Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude

[edit 7/9/2007: This series has been moved to it's own blog. Please see 17 Success Principles for updates.]

[edit 01/31/2007: please see What To Do When You Quit for an update on this series. I've also adjusted the links to Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich and Laws of Success to free versions, rather than amazon.com links.]

I just started re-reading Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone. It’s been a few years since I last read it, but I do remember it as one of those books with a lot of meat on it’s bones; it really put me on a track of working to achieve those things that I wanted in my life.

One thing that I’ve never written is a series of posts on a particular subject. I’ve seen it done successfully on a few other blogs; one of my favorite examples being Bill Perry’s series on How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey suggests that when learning material, learn it with the intent that you will have to teach it to others. This, he says, will provide you with a much stronger understanding of the material. That is why I’m doing this.

In the book, Hill and Stone outline 17 Success Principles that they claim are the keys to achieving things in our lives. It states in the introduction that they are culled from two of Hill’s earlier works: Think and Grow Rich and The Laws of Success. From the introduction:

“What Hill and I undertook to do in this book, and I believe we accomplished it, was to distill the essence of both into a context that would make them immediately accessible.”

One of the things that attracted me to Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude in the first place was the strong recommendation by Og Mandino, author of, among many other books, The Greatest Salesman in the World. In short, he credits the application of the ideas in the book as the thing that lifted him from the gutter (literally!) to become, from the book’s preface: “the president of two corporations and the executive editor of the finest magazine of its kind in the world, Success Unlimited“. I’ve always had an affinity for Mr. Mandino: his story is very close to my own… except that I haven’t achieved the levels of success that he did… yet!

Another thing that struck me about the book is the idea presented up front that “anything worth having is worth working for!” (a quote attributed to Andrew Carnegie in the dedication). That’s something that you don’t see much anymore. Readers of this blog know that I’m a big fan of the Law of Attraction, but I think that people get a little sidetracked when it comes to the Law. They think it means the equivalent of just focus on what you want and it will fall into your lap. Now, that may be true of highly evolved spiritual beings such as Jesus, Krishna, and Buddha… but it’s never worked very well for Lyman. Maybe just a few thousand more lifetimes. For those of us who haven’t gotten there yet, we do need to take some action (which is the definition of work that I’m using here, not the drudging 9 to 5 definition of it) toward the achievement of our goals.

The 17 Success Principles outlined in the book are:

1. A Positive Mental Attitude
2. Definiteness of Purpose
3. Going the Extra Mile
4. Accurate Thinking
5. Self-Discipline
6. The Master Mind
7. Applied Faith
8. A Pleasing Personality
9. Personal Initiative
10. Enthusiasm
11. Controlled Attention
12. Teamwork
13. Learning From Defeat
14. Creative Vision
15. Budgeting Time and Money
16. Maintaining Sound Physical and Mental Health
17. Using Cosmic Habit Force (Universal Law)

My plan is to present a blog post (or 2, or 3) dedicated to each of these principles. I’d like to know your thoughts on each of these as well, so please, don’t be afraid to comment or trackback from your own blog. I will update the above with links to the articles as they are created.

I’m pretty excited about doing this. I hope you get as much out of reading it as I know I will writing it!

Similar Posts:

• Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude Principle One – A Positive Mental Attitude
• A Book, a Pen, and a Post-it®
• Get Paid to Reach Your Goals
• What To Do When You Quit
• Three Books That Changed My Life

Tagged as: Law of Attraction, Personal Development, PMA, Success