MBA1223 Must Read: Napoleon Hill’s Golden Rules by Napoleon Hill

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Hey O. Welcome to the $1 business lessons. You can look forward to every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and Today's Episode is a Must Read Episode on our Must Read Episodes, I share with you a book that I've read that has influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its takeaways, some.

Of its insights and why you should read it too.

Today's must read is Napoleon Hill's Golden Rules by no other than Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill's Golden Rules offers a wide array of tips and life hacks to improve your life and bring you closer to realizing your goals. The author Napoleon Hill developed his techniques, many of which stem from the power of positive thinking, were developed nearly a century ago, but they're still the cornerstone of many of today's self help and personal development theories. Of course, o' Bullion Hill is known for his Legend of a book Think and Grow Rich, a book people swear by and is probably one of the most recommended books in history, still remains as one of the top 20 best selling books in the self help category. Crazy. It's over a hundred years old, but this book, his Golden Rules is rules he lives by. Rules that you can apply in your own life and business that allow you to develop better habits and of course, become a better person. Can't wait to get into this one today. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Napoleon Hill was born in 1883, but if you read his books, it seems like he's living today. He is the pioneer when it comes to motivational thinking and self improvement with, of course, the book Think and Grow Rich. One of the reasons why his advice continues to attract readers is that he didn't believe that you had to be born with natural talent to succeed in life. In his estimation, with a little determination and hard work, anyone can develop the skills needed to reach their goals and be successful in their field. Many of Hill's techniques come down to how you think. If you want to get ahead in life. Considering yourself unworthy of good fortune or thinking defeat his thoughts isn't going to cut it. But it's not just positive thinking that he enforces or teaches. I should say he really encourages you to put your thoughts to work. How to develop new skills and new habits to bring in new energy and new action in your everyday life. There's so many things I want to share with you from this book, but I'm going to choose the things that I found to be most profound and the most effective. And one of the things I found to be a pillar of his thinking again is we create our lives through our thoughts. And this can lead to transformational success. Now, he's not saying that if you think something, it's just going to happen. But he does say if you don't think it, it can't happen. And this is totally true. If you can't imagine something happening, then it's hard for you to actually achieve it. Think of anything that you've accomplished or have done. Anything, even something that's insignificant. Maybe last month you went on a short trip over the weekend. It wasn't a long trip. Maybe it was over the weekend and maybe it was even international. It was within your country. But if you think back when you thought about doing this trip, you actually pictured it in your mind. You actually believed that you could do it. You can actually go on this trip. Otherwise you wouldn't have tried, you wouldn't have done it. Now this is happening so quickly in our mind because it's such a simple example, but we think of things that are a little bit more challenging, like accomplishing some sort of business goal. Look at the past. When you've accomplished something like launch a new product or hit a sales target, along the lines, you had to imagine it in your head. You had to picture it in your head. And you also had to believe that it was possible. That was the first step. It starts with our thoughts. So you have to start there. And you have to recognize that your thoughts are very powerful. What you think changes who you are, how you feel. This is why I'm hyper conscious about the things that I think about and the things that influence what I think about. So I'm always trying to make sure that there are always positive things around me. Positive information, positive news. If I had a rough week at work, it was super busy and I was really worn out and I wanted to treat myself. I wouldn't go to a movie that's depressing. I would go to a movie that would uplift me. Given the fact that I'm conscious of the fact that those images, those scenarios, those stories are going to change the way I feel, the way I think. In fact, Napoleon Hill mentions in the book that he regularly practices thinking of imaginary meetings where he sits down and has a chat with distinguished and inspiring guests. Guests like Abraham Lincoln, Socrates and Aristotle. During these imaginary meetings, Hill would focus on certain characteristics of his guests that he hoped he would make his own. In Lincoln's case, he hoped to take on his ability to be fair and to help others and be courageous, to find new ways of doing things. Every night, Hill would spend an hour performing this exercise, adding more inspiring figures to his meetings as he would learn more about them. I know this sounds insane. It sounds crazy. Who's this loon who's talking to imaginary Lincoln? But it's a great exercise to force your brain to ask questions. How would Lincoln speak? How would Lincoln act? Knowing what I know, how can I adopt these things? It's forcing productive thoughts in your head. It's forcing inspiring thoughts. Another chapter of the book he mentions, Positive suggestions can improve performance at work and even make people healthier. If you think back in your life, can you recall a time when you felt properly motivated after being harshly criticized or humiliated? Probably not, because if you want someone to do something, the best way is positive reinforcement. In other words, if you want to improve the work performance of your employees, you need to use positive suggestions, not negative ones. Napoleon Hill knew a manager who never criticized his workers. Instead, he'd walk through the office and compliment each worker one at a time for their great work. While doing so, he would also make subtle suggestions to them to help them improve. On one occasion, the manager had to deal with an employee whose efficiency had taken a nosedive. But here, too, being positive helped. The manager knew that criticizing him for his dip in performance would only demoralize the employee. So he put his hand on his shoulder and told him that he was impressed with how the pace of his work has improved and that he appreciates his efforts. Remarkably, that day, that employee's efficiency rose 25%. Just making them aware that, hey, I notice you, I appreciate you, will make them just more aware of their performance. Hey, I should try it a little bit harder. I should be a little bit more aware of how well I'm doing. Of course, it's not going to work in every example where somebody's deliberately slacking off. But I definitely recommend sandwiching your feedback with positivity. Love what you're doing here, Michael. I've really noticed your improvement, but I was wondering, next time you do this, what would happen if you did this instead? Try it out. Let me know. Thanks again for working so hard and being committed. You're doing a fantastic job. Sandwiching feedback with the bread of positivity can really help. Napoleon Hill also talks about affirmations and how they really help you become more self confident. And it's an important part of success to be confident. Napoleon Hill says that most people go through life with two main goals, material wealth and happiness. He says the good news is you can obtain both with just one characteristic, self confidence. He asks the question, how important is self confidence? Well, to start with, you'll never be happy without it. Because if you hope to gain the things you want in life, you first need to believe in yourself. You need to believe you deserve it. He says self confidence comes from self love. Believing in yourself says you can work day and night, seven days a week, but without self confidence, you'll never make the big bucks. You'll never make a big difference in the world. So you need to really work on your self confidence as a part of your daily practice. So how do you develop your self confidence? Well, he's a big believer in affirmations. An affirmation is simply a positive thought that you repeat and focus on until it becomes your reality. Some examples of powerful affirmations are, I know I can accomplish anything I set out to do. I'm a problem solver, I'm a good leader. Scratch that, I'm a great leader. It's basically saying things to yourself that you want to be. I've read tons of biographies, and one surprising thing that is in common, all these successful people I read about is that they all do affirmations. It's crazy. I can't believe it when I discover this person, too. At some point, they look themselves in the mirror and would tell themselves what they needed to hear. They would say things like, you will be a New York Times bestseller. You'll be the best tennis player of all time. You will earn a million dollars, things like that. I know this sounds crazy, but this goes back to believing things before they happen. When you say things out loud and you tell yourself things, literally if you look in the mirror and tell yourself certain things, it allows you to start believing it. And that's the first step. Imagining things, seeing it in your head. When it's a reality in your head, then you start thinking of ways to get there. How do I get to that reality? For a very long time, I totally didn't believe in this. I thought, this is just a bunch of hogwash. What are you talking about? Say things to yourself and you're going to start being better at it or start being more successful. But when I saw time and time again when successful people, people that I read about, people that I've learned, the people I met, and they would say, I do affirmations. And they may not even say the word affirmations. They may say, hey, I give myself a pep talk. But it basically means they are telling themselves what they want, what they are, what they can be. And that gets the ball rolling. One of the other great takeaways of this book is talking about how to fill your environment with positive influences and remove negative influences from your life. This is super hard because changing your network around you sometimes is harder than it sounds. That means changing your friends, changing the people that you spend the most time with. For some of us, it could even mean changing their own personal relationships, their partner in life. Life is hard as it is. It's even harder when you have negative influences around you, when you have people that don't support you, that don't have your back, or even just belittle what you want out of life. In the example he gives a book of prisoners and they go to prison, they're surrounded with other criminals, with other people that don't believe in themselves. And this gives them little to no opportunity to rehabilitate or educate themselves or give them other options in life. That's why he says, it's common to have a repeat offender, somebody who goes to prison, gets released and is back in prison shortly after. So if you want to be an entrepreneur, a successful one. Are you around successful entrepreneurs? Look at your friends. Look at the people you spend most of your time with. If they're not where you want to be, if they're not doing the things you want to do, how are you going to learn how to do it? How are you going to be inspired? As soon as I started doing this.

I started to change.

I started to really change what I consider to be normal in my life. It should be normal for me to be an entrepreneur. It should be normal for me to build a business that's successful. Without that environment, it feels impossible to create that environment for yourself.

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To wrap up today's lesson. Napoleon Hill's Golden Rules is amazing. It's a great book and it's a great reminder of how our thoughts really affect our life and our success. My advice is pick up this book with an open mind and give some of his tips, some of his strategies a chance. Try it out for a week. You don't have to love it, but at least try it and then make your judgment. Don't do like I did, where I just judged it and just said, nah, I don't think this stuff works and I never even actually put it to a test. Let reality prove me right or wrong. That's what I like to say. All right, thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now so you get all our episodes automatically on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, we're on them all. And when you have a moment, drop us a rating and review and let us know what you think of the show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Business is a mental and emotional game. I probably would say 80% of success in business is about what you think about and the way you feel. You can control your emotions, control the way you think about yourself and about others. You're going to be far, far ahead of the competition. This is what I love about business. You can continue to do it far into your years. You could be a successful business person in your 80s, like Warren Buffett, and it's a lifelong journey where you can continue to improve. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take.

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