Think and Grow Rich summary

Every success story begins with people who know what they want to achieve.

So before you begin chasing after any old dream, you should start by defining your own personal goal as precisely as you can. For example, if you want to get rich, you should decide precisely how much money you want to make.

Having an unwavering faith in yourself is a way of making sure that you can – and will – achieve your goals.

You can only achieve success if it’s based on self-confidence and an unwavering faith in yourself: no wealth has ever been acquired, no faraway continents ever discovered, nothing ever invented without this faith as its basis.

Unwavering faith in yourself is not necessarily something you’re born with or that falls from the sky: anybody can develop it, bit by bit, through auto-suggestion.

Auto-suggestion describes a way of influencing yourself by thinking very specific and purposeful thoughts or ideas.

Knowledge can make it a lot easier to achieve your aims in life. All you have to do is take a few basic points into consideration.

First of all, you need to take the “traditional” meaning of knowledge and education – and throw it out the window.

Each and every success story begins with an idea. And behind each and every idea is the imagination. It is, essentially, the creative workshop of our minds that transforms our dreams into ideas and our ideas into reality.

This imaginative ability has two different forms: the creative imagination and the synthetic imagination.

One important building block for professional success is an awareness of your own strengths and weaknesses – in other words, being self-aware.

Since things like having vague goals, lacking ambition, procrastinating and lacking resolve are common reasons for failure, self-awareness can help to constructively take action against these weaknesses – or at least to balance them out with your strengths.  

Our subconscious receives and stores sensory stimuli, feelings and thoughts. It saves everything we’ve ever experienced – regardless of whether it was positive or negative.

But saving information alone isn’t all there is to it: our subconscious is also constantly exercising its influence on our actions. It can shape us positively, endowing us with strength and enterprise, but it can also shape us negatively, misleading us into despondency and pessimism.

The analysis of over 25,000 life stories of people who failed to achieve professional success shows that a lack of determination is the main reason for their failure.

The analysis of the success stories of multimillionaires revealed, by contrast, that they all had two characteristics in common: they were used to making split-second decisions and, once they made them, they stood firmly behind their decisions.

Over the course of any project – regardless of its nature – we are all bound to encounter obstacles and difficulties. In such situations, most of us are too quick to give up our plans and let the project die. But there are a few people who, despite all the obstacles, stick to their original plans and give their dreams space to blossom into reality.

Persistence and endurance are key. That means, above all, that we work constantly on the realization of our goals and don’t lose sight of them. However, obstinacy and inveteracy should be avoided at all costs: if, say, there’s a dire need for a price correction, you also have to be willing to implement it.

The bigger the goal, the more complex the planning; the more complex the planning, the more difficult the goal’s execution; the more difficult the execution, the more dependent the brains behind the project will be on the creative, intellectual and moral support of others.

This mutual backing works best in the form of a brain trust – a select group of intelligent people.