Roger Abramson: Napoleon Hill Stripped and Uncensored (Part I)

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The question of business ethics came up. Folks, it’s story time.

Once upon a time, Grandfatherly old Napoleon Hill, who we all think we know and love, discovered what’s most highly effective. Early on in life! But not before he buried the bodies. Literally.

His greatest secret of all, never explicitly revealed, is hidden right in plain sight, but covered up in euphemisms.

At age 19, it seems (according to Hill’s unpublished autobiography) Napoleon helped cover up an “accidental” killing of a black bellhop while the boss was outta town. A maneuver from which he profited tremendously.

A bit of standard lawyering? All in a day’s work? Perhaps not. At age 19, who has time to pass the bar exam?

In the process, he surely learned the valuable life lesson that dead men tell no tales.

Yes, I’m talking about THAT Napoleon Hill. It’s suddenly like an episode of House of Cards in here. Spoilers, guys.

Hang on, because I’ll come back around to ethics in just a sec…

Hill’s much larger secret, an obvious one he NEVER quite admitted to, involved the endorsement of lots of important dead men. And maybe even President Taft’s actual signature.

Was it lifted from a fund-raising letter? Who knows? Such temptations may cross one’s mind from time to time, if you’re clever, and as you’ll see, the world is slow to catch up.

In a 1995 review of Hill’s Biography, New York Times reporter Richard Lingeman said the meeting Hill wangled with Carnegie “sounds a bit too inspiring to be true”.

If you know the value billionaires place on their time, certain points in the story seem all the more unlikely:

• First, that Carnegie would generously invest days of his time with Hill,
• Second, that on a philanthropic expedition of his own design, that Carnegie would be so stingy about paying reasonable expenses,
• Third, that he’d put all his eggs in one basket and appoint nobody else to supervise or support him,
• Fourth, if Carnegie had wanted such a venture to succeed, a press conference would be more expedient, public, and credible than letters of introduction entrusted to a near-stranger. Such letters are unlikely to have disappeared, if they indeed existed.

Not saying they didn’t exist. It just seems a little too convenient, especially in light of the following facts:

Wikipedia seems to think most of the wealthy men Hill “analyzed” were dead or incapacitated or unreachable at the time of publication, so we simply can’t ask them for their version of events.

Simply consider Napoleon Hill’s era:

In the Yellow Journalism hay-day, getting it first mattered more than getting it right. Like anyone else in the media, Hill would have known how sensational news stories are rushed out the door with little regard for accuracy.

If you’re an interviewer with a letter of introduction from Andrew Carnegie himself, and you still can’t get in to see Henry Ford, then you can rest assured no else can, either. Meaning no “muckraker” can ever expose you.

And who would bother? When you’re trying to sell newspapers, you’re too busy exposing big-name corruption and celebrity scandal to worry about small-time book authors. Then again…

Maybe there’s a good reason the book (famously) wasn’t advertised.

Even if you wanted to catch Hill “in the act”, can you imagine wasting precious seconds with Henry friggin’ Ford, one of the last living witnesses, asking him to confirm or deny an interview he may or may not have granted to one of a hundred no-name magazine writers sometime in the past twenty years?

Not if you want to keep your job.

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” – Mark Twain, from Political Communication Ethics: An Oxymoron?

Turns out the truth is slow as cold molasses. Especially if it can’t catch up to a blatantly obvious and widespread fabrication lasting 77 years or more.

Then again, it did take quite a while to figure out whether or not Earth was in the center of the solar system. Some people still haven’t gotten the memo…

According to a recent Michigan State University survey*, more than a quarter of Americans still think the sun goes around the Earth.

Is 70 or 80 years enough time for you to amass a fortune? My compounding calculator seems to think so. Let me simply put it this way:

It is my personal opinion that the masses aren’t catching on anytime soon.

To quote Mark Zuckerberg and Robert De Niro (from Goodfellas), “Fuck em in the ear”, regarding his former associates.

Zuckerberg certainly proves Hill’s point about the power of desire and belief.

Flip desire upside down, and it’s nothing but all-consuming selfishness.

Check in next week to read about the other side of desire.