Napoleon Hill's Success Masters

by Napoleon Hill

  Prepare as much as you can. That way, you can focus on bigger hurdles.

  7. What you tell yourself: “My goal is stupid.”

  What you should think or do instead: Exude confidence bordering on arrogance.

  If you’re preoccupied with the idea that no one else will be interested in what you’re trying to do, you may start trying to convince yourself that you should quit pursuing your goal based on what you’re worried others will think.

  Try to avoid beating yourself up. Instead, try to learn from your mistakes and understand that confidence is everything. Take up space, and practice good posture if that helps you realize your own confidence. Both can reinforce positive self-perception. Despite the fact that science has not proved power posing effective, some people find that it has a positive effect on their confidence.

  8. What you tell yourself: “That other person already achieved my goal and made it look so easy. I’ll never be as good as them.”

  What you should think or do instead: Approach the person and ask for advice.

  It can be toxic to think about other people’s success. You may put them on a pedestal and think they’re superhuman or free of doubt. Ultimately, you may become wildly jealous of them to the point that you devalue yourself and your potential.

  You shouldn’t feel shy about reaching out to someone you feel inferior to. The other person probably has similar thoughts, and you have plenty to teach them, too.

  9. What you tell yourself: “Even if I achieve my goal, I’m never going to impress the people I want to impress.”

  What you should think or do instead: I’m here to connect with others.

  Reaching a goal, especially a professional one, is often about more than your ability to excel in your line of work. It also involves a social element, such as networking. This leaves many people convinced that they are going to make a negative impression. Someone will find them too shy, too bossy, too something and not enough something else, and that deficiency will cloud all their achievements, so they think.

  Try not to focus on the worst version of yourself or on the self you wish you could be. Try instead to think about how you act around those who value you the most and mirror that behavior elsewhere. Approach meetings and social events with an interest in others, rather than a preoccupation with yourself and your own shortcomings.

  10. What you tell yourself: “It doesn’t seem like I’m making any progress toward my goal.”

  What you should think or do instead: Find someone to hold you accountable.

  When you take on a new challenge, it can be discouraging when your life doesn’t magically change overnight. You’re working so hard, yet you don’t feel like you’re getting anywhere. You begin to wonder if all your effort is worth it.

  To ensure you don’t give up on your goal, establish a support system—one person or a group who will hold you accountable. It could be a family member; Facebook friends, or a life coach. You’ll feel less alone in your journey, you’ll have someone to report to who will make sure you follow through, and best of all, you’ll have someone who will notice and remind you of how far you’ve come.

  11. What you tell yourself: “That didn’t work.”

  What you should think or do instead: Keep your goal, but find a new means of achieving it.

  It’s one thing to be oblivious of the subtle progress you’re making, it’s another to know that what you’re doing is ineffective. But rather than give up in those times, try a different approach.

  Say you’re trying to learn a new skill. For example, you might be trying to learn a new language solely by listening to audio guides during your commute, but you’re not a strong auditory learner. So, you may need to rethink your approach. Perhaps, you learn better with an app or gamification.

  12. What you tell yourself: “This goal isn’t enough. I should be doing more.”

  What you should think or do instead: Focus.

  Don’t overload yourself with to-dos. If you’re making a little progress, don’t devalue what you’ve already accomplished by trying to take on a new task or goal. It’s likely that you still have work to do on the first one.

  Instead, recognize that you should just focus on one thing at a time.

  13. What you tell yourself: “I’m so overwhelmed.”

  What you should think or do instead: Journal.

  Goal-setting requires focus. You have to stay organized about what you need to do to achieve your goal, but you can’t shut the world out, nor can you always resist the temptation to get ahead of yourself. When there are a lot of thoughts swirling around in your head (including negative ones), it can help to write some of them down.

  Write just one or two things most days, whether it’s something you want to work toward or something that’s been on your mind. There’s no structure or plan for what you can write down—just record your thoughts.

  Writing things down also gives you the chance to reflect. You can go back later bimonthly and read your notes to resurface thoughts, do follow ups, and remember things that were done well.

  14. What you tell yourself: “Working toward this goal is taking over my life.”

  What you should think or do instead: Take care of yourself.

  A lot of people who are working hard toward a goal, be it a college degree or a company launch, let their wellness go by the wayside. They romanticize all-nighters and ramen noodles and think that the more they’re sacrificing for their goal, the more likely they are to reach it.

  While some people succeed despite neglecting their own health, it is not sustainable for most.

  If you’re not paying attention to your nutrition, it is going to affect your ability to think clearly. Similarly, stagnation in the body correlates with stagnation in the mind—and creativity.

  Don’t be afraid to invest some time to burn some energy and take care of yourself by eating right and sleeping.

  15. What you tell yourself: “I’m scared to face the changes that achieving my goal will bring.”

  What you should think or do instead: It’s not a matter of life or death.

  Think of the most intimidating thing you’ve had to face or the most dangerous situation you’ve had to get out of. Now recognize that you made it. You’re here, right now, reading this.

  Now think of your goal, and think of which aspect of reaching it is so scary to you. Compare that with what you’ve already overcome in your life. Finally, know that it’s natural to fear new things. Humans are creatures of habit. But they also tend to beat themselves up. You’ll continue to do that if you don’t take the plunge toward what you’re trying to achieve.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Facing Life Successfully

  Earl Nightingale

  What does it take to face the facts of your life? Overcoming problems and adversity is an essential part of any success plan, and no one knows that better than motivational author Earl Nightingale. Born at the dawn of the Great Depression, Nightingale was raised by a single mother and later went on to a successful radio career. Later, after being inspired by Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Nightingale began his career as a motivational speaker and writer. He later went on to start the Nightingale-Conant Corp. with Lloyd Conant, which remains one of the biggest sellers of motivational content. He died in 1989.

  Here, in this essay, Nightingale discusses how you can rise to face life’s challenges.

  THE ANSWER IS IN THE PROBLEM

  The first point I want to make is that all of us have problems, and that our problems will only end when we confront them. We have national problems, corporate problems, family problems, personal problems. But there are two Chinese symbols that together form the ideograph for opportunity. One stands for trouble, the other for crisis. Trouble and crisis, when put together, represent opportunity. As the answer always lies in the question, so the opportunities of life lie directly in our problems. It’s one of the most difficult things in the world to learn, but it is absolutely true. And in the problem
itself always lies the answer to that problem.

  RISK EQUALS REWARD

  A great American educator, Arthur E. Morgan, noted that the process of constantly pressing upon one’s limits is what makes life become larger. That habit can become one of the chief sources of enjoyment and interest in our lives. Those who find themselves bored and unhappy as the years progress and finally come to the end of their lives querulous and bitter, are those who have never discovered the joys of pressing themselves, of searching for sources of strength, talent, and interest far beyond the safe and placid boundaries of their day-to-day experiences.

  I gave some flowers the other day to my assistant, and she commented that they were very beautiful. “But,” she said, “you know, they don’t smell good.” And so I explained to her that flowers which are raised in a hothouse environment, where everything is done for them, simply don’t have to attract insects anymore to pollinate themselves, so they lose their scent. It’s the same with fruit that’s raised under these same kind of circumstances: They don’t taste as good as the apple we pick from a tree. They don’t have to work hard to attract animals and birds to spread their seed.

  When my son and I were visiting Australia’s Great Barrier Reef this past March, we were amazed to discover, as we were told there, that the coral polyps in the inside of the reef, where they’re protected, where the water is calm, tend to die and fall apart, while the coral polyps on the outside of the reef, where the breakers are pounding on them every day and every night, thrive and reproduce marvelously. Now what I’m getting at is that we, too, are creatures. We are related to the coral polyps. And the human creature thrives at his very best in a climate of risk. One of the paradoxes of modern life is that the thing the human being seeks most assiduously, a state of complete security, so called, is the very state that’s the worst for him. He is at his best and is happiest when he’s working, stretching, reaching, trying to achieve new and more difficult goals. It’s just the way it is.

  Of the millions of creatures that have appeared on this planet, more than 90 percent have become extinct. They could not handle change. They could not cope with risk. Marriages tend to survive the risks and hardships of working toward meaningful goals. It’s when the goal has been reached that they fall apart. I wonder how many couples have said, wistfully, “You know, we were happier when we were living in that walk-up flat and working our tails off.”

  DON’T SIT ON YOUR GOALS

  There’s a great educator by the name of Sidney Hook, who taught for many years at Columbia University, who said a very wise thing. He said that while anticipation is a marvelous thing and motivates us, the real disasters in life occur when we get what we want. Now, I want to modify that a little bit. There’s nothing wrong with reaching our goals, unless we sit on them. Unless we stop there. And when we stop, we begin the process of dissolution, of falling apart. How do we know the true range of our growing capacities, and that the capacity of a 50-year-old man is greater than the capacity of a 45-year-old man, and so on? How do we know the true range of our growing capacities unless we keep pressing toward those goals that tend to fulfill us as persons, whatever they are? Whatever you happen to desire.

  I saw a very funny cartoon in the The Wall Street Journal not long ago. It showed two men standing on a busy corner in New York. One was dressed in a business suit, the other was wearing a toga, sandals, horn-rim glasses, and carrying a briefcase. And the one in the toga is saying to the other man, “I’ve found enlightenment, and I still pull down my 85 thousand a year.” Now, it seems that that will work for us. We can do both. We can reach the goals that we want and we can still find the fulfillment, the peace, and these other things that we would also like to have.

  Now, it seems that as a species, collectively, we tend to want things as human beings that aren’t good for us when a marvelous balance of maturity and education is missing. We do that as a species simply because the great majority of human beings lack the education and insight into what makes the human being happy and successful. And the majority constitutes a tremendous influence on us all.

  AVOID GROUPTHINK

  Freud and others discovered that there is a basic human dread of leaving the security of the family and venturing forth alone into the mysteries and dangers of the world. By belonging to a group (the larger the better), we’re able to maintain the feeling of security and protection we knew as small children. These feelings are embedded in one’s earliest experiences of comfortable merger with the family. People want to be led. They want others to make the important decisions for them, and they’re willing to pay for the leadership they get, no matter how expensive or wrongheaded it may be.

  ENTREPRENEUR TIP

  Want to be a part of a group without giving in to groupthink? Create a coalition of people in your industry and find a time each month to meet up and discuss common concerns and issues that affect your business. By reaching out to colleagues outside of your own business, you can talk about those issues without the concern of interoffice politics affecting the conversations.

  How many times have you sat in a restaurant, and everyone’s holding a menu, and one of them says, “What are you having?” He just simply can’t make up his mind. He wants you to order for him. I’ve seen people at stop lights, that even after it turns green, they won’t go until another car goes and indicates that it’s OK to go ahead and pull out. It’s why most businesses look alike, as well as the people who run them and think alike, too. They wait for ideas to come from the home office or pick them up at the annual convention.

  OK, there’s a powerful human tendency to think that others are quite qualified to do our thinking for us. Perhaps we never think of it quite that way, but that’s what it amounts to. But there are at least two very excellent reasons for questioning that idea and examining from time to time the present course of our lives and thinking. We can think as well as anyone else.

  The first is that we tend to settle for too small a portion of the richness, the real richness of life, and in fact usually don’t even know the true direction to follow. As Americans, we often as not believe the answers are to be found in the collection of things. But as we pile things on top of things and new things on top of other things, we often find that we’re not finding the happiness we sought. As one writer put it, ‘We have built a technological tower to the moon, but as we look down from the top of our leaning tower, we find that we’re no nearer heaven and that perhaps we’d better return to earth again.”

  In Ernest Becker’s excellent Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death, which I strongly recommend, he points out that in our immaturity we pile things on top of things because they give us symbolic reinforcement of our value as persons. They tell us how wonderful we are and in our immaturity we need that. When we hear of a pipeline explosion at a pumping station on the Alaska Pipeline, or an airplane disaster, we all seem to be oddly relieved when we hear someone say, “It was a human error.” To know that our beloved machines were not to blame. The crowning proof of where modern science rates the human creature vis-a-vis other things was beautifully clarified, I think, by the development of the neutron bomb: It just kills people; it doesn’t damage the real estate.

  The second important thing to remember is that until we get the human being back in first place, back on the very top of the pile of values, we’re not going to have our heads on straight. Everything we do, all our work, all of our striving and education and scientific investigation, every business and government agency exists in order to help men, woman and children lead better, more interesting, healthier, and effective and satisfying lives. When we get that straight, everything else has a way of falling into place.

  I remember hearing about a man who was watching television one Sunday afternoon, watching a football game. And his little boy, about 5 years old, kept bothering him, and so he reached down to the Sunday paper and there was a full-page ad for TWA there, with a big picture of the globe. And he tore it up in little pieces and ga
ve the boy the torn-up picture and some Scotch tape and he said, “See if you can put the world together for Daddy.” In just a couple of minutes, the boy came back with the whole thing put together, and he was astounded. He said, “How in the world did you do that?” And the boy said, “Well, there was a picture of a man on the other side, and when I got him together, the world was OK.”

  We have a tendency to think that whatever people are doing in large numbers must be right because so many of them are doing it. As with so many popular beliefs, it turns out that just the opposite is true. One of the great American financiers and advisors to presidents, Bernard Baruch, was once asked by a reporter the for the secret of his success. And he smiled, the wise old man, and he said, “I buy my straw hats in the fall.”

  Here’s a rule of thumb to keep in mind: Whatever the great majority of people is doing under any given circumstance, if you’ll do exactly the opposite, you will probably never make another mistake as long as you live. I have never yet found an exception to that rule. It applies to getting an education, decorating your home, raising your children, handling your work, driving your car. As E.F. Schumacher has pointed out, millions slave in mindless and mind-rotting work without question, simply because others around them are doing the same thing. So collectively, we tend to want things that aren’t good for us when the balance is missing.

  AVOID THE EFFECTS OF AFFLUENCE

  It’s been only during the past few seconds of our species’ existence on this planet that we’ve experienced general affluence, and only in this country. It’s something new, even to the United States and Canada. For most of the rest of the world, it’s still something to dream about and work toward, yet it’s a sociological fact of life today in America that the American people are not happier now than they were during the Great Depression of the ‘30s. Now, that’s obviously not because they were poor; they were happier than one might expect because they knew where they were going, what they were working toward. They had meaningful goals. They were striving, they were living in the state of risk.