The Alex Project: Laws of Success "Imagination"

            The sixth “Law of Success” that Napoleon Hill discusses involves the need for imagination.  Hill emphasizes this as being one of the most important of the lessons in his book.  The chapter on imagination calls for the reader to use the one power that no person can take away from them.

Man has the ability to cheat and slander other men, but a man has no power over any mans imagination. Hill maintains that the idea of daydreaming is not a useless one, but rather that many vital ideas and products were developed through the act of daydreaming. Simple use of imagination has proven to lead to success, with the creation of “Five and Ten Cent Stores”, “Self-Help Grocery Stores”, and even the Panama Canal as evidence.

The main point that Hill intends to emphasize in this lesson is to use your imagination to rearrange old ideas into new combinations. With maximum effort combined with imagination, you can achieve maximum achievement. This is where a “Master Mind” group will become vital, as the collective effort provides for even greater imagination.

The Alex Project Part 1 - The "Master Mind"

The “Master Mind”

            Napolean Hill begins his volume of work, Law of Success, with a lesson on what he refers to as the “Master Mind.” A “Master Mind”, according to Hill, is defined as “a mind that is developed through the harmonious co-operation of two or more people who ally themselves for the purpose of accomplishing any given task.” From this definition, it seems as though Hill’s idea is that by combining two or more minds in order to accomplish something,the result is a separate mind that contains the knowledge of all of the minds in the group. This mind would therefore be referred to as a “Master Mind”. However, it is not as simple as this. What Hill emphasizes the most, and does so repeatedly throughout the first lesson, is the word HARMONIOUS that is given in the initial definition. A “Master Mind” cannot and will not be formed unless the minds that are involved in the group work in a HARMONIOUS manor. In fact, a “Master Mind” completely disintegrates the moment that the group is joined by just one person that doesn’t have the full co-operation and harmony between all of the other minds involved. In this first lesson, Hill concludes with the idea of education and how important it truly is to a person’s future. According to Hill, “the man who can intelligently use the knowledge possessed by another is as much or more a man of education as the person who merely has the knowledge but does not know what to do with it.” There are many well-educated people in the world who know an abundance of information that they have gathered over many years. However, it is the people who take in this information from many others and put it to good use who find true success.