6 Success Principles based on Napoleon Hill's philosophy

Success is an enormous subject that extends its roots in everyone's life. Many people misunderstand what it means to be successful in their own minds and how to achieve that, so it might seem like a wild goose chase.

However, some other people actually learned the secrets behind success and managed to find and catch that goose.

So let’s dive into what it means to be successful and analyze some crucial steps for gaining what it is that we desire.

What Can We Call Success?

Success as a term is a really vague one that can cover pretty much an infinite number of things. So starting, it’s imperative to understand what success means to us, before trying to create the appropriate mindset to achieve it.

Success, in general, is a psychological state that a person enters when they attain a certain physical object, state of mind, or mainly way of life they got motivated enough to try and earn, for that is something that makes the person happier in case it’s acquired.

Because of the vagueness of that definition, every person on earth has success on their mind in a different way than the other people; meaning that success gets attached to something a person wants to fight for and receive (like a job, a healthy body, a specific way of living, etc.).

There is one more thing: success is divided into 2 categories: minor wins and a purpose in life.

Minor Wins

Minor wins are a variety of things that we want to achieve in the short term and don't need to intermingle with each other.

These are important for our satisfaction with ourselves because they provide us with a mood boost (since we achieve or attain something we want now) and hence act as motivators for pursuing our major purpose in life.

Typical examples of minor wins are: getting a promotion, watching our body getting fit in a way we intended it to, learning a useful skill for our life, etc.

Purpose in Life

The purpose in our lives is something of extreme importance to our well-being. It’s something a human fights for in a long period of his/her life, trying to act in the appropriate ways to acquire it, and won’t be happy unless he/she gets it.

It’s that one thing that wakes us up in the morning and gets us out of bed, that motivates us to learn and work hard so that as long as we are in the path of grasping it, we will be happy with ourselves.

Our purpose in life is something unique for an individual, so there aren’t typical examples, but something like becoming financially independent is fitting the criteria.

How to Grow The Success Mindset

By understanding what we actually comprehend as success in our lives, we can move on to practical ways of achieving that.

There are actually a lot of things to have in mind when one is trying to be successful, but the appropriate mindset is of most importance, considering it is the starting point in our success path.

1. Definiteness of purpose

We covered this one in the previous part, but it is so vital it needs to be highlighted again.

Without a definite purpose in life, our happiness levels plummet, and so does our motivation to push onwards and achieve anything. We simply survive and have nothing to look forward to in our everyday life.

Now did you notice the use of the word definite? That’s a very important aspect when we choose our major purpose in life because that’s the part that makes us strive to accomplish what we want.

If we truly want that which we call our purpose in life, it needs to and is bound to be definite. We must be absolute and sure about wanting to attain that.

Otherwise, when the first wave of difficulties comes ashore, we won’t have the necessary motivation to push forward, get past them, and continue walking in our path of success and personal achievement.

2. Burning desire for our purpose

What is of major importance and connects a lot with our definiteness of purpose, is what Napoleon Hill calls “a burning desire” for what we want to succeed.

The term burning desire is used to underscore how much one person has to yearn for that which he tries to attain to actually go through with what he has put his mind on.

In the case that we don’t really want something, or we are not 100% sure that we desire that which we try to obtain, then we won’t be able to be definite about our purpose.

If we have a burning desire for something, it means that it is so vital to our life that we will do whatever it takes to have it: we will give anything, try our best, and even in the darkest of hours we won’t give up because failure is non-negotiable. It is and will be part of our soul.

3. Applied faith

After establishing our absolute desire for our purpose, comes one of the most important principles to keep in mind for whatever we are doing in life. Applying faith.

Faith is the backbone of the success mentality; it gives strength to every other principle, attitude, and thought we have about success and its achievement.

Without faith in ourselves, we won’t be decisive about our actions nor definite about achieving our purpose, since our negative emotions or fears will overtake us when push comes to shove.

One other fundamental application of faith is that of truly believing that the universe will provide us with the right people, situations, physical and mental things that we will need in our path to success, only after we give the direct equivalent of them (being time, sacrificing our entertainment, etc.).

“Every time you ask for guidance you receive it.”

- Gary Zukav

4. Winner’s mentality

To develop the right mindset for success, we also need to base it on what I call the “winner’s mentality”.

The name derives from the fact that the difficulties we encounter as obstacles in our path to success can provide us with a tangible or intangible profit if we use them and see them as such.

Whatever adversity might come our way is a test of our conviction and desire to complete our purpose and thus hides an equivalent benefit to gain from it.

The word equivalent here is used to promote the idea of gaining something only when we provide the direct equivalent of that which we wish to receive.

5. Power of thoughts

One more crucial thing to have in our mind is that the success mindset and our happiness, in general, are dependent upon the quality of our thoughts.

This means that whatever we fix our minds into will actually occur one way or another in our life. This is a very hard thing to process and digest and concurrently a very meaningful and life-transforming principle.

Always remember that if we want to achieve anything we need to control our thinking process and get fixated on our wants and not our fears.

These insightful words of Alfred Bester sum up the aforementioned quite accurately:

“Your mind is the reality. You are what you think.”

6. Persistence & Decisiveness

The last thing to have in our mind if we want to be successful is that of growing our persistence.

Persistence is a powerful principle that grants us enough strength to overcome any adversity and usually even puts us in a beneficial position to gain something out of it.

Being persistent when it's called for is the spine of every success principle; we need to be persistent when we apply the principles to ourselves, otherwise, the overall success mindset and generally anything we have in life won’t last.

Earl Nightingale summed up persistence wonderfully by the following words:

“By being persistent, you are demonstrating faith. Persistence is simply another word for faith. If you didn’t have faith, you would never persist.”

Conclusion

Napoleon Hill tried to crack the code of success by watching closely the most successful people of his time and contributed to the world a philosophy that covers both the basic and deep principles of success.

This success mindset might be only the beginning of our road to success, but it’s the most vital thing to have if we want to carry out both our desires and attain happiness.

Guides

Read more about success: “Think and grow rich” and “Success Habits” by Napoleon Hill