Andrew Carnegie’s Keys to Success
Posted on December 28, 2007 by Ronald T. Brown, Ph.D.
In this video clip Napoleon Hill talks about his meeting with Andrew Carnegie where Carnegie shared what he believed is the key to success (however you would define “success” for yourself.)
Andrew Carnegie (person in the picture) is known for having built one of the most powerful and influential corporations in United States history, and, later in his life, giving away most of his riches to fund the establishment of many libraries, schools, and universities in America, Scotland and other countries throughout the world. Carnegie, a poor boy with fierce ambition, a pleasant personality, and a devotion to both hard work and self-improvement, started as a telegrapher. By the 1860s, he had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, as well as bridges and oil derricks, and he built wealth as a bond salesman raising money in Europe for American enterprise.
Steel was where he found his fortune. In the 1870s, he founded the Carnegie Steel Company. By the 1890s, the company was the largest and most profitable industrial enterprise in the world. He sold it to J.P. Morgan’s US Steel in 1901 and devoted the remainder of his life to large-scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, and scientific research.
Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) was an American author who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal-success literature. His most famous work, Think and Grow Rich, is one of the best-selling books of all time. In America, Hill stated in his writings, people are free to believe what they want to believe, and this is what sets the United States apart from all other countries in the world. Hill’s works examined the power of personal beliefs, and the role they play in personal success. “What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve” is one of Hill’s hallmark expressions.
As part of his research, Hill interviewed many of the most famous people of the time, including Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Elmer Gates, John D. Rockefeller, Charles M. Schwab, F.W. Woolworth, William Wrigley Jr., John Wanamaker, William Jennings Bryan, Joseph Stalin, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Allen Ward and Jennings Randolph. The project lasted over twenty years, during which Hill became an advisor to Carnegie. As a result of these studies, the Philosophy of Achievement was offered as a formula for rags-to-riches success by Hill and Carnegie, published initially in 1928 as a study course called, The Law of Success.
