lannamonday

In his classic Think and Grow Rich!, first published in 1937, Hill said, “There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge. Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.”

The first step in teaching personal selling is autosugges­tion. You sell yourself through the conversations you have with yourself. At the beginning of his career, Zig Ziglar sold cook­ware.

Napoleon Hill had an undying persistence. He followed the principle of getting back up. “It’s not how many times you get knocked down. It’s how many times you get back up.”

“To obtain wealth, you must have the desire for wealth.” Some people ask how you can develop this to the level of a burning desire if you don’t have it. Some people have more of a burning desire because they come from a disadvantaged background, but it’s not necessarily so. Take Bill Gates: he was raised in an upper-middle-class fam­ily, but he developed his principles out of a desire to accomplish something worthwhile. It’s not all about the money, although the bigger the project is, the more likely it is that you’ll make money.

In some ways, Think and Grow Rich is really a story about persistence. In chapter one, Hill tells the story of Edwin Barnes. He was a tramp, but he had a desire: to partner with the great inventor Thomas Edison. Hill told the story of Barnes and the way he went about realizing his desire. Hill said that if he could convey that mes­sage to the reader, the reader would not need to read the rest of the book...

I have daily habits to keep me in the frame of mind I desire. I get up early every morning and always have breakfast. I have oatmeal almost every day to keep my mind fresh. I write things down on index cards, which I keep with me...

You look up the statistics: an average person watches six to eight hours of television a day. Napoleon Hill says “Tell me how you use your time and how you spend your money, and I will tell you where and what you will be ten years from now.” You can become a brain sur­geon if you put in enough years of studying and work...

We all know how important sound physical health is. Napoleon Hill continually emphasized health consciousness, which is produced by a mind that thinks in terms of health and not of illness; this also includes temperance of habits in eating and properly balanced physical activities...

Here’s a question I get sometimes. In the preface to Think and Grow Rich, Hill states, “In every chapter of this book, mention has been made of the money-making secret which has made fortunes for more than five hundred exceedingly wealthy men whom I have carefully analyzed over a long period of years.”