Interesting listening

While this book was written many decades ago there are still some valuable nuggets to be taken from it.

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Timeless Wisdom

My personal library comes from #Audible1. I'm dyslexic and listening to books like "How to Own Your Own Mind" while doing other things is incredible! I love learning and greatly value the 10 steps that Napoleon Hill talks about through his interview with Carnegie. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in becoming more successful in life.

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great book

Its well written and has been a great journey inspiring thoughts and ways I have already or can apply new ways of observations from this book in real life situations. I wouldn't call it narrow sighted in any fashion howver there was a few times it would narrow the viewer only to American way and that was brief and only part that maybe could be expanded on in junction of us as a planetary community. Either way loved the book and effort and all shared. Thank you

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Excellent !

Great compliment to think and grow Rich and clarifies many of the concepts. Enjoyed it very much !

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Must Read

I wish I read this book sooner. It is full of great insights our our mind and how to effectively use it. I feel like I’ve been getting a 4 cylinder performance out of a 400M cylinder engine because of poor understanding. I’m really to now go full throttle.
Great read
Phil

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How to own your own mind

I loved. The narrator was good as well. I will be going though it again

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Still Relevant

This message is still relevant so many years later. It is a great guide for personal growth.

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Mind Opening

I loved the examples of your regular people used definiteness of purpose along with the other principles to attract physical manifestations. We have no time for negative thoughts if we are to achieve health and prosperity.

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Guard your mind, then get to work

The title "How To Own Your Own Mind" caught my attention more compellingly than the author's better known "Think And Grow Rich" -- though it turns out that there's more than one shameless plug in this book for the other.

There are some real gems to be gleaned from this book, if you can get through the lackluster start -- and if you can tolerate the overblown and old-fashioned copy, the fake interview format, and the author's ideological and political ticks.

Indeed, there's great utility in the book's presentation of the aspects of the mind and of how to go about training and controlling one's habits of thought and action as well as harnessing the power of the mind to focus on a definite major purpose in one's life -- even just as a helpful way of looking at the matter, though the book stresses action as a key point. The keen reader should be able to cull the nonsense and not be distracted by the more dubious parts of the book, if he or she can make it past the first chapter and its subsequent "analysis".

The so-called "mastermind alliance" (also apparently espoused in _Think And Grow Rich_) is overzealous terminology for a business network, management team, or peer support group, depending on the specifics. The idea is good, but the bombastic name is just one of several instances of grandiosity or self-delusion tactics posing as inspiration. And then there are obvious truisms that sometimes seem to be presented with wide-eyed wonder, where it's unclear whether the tone is due more to the author's individual style or to the era in which he was writing.

Certain obvious contradictions and other more or less significant issues can perhaps be attributed to the book's overblown style, though its admonition to "accurate thought" gives them an ironic gloss. Among the questionable items (stated as I interpret them): (1) Don't let your mind be controlled, for example by ideology and half-truths -- except by such ideology and half-truths as fed to it by the book itself. (2) Dedicate yourself to accurate thinking, but feel free to disregard the effect of material circumstances or historical milieu; it's _belief_ that makes all things possible. (3) Don't make "riches" your primary goal, but riches, riches, RICHES! (4) And if you didn't already think so, apparently you'll have to take the author's word for such things as that the desire for fame is a universal human trait.

And though it can be dismissed as a minor part, it's especially worth mentioning the pseudo-scientific (and at the same time pseudo-spiritual) suggestion in this book that discrete individuals influence each other's thoughts through mysterious thought connections that act in the same way as electrons and other physical particles interacting with one another. If it were clearly stated to be a metaphor it would be fine, but it's presented literally. The idea seems to be walked back later on, but it still undercuts the otherwise useful message that one's focus and one's environment affect one's achievements in life, and it's the sort of thing that the serious reader can do without. There's no question that thoughts are, in essence, physical phenomena arising in the brain, and also that people influence one another, but combining these facts into the singular notion that people's influence on each other's thoughts is through some sort of weird telepathic electrical connection between two minds, rather than just the result of a biological predisposition of human beings to be able to communicate (i.e. send and receive messages) consciously or unconsciously through words and body language in the physical world, i.e. the normally recognized channels, is akin to the sort of pseudo-quantum-physical mumbo jumbo that Deepak Chopra et al. continue to spout to this day. Indeed, the prudent skeptic might find it worth noting that the "believe and achieve" ethos of this book (related to the New Thought movement) is the not-so-remote jumping-off point for such schlockier schlock as _The Secret_.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but guard your mind appropriately while reading this book.

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I've shortened my initial review but will leave the following, as I find it interesting background:

In following up on my questions about the book, I've read that Napoleon Hill was a noted conman and repeat fraudster. And Andrew Carnegie, for his part, benefited from insider trading (though apparently not illegally), and was anti-union, monopolistic, and all about the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.

In any event, the supposed interview with Andrew Carnegie that comprises a large part of the book (interspersed with Hill's "analysis") is undoubtedly made up. Hill made his claim to have interviewed Carnegie only after Carnegie's death, and Hill's "official" biography (first published 25 years after his death under the aegis of the Napoleon Hill Foundation) further claims that all of the documentary proof of Hill's association with Carnegie and other notable figures (including the various presidents Hill claimed to have been an advisor to) was destroyed in a storage fire. And conveniently for the narrative, even the present book was, until recently, "hidden away in a vault since 1941".

Each book is a product of its time, and no book can be all things, but it's perhap telling that in recent years the Napoleon Hill Foundation, which still exists and in whose archives this text was supposedly found (the book is another "official publication of the Napoleon Hill Foundation"), has given its annual award to at least one dubious multi-level marketing company peddling unfounded health claims about its products.

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Only book you need to live a fulfilled live

Top ten books ever read by myself. I will be gifting this to everyone I care about.

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4 people found this helpful