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In my post How To Find Out What You Really Want, I talked about how to find out what you really want by consulting your emotions. I also said that logic on its own is pretty meaningless unless fueled by emotions.

Yesterday, I picked up my copy of Napolean Hill’s Keys to Success – The 17 Principles of Personal Achievement. I had bought this book almost a year ago, because his Think and Growth Rich book was one of the most important books I’ve ever read. I’d hoped that his other books would be equally insightful, but hadn’t gotten around to it until now. I was definiately right.

On page 109, summarized in few small paragraphs, lies the principles that took me almost my entire life to figure out:

“Self-discipline calls for balancing your emotions with your reasoning. This means you must learn to consult both your feelings and your reason before you reach any decision. Sometimes you will need to set aside your emotions and follow the dictates of reason alone. Other times you will decide in favor of your emotions, modified by your reason. A happy medium is important.

Consider, for example, those people who are so in love that they will do anything for their beloveds. They are putty in the hands of others. They rarely amount to anything because they have no purposes of their own in life.You might wonder if this danger means that it would be safer and wiser to control your life strictly on the basis of reason and leave emotion out of every decision. The answer is an emphatic no.Don.t forget, your emotions provide your driving power, the activating force which enables you to put your decisions into action. If you destroyed hope and faith, what would there be to live for? If you killed enthusiasm, loyalty, and desire but still retained reason, what good would reason be? It would still be there to provide direction, but what would it direct?”

It’s very surprising to me that this has already been summed up so well. In high school, I made it one of my most foremost goals to think about the meaning of life. Little did I know, it seems to be written everywhere.

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Comments

3 Responses to “Napolean Hill’s Keys to Success”

  1. littleengine on August 2nd, 2007 6:59 pm

    I fully understand about consulting your emotions about a path in life. As a child and teenager, I enjoyed writing, philosophical thought and speaking in front of people. However, I was a terrible writer and the thought of studying writing and language arts in college was unimaginable. 20 years later, I am in the beginning of a public speaking career. I learned the hard way that you have to follow your passions into a career no matter how little sense it makes at the time.

  2. A Lesson From Steven Covey's 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People on October 12th, 2007 10:24 pm

    [...] realize has been summed up so concisely in a book. This is almost a follow up to my astonishment in Napolean Hill’s Keys To Success. On one hand, it’s almost a bit disappointing that such a unique discovery has already been [...]

  3. napolean hill on May 13th, 2008 10:40 pm

    [...] Hill’s Keys To SuccessA review of this masterpiece.http://www.whatithinkabout.com/napolean-hills-keys-to-success/The Napoleon Hill FoundationThis on line distance learning course presents and examines the [...]