Brian Tracy presents three personal-development books he credits with transforming lives: Think and Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill), his own Maximum Achievement, and The Power of Positive Thinking (Norman Vincent Peale). He summarizes each book’s origin and core contribution—Hill’s 17 learnable success principles, Tracy’s modern goal-setting and emotional-control methods, and Peale’s emphasis on positive thinking—and urges viewers to read them.
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Hello, I'm Brian Tracy. Let me tell you about the three top self development books that have had such a great impact on me. The first one, which I stumbled across many, many years ago was called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Now Napoleon Hill was a journalist and a writer and he was called in to visit with Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest, most successful business magnates in the world at that time. And Andrew Carnegie invited him in for this interview and he wasn't sure what it was about. And then Carnegie said, I want you to help me to develop a philosophy of success. I will open the doors to the 500 richest people in America so that you can interview them as many times as you need to. Then take all the best information from these 500 people and put it into a series of books to help other young people to be successful much faster. And he said, but the challenge is this. He said, I'm not going to pay you a penny. I'll open all the doors so that you can get all the information and interview all these top people, but I won't pay you a penny. What do you say? And Napolevian Hill had thought this man was going to hire him and pay him an enormous amount of money to do this writing. He was shocked. And he sat there, he tells about it later. He sat there and he thought and he thought and he finally said, okay, I'll do it. And then Andrew Carnegie pulled his watch out from under the desk and he said, you had 60 seconds to give me an answer. You made your answer in 46 seconds. He then went on to open the door to every wealthy person in America. People who had started from nothing and become extraordinarily rich. And what Napoleon Hill did is he took over the years and he found that there were 17 principles that wealthy people had qualities and behaviors. He found that no one started off with these qualities and behaviors. And he found that they were all learnable. So he wrote a 22 volume set of books on success which nobody would buy. Then he wrote a thousand page book on success which nobody would buy. And then suddenly the depression hit and nobody would buy a success book at all. So in 1936 they took a flyer, the publisher, and they published one small 250 page book called Think and Grow Rich which became the most successful success book in the history of the world. And I read it over and over again, as have many of the wealthiest people in America. So that's my first one, that's where you would start. Now my second one would be my own book. Maximum achievement. Napoleon Hill's book was written in the 20s and 30s. My maximum achievement was written for the 21st century. And it shows you how to completely change the way you think, how to set goals in every area of your life, how to dramatically take control of your life in every area and eliminate the negative emotions that hold people back. But it also shows you how how to form beautiful relationships with the most important people in your life, how to develop high levels of self esteem and self confidence all the time, and many other things. This book is based on my lifetime of study, reading hundreds and thousands of books and articles, putting the material together into seminars and training more than a million people in something like 58 countries on these principles and then writing it into a book. And so Maximum Achievement and Think and Grow Rich are the right hand and the left hand of success. Now another book that I would recommend that I have always liked is the Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. Norman Vincent Peale. I knew him and I worked with him before he died. He was a minister and he came up with some very, very interesting ideas about how the more positive you think, the more energy you have, the more grateful you are for the things in your life, the more things that you will have to be grateful for. Just like I teach and other people teach, you'll attract into your life people and circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts. So Norman Vincent Peale's idea, the Power of Positive thinking, has changed an entire generation. You know, the last few decades in America have been the wealthiest decades of any country in the history of man on earth. And it's because these books and other books like them have cascaded like waves. And the people who read the books in the 50s and 60s and 70s, these people have become the movers and shakers and the wealthiest people in our society. So if you want to be like them, number one, read, Think and grow Rich. Number two, read my book Maximum Achievement. Number three, read the Power of Positive Thinking. Those books will change your life. I've spoken to thousands of people who say literally they went from rags to riches by reading any one of those books. If you read all three, what a difference it will make. Thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please leave a comment and subscribe to my channel by clicking on the button that appears on the screen.
