Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill Book Review: The 1937 Original

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill is a 1937 success manual built on thirteen named steps, from Desire through to the Sixth Sense. Hill said he spent decades studying wealthy men before writing it. The book became the template most of the genre copied afterward. Kevin Trudeau's recommended reading list carries it near the top, and his own site treats Hill as the foundation his teaching builds on. Worth reading? Yes, if you want the original framework instead of somebody's summary of it. This review covers the Napoleon Hill Foundation's official reproduction of the 1937 first edition.

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Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill Book Review: The Short Verdict

• What it is. A procedure. Thirteen sequential steps to riches, each with its own chapter, plus a closing chapter on fear.
• The part you can act on today. Six instructions in the Desire chapter: a fixed amount, what you will give in return, a date, a plan, one written statement, read aloud twice a day.
• The idea most readers walk past. Knowledge on its own is only potential power. It becomes power inside a definite plan and nowhere else.
• The honest weakness. Hill's Carnegie origin story has never been supported by evidence, and the book names belief as the lever without giving much method for moving one.
• Reader reception. 4.16 out of 5 on Goodreads across roughly 393,000 ratings as of August 2026.
• Our rating. 4.5 out of 5.

What Think and Grow Rich Actually Teaches

Most people who quote this book have read a summary of it. The book itself is a procedure, not a pep talk. Napoleon Hill lays out thirteen steps in a fixed order and gives each one its own chapter.

Thoughts are things, and the man who tested it

Hill opens the general introduction with the line the whole book hangs on: "Truly, 'thoughts are things,' and powerful things at that, when they are mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire for their translation into riches, or other material objects." Every qualifier in that sentence matters. Thought alone does nothing in Hill's system. Thought plus a definite aim plus persistence plus a burning desire is the claim.

He then hands you an example rather than an argument. Hill writes that Edwin C. Barnes climbed down from a freight train in Orange, New Jersey, with a burning desire to become the business associate of Thomas Edison. Note Hill's emphasis: Barnes wanted to work with Edison, not for him, and the desire was definite rather than vague. Barnes did not get the partnership at the first interview. He took a job in the Edison offices at a nominal wage and waited where he could be seen. Hill writes that Edison eventually gave him a contract to distribute a product nationally, and that Barnes made himself rich out of it.

Take the story as Hill tells it, which is how this review reports it.

What Hill means by thought is narrower than the phrase suggests. A passing thought does nothing. A thought organized into a plan, backed by faith, repeated into the subconscious mind by auto-suggestion, and held through failure until the goal arrives is the whole machine. Each of the thirteen steps is a condition placed on that one word.

The thirteen steps to riches, with Hill's own chapter subtitles

The 1937 text runs like this. Each chapter carries a numbered subtitle, and the subtitles are the clearest signal of what Hill thought he was writing.

1. Desire (The First Step to Riches)
2. Faith (The Second Step to Riches)
3. Auto-Suggestion (The Third Step to Riches)
4. Specialized Knowledge (The Fourth Step to Riches)
5. Imagination (The Fifth Step to Riches)
6. Organized Planning (The Sixth Step to Riches)
7. Decision (The Seventh Step to Riches)
8. Persistence (The Eighth Step to Riches)
9. Power of the Master Mind (The Ninth Step to Riches)
10. The Mystery of Sex Transmutation (The Tenth Step to Riches)
11. The Sub-Conscious Mind (The Eleventh Step to Riches)
12. The Brain (The Twelfth Step to Riches)
13. The Sixth Sense (The Thirteenth Step to Riches)

A general introduction opens the book, and a final chapter, How to Outwit the Six Ghosts of Fear, subtitled Clearing the Brain for Riches, sits outside the numbered sequence. It works as a diagnostic on what Hill argues stops people before step one.

The six-step method in the Desire chapter

The Desire chapter is where the book stops being philosophy and starts being homework. Hill gives six instructions: fix the exact amount of money you intend to acquire, decide what you will give in return for it, set a date, build a plan and begin acting on it whether you feel ready or not, write all four of those items into one clear written statement, then read that statement aloud twice a day, morning and night.

That is the part of the book that has been copied more than anything else in the category. Vision boards, goal cards, morning scripting routines. The lineage runs back to those six lines from 1937.

The idea most readers walk past

In the Specialized Knowledge chapter Hill makes an argument that cuts against the whole self-improvement industry he helped create: knowledge on its own is only potential power. In his telling it becomes power only when it is organized into a definite plan and pointed at a definite end. Collecting information is not progress, and neither is thought without a plan. General education is not the same as specialized knowledge, and the book is fairly hard on people who mistake reading for doing, which is an odd and useful thing to find inside a book you are reading.

Napoleon Hill's Six Ghosts of Fear

The closing chapter is the one most summaries skip, and the most practical thing in the back half. Hill argues that six basic fears block the thirteen steps before you reach them, and that they are ghosts: they feel solid and are not. He names them.

1. The fear of poverty. Hill treats this as the most destructive of the six, and the whole book is written against it.
2. The fear of criticism. The reason people water down a plan before anyone has seen it.
3. The fear of ill health.
4. The fear of loss of love of someone.
5. The fear of old age.
6. The fear of death.

The chapter's subtitle, Clearing the Brain for Riches, tells you how Hill filed it. He is not writing about emotions for their own sake. His claim is that a mind occupied by any of the six cannot hold a definite thought long enough for the thirteen steps to run, so the fear work comes first in practice even though it comes last in the book. Read it first if the earlier chapters keep sliding off you.

Key Takeaways: Hill's Framework Next to Kevin Trudeau's

This is the table worth studying if you already know Trudeau's material. It shows where his system sits on top of Hill's and where he says Hill left a gap.

Hill's idea (1937)	Kevin Trudeau's counterpart	What Trudeau says he adds
Desire, held as a definite purpose	Desire, step one of his four-step formula	His site says Hill called this definiteness of purpose and that Trudeau adds a layer of specificity Hill only gestured at
A written statement, read aloud morning and night	The written desire statement	Trudeau says the reading has to happen in or approaching a specific brainwave state, not in ordinary waking consciousness
Faith and Auto-Suggestion, belief installed by repetition	The reactive mind and the subconscious	Trudeau frames belief as something that was programmed into you rather than something you select
No equivalent chapter	Counterintentions	Trudeau's site argues directly that Think and Grow Rich is incomplete because it never addresses the inherited beliefs he says run against your stated goal
Specialized Knowledge, where knowledge is only potential power	The Teachability Index	Trudeau scores it: willingness to learn multiplied by willingness to change
Organized Planning, Decision, Persistence	The Training Balance Scale	Trudeau claims the ratio runs 90 percent internal to 10 percent action, which is a sharper split than Hill's

Why Kevin Trudeau Recommends Think and Grow Rich

Trudeau does not treat Napoleon Hill as a rival. He treats him as the first draft.

Open the page on kevintrudeau.com about Trudeau's four-step manifestation formula and Hill is named twice inside the first few sections. The site says Hill called desire "definiteness of purpose" and that Trudeau builds on that foundation. It also says Hill prescribed the written statement practice in 1937, and that what Trudeau adds is the requirement to read it while in or approaching the THETA state.

The same pattern shows up in the Teachability Index, where Hill's line about knowledge being only potential power is cited as support for the scoring system Trudeau uses. And it shows up again in the Training Balance Scale, where Trudeau argues most people spend 90 percent of their effort on action and 10 percent on internal state, and that they have the ratio backwards.

The sharpest connection is the one where Trudeau disagrees with the book. His article on what Trudeau calls counterintentions names Think and Grow Rich by title and calls it incomplete. His claim is that Hill correctly identified belief as the mechanism but never gave a method for changing a belief you did not choose and cannot see. Hill's answer is repetition. Trudeau's answer is that repetition fails when a subconscious program is pulling the other way, which is also the argument behind the reactive mind in his teaching.

Read the book knowing that. It makes the gap visible instead of leaving you wondering why the written statement did not do what it was supposed to do.

Where It Sits Relative to the Global Information Network

Trudeau founded the Global Information Network in 2009 as a private success club, and it now says it has members in more than 160 countries. His framing is that the material was held privately for a long time and that he is the one making it available.

Think and Grow Rich sits at the front of that. It is the public, openly sold, nearly ninety-year-old version of the argument that thought precedes result. It introduces the vocabulary, definite purpose, auto-suggestion, the mastermind, that runs through everything Trudeau built afterward, including Your Wish Is Your Command. If you want the map of what he wrote himself, there is a guide to every Kevin Trudeau book on this site.

Think and Grow Rich Among the Timeless Classics of Success Writing

Every list of timeless classics in this category carries the same handful of titles, and Hill's is usually the pivot between the two halves of the shelf.

Behind him sits R.H. Jarrett's It Works from 1926, a booklet that hands you three daily rules and refuses to explain the mechanism. Hill does the reverse: he explains for 386 pages and organizes the whole thing into numbered steps with dates attached. Alongside him, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People appeared in November 1936, a year ahead of Hill, aimed at other people rather than your own mind.

After Hill, the shelf splits again. Claude Bristol's The Magic of Believing in 1948 works the belief question harder. Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Cybernetics in 1960 supplies the mechanism Hill never gave. David J. Schwartz's The Magic of Thinking Big in 1959 restates the thought argument in plainer language for a general audience. And Rhonda Byrne's The Secret in 2006 keeps the promise and drops most of the procedure.

Why people re-read the Think and Grow Rich book

Re-reading is unusually common with this one, and there is a structural reason for it. The book is a sequence, so which chapter lands depends on where you are stuck. A reader with no aim gets Desire. One with an aim and no traction gets Organized Planning and Decision. One who has been at it two years gets Persistence and the fear chapter. Read it once and you get Hill's message. Read the Think and Grow Rich book a third time and you get the chapter you were not ready for.

That is also why it teaches badly in summary: the steps only mean anything in order, and a summary flattens them into a list of words.

Common Criticisms of Think and Grow Rich

The book averages 4.16 out of 5 on Goodreads across roughly 393,000 ratings, so most readers rate it highly. The critical reviews still land on the same four objections.

The origin story has never been supported

Hill claimed Andrew Carnegie challenged him in 1908 to interview wealthy people and find a formula. That claim has never been supported by evidence, and Carnegie's biographer David Nasaw found no evidence the two men ever met. Hill's own biography also carries a documented record of fraud charges and failed ventures. None of that changes what is on the page. It should change how you read the parts where Hill asserts rather than explains.

There is no evidence in it

The book is built from anecdote and assertion. Sales figures for it are contested too: biographers put it at 20 million copies over 50 years, while the writer Richard Lingeman concluded the real number was considerably lower. What is documented is that BusinessWeek ranked it the sixth best-selling paperback business book seventy years after publication. Reviewers who object to vibrations of thought being stated as fact are objecting to something genuinely in the text.

It blames the reader for the reader's circumstances

The most common serious criticism in reader reviews. Hill's framework leaves the impression that anyone short of money lacks the right thought, or enough desire, which ignores a person's starting position entirely. You can take the procedure seriously and still refuse that conclusion.

The chapters do not age evenly, and it repeats itself

The Mystery of Sex Transmutation and The Sixth Sense read very differently in 2026 than Desire and Persistence do. Reviewers also point to Hill's treatment of women and an aside about sign language for deaf people as passages that date the book. Readers note the burning desire idea gets restated rather than developed. Skim where it repeats.

And the gap Trudeau names

The book tells you belief is the lever. It does not give you much for the case where the belief will not move. That is the criticism Trudeau makes directly, and it is the one this review finds most useful.

Who Should Read It and Who Should Skip It

Read it if

• You keep hearing the ideas secondhand and want the source text.
• You want a procedure. The six steps in the Desire chapter are instructions, not encouragement.
• You are working through Trudeau's material and want to see what he is extending and what he is arguing against.
• You like older prose. The 1937 voice is direct and formal and it has not been sanded down.

Skip it if

• You want evidence, controlled research, or a source note for any claim in it.
• You expect a get rich formula. Hill's steps demand a plan, organized effort and years of persistence.
• Hill's biography would spoil the framework for you.
• You want a method for changing a belief rather than a reason to hold one.

The verdict: 4.5 out of 5. The criticism above is aimed at Hill's biography, not at the framework. The framework is specific, sequenced, and still the structure the entire genre borrows from. Very little has replaced it in the decades since.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Think and Grow Rich still worth reading?

Yes, as the source text. The thirteen steps are still the structure most later success books reorganize and rename. Read it for the Desire chapter and the Specialized Knowledge chapter in particular. Treat Hill's biographical claims as claims.

Which edition of Think and Grow Rich should I buy?

The Napoleon Hill Foundation recommends the original unedited 1937 text. The edition linked in this review is the Foundation's official version, published by Sound Wisdom, a reproduction of Hill's personal copy of the first edition. Later revised versions exist and read differently.

What are the 13 steps in Think and Grow Rich?

Desire, Faith, Auto-Suggestion, Specialized Knowledge, Imagination, Organized Planning, Decision, Persistence, Power of the Master Mind, The Mystery of Sex Transmutation, The Sub-Conscious Mind, The Brain, and The Sixth Sense. Each chapter carries a subtitle numbering it as a step to riches. A fourteenth chapter, How to Outwit the Six Ghosts of Fear, closes the book.

What are the six ghosts of fear?

The fear of poverty, the fear of criticism, the fear of ill health, the fear of loss of love of someone, the fear of old age, and the fear of death. Hill devotes the closing chapter to them, subtitled Clearing the Brain for Riches, and treats the fear of poverty as the most destructive of the six.

What does Napoleon Hill mean by riches?

Money, first of all. The chapter subtitles number each step as a step to riches and the Desire chapter asks you to fix an exact amount. Hill widens the word elsewhere in the book to cover other material objects and states of mind, but the procedure he gives is built around a specific financial goal with a date attached, which is what separates it from vaguer books in the category.

Did Andrew Carnegie really commission Think and Grow Rich?

Hill said so. Historians have not found evidence for it. Carnegie's biographer David Nasaw found no record that Hill and Carnegie ever met. Hill's Carnegie story is the foundational claim of his career and it remains unsupported.

How many pages is Think and Grow Rich?

The Napoleon Hill Foundation's official paperback edition runs 386 pages. The book was first published in 1937 by The Ralston Society.

Does Kevin Trudeau recommend Think and Grow Rich?

It sits near the top of the reading list circulated by his fan club, and kevintrudeau.com references Hill repeatedly as the foundation Trudeau's own teaching extends. He also argues the book is incomplete on the specific question of counterintentions, so the recommendation comes with a caveat attached.

The Short Version

Nearly ninety years old, still the blueprint, still cheap. Hill gives you the sequence and the homework. What he does not give you is the part Trudeau spent a career on, which is what to do when you follow the instructions exactly and nothing moves. Read Hill first anyway. You cannot see the gap until you know the framework.

Further background on the book and the author is available at Wikipedia's entry on Think and Grow Rich and its biography of Napoleon Hill.