It’s time to dive back into the history of self-help and consider its impact on our understanding of how and who we are. In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, we are looking at the 1937 book, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

Think and Grow Rich sits on millions of bookshelves worldwide. It has remained one of the most enduring self-help books since its publication during the Great Depression. Despite documented controversies and allegations concerning the author, Napoleon Hill is still regarded by many contemporary self-help influencers as an important figure.

For this special episode, Napoleon Hill invited me to meet with him, where he promised to reveal the secret to becoming a successful self-help guru. He tasked me with turning this into a formula, which I could then share with the world. If you are ready to hear this secret, you will. But not all are. Which is why, despite it being mentioned in every part of the episode, I have not spelt it out in the starkest terms. For to do so would diminish its potency.

https://youtu.be/Cn6H17AFwPU 12 Steps To Thinking and Growing Rich as a Self-Help Influencer

We will explore these twelve keys to becoming a successful self-help grifter—sorry, I mean self-help guru—that we can learn from Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich.

Step 1: Lay Out Your Recipe for Success

Your recipe should promise clarity, control, and a sense of certainty in an uncertain world.

Step 2: Parade Yourself As Living Proof

Don’t be shy about telling people how your life changed from implementing your now tried and tested formula.

Step 3: Build Fail-Safe Principles

Be flexible with your words so that in the face of pushback and criticism, you can use them as reinforcement rather than undermining your idea.

Step 4: Establish Your Inner Circle

Join (or build) a fortifed circle of mutual back-scratching allies to grow authority by association and encourage aspirational sycophancy in your readers who dream of one day belonging to it.

Step 5: Drip Your Secret Sauce

Create and nurture a mystical secret, which sustains in your reader the sense that there is still something graspable they haven’t quite embodied – reinforce this with testimonials from those who appear to get it

Step 6: Nail Your Origin Story

Your appeal hinges on your origin story, which should follow a hero’s journey arc that starts with you in the reader’s current position (facing a challenge, wishing for change, etc). Describe the moment when everything changed for you and how this epiphany led your life to transform into what it is now. Firmly suggest that reading your book might be that wake-up call for the reader’s own heroic journey towards the life they’ve dreamed of but never yet dared follow.

Step 7: Use Confidence as Currency

Speak with confidence even if you are full of doubt and fear. The human mind is suggestible; the projection of confidence creates the perception of confidence. If you believe in your idea, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not; you know that it’s for the ultimate good of your reader to trust and follow you. Confidence is also what you are selling – people want to feel more of it, so if they see you wearing it, they will follow you.

Step 8: Turn Your Beliefs into Facts

Reinforce a picture of the world your readers want to believe in. Pick stories, metaphors, and research that move the frame of reality to one where your idea can be universally applied, and would be if all people were receptive to its power.

Step 9: Present The Pen of Destiny

Empower your readers to see reality primarily created by them as individuals. Emphasise the power of mindset, desire, and hard work, reinforcing the idea that taking personal responsibility for the quality of their life is what will bring the change they desire.

Step 10: Expose The Inner Enemy

Help your readers focus attention inwards to expose the biggest enemies of personal progress: fear, doubt, and indecision. Use militarised language to impress the urgency of the situation, which your method will help them emerge victorious.

Step 11: Feed The Lone Wolf

Stoke the fire of individual power by showing the reader that they are the protagonist and other people are supporting characters (obstacles or aids) in their life.

Step 12: Divide and Conquer

Nurture loyalty in your readers by turning them into followers, so they will defend you and your ideas if envious people criticise and attack you. And always remember that your people are your easiest source of future profit.

Self-Help is a Form, Not a Topic

Of course, while these might sound absurd, they’re the very mechanisms that keep the self-help industry turning.

Think and Grow Rich is an excellent demonstration of the technical tricks at play. A picture is beginning to form of how, as a genre, self-help is about more than its content. It’s about influencing beliefs and behaviours about ourselves, one another, and the way the world works.

Hill’s techniques rely on narrative, authority, perception, and engagement rather than the presentation of researched and documented knowledge. And when we view it in its historical context, we can see how important that was in the success of Think and Grow Rich. People were in vulnerable positions, still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression in the wake of the Wall Street Crash. They were seeking hope and practical solutions to the real material precarity created by a crisis inherent in the capitalist system. But rather than looking to the cause of that crisis and organising collectively for accountability to the real causes, and to ensure a safer future, Hill sold a story of individuals as personally responsible for the crash and responsible for pulling themselves up and following their dream to riches and success.

Hill’s formula has been replicated, adapted, and updated by thousands of self-help authors in the years since.

Further Reading/Viewing:

If you want to dive deeper into the truth about Napoleon Hill and the context of Think and Grow Rich, several resources do a great job highlighting the pattern of deception, fraud, and opportunism that was his true legacy. Think and Grow Rich isn’t an exception to that pattern – along with his other books, his emergence as a self-help success author sits squarely in his life as a con artist and snake oil salesman.

I hope that, by showcasing some of the techniques Hill employed in his self-help writing, we might be better equipped to recognise these same tactics used by influencers and gurus today. And to help those who are vulnerable to its allure, to notice before they spend thousands of dollars on promises that can’t come true.

In tracing its roots, we can begin to see how the mythology of self-help continues to shape our understanding of who and how we are today.

• The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time (Matt Novak) (Article)
• The Untold Truth of Napoleon Hill – History’s Most Beloved Con-Man (Coffeezilla) (Video)
• Think and Grow Duped | The Dream (Podcast)
• Napoleon Hill: The Grifter Who Invented ‘The Secret’ & Donald Trump (BTB – Part One) (Video)
• Napoleon Hill: The Grifter Who Invented ‘The Secret’ & Donald Trump (BTB – Part Two) (Video)