Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill, nineteen thirty eight. Summary. Three things
connected with my interview with the Devil interest me most. These three factors interest
me because they have been the most important influences in my own life, a
fact which any reader of my story can easily discern. The three important factors
are the habit of drifting, the law of hypnotic rhythm, through which all
habits are made permanent, and the element of time. Here is a trio
of forces which hold in violate the destinies of all men. The three take
on a new and more important meaning when they are grouped and studied as a
combined force. It takes per little imagination and scarcely any understanding of natural laws
for one to see that most of the difficulties in which people find themselves are
of their own making. Moreover, difficulties seldom are the outgrowth of immediate circumstances.
They are generally the climax of a series of circumstances which have been consolidated
through the habit of drifting and with the aid of time. Samuel Insell did
not lose his four billion dollar industrial empire as the result of the depression he
began losing it long before the Depression, when he became the victim of a
group of women who flattered him into turning his talents from public utilities to grand
opera. If ever a man in a high position in the financial world went
down because of the power of drifting hypnotic rhythm and time, that man was
Samuel Insell. I am writing from accurate knowledge of mister insul and the cause
of his troubles, dating from the time that I served with him during the
World War to the time of his ill advised attempt to run away from himself.
Henry Ford went through the same depression that swept mister insol under, but
Ford came out on top without a scratch. Do you want to know the
reason, I'll tell you Ford has the habit of not drifting on any subject.
Time is Ford's friend because he has formed the habit of using it in
a positive, constructive manner, with the dad the aid of thoughts of his
own making woven into plans of his own creation. Take any circumstance you wish,
measure it with reference to its relationship to the habit of drifting hypnotic rhythm
and time, and you may ascertain accurately the cause of all success and all
failure. Franklin D. Roosevelt went into office with a bang. During his
first term. He had but one major purpose in mind, and that was
very definite. It was to stop the stampede of fear and start people to
thinking and talking in terms of business recovery instead of business depression. In carrying
out that purpose, there was no drifting. The forces of the entire nation
were consolidated and moved as one to help carry out the president's definite purpose.
For the first time in the history of America, the newspapers of all political
leanings, the churches of all denominations, the people of all races and colors,
and the political organizations of all brands united themselves into one stupendous power for
the sole purpose of helping the President restore faith and normal business relationships in the
country. In a conference held between the President and a group of emergency advisers
a few days after he went into office, I asked him what was his
major problem. He replied, it is not a question of majors and miners.
We have but one problem, and that is to stop fear and supplant
it with faith. Before the end of his first year in office, the
president had stopped fear and supplanted it by faith, and the nation was slowly
but surely on the way out of the jungle of depression. By the end
of his first term mark while the element of lapse of time, the president
had so effectively consolidated the forces of American business and private life that he had
an entire nation in back of him, ready willing and enthusiastically desirous of following
his lead no matter which way he went. These are facts well known to
everyone who reads newspapers or listens to the radio. Then came another presidential election
and the opportunity for the people to express their faith in their leader. They
expressed it in a landslide without precedent in American politics, and the President went
into office a second time with an almost unanimous electorate vote, with only two
states meekly dissenting. Now observe how the wheel of life began to reverse itself
and turn back in the other direction. The president changed his policy from definiteness
of purpose to indefiniteness and drifting. His change of policy split the powerful labor
group and turned more than half of it against him. It split the almost
solid following he held in both houses of Congress, and more important than all
this, it split the American people into pro and anti groups, with the
result that about all the President had left of his original political assets was his
million dollar smile and his ready hand shake, obviously not enough to enable him
to regain the power he once wielded in American life. Here, then,
we have an excellent example of a man who skyrocketed to great power through definiteness
of purpose and belly flopped to the starting point by his habit of drifting.
In both his rise and his fall can be seen clearly the operation of the
principles of drifting and non drifting, reaching a climax through the power of hypnotic
rhythm and time. All my life, the devil had a dramatic story to
tell of his dealings with me. He saw me drift in and out of
scores of business opportunities for which many would have given a king's ransom. He
saw me drifting in my policy of relating myself to others, particularly in my
lack of caution in business dealings. The circumstance which saved me from fatal control
of the law of hypnotic rhythm was the definiteness of purpose with which, at
long last I dedicated my entire life to the organization of a philosophy of individual
achievement. I drifted, at one time or another on all my minor whims
and endeavors. But my drifting was offset by my major purpose, which was
sufficient to restore my courage and start me once more in the quest of knowledge.
Every time I was defeated in connection with my minor aims, I learned
something of the hazardous nature of the habit of drifting. While engaged in analyzing
more than twenty five thousand people in connection with the organization of the Law of
success, these analyzes showed that only two out of every one hundred have a
definite major aim in life. The other ninety eight were caught by the habit
of drifting. It seems more than a coincidence that my analyzes clearly corroborated the
devil's claim that he controls ninety eight out of every one hundred people because of
their habit of drifting. Looking back over my own career, I can see
clearly that I could have avoided the majority of the temporary defeats with which I
met if I had been definitely following a plan for the attainment of my major
purpose in life. From my experience in having analyzed the problems of more than
five thousand families, I know definitely that the majority of married people who get
out of harmony with each other due so because of the accumulation of a great
number of little circumstances in their married relationship which could have been cleared up and
disposed of as they arose if there had been a definite policy to do so.
They do not live their married life with definiteness of purpose. So the
story has gone all back down the ages. The man with the most definite
plan and purpose and the most power rides on to victory. The others scurry
for cover and get crushed under the heels of those who are more determined.
The answer is not hard to find. There is no use looking toward high
Heaven for it. For my part, one would prefer to seek the answer
from the devil, for he would tell me quickly enough that victory goes to
the people who know what they want and are determined to have it. They
have mastered the habit of drifting, They have definite policies definite plans and definite
objectives. Their opposition, which may outnumber them very greatly, has no chance
against them, because the opposition has no plan, no purpose, no policy
except that of drifting along hoping that something may turn up to help them.
In those three brief sentences, you have the sum and the substance of the
difference between success and failure, power and lack of it. We come now
near to the end of our visit through this book. If we were to
try to state in one brief sentence the most important part of that which I
have tried to convey through the book, it would be something like this.
One's dominating desires can be crystallized into their physical equivalence through definiteness of purpose,
backed by definiteness of plans, with the aid of nature's law of hypnotic rhythm
and time. There you have the positive phase of the philosophy of individual achievement
I have tried to describe through this book, brought down to an irreducible minimum
of brevity and simplicity. If you expand the philosophy for the purpose of adapting
it to the circumstances of life, you find that it is as broad as
life itself, that it covers all human relationships, all human thoughts, aims,
and desires. So here we are at the end of the strangest of
all the thou sands of interviews I have had with the great and the near
great over a period of fifty years of labor in my search for the truths
of life that lead to happiness and economic security. How strange indeed, that
after having had active co operation from such men as Carnegie, Edison, and
Ford, I should have been compelled finally to go to the devil for a
working knowledge of the greatest of all the principles uncovered in my quest for truth.
How strange that I was forced to experience poverty and failure and adversity in
a hundred forms before being given the privilege of understanding and using a law of
nature which softens the thrust of these wicked weapons or wipes them out altogether.
But the strangest of all this dramatic experience which life has provided me is the
simplicity of the law through which, if I had understood it, I could
have transmuted my desires into substantial form without having to undergo so many years of
hardship and misery. I find now, at the end of my interview with
the Devil, that I had been carrying in my own pockets the matches with
my God which the fires of adversity were being touched off. And I find
too that the water with which those fires were finally extinguished was at my command
in great abundance. I searched for the philosopher's lodestone with which failure may be
converted into success, only to learn that both success and failure are the results
of day to day evolutionary forces, through which dominating thoughts are pieced together,
bit by bit and woven into the things we want or the things we do
not want, according to the nature of those thoughts. How unfortunate that I
did not understand this truth from the time that I reached the age of reason,
for if I had understood it, then I might have been able to
go around some of the hurdles I have been forced to jump as I walked
through the valley of the shadow of life. The story of my interview with
the Devil is now in your hands. The benefits you will receive from it
will be in exact proportion to the thought it inspires in you to benefit from
reading the interview. You need not agree with every portion of it. You
have only to think and to reach your own conclude lusions concerning every part of
it. How reasonable that is. You are the judge and the jury,
and the attorney for both the prosecution and the defense. If you do not
win your case, the loss and the cause thereof will be yours. Napoleon Hill