Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude by Napoleon Hill Book Review (1960)
Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude is the 1960 collaboration between Napoleon Hill and the insurance executive W. Clement Stone, and its central image is an invisible talisman you already carry, with PMA on one face and NMA on the other. Kevin Trudeau's recommended reading list includes it. This same site also publishes an article arguing that positive thinking on its own does not work. Both of those things are true at once, and this review does not hide the seam. Worth reading? Yes, with your eyes open about the question Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone never answer.
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What Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude Actually Teaches
Two authors, two very different jobs. Napoleon Hill was the philosopher, and he had already written Think and Grow Rich in 1937. W. Clement Stone was the operator. Wikipedia's entry on Stone says he parlayed $100 in savings into an insurance empire, that he opened his own agency, the Combined Registry Company, in Chicago in 1922, and that he built it into the Combined Insurance Company of America by 1947. The two men worked together for a decade. Hill taught his Philosophy of Personal Achievement in association with Stone from 1952 to 1962, and the pair founded a magazine, Success Unlimited, in 1954. This book is what came out of that partnership.
The talisman, PMA and NMA
The opening device is the one everybody remembers. You carry an invisible talisman. One side reads PMA, positive mental attitude. The other side reads NMA, negative mental attitude. Same object either way, and the side turned outward is what the authors say separates two individuals standing in identical circumstances.
What the authors mean by PMA, which is wider than the phrase suggests
This is the part that gets flattened in every summary, including the hostile ones. Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone do not define a positive mental attitude as cheerfulness. Wikipedia's entry on positive mental attitude records the book's definition as a cluster of characteristics: faith, integrity, hope, optimism, courage, initiative, generosity, tolerance, tact, kindliness and good common sense.
Read that list again. Integrity is on it. Generosity is on it. Good common sense is on it. Feeling upbeat is not. A positive attitude, in the hands of these two authors, is a set of principles you live by rather than a mood you arrive in.
What a positive mindset is not
Worth saying plainly, because it is the most common misreading. Nothing in that list is about feeling good. A positive mindset here is closer to a working character than to a mood. It asks an individual to choose traits, not feelings, which is why readers who arrive expecting to be told to cheer up find something more demanding and often put it down.
Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude Summary: The Book in Five Parts
The Internet Archive's catalog record for the 2007 Pocket Books printing lists five parts:
- Where the road to achievement begins
- Five mental bombshells for attacking success
- Your key to the citadel of wealth
- Get ready to succeed!
- Action please!
Chapter one, Meet the Most Important Living Person, is built around the businessman Samuel B. Fuller, who grew up poor and refused the explanation he had been handed for it. Chapter two is You Can Change Your World, and Wikiquote attributes to it a line that is vintage Napoleon Hill: "Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement." Chapter three, Clear the Cobwebs from Your Thinking, carries the sentence that does the most work in the entire book: "You are what you think. But what do you think?"
The later chapters show you the range the authors were reaching for. Chapter fourteen is How to Find Satisfaction in Your Job. Chapter fifteen is Your Magnificent Obsession. Chapter seventeen is You Can Enjoy Good Health and Live Longer, and this review takes no position on anything in it. Nothing in that chapter, or in this article, is medical guidance. Chapter eighteen asks Can You Attract Happiness?
That spread is the honest summary of the book's ambition. One mental variable is offered as the lever on work, wealth, health and happiness at once, and a reader who wants the lever tested in any one of those areas will not find it tested here.
How Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone Say You Achieve Success
Three devices carry the method, and all three carry Stone's fingerprints rather than Hill's. Each is aimed at the same job: getting your goals out of your head and into a form you can work on daily.
R2A2, the instruction for how to use the book
The formula attached to the Hill and Stone material is abbreviated R2A2: recognize, relate, assimilate, apply. Recognize the principle. Relate it to your own life. Assimilate it until it has become part of how you think. Apply it, which in their phrasing means follow through and act on it. The formula exists because the book is meant to be worked rather than read, and it is the closest thing here to an instruction for how to learn anything at all.
Self-motivators, the short lines you repeat
The second device is the self-motivator: a short instruction to yourself, repeated on purpose until it fires without being called, so that your thoughts arrive already pointed somewhere. Stone's own daily line, quoted by Wikiquote from chapter fourteen, is "I feel healthy! I feel happy! I feel terrific!" Whether repeating it does anything is exactly the question the book never puts to a test, and the authors do not treat it as an open question.
Repetition, self-suggestion and the subconscious mind
Underneath both devices sits one assumption. Say a thing to yourself often enough and it stops being a thing you are saying and becomes one of your own thoughts. The subconscious mind is the addressee, repetition is the delivery mechanism, and the authors argue for neither. They assume both and move on.
That assumption is the load-bearing wall of the entire book, and it is also the one place Kevin Trudeau attacks it directly. His account of the three parts of your mind agrees that the deeper layer runs on repetition rather than reasoning. Where he breaks with Hill and Stone is on what happens when a program is already running the other way.
Key Takeaways: The Book's Claim Next to Kevin Trudeau's Objection
This is the table to study if you already know Trudeau's material, because the disagreement is narrower and more specific than the headline suggests.
| What Hill and Stone argue | What Kevin Trudeau says about it | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| Attitude is the variable separating two people in the same circumstances | His site says positive thinking does not work the way most people were promised, and that treating it as the whole system is a costly mistake | Both can stand. The book names a variable. Trudeau is arguing about how much of the result that one variable explains |
| PMA is a set of eleven traits including integrity and generosity, not a mood | His article takes aim at the popular version of positive thinking, which is a mood | The objection lands harder on the caricature than on the text |
| The method is repetition: self-motivators, daily statements, R2A2 run against each principle | He says repetition fails while a subconscious program is running the other way, which is what he calls counterintentions | This is the real disagreement, and it is about mechanism rather than tone |
| Most of the work happens before the action does | His Training Balance Scale claims success is roughly 90 percent internal and 10 percent action | Closer than they look. Both load the weight onto the same end |
| Willingness to change is treated as a given | His Teachability Index scores it: willingness to learn multiplied by willingness to change | Trudeau puts a number on something the book leaves implicit |
| PMA is presented as the decisive factor once installed | He calls positive thinking one point inside a system he says has forty | A necessary input, and a disputed share of the total |
Why Kevin Trudeau Recommends a PMA Book While Arguing That Positive Thinking Fails
The book sits at number ten on the reading list published by the Kevin Trudeau fan club, a few places below Think and Grow Rich and The Magic of Believing. So the company it keeps is consistent.
Now read his article on why Trudeau says positive thinking does not work and the friction is immediate.
His claim is that positive thinking does not work the way most people were promised. His metaphor is flour: flour belongs in a cake, but a bowl of dry flour is not a cake, and no amount of stirring will turn it into one. He puts positive thinking at a single point inside what he calls a forty point success algorithm. He traces the modern movement back to Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 book. And he cites the NYU psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, whose research found that people who spent the most time fantasizing about a good outcome, without weighing the obstacles standing in the way, actually did worse.
That is a direct hit on the genre this book belongs to, and it should not be softened.
Here is the other side, and you get to weigh it yourself. The PMA of Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone is that eleven-trait list, not a mood, and their method is a stack of exercises rather than an instruction to feel good about things. Trudeau's argument is aimed squarely at the popular reduction of positive thinking. The reduction has it coming. Whether the book does is a separate question, and the honest answer is that the book is better than its reputation and worse than its promise.
Where the objection genuinely bites is mechanism. Trudeau's central diagnostic is what he calls counterintentions, the inherited subconscious beliefs he says pull against a stated goal. His article names three money-shaped versions: money is bad, I do not deserve it, I cannot keep it. The answer W. Clement Stone and Napoleon Hill give for a belief that will not move is repetition. Trudeau says repetition is the wrong tool for that job, and that a belief like that has to be reached in a receptive state before it shifts. He levels the same charge at Think and Grow Rich. This book inherits it wholesale.
Two of his frameworks then sit directly on top of the text. The Training Balance Scale puts success at roughly 90 percent internal and 10 percent action, a sharper version of what Part One of this book is already arguing. The Teachability Index multiplies willingness to learn by willingness to change, which is R2A2 with a score bolted to it.
Where the Book Sits Next to the Global Information Network
Trudeau founded the Global Information Network in 2009 as a private membership club, and it states that it has members in more than 160 countries. His framing is that this material was held privately for a long stretch and that he is the one opening the door on it.
This book is the opposite kind of object. It has been in print since 1960, it is sold in airports, and a used copy costs pocket change. It is the trade paperback version of the position, written by a philosopher and an insurance man, and it hands you the vocabulary that runs through Your Wish Is Your Command and everything Trudeau built afterward. Read it first and his objection stops being a slogan and becomes a specific, checkable disagreement. If you want the map of what he wrote himself, there is a guide to every Kevin Trudeau book on this site.
Who Should Read It and Who Should Skip It
Read it if
- You have read Think and Grow Rich and want the operator's half of the pairing. Stone actually ran a company, and his fingerprints are all over the practical chapters.
- You want the real definition of PMA rather than the mush the phrase has decayed into.
- You are working through Trudeau's material and want the strongest version of the position he spends his career arguing against.
- You like being handed a procedure. R2A2 is an instruction for how to read anything, and it survives outside this book.
Common Criticisms of Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude
Five objections, and none of them are cheap shots. Each one comes off the text.
The evidence is success stories
The argument is carried by people who won. Samuel B. Fuller refused the explanation he was handed and rose out of poverty, and the reader is invited to draw the general rule from the particular case. What the book never shows you is anyone who held the identical attitude and got a different result. That is reasoning backward from winners, and it is the same defect that runs through The Secret half a century later.
A lot of it is Napoleon Hill repeating himself
Napoleon Hill had already written Think and Grow Rich in 1937 and taught his Philosophy of Personal Achievement for a decade. A large share of the framework here is that earlier work restated under Stone's banner. Readers who have gone through one Hill book carefully will recognise most of the furniture.
Negative mental attitude is treated as a choice
The talisman has two faces and you are told which one to turn out. That framing makes a negative attitude sound like a decision a person keeps making, and it leaves no room for circumstances that are not attitude problems. It is the single least generous idea in the book, and the authors never soften it.
One variable is asked to explain too much
By chapter seventeen the same mental attitude is being pointed at physical wellbeing, and by chapter eighteen at happiness. This review takes no position on those chapters and nothing here is medical guidance. What is fair to say is structural. One mental variable is asked to account for a person's work, wealth, physical condition and happiness at once, and the wider the claim gets, the less any single piece of it is tested.
No method for a belief that refuses to move
Here the book and its most prominent critic agree about the hole. Hill and Stone prescribe repetition. Kevin Trudeau says repetition is the wrong tool when something underneath is pulling the other way. Neither side supplies the fix. That gap is the reason a reader can finish this book, agree with all of it, and change nothing.
The verdict: 4 out of 5. Stone's contribution is what earns it. He brought a defined reading procedure and a working definition of PMA that is far more demanding than the phrase implies. The point off is for how much of it is Hill repeating himself, and for a book that spends 300 pages naming the lever without giving you much for the day the lever will not budge.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude about?
It argues that every person carries an invisible talisman with PMA on one face and NMA on the other, and that the side you turn outward is the variable separating two people in the same situation. The book runs in five parts and pairs Napoleon Hill's success philosophy with W. Clement Stone's experience building an insurance company.
Is Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude just Think and Grow Rich again?
Not entirely, but there is real overlap. Hill restates a lot of his own framework here. What is genuinely new is Stone: the PMA and NMA talisman, the R2A2 reading procedure, and a stronger emphasis on working the material rather than absorbing it.
What does PMA actually mean in the book?
Wikipedia records the book's definition as a set of characteristics: faith, integrity, hope, optimism, courage, initiative, generosity, tolerance, tact, kindliness and good common sense. It is a description of character, not of mood, which is why most summaries of the book misrepresent it.
What is the R2A2 formula?
Recognize, relate, assimilate, apply. Recognize the principle. Relate it to your own life. Assimilate it until it is part of how you think. Apply it and act. It is the instruction the authors give for how their book is supposed to be used.
When was Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude first published?
Sources split between 1959 and 1960. Wikipedia's bibliography for Hill lists 1959, while its entry on Stone, Open Library and the Internet Archive all date the first edition to 1960. Open Library records Prentice-Hall as the original publisher. The paperback linked in this review is the later Pocket Books printing, ISBN 9781416541592, which the Internet Archive catalogs at 356 pages.
What are the five parts of Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude?
Where the road to achievement begins, Five mental bombshells for attacking success, Your key to the citadel of wealth, Get ready to succeed!, and Action please! That structure comes from the Internet Archive's catalog record for the 2007 Pocket Books printing.
What is a self-motivator in Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude?
A short line you repeat to yourself deliberately until it fires on its own. W. Clement Stone's own daily version, quoted by Wikiquote from chapter fourteen, is "I feel healthy! I feel happy! I feel terrific!" The book treats repetition as the delivery mechanism and does not test whether it works.
Why does Kevin Trudeau recommend it if he says positive thinking does not work?
Because his objection is narrower than it sounds. His article argues that positive thinking is one point inside a forty point system, not the system itself, and that repetition cannot shift a subconscious belief pulling the other way. He does not say the book is wrong about attitude mattering. He says attitude is not the whole account, which leaves the book useful and incomplete at the same time.
Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude by Napoleon Hill Book Review: The Short Version
A 1960 book with a better argument than its title suggests and a smaller one than its cover promises. Stone is the reason to read it. He gives you a definition of PMA with teeth in it and a procedure for turning any book into practice. Trudeau's disagreement is worth reading alongside it rather than instead of it, because he is not saying attitude is irrelevant. He is saying it is one ingredient, and that a bowl of flour is not a cake.