The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons
Napoleon Hill · 1928 · 129 pages
Hill's original name for what everyone now calls a mastermind group: a small alliance of people whose minds blend, through perfect harmony, into a third force none of them has alone. The edition sold under this title is usually just that opening lesson, not the sixteen-lesson course it introduces.
The one idea
Hill's core claim is that two or more minds working in genuine harmony toward a shared purpose produce a 'Master Mind,' a kind of combined intelligence that outperforms any one person in the group, including the smartest one. He is careful about the word harmony: it means real alignment of interest, not politeness. One person in the group who is quietly working against the others, he says, is enough to stop the effect from forming at all.
He backs the idea with real Chicago businessmen rather than theory alone. A group he calls the 'Big Six,' including William Wrigley Jr. and Yellow Cab founder John Hertz, met regularly for years to trade ideas and occasionally back each other's notes, with no formal partnership between most of them. He credits that habit, not any one man's talent, for turning a group of ordinary self-made businessmen into an estimated $25,000,000 a year in combined income.
The second idea, given far less room here, is the Definite Chief Aim: Hill's claim that success is simply the attainment of a single, specifically stated purpose, and that vague ambition is the most common reason people fail. The book promises fifteen more lessons that build out self-confidence, saving, leadership, imagination, and eleven other traits around that aim, but this particular printing stops after the introduction.
What it actually teaches
The introductory lesson lays out four things you actually do to build a Master Mind, in the order Hill presents them.
SCREEN FOR HARMONY FIRST
Before adding anyone to the alliance, Hill says to rule out anyone with a negative or repellent mind, because a single person working against the group's interest stops the blending effect entirely. He gives no test for this beyond judgment; you're supposed to sense it.
STATE ONE DEFINITE CHIEF AIM
Hill defines success as 'the attainment of your Definite Chief Aim without violating the rights of other people.' The group needs a shared, specific purpose, not a general one, before the alliance does anything useful.
MEET ON A FIXED SCHEDULE
The Big Six group met at set periods for years, trading ideas and occasionally endorsing each other's notes to cover emergencies. Hill also cites a car dealership that ran the 'One-A-Week Club': two-man Master Mind pairs, weekly luncheons, and a bonus for any salesman who averaged one car sold a week using a list of 100 prospects, one postcard a week plus ten personal calls a day.
PROTECT THE ALLIANCE
Hill warns the Master Mind 'will disintegrate' the moment two members' interests diverge, so the ongoing job is maintaining harmony, not just forming it. He offers this as a standing warning rather than a checklist.
What it looks like Monday morning
A reader who takes this lesson at face value picks two or three people whose goals genuinely overlap with theirs, not just people they like, and writes down one specific aim the group is meeting to advance. That's a lower bar than it sounds: Hill's own example is a car salesman splitting a prospect list with a partner and comparing notes over a weekly lunch, not a boardroom.
The more useful discipline is the harmony test he keeps repeating: before adding someone to any group whose success matters to you, ask whether their interest actually runs parallel to yours, or just sounds like it does. He offers no test for this beyond judgment, so treat it as a prompt to interrogate the alliance, not a formula that produces an answer.
| Name | Business | Estimated income |
|---|---|---|
| William Wrigley Jr. | Chewing gum | More than $15,000,000/yr individually |
| John R. Thompson | Chain lunch rooms | Part of group total |
| Albert Lasker | Lord & Thomas Advertising Agency | Part of group total |
| Mr. McCullough | Parmalee Express (largest transfer business in America) | Part of group total |
| John Hertz & Mr. Ritchie | Yellow Taxicab | Part of group total |
Hill states the group's combined income was estimated at more than $25,000,000 a year, or over $4,000,000 per man on average, and credits their regular, informal alliance rather than any individual's talent.
A Master Mind may be created through the bringing together or blending, in a spirit of perfect harmony, of two or more minds.Napoleon Hill, The Law of Success
Where it fails
- This edition delivers one lesson of sixteen. The book spends several pages previewing fifteen more lessons (Self-Confidence, Habit of Saving, Initiative and Leadership, Imagination, Accurate Thinking, and ten others) as things 'you will learn' in the course. None of them appear in this 129-page PDF, which is only the Introductory Lesson and Lesson One, The Master Mind. Full printings of the original 1928 course commonly run to several hundred pages across all sixteen lessons; a reader buying on the strength of this page should confirm they are getting the complete course, not the introduction alone.
- The science behind the telepathy claims is wrong. Roughly a third of this lesson argues that thought travels between minds as a vibration through 'the ether,' citing specific vibration counts (sound above 32,000 per second, heat above 1,500,000, violet light at 3,000,000) as the mechanism for how one person's ideas reach another's brain. Luminiferous ether had already been discredited by physicists well before 1928. Hill presents it as established fact, not metaphor, and none of the practical advice depends on it being true, which makes it dead weight rather than support.
- Every case study is a survivor with no counterexample. The Big Six ($25,000,000 a year combined), Henry Ford ($225,000,000 in advance orders before a car shipped), and Judge Elbert Gary (who nearly paid $150,000 to give the course to every US Steel employee before he died) are the only examples in the lesson. There is no case of a Master Mind alliance that formed and failed, and no discussion of how to tell in advance whether a given alliance will work. The reader only sees the outcome, never the base rate.
- The self-grading chart is entertainment, not diagnosis. Near the end, Hill scores ten historical figures, including Ford, Lincoln, and Napoleon Bonaparte, against Jesse James on the fifteen traits of the full course, on a 0 to 100 scale, and invites the reader to score themselves the same way. The traits are never operationalized (what makes 'Enthusiasm' worth exactly 80 rather than 90), so the exercise produces a number that feels diagnostic without being measurable against anything.
- The proof points assume Hill's own audience, not the reader's. The evidence Hill offers that the course itself works is a $30,000 fee he was paid for training 3,000 salespeople and a near-miss $150,000 corporate contract with US Steel. Those numbers establish that wealthy men bought the course, not that the Master Mind method produces results for someone without a sales floor, a corporate budget, or six other self-made millionaires to call.
Who it is for
Buy it if
You want the original text behind the modern 'mastermind group' concept, in Hill's own words, and you're specifically looking for the introductory lesson rather than the full sixteen-lesson course. It also works as a period piece: a 1928 attempt to explain psychological influence using the physics vocabulary of the day.
Skip it if
You want the complete Law of Success course; this printing does not contain it. You also don't need it if you already know the mastermind-group concept from a later book like Think and Grow Rich, which restates the same idea in far fewer words and without the ether physics.
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