A book that launched both the self-help and the get-rich book genres by a man who became a pioneer of the motivational-speaker-circuit!
By Godlove Manase Mlaki | Book Review, Personal Finance 12th May 2015
You really need to respect and highly consider the work of a man who has spent more than 20 years in research on how wealthy men become that way. You cannot help but respect himmore if this man has (in the process) interviewed and synthesized the experience and insights of more than 500 of the richest and the most successful men in his generation.It becomes more enticing if this man comes up with an intriguing book title of Think & Grow Rich.I don’t need to convince you anymore if you happen to know that this book has sold way over 70 million copies and that almost every successful man/woman has read it at least 3 times. This book goes up to the top of the “must-read” books to any serious student of life.
Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill is among the best books of the 20th Century and it is still very practical in the 21st Century. The principles outlined in this book are endless.
I normally refer to this book’s price as “the Tsh 4,500 that changed my mind and then my life”. I bought this book in January 2007 for only Tsh 4,500. Read it 36 times within that year and got hooked in the quest for knowledge. It opened a door in my mind that I could not have managed to open any other way.
This book was like heaven sent for it came to me in the right moment in life when I had a burning question in my mind on how the rich make money. Up to that time I had bought and read books on how to be rich but nothing came any closer to the concise and definite answers that this book offers. Other works on the subject of getting rich are biased and are narrowed to fit in one little box but Hill’s work is prepared with a big picture in mind, for life is multifaceted and cannot fit in just one little box. Everyone and everything is different and there is no such a thing as one solution for everyone and everything. This is being naïve. This book has no shadows or complications; it is philosophically clean, setting out the things ‘which work’, and leaving others, rightfully, to the realm of mystery.
Think & Grow Rich outlines 13 concise principles for making money and it is so amazing that these 13 principles can be applied to achieve any worthwhile goal in life. If I were to sum-up these principles into one completed thought I could say that Dr. Hill’s (and all his 500 successful associates) philosophy is aboutThinking& Becoming, not just doing. It is a growth! The majority of people make a misleading assumption that just doing what the rich and successful do will make them rich and successful. This is wrong. The secret is in Thinking &Becoming a different person from within before you can do and achieve what the rich and successful have. Becoming rich is a result of a mind and lifestyle transformation. It requires the change of thoughts and attitudes. It demands the change of lifestyle and I am not referring to a luxurious lifestyle in this instance but I am referring to the priorities you set in life. In a sense, you have to see riches (the life you desire) in your mind and believe it wholeheartedly before it can be manifested, in the physical realm. It is a slow process that takes time and effort, and that is the main reason this author used the word growin the book tittle.
Near the end of this book, Hill admits that the main reason he wrote it was ‘the fact that millions of men and women are paralyzed by the fear of poverty’. This was in the America of the 1930s, still scarred by the Depression, when most people were focused on avoiding poverty rather than getting rich. That Hill’s book did not stop at poverty avoidance, but dared to be about becoming fabulously rich, may have forever classified it in some minds as a greed manual, but this is precisely what gave it its huge attraction.
I could go into details on the principles outlined in Think & Grow Rich in this article but space cannot really allow me to cover even a very small part of this philosophy. I will not be as effective as Dr. Hill in this endeavor. As a result of this I can strongly assert one advice: If you want to be rich and you can only read one book (even though you can’t read just one book and get all available secrets to wealth) let it be this book. I strongly suggest you get this book and read it at least three times.
“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”- Napoleon Hill
