What's Old Is New Again

I love books. I also love getting great ideas from good books. I don’t discriminate. I’ll read paperbacks, hardbacks, and ebooks. However, once I find a book I really like and started reading it in ebook form, I spend the extra money and purchase it in print.

There’s just something soul satisfying about being able to mark the passages I want to reread with pen or pencil, and adding my own comments in the margin. I also love being able to flip back into a previous chapter to find a special passage. The electronic books offer this too, but it’s just not the same.

One book I recently started in ebook form is Think and Grow Rich. I’ve read it several times over the years. I can even point to events in my life that I attribute Napoleon Hill and his system.

Something seems different this time, however. The ideas seem to resonate more with me now than they have in previous years.

I was delighted to discover that several of the points in Think and Grow Rich dovetail perfectly with the qualities needed to make the most of the opportunities offered by Wealthy Affiliate. Let me show you what I mean.

For those of you unfamiliar with the book, a little background information may be helpful. The book was written by Napoleon Hill. The idea for the book was given to him by Andrew Carnegie.

You might want to take a few minutes and read a bio of Carnegie. Carnegie challenged Hill to research and discover how the most successful men of their day had become so successful.

It took Hill twenty-five years to complete his research and publish his book. During the course of those years, he interviewed 500 of the world’s wealthiest men. We only know them through the pages of history books. Men like Henry Ford, William Wrigley, Jr., Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas A. Edison, and F.W. Woolworth sat and spoke with Hill, and shared their secrets of success with him. Through his book, those secrets are available to us too.

A Burning Desire for Something Definite

The first step in Hill’s plan is to begin with a burning desire to achieve something definite with your life. This is such a great compliment to WA and working with a niche of your choosing. Picking something you truly care about help to carry you through when you run into the inevitable bumps in the road to affiliate success.

Faith

Mother Angelica once said that “faith is what gets you started.” Mother Angelica is the nun who had a wonderful art program on PBS several years ago. She also mixed faith with a desire for something definite. Her bio is facinating!

Napoleon Hill believed that Faith mixed in with your desire propelled you forward in your march to success. I suppose another way to look at this is simply to believe that you can accomplish your goal. Sounds like such a small thing, but it's huge!

Persistence

The third piece to this plan for success is to be persistent. Once you have discovered the object of your desire, and then mixed it with an appropriate measure of faith, you need to do the physical things that allow the magic of success to happen. For us, that means write those posts! Get involved in the Comments section. Help other members, as you can, to solve their WA problems.

For a book that was originally published in 1937, It rings true in so many areas of building a business, and building a happy life. While it’s true computers were being developed in Hill’s time, the ENIAC started its productive business life around 1946, and personal computers made their appearance around 1975, online businesses were not a reality during the writing of Think and Grow Rich. That it is so relevant to today’s readers is a testament to the author’s work.

This book is full of gems that can be useful to WA members. If you decide to grab a copy and give it a read, let me know what you think.