These and many other selections from The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons by Napoleon Hill can be found in The Get-To-The-Point Success Reader Volume 1

Take Your Choice

Some people are successful as long as someone else stands back of them and encourages them, and some are successful in spite of Hell! Take your choice.

What People Say About You

If a person has built a sound character, it makes but little difference what people say about him, because he will win in the end.

Opportunity

Ask the next ten people whom you meet why they have not accomplished more in their respective lines of endeavor, and at least nine of them will tell you that opportunity does not seem to come around their way.

Go a step further and analyze each of these nine accurately by observing their actions for one single day, and the chances are that you will find that every one of them is turning away the finest sort of opportunities every hour of the day.

Selecting the Proper Environment

The mind feeds upon that which we supply it, or that which is forced upon it, through our environment; therefore, let us select our environment, as far as possible, with the object of supplying the mind with suitable materials out of which to carry on its work of attaining out definite chief aim in life.

The Power of Concentration

Concentration, itself, is nothing but a matter of control of the attention! … Learn to fix your attention on a given subject, at will, for whatever length of time you choose, and you will have learned the secret passage-way to power and plenty! This is concentration!

Can I Take Your Order?

We have found that any idea or thought that is held in the mind, through repetition, has a tendency to direct the physical body to transform such thought or idea into its material equivalent.

We have found that any order that is properly given to the subconscious section of the mind…will be carried out unless it is sidetracked or countermanded by another and stronger order.

The Truth

Not all people are so constituted that they wish to know the truth about all matters vitally affecting life.

One of the great surprises the author of this course has met with, in connection with his research activities, is that so few people are willing to hear the truth when it shows up their own weaknesses.

Knowing What You Want

The battle for achievement of success is half won when one knows definitely what is wanted. …

The man who actually knows just what he wants in life has already gone a long way toward attaining it.

JD Rockefeller

[John D. Rockefeller] has one quality that stands out, like a shining star, above all of his other qualities; it is his habit of dealing only with the relevant facts pertaining to his life-work. As a very young man (and a very poor young man, at that) Mr. Rockefeller adopted, as his definite chief aim, the accumulation of great wealth. It is not my purpose, nor is it of any particular advantage, to enter into Mr. Rockefeller’s method of accumulating his fortune other than to observe that his most pronounced quality was that of insisting on facts as the basis of his business philosophy.

Some there are who say that Mr. Rockefeller was not always fair with his competitors. That may or may not be true (as accurate thinkers we will leave the point undisturbed), but no one (not even his competitors) ever accused Mr. Rockefeller of forming “snap-judgments” or of underestimating the strength of his competitors. He not only recognized facts that affected his business, wherever and whenever he found them, but he made it his business to search for them until he was sure he had found them.

Adaptation to Environment

Success in life, no matter what one mat call success, is very largely a matter of adaptation to environment in such a manner that there is harmony between the individual and his environment.

The Adaptive Leader

The successful leader must possess the ability to change the color of his mind, chameleon-like, to fit every circumstance that arises in connection with the object of his leadership.

Moreover, he must possess the ability to change from one mood to another without showing the slightest signs of anger or lack of self-control.

Confidence Shows

If you have self-confidence, those around you will discover the fact.

A Change Is As Good as a Rest

Everyone needs a change of mental environment at regular periods, the same as a change and variety of food are essential.

The mind becomes more alert, more elastic and more ready to work with speed and accuracy after it has been bathed in new ideas, outside of one’s own field of daily labor.

Carnegie’s “Subtle Something

Perhaps no person was ever associated with Mr. [Andrew] Carnegie who knew him better than did Mr. C. M. Schwab. In the following words Mr. Schwab has very accurately described that “subtle something” in Mr. Carnegie’s personality which enabled him to rise to such stupendous heights.

“I never knew a man with so much imagination, lively intelligence and instinctive comprehension. You sensed that he probed your thoughts and took stock of everything that you had ever done or might do. He seemed to catch at your next word before it was spoken. The play of his mind was dazzling and his habit of close observation gave him a store of knowledge about innumerable matters.

“But his outstanding quality, from so rich an endowment, was the power of inspiring other people. Confidence radiated from him. You might be doubtful about something and discuss the matter with Mr. Carnegie. In a flash he would make you see that it was right and then absolutely believe it; or he might settle your doubts by pointing out its weakness. This quality of attracting others, then spurring them on, arose from his own strength.

“The results of his leadership were remarkable. Never before in history of industry, I imagine, was there a person who, without understanding his business in its working details, making no pretense of technical knowledge concerning steel or engineering, was yet able to build up such an enterprise.

“Mr. Carnegie’s ability to inspire people rested on, something deeper than any faculty of judgment.”
…
[Back to Napoleon Hill’s commentary]

It is obvious that his [Carnegie’s] success was due to his understanding of his own mind and the minds of other people, and not to mere knowledge of the steel business itself.

The World’s Leading Salesman

One of the greatest salesmen this country has ever seen was once a clerk in a newspaper office. It will be worth your while to analyze the method through which he gained his title as “the world’s leading salesman.”

He was a timid young man with a more or less retiring sort of nature. He was one of those who believe it best to slip in by the back door and take a seat at the rear of the stage of life. One evening he heard a lecture on…self-confidence, and that lecture so impressed him that he left the lecture hall with a firm determination to pull himself out of the rut into which he had drifted.

He went to the Business Manager of the paper and asked for a position as solicitor of advertising and was put to work on a commission basis. Everyone in the office expected to see him fail, as this sort of salesmanship calls for the most positive type of sales ability. He went to his room and made out a list of a certain type of merchants on whom he intended to call. One would think that he would naturally have made up his list of the names of those whom he believed he could sell with the least effort, but he did nothing of the sort.

He placed on his list only the names of the merchants on whom other advertising solicitors had called without making a sale. His list consisted of only twelve names. Before he made a single call he went out to the city park, took out his list of twelve names, read it over a hundred times, saying to himself as he did so, “You will purchase advertising space from me before the end of the month.”

Then he began to make his calls. The first day he closed sales with three of the twelve “impossibilities.” During the remainder of the week he made sales to two others. By the end of the month he had opened advertising accounts with all but one of the merchants that he had on the list. For the ensuing month he made no sales, for the reason that he made no calls except on this one obstinate merchant.

Every morning when the store opened he was on hand to interview this merchant and every morning the merchant said “No.” The merchant knew he was not going to buy advertising space, but this young man didn’t know it. When the merchant said No the young man did not hear it, but kept right on coming.

On the last day of the month, after having told this persistent young man No for thirty consecutive times, the merchant said:

“Look here, young man, you have wasted a whole month trying to sell me; now, what I would like to know is this-why have you wasted your time?"

“Wasted my time nothing,” he retorted; “I have been going to school and you have been my teacher. Now I know all the arguments that a merchant can bring up for not buying, and besides that I have been drilling myself in self-confidence.”

Then the merchant said: “I will make a little confession of my own. I, too, have been going to school, and you have been my teacher. You have taught me a lesson in persistence that is worth money to me, and to show you my appreciation I am going to pay my tuition fee by giving you an order for advertising space.”

And that was the way in which the Philadelphia North American’s best advertising account was brought in. Likewise, it marked the beginning of a reputation that has made that same young man a millionaire.

He succeeded because he deliberately charged his own mind with sufficient Self-confidence to make that mind an irresistible force. When he sat down to make up that list of twelve names he did something that ninety-nine people out of a hundred would not have done—he selected the names of those whom he believed it would be hard to sell, because he understood that out of the resistance he would meet with in trying to sell them would come strength and self-confidence.

It Can’t Be Done! … How Did They Do It?

At the east end of the great Brooklyn Bridge, in New York City, an old man conducts a cobbler shop. When the engineers began driving stakes and marking the foundation place for that great steel structure, this man shook his head and said “It can’t be done!”

Now he looks out from his dingy little shoe-repair shop, shakes his head and asks himself: “How did they do it?”

He saw the bridge grow before his very eyes, and he still lacks the imagination to analyze that which he saw. The engineer who planned the bridge saw it a reality long before a single shovel of dirt had been removed for the foundation stones. The bridge became a reality in his imagination because he had trained that imagination to weave new combinations out of old ideas.

The Get-To-The-Point Success Reader Volume 1