We did it!! We’re releasing our first premium episode! Thank you for all the patience.
We plan on releasing more premium episodes very soon. For the time being, our release schedule will be one regular episode and one premium episode each month. Eventually we’ll be speeding things up at Wetwired headquarters and drop two of each flavor every month.
Napoleon Hill’s most famous book, Think and Grow Rich, has, according to the Napoleon Hill Foundation, sold more than 60 million copies since it was published in 1937. Reputedly, notably wealthy guys and gals such as Newt Gingrich, Oprah Winfrey, Mitt Romney, Tony Robbins, and Larry Ellison, the co-founder and current CTO of Oracle, are fans of either Hill specifically or his ideas.
Here are some highlights from the official story of the rise of Napoleon Hill.
He was an attorney who came from nothing, born in a one-room cabin in Appalachia.
He worked closely with Andrew Carnegie to produce the book Think Your Way to Wealth and led to a years long collaboration between the two men.
Hill was an advisor to two presidents—Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He helped Wilson to negotiate Germany’s surrender after World War I.
Hill invented FDR’s famous line: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Any parts of a bio like this would be eventful enough for a whole life!—except for the minor problem that there is absolutely no evidence that any of these things ever happened.
Every one of these official biographical details has been called into question, and no evidence was ever provided by Napoleon Hill or the Hill Foundation to substantiate any of them.
Neither Andrew Carnegie nor the Carnegie estate ever confirmed that any meeting with Hill ever took place or that Carnegie helped create the book.
Aside from a short meeting with Thomas Edison, Hill doesn’t seem to have met any of the over 500 people who show up in interviews in his books.
Nap claimed that the records of all of his meetings were lost in a structure fire.
I came into this episode with a pretty strong skepticism about the benefits of self-help and Napoleon Hill specifically. But I didn’t expect to find any of this. The scope of Hill’s fraud is truly amazing.