

The early pages allude to a secret that the book contains but does not spell out. Think and Grow Rich is the condensed form of this larger work.

Hill's mission was simply to know 'how the wealthy become that way', and the systematic approach to success became the eight-volume Law of Success (1928). Carnegie had given Hill letters of introduction to the likes of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and FW Woolworth, and he would spend 20 years synthesizing their experience and insights. The book also sold because it was not simply Hill's dreamed-up ideas, but a distillation of the success secrets of hundreds of America's most successful men (not many female tycoons in the 1930s), beginning with his patron, steel baron Andrew Carnegie. Hill refused to accept that success was the domain of luck or background or the gods, and wanted to provide a concrete plan for success that depended entirely on us. In our culture, any book with the words 'rich' or 'success' in the title has a better than average chance of selling well money and external achievement are basic to our time, as rank and honour were to the Middle Ages. A compelling title might explain initial rushes to buy a book, but in the last 80 years, the world has bought over 15 million copies of Think and Grow Rich.

Napoleon hill think and grow rich