“Think and Grow Rich” by Napolean Hill is an amazing plan-making, goal-setting, entrepreneurial book. It comes from one of Dale Carnegies’s (How to Win Friends & Influence People) industrious students. The book really focuses on how to create plans, see visions, and realize them. At times it gets a bit long, perhaps the author didn’t know that most people don’t remember lists of more than seven things, but the content is fantastic. I had my first business idea after reading the book and following its steps and because of this I learned about patents, product evaluation, goal setting and following through on plans.

I got the recommendation for this book from Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad“. After reading that book, I realized that my web development job was going nowhere and just wasting my time. I was eager to start a new business. The plan was to teach SAT’s, however that wasn’t exactly a business rather a self-employment thing. Still not sure about what to do and excited to learn more I followed up with this book. The first thing it said was to set a goal, visualize it, and make a plan for it. My short term goal was to make twenty thousand in assets by the end of February. Since I was planning on studying for the GMAT and teaching SAT’s (the two help each other out quite nicely), why not make a new innovative product. The idea finally came, a special card game for memorizing new facts and words. I wrote down the plan to accomplishing it, and read the commitment to it and the steps every morning and evening.

Among the first steps was to read a book on patents. I accomplished this in the first week, even with work destroying my energy. By the following week I started a website and started thinking about the design. Eventually I did an analysis and realized that manufacturing and distribution of the game would force a fairly high price on everything and perhaps it would be better to get the whole thing going online. After about a week of planning and brainstorming, everything seemed clear. I told my roomate and we sat down to see the closest competition. Then came the big lesson. Someone had already created such a website a few years back. It actually had all the ideas we had and worked really well. It also charged about twice as much. At that point I joined a small start-up and had no time to work on any other projects until I quit my day job. On one hand it was a bit disappointing not being first, on the other hand it was an important lesson about doing one’s research. The lessons learned through this experience and inspired by the “Think and Grow Rich” book were priceless. The book gets kind of strange at times, but nonetheless if one follows its steps, he or she will surely gain a wealth of knowledge.