Posted by: thepinetree on 03/05/2009 10:02 PM
Updated by: Kim_Hamilton on 03/07/2009 03:46 PM
Expires: 01/01/2014 12:00 AM
:
A Little Motivation? Our Classic Ebook of the Week "Think and Grow Rich" may be just what you need. ~By John Hamilton
Angels Camp, CA...With all of the bleak news floating around lately we are going to try and pass along some uplifting stuff as well. We are guessing that even most positive among you may see your confidence wavering from time to time. One of the things that has jumped out at me with all of the dire predictions economically is that we as as a country need to remember what made us great. We are the country where anything is possible...
Click for a PDF copy of the Book
Every citizen can take their lives to as high a point as they chose to.
From our founding fathers including Benjamin Franklin who was regarded as the first prototypical American who rose from humble origins to become one of the most successful people of this age to Abraham Lincoln who seemed at times to carry this country on his back through sheer force of will to the entrepreneurs of our modern age who have taken sparks of ideas and made the world as we know it.
Even President Barack Obama's rise to become the fist African Americian to rise to our highest office is proof that any of us can become whatever we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps to be. We must never forget this!
Economic turmoil and recessions also create opportunities and the loss of a job may be just the kick needed to start your life down the path you were meant to follow. Many of you in the past may have felt you had too much to lose to risk starting that risky venture. Now there may be more at risk if you don't start anew!
Many of you many have read our Ebook of the week. Think and Grow Rich was the book that was the prototype for all of the "Self Help" books of varying quality that have come down the pike in the 72 years since it first printing. It was written in the midst of the Great Depression to help people climb their way out mentally and financially.
The examples in the book may seem a bit dated but the lessons are a fresh today as they were then. It's a book that is not for everyone and I have a few issues with a couple of chapters but it has been the starting point for an astonishing number of our most successful of citizens.
Let us all remember that for all of us the best of our lives might be just around the corner. Just click the image above for a PDF copy of the Book. One thing to remember about Adobe Reader is that it will actually read the book aloud to you as well.
A little on the book and it's author is below...
"Napoleon Hill (October 25, 1883–November 8, 1970) was an American author who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal success literature. His most famous work, Think and Grow Rich, is one of the best-selling books of all time. Hill's works examined the power of personal beliefs, and the role they play in personal success. "What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve" is one of Hill's hallmark expressions.[1][2] How achievement actually occurs, and a formula for it that puts success in reach for the average person, were the focus of Hill's books.
Life and works
According to his official biographer, Napoleon Hill was born in an impoverished, one-room cabin in the Appalachian town of Pound in Southwest Virginia.[3] Hill's mother died when he was ten years old and his father remarried two years later. At the age of 13, Hill began writing as a "mountain reporter" for small-town newspapers in the area of Wise County and he later used his earnings as a reporter to enter law school, but soon had to withdraw for financial reasons.[citation needed]
Influence of Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie
The turning point in the writing career Napoleon Hill is considered to have occurred in 1908 with his assignment, as part of a series of articles about famous men, to interview billionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who at the time was one of the most powerful men in the world. Hill discovered that Carnegie believed that the process of success could be elaborated in a simple formula that could be duplicated by the average person. Impressed with Hill, Carnegie commissioned him (without pay and only offering to provide him with letters of reference) to interview over 500 successful men and women, many of them millionaires, in order to discover and publish this formula for success.[4]
As part of his research, Hill interviewed many of the most famous people of the time, including Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Elmer Gates, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Charles M. Schwab, F.W. Woolworth, William Wrigley Jr., John Wanamaker, William Jennings Bryan, Joseph Stalin, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Allen Ward and Jennings Randolph. The project lasted over twenty years, during which Hill became an advisor to Carnegie.[5] Mr. Hill was also an advisor to two presidents of the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.[6]
[edit] The Philosophy of Achievement
As a result of Napoleons studies via Carnegie's introductions, the Philosophy of Achievement was offered as a formula for rags-to-riches success by Hill and Carnegie, published initially in 1928 as a study course called, The Law of Success. The Achievement formula was detailed further and published in home-study courses, including the seventeen-volume "Mental Dynamite" series until 1941.
Hill later called his personal success teachings "The Philosophy of Achievement" and he considered freedom, democracy, capitalism, and harmony to be important contributing elements. For without these foundations to build upon, as Hill demonstrated throughout his writings, successful personal achievements are not possible. He contrasted his philosophy with others, and thought Achievement was superior and responsible for the success Americans enjoyed for the better part of two centuries. Negative emotions, fear and selfishness among others, had no part to play in his philosophy, and Hill considered them to be the source of failure for unsuccessful people.
The secret of Achievement was tantalizingly offered to readers of Think and Grow Rich, and was never named directly as Hill felt discovering it for themselves would provide readers with the most benefit. Hill presented the idea of a "Definite Major Purpose" as a challenge to his readers, to make them ask of themselves "in what do you truly believe?" For according to Hill, 98% of people had no firm beliefs, putting true success firmly out of reach.
Hill's numerous books have sold millions of copies, proving that the secret of Achievement is still highly sought-after by modern Americans. Hill dealt with many controversial subjects through his writings including racism, slavery, oppression, failure, revolution, war and poverty. Persevering and then succeeding in spite of these obstacles using the philosophy of Achievement, Hill stated, was the responsibility of every American."
|
