Think and Grow Rich

I like to listen to books. In particular, books of a professional interest. These days there is no time to keep up a good professional reading habit. It is my good fortune that books are increasingly available as audio titles. The downloadable variety are often no more expensive than buying a paper version.

Availability of inexpensive audio players makes it easy to use travel and exercise time more productively. This habit has led me to acquire audio versions of books that have rested on my bookshelves unread. I have even bought audio books that I have read, and gained even more from them by listening. I recently found an mp3 version of Napoleon Hill’s ‘Think and Grow Rich’ offered for $8. It has been a pleasure to reacquaint myself with this landmark work.

I first read Hill’s life’s work in 1984. Looking back, I can recognise the influence it had on my views and outlook. As you may know, encouraged by Dales Carnegie, Napoleon Hill set out to identify the natural principles by which a person, almost any person, can make themselves rich. When he finished the book in the nineteen thirties, money or the lack of it was very important to Americans. It seems to me that the thirteen principles that Hill defined are perfectly applicable and relevant to the success of any endeavour to which people truly commit themselves. And further, this is as true today, seventy years on, as it was in the years leading up to the Second World War.