The 2nd Book That Changed My Thinking
Not long ago, I wrote about a book that had a big influence on the way I began thinking about work, money and entrepreneurship: Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad.
But there was another book that came along and challenged my thinking in a different way.
Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich.
I’ll admit something.
When I first heard the title, I thought it sounded a little cheesy.
Think your way to becoming rich? Yeah, right!
But curiosity got the better of me.
And once I started reading it, I realised the title doesn’t really capture what I eventually took from the book at all.
For me, its most interesting message wasn’t about magically thinking your way to wealth.
It was about purpose, belief, persistence and the extraordinary influence our thinking can have on the direction of our lives.
What Are You Actually Aiming For?
One of the central ideas in Think and Grow Rich is what Napoleon Hill called definiteness of purpose.
In simple terms:
Know what you want.
That sounds obvious.
But how many of us actually stop and decide?
It’s very easy to spend years responding to whatever life puts in front of us.
Go to work.
Pay the bills.
Deal with today’s problems.
Look forward to the weekend.
Repeat.
Without necessarily asking:
Where am I actually trying to go?
A clear goal doesn’t guarantee you’ll reach it.
But without some sense of direction, it’s incredibly easy to drift.
And that was one of the ideas from the book that stayed with me.
Your Thoughts Influence What You Notice
Hill also wrote extensively about feeding the mind with thoughts connected to the things you want to achieve.
Some of the language used in a book first published in 1937 can sound unusual today.
But I think there’s a very practical idea underneath it.
When something becomes important to you, you start noticing things connected to it.
You notice conversations.
You notice people.
You notice books.
You notice opportunities.
You start asking different questions.
And perhaps most importantly, you begin making different decisions.
This doesn’t mean that simply thinking positively makes good things magically happen.
Thinking has to lead somewhere.
It has to influence what you learn, what you attempt and what you actually do.
Persistence Matters More Than Perfect Progress
Another lesson that stayed with me was Hill’s emphasis on persistence.
Almost anything worthwhile becomes difficult at some point.
A new business idea doesn’t work as expected.
You learn a new skill and initially aren’t very good at it.
You try something and receive little response.
You make a mistake.
You start wondering whether you’re wasting your time.
Those moments are often where the real learning begins.
Looking back, I think one of the biggest mistakes we can make is assuming that a setback means we’ve chosen the wrong path.
Sometimes it does.
But sometimes it simply means:
Learn. Adjust. Try again.
Success rarely arrives as one uninterrupted sequence of good decisions.
More often, progress comes from making decisions, seeing what happens, learning from the result and continuing.
The Book Changed the Questions I Asked
Before I became interested in entrepreneurship and online business, I largely followed the conventional route.
Build a career.
Work hard.
Progress.
Earn more.
There is nothing wrong with any of those things.
But books such as Think and Grow Rich encouraged me to ask questions I hadn’t really considered before.
What do I actually want my life to look like?
What am I capable of creating?
What opportunities might exist outside the path I’m already following?
What would happen if I took some of my ideas seriously enough to act on them?
Those questions eventually contributed to my interest in entrepreneurship, investing, digital marketing and building income online.
And perhaps that’s the real power of a good book.
It doesn’t necessarily give you the answers.
Sometimes it gives you better questions.
Thinking Is Only the Beginning
There is an important distinction here.
Positive thinking without action doesn’t achieve very much.
You can visualise a different future every morning, repeat affirmations all afternoon and think about your goals every evening.
But eventually you have to do something.
Learn the skill.
Have the conversation.
Test the idea.
Create the thing.
Put it in front of somebody.
See what happens.
Then learn from it.
That’s where thinking begins turning into progress.
And interestingly, that’s one of the lessons I’ve come to appreciate even more as the years have passed.
You don’t need to know exactly how everything will work before you begin.
You need enough belief to take the next step, and enough persistence to learn from what happens afterwards.
What Are You Thinking Towards?
Think and Grow Rich was first published almost ninety years ago.
The world Napoleon Hill wrote about was very different from ours.
There was no internet.
No digital economy.
No artificial intelligence.
No possibility of sitting at home with a laptop and reaching customers around the world.
Yet one of its central ideas still feels remarkably relevant.
Decide what you want. Believe that change is possible. Then start moving towards it.
You won’t control everything that happens along the way.
Your destination may even change as you learn more about yourself and the opportunities around you.
But there is an enormous difference between drifting through life and deliberately moving towards something.
And that’s why, despite initially rolling my eyes at its title, Think and Grow Rich became the second book that genuinely changed my thinking.
It didn’t teach me how to think myself rich.
It taught me to think more carefully about where I wanted to go and what I was prepared to do about it.
Your Friend,
Dylan