Think and Grow Rich Summary & key ideas explained

A young man climbs down from a freight car in New Jersey. He has no money, no connections and no appointment. He walks to the laboratory of Thomas Edison and announces that he has come to go into business with him.

That scene opens one of the most famous success books ever written. Napoleon Hill published Think and Grow Rich in 1937, when the Great Depression had left millions of Americans broke and frightened. Hill claimed he'd spent some twenty-five years studying how hundreds of wealthy men got rich, and he boiled what he found down to thirteen steps.

He also claimed the whole project began with a challenge from the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Historians have found no record that the two ever met, so treat Hill's backstory with care. But the ideas themselves echo through countless success books written since, and many of them hold up surprisingly well.

In this read, you'll learn:

• why a wish and a desire are not the same thing;
• how a gold miner lost a fortune by stopping too soon;
• and what Hill thought really stands between most people and the life they want.

So what did that young man at Edison's door know that others didn't?