Hill's Heroes

Napoleon Hill wrote the original, and probably still the best, self improvement book. He studied the five hundred most successful men of his generation and distilled the secrets of their success. Entitled Think And Grow Rich it could as well be called think and achieve any goal you set yourself. For me, the most important premise is the idea that we are the product of our dominating thoughts, however there's much more, including chapters on such vital attributes as desire and persistence.

The whole process was started by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who challenged Hill to go and discover the secrets of success for himself and then share them with the world. At the time Hill was a journalist who had gone to meet Carnegie for a straightforward interview. Nonetheless, he rose to the challenge and made himself rich in the process, from books, which are still widely read today.

When Think And Grow Rich was published Hill's readers would have been familiar with the men he wrote about, very familiar in some cases. In the same way that we are familiar with the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Donald Trump, Barack Obama and the particularly successful men and women of our generation, so Hill's readers were privy to the life stories of men like Henry Ford, Orville Wright, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and all the other greats who inspired Hill. If only because their lives overlapped.

Today we might know that Henry Ford founded the car manufacturer Ford, but we may not be fully aware of how his production line idea made the motor car affordable for the masses, nor that he sponsored a peace conference in a brave effort to forestall World War One. In fact there's much most of us just don't know about the men I call Hill's Heroes. Indeed when I started researching the book there were some, like Robert Dollar, whom I'd never even heard of, yet their lives are remarkable. Hence my new book Hill's Heroes Volume 1 which covers the first fifty names from Think And Grow Rich.