This book grew out of the discovery, in 1986, of an unpublished manuscript by Napoleon Hill. Michael J. Ritt, Jr., executive director of the Napoleon Hill Foundation, knew that sometime during the 1950s Hill had written a book entitled The Science of Successful Insurance Selling, but the work had been lost among the trunks full of papers left by the author at his death in 1970.

Ritt was elated with his find. He knew that the insurance-industry examples and figures were too outdated to make the book viable as it stood, yet it would be a shame to let the old master's views on insurance sales languish forever in a dusty archive box. So he sought W. Clement Stone's advice on what to do with it.

In July 1986, Stone sent the manuscript to the editorial office of PMA Books with a four-page memo which suggested that an author familiar with the life-insurance business be contracted to use Hill’s notes as the basis for a new book targeted at salespeople.

The Kinder brothers, Jack and John, jumped at the opportunity. Part of their early training in the field was attending the original PMA Science of Success lectures given by W. Clement Stone and Napoleon Hill in Chicago. So integrating Hill's seventeen lessons with their own modem sales techniques was a labor of love.

The Kinders believe that after thirty years of slow but dramatic changes, this new era abounds with opportunity but it demands a very high level of professionalism on the part of the agents, who must be able to diagnose and creatively solve client problems in order to make sales. The Kinders refer to this buyer-oriented approach as "need selling rather than greed selling." They teach what they call a "value-added" approach to selling.

The result is a book that delivers a payload of professional insurance sales techniques, yet it is grounded in the practical attributes of Napoleon Hill's philosophy. As the great Ben Feldman says in his foreword, this book makes use of the wisdom of the past in explaining the latest approaches in selling.