Selections from the Writings of Napoleon Hill, Orison Swett Marden, Samuel Smiles, Herbert N. Casson, and Charles F. Haanel




Item Description:

The Get-To-The Point Success Reader Volume 1 takes some of the best passages from thousands of pages of success writings, and puts them in one power-packed 240 page volume.

The book features selections from:

Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons by Napoleon Hill
Be Good to Yourself by Orison Swett Marden
Every Man a King by Orison Swett Marden
Self Help by Samuel Smiles
Tips on Leadership by Herbert N. Casson
The Life Stories of 25 Leaders by Herbert N. Casson
The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel

Editor Rodney Ohebsion brings the reader the parts of these works that are most interesting, useful, and relevant to today. Redundancies and clearly outdated material have been filtered out, and everything is presented in a highly accessible format.

The result is a timeless treasure that efficiently and effectively presents much of these authors' supreme work, and will give you a bounty of material that is a joy to read, and an invaluable and timeless source of life wisdom.

Page Count: 240
Publication Year: 2004
Publisher: Immediex Publishing
ISBN:1932968202

Sample Passages:



From Napoleon Hill Think & Grow Rich Chapter

Survivor

Several years ago, one of my business associates became ill. He became worse as time went on, and finally was taken to the hospital for an operation. Just before he was wheeled into the operating room, I took a look at him, and wondered how anyone as thin and emaciated as he, could possibly go through a major operation successfully. The doctor warned me that there was little if any chance of my ever seeing him alive again.

But that was the DOCTOR’S OPINION. It was not the opinion of the patient. Just before he was wheeled away, he whispered feebly, “Do not be disturbed, Chief, I will be out of here in a few days.” The attending nurse looked at me with pity. But the patient did come through safely.

After it was all over, his physician said, “Nothing but his own desire to live saved him. He never would have pulled through if he had not refused to accept the possibility of death.”

Dominating Thoughts

It is a well known fact that one comes, finally, to BELIEVE whatever one repeats to one’s self, whether the statement be true or false. If a person repeats a lie over and over, he will eventually accept the lie as truth. Moreover, he will BELIEVE it to be the truth.

Every person is what he is, because of the DOMINATING THOUGHTS which he permits to occupy his mind. Thoughts which a person deliberately places in his own mind, and encourages with sympathy, and with which he mixes any one or more of the emotions, constitute the motivating forces, which direct and control his every movement, act, and deed!



From Napoleon Hill The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons Chapter

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.

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.

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.

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.



From Orison Swett Marden Be Good to Yourself Chapter

Treat Yourself Well, Think Well of Yourself, and Cultivate the Mind

Some one has said that the man who depreciates himself blasphemes God, who created him in His own image and pronounced him perfect. Very few people think well enough of themselves, have half enough esteem for their divine origin or respect for their ability, their character, or the sublimity of their possibilities; hence the weakness and ineffectiveness of their careers.

If we would make the most of our lives, if we would be and do all that it is possible for us to be and to do, we must not only think well of ourselves, but we must also be just to ourselves physically, be good to our bodies. In order to be the highest, the most efficient type of man or woman, it is just as necessary to cultivate the body, to develop its greatest possible strength and beauty, as it is to cultivate the mind, to raise it to its highest power.

There are plenty of people who are good to others, but are not good to themselves. They do not take care of their own health, their own bodies, do not conserve their own energies, husband their own resources. They are slaves to others, tyrants to themselves.

Faithfulness to others is a most desirable trait, yet faithfulness to yourself is just as much of a requisite. It is as great a sin not to be good to yourself as not to be good to others. It is every one’s sacred duty to keep himself up to the highest possible standard, physically and mentally, otherwise he cannot deliver his divine message, in its entirety, to the world. It is every one’s sacred duty to keep himself in a condition to do the biggest thing possible to him. It is a positive sin to keep oneself in a depleted, rundown, exhausted state, so that he cannot answer his life call or any big demand that an emergency may make upon him.

Most of us are at war with ourselves, are our own worst enemies. We expect a great deal of ourselves, yet we do not put ourselves in a condition to achieve great things. We are either too indulgent to our bodies, or we are not indulgent enough. We pamper them, or we neglect them, and it would be hard to tell which mode of treatment produces the worst results. Few people treat their bodies with the same wise care and consideration that they bestow upon a valuable piece of machinery or property of any kind from which they expect large returns.




From Orison Swett Marden Every Man a King Chapter

A Leader is a Dealer in Optimism

People do not like to work for a pessimist. They thrive in a cheerful, optimistic atmosphere, and will do more and better work there than in one of discouragement and depression. The man who talks his business down cannot possibly do so well as the man who talks his business up. The habit of talking everything down sets tile mind toward the negative side, the destructive side, instead of toward the positive and creative, and is fatal to achievement. It creates a discordant environment. No man can live upward when he is talking downward.

People Who Only Count Other People’s Misses and Not Their Hits

A most injurious and unpleasant way of looking for trouble is fault-finding, continual criticism of other persons. Some people are never generous, never magnanimous toward others. They are stingy of their praise, showing always an unhealthy parsimony in their recognition of merit in others, and critical of their every act.



From Samuel Smiles Self Help Chapter

Self-Respect

Self-respect is the noblest garment with which a man may clothe himself—the most elevating feeling with which the mind can be inspired. One of Pythagoras’s wisest maxims, in his ‘Golden Verses,’ is that with which he enjoins the pupil to “reverence himself.”

Choosing Good Companions for Models

Good rules may do much, but good models far more; for in the latter we have instruction in action—wisdom at work… Hence the vast importance of exercising great care in the selection of companions, especially in youth.


From Charles F. Haanel The Master Key System Chapter

Application

Knowledge will not apply itself. You must make the application. Abundance will not come to you out of the sky, neither will it drop into your lap, but a conscious realization of the law of attraction and the intention to bring it into operation for a certain, definite and specific purpose, and the will to carry out this purpose will bring about the materialization of your desire by a natural law of transference…

The Source Instead of the Symbols

You may be pursuing the symbols of power, instead of power itself. You may be pursuing fame instead of honor, riches instead of wealth, position instead of servitude; in either event you will find that they turn to ashes just as you overtake them…

The race has usually been for money and other mere symbols of power, but with an understanding of the true source of power, we can afford to ignore the symbols. The man with a large bank account finds it unnecessary to load his pockets down with gold; so with the man who has found the true source of power; he is no longer interested in its shams or pretensions.