The Law of Success by Napoleon Hill Book Review: The Full 16-Lesson Course
The Law of Success by Napoleon Hill is a sixteen-lesson study course, published in 1928 by The Ralston University Press of Meriden, Connecticut. It is the long version of Hill's philosophy of achievement. Sixteen lessons instead of thirteen steps, opening with the Master Mind and closing with the Golden Rule. Kevin Trudeau's recommended reading list carries it, with a note telling readers to work through more than one version of it. Worth buying? Yes, if you already know the famous short book and want the course it came out of. Here is what the sixteen lessons contain.
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The Author: Napoleon Hill in 1928
You cannot read this course sensibly without knowing who was writing it and what he had already done by then.
Napoleon Hill was born on 26 October 1883 in Pound, Virginia, and died on 8 November 1970 in Greenville, South Carolina. He came up poor, worked as a writer, and enrolled in law school before withdrawing for lack of funds. He used the title "Attorney at Law" anyway, and there is no record of his having performed legal services for anyone. That detail matters here only because it tells you what kind of career you are reading: a self-made author who was also, repeatedly, his own best product.
By 1928 he had the story he would live off for the rest of his life. Hill said the steel man Andrew Carnegie challenged him to interview the wealthy, study how those leaders actually thought, and reduce their methods to a philosophy any ordinary person could apply. The course you are buying is the first full statement of that philosophy. Hill's own acknowledgments in the 1928 text say it came out of careful analysis of the life-work of over one hundred men and women. One hundred. Not five hundred, not sixteen thousand, whatever the marketing copy on later reprints has since claimed.
What Hill later called his Philosophy of Achievement reached print here first, in the 1928 course, and not in the 1937 book that made him famous. The modern paperback still carries the subtitle A Complete Classic Course in Personal Achievement, Leadership, and Success, and that is a fair description of the three things the sixteen lessons are actually about.
His estate is now managed by the Napoleon Hill Foundation, a nonprofit established in 1963 that promotes his teachings and maintains a private archive of his papers. Most modern reprints trace back through it, which is worth knowing when two editions of the same title disagree with each other.
What The Law of Success Actually Contains
Start with the thing most buyers get wrong. This is not a longer edition of Think and Grow Rich. It is a different product with a different shape, and Hill built it first.
The sixteen lessons in order
- The Master Mind
- A Definite Chief Aim
- Self-Confidence
- The Habit of Saving
- Initiative and Leadership
- Imagination
- Enthusiasm
- Self-Control
- The Habit of Doing More Than Paid For
- A Pleasing Personality
- Accurate Thinking
- Concentration
- Co-operation
- Profiting by Failure
- Tolerance
- The Golden Rule
Look at where the Master Mind sits. In the 1937 book it arrives ninth, well after you have already been told to write down a number and a date. Here it is Lesson One. Hill puts the group before the goal. That single reordering tells you something about what he thought mattered most when he had room to say it.
How the sixteen principles group together
Read as a list, sixteen principles is a wall. Read in blocks, the design of the course becomes obvious, and you can decide which principles you actually need before you spend a month on the wrong ones.
| Block | Lessons | What this part of the course is for |
|---|---|---|
| The setup | 1 to 4: Master Mind, Definite Chief Aim, Self-Confidence, The Habit of Saving | Build the circle, fix a definite purpose in writing, and get your own money under control. Hill treats saving as a character test, not a finance tip, and self-confidence as a thing you install rather than inherit. |
| The engine | 5 to 7: Initiative and Leadership, Imagination, Enthusiasm | The outward-facing block. Initiative is doing the thing unasked, leadership is what happens next, and enthusiasm is what makes either of them travel. |
| Self-command | 8 to 12: Self-Control, Doing More Than Paid For, A Pleasing Personality, Accurate Thinking, Concentration | Five lessons on governing yourself, including Accurate Thinking, which is Hill's demand that you separate fact from opinion before acting. This block has aged best and most readers skip it. |
| The frame | 13 to 16: Co-operation, Profiting by Failure, Tolerance, The Golden Rule | How you treat other people and how you treat your own losses. Hill puts ethics last, in the position of a conclusion rather than a caveat. |
Anyone short on time should read Lesson One and the self-command block, then decide whether the remaining principles earn the months they will take.
It was built as a course, not as a book
The 1928 release was a multi-volume study course issued through The Ralston University Press, originally circulated as a set of separate booklets before it was consolidated into an eight-volume series. That format explains the reading experience. There is repetition, because a correspondence student picking up volume five was not assumed to have volume two open beside him. There are direct addresses to "the student." There is homework.
It also explains the size. The single-volume paperback linked in this review runs 548 pages. Think and Grow Rich is a paperback you finish on a flight. This is not that, and going in expecting it to be is the most common way people waste the purchase.
The six fears
The 1928 course names six basic fears: the fear of Poverty, the fear of Ill Health, the fear of Old Age, the fear of Criticism, the fear of Loss of Love of Someone, and the fear of Death. Hill treats them as the thing standing between a reader and Lesson Two, which is close to how Trudeau describes the reactive mind running on old programming. The later book turns the same material into a closing chapter about the six ghosts of fear. Same list, different placement, and the placement changes how you read the rest.
The Law of Success vs Think and Grow Rich: Which One to Buy
Both books came from the same research and both carried a Ralston imprint. Beyond that they are built differently.
| The Law of Success (1928) | Think and Grow Rich (1937) | |
|---|---|---|
| Original format | Multi-volume study course, The Ralston University Press, Meriden, Connecticut | Single trade book, The Ralston Society |
| Units | Sixteen lessons | Thirteen steps |
| Opens with | The Master Mind | Desire |
| Closes with | The Golden Rule | The Sixth Sense |
| Where fear sits | Six basic fears named early, as an obstacle to starting | Six ghosts of fear, as a closing chapter |
| Reader it assumes | A student working through volumes in sequence | A general reader in a single sitting |
| Published | 1928, a rewrite of a 1925 manuscript | 1937, nine years later |
The practical answer: if you have never read either, read the short one first. Our review of Think and Grow Rich covers what that book does and where it stops. Come back here when you want the parts that did not survive the cut, which is most of Lesson One, most of Lesson Nine, and the entire idea of a Pleasing Personality as a trainable skill rather than a personality trait you either have or do not.
Which Version You Are Actually Buying
This is where buyers get burned, so be careful here.
There are two Napoleon Hill texts sold under the Law of Success name. The 1925 manuscript came first, self-published, and a modern press called Vieux Publishing built its business on reissuing that original manuscript version. The 1928 course is the rewrite of it, the one issued by The Ralston University Press as an eight-volume set, and the one that carries the "in Sixteen Lessons" wording on the title page.
The edition linked in this review is the Sixteen Lessons text, sold as a single 548-page paperback, ISBN 9781617201783. That is the 1928 lineage, not the 1925 manuscript.
One correction worth making, because it appears on the reading list itself. The list entry says there are two versions, "one published in 1925 by Vieux and one published in 1927." The 1925 date is right for the manuscript and Vieux is a real publisher of it. The second date is off by a year. The sixteen-lesson course reached print in 1928, and the archive copies carry a 1928 copyright line under Hill's own name. If you are hunting for the second version, search 1928.
If you would rather read before you buy, the whole 1928 original sits free on the Internet Archive, scanned page by page. Check any quote anyone makes about this course against that copy.
Why Kevin Trudeau Recommends The Law of Success
Trudeau's material and this course agree on something the 1937 book is quieter about, which is that the work is mostly not action.
Sixteen lessons is a lot of lessons. Two of them, Self-Control and Concentration, are about governing your own attention before you attempt anything external. Two more, Accurate Thinking and Tolerance, are about the quality of the thinking you let into your head. That is four of sixteen spent entirely inside the reader before Hill discusses a plan. It lines up cleanly with the Training Balance Scale, where Trudeau argues success runs 90 percent internal alignment and 10 percent physical action, and that most people have the ratio backwards.
The second connection is the length itself. The Teachability Index on kevintrudeau.com scores you on willingness to learn multiplied by willingness to change. A sixteen-lesson correspondence course is an unusually honest test of both numbers. Nobody finishes it by accident. The reading list goes further than recommending the book. It tells readers to work through more than one version, which is a willingness-to-change instruction dressed up as a shopping note.
Third, Lesson Ten. A Pleasing Personality is Hill treating likeability as a skill with components you can practice. If that sounds familiar it is the same territory Dale Carnegie built a career on, and our review of How to Win Friends and Influence People covers the version of that argument most people actually read.
Where the course and Trudeau part ways is fear. Hill names six fears and then tells you to out-think them. Trudeau's article on counter intentions argues that a subconscious intention running opposite your conscious goal cannot be out-thought, because you did not install it and cannot see it. That page names Think and Grow Rich by title as a book that does not address it. The 1928 course gets closer, since it puts the fears up front instead of in an appendix, but it still hands you the same tool, which is repetition. Read Lesson Three knowing that. For the self-image mechanics Hill gestures at but never explains, Psycho-Cybernetics is the better book.
Where It Sits Relative to the Global Information Network
Trudeau founded the Global Information Network in 2009. This site describes it as a private membership organization built on one premise, that the most valuable knowledge about wealth, success, and personal power has been deliberately kept from the general public, and says that at its peak it drew tens of thousands of members worldwide.
Lesson One is the reason this particular book belongs on his list rather than any other Hill title. The Master Mind is Hill's argument that a coordinated group of minds produces something none of the individuals produce alone, and that you should therefore build one on purpose. Strip the vocabulary and that is the structural argument for a membership club. It is also the structural argument behind what Trudeau calls the Brotherhood, the group he says taught him. Hill made the case for the private circle in 1928 and put it in the first lesson. Trudeau built one.
There is a smaller connection too, and it is a funny one. Trudeau's page on the attractor field tells readers to collect old books, which he calls the most powerful attractor field objects a home can hold. A 1928 correspondence course is squarely in that category. If you want the map of what Trudeau wrote himself, there is a guide to every Kevin Trudeau book on this site.
Common Criticisms of Napoleon Hill's The Law of Success
The case against this course is real and a review that hides it is not worth reading. Three criticisms come up, and they are not equally serious.
The Carnegie story has never been supported
Hill said Andrew Carnegie commissioned the work and challenged him to spend twenty years reducing success to a formula. The collaboration has remained unsupported by any evidence, and Hill's biographers still argue over whether the 1908 meeting happened at all. This is the foundational claim of his entire career, and it is the one thing in the philosophy that nobody has ever been able to check.
Hill's own biography does not survive checking
Wikipedia's article on him opens by calling him an American self-help author and con man. Matt Novak, writing for Gizmodo on 6 December 2016 in a piece titled "The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time," went through the record and found a career of ventures that did not end well for the people in them. The "Attorney at Law" title he used without ever practicing law belongs in the same file.
Here is the fair way to hold that. A bad biography does not make an idea wrong, and the sixteen lessons stand or fall on whether they work when you apply them. What it does mean is that you should never take Hill's word for a fact about the world. Take his lessons as a training method, check everything else.
It repeats itself, and 548 pages is the bill
The course was written as separate volumes for students who did not have the earlier ones in front of them, so ideas come around again and again. Some readers find the repetition useful, because a principle you meet five times is a principle you keep. Others find it exhausting. Know which one you are before you buy, because at this length the difference is a month of your life.
Who Should Read It and Who Should Skip It
This one is not for everybody, and the people it is wrong for are easy to name.
Read it if
- You have already read Think and Grow Rich and found it thin in places. This is the thick version of the same argument.
- You want the Master Mind material at full length instead of one chapter.
- You are working through Trudeau's teaching and want to see which parts of it have a 1928 ancestor.
- You like primary sources. Scanned copies of the 1928 course circulate on the Internet Archive, so you can check any quote anyone makes about it against the original.
- You intend to actually work the lessons. One principle a week for sixteen weeks is how this course was designed to be taken, and it is the only way most readers ever finish it.
Skip it, or go in with your eyes open, if
- You want it tight. It is not tight, and the criticisms section above explains why.
- The origin story matters to you. The Carnegie claim is unsupported and Hill's biography is worse than most readers realise. Again, see above.
- You want 1928 to read like 2026. It does not. The prose is formal, the examples are Gilded Age industrialists, and the assumptions about who is reading are of their time.
- You are buying it as your first success book. Do not. Start short with something like The Go-Getter, then come here second.
The verdict: 4 out of 5. Half a point below the 1937 book, and the missing half point is entirely about length and repetition rather than content. As a source text its value is higher than what replaced it. As a reading experience it asks more of you than most people will give it.
You do not have to take any of that on faith. Look at the sample pages on Amazon and read the first lesson before you decide.
The Law of Success by Napoleon Hill Book Review: Frequently Asked Questions
What are the 16 lessons in The Law of Success?
The Master Mind, A Definite Chief Aim, Self-Confidence, The Habit of Saving, Initiative and Leadership, Imagination, Enthusiasm, Self-Control, The Habit of Doing More Than Paid For, A Pleasing Personality, Accurate Thinking, Concentration, Co-operation, Profiting by Failure, Tolerance, and The Golden Rule.
Is The Law of Success the same as Think and Grow Rich?
No. The Law of Success came out in 1928 as a multi-volume study course with sixteen lessons. Think and Grow Rich came out in 1937 as a single book with thirteen steps. Both carried a Ralston imprint and both came from the same body of Hill's research, but the course is much longer and orders the material differently.
Which version of The Law of Success should I buy?
There are two texts. The 1925 manuscript, which Vieux Publishing reissued, and the 1928 rewrite published as sixteen lessons by The Ralston University Press. The edition linked in this review is the Sixteen Lessons text, ISBN 9781617201783.
How many pages is The Law of Success?
The single-volume paperback linked here runs 548 pages. The 1928 original was not one book at all: it went out first as a set of separate booklets and was then consolidated into an eight-volume series, which is why the modern reprint is so much thicker than Think and Grow Rich.
Can I read The Law of Success free online?
Yes. A scanned copy of the 1928 course is hosted on the Internet Archive, so you can read the original text before deciding whether to buy a printed edition. Checking a modern reprint against that scan is also the quickest way to confirm which version you are holding.
Which Napoleon Hill book should I read first?
Think and Grow Rich, then this. The 1937 book gives you the framework in a few hours. The 1928 course gives you the parts that were left out, which only reads as valuable once you know what was cut.
Did Andrew Carnegie commission The Law of Success?
Hill said so. Historians have not found evidence supporting the collaboration. Treat it as Hill's claim about Hill, not as a documented fact, and read the course on the strength of what is on the page.
Why does Kevin Trudeau recommend The Law of Success?
It appears on the recommended reading list circulated by his fan club, with a note telling readers to work through more than one version. The course also matches his own framing in two places: the heavy weighting toward internal work over action, which is his Training Balance Scale, and Lesson One's argument for building a private circle of minds on purpose.
The Short Version
Sixteen lessons, 1928, built as a course and it still reads like one. Hill put the Master Mind first and the Golden Rule last, and everything about the ordering says he thought the group and the ethics were the frame rather than the decoration. The famous book is the one people quote. This is the one they quote from without knowing it.
Background on the course and its author is available at Wikipedia's entry on The Law of Success and its biography of Napoleon Hill.