The object of this ladder is to show what man-power is, and how it is developed in those who do not possess it. Man-power comes only through organized knowledge intelligently directed. Facts within themselves do not represent power. Knowledge—unorganized and without intelligent control and direction—does not represent power.

There is a great deal of knowledge carefully classified and stored away in a well-edited encyclopedia, but it represents no power until it is transformed into organized, intelligently directed effort.

There is no power in college degrees, nor in the education that these degrees represent, until it is classified, organized, and put into action.

Human power is organized and intelligently directed energy, as represented by facts, intelligence, and the faculties through which the human mind operates.

In weight, tensile strength, and size, there is a strong log chain in a sack full of disconnected chain links, but these links represent only a potential chain until they are organized, connected up, and the links welded together. So it is with man’s faculties. They must be organized before they represent power.

There are two kinds of man-power. One is represented by the organization of the individual faculties, which gives increased power to the individual, and the other is represented by the organization of individuals and groups of individuals.

A little handful of well-organized soldiers has been known to put to rout ten times its number of disorganized, undisciplined men, and history is full of the biographies of men who have risen to fame and fortune through the process of organizing and intelligently directing their individual faculties, while millions around them, with equal opportunities, remained mediocres or out-and-out failures.

There is considerable energy in an ordinary small electric dry battery, but not enough to do bodily damage if one should form a short-circuit with his finger and absorb the entire charge. A thousand such dry batteries are equally harmless—until they are organized and connected together with wires. Through this process of organization, if the energy of the entire thousand batteries is fed to one wire, enough energy is produced to turn a considerable piece of machinery. This group of dry batteries may be likened to individuals, in that greatly increased power comes through the organized effort of a large group of men, as compared to the efforts of the same men acting singly.

The object of this ladder, mainly, is to direct attention to the modus operandi through which individual power is developed and applied to the economic problems of life.

If you will organize your own faculties after the pattern laid down in this ladder, by properly developing the qualities represented by the sixteen rungs, you will find your power enormously increased. You will find yourself in possession of power that you did not know you possessed, and through the intelligent direction of this power you can attain practically any position in life to which you aspire.

The sixteen rungs of this ladder represent the choicest and the most illustrative experience of my twenty-two years of business life:

Rung No. 1:  A Definite Aim in Life
Rung No. 2:  Self-Confidence
Rung No. 3:  Initiative
Rung No. 4:  Imagination
Rung No. 5:  Action
Rung No. 6: Enthusiasm
Rung No. 7:  Self-Control
Rung No. 8:  The Habit of Performing More Work and Better Work Than You are Paid to Perform
Rung No. 9:  An Attractive Personality
Rung No. 10:  Accurate Thought
Rung No. 11:  Concentration
Rung No. 12:  Persistency
Rung No. 13: Failures
Rung No. 14:  Tolerance and Sympathy Rung No. 15:  Work
Rung No. 16:  The Golden Rule

I will take you behind the curtains of my own private life so that you may learn these great lessons, as portrayed in the outline of the ladder, with the hope that the road over which you will have to travel to reach the objective for which you are striving in life may be some-what shortened, and the obstacles which will surely await you somewhat minimized.

Success ought not to be a mere matter of chance, as is true in the majority of instances, because the roadway over which success is reached is now well known, and every inch of it has been carefully and accurately charted.

The Magic Ladder to Success will carry you wherever you wish to go if you will master it and organize your faculties according to its plan—a statement I make after having not only organized my own faculties and directed them to a given end successfully, but after having helped others to do the same in many thousands of cases.

This Magic Ladder to Success represents twenty-two years of actual experience and observation, at least twelve of which have been directed to the intense analysis and study of character and human conduct.

During the past twelve years I have analyzed more than 12,000 men and women. These analyses developed some startling facts, one of which was that 95 percent of the adult population belong to the class that might properly be called unorganized (both as to individual faculties and as to group or collective effort) or followers, and the other 5 percent might be called leaders. Another startling fact discovered from organizing and classifying the tendencies and habits of human beings, as shown by these analyses, was that the main reason why the overwhelmingly large percentage of people belonged in the class of followers was lack of a definite purpose in life and a definite plan for carrying out that purpose.

With the foregoing analysis of the Magic Ladder to Success, you have already seen that the ladder deals entirely with the subject of acquiring man-power through organization, coordination, and classification of the human faculties.

Bear in mind that this ladder is not intended as a panacea for all the evils which beset the pathway of the human race, nor is it intended as a “new” formula for success. Its purpose is to help you organize what you already have and direct your efforts in the future more powerfully and more accurately than you have done in the past. Its purpose, stated in another way, is to help you educate yourself—meaning, by the word educate, to develop, organize, and intelligently direct your natural faculties called the mind.

Source: Napoleon Hill’s Magazine