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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 doing—working 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: “Whate...