As a cub reporter, Napoleon Hill received an assignment to interview the industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
The meeting proved the most important of Hill's life.
In the course of the interview, Carnegie, one of the most accomplished men of his age, offered Hill a daunting project.
He suggested Hill (1883-1970) devote at least 20 years to the study of successful leaders in business and other pursuits.
This research would illuminate the principles of a perennial philosophy of success, Carnegie told Hill.
The magnate offered no prospect of money to Hill for this work, but he said that he would help him make contacts.
Hill, as he confessed later, didn't even know what the word philosophy meant. He had to go home and look it up in the dictionary. Nor did Hill have any assurance that the venture would reap any profits.
But he trusted Carnegie's judgment and pursued the project.
Armed with letters of introduction from Carnegie, Hill proceeded to interview Thomas Edison, William Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller and Alexander Graham Bell.
As Carnegie predicted, Hill's immersion in the details and lessons of these lives of achievement yielded a rich harvest of insight.
From this research Hill developed a grasp of the essential elements of success that led him to write such seminal works as "The Law of Success" and "Think and Grow Rich," books that reportedly sold 20 millions copies by the time he died and still sell today.
Born poor in Wise County, Va., Hill died rich.
Raised in an atmosphere of illiteracy, he became one of the most influential authors and lecturers of his time. Long before the field of self-help literature exploded as a fashionable and profitable study, Hill launched motivational magazines for businessmen and offered audio tapes and courses on his "philosophy of achievement."
His emphasis on self-reliance struck a chord with Americans who survived the Great Depression. "The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun," he wrote, "It's the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun."
Such lines resonated with struggling yet aspirational Americans.
His work appealed to the common man and members of the elite.
For a time he served as an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, whose famous 1933 inaugural address line, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," derived, according to Hill, from their discussions on the subject of overcoming anxiety.
Judy Williamson, director of the Napoleon Hill Foundation World Learning Center at Purdue University Calumet, says Hill's exhaustive study of success made him not only an innovator in the field of self-help literature, but also sealed his enduring relevance in that field.
By studying success scientifically, he saw the whole of the subject and not just its parts, she says. While other writers limited themselves to various elements of success, he comprehended all of them.
"He didn't just stop with one," she told IBD. "He discovered a science of success that embraces all the traits of a successful person."
She added: "His brother thought he was crazy" to take up Carnegie's uncompensated project, but that firm foundation of study was what gave his work a lasting depth and distinctiveness. "He analyzed case studies of success and failure. No one else had done that."
And he never stopped learning, drawing upon other fields, such as psychology, to enrich his work.
The Right Direction
One of the chief lessons he drew from his study of great men was the power of positive thought.
"Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve," he said often.
"He knew how people could change," said Williamson.
She cites the time a policeman brought a distressed man into Hill's office in Chicago.
"This man can help you," the cop told the man, pointing to Hill.
Hill sat the man down and listened to his troubles.
"I can't help you, but I know someone who can," Hill told him.
Hill then took the man into an adjoining room with a mirror and stood the man in front of it.
"You are the only one who can change you," he said to the man looking at his reflection.
The man left disappointed, but returned later changed and grateful.
Hill, who faced many trials of his own, practiced what he preached.
"He always bounced back," said Don Green, executive director of the Napoleon Hill Foundation.
At age 10, Hill lost his mother and grew up in a tiny log cabin.
As an adult, he lost a mentor, the crusading, Prohibition-era newspaper publisher Don Mellett, to an assassin who had also intended to kill Hill — a scare that plunged the author into what he called the "living death" of depression.
But Hill found that by directing his attention to positive goals, he could eject despairing thoughts.
"Hill said it is impossible for the mind to hold positive and negative thoughts at the same time," said Green. "Concentrate on something that has meaning for you, and that will distract you from the pain."
Hill's business ventures also met occasionally with failure. One of his magazines folded, and he struggled at first to find publishers for his books.
But his study of successful entrepreneurs had taught him the value of perseverance.
"Before success comes in any man's life, he is sure to meet with much temporary defeat and, perhaps, some failure. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what the majority of men do," Hill wrote in "Think and Grow Rich." "More than 500 of the most successful men this country has ever known told the author their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them."
Edison told Hill that he had "failed 10,000 times" before he invented the electric light.
"Do not be discouraged if you fail a few times," the author wrote.
Hill didn't let failure or conventional wisdom dictate his decisions. This let him keep going when others quit. He saw knowledge as power and resolved to research matters himself — a trait in the thick of his professional and personal successes.
When his son Blair was born without normal hearing organs and doctors suggested that the boy be institutionalized, Hill "refused to do that," said Green.
Hill then read up on the subject of deafness, suspecting that his son wasn't as deaf as the original diagnosis suggested. He was proved right. His son grew up to hear normally and live productively.
"I hear every few days from people who have been influenced by his books," said Green, who notes that the interest in Hill goes beyond America. Green's foundation received a large donation from an African businessman whose life changed after reading one of Hill's books. "He was ahead of his time in a lot of ways, and the principles in his books are universal."