In his best-selling book of all time, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill mentions in his first chapter that throughout the book he will refer to Carnegie’s Secret many times. He said he wouldn’t tell you what that secret is, but when you’re ready, it will jump off the page and into your brain. He said: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. The doors will open. The lights will turn green. Ideas will come. The money will come. People will be there to help you.
Since 1970 we have been teaching the principles of success that Andrew Carnegie commissioned Napoleon Hill to study and share with the world. Napoleon Hill spent his entire life researching the most successful people of all time around the world.
Many, many times in our classes, workshops, talks, rallies, and at our Mastermind Alliance Success Club meetings we have asked this question of those in our audience who had read the Think and Grow Rich book,
What is the Carnegie secret that Napoleon Hill refers to in his book?
We got all kinds of guesses and some answers that were somewhat close.
HERE IT IS ——- THE SECRET OF CARNEGIE
1. Have a definite main purpose.
What is the most important thing you would like to achieve in your life? Try to define it in a paragraph, even if you have to keep rewriting it a hundred times until it is as clear as possible. It has to be the most important thing in your life. Mahatma Gandhi’s main definite purpose was to achieve the independence of India from its British rulers. He succeeded. Dr. Martin Luther King’s was equality and the end of oppression for blacks. Dr. Jonas Salk’s job was to find a cure and an end to polio. Thomas Edison’s was the incandescent light bulb. What’s yours?
If you don’t currently have what you think is a defined primary purpose, then have a defined primary purpose to find your defined primary purpose.
It has to be something that you want so much that you think about it all the time.
2. Be willing to stake your entire existence to achieve it.
Do not give up. There are many beginners in life, but very few finishers – when the going gets tough, they quit. A person with a definite important purpose never gives up, no matter how long and difficult the road is; instead, they become more determined. Jack London was rejected more than 600 times before he finally sold his first writing. Thomas Edison failed more than 9,999 times before perfecting the incandescent light bulb, and more than 5,000 times before perfecting the world’s first phonograph record player. There will be times when everything in you will tell you to stop trying, but if you hold on, eventually you will, you must succeed. Those who quit never win, and winners never quit.
Perseverance is the power to resist despite everything, to resist. It is the ability to face defeat repeatedly without giving up, to keep going even in the face of great difficulty or danger. Perseverance means striving to overcome all obstacles, to do whatever it takes to achieve your goals. You win because you refuse to be discouraged by your losses. Those who win are those who endure.
3. Keep intensifying your desire.
There are many “firemen” in life who will come and try to put out the fire of desire. They will give you all kinds of reasons why your idea or goal won’t work and tell you to drop it, forget it, or say “You can’t do it.” You have to become an arsonist. An arsonist starts fires. Every morning when you wake up you have to re-ignite and rebuild the intensity of your fire of desire. You have to eat it, sleep it, walk, talk and focus on it until it turns into a burning, burning, obsessive desire that will eventually end all the opposition that you will face throughout each day. If you don’t, your sizzle of desire will be reduced to nothing. I am not suggesting that you stop talking or seeing your family and friends; what I’m saying is stay focused day and night, seven days a week. This will bring into play: THE LAW OF HARMONIOUS ATTRACTION. Your burning desire becomes a magnet. You will attract what you need; the ideas and plans, the money you need, and the people you need to help you. They will eventually gravitate towards your desire.
4. Have Bulldog determination and perseverance that will eventually wipe out all opposition.
Expect lots of trouble, adversity, and discouragement along the way. Flip it over, go over it, go under it, or punch a hole through it, but never go back. Make your Defined Primary Purpose the dominant thought on your mind. It is a known fact that high achievers have gotten into the habit of making an “obsession” of their Defined Primary Purpose. Andrew Carnegie said put all your eggs in one basket and then look at the basket. Andrew Carnegie’s definite primary purpose, which he wrote at a young age and kept on his desk, was to earn as much money as he could in life and then ultimately establish the Carnegie Foundation to give it all away to worthy causes. Even after his death long ago, the Carnegie Foundation continues to give away millions each year to help humanity.
I have been teaching The Success Science Course since 1970. There were many times when I taught the course to ten different groups per week. Some in large hotels, others in large corporate training rooms, at the YMCA, in hundreds of insurance and real estate offices, in prisons, rehabilitation centers, and for many groups of sales and marketing people.
In all of my classes, (there were ten separate 4-hour classes for the course), I would always tell my students at the end of the first class: “For your homework this week, I want you to read the first four chapters of Think and Grow Rich. (I always had lots of books to sell.) As you read each page, write a list of all the things the author tells you to do and what he tells you not to do. Then I want you to take that list with you all days and keep going through your list and keep doing the things the author told you to do. And then go back to class # 2 next week and tell the class about the list you made, what actions they took as a result of reading the book and what results it obtained “.
At the beginning of class the following week, I always started by asking: raising your hand, how many of you read the first four chapters of Think and Grow Rich? About 2% would raise their hand. The rest did not take the time to read it. So I would ask 2% how many of you read the first four chapters and made the list that I told you to do of all the things the author told you to do? Usually about three hands were raised. I asked each of them: How many items do you have on your list of things the author told you to do? The first person said three. The second person said nine. The third person said – 90 items
I asked the person who had ninety on his list to come to the front of the classroom.
I told others: you paid a lot of money to take this course because you wanted to be more successful. How can you expect the results you expected if you are not willing to take notes and put what you are learning into practice?
Then I had the lady read from her list of 90 items. And the class was amazed at how powerful and important the things on their list were.
I asked the class: How many of you are speed readers? All kinds of hands went up. Then I told them about an incident when I was at a party and someone asked me what I do. I told him that I teach a course based on the book Think and Grow Rich. He said, “That’s a book we teach in our speed reading school.” Then I asked him, “What were the most important lessons you learned from the book?” He tried to think and then said, “I don’t remember that book that well.” Later I found out that he was a speed reading instructor. I thought to myself: there is a guy who can read 10,000 words per minute and not remember anything.
Think and Get Rich is so powerful that it is the kind of book that you have to read very slowly and carefully, many times until it becomes part of your life and your habits. I have been reading the book every year since 1970. Every year I take it off the shelf again and let it turn me on for the achievement of my new goals for the year.
CARNEGIE’S SECRET TO SUCCESS
Excerpt from the book
“The Science of Success Course”
By Rick Gettle © 2006