Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill: An Honest Review

📖 What is Think and Grow Rich about?🔗

The book is built around one central idea: that a burning desire, combined with a clear plan and relentless persistence, can be turned into wealth. Napoleon Hill called this the "success mindset" and structured it across 13 principles. The core ideas include:

• Desire and a definite chief aim: a specific goal, not a vague wish, written down with a deadline and read aloud daily.
• Faith and autosuggestion: repeating affirmations to "reprogram" the subconscious, the most law-of-attraction-adjacent part of the book.
• Specialised knowledge and imagination: develop real expertise, and recombine ideas into new ones.
• Organised planning, decision and persistence: desire without a concrete plan is daydreaming; decide quickly, change your mind slowly, and outlast setbacks.
• The Master Mind principle: surround yourself with people whose knowledge complements yours, essentially a 1937 accountability group.
• "Thoughts are things": the most famous and most contested claim, that a thought held with enough intensity and backed by a plan can manifest as physical reality.

A few things to know upfront: this is a mindset and motivation book, not a personal finance how-to. No budgets, no investment strategies, no compound interest tables. The writing is very much of its era: formal, occasionally grandiose, and full of anecdotes about early 20th-century American industrialists. Expect a practical finance guide and you'll be disappointed.

⚖️ Strengths and weaknesses🔗

👤 Who should read it, and who should skip it?🔗

🔍 What do critics say?🔗

The criticism that gets the most attention isn't about the ideas, it's about the man behind them. Hill's entire origin story rests on a claimed 1908 meeting with steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who supposedly tasked him with interviewing hundreds of successful people. The problem: Carnegie died in 1919, Hill only started making the claim long afterwards, and Carnegie's biographer found no evidence the two ever met. Even Hill's authorised biographers conceded the book supposedly drawn from those conversations used a contrived conversational format.

Beyond that, biographical investigations document a long history of fraud allegations and embellished claims across Hill's life, including securities charges, mail-fraud allegations, a string of failed ventures, and false claims about being an attorney and a presidential advisor. And the "thoughts become reality" framework simply isn't science: visualisation and positive thinking can support motivation, but they don't on their own produce wealth. And yet the book has still sold tens of millions of copies and holds an approximate Goodreads rating around 4.2 out of 5, which tells you something about the power of the core ideas even when the messenger was deeply flawed.

💬 What do readers say?🔗

On Goodreads it holds around 4.2 out of 5 from hundreds of thousands of ratings, suggesting most readers get something meaningful from it even if they wouldn't recommend it uncritically. Reader sentiment is genuinely mixed, which is useful: on r/books the dominant note is scepticism about the anecdotes and Hill's credibility, while on r/getdisciplined readers strip out the metaphysical claims and keep the goal-setting and autosuggestion techniques as daily self-discipline tools.

🇦🇺 The Australian angle🔗

The mindset and persistence ideas are universal. Setting specific goals, building accountability networks and developing persistence aren't culturally specific, and Australians in their 20s and 30s building wealth from scratch can take something from the goal-setting framework. But there isn't a single Australian financial mechanic in this book: no super, no franking credits, no negative gearing, no HECS, no low-cost index funds like VGS or A200. It was written for Depression-era Americans, and it shows.

The "thoughts become riches" framing is also not an investing strategy. Thinking hard about wealth won't grow your super balance; contributing regularly to a diversified portfolio of low-cost ETFs will. Treat this book as the mindset warm-up, not the workout, then do the actual financial work with evidence-based resources. Our Psychology of Money review and Little Book of Common Sense Investing review are far better starting points for the practical side.

💰 The verdict🔗

Yes, read it once, critically, with realistic expectations. If you want a mindset reframe and a structured way to think about goals, there's genuine value: the goal-setting framework, the persistence emphasis and the Master Mind concept have stood up reasonably well over nearly 90 years, even if the scientific framing around them is shaky. If you want practical financial guidance, look elsewhere, because it will never tell you how to build an emergency fund, choose an ETF or optimise your super. The credibility questions around Napoleon Hill are real and worth knowing; reading the book with that context doesn't ruin it, it just means you engage honestly rather than treating it as revealed truth. Extract the useful bits, leave the rest. Our rating: 3.5 out of 5.

❓ Frequently asked questions🔗