How to Own Your Own Mind (The Mental Dynamite Series)

How to Own Your Own Mind (The Mental Dynamite Series)

Locked in a vault since 1941, here is Napoleon Hill's definitive lesson on how to organize your thinking to attain success! In How to Own Your Mind , you receive a one-of-a-kind master class in how to think for success from motivational pioneer and author of Think and Grow Rich , Napoleon Hill. In three compelling chapters, Hill demonstrates how to organize, prioritize, and act on information so that it translates into opportunity. Knowledge is not power. Only applied knowledge is power. This book teaches you how to use what you know, and how to know what’s worth knowing. “The name Napoleon Hill is synonymous with practical advice on how to get ahead.”— Mitch Horowitz, CNBC Napoleon Hill was born in 1883 in Wise County, Virginia. He worked as a secretary, a "mountain reporter" for a local newspaper, the manager of a coal mine and a lumber yard, and attended law school, before he began working as a journalist for Bob Taylor's Magazine--a job that led to his meeting steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, which changed the course of his life. Carnegie believed success could be distilled into principles that any person could follow, and urged Hill to interview the greatest industrialists of the era in order to discover these principles. Hill took on the challenge, which lasted twenty years and formed the building block for Think and Grow Rich, the wealth-building classic and all-time bestseller of its kind, which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. Hill devoted the remainder of his life to discovering and refining the principles of success. After a long and rich career as an author, magazine publisher, lecturer, and consultant to business leaders, the motivational pioneer died in 1970 in South Carolina. Chapter One Creative Vision A philosopher said, "The imagination is the workshop of man wherein is fashioned the pattern of all his achievements." Another thinker described it as "the workshop of the soul wherein man's hopes and desires are made ready for material expression." This chapter describes the methods by which some of the great leaders of America have, through the application of Creative Vision, made the American way of life the envy of the world. This chapter begins in the private study of Andrew Carnegie in 1908, with me, Napoleon Hill, as the student and reporter. HILL: Mr. Carnegie, you have said that Creative Vision is one of the principles of individual achievement. Will you analyze this principle and describe how one may make practical use of it? CARNEGIE: First of all, let us have a clear understanding of the meaning of the term "Creative Vision," as we are here using it, by explaining that this is not merely another name for imagination. It is the ability to recognize opportunities and take action to benefit from them. An important element of Creative Vision is the use of the imagination. There are two types of imagination. One is known as synthetic imagination and the other as creative imagination. Synthetic imagination consists of the act of combining recognized ideas, concepts, plans, facts, and principles in new arrangements. The old axiom "There is nothing new under the sun" grew out of the fact that the majority of things which seem to be new are nothing but a rearrangement of that which is old. Practically all the patents recorded in the Patent Office are nothing more than old ideas which have been arranged in a new order, or given a new use. Patents which do not come under this heading are known as "basic patents" and they are the work of Creative Imagination; that is, they are based on newly created ideas which have not been previously used or recognized. Creative Imagination has its source, as far as science has been able to determine, in the subconscious mind, wherein exists, through some power unknown to science, the ability to perceive and interpret new ideas. It is believed, by some, that the faculty of Creative Imagination truly is "the workshop of the soul." Of one fact we can be sure, and that is the undeniable reality of the existence of a faculty of the mind through which some men perceive and interpret new ideas never before known to man. Later I shall cite well-known examples of such ability. Moreover, I shall endeavor to describe how this ability may be developed and made to serve practical ends. HILL: Which of the two types of imagination is used more often in the field of industry, and in the ordinary walks of life? CARNEGIE: Synthetic imagination is more commonly used. Creative imagination, as the name implies, is used only by those who have attained the means to apply this unusual skill. HILL: Will you mention examples of the application of both types of imagination, giving as many of the details as possible in order that the practical methods of application of these principles may be understood? CARNEGIE: Well, let us take the work of Thomas A. Edison, for example. By studying his achievements we shall see how he