Speaker 1Hello everybody, it's Trevor G. Blake and you can find out more about what I have to say about science, spirituality and business coming together in this great age of transformation at trevorgblake.com. And I've been asked to talk a little bit about Napoleon Hill and his book Think and Grow Rich because I have a book myself, I have several books, but the first book I wrote was called Three Simple Steps. And in Three Simple Steps, in one of the chapters, I talk a bit about Think and Grow Rich, but in a different way, in a heretical way, perhaps, than other people do, because Think and Grow Rich sold over 70 million copies since 1937. I understand why. But people read the book and they think that the book is, the advice in the book is coming from a man who achieved, who's, he's talked about in saintly terms by both reviewers, but also there's loads of websites out there that base their whole concept on Think and Grow Rich. And I always say to everybody, you know, before you take advice from anybody, check the background of the person giving you advice. Why do I say that? Because I grew up, so unlike Napoleon Hill, you know, all the reviews say he grew up in poverty and he found a way out. He never did. He was brought up by a stepmother and his grandfather, and his grandfather was a printer who earned a lot of money and also a self-taught dentist, which was illegal in those days, but you know, made wooden teeth for everybody. And Napoleon Hill, his stepmom bought him a typewriter, which is a hugely expensive and very rare piece of equipment when he was age 13. And she bought it to try and calm him down because he was a bit of a wild kid and he had a six-shooter and was getting into trouble. That's a very different story than the one you read on these sort of websites that paint him as some kind of saint. It's not negative, by the way. This is actually a positive conversation. It might sound like I'm being critical. I'm not. The foundation of magic is the ability to objectively observe. And so that's what I do. So I say, you know, before you take advice from anybody, including me as well, of course, check their background out and make sure that the background matches what they're talking about, that it's authentic. There are so few self-help books out there that are written by people who achieved any type of success before the book caught on for whatever reason. And that's okay, you know, so maybe the content of the book is valuable and maybe it was channeled and maybe it was genius. I don't know. So I'm not saying they don't have value. But in some cases, there is a question of authenticity. In some cases, they are just very cleverly multi-level marketed books. And if you follow the advice like a religion, you're not going to get out of your version of quicksand. You know, every self-help book, every personal development book has some nuggets of gold in it. And so they're worth reading, but they're not religious texts. I meet a lot of people who think they're religious texts and never more so than when it comes to Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich. And the reason I mention it in my book, Three Simple Steps, is because I was observing my parents' existence, my parents' life. And the similarities between my father and Napoleon Hill are just surreal. It's like I'm reading about the same person. So let me tell you about my parents. So we grew up in poverty. We were evicted three times before I was seven. We ended up escaping the creditors and out in the countryside, which as a kid was just one great adventure for me. I didn't realize we lived in poverty. I thought everybody lived like we did. It's only when I left home and came back, and I was shocked when I came back. I joined the Royal Navy. I was gone for six months. I came back and I'd forgotten what the house looked like, this ramshackle house with a tree through the roof. I'd forgotten all that. Because you get so used to seeing it every day, you don't think anything of it. And so I had a brilliant childhood, like living in the Chronicles of Narnia. My parents would just open the front door at eight o'clock in the morning and say, see you at five o'clock and off I go. And I just wander through the woods and streams and the pastures and everything. It was just incredible, wonderful. But it must have been very stressful for my parents because, you know, to be evicted with three kids when they were young, a young married couple, it must have been terribly stressful and terrifying for them. But I mentioned that because from that, as if that's not hard enough, you know, just after we escaped the third time, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and the doctors told her she had six months to live. And in those days, there were no treatments. And so people did what the doctor said. Power of suggestion, they would die six months later. I'm not kidding. That's the way it was. But my mother was different. And she, you know, she was a really strong willed and very, very strong spirit, very powerful feminine energy. And I learned so much from her, so many good things. So when people ask me about on a podcast or radio show, they ask me about, you know, what you credit for your business. I always say my parents and I say my mother in particular, because she inspired me. She inspired me to be the best version of myself. She always told me, you know, stand up straight, look the world in the eye. You can be anything you want and never give up and have self-confidence. She just was always inspiring and always telling great stories that inspired you to be a better person, really. And so my father was slightly the opposite. My father came from the school of the woman's places in the kitchen and he had had jobs, but he had quite a few different jobs. None of them had worked out. He went independent and he was a market stall trader. And that collapsed and went bankrupt. Then we were evicted from a shop that he opened selling furniture. That's why we got evicted, because he bought too much inventory that wasn't selling. Cash flow mismanagement. Okay. And then we ended up in the countryside and he tried different things there. In my teenage years, he tried and failed. And I'll use the word failed. No one ever fails, but I think you fail if it goes wrong and you don't learn from it. So I suppose in that sense, my father failed because he made the same mistake 12 times. And so he opened a tire factory, a tire changing place. He had a wine import and export and knew nothing about wine. We never had alcohol in the house. He opened a financial consulting business where he advised people on mortgages, having never had a mortgage himself in his life. Just like that, one thing after another. And they all failed, of course. And it damaged his self-confidence and his self-esteem and his ego, of course. And he eventually just gave up on life and sat at home smoking and reading books. And all that's fine. When I say that, people will say, will say something negative about my dad, but not me. I idolized the grand he walked on. I worshiped him. He's my dad. But I also observed his attitude and all of that. And his attitude and all of that was not how to fix something or how to create something that needs to be created to solve a solution or to resolve something. And his attitude was not how to make an impact in people's lives. And his attitude was not to do things for other people. But what can he get out of it? Could he make a quick buck? And that came through really strongly. He also was a very charming man, very well spoken and very intelligent. So well read. And a bit of a bit of a con man, I think, really. And because of that, people fell for his stories all the time. And so people would invest in his new idea and they would lose their house and they would lose their truck. And he never lost anything because he didn't have anything to invest in the first place. Just the charm and the ability to persuade other people to invest. And I watched all of that and gradually kind of lost a little bit of respect, I think. And so we had a terrible late teenage, typical father-son competitive relationship. But since I've been in business, I've really realized the value of the lessons I learned from him, the value of cash flow management, particularly the value of a winning idea that has purpose and impact. And so I write about that in Seekers to a Successful Startup. So right now I have two books out there, a New York Times bestseller, Three Simple Steps. A lot of that is based on the advice and inspiration that my mother and later my wife, who my mother introduced me to. She was she was my mother's nurse or one of the nurses. And so so I credit Three Simple Steps to their their incredibly inspirational advice on mentality control, on connectivity and nature and the power of their intuition. And on setting big targets that they all gave me that advice and it all inspired me to do that. And that's how my six companies are what they are, who were what they were because of sort three. And my father gave me they gave me the advice from my other book, Seekers to a Successful Startup. So I'm Seekers to a Successful Startup. I credit my father for all the lessons I learned observing his interaction with the energy of the universe, as opposed to Three Simple Steps, which is my mother's interaction with the energy of my wife's interaction with the energy universe. And so that is you know, the foundation of magic is is objective observation. So so it's not negative, not critical. But here's where here's where I have a challenge because people present Think and Grow Rich to me like it's a Bible and the secret to the universe and people present a book like The Secret as if this is the secret to the universe. And I say the same thing to everybody. Check the background of the person giving the advice, please. First, and then the value of the book sometimes is actually more about reading between the lines than what's written in the book. And just like music, just like a silence between the notes makes music. So sometimes what's not written, but you can feel and you can digest when you when you read, read a book, that's more valuable than what's in the book itself, the printed word itself. And so Napoleon Hill, you know, he's painted as a saint who grew up in poverty, but he didn't, as I say, his grandfather helped him out. He got a typewriter at 13. And so he started a magazine, which didn't go that well. So he gave that up. And then he went to work for a prominent lawyer who owned a company. And he was doing the coal mine. And one night, the manager of the coal mine got drunk and shot the bellhop and Napoleon Hill covered it up as an accident and bribed some people to make that happen not a terribly authentic start to life and but probably more common in his day than it would be today he got promoted to manager of the mine as a result and it didn't work out the mine went bust and so then he became I think a reporter and then he wanted to be a lawyer but wasn't smart enough so he ended up going to New York and that's where he first encountered some of the industrialists that were hanging around in New York at the time like Andrew Carnegie and eventually you know if you've read Think and Grow Rich you'll know that Andrew Carnegie is the main star in Think and Grow Rich and I also have studied by my friend biographies of Andrew Carnegie and I think Andrew Carnegie was a genius but I also know that Andrew Carnegie was was sensible enough this is and this is one of the lessons I teach in Secrets to a Successful Startup he was sensible enough to get cross-functional training now he might not have done it on purpose like I did but I did on purpose because of reading the biography of Andrew Carnegie and I realized when I was in a regular career that I really only knew sales and sales management I knew a little bit of marketing but I didn't understand distribution or manufacturing or finance or any of the human resources or any of the other functions of a business so but I observed in reading the biographies of Andrew Carnegie that he started out on the factory floor as a bobbing boy but he could read and write so he ended up working as a on a ledger and as a secretary and then he ended up as a message distributor in those days telegraph messages you get the telegraph he'd run to find the person that it was for and you find them in their place of work whereas everybody else the system at the time was hold on to the message till the recipient comes in but the recipient could come in three days after the telegram was arrived so Andrew Carnegie very smartly said I'll take it to the recipient and get a sixpence or whatever you got a cent or whatever you got in those days sixpence anyway and he learned so he learned to plan out routes and then later on that became really valuable in his railroad experiences so he eventually went through every aspect every function of the business until when it came time for him to run his own business he had tremendous self-confidence in how to run a business and how it all dovetails and why that's so important is all of the studies that have been done by all of the people who look like like an olian hill they look at other people and and they say what makes some successful and others not so successful but they've not actually done anything themselves to be successful so how can you observe correctly this is my challenge my main challenge for think and grow rich you you're likely to get it as wrong as get it right and he got it really wrong with Andrew Carnegie which is the main spine of the book right so so so he said oh it's because I'm he's looking at him where he is not how he got to where he is so he's looking at him and he's looking at him and he's looking at him saying oh it's because of he has all these great people surrounding him the mastermind principle I don't know there's no such thing okay so so Andrew Carnegie didn't sound surround himself with sycophants Andrew Carnegie when he got to the level who understood what it takes to get to that level and said how a business worked he surrounded himself with also people who'd done that everyone had gone from the factory floor to the top of their business and they were all already mastermind group of different experts you got it completely wrong and so so Andrew Carnegie built up through getting cross-functional training and this is one of the things that I teach in Seekers to a Successful Startup while you have the chance get as much cross-functional training as you can because as I was going to say all of the studies I've read that lock into what makes success say that the only two things that matter it's not about capital it's not about connections it's not about brilliant ideas or business plans it's about self-confidence number one item self-confidence number two item a tendency to set targets on all the studies that are worth reading those are the two things that always come up as being really that's it and so Andrew Carnegie he had built self-confidence without realizing that's what he was doing I learned from that so I deliberately set about being a pain in the neck to all of the people I worked with by knocking on the door and saying I've brought a pizza do you mind if I spend half an hour talking to you about what you do here and what your issues are and how you work it with other things and at the first that was a bit of a nuisance and then after a while people look forward to it because people love talking about their jobs and what they do and how brilliant they are so I learned a ton of stuff so when I started my first company it was easy for me to resist the temptation that so many people fall into of hiring full-time employees a lot of entrepreneurs I find come from sales or they come from software or they come from finance and they get a crisis of confidence because they don't know the other aspects of the business so they hire ahead of sales and they hire ahead of hardware and a head and an engineer and a human resources manager and you at the beginning of a company that can kill you before you even get a chance to survive because you're using up all that incredible cash so if you get cross-functional training then you can get to a certain level before you need to purchase that you can just purchase what you need through contracts and vendors for quite a long time and I became so good at this that I started my first company in 2003 for 200 which I sold in 2009 for 105.5 million right so I didn't write three simple steps until I'd had some success because I didn't think I had the right to I didn't hire an employee the whole time and then after that I've built two more companies that I've sold and I have three companies right now and I still don't have any full-time employee I've never had a full-time employee because I don't find it necessary I find that contractors and vendors do a much better job and they don't need supervising so I can focus on growth and on things that I enjoy like marketing so Napoleon Hill got it wrong I have to say and I I know it's heresy um so he he went from New York he started so with no success he started a magazine called the laws the rules of success and of course that failed too and um and then he tried some different businesses and eventually he came up with a con trick he fell out with everybody by the way he got sued by everybody he that half of them ended up in jail uh very reminiscent of how my father reacted to the energy of the world or interacted with the energy of the world and um he had a con uh trick with what little money he had left we borrowed money actually and with that borrowed money he bought some fancy cigars some fancy clothes and he hired a room in one of the top hotels in New York and he invited some publishers to come in and talk to that talk to him about his new book and one of them was Andrew Pelton who eventually became the publisher of um what eventually came Think and Grow Rich and uh while he was in the hotel Andrew Carnegie actually Napoleon Hill gave these fancy cigars away to everybody like a rich man like a fancy man and in his fancy clothes and he tipped the bell hops and everybody else really well and so when Andrew Pelton came in he realized that oh everybody knows this guy called Napoleon Hill and they think really highly of him then no one's got a bad word to say about him and he went to the fancy hotel room and it was all a con and it worked and Andrew Pelton agreed to to write his book and his book was I think it was um I think it was the 15 to 15 principles the seven notes I think it was the seven laws of success and the 15 principles of doing something or the um awful title and Andrew Pelton you know knew that's an awful title so he said we need a catchier title oh and Napoleon Hill showed him uh two pages of the book he's writing and he only had two pages hadn't written the book he wanted to know from payment which he got to get out of debt and um so so uh where was I go what was I saying oh so they came up with another title they said uh noodle use your noodle that was the title and only just before it was published did they decide you know we need to we need to change that title it's too quirky and they changed it to think and grow Rich and the book took off took off and did tremendously well um in the meantime Andrew and Napoleon Hill tried and started another six businesses and failed in all of them um he he with the uh proceeds from a magazine that he started that did quite well for a while it was it was bringing in two thousand five hundred dollars in monthly royalties which is a huge amount back in those days um and it was successful for 18 months and then the royalties dried up but in the 18 months he bought a 600 acre Ranch called Xanadu and that got foreclosed and he got kicked out and evicted similarities and uh he actually died poor penniless if he'd lived another two years he'd have been a millionaire because his friend Clement Stone bought the rights to um think and grow Rich and presented them to them presented them to Napoleon Hill close to his death as a gift and uh the book just kept going crazy just kept taking off at a time when those books were really really popular self-help was huge in the 1930s in America and almost a religion and they're all based on on Christian um concepts uh as comes out through the book of course and um and that's his story so so you know all of these websites that talk about it being a saint and a genius observing how other people are successful and passing that on I don't get it I never have and you can call it heresy and burn me on a pile of cow manure if you like but I I stand by it the books that have value and the courses that have value are pretty much written and led by people who have had some modicum of success before they decide to pass on what they've learned so that you don't have to go through the same experience but also because it's the right thing to do it's a way of giving back paying back that's what I do at Trevor G Blake dot com all my proceeds go to cancer research and development all my animal sanctuary Fluffs I don't do this for money I do this because it's the right thing to do and I really enjoy it and nothing than getting testimonials back from people whose lives have changed dramatically. I wonder in history how many people have actually spontaneously said that Think and Grow Rich really made a huge difference in my life. But I've been doing TrevorGBlake.com for less than two years now, and we have testimonials from over 2,700 people who describe getting out of their version of quicksand, and that can be a mixture of things, bad relationships, businesses that went south, heavy personal debt. All those really heavy things that we take on to ourselves. Inadvertently, no one's at fault. We just think we're doing the right thing, and it didn't turn out. But there's a way of changing that, and the way of changing that is to go to TrevorGBlake.com and go down the rabbit holes of transformation, which is personal transformation, which gets you out of your version of quicksand and lets you be the best version of yourself so that you can have the biggest impact in the world, in other people's lives, which is why we are here in the first place. And you can purchase three simple steps and seek us to a success. Successful startup for less than you would pay for a cheap lunch somewhere, and they are life-changing. And then you can go down the rabbit's hole and go on the journey of becoming your own magician because the ability to create our lives is inside of us, not outside of us. And in that, Napoleon Hill and I agree. And Rhonda Byrne and I agree on that, at least. So that's it. I was asked to talk about Think and Grow Rich, and that's my. That's my take on the whole thing. Now, if you like this conversation, please hit the subscribe button because you will do that because you want more people to hear about it. It doesn't matter whether you agree with me or not. The healthy thing is let's get the conversation out and let's all together learn how to better play with the energy that's in the universe so that we create better outcomes in our lives. And we create the lives we want, not the lives we don't want. So again, trevorgblake.com. There's a free download, The Practical Magic of the Five-Hour Workday, because what I haven't mentioned in this little video, so far, is that I never work more than five hours a day. Never have. Do it on purpose because to get that balance is really critical. The balance between the analytical hours and the relaxation hours where you get the magical aha, those ideas that flow in. If you're working 10, 12, 15 hours a day, you don't get those aha moments. And they're critical in the world of any adventure, art, music, writing, or indeed being an entrepreneur. So that's it. I've rambled long enough. So please hit the subscribe button. And leave a comment. And we'll go from there. Thank you.
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