Think and Grow Rich

Hill spent 20 years interviewing Carnegie, Edison, Ford, and others, then extracted thirteen principles he claimed were common to wealth creation. The throughline is that wealth begins with a definite, burning desire backed by a written plan, sustained faith, and persistence past failure. Some of the language feels mystical now, but the core ideas — clarity of goal, mastermind groups, persistence, decisiveness — remain durable.

In 1905, a young man named Edwin C. Barnes stepped off a freight train in West Orange, New Jersey, looking like the tramp he was. He walked into Thomas Edison's laboratory and announced not that he wanted a job, but that he intended to become Edison's business partner. Edison gave him a menial position sweeping floors. Barnes accepted with the same calm certainty he had stated his aim — and waited. Hill opens his book here because the moment of announcement is the moment of definite aim.

Hill tells the story of an unnamed general who, on landing his army in enemy territory, ordered his ships burned in the harbor so retreat became impossible. The story is most often attributed to Hernán Cortés in 1519 at Veracruz. Cortés stripped his men of any way home, then marched on Tenochtitlán with a force vastly outnumbered. They won. Hill returns to the burned ships as the externalization of unyielding desire: removing escape routes forces desire to manifest as action.

From the 1910s through the 1930s, four men — Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and the naturalist John Burroughs — went on annual camping trips together. They called themselves the Vagabonds. Photographs show them in suits in the woods, debating fuel chemistry by campfires. Hill argues these trips were a deliberate mastermind: a coordination of high-caliber minds in a setting that suspended business pressure long enough for the third invisible mind to emerge.

Over twenty years Hill analyzed 25,000 men and women who had failed in life, looking for common causes. The leading cause, by a wide margin, was procrastination on decisions. The wealthy by contrast decided promptly and reversed course only with great deliberation. The pattern held across industries, geographies, and decades.

Thomas Edison reportedly tested over 10,000 filament materials before finding one that would burn long enough in a bulb to be commercially useful. Asked by a reporter how it felt to have failed 10,000 times, Edison replied, 'I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.' The reframing was not motivational sleight of hand — it was the cognitive precondition for being able to test 10,001.

During the gold rush, R.U. Darby's uncle staked a claim in Colorado, dug a shaft, and hit a rich vein. He raised money to buy machinery, hauled it across the country, and began extracting ore. Then the vein vanished. He drilled deeper, found nothing, and finally sold all his equipment to a junk dealer for a few hundred dollars and went home defeated.

During World War I, a Chicago newspaper called Henry Ford an 'ignoramus' and Ford sued for libel. On the witness stand, attorneys grilled him with general-knowledge trivia — historical dates, geographic facts, basic literature — and Ford fumbled most of them. Then he leaned forward and said, 'If I should really want to answer the foolish question you have just asked, let me remind you that I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right one I can summon to my aid men who can answer any question.'