Napoleon Hill - Wikipedia

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that October 26 is the anniversary of the birth of American self-help author Oliver Napoleon Hill who is best known for his book Think and Grow Rich (1937)

Rest in peace Oliver Napoleon Hill if he can.

Background from paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-greatest-self-he [login to see]
"Napoleon Hill is the most famous conman you’ve probably never heard of. Born into poverty in rural Virginia at the end of the 19th century, Hill went on to write one of the most successful self-help books of the 20th century: Think and Grow Rich. In fact, he helped invent the genre. But it’s the untold story of Hill’s fraudulent business practices, tawdry sex life, and membership in a New York cult that makes him so fascinating.
That cult would become infamous in the late 1930s for trying to raise an “immortal baby.” But even those who know the story of Immortal Baby Jean may not know that the cult was inspired by Hill’s teachings, practically using his most famous work as their holy text. Don’t worry, the whole story of Napoleon Hill only gets weirder from there.
Modern readers are probably familiar with the 2006 sensation The Secret, but the concepts in that book were essentially plagiarized from Napoleon Hill’s 1937 classic Think and Grow Rich, which has reportedly sold over 15 million copies to date. The big idea in both: The material universe is governed quite directly by our thoughts. If you simply visualize what you want out of life, those things and more will be delivered to you. Especially if those things involve money.
The past few decades have been a profitable era for all sorts of self-help and business success books. Napoleon Hill blazed a trail for an entire industry. But Napoleon’s early work is seen as “the source” when people get deep into self-help and business success literature. Hill’s Think and Grow Rich is passed around in certain business and real estate circles like some kind of ancient text. In fact, when The Secret emerged on the scene in the mid-2000s, countless entrepreneurial writers would pen their own books, pointing to the works of Napoleon Hill as the true basis for what The Secret called the Law of Attraction.
You can see the influence of Hill in everything from the success sermons of Tony Robbins to the crooked business dealings of Trump University. In fact, you can draw a direct line to Donald Trump’s way of thinking through Norman Vincent Peale, an ardent follower of Napoleon Hill. Reverend Peale, author of the 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking, was Donald Trump’s pastor as a child.
“You always, when the service was over, you said, ‘I’d have sat there for another hour,’” said Trump of Peale. “There aren’t too many people like that. It wasn’t the speaking ability, it was the thought process.”
The legend of Napoleon Hill has grown and morphed over the years. He really did live an extraordinary life, just not the life that his thousands of disciples over the years have claimed. It’s just too bad that Hill spent most of his life as an utter fraud—a fraud who by hook and by crook was constantly reinventing himself.
Napoleon Hill’s Wikipedia page sometimes warns that it’s written like an advertisement. Which pretty much hits the nail on the head. Hill’s entire life was an advertisement; one that spoke of honor and taught that if people visualized their dreams and narrowed down their own purpose in life, good things would come to them. And if the lessons in Hill’s writings “work” for some people, I say good for them. I’m not here to say that there’s nothing to be learned from some of Hill’s writings—especially those that speak of self-confidence, being kind to others, and going the extra mile for something you believe in. But the real story behind Napoleon Hill’s life is long past due.
After countless hours of research, I still feel like I’ve captured just a mere glimpse of the complex man that was Napoleon Hill. But it’s a glimpse that I share in the interest of uncovering Hill’s real life; a life that has been hidden to so many lost souls looking for answers in a confusing world seemingly without order or meaning.
Hill was a product of the late 19th century New Thought movement and the magic that came along with believing that mere thoughts could move mountains, or at the very least cure cancer. And after Napoleon Hill’s death in 1970, practitioners of the Prosperity Gospel would offer little but empty promises for their own enrichment. Somewhere in between we have the life of Napoleon Hill.
Cracks in History
If you pull up the website of the Napoleon Hill Foundation or flip through the official biography of Hill, released in 1995, it’s hard not to be impressed by the man’s supposed accomplishments. He was said to be an advisor to two presidents: Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Hill even claimed that he came up with FDR’s most famous phrase: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Hill was a charlatan through and through. In fact, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Hill met President Wilson or President Roosevelt, let alone acted as a trusted advisor to both. There’s little evidence Hill ever met any famous person he claimed was an inspiration for his work, outside of Thomas Edison. But we’ll get to that later.
Hill’s most infamous claim was that he met and interviewed at length the industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1908—the richest man in the world at the time. Hill said that Carnegie tasked him with interviewing the most successful men in business and learning the secrets to their success. But Hill only started making this claim long after Carnegie had died in 1919. Hill spent the 1920s telling of his great mission from Carnegie, and went on to write an entire book detailing his conversations with Carnegie. It was first published as Think Your Way to Wealth in 1948, then in 1953 as How to Raise Your Own Salary, and today published by the Napoleon Hill Foundation under the name Napoleon Hill’s The Wisdom of Andrew Carnegie as told to Napoleon Hill.
Frankly, the entire book is laughable. What’s ostensibly a conversation between Hill and Carnegie is written in the garbled style of self-help, get-rich-quick nonsense that Hill would help popularize. And tellingly, in the official biography released in 1995, Hill biographers can’t help but concede that the book released about this meeting was largely fiction—or as they put it, “a somewhat contrived conversational format featuring Hill and Andrew Carnegie.” They insist that the meeting really did happen, just that Hill expanded it into a work that contained his own ideas about success. But the 300-page ramblings are so absurd as to be transparently a work concocted from whole cloth by Hill.
I contacted Andrew Carnegie biographer David Nasaw about the alleged meeting between Carnegie and Hill, and he told me he “found no evidence of any sort that Carnegie and Hill ever met.” I pressed Nasaw about whether there was any chance at all that Hill’s book could be based on real events. Nasaw replied, “Let me put it this way. I found no evidence that the book was authentic.”
Hill was involved in countless scams over the years. One of his earliest involved buying lumber on credit, never paying his suppliers, and selling the lumber to others for cash at rates well below market value. This, as you can guess, didn’t last very long before Hill went on the run. But that was just one of many scams that Hill would try over the years. Napoleon Hill was a man whose entire racket was reinvention—selling himself and his ideas as transformative. From his involvement with an infamous cult that used Think and Grow Rich as their most holy book, to embezzlement from his own charity, the most fascinating aspects of Hill’s many misdeeds have been forgotten by history."

"Napoleon Hill, author of the self-help book Think and Grow Rich, is a career scam artist. Think and Grow Rich is among the 10 best selling self-help books of all time. Before you read Law of Success, watch this video to see how he scammed investors by selling worthless stock."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H0hMa1PpdE

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Maj Marty Hogan Always admire authors.

Thank you for the share.