THINK and GROW RICH

By Napoleon Hill

Originally Published in 1937

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Welcome and Disclaimer

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A tip of the cap and welcome aboard the Wings and Wealth Show. Before we start, a quick disclosure. This show is educational only, not investment, tax, or legal advice. I'm a former series 65 holder, not currently registered or licensed as an investment advisor representative, and not acting as a fiduciary.

This is independent content, not sponsored by or affiliated with any company or registered investment advisor. For the full disclaimer, go to wings and wealth.com/legal. We'll be pushing back momentarily.

Why Wings and Wealth

But first, a bit about who I am and why wings and wealth exists. I'm Rob Eklund, former fiduciary wealth manager, and lifelong student of what true wealth really is.

After years of working with clients, one truth became impossible to ignore. Wealth isn't about the numbers on a statement. It's about freedom, purpose, friends and family values, fun and yes, legacy, everything that still matters when the engines wind down. I'm gonna use aviation cliches here and I'll tell you why here in a second.

But what it's about and what true wealth really is, is why I built the show where we'll distill the timeless wisdom passed down from the financial giants who came before us. At Wings and Wealth, our mission is to help people understand money and wealth in a way that creates richer and more meaningful lives through an aviation lens that transforms knowledge into compounding power.

Each episode we pull a classic book outta the hangar and take it for a flight. Think of the big giants here, Hill, Buffett, Malkiel, Housel, Zweig, Bernstein, and others who've shaped, helped shape how people think about money and success. If you didn't recognize some of those names, don't worry about it. That's why I'm here.

So we'll climb through the big ideas, bank into the stories and call out the turbulence when the advice starts losing altitude in the real world, which we'll see in our first book. A little bit of that. This isn't Hot Stock tips. Right. So if you're here for that, go somewhere else. This isn't crypto hype, it's not get rich quick illusions.

Sorry, kiddos. This is about strapping in with the giants, the builders, the investors, and discipline thinkers who already flew the roots and examine what they did, their fly plans. So we can chart our own maybe a little more thoughtfully, maybe a little more carefully. And stand on their shoulders, right?

Aviation Lens Explained

I use an aviation lens for a few simple reasons. First, I'm a pilot, former Air Force 📍 C-130 in KC-10 Pilot turned commercial airline pilot, and now Captain Second Aviation has taken incredibly complex and high stakes endeavor and made it remarkably safe through checklists, standardization, and discipline, decision making.

These practices were later adopted or have been adopted by doctors and hospitals who are in the business of saving lives. The third reason is it makes dense financial ideas easier to visualize while keeping the conversations human. And we want them to be engaging, which aviation, who doesn't love going in the air, right?

At least thinking about it. Fair warning, in my fellow pilots, yes, there will be cliches. You've already heard them. It's just a way to relate. With an industry most have wondered about. Okay, so strap in and you can roll your eyes if you want at some of these cliches, but we're gonna use them 'cause they're helpful.

Think of this as one of your one aircraft in your private intellectual fleet. We debrief the Worthiest books on money, success, and life. We're now at cruising out. So put those tray tables down, sip your coffee, and let's fly together. Welcome to Wings and Wealth, where the best books on money, success, and Life take flight.

Speaking of sip, and coffee, here we go.  

Introducing Think and Grow Rich

we'll begin our journey with, any staple in a financial library. It's Napoleon Hills. Think and Grow Rich. And it's not just in financial libraries, it's in motivational or manifesting self-help libraries as well. This book isn't for the faint of heart. It touches on philosophy, religion, manifesting, and yes, even sexual energy for good measure.

It was written in 1937, but many of the lessons remain timeless and worthy of our study. My job today is to separate enduring principles from the outdated claim, so you'll walk away with the parts that actually matter for your financial life right now. Think and Grow Rich is too powerful and too dense to squeeze into a single episode.

So instead of rushing it, we're gonna give it the space it deserves. A three part podcast show, YouTube series, whatever you're listening and watching it on. This isn't a summary. It's a deep dive into one of the most influential success philosophies ever written, and a little bit of my notes on it.

Preface and Early Tributes

The hardback version I read begins with a short section titled, what Do You Want Most?

Is it money, fame, power, contentment, personality, peace of mind, happiness. The 13 Steps to Riches described in this book offer the shortest, dependable philosophy of individual achievement ever presented for the benefit of the man or woman who is searching for a definite goal in life. that's probably enough of a quote to keep you going.

I think. Next, it goes on to why you should read this book. It gives several tributes Tohill from President and Former Chief Justice William Howard Taft. FW Woolworth gave him a tribute. He was the founder of Woolworths, which was basically a precursor to Amazon and it's kinda low margin and high volume.

Model there. Robert Dollar, who was a lumber baron, a shipping magnet, and philanthropist, and President Woodrow Wilson, who was the architect of the League of Nations, which you no doubt read about or learned about in high school. Now. After this, we reached the publisher's preface originally again published in 1937 by the short-lived Ralston Society of Connecticut.

This section sets the tone and gives us another quote that is very worthy. "Riches cannot always be measured in money. Money and material things are essential for freedom of mind, of body and mind, but there are some. There are some who feel that the greatest of all riches can be evaluated only in terms of lasting friendships, harmonious family relationships, sympathy , and an understanding between business associates and Introspective Harmony, which brings one piece of mind, measurable only in spiritual values."

That's almost a mic drop, but we're not gonna drop the mic moment here.

Carnegie Myth and Halo

The publisher's preface also launches straight into the book's most enduring piece of mythology.

The claim that Think and Grow Rich is built entirely on Andrew Carnegie's secret formula. Personally handed down, supposedly to a young Napoleon Hill after a two hour meeting and a 20 year commission. Historical evidence strongly suggests that this meeting never happened. It was most likely a crafted narrative, an early example of myth making used in the book The Ultimate Halo Effect by associating it with one of the most powerful business titans of the era, maybe of the United States history, which was Andrew Carnegie.

Ironically, the myth itself became a successful application of hill's own principles in the book, which was autosuggestion definite purpose, almost like a fake it till you make it type deal. And the strategic use of authority, the story worked, it gave the book instant gravitas and the underlying philosophy.

Desire, faith, persistence, mastermind alliances, they prove so compelling that the, in the real world, it generally shaped lives and continues to shape lives. So even if the, there was a myth on how it came about, it actually works. For many or has worked for many people since 1937, think and Grow Rich has sold more than a hundred million copies and generated over half a billion dollars in book sales alone.

Likely closer to a billion when you're just for inflation, which we love to do. And global licensing fees. It's one of the most profitable personal wealth books ever printed, a true jumbo jet in the publishing world. I tried to use Austin Power's. Accident there. It failed. Apologies. Here we go. Oprah Winfrey, Jim Carrey, Tony Robbins, Damon John, and countless others.

Credit Think and Grow Rich as a turning point. Not because Andrew Carnegie whispered secret formulas in 1908, but because the ideas and all of the steps still resonate. Okay?

Hill Success and Struggles

What makes Think and Grow Rich even more compelling is the story of its author. Napoleon Hill produced one of the most profitable and influential money books ever printed, and he made a lot of money.

Yet he personally struggled to build lasting wealth. And these reasons are instructive. I think Hill didn't own all the rights to the book that made him famous. So he traded often, traded away long-term royalties for short-term cash just to keep himself airborne, if you will. He was a master of mindset, but not a mechanics.

Brilliant at generating ideas, but inconsistent at turning those into lasting profitable businesses, lawsuits. A divorce, a venture, failed ventures and constant reinventions kept him from finding, he placed him in a financial holding pattern, if you will. He's burning fuel and never climb at a steady cruising out there.

At one point, he actually had to live with this kid, and this was at a time during the, there were the contracts of the 1930 sevens, which was the Great Depression. At the tail end of the Great Depression when publishing margins were thin. Authors had very little negotiating. Power Hill wasn't in a position to demand equity in the empire he was about to create.

He didn't know that the, to be fair also, he didn't know the book was gonna be as wildly successful as it is and stand the test of time, at least in, in part. But he still wasn't able to capture the tail ones. That generated a lot. Through his own folly. Again, the divorce took a lot of his wealth there.

He lived beyond his means, though he overspent on lifestyle. He liked his things and he spent, and that didn't. Do well for him in the end, in aviation terms, he built a spectacular runway for others, but never constructed his own aircraft to take full advantage of it. Okay. Now that's what makes it so fascinating because not because he lived out every principle he wrote about, we became wildly successful.

He did become successful, but he squandered it. But it's really about the struggles that really highlight this deeper truth, which is in wealth true wealth, and that is mindset's just the ignition system. It isn't the whole aircraft. You can get these ideas and you can get this motivation and manifest it and do these things, but once you get it, there's a way you need to think about to  sustain it.

And we'll probably get into that in a different book. This is not the book obviously for that, but he'll give us the spark, the psychology, the reason to believe that big goals matter.   📍 What he didn't provide were the systems and guard rails that translate the belief into durable wealth. So as we climb into the pages of Think and Grow Rich, we're simply going to take the best parts of Hill's philosophy, hold them up  to light  and see what still holds altitude today.

Today we're gonna talk about some that don't as well.  Sometimes wrappers fiction. But the   📍 gift inside is still real.

The Secret Teased

 Okay, now we get to the author's preface. This sets the stage for Hill's Lifelong investigation into the patterns of extraordinary wealth. He recounts  Andrew Carnegie's challenge. To him to study more than 500 of the world's richest men over the course of decades.

A task that became his obsession and ultimately the backbone of Think and Grow Rich. Now, whether he interviewed all these 500 men is probably very debatable. However, the formula that we're gonna talk about, he did probably look at these people and see if it applied to them. So Hill turns to what he calls the secret.

I'm gonna read from page 15 here. It's a little bit of the myth here, but the secret was brought to my attention by Andrew Carnegie more than a quarter of a century ago. The canny lovable old   📍 scottsman carelessly tossed it into my mind when I was but a boy. Then he sat back in his chair with a merry twinkle in his eyes 

And watch carefully to see if I had the brains enough to understand the full significance of what he had to say to me. He of what he had said to me when he saw that I had grasped the idea, he asked if I would be willing to spend 20 years or more preparing myself to take it to the world, to men and women who, without the secret might go through life as failures.

I said I would. And with Mr. Carnegie's cooperation, I have kept my promise. This book contains the secret after having been put to a practical test by thousands of people in almost every walk of life. At, or excuse me, having been put to a practical test by thousands of people in almost every walk of life, it was Mr.

Carnegie's idea that the magic formula, which gave him a stupendous fortune, ought to be placed within reach of people who do not have time to investigate how men make money. And it was his hope that. I might test and demonstrate the soundness for the formula Through the experience of men and women in every calling, he believed the formula should be taught in public schools and colleges and express the opinion that if it were properly taught, foot stomped us.

For all the kiddos listening to this if it were properly taught, it would so revolutionize the entire educational system that the time spent in school could be reduced to less than half. His experience with Charles Schwab and other young men of Schwab's type convinced Mr. Carnegie, that much of what of that which is taught in the schools is of no value whatsoever in connection with the business of earning a living or accumulating riches.

A side note here that is still very much true in my experience. He had arrived at the this decision because he had taken into his business one young man after another. Many of them with but little schooling. And by coaching them in the use of his, of this formula developed in them rare leadership.

Moreover, his coaching made fortunes for every one of them who followed his instruction. That's, pretty powerful, somewhat anecdotal. This is where he'll insists the formula will work for all who are ready for it, and he   📍 📍 📍 foot stomps that and that it's power only activates once you know what it is that you want.

In classic Hill fashion, he refuses the name, the formula outright. Instead, he hides it in plain sight. Claiming it works best when left to be discovered rather than announced. And now the preface begins to build its momentum.   📍 Hill teases the story about Schwab that we already talked about applying the formula to the 📍 tune of $600 million return, and that was in the 20th century, not now.

That's an astronomical sum. Back then, it is an astronomical sum now, but really back then and it hints that he'll break down that example later in the book. Okay. He mentions how a clergyman, a tailor, a lawyer, and even his own young son applied the principle with powerful results. And a lot of these are true.

This is not made up, which is very important. This is where the book starts to take emotional flight. You can feel Hill's personal investment in the idea and the people he cites. Particularly, obviously his own son, he widens the scope further, pointing to President Woodrow Wilson arguing that the same secret played a role in raising funds for World War I.

Again, this is written just after the Great Depression and before World War ii, when the idea of a mindset driven approach to wealth was either radical or deeply needed depending on who you were. Hill then offers a striking example from abroad manual l Kza. I'm probably butchering that, but the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth who Hill said, claims used the formula to his rise to political and national leadership wildly successful there.

And the, and this is the fi finally hill makes the boldest promise of the entire preface that those who uncover the secret find themselves literally swept onto success with but little effort. And they never again submit to failure, which he himself didn't really do. But it's a nice quote. He challenges the reader to examine the lives of those who discovered it and verify the results for themselves, which you can do.

And we're gonna do a radical, a rhetorical move that simultaneously dares and seduces the reader into continuing. It's beautiful. He doesn't let the reader wander into fantasy. He's blunt. There's no such thing as something for nothing. At least not here. He doesn't, there's no such, there's no such thing as something for nothing.

The secret to which I refer cannot be had without a price, although the price is far less than its value. That's page 19 of this book. With that, he draws a line in the sand, whatever the secret is, and demands, effort, intentionality, and personal investment. It does not demand formal education however. He will argues that the schooling is not a prerequisite for success.

Granted, this is written at a different time. He offers a heavyweight evidence, Thomas Edison, John Wanamaker, Henry Ford, all those all rows to extraordinary levels of accomplishment. Despite having little formal education, he'll claims Edison completed only three months of school. I fact checked this with Edison's own autobiographical notes, and Hill is correct.

Edison attended a small private school in Port Huron, Michigan for roughly 12 weeks at age seven after a teacher dismissed him as adult, which we don't use that word much, or I haven't, meaning befuddled or confused. His mother withdrew him and taught him at home. Edison later said he was largely self-educated, devouring books, exploring ideas, and experimenting endlessly.  📍

Edison invented much but was perhaps best known for his phonograph, which was the first machine to record and reproduce sound. It was at the time, it was like magic.  He also produced the   📍 light bulb  and the world's first central power plant and the motion picture camera among many, many others. He was almost like the Elon Musk of his day, except maybe even better Ford too, never made it to high school. Henry Ford. That is of course, these men were of their time where when compulsory schooling didn't resemble what it is today, but Hill Point still lands. Knowledge is not schooling and schooling is not knowledge. Formal education can be a powerful path to knowledge, but it isn't the is not the only one.

And obviously this idea resonates. Deeply with me as a son of two teachers, I know firsthand the value and the dignity education brings, but I also know what hill's getting at, and that's a driving force behind the show. Wings and Wealth is not a classroom yet. It is meant to teach. It's meant to show and discuss.

That knowledge becomes in many forms, stories, examples, habits, mistakes, metaphors, checklists, and conversations. If we can make those lessons entertaining. Relatable and immediately useful then we honor both sides of hill's argument. The hunger for knowledge and the responsibility to do something with it.

So education is not knowledge. Knowledge is not necessarily education. It can be but isn't necessarily. So after all that buildup, hill parades, the heavy hitters who in his estimation applied the secret Edison Ford, Carnegie. Other famous men, including someone near and dear to wings and wealth, Wilbur Wright of the legendary Wright Brothers to heal.

The Wright Brothers are living proof. What happens when the secret takes hold of a person? Hundreds of shattered gliders, broken wings, and winter sandstorms at Kitty hawk. Yet they've refused to quit. Driven by unshakeable faith and their definite major purpose to conquer the sky itself and achieve the ancient dream of flight.

The Wright brothers serve as hill's perfect proof that they had discovered and applied the secret.

Turn Down a Glass

And then right in that   📍 📍 📍 moment, hill drops one of the most gloriously weird instructions in all of self-help. And I spent too much time looking at this. But, he reviewed when the secret finally reveals itself to you, turn down a glass.

That phrase hit me like a 40 knot cross went on short final. I was taken straight back  to my 18-year-old self in a blacked out dorm room at the Air Force Academy standing before the POW and MIA missing an action table. It's a prisoner of war and missing an action table. Look it up if you haven't ever seen it, but it's one candle, one empty chair, one inverted class among other symbolic elements.

Also called the missing man table In some circles, a silent tribute to a comrade. It's a silent tribute to a comrade who will never raise another toast. The image is burned into me. So when Hill said, turn down a glass, that's exactly where my mind snapped first. But as powerful as that picture is, hill wasn't talking about mourning.

The Missing man tradition came decades after Think and Grow. Rich was published. So I went down the three day Rabbit hole through old etiquette books, temperance Tracks and 19th Century Saloon, Lord, to figure out what he actually meant. He turns out the gestures older, simpler, and far more personal In taverns clubs and military messes of the seventeens.

And 18, 17 hundreds and 18 hundreds. Flipping your glass upside down on the bar was a universal signal. I'm done. Done for the night. Done with excuses, done with the old life. A quiet public act of discipline. The moment a person decided the next drink would never be poured for them again. They weren't being controlled.

They were the one in control. He'll grabs that symbol and drags it off the bar top and into your soul. With this book, when The Secret finally clicks for you, he wants you to turn down your own glass, not as a memorial, but as a vow. A hard line in the sand that says the previous version of you no longer gets served.

No more drifting. No more DRA travelling, dabbling. No more someday. In aviation, we have a name for that exact moment, if you will. It's called V one past V one. The runway behind you is useless. You are committed to this guy. There is no rejecting the takeoff. No half measure, no turning back.

Hills inverted glass is the personal growth equivalent of passing V one and rotating The old life is over. You're not on the ground anymore, you are airborne. And I'll be honest, as I reread the section I wrestled with whether to spell out my own take on what the secret actually is, he'll never names it plainly.

That's deliberate. I have my answer, but I'll hold it close to the chest for now. We'll get to it. Don't worry. What I say, we will say is this real transformation always requires the end of your old self. And I'm taking a moment to pause there. It should take a moment. The real transformation always requires the end of your old self.

The ritual feels solemn because the change it marks is real and irreversible.

I.

Barnes and Edison Desire

Okay, now we get into chapter one, introduction. The man who thought his way into partnership with Thomas Edison, he'll starts off strong with the thought quote. Truly, thoughts are things and powerful things at that when they are mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire for their translation into riches or other material objects.

End quote. We also see how he uses it for non-material objects with his son. But he describes the desire for Edwin c Barnes, who had a burning, definite desire to work with Thomas Edison, the famous inventor. He did not know Edison and did not have money to pay for his railroad fair, but traveled by blind baggage.

To Mr. Edison riding blind baggage, I had to look this up, meant sneaking aboard a passenger train for free by crouching on the narrow doorless front platform of the baggage car, the first car behind the locomotives tender, the spot was blind because neither the conductor walking through the coach is behind, nor the engine crew ahead could easily see riders tucked there.

It was one of the most popular hobo methods for beating the fair because it was also one of the deadliest, a sudden stop or emergency brake could slam the baggage car into the tender Co crushing anyone in between high speeds, threw riders off, or battered them against male sacks and trunks. Rain, snow and senders made it the platform a miserable perch.

And if a brakeman or bull spotted you, that's what they call the brakeman a bull. A beating or arrest usually followed. Dangerous. Absolutely right. But not as instantly fatal as riding the rods beneath the train. I got down a little rabbit hole there. You got this term, if you will, which is blind baggage.

And then you've got riding the rods. Which is something completely different, but both pretty, pretty crazy. Anyways, blind baggage was the method. Edwin c Barnes used to get himself to New Jersey, where Thomas Edison's laboratory was located. Hill doesn't specify where Barnes began the journey, but since this record show he lived.

Worked in Shelby Richland Shelby, Ohio before heading east, if that was his departure point. He risked his life for over 500 miles to stand in front of Edison and declare he wanted to become his business partner. Edison later described their first meeting like this in his chapter, excuse me, page 24 in this book.

In speaking of the first meeting between Barnes and Edison years later, Mr. Edison said he stood there before me looking like an ordinary tramp, but there was something in his ex, the expression of his face, which conveyed the impression that he was determined to get what he had come after. I had learned from years of experience with men that when a man really desires a thing so deeply that he's willing to stake his entire future on a single turn of the wheel in order to get it.

He is sure to win. I gave him the opportunity he asked for because I saw he had made up his mind to stand by until he succeeded. Subsequent events prove that no mistake was made. End quote hill goes on. Barnes did not get his partnership with Edison on his first interview even though. Edison gives him a chance.

He didn't give him it. He didn't give him everything he wanted. He did get a chance to work in the Edison offices at a very nominal wage doing work that was unimportant to Edison, but most important to Barnes. Months went by and we continue with on page 25 here, psychologists have correctly said that when one is truly ready for a thing, it puts it in its appearance.

Barnes was ready for a business association with Edison. Moreover, he was determined to remain ready until he got that which he was seeking. He did not say to himself, ah, well what's the use? I guess I'll change my mind and try for a salesman's job. But he did say, I came here to go into business with Edison and I'll accomplish this end if it takes the remainder of my life.

And he meant it. What a different story. Men would have to tell if they only. Would adopt a definite purpose and stand by that purpose until it had time to become an all consuming obsession. He continues, maybe Young Barnes did not know it at the time, but this bulldog determination, his persistence in standing back.

Of a single desire, which was destined to mow down all opposition and bring him the opportunity he was seeking. When the opportunity came, it appeared in a different form and from a different direction than Barnes had expected. That is one of the tricks of opportunity. It has a sly habit of slipping in by the back door.

I love that term, and often it comes disguised in the form of misfortune or temporary defeat. Perhaps this is why so many fail to recognize opportunity. Mr. Edison. Had just perfected a new office device known at the time as the Edison dictating machine. Now, the ED phone, his salesman were not enthusiastic over the machine.

They did not believe it could be sold without great effort. Barnes saw this opportunity and he took it. It had it crawled in quietly hidden in a queer looking machine, which interested no one but Barnes and the inventor. Barnes knew he could sell the Edison dictating machine. He suggested to this, to Edison and promptly got his chance.

He did sell the machine. In fact, he sold it so successfully that Edison gave him a contract to distribute and market it all over the nation. Out of that business association grew the slogan made by Edison and installed by Barnes. The business Alliance had been, has been in operation for more than 30 years.

Obviously this was when it was written out of it. Barnes has made himself rich in money, but he has done something infinitely greater. He has proved that one really may think and grow rich. Obviously, that's why we. Had that there he continues on though perhaps it has brought him two or $3 million, but the amount, whatever it is, becomes insignificant when compared to the greater asset he acquired in the form of definite knowledge and that an intangible impulse of thought can be transmuted into its physical counterpart by the application of known principles.

Barnes literally thought himself into a partnership with the Great Edison, and this has happened and will continue to happen in the world, right? He thought himself. Into a fortune. He had nothing to start with except the capacity to know what he wanted and the determination to stand by that desire until he realized that he had no money to begin with, he had, but little education, he had no influence, but he did have initiative, faith, and the will to win.

And that's pretty powerful stuff.

Three Feet from Gold

Hill follows the barn story with the   📍 cautionary tale of RU Darby, who famously quit three feet from gold Darby's. And this is a fascinating story.

Darby's uncle had gone to Colorado, and as Hill puts it, he   📍 had never heard that more gold has been mined from the brains of men than has ever been taken from the Earth. That's on page 27, the quote, but  yet luck seemed to be on his side.   📍 The uncle struck a promising vein, and with the help of Darby and other family members and friends, they bought machinery and dug with high hopes. 

Then the vein vanished. After digging fruitlessly, they grew discouraged, quit, and sold their equipment to a junk man. The junk man hired an engineer who studied the geology, calculated the fault line, and discovered the vein was three feet from where Darby had stopped. He dug and uncovered one of the richest deposits in Colorado as Hill Notes.

The junk man succeeded because he knew enough to seek expert counsel before giving up. I think that's so wise. He didn't know it himself, but he knew enough to ask rep expert counsel. That struck me as almost identical to what we did in the Air Force when we hit an extremely complex aircraft problem.

If something exceeded the technical scope of the crew checklists and manuals, we could request this conference Sky hook all of my Air Force base will know what this is. If not, check it out. It's basically a live patch into the engineers at Boeing or wherever. The specialists and depot level experts who literally.

Wrote the book on the aircraft. You don't guess. You don't quit. If you're up in the air, you do this conference Sky Hook and calling the experts who won't let you give up three feet from gold, if you will. You elevate the problem to someone who knows more. If Darby had done that, consulted an expert before giving up the outcome might have been very different.

He could have done what the junk band did, right? But apparently he didn't think he needed to ask or didn't think the, expert would know. He. Derby also realized that had he persisted just three feet further because he heard about it, obviously they would've rediscovered the vein. He never forgot the lesson.

Persistence, what he'll call stickability, which I like that term. Stickability is often the dividing line between failure and success. Darby took that harsh lesson and turned it into a fortune selling life insurance. Maybe not the best application in my opinion, but an occupation where stickability isn't just helpful, it's a practically the job description, right?

As Hill writes, Darby owed his persistence and insurance to his credibility, the gold mining business, he needed stickability. He had credibility. Hill reinforces this with another Darby anecdote one day. One he says, occurred after Darby had earned his degree from the University of Hard Knocks, if you will.

This incident involved a young black girl and Darby's uncle, apparently the same uncle from the mining story, though Hill is not entirely explicit. The child appeared at the mill door requesting 50 cents owed to her mother. The uncle barked that he wouldn't pay and ordered her to run home. She replied, yes, sir, but didn't move.

He went back to work. When he looked up again and saw her standing there, he exploded. Threatening to beat her if she didn't leave again. She said, yes, sir, and again, she did not move. Enraged the uncle dropped a sack of grain, grabbed a barrel, stave, and advanced on her. Darby watching, genuinely believed he was about to witness a murder.

Defiance like this from a black child, simply wasn't tolerated in the Jim Crow South. What happened next is astonishing and if even if hill embellishes, the moment it rings the truth of the era. When the uncle reached the spot where the child stood, she stepped forward one step, looked up into his eyes and screamed at the top of her shrill voice.

My mamie's gotta have that. 50 cents sits, the uncle froze. Then slowly he laid down the barrel, stave on the floor, reached into his pocket and paid her the money. In that terrifying moment, a small, unarmed black girl in Jim Crow South armed only with Unbreakable will conquered a furious large white man with a weapon, and one hill point lands like a hammer, at least to many of us.

Persistence and defiance can overcome overpower extreme obstacles when someone simply refuses to yield. And he goes on, on page 32 here.

Mr. Darby pointed out every time a prospect tried to bow me out, I think he's talking about InsuranceNow. Tried to bow me out without buying. I saw that child standing there in the old mill, her big eyes, glaring in defiance, and I said to myself, I've gotta make this sale. The better portion of all sales I have made were made.

After people had said no, he recalled two. His mistake in having stopped only three feet from gold. But he said that experience was a blessing in disguise. It taught me to keep on keeping on no matter how hard the going may be, a lesson I needed to learn before I could succeed in anything. And it continues on.

When riches begin to come, they come so quickly and in such great abundance he'll continues on that one wonders where they have been hiding During all these, those lean years, this is an astounding statement. And all the more so when we take into consideration the popular belief that riches come only to those who work hard and long.

When you begin to think and grow rich, you'll observe the riches begin with the state of mind, with definiteness of purpose, with little or. No hard work. You and every other person ought to be interested in knowing how to acquire the state of mind, which will attract riches. I spent 25 years in research analyzing more than 25,000 people because I too wanted to know how wealthy men became that way.

Without that research, this book would not have been written here. Take notice of a very significant truth. The business depression started in 1929 and continued on into an all time record of destruction until sometime after President Roosevelt entered office. Then the depression began to fade into nothingness just as an electrician and a theater raises the light so gradually the darkness has transmuted into light before you realize it.

So did the spell of fear in the minds of people gradually fade away and become faith. Obviously it was a little bit different. And then obvi observe very closely that as soon as you master the pr, the principles of this philosophy and begin to follow the instructions for applying those principles, your financial status will begin to improve.

And everything you touch will begin to transmute itself into an asset for your benefit. Impossible. Not at all hands, the quote there. But later on in the, on the page, he does say success comes to those who become success conscious.

Mindset and Perspective Shift

success comes to those who become success conscious and then he'll pivots to a deeper idea. Most of the chains that keep people poor or stuck are self forged. Success, he insists is less about external circumstances and more about learning to change the angle from which we view those circumstances, cutting away the mental habits and inherited limitations that masquerade as reality.

He drives his point home with a brief, provocative exchange. A young man from the far east studying at the University of Chicago has asked what strikes him as most unusual about Americans. Instead of answering directly, he turns the question back. What? Why? The queer slant of your eyes? Your eyes are off slant.

The phrasing lands awkwardly, obviously, today and rightly so, but the language reflects 1937, not 2026, but Hill isn't engaging in caricature. He's using the moment as a mirror what each person experiences as normal, looks strange, or even deformed from the other, from the opposite shore or the opposite person.

The students reply startles the American interviewer into realizing that his eyes appear slanted to someone else.

That jolt is exactly what Hill wants the reader to feel. Fixed barriers, immovable obstacles and realistic limits are often nothing more than perspectives held to tightly shift the angle. Reframe the picture and mountain street to molehill. Closed doors swing open and what's what. Once looked impossible, begins to look inevitable.

Is the sentiment hill's conveying here? The deeper lesson isn't about nationality or appearance at all. It's this the same mind that convinces you something can't be done is perfectly capable of convincing you it can, if you're willing to adjust the slant through which you yourself. You see yourself and the world change the frame Hill says, and you change the game.

Henry Ford V8 Persistence

The book turns to Henry   📍 📍 📍 Ford, the man who more than anyone else in the book, personifies what happens when a burning desire meets an absolute refusal to accept impossible. Before we go further in there, necessary parenthesis here. Henry Ford was a genius of production, but he was also a documented anti- semite in 1919.

He bought the Dearborn Independent and starting  in 1920 turned into a megaphone for vicious anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. Those articles were later bound into a four volume set title, the International Jew, which circulated widely and was praised by the Nazis under mounting pressure and lawsuits forged to shut the series down and issued a public apology in 1927.

But historians agree, the damage had already been done and it lasted hill writing in 1937. Amids all of this, which. Makes sense 'cause he's making him the person of his book, but not necessarily fair to history given that this book is about success principles not for his biography. So take it for what you will.

But I did think it was important to note, not everyone here is someone you wanna be just like I note it here so we don't sanitize the past. It's possible to learn from Ford's persistence while completely rejecting the prejudice he promoted. Okay, with that on the table, here's the story he wants us to see.

Ford decided. He decided he wanted a V eight engine cast in a single block of metal, lighter, cheaper, and more powerful than anything on the road. His engineers told him politely at first and then desperately that it couldn't be done. The alloy cracked every time they poured it. Prototype after prototype, the project dragged on for months, then years, the engineering team begged to fall back to the proven three piece design.

Everyone else used Ford's. Reply was short. I want it and I'll have it produce it. He didn't scream, he didn't fire anyone. He didn't back down. He simply held the vision, persisted and gave his people unlimited time and resources to make it real. Eventually, after countless dead ends, the metallurgist solved the problem.

The single block V eight rolled off the line in 1932 and changed the automobile forever. Affordable power for the average buyer, a competitive death blow to dozens of rival manufacturers, and the engine that cemented Ford's Legend Hill's. Takeaway is blunt. Most impossibilities are only impossible until someone with a different perspective decides they aren't.

Ford didn't know how to cast the block himself. He knew he wanted it and refused to accept any answer. That began with can't. The obstacles weren't warnings. They were simply the price of admission. It's the same mental muscle we saw with Darby's, three feet of gold, and the little girl who wouldn't leave without her 50 cents.

The circumstances differ, the stakes differ. Even the morality of the actors differs, but the mechanism is identical. A mind that will not quit reshapes the world faster than any amount of talent or resources alone ever could. Ford's darker flaws don't invalidate the principle. They simply remind us to use it carefully.

A fixed purpose can build an empire or spread poison. Hill's Real message isn't be like Henry Ford. It's decide what you want. Lock into it with everything you've got, and don't let others' perception vote on whether you are allowed to have it or not. So far, once that the Air's tone is accounted for, the book I think is on course and on Glide Path obviously.

There are some footnotes here.

Invictus and Inner Sovereignty

Napoleon Hill closes the introduction of Think and Grow Rich by turning to a short poem that has Outlived Empires, markets, and manifestos. It's Invictus by William Ernest Hinley. He does not quote the poem in Full and Steady focuses exclusively on his final two lines, using them to frame his central argument about personal responsibility, self-mastery, and the power of thought.

What follows next is Hill's interpretation. Hill points to Henley's declaration. Quote, I'm the master of my fate. I'm the captain of my soul. As evidence that human beings possess ultimate authority over their lives to heal, these lines are not just bravado, they're psychological truth. They support his belief that success, failure, wealth, and poverty begin not with circumstances, but with the thoughts a person consistently holds.

What Hill does not provide is the historical context of the poem or the life of the man who wrote it. The context is worth pausing on and I dive deep here. Invictus was written in 1875 during a long hospitalization for tuberculosis of the bone. William Ernest Hinley had been fighting illness since childhood.

At the age of 12, his condition progressed to the point the doctors were forced to amputate his leg. As a young man, Henley faced the very real possibility that the disease would claim the other as well. He wrote the poem from a place of pain, confinement, and uncertainty, literally staring into the darkness.

He describes and just imagine that his amputation of the legs. It was also worth noting that the title Invictus is Latin for uncured. I found the poem moving, obviously. So moving that I thought it would be best if we stated here in full, even though he'll himself only used the first two lines. I'll try to do it ju justice here out of the night that covers me.

Black is the pit from pole to pole. I thought. I thank whatever Gods may be for my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced or cried aloud under the bludgeonings of chance. My head is bloody, but not, but unbowed beyond this place of wrath and tears looms, but the horror of the shade and yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how straight the gate. How charged the punishments, the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul historically. The poem belongs to the late Victorian area. A time preoccupied with endurance, resolve and self command. But unlike much of the stiff moralism of its age, Invictus is deeply personal.

It does not deny suffering. It does not promise rescue. Instead it, I think it asserts something more radical. Your inner sovereignty, you are the master of your fate. You are the ER of your soul. Hanley does not argue that life will be fair. He accepts that it will be brutal and insists that dignity lies and how one responds.

Invictus and Thought Power

That philosophy as my family and my son Robbie in particular would note is very near and dear to us. And I know this gets off finance very quickly and we will continue to do that. That's what this is partly about. The poems. Final lines have echoed far beyond their area, quoted by soldiers leaders me.

It's memorized by generation seeking strength in difficult circumstances. Nelson Mandela famously recited Invictus during his imprisonment, further cementing its place in the collective Consciousness. Hill, however, saw something more specific and something unfinished. Henley Hill believed was right, but incomplete.

Yes, we are the masters of our fate. Yes, we are the captains of our souls, but hill pressed one step further, according to Hill, we hold the power because we control our thoughts. While we cannot always command circumstances, markets, health, timing, or re retain authority over how we think, what we believe and the actions that flow from those beliefs.

In Hill's View, the inner control is the true source of wealth, not merely financial wealth, but the wealth of character, purpose, resilience, and ultimately freedom. It is the same quiet authority Henley claimed from a hospital bed long before Hill gave it a name. And on page 37, hill writes. When Henley wrote the Prophetic Lines, I'm the master of my sa fate.

I'm the capital of my soul. He should have informed us that we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our souls because we have the power to control our thoughts. So we have the con power to control our thoughts which is what hill's elaborating on here.

Ether and Mental Magnetism

He should have told us that the ether in which this little earth floats.

In which we move and have our being is a form of energy moving at an inconceivably high rate of vibration, and that the ether is filled with the form of universal power that adapts itself to the nature of the thoughts we hold in our minds and influences us in natural ways to transmute our thoughts into their physical equivalent.

I'm sure this was, has been talked about for years before, but during this time and since it's this passage or that thought has been talked about time and time again. Okay, he continues. He should have told us with great emphasis that this power makes no attempt to discriminate between dis destructive thoughts and constructive thoughts, that it will urge us to translate into physical reality, thoughts of poverty just as quickly as it will influence us to act upon thoughts of riches.

He should have told us too that our brains become magnetized with the dominating thoughts which hold we hold in our minds and by means with which no man is familiar. These magnets attract to us, the forces, the people, the circumstances of life, which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts.

He should have told us that before we accumulate riches in great abundance, we must magnetize our minds with intense desire for riches that we must become money conscious. Until the desire for money drives us to create definite plans for acquiring it. With that foundation established, he'll tells us we are now ready for the first principle desire.

He introduces Congressman Jennings Randolph, a member of the graduating class who heard his commencement speech at Salem College. And urged him to write the book, this book, think and Grow Rich as a Service that would prove priceless to countless others.   📍 📍 📍

Desire Barnes and No Retreat

So chapter two is Desire. Hill opens the first principle by returning to the story of Edwin Seed Barnes emphasizing that Barnes success was driven by a burning, definite desire.

This was not a wish or a hope, but a fixed intention that transcended all alternatives. Barnes did not merely want to work with Edison in his own mind.  He was Edison's partner long before reality reflect. Barnes worked for Edison for five years before the opportunity had been seeking finally appeared.

During that time. According to Hill, Barnes desire did not fade. It intensified. He continuously held the identity of Edison's partner in his mind, and when the moment arrived, he was psychologically prepared to recognize and sees it. And he writes. He writes on page 44.

He did not say, I will work there for a few months and if I get no encouragement I will quit and get a job somewhere else. He did say I will start anywhere. I will do anything Edison tells me to do, but before I am through, I will be his associate. He did not say, I will keep my eyes open for another opportunity in case I fail to get what I want in the Edison organization.

He said, there is, but one thing in this world that I am determined to have, and that is a business association with Thomas a Edison, I will burn all bridges behind me and stake my entire future on my ability to get what I want. And he'll compare his Barnes mindset to that of. Ernan Cortez evoking the famous story of the burning ships, which sorry, let me put my Uber nerd glasses on for a second.

And point out that Cortez did not burn his ships. Probably he probably scuttled to ships deliberately rendering them unusable to eliminate the possibility of retreat story later. Mythologize is burning them. Whether literal or symbolic hill's Point is clear. Retreat was removed from his mind. It was a victory or defeat with no return and no second option.

He argues that Barnes adopted the same internal posture as Cortes. He gave himself no alternative outcome. No alternative outcome.

Six Steps to Riches

From here, he'll shifts from narrative to method.

He outlines that what is essentially a step-by-step process for transforming desire into reality. A framework that would later inspire countless books and interpretations around manifestation, which he says here in it basically gives the steps, which I'm gonna read directly from page 45 here on the which he gets into every human being.

Quote, every human being who reaches the age of understanding of the purpose of money, wishes for it. Wishing will not bring riches, but desiring riches will with a state of mind that becomes an obsession. Then planning definite ways and means to acquire riches, and then backing those plans with persistence, which does not recognize failure.

Will bring riches. The method by which desire for riches can be transmuted into its financial equivalent consists of six definite practical steps. First, fixing your mind the exact amount of money you desire. It is not sufficient to merely say, I want plenty of money, be definite as to the amount. There is a psychology reason for psychological reason for definiteness, which will be described in a subsequent chapter Second.

Determine exactly what you intend to give and return for the money you desire. There's no such reality as something for nothing. Third. Establish a definite date when you intend to possess the money you desire. Fourth, create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once. Whether you're, you are ready or not, to put this plan into action.

Fifth, write out a clear and concise statement of the amount of money you intend to acquire. Name the time limit for its acquisition. State what you intend to give in return for the money, and describe clearly the plan through which you intend to accumulate it. Sixth, read your written statement aloud twice daily.

Once just before retiring at night and once after rising in the morning. As you read, see and feel and believe yourself already in possession of the money. Now these end quote. These six steps require clarity, commitment, repetition, and emotional engagement. They provide and require a disciplined mental practice.

He'll go so far as the claim that Thomas Edison personally reviewed these steps and placed a stamp of approval on them, calling them not only essential for the accumulation of money, but necessary for the attainment of any definite goal. He'll also emphasizes that the steps call for no hard labor. App application requires no great amount of education, special talent or formal training only disciplined adherence.

And at this stage of the book Hills Lang, the psychological foundation desire must be definite, dominant, and sustained. Without this level of commitment, none of the principles that follow can take hold. Okay.

Depression Changed World

We get now to the major reason the book was written, the Great Depression, which was a big impetus for the book.

He writes, quote, never in the history of America has there been so great an opportunity for Practical Dreamers as now exists. The six year economic collapse has reduced all men sub substantially to the same level. A new race is about to be run. The stakes represent huge fortunes, which will be accumulated within the next 10 years.

The rules of the race have changed because we now live in a changed world, and the changed world is capitalized. That whole term is capitalized. That definitely favors the masses, those who had been little or the, those who had but little or no opportunity to win under the conditions existing during the depression when fear paralyzed growth and development.

And that's end quote. It wasn't being poetic when he called it a changed world. He was describing a literal reset of the playing field triggered by the Great Depression. He but he made a real, he made it all real by stacking the emergency decisions that changed how money banks and confidence worked in America and keeping with our aviation theme.

Think of a plan going down with multiple emergencies going on at once, and a complete reset may be the ticket , and that's what they did. Here, and I'm going to briefly, this is not in the book. This is briefly describe. This, the Great Depression and what they did. So bear with me.

The depression wasn't only a stock market story, it was a trust and liquidity story. When fear took the controls, people ran not just from stocks but from banks themselves at that time. If you don't trust your bank, you don't keep deposits there. We've actually seen that recently here with in Silicon Valley, and if you.

Ever seen. It's a wonderful life. You get it? George Bailey does a great job explaining how a bank actually works. And if you don't trust paper money, you try to exchange it for something you believe, it will still be valuable. Tomorrow. In the early 1930s, that's something was gold. Heck, it might be gold.

Now, under the old system, that fear had teeth, the public could pressure banks with through withdrawals, and banks could be pressured through gold redemption. The danger wasn't merely that the economy was shrinking. The danger was that the money supply and credit system, the credit system could shrink with it like a plane losing lift because the air itself is thinning, deflation, which in many cases scarier than inflation, made it worse.

Falling prices make debts heavier. In real terms, loan defaults rise. Banks get weaker and panic spreads. That loop is where economic collapse becomes economic paralysis, and we see great depression. Deflation can bees, especially nasty because it changes behavior. And behavioral finance is one. We're gonna talk about a lot in this show, but if people expect things to be cheaper tomorrow, why would they pay for anything today?

They'll delay the purchases when spending freezes. Businesses don't just slow down. They fail because nobody's buying what they're selling.

Banking Rewired and Fear

So the government did something at that time that was radical. It changed the rules of flying mid-flight. Midair right. They changed the gold rules to stop the panic and keep the banking system from bleeding out in 1933 to 1934, the government basically stopped the old swap your dollars for gold anytime.

Setup that people were used to. This wasn't about politics or making a statement. It was about stopping a dangerous cycle. People got scared, pulled money out, and that fear made banks even weaker, which made everyone even more scared. So they changed the rules, gave the government more room to steady the banks and get money flowing again, and not long after, they also devalued the dollars relation to gold, which meant they made gold more expensive in dollars.

So once gold convertibility pressures were removed, you convert, dollars to gold. They removed that by making gold, more expensive dollars, and gold hoarding was restrained 'cause it cost more to do it. Policymakers regained room to stabilize the financial system and re-expand credit. This didn't magically fix the economy overnight, but it changed the environment from everyone braced for impact to we can actually attempt a recovery here.

And that's the context behind Hills Line about the rules being different. In his mind, the country wasn't simply rebuilding businesses, it was rebuilding the conditions that allow businesses to function. And this is why people get tripped up later when they say, but, well, we left gold in 19, in the 1970s.

Obviously this was not written in the 1970s. That's true internationally. Foreign conver convertibility under Bretton Woods happened, but in the seventies. But hill's talking about the earlier depression era shift where the domestic relationship between dollars and gold and baking stability and public confidence was reengineered.

And now we get to glass stegel, which was kind of just fun to say. Glass stegel, uh, think of it as rewiring. The aircraft and separating the fuel lines from   📍 📍 📍 the e and e or the electronics and equipment bay, you don't want fuel and sparks going in the same spot, right? So banks couldn't gamble with the system's foundation potentially causing a catastrophic incident.

Right. That's what they're trying to prevent here. So banking reforms were layered on top of the gold exchanges, especially  the idea that banks needed guardrails. They, unfortunately when banks didn't have guardrails, they were putting the fuel with the electronics, so to speak. Glass Stegel was part of the banking act of 1933.

Probably the most famous of them. The simple version is this, if deposits are the financial system's oxygen, you don't want the institutions holding them to also be running, something in the back room. Glass stegel aimed to separate commercial banking deposits and loans from investing, banking activities. Which is so glass stegel aimed to separate commercial banking, which is deposits and loans from investment banking activities. So they were doing both, which is securities, underwriting and trading. So whether you agree with every detail or not, doesn't matter.

The intention is easy to understand, protect the core functions that keep the everyday economy alive. Payments, savings, lending from the kinds of risks and conflicts that can blow up the fast and spread panic. So separate those commercial banking from investment banking and that, that word panic matters.

I didn't wanna spread panic, not because fix he'll, fixates on fear for its own sake, but because he understands how central psychology is to economics. Hill isn't studying balance sheets, he's studying behavior. When fear takes over, people don't make clearheaded decisions. They retreat. They stop investing, stop hiring, stop building, and most damaging of all.

Stop imagining what could be. Now think and Grow. Rich is Hill's attempt to pull the reader out of that mental crater and get them thinking like a builder again, forward looking, intentional and constructive rather than defensive. And why Hill sees opportunity where others see rebel Hill's Argument finds its footing here if depression.

If the depression flattened old structures and the government rewired some of the systems weak points, then the post collapse era is different. It becomes a strange mix of destruction and possibility. The incumbents aren't invincible. What has happened is, and who's been in power can get replaced. Old advantages don't mean as much.

New systems, new markets, and new needs appear. That's what he, I think that's what he means by practical dreamers. He's not talking about fantasy or optimism without a plan. He's describing people who can look at a damaged landscape and spot the new runways. Industries that have to be rebuilt.

Businesses that have to operate with new rules, consumers who will buy differently, and a society that will reward people who can organize, communicate, and execute. It's also where Hill's message becomes both inspiring and worth questioning. His optimism is part motivational medicine and part historical observation.

He's right that re that. This reset creates openings and history does show that big fortunes can be made after big dislocations like this. But it's also true that the same level is more rhetorical than the quote. Same level is more rhetorical than literal. Not everyone started equal. Plenty of people never recovered.

Plenty of people started off, they did. They did. Okay. The Kennedys come to mind. Hill's gift is that he writes as if mindset is the decisive factor. While the reality is that mindset is powerful, but not the only variable in the equation, still his timing matters. Hill is writing to people who feel stuck, scared and outmatched.

He's saying the world didn't just collapsed. It rearranged. And if you understand the rearrangement. Money rules changing, banking being rewired, confidence being rebuilt. You can stop waiting for the old world to return and start building inside the new one. And he isn't selling the depression. He's selling what comes after it.

Dreamers and Reality Check

If you were willing to clearly think when everyone else is frozen and he writes, quote, never, there never has there been a time more favorable to pioneers than the present. True. There is no wild and woolly West to be conquered as in the days of the covered wagon. But there is a vast business, financial, and industrial world to be remolded and redirected along new lines and better lines.

In planning to acquire your share of riches, let no one influence you to score in the dreamer. To begin the big stakes in this changed world, you must catch the spirit of the great pioneers of the past whose dreams have given to civilization, all that it has a value, the spirit, which serves as the lifeblood of our own country, your opportunity and mind to develop and market our talents.

Let us not forget, Columbus dreamed of an unknown world staked his life on the existence of such a world and discovered it. Copernicus, the great astronomer dreamt of a multiplicity of worlds and revealed them no one denounced him as impractical after he had triumphed. Instead, the world worshiped at his shrine, thus proving once more.

That success requires no apologies, failure permits, no alibis. I love the sentiment about Dreamers. This is me talking while Hill isn't entirely wrong, in my opinion, he stumbles a bit here. Yes, Columbus dreamt of a world beyond the known horizon and believed it in it so deeply that he risked his life, but others with similar convictions did not share his outcome.

And Copernicus, in a sense, I think was for fortunate. You if you think of Galileo, unlike Galileo, who was persecuted for his similar beliefs decades after per Copernicus, by the way, Copernicus quietly published his work dedicated to the Pope on Helio centrism, and died shortly after. Thereafter, he did not openly challenge the church like Galileo, and he wasn't alive to see the full reaction to his findings.

He had circumstances been different, he too might have been faced a severe backlash. It's a little bit of a stretch there for. For those two. The assertion that success requires no apologies, also feels overly simplistic. Histories filled with examples of individuals who achieved success by trampling on others and were later forced to answer for it.

So success does not automatically equal righteousness. As a saying goes, karma is unrelenting. It has a way of catching up whether in this life or the next that's not Hill's quote. Nevertheless, I agree with Hill that the world needs dreamers. He regains his footing in the following paragraph, and this is where the message resonates most strongly for me.

The encouragement to pursue what you believe is right, despite temporary defeat. Captures the, this captures the essence of resilient vision. The idea that failure carries with it. The seed of equivalent success is timeless and powerful. Hill presents what feels like a hall of fame, practical dreamers.

Next with Henry Ford in the horseless carriage. Edison win the lamp wheeling in cigar stores, though that example doesn't age very well. Lincoln and Freedom, the Wright brothers in flight, Marconi and the radio here, he truly strikes a chord. Imagine he goes into this a little bit. Imagine being one of Marconis friends at the time where there was no radio, no cell phones, no Bluetooth, no wireless anything, right?

Most people believed only. This is, this is me. Uh, paraphrasing here. Most people believed only in what they could see, touch or physically measure. Then your friend starts talking about sending invisible messages through the air messages that could be heard hundreds of miles away. How would you have responded?

Skepticism would've been the natural reaction and history shows Mark Marconi faced plenty of it as ward counts in one of his more dramatic anecdotes. He says Marconis own friends had him taken into custody and examined in a psychopathic hospital when he first announced his discovery. While that specific story appears to be apocryphal, I don't know that that actually happened.

No reliable biographies confirmed friends or authorities committed him to a, to an asylum. So I think he'll stretch there. Power, but it did capture. Powerfully, the ridicule and disbelief that Marconi did endure for sure. Italian officials initially dismissed his ideas implausible, pushing him to seek support in England instead.

And that thin line between visionary and madman, at least in the eyes of the present moment, remains one of the hill's most memorable illustrations. He goes on. It goes on to quote James Allen from his 1903 book. As a Man Thinketh, a title drawn from the biblical proverb, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.

The line hill includes his Allen's the Oak quote. The oak sleeps in the acorn. The bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul, awaking angels stirs dreams are the seedlings of reality. End quote. And that's again from James Allen's 1903 book, Allen. He quoted clearly influenced Hill, especially in the idea that thought is the starting point of achievement.

Thought is the starting point of achievement as a man thinketh. Alan focuses on the inner mastery I.

 Now Alan clearly influenced till, especially in the idea that thought is   📍 📍 📍 the starting point of achievement. And as a man thinketh, Alan focuses on inner mastery, arguing that our dominant thoughts shall shape our character, circumstances, and destiny. He'll builds on that foundation, but applies it more directly to achieve definite purpose and financial success.

Alan emphasizes inward transformation.  He'll channels that principle into outward results. I can almost picture Hill standing on a stump and preaching as he launches into this next sec section. His tone shifts urgent and rallying, less instructional and more inspirational. If he's call as if he's calling the dreamers of the world to their feet, which he probably is given the timing, he writes, awake, arise and assert yourself, you dreamers of the world.

Your star is now in the ascendancy. The world Depression brought the opportunity you have been waiting for. It taught people humility, tolerance, and open-mindedness. The world is filled with an abundance of opportunity, which the dreamers of the past never knew. End quote. Now his momentum carries over to the next page with this during encouragement quote.

You have been disappointed. You have undergone defeat during the depression. You have felt the great heart within you crushed until it bled. Take courage for these experiences have tempered the spiritual medal of which you are made. They are assets of incomparable value.

Other Self in Adversity

End quote, that passage feels, this passage feels straight outta the stoic philosophy.

Echoing Marcus Aurelius in meditations, which is the quote, the impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way hill like the stoics, reframes suffering as not as dead, as not as a dead end, but as the ferry forge that strengthens character and prepares one for greater achievement.

Hill has this line about. Meeting your other self. That moment when life backs you into a corner and you discover there's more in you than you knew. Not a different person, exactly. Just a deeper gear you didn't have ever have to engage before. In that section of chapter two, around page 52 in my edition, he brings up John Bunion, locked up for his religious beliefs.

Bunion didn't let confinement in his story. Instead he wrote the Pilgrim's Progress. And he'll uses him as a proof. That pressure doesn't always break people. Sometimes it reveals a strength you didn't know you had. He'll continues ruling with more examples of his other self emerging from crisis. He describes O Henry confined in an Ohio prison who discovered himself to be a great author instead of a miserable criminal and outcast.

Then Charles Dickens, the tragedy of his first love penetrated the depths of his soul and awakened his incredible other self turning personal heartbreak into literary mastery. That's good and here's a key insight. He'll stresses disappointment over love affairs. This is a quote, disappointment over love.

Affairs generally has the effect of driving men to drink and women to ruin. And this because most people never learn the art of transmuting their strongest emotions into dreams of a stro, of a constructive nature. Helen Keller became deaf, blind, and un unable to speak shortly after birth. Despite her greatest misfortune she was, has written her name indelibly in the pages of history of the great.

Her entire life has served as evidence that no one ever is defeated until defeat has been accepted as a reality. Boom. Mic Trop, but not really he'll continues with other examples of Robert Burns, Booker t Washington, and Beethoven. That idea hits home for me, but in a very different way. My, my other self moment wasn't in a prison cell, it was a hospital living through my son's kidney transplant.

You know, for me, the appointments, the waiting, the uncertainty, all of it. I think all, a lot of us believe in theory that we do anything for our family, but when you're actually standing in it, you find out whether that's just a nice idea or a real. Decision a reality. And for me, it became real. I was able to donate a kidney to my son, which I'm forever thankful for.

I'm not sharing this to sound special. Most parents would do it if they could if they had to. I'm sharing it because it changed me. It made Hills Point. Feel real. You don't always know what you're capable of until you're deep in it. I didn't know I was capable of those things. My son taught me a whole lot of stuff about what people can be capable of.

But when it's your kid, you don't need a mo motivational speech. You just need steadiness, faith and resilience in, in my opinion, you need to keep going even when you're tired and even when you're scared. And I wasn't scared for myself, was scared for my son but in that season. I saw a version of me I always hoped was there, determined, ready to do what love requires.

Just like when you know warriors go to war, they hope they will react the way they want to and deal with the violence they need to. Similarly, so when Hill talks about meeting our other selves in adversity, I get it. Bunion met his in confinement and created something enduring. I met mine in a season I never asked for, and it left me with a simple kind of confidence.

If I'm called on again, I'll be there and I know it. He finishes the section by differentiating between wishing for a thing and being ready to obtain it. No one is ready for a thing until he, he believes. He can acquire it. The state of mind must be belief, not mere hope or wish. And he continues on page 54, which is still chapter two.

And I know this is just some really good stuff in here. So we're gonna take a second. I'm read this part. Remember, no more effort is required to aim high in life, to demand abundance and prosperity than it is required to accept misery and poverty. And he reads this great, great poem. I bargained with life for a penny, and life would pay no more.

However, I begged at evening when I counted my scanty store for life as a just employer. It gives you what you ask, but once you have set the wages, while you must bear the task, I worked for a menial hire only to learn dismayed that any wage I had asked of life, life would have willingly paid. Boom.

Blair Hill Faith and Hearing

In chapter two of Thinking Rich Hill pauses the success principle.

The principals and talks about his son Blair's story, and this is about as personal as it gets. Blair was born without ears. He says The doctors told them they would, they thought Blair would be deaf and mute for life. That old school label of deaf and mute, and it was basically end of discussion.

Case closed except Hill doesn't close the case. He says he made a decision quietly in his own heart that Blair would hear. And would speak, he'll combine a definite desire backed by faith. The kind of faith that doesn't leave much room for, probably not. So he and his wife built everything around one idea.

This is not going to be Blair's identity. They don't put Blair on a special track. They don't ship him off to a school for the deaf as his customary at that time. And he makes a huge deal out of this part. They wouldn't allow Blair to learn sign language. And I'll talk about my thoughts in a second.

Their thinking was simple. Keep him in the hearing world around hearing kids. So normal life stays normal, not something he has to opt into Later. He'll describes their home like a full-time belief lab, constant reinforcement, bedtime stories, encouragement, basically training Blair's mind to expect hearing and speech as the future, even though he had no ears and he was not hearing.

Put this unbelievable belief, and then slowly things start to change. And on page 56, he writes, we could tell by his actions that he could hear certain sounds slightly. That was all I wanted to know. I was convinced that if he could hear even slightly, he might develop, still hear greater hearing capacity.

Then something happened, which gave me hope. It came from an entirely unexpected source. We bought a Victrola when the child heard the music for the first time, he went into ecstasies and promptly appropriate the machine. He soon shove showed a preference for certain records among them. It's a long way to temporary one On one occasion, he played that piece over and over for almost two hours, standing in front of the illa with his teeth clamped on the edge of the case.

The significance of this self formed habit of his did not become clear until to us, until years afterward for we had never heard of the principle of bone conduction of sound at that time, which you're probably familiar with, uh, firefighters use some of that, I believe, in their and their helmets. He continued.

Shortly after he appropriated the Victrola, I discovered that he could hear me quite clearly when I spoke with my lips touching his mastoid bone at the or at the base of the brain. These discoveries placed in my possession, the necessary media by which I began to translate into reality my burning desire to help my son develop hearing and speech.

By that time, he was making stabs at speaking certain words. The outlook was far from encouraging, but desire backed by faith knows no such word as impossible. That's powerful stuff. He tells Blair's stories attempting to plant in his mind the thought that his affliction was not a liability, but an asset of great value.

And that's a quote he plant. He wanted to   📍 📍 📍 plant in his mind the thought that his affliction was not a liability, but an asset of great value. He states that despite the fact that all the philosophy I had examined, clearly indicated that every adversity brings it with it the seed of an equivalent advantage, I must confess that I had not the slightest idea how his   affliction could ever become an asset.

However, I continue. And Hill goes on to describe Blair's burning desire to do things like other kids, including sell newspapers. His mother had to forbid him. I had forbidden him from selling the newspapers as she was afraid. Blair would get hit by a car due to his deafness peers. He defied her. He broke out of the house, borrowed 6 cents from in capital, quote, borrowed 6 cents in capital from the neighborhood.

Shoemaker invested in papers. Sold out, reinvested, and kept repeating until late in the evening after balancing his accounts and paying back the 6 cents he had borrowed from his banker, he had a net profit of 42 cents. Very it is a great story in resiliency. When Hill and his wife got home that night, they found him in bed asleep with the money tightly clenched in his hand hill laughed heartily and saw a brave, ambitious, self-reliant little businessman whose stocking himself had increased 100% because he had gone into future, into business on his own initiative and had won.

Little did he know this would be a foretelling of Blair's future. Now, bear with me as I read the section, but I think it's worth or there to be read in its entirety. It's on page 60. During his last week in college, 18 years after the operation, something happened which marked the most important turning point of his life through what seemed to be mere chance.

He came into possession of another electrical hearing device, which sent him on trial, sent to him on trial. He was slow about testing it due to his disappointment with this similar device. Finally, he picked up the instrument and more or less carelessly placed it on his head, hooked up the battery, and low as if by a stroke of magic, his de lifelong desire for a normal hearing.

It became a reality for the first time in his life. He heard practically as well as any person with normal hearing. God moves in mysterious waves, his wonders to perform overjoyed because of the changed world which had been brought to him through his hearing device. He rushed to the telephone, called his mother, and heard her voice perfectly.

The next day, he plainly heard the voices of his professors in class for the first time. In his life. Previously, he could hear them only when they shouted at short range. He heard the radio. He heard the talking pictures. For the first time in his life, he could converse freely with other people without the necessity of their having to speak loudly.

Truly, he had come to into possession of a changed world. He had refused to accept nature's error and by persistent desire he had induced nature to correct the error through the only practical means. Available desire had commenced to pay dividends, but the victory was not yet complete. The boys still had to find a definite, practical way to convert his handicap into an equivalent asset.

Hardly realizing the significance of what had already been accomplished, but intoxicated with the joy of his newly discovered world of sound. He wrote a letter to the manufacturer of the hearing aid enthusiastically describing his experience. Something in this letter, something perhaps, which was not written in the lines but back of them, caused the company to invite him to New York.

When he arrived, he was escorted through the factory and while talking with the chief engineer telling him about his changed world, a hunch, an idea, or an inspiration, call it what you wish flashed into his mind. It was the impulse of thought which converted his affliction into an asset destined to pay dividends in both money and happiness to thousands for all to come.

The sum and substance of that impulse of thought was this. It occurred to him that he might be of help to the millions of deafened people who go through life without the benefit of hearing devices. If he could find a way to tell them the story of his changed world, then and there, he reached a decision to devote the remaining, the remainder of his life to render.

Useful service to the heart of hearing For an entire month, he carried on intensive research during which he analyzed the entire marketing system of the manufacturer of the hearing device and created ways and means of communicating with the heart of hearing all over the world for the purpose of sharing with them this newly discovered, changed world.

When this was done, he put into a writing a two year plan based upon his findings. When he presented the plan to the company, he was instantly given a position for the purpose of carrying out his ambition. Little did he dream that when he went to work, that he was destined to bring hope and practical relief to thousands of deaf people who, without his help, would've been doomed forever to deaf mutism.

Boom. Hill's takeaway is pretty clear here. This is. His proof that a definite purpose, faith, and persistence can rewrite what everyone call else calls impossible. Now, modern day footnote here, because we're not in the thirties hill and his wife went all or nothing on sign language. In their case, it appears to have worked.

I read about Blair and he and saw pictures and he, obviously was didn't have ears and he became successful at the same time. I'm not sure that approach should be used today. Many families would choose both and strategy sign language for early communication and inclusion.

Plus speech therapy tech, like hearing aids or cochlear implants, and that same fierce belief and persistence, but an and approach. Different tools don't weaken the vision. They compliment and strengthen it. In my opinion. That said, I do understand the burn the ship's mentality. Hill was all in no retreat.

That intensity clearly fueled the outcome.

Robbie Survival and Tenacious Wave

The story resonates, and I'd be remiss if I didn't share the story of my son, Robbie. I didn't start this book review intending to talk about this at all, but it feels appropriate and it blends into what he's doing. So he'll refuse to let a diagnosis define Blair's future.

And we, my family and I faced our own version of that moment with Robbie, but much more intense. Robbie's the double transplant survivor bone marrow and kidney. Transplants. But before the kidney transplant, before the headlines of him being a survivor, there was a season where survival didn't look likely at all due to the immunosuppressants keeping his body from fighting itself from the bone marrow transplant, he developed a fungal infection that invaded his heart, lung, and brains and brain.

And he was a little bit like a bubble boy for many years there and couldn't go to school and do a lot of things. But he was. He was still surviving there, and I was deployed actually overseas in the United States Air Force at the time when the doctors told my wife to call the Red Cross and bring me home.

Immediately when I got to the hospital from the Middle East, some of the smartest doctors on the planet, Stanford children, Lucille Packard's Hospital, told us Robbie had days to live at best. The fungal infection is heart, lung, and brain would would kill him. Hospice was urgent. I'm gonna try to say this without crying, but if I don't, I can edit it.

Hospice was urged and they tried to get us to sign a do not resuscitate order, DNR. The wind was quite literally sucked from our souls. We were knocked down and we were used and we were used to fighting after all. But at up until this point, Robbie's life included Port Central lines. NG Tubes IVs, PICC lines in long hospital say he survived a complicated bone marrow transplant.

Severe graft versus host disease. He had to learn to walk three separate times, lost his eyesight for a year, fought the flu for a year and a half straight, and later he would endure and thrive through an open heart surgery and the kidney transplant among many other battles. And I knew we needed to decrease his immune sys the immunosuppressants so his body could fight.

The infection when the doctors told us what, what was happening. So the hope and prayer was that his body wouldn't reject the bone marrow graft while we were backed off the suppression, and instead it would fight off the fungal infection. In the heat of the moment, I'll never forget telling the doctors, no, we're not taking him to hospice and we're going to decrease the immunosuppressants fast enough for his body to fight.

We refuse to give up. And got second, third, and fourth opinions all with the same grim verdict. I'll never forget my mother-in-law telling my wife, they're just doctors. They don't know everything. And separately, I asked my uncle when would be the time to throw in the towel so he didn't suffer unnecessarily.

And my uncle a minister, gave me the most important advice I have ever got. And then he said, if he hasn't given up. Then you don't give up. And Robbie never gave up. And the topic oncologist at Stanford told us she'd never seen anyone make it through what he was going through. And she said, if I could see just one, just one, make it through it would all be worth it.

And she was talking about someone surviving, something like that. And Robbie defied all the scientific odds in doctor's diagnosis and made it through. We weaned the immunosuppressants. His body accepted the bone marrow after years of fighting it, and he fought off the fungal infection. Much to the doctor's surprise and our prayers were answered.

Literally, this is only one of them. His many battles. Probably the biggest one. They, but it one of them that shaped who he is. Out of those trials, Robbie realized clothing hadn't evolved to support patient care. Among other things, it lacked tenacity, so it's only fitting that this episode is brought to you by Tenacious Wave.

It wasn't planned on this, but here it goes. Brought to you by Tenacious Wave the company. Inspired by the original tenacious wave. My son Robbie. As you know, Robbie survived a bone marrow transplant, a kidney transplant, and a fungal infection. Doctors said would take him in days. They pushed hospice. They placed a DNR in front of us to sign, but he never quit.

He kept arising today. He's thriving in college and helping shape the company. His courage inspired. We learned that when someone is in the fight, people want to help. They just don't know how. Flowers fade and gift cards feel cold. Meal trains don't always work with hospital schedules and pajamas aren't built for medical gear.

So. He, we built tenacious wave apparel designed for real medical access without sacrificing dignity or style. And the Meridian 26 sweatshirt, which you can check out on tenacious wave.com, is built for treatment days, but designed for everyday real life. It doesn't look clinical. It carries a coastal confidence.

Be the tenacious wave, unleash, rise, repeat head to tenacious wave.com and use code Wings and wealth for 10% off your first order. That's tenacious wave.com code, wings and Wealth. That was an ad for my son's company and we're helping him with it obviously, and we couldn't be more proud of how he's using what he's been through.

To his advantage, the obstacle in the way has become the way. That's it.

Episode Wrap and Disclaimer

We'll close episode one here, not because we've covered it all, but because we've laid the foundation, hopefully is a little bit longer than normal. They normally won't be this long. Today was about desire, definite of purpose, the decision to stop drifting, and start directing your life with intention.

Hill isn't just talking about money, he's talking about identity, about choosing a target so clearly that your mind begins to organize itself around it. And magnet become a magnet for the people that you need in your life. Before wealth ever shows up in your bank account, it has to show up in your thinking.

That's the thread running through everything we do here at Wings and Wealth. Vision First,  discipline, second results Third, in part two, we move into Faith Autosuggestion in the subconscious 📍 mind. It sounds boring, but trust me, it's not, we won't get as in depth as this first one, but the middle mechanics behind our achievement.

So this is where hill shifts from inspiration to implementation, and whether you see it as psychology, spirituality, or performance conditioning, it's very powerful. So don't just listen to this. Decide something, set a definite name, write it down, read it daily and begin, because drifting is a choice and so is building.

This has been wings and wealth stay wings level, my friends.   📍 📍 Final disclosure, wings and wealth is independent educational content, not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by, or produced on behalf of any company or registered investment advisor. The views expressed are solely my own. Do not reflect any employment or client.

I'm a former Series 65 holder, not currently registered or licensed as an investment advisor representative, and I'm not acting as a fiduciary in connection with this content. Nothing here is investment tax or legal advice, and nothing is a solicitation or recommendation to buy or sell a security or.

Implement any investment strategy. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal and past performance is non indicative of future results. For the full disclaimer, visit wings and wealth.com/legal copyright wings and wealth 2026. All rights reserved.