Reid - Think and grow rich!: stickability, the power of perseverance

The Key to All Great Achievements

by J. B. Hill, grandson of Napoleon Hill

Words of wisdom, age-old adages, myths and folktaleswhatever we call them, the stories we tell one another and pass down to the next generation connect us across race, religion, and national boundaries. Although these stories have diverse themes, each is powered by the testimony of example, and no story resonates so universally as the tale of how to succeed in life.

But what does this mean? For most of us, it is the application of the experience of others to our own lives. Samuel Smiles, a Scottish author, wrote the first book about success in 1859. Appropriately titled Self Help, it laid the framework for the writings of Orison Swett Marden, and later Napoleon Hill, by teaching success through the parables of experience. Napoleon Hill, who is arguably the founder of the modern-day success movement, was a master storyteller who compiled the first comprehensive philosophy of success. He did this after discovering that the most remarkable self-made men of his timelike Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and Henry Fordall did the same thing to succeed, although they each used different means.

For the past 150 years, success philosophers and thinkers have proved time and again that one trait in particular appears to be a key to all great achievementpersistence. It was persistence that allowed George Goethals to build the Panama Canal when so many had failed. It was persistence that drove Edison to success in devising a viable lightbulb. It was persistence that pushed Abraham Lincoln through a broken heart, two business failures, and eight losses for election to public office to become president of the United States. Napoleon Hill wrote:

One reason why most men seldom accumulate fortunes until they have passed well beyond the 40-year goal post of life is that they must undergo failures and adversities and overcome sufficient obstacles to develop in them sufficient knowledge to accumulate wealth.