"I discovered that happiness, the highest aim of mankind, was mine for the taking, business depression or no business depression."
- Outwitting the Devil, page 44
"For nearly two months I suffered with the worst of all ailments; indecision. – I knew the seventeen principles of personal achievement but what I did not know was how to apply them."- Outwitting the Devil, page 11
The entirely fascinating start to the book where Hill tells us about his failures and battles with doubt and indecisiveness had me hooked. We hear stories of his own paralyzing fear like the day in July 1923 when he received an anonymous phone call warning him he was destined for a pine box if he didn’t leave Ohio within the hour. He escaped immediately to West Virginia and he speaks of how his courage left him and his nerves cracked. Hill speaks from the heart of someone who has experienced the fear, procrastination, frozen thoughts and general uselessness that visits us mere mortals. He entreats us to learn how to control our thinking and he declares quite simply that you are either motivated by fear or by faith. Faith he refers to as a miracle, a sixth sense.
Hill interviewed 25,000 men and women rated as failures and over 500 that were classed as successful including Henry Ford, Thomas A. Edison and John D. Rockefeller over a period of twenty years for his groundbreaking book Think and Grow Rich. He says “How strange after talking with the greatest men I sought out the Devil for a working knowledge of the greatest of all principles uncovered in my quest for truth. How strange I was forced to experience poverty and failure and adversity before understanding the law of nature.”
We are treated to lengthy debate between Hill and the Devil, which results in seven principles showing us how to create our own success by:
"My greatest weapon over human beings consists of two secret principles by which I gain control of their minds. I will speak first of the principle of habit, through which I silently enter the minds of people. By operating through this principle, I establish (I wish I could avoid using this word) the habit of drifting. When a person begins to drift on any subject, he is headed straight toward the gates of what you earthbound call Hell."- Outwitting the Devil, page 73
Drifting is a fabulous word that Hill has utilized to describe what happens when we no longer focus on our purpose, whatever that may be. We are even guiltier of this “drifting” today as our attention is hijacked by e-mail, blogs, web sites or any number of advertisers. The devil intrudes on us by disrupting our thoughts and slowly establishing bad habits that ultimately do not serve us well but we have a devil of a job to get rid of!
Hill urges us to retain a definite purpose in everything that we do. He is unremittingly damning of the education and religious systems that he says help retain poor thinking and ultimately fail us all. And when Hill asks the Devil how come he doesn’t just get rid of all the churches so that God is annihilated from people’s thinking – the Devil quickly retorts that it is the Churches that keep him alive in people’s minds by filling us all with fear of the Devil, Hell and damnation. So without God he would disappear from people’s thinking, wither and perish and this in many ways mirrors the position he takes on success and failure – that each generates the other.
"People who achieve outstanding success – is usually in exact ratio to their experiences of defeat before succeeding."- Outwitting the Devil, page 202
In order to combat drifting, Hill urges us to use self-discipline. What I love about this book is that it is in many ways a product of its time; definitive and reverential in its tone, intermittently bursting into bombastic colourful language like when Hill directs that self-discipline means mastering three appetites: 1) our desire for food 2) the desire for expression of sex and 3) the desire to express loosely organized opinions. Hill’s words are piercing. He says we should stop overeating and taking rich food as we poison and clog up the body sewer system, causing us to be sluggish and he finishes with the statement “If he (the person) could only take one good look at and one bad smell of his sewer system–he would be ashamed to look at himself in the face.” Now that’s telling us to get ourselves in order.
But self-discipline does not mean that we will inevitably be successful. Hill talks about his own challenges, fears and failures, and uses the Devil to repeat that misfortune or hardship are the walking shadow to success. He believes that what we endure will bring a corresponding benefit. He declares that adversity is a good thing as adversity allows you to form new habits, which serve to break the hold of hypnotic rhythm and change your path from negative to positive. The term hypnotic rhythm refers to the mindlessness that we enter into on a regular basis. Continuing the spiritual element to our lives he says, “It is a sin to accept from life anything one does not want because that indicates an unpardonable neglect to use the mind.”
Part of the original typewriter manuscript illustrates emphatically how technology has moved forward. So, does this text have anything worthy to hold our attention now? The work has been annotated by Sharon Lechter, co-author of the international bestseller Rich Dad Poor Dad, and there is a forward by Mark Victor Hansen, creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, so it is trumpeted by the leaders in the field. Impressive accolades, but is it fur coat and no knickers? I think not. There is indeed a great deal to get to grips with but not in a simple, docile way. This is a book that demands more from you—only if you have a thirst for knowledge should you venture into this deep and spookily accurate book.
Napoleon Hill was born in 1883 in a one-room cabin on the Pound River in Wise County, Virginia. He began his writing career at age 13 as a “mountain reporter” for small town newspapers and went on to become America’s most beloved motivational author. Hill passed away in November 1970 after a long and successful career writing, teaching, and lecturing about the principles of success. His work stands as a monument to individual achievement and is the cornerstone of modern motivation. His book, Think and Grow Rich, is the all time bestseller in the field. Hill established the Foundation as a nonprofit educational institution whose mission is to perpetuate his philosophy of leadership, self-motivation, and individual achievement. His books, audio cassettes, videotapes, and other motivational products are made available to you as a service of the Foundation so that you may build your own library of personal achievement materials… and help you acquire financial wealth and the true riches of life.
