When Napoleon Hill wrote his best-selling classic Think and Grow Rich back in 1937, he planted his famous secret within its pages; actually, in two parts. The first part of the secret he revealed openly to his readers. However, the second part of the secret he did not openly reveal. Hill says however, that it will jump off the page when the reader is ready to receive it. Exactly what this secret is has been the subject of continuous discussion ever since.
It was around twenty years ago that I first read the book and I must have, quite simply, not been ready to receive the secret, because it certainly did not jump out of the page as the author suggested it would. In fact, even when I came back to the book, after many years, the secret still remained doggedly elusive, at least to me.
I began to search the internet to see what other people had to say about Hills secret; and I found many people who claimed to know it too. Some wanted to sell the secret and some gave their interpretation of it, but I found that almost no two versions of the secret were the same. So I began to think, for a while, that there was no secret at all; and later still, that the secret was that there is no secret.
But then, a thought struck me. Hill says in the book that people like Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell and John D Rockerfeller had all used the secret to acquire their wealth, so I figured that I might be able to get some insight into the secret by studying how these people had become wealthy. But alas, I was not able to find a common theme that might suggest they were all applying the same principle.