July 29, 2023
Good afternoon all,
In this post, and the following series of posts, we will be reading Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich. We will refer to this series of posts as OWD##.
I have read this book once before, finishing it just a few weeks ago. A lovely text it was, and as I read through it the first time, I knew I had to read this again. This time, I want to take notes and publish them.
I’ll likely be doing this in roughly 30min reading sessions. I’ll take notes and reference lines directly, italicized, with page markers and thoughts and things.
The book is broken into 2 parts: a bit about ol’ Nappy by himself, and his interview with the devil.
Without further ado, let’s get into it!
Um…I’ll skip taking notes for the forwards by Sharon Lechter (arranged and annotated), and Mark Victor Hansen (important player in the self-help/dev/disc/improvement space). Still gonna read them though, I encourage you too as well, but they are not core to what the book is, so yeah.
Chapter One: My First Meeting with Andrew Carnegie
He writes as if a year like 1908 were just a few ago, the way I might talk about 2015 (realizing that is now 8 years ago, sheesh).
Hustle culture is not new, it has almost certainly been a part of humanity for millennia.
I wonder if Hill actually spoke to Carnegie in the manner written, interesting that Carnegie understood Hill so well and was adamant on pushing him to interview all those people and write it all up in his works. Carnegie speaks as if he were a Roman philosopher, that is to say, he speaks as if he were a practitioner of Greek philosophy, and Aurelius or Seneca type figure, and of course Epictetus comes to mind as well.
According to a brief q&a w/ chatgpt3 (the free one lol), it is highly likely that Carnegie was familiar with Roman philosophy and that he and Hill shared a deep connection.
Carnegie tells Hill to interview failures in addition to successes because you will learn so much from the failures, potentially more than from the latter.
I always wonder though, as someone who has had struggles, longer periods of pain, and a lack of direction, if I could have seen people who were successful, I would have been able to mirror them and learn from them and become successful myself. I think more people have unsuccessful role models than successful role models. In other words, more people see failure up close, mimicking failure, than success. So why is all the focus on learning from failure rather than success?
I understand that you can learn what not to do, learn where a subject could have made a different choice, or held on a little longer and they would have found their diamonds, and various things of this sort, but how can we say that those succeed have fewer lessons than those who fail/give up?
What do you guys think of that?
Begin Life Anew (section in the chapter)
So up to this point in the chapter, Hill recites the conversation with Carnegie and now delves into how that conversation showed its power at two points in Hill’s life. Interestingly, Carnegie had used the term “other self” and Hill connected deeply to it.
In my own readings of various books, including The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, I came to adopt the term “higher self” as my equivalent. Also, I see my higher self as a sort of parent/guardian angel/advisor to my “lower” self – my “inner child” or “ego” or something of this sort. In the space they meet, the synapse as it were, I find the balance between man and spirit. I imagine that this sort of thing occurs somewhere in the prefrontal/neo cortex or deep near the hypothalamus, and for people w/ inner monologues, it shows up in speech centers, and for others, in more visual centers of the brain.
So what was Hill’s mission? Well, it was to interview as many people as possible over 20-25 years to find the root causes of success and failure. He interviewed roughly 25,000 “failures” and 500 “successes” and distilled from this body of work 17 principles of achievement and 30 causes of failure.
Hill took a couple of forays into advertising, magazine publishing, and a few others along the way to his main goal, and he was rather successful in these endeavors too, with the help of a bunch of people of course. Interestingly, Carnegie’s Challenge (as I am deciding to call it with these keystrokes), ate away at him, in the back of his mind, for years. These detours occurred before, through, and after WW1.
Hill, feeling the nagging pull of Carnegie, dipped out from a sales training school he built, which got $30k in 1923 dollars in the first six months, having no money with him – strange. That’s about $535k in 2023 dollars, crazy what a hundred plus years of the Fed, fiat money, and a human Congress can do to the value of money.
Defeat Is Converted into Victory (section in the chapter)
Hill took a 7-8 mile walk to clear his head and then something happened.
Hill stood still, and felt a command from his other self, “The time has come for you to complete the philosophy of achievement which you began at Carnegie’s suggestion. Go back home at once and begin transferring the data you have gathered from your own mind to written manuscripts.”
Oh, Hill had a family at this point, 3 sons. And it was Christmas Eve, lol. At the time, this mattered a lot more than it does now, for like religious, spiritual, familial reasons.
I realize important things on walks when I allow myself to think rather than listen to audiobooks or podcasts or music or being high (weed – THC pen cartridges). I should do that more often – nothing but my ears and the wind. (If/When I go bald, I’ll at least know the scalpular feeling that all airbenders know)
Doubt Makes Its Appearance (section in chapter)
Right off the bat – Hill says “The ‘spell’, if the experience may be so called, passed away.” I’m thinking he was depressed for a while and the above walk and realization helped bring him out of it.
One thing I have not yet touched on is that Hill tells us this story because when he was feeling really down, he had to learn physically/emotionally that his learnings must first be applied to himself, then to others. Without that firsthand experience, he would not be fully credible. He tells us of his curve oscillating between levels of fulfillment caused by the misalignment of his pursuits with his true mission – to study success and failure (though hill also refers to the construction of “a philosophy of personal achievement”). As he comes down to a local (potentially global) low point, he uses his other self, and what he knows to be true, to pull him up, creating an inflection point towards a more stable fulfillment curve/trend. Very interesting indeed.
So Hill had taken that walk and realized he must act immediately and begin writing the philosophy/manuscript. He was a bit restless in the beginning because of the tension between the desire to quit and the desire to continue.
I find that that happens to me a lot, especially when I am having trouble focusing (which is often, especially when doing things I don’t really want to, bore me [of which I may be consciously unaware], or it makes me anxious). This also happens when I have my phone/laptop or easy access to distractions (twitter, reddit, youtube). I’m just noting that his restlessness in that moment at his typewriter reminds me of my own daily life. Of course, they are very different, I’m suffering from tech addiction, lack of discipline, etc, while Hill was breaking through a sort of writer’s blook as it were.
He wrote three manuscripts, completing them by early 1924 (to follow along the timeline).
Hill literally purchased a college – the Metropolitan Business College in Cleveland, Ohio – who knows if it’s even around anymore, or how much it cost, or who he was with, etc etc.
I just spent the last like 15 minutes frenetically searching for any record of the Metropolitan Business College, in Cleveland, and could find no such record(s) of its existence. The closest thing I found was Metropolitan Business College in Seattle which was called something like Seattle Business College for a while. So I don’t think this College was super reputable, old, or long-lasting. A few prompts to ChatGPT3 yielded empty results. Interesting.
I just spent the last like 10 minutes digging further into Hill. As it turns out, there’s a lot of controversy around Hill for fraud allegations, potentially lying, misleading, etc. No records at all of him ever meeting Carnegie, many of his businesses went into bankruptcy, a lot of legal issues, and other stuff.
Doesn’t make doubt, however, the validity of his ideas in this book (since I’ve read it already) or in Think and Grow Rich (which is more about fulfillment than wealth).
Super weird though, even if he is a conman. Maybe this is why the family waited for so long to publish, because they know the truth of his life (assuming it is fabricated). Waiting until Hill is more famous than ever, and there’s no one alive who can discredit him to a wide audience, would be a good way to dodge that kind of criticism.
Chance (?) Saves My Life (section in the book, question mark not a typo)
The veracity of this part of the book was questioned by folks whose conversations/thoughts/arguments appeared in search results, including Wikipedia.
Hill kind of reminds me of a Kiyosaki or Cardone or Trump type.
Regardless of the truthfulness of this part of the book, Hill uses it as a tool to build the idea that isolation and time with one’s own thoughts can help bring about great positive change.
So apparently this guy, a journalist, Don R Mellet was wacked by a couple of bootlegger assassins for exposing corruption and cooperation between Canton County police and the bootleggers. Hill says that he was targeted for assassination (via phone call). He believes it was because his relationship with Mellet (which began on the idea that they would publish Hill’s work together) was actually about further exposing the corruption, yikes.
Hill upped and dipped to West Virginia to stay with family for a while. He was paranoid during this period, and he carried an automatic pistol. I think today that would be like a semi-auto like any standard pistol, but I cannot be sure because I don’t care enough about firearms to google it all.
He mentions his paranoia being terrible or two reasons. First, it keeps him in a constant state of fear (like sustained anxiety). Second, because he was in fear for his life, he stayed in his house, isolated, he was rendered mostly idle. So from a neuro/psycho/physio point of view, Hill’s nervous system was overdosing on amygdala activity, stress hormones, and other things which typically destroy one’s mind and perception of reality. That’s a rough spot to be in, and a visit here is always for months at a time.
Hill was stricken with insecurity. For a guy who preached successful mindsets/habits, overcoming adversity, and all the things, he was straight up succumbing to the adversity, abandoning those habits, and all the things, and hating himself for it. One might argue the writings he wanted to publish caused a sense of imposter syndrome during this time. It would be an awkward argument I wouldn’t actually argue, which is why I said, “One might”.
The Most Dramatic Moment of My Life (section in chapter)
***Maybe from my next session writing and onward, I will only write after I read so I am not essentially reporting on everything that happens in the book, sentence by sentence. Also, date the beginning, and time stamp that and the end of each writing. This will help you and readers know more clearly what your habit and timespan are like.***
Hill believes that this part of his life was there to test him and force him to overcome his adversity. We’re in another local low, which is most definitely a heck of a lot lower than the previous low.
I have taken that sort of path before, a low, a rebound, and then a further, more costly low. Hill, says this was to discover his “other self”, which I call my higher self, no quotes buddy. My higher self is with me all the time, guiding and advising me, sometimes doing the hard work with me, or for me, if you can imagine that.
Sometimes a mediation is something you do for 10, 20, 30, 60, 180 minutes, on maybe a regular basis. But sometimes, a meditation is a long, drawn-out period of weeks/months of intense focus on yourself. People would call it ghosting or falling off the face of the earth or something these days.
This other self of Hill’s coming through and convincing him that it was only a test, gave him great relief, and confidence, that he could solve his problem and achieve his goal.
Hill ends this section talking about what’s been mentioned and his decision to go to Philadelphia. A sudden decision, he gets $50-1924 (around $860 in 2023) and begins a drive on over, from West Virginia.
–End today’s session. 7/15/2023 2:48pm
–Begin session Saturday 7/29/2023 @ 10:16 am. Location: Honda Service Center
My “Other Self” Takes Command (chapter subsection)
Hill starts off briefly describing the age-old concept of the two entities within oneself which compete for dominance within the mind, namely, good vs evil, courage vs fear, yin vs yang, the two wolves – whichever you feed gets stronger. Not a new idea to me, but to some it will be. What I like about it is that it takes the age-old proverb thing and embeds it within the context of Hill’s story, so it’s a new perspective and I like that.
Hill takes himself on over to Philly and finds someone who can provide him with $25k in what I believe is still 1924 dollars for his book/publishing input costs. $25k 1924 is about $446k 2023. That works out to new/old = 446/25 a nearly 1700% decrease in the value of the dollar, what’s wild. 24/446 = 0.056 so the 25k is about 5.6% of the 446. Crazy how powerful the government is.
Hill is stricken by his “other self” and in the context of the two inner selves, this one he calls the “faith self”. It sort of instills confidence, certainty, and fearlessness within Hill. The things it tells him to do are in-line with his goal: publishing the book, finishing the quest set before him, allegedly, by Carnegie (though I am skeptical).
So he gets on over to Philly and instead of getting a $1 room, he goes for a $40 suite at the best hotel he can find, which remains nameless. In a somewhat meditative trance, the other self communicates with Hill, giving him a list of commands about how to say what he needs to say the person who will provide the capital when he finds them and that he should understand that the other self is not doing the work for him, but clearing a path forward.
This sounds a lot like a bipolar episode. Think about it with me for a sec, Hill goes through a few business ventures, winds up in a wacky circumstance where someone in his circle gets wacked. Then he gets paranoid (maybe justifiably, but maybe the way he handled it was poor). Then he hangs out at his in-laws’ house for several months without providing any income, but some tasks around the house to feel useful. One day he gets up, asks for a bunch of cash, then drives overnight to Philly. Once there, he takes that money and buys the most expense hotel he can find and gets these thoughts which mimic religious thoughts when someone says they met Jesus or something, off to go do something wild.
Faith? Bipolar? I don’t know, sounds a bit manic and sharp to me. And all of this to publish a manuscript. Good lord, he might actually be having a manic episode here. At least it looks like it. Could also be something related to seasonal changes, dietary changes, the social relationships at home, the progress he made in his thinking, etc.
As someone who has struggled with depression, anxiety, and a diagnosis (then retracted lol, weird story for another time) of bipolar type 2, I have a pretty good understanding of how such episodes may present themselves. Typical activities manic episodes include are shopping sprees, manuscripts, insomnia, drugs, sex, gambling, excessive risks (think physical activities), and more. I would then say that what one does in a manic episode is probably going to occur from a set of activities that exist in their mind or environment. For Hill, he wanted to publish a book, not do drugs or go on a shooting or shopping spree (both can be done at shopping malls) and talk to some people he hasn’t for a while.
Was driving overnight a symptom of insomnia? Maybe, but a lot of people can pull an all-nighter without it being insomnia. However, Hill has not mentioned rest, so we are unsure as to whether he slept or sat awake as these thoughts spontaneously generated.
Was buying the most expense room he could find a symptom of excessive spending/shopping spree? Maybe, but it was only one thing for a few days, and Hill is the kind of guy who could figure out a way to get food/gas money, especially back in the day. It was the ‘20s after all, things were decent overall.
Were these thoughts of chutzpah, confidence, and clear direction delusional and part of some manic stream of consciousness? Maybe, but they also could have been a clear plan that has been part of his background thought for years.
So who knows? Not me lol!
Lastly, Hill acknowledges his “fear” self (juxtaposed to the “faith” self) will always be there, lurking in the background, awaiting a time to strike. He must be vigilant to keep it at bay.
End chapter End session @ 10:44a