PNTV: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (#27)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do an episode on the classic from Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. As always, we've got a great book. We've got my Philosopher's Note on it with about a dozen of my favorite big ideas in the six page PDF, one of a hundred that we do. If you haven't gotten them yet, what are you waiting for? We've got a big old workbook, MP3s, all that good stuff. So Think and Grow Rich, one of the classics of self development literature, if not the classic, kind of the grandfather of all of self development literature. Almost all the modern teachers have been influenced by this book in one way or another. And it's packed with big ideas, lots of great stuff, and I'm excited to share some of them with you now. So the first big idea here is the idea that wealth or riches. And we're talking about it in every sense of the word, not just the, you know, big fancy house and fast car and all that stuff, talking about health, abundance in our relationships, in everything we do, our creative expression, etc. So it all starts with a state of mind. It all starts with the consciousness that attracts wealth. And we talk about this again and again in the 10 or 12 financial abundance books we profile in these notes. It's not about going after the money. It's about creating the consciousness that naturally magnetizes all things abundant in our lives. It's a really cool idea. So reminds me of a story from Deepak Chopra. He says in wealth, there are two goddesses. The Goddess of wealth, whose name is Lakshmi, and the Goddess of Knowledge whose name is Saraswati. These are the two goddesses involved in creating wealth. Most people think you go after Lakshmi directly, the Goddess of wealth. Deepak says, no, no, no, no, that's not what you want to do. You want to go after the Goddess of knowledge, self knowledge, self awareness, self expression, all those things, knowledge, wisdom, etc. You want to go after Saraswati. If you go after Saraswati, the Goddess of knowledge, the Goddess of wealth, Lakshmi will actually chase you. But if you go after Lakshmi directly, she'll evade you. See, we want to think about how we can create the consciousness that will attract wealth into our lives. And I love that metaphor. I've actually got two statues from Bali out in the back porch here, one of Lakshmi, one of Saraswati, and reminding me what to pay attention to, which is how I can become the type of human being where money, abundance, all these things naturally flow through me. But we get stuck when we try to go straight for the money. First we've got to do the work on our consciousness. And that's what this book is all about. So that's a long introduction, but I love that story by Deepak. Here are a few big ideas, specifically from Think and Grow Rich that I love. So first off, the whole idea of impossible, we need to remove that word from our vocabulary. It's impossible for me to create the wealth I want in my life. I'm too old or too young or too whatever. It's impossible for me to create the relationships I want to create. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We want to get rid of the whole idea of impossible. And he tells some great stories about that. And he tells the importance of being willing to bet everything on the truths in which we believe. So whatever it is you deeply, deeply believe, and you know from all the stuff you've studied, all the stuff you've experienced, we've got to be willing to go for it when we've got to be willing to test it out and stake everything on it. That's definitely been one of the things I've been willing to do, is take big risks in the businesses I've started. Few people around me believed that my first business would work or that it could even be possible to do. And I went for it and did it. And there's something powerful about that. And I think that's one of the things that, for my own life has really allowed me to express myself and get to a point where I can do this. And all the people who I've spent time with who have achieved extraordinary success, this is one of the hallmarks. And it's also one of the things that we talk about it again and again and again throughout these notes. We've got to be willing to dare, to dream and to push edges and to think a little abnormally, right? Not just be normal and create normal results, but create our ideal lives and extraordinary results by being willing to think a little differently. So got to get rid of impossible from our vocabulary. I talk about the idea of burning our ships and being willing to go for it and embrace our desires. Too often, in our failed attempts to play in the rat race, right, go for these goals that were always, usually external, and we kind of get burned out, and then we no longer even want to dream anymore. I talk about how important it is, and Napoleon Hill talks about how important it is to maintain healthy desire, even the desire to achieve enlightenment. You're only going to get that if you have an intense burning desire to make it happen, Ramakrishna says Sri Ramakrishna, that you can't go after enlightenment unless you pursue it. Like a man whose hair is on fire is pursuing a lake, or a woman whose hair is on fire is pursuing a lake. You got to have that kind of intensity. But too often, once we've failed once or twice or three times or 100 times, or whatever we perceive we've done, we give up. We don't even desire anymore. And we've got to start with a burning desire. That's funny, I hadn't thought about that. But that's what Napoleon Hill calls it, a burning desire for whatever it is we want to create in our lives. Big, big, big idea. I talk about it and kind of go off on it. In the note, he talks about the fact that thoughts are things way ahead of his time. We now know that thoughts are in fact things. Thought thoughts, kind of intangible little electrical impulses are in fact measurable. We can see the physiological effects of certain thoughts are going to either enhance or decrease our immune functioning. For example, thoughts are things. They're actual physical things that manifest immediately in our bodies and in our lives in terms of the behaviors we do, we choose to take and the results that come from that. So we really, again want to discipline our minds. This is a theme we come back to again and again and again in these notes. It's principle number one, literally in my evolving philosophy, optimism. We've got to have the ability to shape the contents of our consciousness. We can't just be stimulus, response, stimulus, response. And again, it's not about imagining the shiny red bike and then it just popping up on our porch one day or the shiny red Ferrari and all of a sudd it shows up. It's about. That's not what these authors are talking about when they say how important it is for us to shape our mind. Yes, we want to have a vision of what we want to see, but then we got to get to work on removing things that are not consistent with the wealth consciousness. Things like anxiety and doubt and fear, anger, impatience, all these things are not going to get us to a consistent flow of abundance. We've got to live from gratitude, faith. We talk about faith a lot in this note. From appreciation and gratitude, love, creative expression, kindness, generosity. These are the things we want to live from, the thoughts we want to have percolating in our minds that will show up in creative kind acts that will naturally allow us to circulate wealth. We want to see in our lives. So really powerful stuff. He's got some great stuff on persistence. Now, persistence isn't very sexy. He doesn't say that. But he says something to that effect. Persistence isn't the most glamorous thing in the world, but it's the most important. If you remove persistence from our existence, from our character, we're not going to achieve anything. Nothing great was ever achieved without persistence. And he says, when your first plan fails, try another. That plan fails, no problem. Try another, that plan fails. Alright, cool. Now you know, two plans don't work. Try another, try another, try another. Continuing to move toward your goal and realizing that you're just learning more and more and calibrating and getting closer and closer to achieving the thing that you want to achieve. So you maintain the vision of what you want to achieve. You hold the tension between where you want to be and where you are with a lot of gratitude and a lot of playfulness and a lot of diligence. And as we move toward our goal, with these baby steps, we want to do so, as I say again and again and again and again and again, diligently, patiently, persistently and playfully, diligently, patiently, persistently and playfully, we're bound to be successful. Napoleon Hill echoes that again. Another really big idea. A couple of them. One, the power of your mastermind. Hill kind of coined this phrase. We've talked about it before. Really quickly. Jim Rohn, the great teacher, said, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So figure it out. With the people you're spending time with, are they averaging you up or averaging you down? Because you're going to be the average of those five people. And you want to average up. Find more inspiring people, be more inspiring and rock it. Finally, just do it Napoleon Hill style. He says, tell the world what you intend to do, but first show it. Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing. He said, what you do speak so loudly I cannot hear what you say. So let's do the things we know we need to do to live an extraordinary life and think and grow rich in the process. That's a really quick look. Hope you enjoyed. See you.