Think And Grow Duped (2026)

There are about a million different origin stories for our current obsession with maximizing our potential in America.

And my favorite one of those stories kind of explains everything you need to know about the coaching hustle today.

Only it starts back around the first time the machines started to take over.

I'm talking Industrial Revolution era, the latter half of the 1800s.

Not this like new chat GPT stuff.

Back then, humans were looking inward like, what makes me, a human, individually special and irreplaceable? And a bunch of their ideas were like, hey, I have a mind and a body and a soul.

Look what I can do.

Spiritual movements like New Thought and the Law of Attraction, you know, how your attitude and thoughts affect stuff in the physical world, became super popular right around then.

So did hypnosis.

Some folks took all this stuff a little too far, in my opinion, and started doing a thing called mentalism, mind reading and watch me bend this fork without touching it, magic stuff like that.

Others took the idea to church and came up with beliefs like Christian science, which focused on healing the body with the mind, often through prayer.

And, of course, there were a bunch of charlatans in on the game.

There was money to be made on seances.

Everyone wanted a Ouija board and all that other creepy Victorian stuff.

Supposedly, this all became really popular after the Civil War because so many people died and there weren't proper funerals.

Folks wanted to connect with lost loved ones again, you know, like in their minds.

And then along came a man named Napoleon Hill.

And he said, what if this new way of thinking was applied solely to making money? After all, if you can conjure the dead and bend spoons with your mind, you should be able to like manifest a pile of gold bricks, you know, think and grow rich.

So back in the 30s, he wrote a book called Think and Grow Rich.

His inspiration, he said, was a meeting with Andrew Carnegie.

And this is Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, not Dale Carnegie, the author of another self-help classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

That guy, Dale Carnegie, no relation, changed the spelling of his last name to match Andrew's The Year Andrew Carnegie Died.

Coincidence.

So we're talking about the OG Carnegie, Andrew.

Anyway, Napoleon Hill meets OG Andrew Carnegie.