The 17 Principles of Personal Achievement By Napoleon Hill

Annotations by:  Joe Joson

1. DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE - The starting point of all achievements, knowing what you want.  GOALS!  Set SPECIFIC GOALS.

2.  MASTER MIND PRINCIPLE - The coordination of effort between two or more people in a spirit of perfect harmony in order to attain a specific objective.

  Teamwork!  Creating a Specific Team(s) to focus on, work at and achieve a Specific Goal(s).

3. APPLIED FAITH - A state of mind through which your aims, desires, plans and purposes are translated into spiritual, physical or financial equivalents.

Action!  Action, action  and More Action. Action With Measurable Results. (Faith without works or without action is dead.)

4  PLEASING PERSONALITY - A pleasing personality helps you master the major cause of failure-the inability to get along with people harmoniously.

Pleasing Personality: An extremely desirable Teamwork quality sought for in every Team Player. Being just a team member alone as the first step is not enough. A personable, dedicated team player is something else.

5  GOING THE EXTRA MILE - Rendering more and better service than you are paid to render, doing it all the time and doing it with a pleasing, positive attitude.

As an Action component: Going the Extra Mile equates to lots of Specific Actions done. 

As a Teamwork component:  It takes a certain quality of a Team player to go the Extra Mile.

Team players that go the extra mile are normally the ‘lifters’ (those that lift or take Action)  vice the ‘leaners’ (those that lean on others and do not do a whole lot). 

6. PERSONAL INITIATIVE - The inner power that starts all ACTION; the power that inspires the completion of all that one begins.

Personal Initiative, the mother and beginning of all  Actions. This is what takes winners to the finish line.

As a team player in a Teamwork:  What can I, as an individual do to maximize the team’s results. What can I contribute to the team  to bring us closer to this great objective or  GOAL.

7. SELF-DISCIPLINE - The ability to control our thoughts and emotions. Self-discipline is the only thing in life over which you have complete, unchallenged, and unchallengeable control.

In a Teamwork, Self discipline helps to maintain order, predictability of results, reliability, greatly organized team effort.

“If you do not discipline yourself, someone else will come along and discipline you.”

8. CONTROLLED ATTENTION - The highest form of self-discipline, the act of coordinating all your mind's faculties and directing their combined power to a given end or GOAL.

In a Teamwork , the Ability to Focus everyone’s brains, skills, resources to achieve a specific objective or GOAL.

9. ENTHUSIASM - A contagious state of mind that not only helps you gain the cooperation of others but, more importantly, inspires you to draw upon and use the power of your imagination.

In a Teamwork, Enthusiasm fires up everyone else in a group. Enthusiasm brings in needed extra boost to everyone’s morale. This results in increased actions that bring us closer to our Specific Goals.

10. IMAGINATION - Your mind's exercise, challenge and adventure. It uses old ideas and established facts to reassemble them into new combinations and to put them to new uses.  CREATIVITY!

In a Teamwork , Putting into gear our Creative Powers creates our drive, energy, motivation. When we go after a GOAL we challenge our creative minds, we go into an adventure that could become very exciting.

11. LEARNING FROM ADVERSITY AND DEFEAT - Hardship and adversity are a common language of nature in which she speaks to all living creatures and teaches them many things they would not learn in any other way.

In a Teamwork , we learn a lot from adversity, defeat and failures.  But our persistence and tenacity will eventually reward us.

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.  - Winston Churchill

“Losers quit when they fail. Winners fail until they succeed.”  (Rich Dad, Poor Dad/Robert Kiyosaki)

“Winners never quit. Quitters never win.” (Dr.  Robert Schuller, Crystal Cathedral,Garden Grove,CA)

12. BUDGETING TIME AND MONEY - Successful people know themselves, not as they think they are, but as their habits have made them: the use of time and money are the most vital of these habits.

Financial and time management are two very critical components needed to allow us to closely follow our ROADMAP or BLUEPRINT to our assured arrival at our destination or desired SPECIFIC GOAL.

13. POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE - To govern your life, you must be able to govern your mind, and that is the starting point of all riches (and success).

Attitude either fires up or Kills the Goal even before you begin. A can-do positive mental attitude is a Must for a Teamwork to be effective.

14. ACCURATE THINKING - The accurate thinker recognizes all the facts of life, both good and bad, and assumes the responsibility of separating and organizing the two, choosing those which serve his/her needs and rejecting others. (Sounds like Wisdom to me!)

The ability of team players in a Teamwork to remove  unwanted ‘noise’ or static, the ability to avoid needless clutter in decision making.

This helps avoid unnecessary detours. This allows for leap-frogging irrelevant issues or concerns. This helps with focusing on the SPECIFIC GOAL or destination.

15. SOUND PHYSICAL HEALTH - The key that coordinates all other principles and sets all ideas into motion, sound health provides the "flavor" to the good things in life.

A healthy Team player can put out excellent results consistently. The opposite, puts out reduced , diminished or no results.

“Achieving goals and bad health do not mix well.”

16. COOPERATION - Harmony based on definitive motive. Cooperation is the medium through which great personal power may be attained; the willing cooperation and coordination of effort to achieve a specific objective or a  SPECIFIC GOAL .

An extremely critical component in aTeamwork . Cooperation is a must. Any group effort is dead without cooperation from team members.

17. COSMIC HABITFORCE - The cosmic habitforce is the universe's law of equilibrium, the one natural law into which all other natural laws resolve themselves.

As a Goal-setting component Cosmic Habitforce  translates to this: There is no more effective and more powerful Universal Law than the Laws of Him who Created the Universe.  Natural Laws are laws set by Him who created nature. Flow with Him, follow Him and your goals and desires will have maximum results, if those goals are lined up with His goals for you.  (Not your will but His.)