Incredible as it may seem, most if not all of the secrets of “The Secret”, an understanding of the powers of the mind and the amazing power of attraction, have been around for a very long time. The amazing video below shows Napoleon Hill talking about his meetings with Andrew Carnegie, now more than one hundred years ago. Yes, more than a century ago!

These basic truths are as true today as they were then. Anyone seeking to step up, get out of the rut, become an achiever and therefore be successful, must believe that these worthwhile objectives or goals are possible and achievable. With that belief you can do anything you set your mind to do!

For those of you who are not familiar with Andrew Carnegie he is regarded as the second richest man ever in the world after John D Rockefeller. I hope you will enjoy and gain some secrets of success from this fascinating video.

The following information about Napoleon Hill and Andrew Carnegie is extracted from Wikipedia.

Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883 – November 8, 1970)

Napoleon Hill 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. Hill’s works examined the power of personal beliefs, and the role they play in personal success. He became the advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933-36. “What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve” is one of Hill’s hallmark expressions. How achievement actually occurs, and a formula for it that puts success in reach for the average person, were the focal points of Hill’s books.

According to his official biographer, Tom Butler-Bowdon, Napoleon Hill was born in an impoverished, one-room cabin in the Appalachian town of Pound in Southwest Virginia. Hill’s mother died when he was nine years old and his father remarried two years later. At the age of 15, Hill began writing as a “mountain reporter” for small-town newspapers in the area of Wise County and he later used his earnings as a reporter to enter law school, but soon had to withdraw for financial reasons.

The turning point in the writing career of Napoleon Hill is consideredto have occurred in 1908 with his assignment, as part of a series of articles about famous men, to interview the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, one of the most powerful men in the world. Hill discovered that Carnegie believed that the process of success could be elaborated in a simple formula that could be duplicated by the average person. Impressed with Hill, Carnegie asked him if he was up to the task of putting together this information with only reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses to interview or analyze over 500 successful men and women, many of them millionaires, in order to discover and publish this formula for success.

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, Sr., Charles M. Schwab, F.W. Woolworth, William Wrigley Jr., John Wanamaker, William Jennings Bryan, Joseph Stalin, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Jennings Randolph. Hill was also an adviser to two presidents of the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Other famous works include The Laws of Success (1928) and Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude (1960).

Andrew Carnegie

Carnegie made his fortune in the steel industry, controlling the most extensive integrated iron and steel operations ever owned by an individual in the United States. One of his two great innovations was in the cheap and efficient mass production of steel rails for railroad lines. The second was in his vertical integration of all suppliers of raw materials. In the late 1880s, Carnegie Steel was the largest manufacturer of pig iron, steel rails, and coke in the world, with a capacity to produce approximately 2,000 tons of pig metal per day. In 1888, Carnegie bought the rival Homestead Steel Works, which included an extensive plant served by tributary coal and iron fields, a 425-mile (685 km) long railway, and a line of lake steamships. Carnegie combined his assets and those of his associates in 1892 with the launching of the Carnegie Steel Company.

By 1889, the U.S. output of steel exceeded that of the UK, and Carnegie owned a large part of it. Carnegie’s empire grew to include the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works, (named for John Edgar Thomson, Carnegie’s former boss and president of the Pennsylvania Railroad), Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Works, the Lucy Furnaces, the Union Iron Mills, the Union Mill (Wilson, Walker & County), the Keystone Bridge Works, the Hartman Steel Works, the Frick Coke Company, and the Scotia ore mines. Carnegie, through Keystone, supplied the steel for and owned shares in the landmark Eads Bridge project across the Mississippi River at St. Louis, Missouri (completed 1874). This project was an important proof-of-concept for steel technology, which marked the opening of a new steel market.

In 1901, Carnegie was 66 years of age and considering retirement. He reformed his enterprises into conventional joint stock corporations as preparation to this end. John Pierpont Morgan was a banker and perhaps America’s most important financial deal maker. He had observed how efficiently Carnegie produced profit. He envisioned an integrated steel industry that would cut costs, lower prices to consumers, produce in greater quantities and raise wages to workers. To this end, he needed to buy out Carnegie and several other major producers and integrate them into one company, thereby eliminating duplication and waste. He concluded negotiations on 2 March 1901, and formed the United States Steel Corporation. It was the first corporation in the world with a market capitalization over $1 billion.

Before his death on 11 August 1919, Mr. Carnegie had donated $350,695,654 for various causes. The ‘Andrew Carnegie Dictum’, speaks a lot about Mr. Carnegie’s generous nature. Here is what Andrew Carnegie said through his dictum, To spend the first third of one’s life getting all the education one can. To spend the next third making all the money one can. To spend the last third giving it all away for worthwhile causes. Andrew Carnegie was involved in philanthropist causes, but he kept himself away from religious circles. He wanted to be identified by the world as a ‘positivist’.