Book 6: Think and Grow Rich, Pt. 1
“Henry Ford was a success because he understood and applied the principles of success.”
“Henry Ford was a success because he understood and applied the principles of success.”
Are some people born superstars and business moguls? Are they made of different stuff than we are? Or are their successes achievable for us as well?
When we look at those who have achieved dramatically greater success than the average person, it’s helpful to know that there are reasons why this occurred beyond magic, inheritance, and luck.
We’ll dive into those reasons in future posts about this book. Since Useful Humans exists to react to and learn from great books, you’ll want to subscribe if you haven’t already, to keep track of all the different trains of thought that stem from a single book on the reading list.
In our lifetime, it’s become popular to envy the rich and famous to the point of bitter criticism, and an entitled desire to see them brought low through extensive taxation and misfortune.
I think this reaction is the result of ignorant envy. When we don’t know how to do better for ourselves, there’s a temptation to consider it unfair for anyone else to experience significantly greater outcomes.
Rather than trying to bring the successful down, let’s aim to educate ourselves and through effort and mentoring rise to the occasion.
Do you have the ability to control over your own thoughts?
“I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. He should have informed us that we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our soul BECAUSE we have the power to control our thoughts.”
A concept we’ll struggle to accept. In an age where fleeting thoughts and feelings are rated the most authentic forms of our selves, it’s no wonder we haven’t learned to consider ourselves the master of our own thoughts.
After all, we’ve each had some pretty crazy thoughts pop into our heads from time to time. Where did they come from? Without a credible explanation for the source of thoughts and ideas beyond our own selves, we attribute each thought as the creation of our own personalities and/or subconscious minds.
I’m not here to tell you how to define your subconscious mind. I will, however, challenge you to ponder how sensible it is to attribute every mysterious thing within you to this undefined, unlocatable part of yourself that you cannot prove other than by pointing to inexplicable events as some sort of unscientific proof.
By doing this, every single thought that has ever occurred to us gets automatically and, perhaps carelessly, attributed to our own personality.
Are you REALLY satisfied with that conclusion? That every thought was originated by you? Even the ones that you find repulsive and disturbing? You just have this Jekyll and Hyde-like soul that both creates the beautiful and the profane?
Technology companies are actively working on the ability to see, recognize, and understand thoughts. At this exact moment, the tech exists to observe thoughts occurring and differentiate on some level different types of thoughts.
If a machine is capable of seeing thoughts at all, then thoughts must have an energy signature. They must be a type of broadcast signal. And if they are, what if you’ve always received broadcast signals from elsewhere, outside yourself, but lacked the awareness and skill to discern one source from another?
So here we are, faced with a very important question:
Do all thoughts you’ve observed come from you? If so, how did you conceive of so many intrusive thoughts that disagree with your behavior, patterns, and experiences?
If not, where did some of those thoughts come from? What is your responsibility toward them? How do you achieve the power to control your own thoughts?
Without attempting to explain the more abstract nature of thought, Napoleon Hill describes how we can not only control our thoughts, but also control and direct our belief.
We’ll dive further into those concepts in another post.
Success lies just beyond failure
“Before success comes in any man’s life, he is sure to meet with much temporary defeat and some failure…
More than 500 of the most successful men told the author their greatest success was one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them.”
I’m reminded of Thomas Edison. It’s said he tried more than one thousand times to create a proper light bulb. He didn’t call the first 1,000 attempts failure, but rather he said he found 1,000 ways that didn’t work.
That sounds clever at the onset. But if you had tried to create something even 50 times and failed, at what point do you conceded that the answer is unknowable to you?
Place yourself in his position. You have no idea how exactly it will work. There’s no hindsight or clues. You try, you fail. You try again, you fail again. You try 50 more times, and fail each time. You have no idea whether the solution will present itself on the 51st attempt, the 550th attempt, or the 1,001st attempt.
That Time I Failed to Sell on Amazon
I launched a product for sale on Amazon in 2017 with minimal budget. 100% wool dryer balls. They help your clothes dry faster with fewer wrinkles. But it was already a highly competitive market. By 2019 it was clear that my product couldn’t compete in the market against more established brands with thousands of positive reviews. I tried five different listings in search of the magic sauce, but eventually the only tactic that moved merchandise was lower price point.
I closed down the product line after deciding that it wasn’t worth my effort or my time to troubleshoot this product or continue further attempts to differentiate it in a saturated market.
Was there anything wrong with the product I chose? Not at all. With enough startup capital, I could have weathered the storm of the first 3-5 years and by now we’d have a thriving business that would probably have expanded to multiple other products based on the success of the first.
But that never happened. In fact, I never tried selling another product on Amazon again. Is Amazon a faulty system? Not at all. Thousands of people make excellent money selling products on the world’s largest marketplace website.
The difference is that I gave up. I was not willing to take another step forward after suffering defeat and supply chain issues.
I did not witness the glory of success because I failed to follow the example of exemplary men and women all over the world. I quit and moved on.
Should you quit or press through?
There’s nothing wrong with quitting, though.
In some cases, the ability to cut losses and move on is the secret to future success.
We view the world through limited vantage points. We see one person quit a business only to launch a successful business later, and we call that wisdom. We see another person quit one business only to fail at a second business and we call that foolish (or at least unprepared).
And that’s the rub, isn’t it? We’ll never know in advance whether quitting or persevering is the answer for the particular challenge we face.
And yet, the choice remains . . .