Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill was an American self-help author whose 1937 book Think and Grow Rich became one of the best-selling motivational books of all time, despite its highly contested claims and methods.

Napoleon Hill published Think and Grow Rich in 1937, presenting it as the distilled wisdom of 500 wealthy individuals including Andrew Carnegie — though subsequent research has cast serious doubt on whether Hill’s claimed interviews and relationships with many of these figures were genuine. The book argues that a burning desire, faith, and a definite plan, combined with specialized knowledge and the famous “mastermind” principle of coordinated effort, are the primary causes of wealth.

Think and Grow Rich is a foundational text of the self-help industry and its influence on motivational writing has been immense — virtually every subsequent success manual has borrowed its vocabulary and framing. Some of its advice is reasonable: persistence, specificity of goals, and the importance of human networks are genuinely useful ideas. But much of the book relies on mystical concepts like “infinite intelligence” and the pseudo-scientific notion that thoughts literally vibrate at frequencies that attract material outcomes.

Readers should approach Think and Grow Rich with significant critical distance. Its claims are largely unverifiable, its biographical sources are unreliable, and its theology of wealth implies that the poor lack simply the right thoughts rather than structural opportunities. It remains historically important as the origin point of a whole genre, and some of its psychological observations have real merit. But it is a period document, and should be read as one.