Napoleon Hill

If more people followed his example they might escape being hamstrung by prejudices. And what a pleasant place to live in the world would be. Every person should make it his business to gather new ideas from sources other than the environment, in which he daily lives and works. The mind becomes withered, stagnant, narrow and closed unless it searches for new ideas.

The farmer should come to the city quite often, and walk among the strange faces and the tall buildings. He will go back to his farm, his mind refreshed, with more courage and greater enthusiasm. The city man should take a trip to the country every so often and freshen his mind with sights new and different from those associated with his daily labors.

Everyone needs a change of mental environment at regular periods, the same as a change and variety of food are essential. The mind becomes more alert, more elastic and more ready to work with speed and accuracy after it has been bathed in new ideas, outside of one's own field of daily labor.

As a student of this course you will temporarily lay aside the set of ideas with which you perform your daily labors, and enter a field of entirely new (and in some instances, heretofore unheard-of) ideas. Splendid!

You will come out, at the other end of this course, with a new stock of ideas which will make you more efficient, more enthusiastic and more courageous, no matter in what sort of work you may be engaged. Do not be afraid of new ideas! They may mean to you the difference between success and failure.

Some of the ideas introduced in this course will require no further explanation or proof of their soundness because they are familiar to practically everyone. Other ideas here introduced are new, and for that very reason many students of this philosophy may hesitate to accept them as sound.

Every principle described in this course has been thoroughly tested by the author, and the majority of the principles covered have been tested by scores of scientists and others who were quite capable of distinguishing between the merely theoretic and the practical. For these reasons all principles here covered are known to be workable in the exact manner claimed for them.