Stella Fred - Selling You! : A Practical Guide to Achieving the Most by Becoming Your Best

Copyright 2006 by The Napoleon Hill Foundation. Additional excerpts and material from other Napoleon Hill Foundation publications were compiled and edited by Bill and Ann Hartley. Published by Brilliance Audio, Grand Haven, Michigan.

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Ray Cashbaugh; Cover images 2011 Shutterstock Images LLC

This book has been authorized by, and a royalty is paid to, The Napoleon Hill Foundation - a not-for-profit educational institution dedicated to making the world a better place in which to live. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4558-1003-1

CONTENTS

Thirty-five years ago a young man dropped from a moving freight train in West Orange, New Jersey, and hurriedly made his way to the laboratory of Thomas A. Edison. When asked to state his business, before being permitted to see Mr. Edison, the young man boldly replied, I am going to become his partner!

His boldness got him past the secretary. An hour later he was at work, scrubbing floors in the Edison plant. That hour of selling was worth millions of dollars. The young man was Edwin C. Barnes. Five years later he was a partner of the great Edison, and he became famous as the distributor of Edisons dictating machine that revolutionized the way businesses operated.

Edwin Barnes accumulated a fortune and he owed every cent of it to the hour he spent in private conversation with Edison. During that hour he sold himself so thoroughly that it gave him his opportunity to go into partnership with one of the greatest men this country ever produced.

My own first job was that of secretary to General Rufus A. Ayers. I started working for him while I was still in my teens, and before I was twenty I became the general manager of one of Rufus Ayers coal mines. The jump from secretary to general manager was made in less than one hour, during which I sold myself to him by voluntarily doing a service for which I neither expected nor asked for pay. That sale changed my life and led directly to my alliance with Andrew Carnegie, which has ultimately affected millions of people around the world.

At the request of Andrew Carnegie, I began to research all causes of success and failure, and to organize the results into a philosophy of individual achievement. The facts described in this book were not merely written; they were lived by the men and women who made America the greatest industrial nation on earth. I got the facts directly from those people. For thirty years I had the collaboration of Americas most creative and successful entrepreneurs, inventors, businessmen, industrialists, and political leaders.

During all those years of research I interviewed and gained the cooperation of more than 500 of the most successful men and women in the world, including Henry Ford. Thomas A. Edison, Luther Burbank, President Woodrow Wilson, John D. Rockefeller, Harvey S. Firestone, William Wrigley Jr., F. W. Woolworth, and scores of others who sold themselves into fabulous richeswith the aid of the same principles of selling you will find in this book.

EDITORS NOTE

Few people have ever understood salesmanship as well as Napoleon Hill. In addition to being world-famous as the author of the bestselling self-help books of all time, Hill became a legend in business circles for personally teaching salesmanship so effectively that he turned around failing companies by multiplying sales many times over. He not only taught salespeople how to double and triple their income, but he also created college-level courses on advertising and sales, then sold the colleges on the concept of making his courses part of their curriculum.

Although Hills philosophy of personal achievement was rooted in the secrets of success told to him by the leaders of business and industry, he also learned some of the lessons the hard way, having personally launched a number of startup companies that made fortunes then lost everything, some due to war, others to the Depression. He sold ideas to some of Americas biggest companies, he settled major labor disputes by selling both management and labor on new and better ways to work together, and he helped two presidents to sell America to Americans during hard times when the average man on the street was losing faith in the future.

W. Clement Stone, who was himself renowned for his ability to turn cold calls into sales, was so impressed with Hills ability that Stone asked Hill to take charge of creating a new sales program for his insurance company, Combined Insurance Company (now known as Aon Corporation). As you will read in the chapter on Master Mind alliances, Combined Insurance was already big, but the sales course Hill created turned it into a giant.

Selling You! offers the most complete exploration of Napoleon Hills approach to sales and selling yourself. In preparing this edition, the editors conducted an extensive review of Hills books, speeches, lectures, articles, and recordings to find the best explanations, examples, anecdotes, and illustrations. The structure of the book is based upon the sales-oriented chapters from Napoleon Hills How to Sell Your Way Through Life, augmented by the relevant chapters and excerpts from Hills four-volume masterwork, Law of Success, and his classic bestseller, Think and Grow Rich: The 21st-Century Edition. This edition also features examples and anecdotes from Hills other works, including selections from Believe and Achieve and from Napoleon Hills Keys to Success, as well as material from The Success System That Never Fails by W. Clement Stone, and A Lifetime of Riches: The Biography of Napoleon Hill by Michael J. Ritt Jr. and Kirk Landers.

In preparing this new and updated edition, where material might be considered dated or out of step with contemporary practices, the original text has been updated or augmented with relevant new material.

In addition to contemporary examples, where the editors felt it would be of interest to the reader, we have included notes that provide relevant information about more recent developments. We have also suggested books and other materials that complement various aspects of Napoleon Hills philosophy.

Further, the editors have approached the written text as we would that of a living author. When we encountered what modern grammarians would consider to be run-on sentences, outdated punctuation, or other matters of form, we opted for contemporary usage.

As noted previously, the basic structure of Selling You! is based on an adaptation of the text from How to Sell Your Way Through Life. In many cases the basic text has been adapted or elaborated upon by carefully integrating into it other material originally published in Law of Success or Think and Grow Rich: The 21st-Century Edition. In those instances where the editors have inserted complete paragraphs or longer segments from these two publications or from Hills other writings, the additional material and the original source are clearly identified. All editorial commentary and new examples are clearly set off in a font and style that is different from Napoleon Hills text.