I picked up this book by Napoleon Hill because it’s a classic and one podcast I listen to, “The Unstoppable Woman” references it all the time. I wanted to be able to understand what she was referencing, so I finally gave in and requested the audiobook from my library.
I have to say, the last thing I was expecting from a book written in the 1930s was for it to be about the “energetic vibration” of money. If I had come to this book at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I probably would not have been open to the concept, but since I’ve been consuming a lot of other content on the subject lately, I was ready for it, even if I was surprised by the source.
Despite the fact that I was already convinced that money has a vibration and is attracted to people with a certain kind of energy before I even picked up the book, Hill spends a fair amount of this book, especially the beginning, convincing readers he’s not crazy. It’s fair even for this day and age, but I definitely found myself zoning out while listening to those sections.
At the same time, I was interested to hear Hill talk about the men from his own lifetime (including himself) who have used the strategies laid out in the book to build enormous wealth. Specifically, Andrew Carnegie apparently approached Hill and told him he had to write a book that detailed his strategy for building wealth. I was definitely surprised to hear that Andrew Carnegie used the law of attraction to build his empire, but knowing what I’ve heard from other sources about how money works, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
I was also glad that Hill included actionable strategies for using the law of attraction to build wealth, and while I’m not sure I fully buy into all his strategies, I have implemented one in particular. I’m still in the early days, so you’ll have to wait for an update to see if it has the desired effect.
The other thing I did not expect to see in this book was a whole chapter on “the emotion of sex” and how one can supposedly use it to drive financial success. While Hill does provide a few examples of successful women from his lifetime in other parts of the book, it appears to be primarily aimed at men, and that’s especially true of this chapter. He lists various prominent men from history who had some sort of famous romance and uses that as his basis for claiming that men require “the love of a good woman” in order to be successful. Also that it’s the wife’s job to make sure she does not “allow” her husband’s attention to stray to other women. You can probably imagine how hard I rolled my eyes at that line.
Since women in romantic relationships are more likely to be tied down to hearth and home (and kids), especially in the first half of the century, I find it highly unlikely that this theory applies to us. The first women to come to my mind are the singers who rose to fame before they had time to attach themselves to a man. Lady Gaga was afraid to have sex for a long time because she was afraid it would sap her creative energies. Neither Jane Austen nor Louisa May Alcott ever got married, and I they have been my writing heroes for almost my entire life.
Ultimately, I liked this book, and I can get behind most of its teachings, but there were a few things I can’t get behind. The aforementioned chapter on “the emotion of sex” is one, but there was also a very disturbing chapter in which Hill describes his son being born without ears, but he “refused” to accept the reality of having a deaf son. He would not send his son to a school for the deaf, nor would he allow him to learn sign language. Instead, he waited until technology came up with an invention that allowed his son to hear, and while he uses it as an example of his willpower dominating the universe, I think that’s ableism bordering on abusiveness. The deaf culture is a thriving culture, and learning a different language (i.e. sign language) could have enhanced his son’s mental capacity by forcing him to think about things in different ways. Hill pays lip service to the idea that his son had certain advantages over his brother because he was forced to compensate for his disability, but he is blind to the fact that refusing to let his son live as a part of the deaf community could have prevented him from accessing some of those advantages.
Hill also spends a chapter going over all the benefits of capitalism and claiming problems start when people want something for nothing without considering the fact that some people are simply unable to work for a variety of reasons. Sometimes getting “something for nothing” turns out to be an investment they can use to buy resources, which they can then put to work and turn into something. I suppose I should not have been surprised by that chapter, especially given the era in which the book was written.