Long before books like The Secret promised to transform our lives with a thought, and before self-help books proliferated with their various quick-fix formulas for success, three twentieth-century masters laid out the steps for translating our deepest desires into reality. Together, their classic works on life mastery have sold more than one hundred million copies worldwide as generations of readers have successfully applied their insights to achieve personal and professional fulfillment in every area of life—and their program for the pursuit of happiness is more relevant today than ever.
Three Habits to Achieve Abundance in Your Finances, Your Relationships, Your Health, and Your Life won’t tell you what you should want. What it will tell you is how to get it. Gathering three powerful works of guidance into one volume—Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill; The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy; and Public Speaking and Influencing People by Dale Carnegie—it lays out practical ways to pursue your personal goals, and reach them.
These authors do not hold themselves up as gurus or experts. They show you that you are already the expert on your own success. As their writings make clear, the real secret to success is not the right connections or the right family or the right education or the right income or any mysterious and star-aligned combination thereof. It’s completely free and available to anyone, regardless of wealth, schooling, or any other kind of advantage. It’s the core of what makes us all created equal. It’s the power of your mind, a power available to all people at this very moment. Your thoughts are more powerful than money, influence, and opportunity combined, and they are what determine whether you stay stuck—or succeed more fully than you’ve ever dreamed.
This book is more than just a blueprint for your own personal success. It is a description of the way the world works. And presenting the core principles of these authors together, in one volume, is the best way we know to highlight the big picture that has been lost in translation over the years: No expert has the real answers you seek. The answers aren’t “out there” somewhere; they are already within you. The unseen principles that govern the translation of our desires to our reality are in your control, and the handbooks we’ve collected here lay them out clearly and straightforwardly: follow the process and success will be yours.
Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, originally published in 1937, takes a practical, cause-and-effect approach to the transformative power of the mind, arising from one of the most challenging economic times in America’s history. In the grip of the Great Depression, many Americans found themselves stuck after experiencing years of poverty, and some were tempted toward even further despair, despondency, and dependence. But even during this time, some individuals became rich—and not just rich, but fabulously rich. We in the modern world might scoff, “The oil magnates? The monopolies? The slumlords? Sure, anyone can get rich if they are selfish and ruthless enough to take advantage of others.” But in 1937, Andrew Carnegie, one of those fabulously rich oil magnates, hired a young man named Napoleon Hill to set the record straight.
Hill was asked to interview hundreds of well-known, wealthy individuals and write a book based on their secrets for succeeding so prominently in the world. In fact, what resulted was not a compilation of many secrets, but one secret, a “magic formula,” that lay at the root of their success. As Hill wrote in his preface to Think and Grow Rich, “It was Mr. Carnegie’s idea that the magic formula, which gave him a stupendous fortune, ought to be placed within reach of people who do not have time to investigate how people make money, and it was his hope that I might test and demonstrate the soundness of the formula through the experience of men and women in every calling.”
Carnegie told Hill the secret before he ever started interviewing, so it really wasn’t a secret at all. But Hill’s research yielded proof positive. He found that the wealth of every single individual he interviewed or studied, such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Charles Schwab, and even Andrew Carnegie himself, did not depend on ruthlessness and greed, nor on previous wealth, nor on influence. He did find thirteen other common denominators among the individuals he interviewed. But these thirteen traits all came down to the power of the mind. The secret was just as Andrew Carnegie had known from the start: “All achievement begins with an idea.”
The ability of an idea to create change and advance one’s goals is likewise the driving force behind Joseph Murphy’s seminal guide to human potential. But while Think and Grow Rich applies the power of the mind within the single context of building wealth, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind finds that the principles of effective thought can apply just as powerfully and practically to any aspect of our lives. Murphy, a minister and leader of one of the most broad-based personal-development movements of the twentieth century, explains in depth and detail how the conscious mind gives “marching orders” to the subconscious, which carries them out by any means possible, constantly working to turn our hopes and desires—or, if our conscious thoughts are not well controlled, our fears—into reality.
And Murphy does not limit himself to theory: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind lays out specific instructions for putting its principles into practice. Among the topics he covers are how to “program” the subconscious mind to achieve your goals; how to overcome problems in marriage and family life; how to vanquish fear and worry; how to replace poverty with riches; and how to overcome illness and debility, all in the interest of enjoying a truly successful and rewarding life.
The same spirit of practicality runs through the works of Dale Carnegie, who wrote many classic self-help books, including the famed How to Win Friends and Influence People. The work included here, an intensely hands-on guide called Public Speaking and Influencing People, shows how to apply the principles of the mind to learning the skill that drives success in any field perhaps more than any other: the power of persuasion. Here, Carnegie shows you how to develop poise, gain self-confidence, improve your memory, make your meaning clear, sway other people to your way of thinking, and win arguments without making enemies.
Public Speaking and Influencing People also offers hundreds of valuable real-world tips on influencing the important people in your life—your friends, your customers, your business associates, your employers. Even better, it’s tried and tested: the information here has been used successfully by more than one million students in the world-famous Dale Carnegie Course in Effective Speaking and Human Relations. What’s more, the text we present here includes updates that make Carnegie’s tips and techniques even more readily applicable to the pursuit of success in today’s world.
The truth is that each of these books has stood the test of time, and each is a classic in its own right. Taken together, they lay out a path to success that all of us can follow, wherever we happen to live and whatever we happen to have. These principles have nothing to do with geography or ethnicity or even opportunity; these same principles, broadly applied, have the power to make individual lives, families, communities, and whole nations successful and influential in the best possible way.
America didn’t become a world power because of the advantage of wealth or might—it started with neither of these. Nor was it dependent on strong, caretaker institutions—quite the opposite. America’s success began with an idea. This idea was that all people are created equal, and because we are all equal, we all have the inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s the American idea, and it’s true in the world beyond America’s borders as well. And the pursuit of happiness is itself a process of ideas—which you’ll see in the pages ahead as you follow each step on the path to success through the awakening power of your own mind.