1. Overview

Wealth, in all its forms, is usually not the result of just luck or coincidence. Wealth is usually the result of some skills, mindsets and traits that anyone can instill in themselves.

Think and Grow Rich tells you:

• How you can determine the goals that are right for you and how you can achieve those goals through action.
• You can only accomplish your goals if you instill a burning desire inside yourself.
• You must first set goals and have a plan before you can reach those goals.
• In order to be successful, you must instill an unwavering faith in yourself.
• Your subconscious is what controls your behavior, and you can control your subconscious through a technique Mr. Hill calls Autosuggestion.
• That certain knowledge and skills are crucial for achieving success.
• Knowledge is power but not the kind of knowledge they teach in schools.
• Dreams are turned into reality first in something Mr. Hill calls “The Workshop Of the Imagination
• To achieve success in life, you must first know your own strengths and weaknesses.
• One of the keys to a successful life are positive emotions. You need to create more positive emotions in your life.
• Successful people take a certain approach to realize their goals.
• You need to have remarkable steadfastness and determination in order to be successful.
• You must be persistent to succeed.
• You must be smart and surround yourself with even smarter people to achieve great things.
• You can only accomplish your goals in life if you are driven by a burning desire.
• Everyone wants to achieve wealth and financial independence but wishing by itself isn’t going to help you achieve your goals. 
• If you want to get rich and realize your dreams, you need to instill a burning desire inside yourself.

Think and Grow Rich Principle 1

To achieve your goals, you must first set them down and plan them out.

You must first know exactly what you want before you can achieve it.
Don’t start chasing after any old dream. Think about what you really want out of life and set your personal goals as precisely as possible. For example, if you want to be wealthy, you should decide precisely how much money you want to make.

Additionally, you must have a clear understanding of exactly when you want to achieve your goal and what you’re prepared to sacrifice in order to accomplish it. Setting a specific goal is worthless if it’s floating in some open-ended future because without an end date, you’ll only pursue your goals halfheartedly.
You must come up with a plan of action that outlines each step you need to be successful to realize your goal. Then, once you have your plan take immediate action.

Mr. Hill gives us the following method he called Auto Suggestion to anchor a burning desire for success into your subconscious so that it affects all your thoughts and actions. 

• First, write down your goals and your detailed plans for achieving them. 
• Then, read it aloud twice a day: once when you first get up in the morning and once every night before going to bed. This is the crucial step you must take every day in order to reach your goal.

Think and Grow Rich Principle 2

You must have an unwavering faith in yourself in order to achieve success.

This unwavering faith in yourself is the way you make sure you can and will achieve your goals. You must have self-confidence and unwavering faith first. No success, no wealth had ever been achieved, nothing ever invented without the existence of this faith first.

Mr. Hill uses Mahatma Gandhi as a paradigmatic example of the power of faith. Gandhi was successful even though he had none of the usual instruments of power. He possessed no money, no military, no political office but he was able to defy British colonial power and free a continent. The only thing he did possess was his undying belief that he could exercise an influence so mighty upon his fellow countrymen that they would stand with him, and all achieve their common goals of freedom. The faith you have in yourself has an enormous influence on your self-image and way of life. It can, in the truest sense of the word, help you move mountains.

Think And Grow Rich Principle 3

Your subconscious can be programmed to influence your behavior through Autosuggestion.

Auto Suggestion will instill an unwavering faith in yourself. Faith is not necessarily something you’re born with or that falls from the sky: anybody can develop it day by day by using these techniques.
Auto-suggestion is a way of influencing yourself by thinking very specific and purposeful thoughts or ideas on a regular basis.

You can use Auto Suggestion to convey certain commands or positive goals to your own subconsciousness and by doing so you increase your own belief and faith in yourself. Auto Suggestion is a method of persuading yourself that you can reach your goals, your thoughts can be transformed into your reality, and you must live your own life with confidence.

The more frequently you use Auto Suggestion, the more likely it is that it will help you achieve your goals. If you constantly impress your desires and goals in your own subconsciousness, it will influence all your thoughts and actions towards making them come true.

Think And Grow Rich Principle 4

Knowledge is power, but it isn’t the kind of knowledge that you learned in school.

You need knowledge to achieve your aims in life. All you must do is take a few basic points into consideration.
First you must take the “traditional” meaning of knowledge and of education and throw it out away and start anew. Possessing knowledge or being well-educated isn’t restricted to having a high school diploma or advanced degrees. “Uneducated” people can also know a lot, as Henry Ford clearly showed. Although he didn’t even graduate from high school, he was able to create an industrial empire and made millions of dollars.

If you want to be a success, you don’t need to fill your head with just facts. Your experiences and knowledge can be just as important. You must learn to use your own strengths and fully exploit your own potential.
The most important thing you need is a willingness to continue learning all throughout your life. Don’t become complacent. You must always be ready to actively and constantly expand upon your own knowledge. There are many ways to achieve this, not only by going to university or taking some evening courses but by having practical experiences. 

Knowing where you can find the knowledge you need is equally important because you don’t need to know everything by yourself. You must know who you can ask if you don’t know something yourself. One person can never know everything they need to succeed so it’s usually more practical and productive to know where and how to find experts who will share their specialized knowledge with you.

Think And Grow Rich Principle 5

You can turn your dreams into reality by using the workshop of the imagination.

Start first with an idea to achieve the success you want. Behind every idea is your imagination. Your imagination is the creative workshop of your mind that transforms your dreams into ideas and your ideas into your reality.

Your imaginative ability has a couple of different forms. First there is the creative imagination and then there is the synthetic imagination. Your creative imagination allows you to come up with completely new things. Ingenious composers, visual artists and authors use this function to create original works unlike anything visualized or made before.

Your synthetic imagination can take old ideas and turn them into new combinations. The engineers at Sony electronics for example, were using that ability when they decided to take the everyday Dictaphone used by businessmen and journalists and turn it into a portable music player for everyone, the Walkman.

Both of your imaginations, the creative and synthetic can play off each other in a productive way. Mr. Hill tells us about Asa Candler, who created the global brand of Coca-Cola out of a headache medication over 140 years ago. Even though Candler himself wasn’t the one who came up with the Coca-Cola recipe, when he bought it from a pharmacist for $3,000, he was able to develop it into a new form and use and developed ingenious plans and marketing strategies that turned the medication into a refreshing drink and a huge worldwide success.

You must keep your imagination from getting lazy by constantly challenging it and using it. You can achieve that by stimulating it, by keeping your imagination active and exercising it like a muscle. Just like a muscle, the more frequently you use your imagination, the more productive and powerful it becomes.

Think And Grow Rich Principle 6

To increase your chances of success you must know your own strengths and weaknesses.

Being self-aware, knowing both your strengths and weaknesses is needed to achieve your success.
The most common reasons people fail are because of vague goals, lack of ambition, procrastination and a lack of resolve. Self-awareness can help you act against these common weaknesses.

You need to conduct a thorough and honest self-analysis in order to understand your strengths and weaknesses. Don’t fret though, this doesn’t require going to a therapist. You can do this by going through a checklist of questions. Ask yourself, have I achieved my goals for this day, this month, this year? Was I always friendly, courteous and cooperative to the people around me? Did I make all my decisions promptly and firmly?

Then you should compare somebody else’s objective opinion they have of you with your own subjective self-analysis. This works best when you pick a person who knows you well to sit down with so you can both discuss your strengths and weaknesses honestly and openly.

Think And Grow Rich Principle 7 

To have a successful life you need to strengthen positive emotions.

Your subconscious mind is the part of the brain that receives and stores sensory stimuli, feelings and thoughts. The subconscious mind saves everything you’ve ever experienced in your life whether it was negative or positive.

Your subconscious is constantly exercising its all-pervasive influence on all your actions. Your subconscious can shape you positively, endowing you with strength and endurance, but it can also affect us negatively, misleading us into depression and pessimism.
Your subconscious can help you realize your desires and goals, but you must make sure your positive feelings have the leading role in your life.

You must constantly “feed” your subconscious positive things because when you do, your subconscious will be a helpful and constructive guide. If you allow yourself to constantly have negative emotions, such as rage, hatred or a desire for revenge or even pessimism, the exact opposite will happen.
You should always insulate yourself from negative emotions, situations and people. You should always make every effort to increase all positive emotions and impulses. Emotions like enthusiasm and love should constantly be on your mind so that you’ll end up developing a positive mentality in the long term.

Think And Grow Rich Principle 8

To be successful you must cultivate a feeling of determination and steadfastness.

Mr. Hill analyzed 25,000 life stories of people who had failed and found that it was usually a lack of determination that was the main reason for their failure. When he studied successful people, he found that they were the type of people who were used to making split-second decisions and, once they made them, they stood firmly behind their decisions.

You should cultivate a certain degree of stubbornness if it does not turn into obstinacy. Henry Ford was known to stick to his decisions for a very long time. For example, many people told him he should retire his famously utilitarian but plain Model T with a newer model. But he decided to produce the car for a long time and was able to continue bringing in large profits.
Opinions of others are cheap. Everybody has an opinion, and most people want to share their opinion with you. To avoid the negative influence of negative and conflicting opinions, try to avoid situations where you must listen to these critical opinions.

Think And Grow Rich Principle 9

In order to succeed, you must be persistent.

Obstacles and difficulties will occur in all situations and during all attempts to move forward in life. The people who fail are the ones who are too quick to give up their plans and let the project die. The people who succeed are the ones who despite all the obstacles, stick to their original goals and plans and give their dreams the time they need to grow into reality.

Endurance and persistence are the keys to success. You must work constantly on the realization of your goals and not ever lose sight of them. Persistence may be the key, but obstinacy and stubbornness should be avoided at all costs: if, say, there’s a dire need for a course correction, you also must be willing to implement the needed changes in order to achieve the larger goal.

If you want persistence and endurance to become a habit, here are four simple but crucial rules:

1. You must have a definite and clear goal and then develop a burning desire to achieve it.
2. You must have a precise and thorough plan to guide the implementation of your goals.
3. You must never allow yourself to be influenced by the negative and disheartening opinions of others.
4. You must develop an intimate and trusting relationship to a Mastermind group or person that provides you with support, encouragement and guidance.

Think And Grow Rich Principle 10 

You must surround yourself with smart people to achieve your goals.

Large goals require complex plans that can be difficult to execute. The more difficult the execution the more dependent you must be on the creative, moral, and intellectual support of others.
A select group of intelligent people working together is called a MasterMind. This is a union of like-minded people, which, unlike a network, focuses on defining a common goal.

The most important benefit of a MasterMind is its synergistic effect: when a group of people who work well together combine their experiences, skills, talents, specialist knowledge, relationships and all other resources and then combine them to work towards the same shared goal, the results will be much more than just a sum of its parts: it’s a force multiplier which allows you to achieve things you could have never achieved alone