Living in More Than One World

It’s always interesting when a person’s legacy is carried on long after his or her death. That’s the case with Napoleon Hill, perhaps best known for Think and Grow Rich. Despite its title, the book is not just a guide to financial wealth but to all-around success and personal development. He wrote it on the personal suggestion of Andrew Carnegie, to intensively study the success secrets of some of the major figures of his era, including Thomas Edison and John D.  Rockefeller.  It and other books by Hill, (1883-1970), remain popular in libraries and bookstores worldwide. Sue Ellen Ross of The Post-Tribune in Gary, Ind., recently did a feature story, Top motivator continues to inspire, about the field trip of a high school band to an open house at the Napoleon Hill Foundation’s World Learning Center at Purdue University Calumet. The foundation carries on Hill’s teachings through publications, seminars and distance learning classes. The article explains that the students listened to a presentation by Dr. J.B. Hill, a West Virginia physician who is Hill’s grandson. He said that he didn’t know Hill well, but reading Think and Grow Rich changed his life. The students also walked the labyrinth on the center’s grounds. Labyrinths were not in vogue in Hill’s day; but their calm, deliberate and meditative qualities fit in well with his emphasis on harnessing the power of the mind to make meaningful achievements in life. I can attest to the quiet intensity of labyrinths after walking the indoor one (there is also one outdoors) at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco last year. Hill would probably appreciate how the foundation has helped to modernize his message by tapping into the power of an ancient concept.

For an easy-to-follow roundup of eight new self-help books, see Megan K. Scott’s AP story, New Self-Help Books Inspire in Our Troubled Times. It includes capsule descriptions and sample advice from such authors as Judith Orloff, M. J. Ryan, Alan Lurie and the financial journalist Jean Chatzky. Lurie seems to be an embodiment of living in more than one world: he is an executive at Grubb & Ellis, an ordained rabbi and a former architect. Learn more about him and his book Five Minutes on Mondays: Finding Unexpected Purpose, Peace and Fulfillment at Work, in the recent New York Post feature, Divine and Conquer: Rabbi Exec Preaches Higher Path to Profit. For more on the new crop of self-help books, see Gwenda Bond’s April 6th article in Publishers Weekly.

How can you resist a column called This Column Will Change Your Life? The latest from Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian (where he is also a reporter), deals with positives and negatives regarding habits and routines. Sometimes the regularity of the routines causes the benefits derived to be diminished. “But there is one way,” Burkeman writes, “to get the best of both worlds: develop habits and routines that are designed to disrupt your habits and routines, and keep things fresh.” This could entail weekly self-reviews of your work, which even though being another form of routine, still gets you out of your daily routine for awhile.

He also writes about “burst working, involving tiny, timed sprints of five to 10 minutes, with gaps in between,” as an antidote to procrastination.
Also check out “The Bedsit Epiphany, ” his recent in-depth interview with Eckhart Tolle, the mega-selling self-help author of The Power of Now and A New Earth.