Andrew Carnegie

"One great success story is the story of Napoleon Hill, who was born
in 1883. His mother died when he was nine years old. Hill's father
remarried, and Hill's new stepmother was a tremendous motivating
force behind this young man. Hill grew up poor, raised in a two-room
cabin, but he had a great imagination. Martha, his stepmother, instilled
in the young boy that he could become a great writer. At age fifteen,
Napoleon Hill started writing as a reporter for a small local newspaper
in Wiss County, Virginia. In 1908, an amazing thing happened: Hill
was assigned to interview one of the richest and most successful men in
the world, the steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie.
Carnegie was seventy-three at the time, and he asked Napoleon
Hill, only age 25, if he would accept a long-term assignment that
Carnegie would orchestrate. Hill was instructed to interview over
five hundred successful and wealthy men and women. He was asked
to formulate the principles that led to the success of these great
individuals. Carnegie told Hill that he would not compensate him
except for reimbursement of expenses, but agreed to introduce Hill to
each of the very successful individuals.
Of course, Napoleon Hill accepted the assignment. He was free to
accomplish it on his own time-in the end, it took a full twenty years.
He called his findings The Philosophy of Achievement, and the rest is
history. Hill went on to become one of the most prolific self-help writers
of all time. Penning many books, he was recognized early on for the
book Think and Grow Rich. Most of his books are still available today,
including Success through a Positive Mental Attitude, which changed my
life when I first read it at age twenty-one.
Hill's interviewees included Edison, Bell, Eastman, Ford, Woolworth,
and Theodore Roosevelt. The following are two of Hill's quotes:
"Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your
soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements."
"Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish,
but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything."

How fantastic is it that words written on a page can change
someone's life forever! Words can turn a failure into a tremendous
success. I wonder how many people have been as positively touched as I
have been by Napoleon Hill's books and his powerful words.

Andrew Carnegie was once asked, in the early 1900s, how it was
possible that he had so many millionaires (forty-three at one point)
working for him. He answered: "Dealing with people is a lot like digging
for gold: When you go digging for an ounce of gold, you have to move
tons of dirt. But when you go digging, you don't go looking for the dirt;
you go looking for the gold." C-John Carinci