Think & Grow Rich A Latino Choice

1 The Five Minutes That Changed My Life The first time I heard about Think & Grow Rich, I was twenty-three years old. Married with two kids and another on the way, I was doing what I thought I should be doingworking like hell to earn a living. The year was 1963 and minimum wage was a dollar an hour. I was doing better than that: $1.10. I was okay with that. I had a desk job as a neon sign designer at a small shop called Texas Neon. Still, my weekly take-home pay after taxes and deductions was only $37.50, hardly enough to make ends meet. I worried every day and prayed, hoping one of the kids wouldn't get sick. How would I pay the doctor? One day, I got lucky. A woman by the name of Sally Pond came into the shop and asked us to design a small sign for her office building. She wanted it to read, "The School of Personal Achievement." As she explained her business, my ears perked up. She promised that anyone who took the course and followed the teachings of Napoleon Hill and his seventeen principles of personal achievement would get rich. Every bit as rich as he or she wanted. Napoleon Hill? Who was that? Was he French? Was he related to Bonaparte? Was he dead? "No," she said. "This man is alive, living in Chicago. And as far as I'm concerned, he's more important than Napoleon Bonaparte. This Napoleon will make you a millionaire." In about five minutes, Sally Pond signed me up. And in those five minutes, my life changed. Not only did I get a chance to design her sign, I got a chance to design my life, and to acquire the knowledge I would need to lead a happy life and earn millions. I borrowed the money to pay for the course, joining fifteen other would-be millionaires at the Napoleon Hill School of Personal Achievement. Those seventeen weeks in class changed my life forever. Hill's mantra was: "Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, you can achieve." I believed every word. After all, his philosophy was not just one man's opinion. It was the shared wis- dom distilled from the minds of hundreds of the most successful people in the world. Napoleon Hill had spent more than twenty years compiling this treasure. He had spent hours, days, and weeks interviewing presidents, heads of state, inventors, and captains of industry. His work was a gold mine of information and success secrets. My eyes were as wide as baseballs. The excitement inside me was huge. Imagine. I could be rich! I could be happy! I could make important contributions to society by learning and applying Hill's seventeen principles of personal achievement! Even before the first day of class, something inside me began to change. For the first time in my life, instead of worrying, I was thinking positively about the future. The course was taught in seventeen installments. Every Monday, we would report promptly at 5 pm, and each week we were introduced to a new lesson. With each lesson, we learned a new principle. During the first twenty minutes of instruction, we were shown a 16-mm movie of Mr. Hill giving an overview of the lesson of the week. Week one: Definiteness of Purpose. Week two: The Mastermind Alliance. And so on. Class discussion was encouraged, and the conversations were spirited. We had workbooks to fill out and homework to do. Sally invited successful people to guest lecture and tell their stories of how their dreams had come true by applying Hill's principles. Many of the students became good friends, though we didn't socialize much after class. We tended to rush home to do our homework and get ready for the following week. Had I been older and more experienced, I might have been skeptical of the whole philosophy. I might have questioned some of iSosa, Lionel is the author of 'Think & Grow Rich A Latino Choice', published 2006 under ISBN 9780345485618 and ISBN 0345485610.