Think and Grow Rich

Principles 1-5

Principle 1 – Desire
The first step in attracting what you want is to cultivate a desire for it. More specifically, a burning desire. You have to viscerally want it, and then create a vision of your life where you have it. The desire has to be strong enough to sustain you even when things get rough (see Principle 8). By coupling longing, vision, and persistence, you can start to attain your objective.

Principle 2 – Faith
Once you have your desire, you need to have faith in the process. Faith is what Napoleon Hill calls an ‘eternal elixir which gives life, power and action to the impulse of thought.’ It transforms your ordinary thoughts into a spiritual force, which powers your communion with Infinite Intelligence. A weak expression of faith holds little power. If you want to attract more wealth, but you only believe in yourself and this process a little bit, than Hill argues that you’ll only attract a little wealth.

As such, exercising this creative faculty requires closing your mind completely to all that may dim your vision, quench your belief, or cause you to doubt. Put simply, the more rock-solid faith you have in this process, the more quickly and powerfully you can manifest what you want.

Principle 3 – Self Suggestion
If you want to maximize your faith, then you need to monitor your self-talk. Self-talk is the words and mental scripts that you tell yourself, whether it’s, “I struggle for money and I’ll never be wealthy” or, “I attract plenty of money with ease.” Your self-talk starts in your conscious, thinking mind; but if you repeat a certain phrase in your head enough times, it seeps into your subconscious. Hill calls this process ‘autosuggestion’. The subconscious is the fertile, creative aspect of your brain; and the words that it uses to describe you affect how you see yourself. By consciously shaping our self-talk, we can control what transpires in our lives.

Principle 4 – Knowledge
The fourth of the thirteen principles of Think and Grow Rich is that, contrary to popular thought, knowledge is not power. Knowledge attracts abundance when it is organized and intelligently directed through practical plans of action. An action plan built on knowledge is necessary, but not sufficient. You also need to have faith that your plan will produce the outcome you desire. That is done by drawing on the accumulated experience of those who have already accomplished the success you desire.

Hill differentiates specialized knowledge (knowledge organized and used for action) from general knowledge (knowledge that’s not organized and used for action, essentially just trivia). Specialized knowledge can help you to become wealthy, whereas general knowledge is useless.

Principle 5 – Imagination
One of the most famous Napoleon Hill quotes is “whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” If you want to attract abundance, start with an idea. The ability to use your imagination to see a picture in your mind of what you want starts the process of creation. What you want can be anything, from a big house on the beach to a job that lights you up every morning. Go ahead and dream big and have complete faith that Infinite Intelligence will do everything possible to make manifest your most vivid imaginings.