by Napoleon Hill
Available in 122 free installments
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Special instructions. When you read this book, read it as if the authors were your personal friends and were writing to you ? and you alone. Underscore sentences, quotations and words that are meaningful to you. Memorize self-motivators. Keep in mind that this is a book to motivate you to desirable action.
Abraham Lincoln developed the habit of trying to learn from the books he read, the people he met and casual events. These gave him ideas for reflection. And thus he was able to relate, assimilate and use ideas as his own.
You too can convert your creative thinking, artistic talent, knowledge, personality and physical energy into success, wealth, health and happiness. This book more than tells you how: it motivates you to try.
Look for the message that is applicable to you. When you recognize it. Pay attention! Get into action! To direct your mind into desired channels, try to answer each question at the end of each chapter during your thinking and planning time.
? W. CLEMENT STONE
PARTI
Where the Road to Achievement Begins
CHAPTER 1 Meet the Most Important Living Person
Meet the most important living person!
Somewhere in this book, you will meet him ? suddenly, surprisingly and with a shock of recognition that will change your whole life. When you do meet him, you will discover his secret. You will discover that he carries with him an invisible talisman with the initials PMA emblazoned on one side, and NMA on the other.
This invisible talisman has two amazing powers: it has the power to attract wealth, success, happiness and health; and it has the power to repel these things ? to rob you of all that makes life worth living. It is the first of these powers, PMA, that enables some men to climb to the top and stay there. It is the second that keeps other men at the bottom all their lives. It is NMA that pulls other men down from the top when they have reached it.
Perhaps the story of S. B. Fuller will illustrate how it works.
"We are poor ? not because of God." S. B. Fuller was one of seven children of a Negro tenant farmer in Louisiana. He started to work at the age of five. By the time he was nine, he was driving mules. There was nothing unusual in this: the children of most of the tenant farmers went to work early. These families accepted poverty as their lot and asked for no better.
Young Fuller was different from his friends in one way: he had a remarkable mother. His mother refused to accept this hand-to-
mouth existence for her children, though it was all she had ever known. She knew there was something wrong with the fact that her family was barely getting along in a world of joy and plenty. She used to talk to her son about her dreams.
"We shouldn't be poor, S. B.," she used to say. "And don't ever let me hear you say that it is God's Will that we are poor. We are poor ? not because of God. We are poor because father has never developed a desire to become rich. No one in our family has ever developed a desire to be anything else."
No one had developed a desire to be wealthy. This idea became so deeply ingrained in Fuller's mind that it changed his whole life. He began to want to be rich. He kept his mind on the things he did want and off the things, he didn't want. Thus, he developed a burning desire to become rich. The quickest way to make money, he decided, was to sell something. He chose soap. For twelve years he sold it, door to door. Then he learned that the company which supplied him was going to be sold at auction. The firm price was $150,000. In twelve years of selling and setting aside every penny, he had saved $25,000. It was agreed that he would deposit his $25,000 and obtain the balance of $125,000 within a ten-day period. Written into the contract was the condition that if he did not raise the money, he would lose his deposit.
During his twelve years as a soap salesman, S. B. Fuller had gained the respect and admiration of many businessmen. He went to them now. He obtained money from personal friends, too, and from loan companies and investment groups. On the eve of the tenth day, he had raised $115,000 He was $10,000 short.
Search for the light. "I had exhausted every source of credit I knew," he recalls. "It was late at night. In the darkness of my room, I knelt down and prayed. I asked God to lead me to a
person who would let me have the $10,000 in time. I said to myself that I would drive down 61st Street until I saw the first light in a business establishment. I asked God to make the light a sign indicating His answer."
It was eleven o'clock at night when S. B. Fuller drove down Chicago's 61st Street. At last, alter several blocks he saw a light in a contractor's office.
