The Magic Ladder to Success (Condensed Classics)

Your-Step-By-Step Plan to Wealth and Winning

Napoleon Hill, Mitch Horowitz

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781722521486
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

HERE IS THE LADDER TO YOUR DREAMS—TAKE THE FIRST STEP!

In 1930, the legendary Napoleon Hill gathered his principles of achievement into The Magic Ladder to Success, the first digest of his life-changing ideas. Now, historian and New Thought scholar Mitch Horowitz refines Hill's seventeen techniques to their absolute essentials so that you can experience the success master's full range of ideas within the space of a single lunch hour or commute.

This is your golden opportunity to experience the wealth-building program that transforms mediocrity into excellence, and stagnation into wealth. Along with Mitch's insightful new introduction, you will discover:

• How the sexual urge can be transformed into success
• W hy you must possess a singular aim in life.
• T he hidden dimensions of the Golden Rule.
• Wh y enthusiasm—tempered with self-control—is the elixir of achievement.
• H ow to create and sustain power in your life.

This Condensed Classics edition of The Magic Ladder to Success is a perfect introduction to Hill's work for the newcomer, and an outstanding refresher for the veteran. You will discover something new each time you visit it.

LESSON ONE

The Master Mind

The Master Mind may be defined as: “a composite mind, consisting of two or more individual minds working in perfect harmony, with a definite aim in view.”

Recall the definition of success, which is attainable through the application of power, and you will more quickly grasp the meaning of the term Master Mind, as it will be immediately obvious that a group of two or more minds, working in harmony and perfect coordination, will create power in abundance.

All success is achieved through the application of power. The staring point, however, may be described as a burning desire for the achievement of some specific, definite objective.

Just as the oak tree, in the embryo, sleeps within the acorn, success begins in the form of an intense desire. Out of strong desires grow the motivating forces that cause men to cherish hopes, build plans, develop courage, and stimulate their minds to a highly intensified degree of action in pursuit of some definite plan or purpose.

Desire, then, is the starting point of all human achievement. There is nothing back of desire except the stimuli through which strong desire is fanned into a hot flame of action. These stimuli are known and have been included as a part of the Law of Success philosophy described in this book.

It has been said, and not without reason, that one may have anything one wants, within reasonable limitations, providing one wants it badly enough! Anyone who is capable of stimulating the mind to an intense state of desire is capable also of more than average achievement in pursuit of that desire. It must be remembered that wishing for a thing is not the same as desiring it with such intensity that out of this desire grow impelling forces of action that drive one to build plans and put those plans to work. A wish is merely a passive form of desire. Most people never advance beyond the wishing stage.

THE BASIC MOTIVATING FORCES OF HUMAN ACTION

There are eight basic motivating forces, one or more of which is the starting point of all noteworthy human achievement. These motivating forces are:

1. The urge of self-preservation

2. The desire for sexual contact

3. The desire for financial gain

4. The desire for life after death

5. The death for fame; to possess power

6. The urge of love (separate and distinct from the sex urge)

8. The desire for revenge (prevalent in the more undeveloped minds)

9. The desire to indulge one’s egotism

Men make use of great power only when urged by one or more of these eight basic motives. The imaginative forces of the human mind become active only when spurred on by the stimulation of a well-defined motive! Master salesmen have discovered that all salesmanship is based upon an appeal to one or more of these eight basic motives, which impel men and women to action. Without this discovery no one could become a master salesman.

The Master Mind principle described in this lesson is the medium through which all personal power is applied. For this reason, every known mind stimulant, and every basic motive that inspires action in all human endeavor, are mentioned in this book and chapter.

A Master Mind may be created by any group of people who coordinate their minds in a spirit of perfect harmony. The group may consist of any number from two upward. Best results appear available from the blending of six or seven minds.

It has been suggested that Jesus discovered how to make use of the principle of mind chemistry, and that His seemingly miraculous performances grew out of the power He developed through the blending of the minds of his twelve disciples. It has been pointed out that when one of the disciples, Judas, broke faith, the Master Mind immediately disintegrated and Jesus met with the supreme catastrophe of His life.

When two or more people harmonize their minds and produce the effect known as a Master Mind each person in the group becomes vested with the power to connect with and gather knowledge through the subconscious minds of all the other members. This power becomes immediately noticeable, having the effect of stimulating the mind to a higher rate of vibration, and otherwise evidencing itself in the form of a more vivid imagination and the consciousness of what appears a sixth sense. It is through this sixth sense that new ideas “flash” into the mind. These ideas take on the nature and form of the subject dominating the mind of the individual.

Every public speaker has felt the influence of mind chemistry, for it is well-known that as soon as the individual minds of an audience become en rapport with the speaker (that is, attached to the rate of vibration of the mind of the speaker), there is a noticeable increase of enthusiasm in the speaker’s mind, and he often rises to heights of oratory that surprise all, including himself.

It must not be presumed that a Master Mind will immediately spring, mushroom fashion, out of every group of minds that make a pretense of coordination in a spirit of harmony! Harmony, in the real sense of the word, is as rare among groups of people as is genuine Christianity among those who proclaim themselves Christian.

Harmony is the nucleus around which the state of mind known as the Master Mind must be developed. Without this element of harmony, there can be no Master Mind, a truth that cannot be repeated too often.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SEXUAL URGE AND GENIUS

The urge of sex is, by far, the most powerful of the eight basic motivating factors that stimulate the mind to action. Because of the importance of this subject, it has been reserved as the closing segment of the first of the seventeen factors constituting the Law of Success. It is also revisited in the lessons on enthusiasm and the habit of health.

The part that the sexual urge plays in the achievement of outstanding success was first discovered by the author in his studies of the biographies of great leaders, and in his analysis of men and women of the present age who have risen high in their fields. But to be highly sexed is not sufficient, of itself, to produce a genius. Only those who understand the nature of sexual urge, and who know how to transmute this powerful emotion into other channels of action than that of sexual contact, rise to the status of a genius. The urge of sex is a driving force compared to which all other motives must take second place. A mind that has been aroused through intense sexual desire becomes receptive to that impulse of ideas that “flash” into the mind from outside sources through what is ordinarily known as “inspiration.”...