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DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight we are starting our series of radio programs here in Paris, Missouri, in which I will explain the principles of success I have learned and developed over more than forty years. I am delighted to be in your city and hope you will benefit from what I have to tell you.
The first principle I will speak about is definiteness of purpose. Definiteness of purpose doesn’t sound like a very imposing or a very dramatic subject, but ladies and gentlemen, it’s the beginning of all achievement worthy of mention. Wherever you find anybody who is succeeding, you’ll find a person who has adopted the principle of definiteness of purpose in connection with the things he does, and he follows that principle at all times. That is why I have given it first position in these broadcasts, and why I will discuss it in our second broadcast as well.
I’m going to give you an illustration of the importance of being absolutely definite in connection with your major purpose. Some years ago, right after the end of World War Number One, I went into my safe-deposit box and took out my written definite major purpose, and in the paragraph in which I had stated my projected income for that year, 1919, it read “$10,000 per year,” I took my pencil and added a zero to those figures, making the number “$100,000,” and laid the written statement back in the vault. I believed I needed to set my sights higher! And I don’t think it was more than three weeks before a man from Texas came into my office and made me an offer of $100,000 a year if I would go down to Texas and spend three weeks out of each month writing sales literature for him. I accepted that contract, which he drew up, signed it, and went down there and ultimately raised some $10 million for him.
He had drawn up a contract that was, I would say, very tricky. It specified that unless I stayed an entire year I wouldn’t receive any of my salary. In a little while, I began to see that he was misusing these funds, and instead of staying the entire year, I turned him in to the FBI and went back to Chicago, and lost my entire salary up to that time. Then I went into my vault again and took out my definite major purpose, which I had written down, and read it carefully. Here is the way it read: “I will earn during the year 1919 the sum of $100,000.”
I saw immediately, when I read it carefully, what was wrong with that statement, and I wonder if you could tell me what’s wrong with it before I tell you. There’s no doubt in the world but that I did earn the $100,000, because there’s hardly anyone who wouldn’t be glad to pay $100,000 for services which raised capital in the amount of $10 million. I earned it, all right, but I didn’t get it. I want to tell you now why I didn’t get it.
I didn’t get it because I left two important words out of my affirmation. Go over the statement as I have given it to you, and see if you can supply those two important words. I’ll repeat the statement again: “I will earn during the year 1919 the sum of $100,000.” Now, isn’t that definite, or isn’t it? You think that’s definite? It sounds definite in a way, doesn’t it? No, there were two words left out. I should have said, “I will earn AND RECEIVE $100,000 during the year 1919.”
Do you think if I had written it that way that it would have made any difference in the makeup of this crooked man who, perhaps from the very beginning, intended to cheat me? Do you think it would have made any difference as to the money I would have received? I’ll tell you that it would have made a difference, and I want to tell you why. If I had placed emphasis on the fact that I was going to receive that money after I earned it, I would have taken that contract, which he drew up, to my attorney, and we would have gone over it very carefully, and my attorney would have provided a paragraph in there whereby I would get that money from month to month as I earned it. That’s the difference it would have made.
The majority of people who go into contracts and various and sundry arrangements and relationships with other people do so with such indefiniteness that there seldom is what the lawyer would call a meeting of the minds. One person will understand one thing, and another person will understand something entirely different.
We need contracts because, unfortunately, some people are cheaters who cannot be trusted, or they will take the easy way rather than the honorable way. Taking the path of least resistance makes all rivers and some men crooked, and that was certainly the case with this man from Texas.
I want to give you another illustration about the importance of definiteness of purpose. Some fourteen years ago Bill Robinson, from here in Paris, purchased a copy of my book Think and Grow Rich. He read it and was impressed by it, and as he was reading it, he said to himself, “Some of these days I’m going to meet this man Hill. I’ll get him to come over here to Paris, and he’s going to deliver a talk for our people.”
Now, “some of these days,” ladies and gentlemen, is not definite. Fourteen years passed. He was lying in bed, reading one of the St. Louis papers in which he saw an advertisement of mine, indicating that I was conducting a course in St. Louis. This time he made another statement. He jumped out of bed and said, “I’m going over to St. Louis and see that man, and I’m going to have him over here immediately.” That was approaching definiteness. He did come over there, and here I am.
He could have done that fourteen years ago, if he had said when he read that book, “I like this message, I like that author; I’m going to have him over here within a month.” If he had put a definite time upon his intentions, you may be sure that I would have been over here a long time ago.
Definiteness of purpose. I have noticed that men who are successful, like Mr. Andrew Carnegie, Henry J. Kaiser, Henry Ford, and Thomas A. Edison, all move with definiteness of purpose. Generally, any great leader, when he tells one of his subordinates to do something, he not only tells him what to do, but he tells him when to do it, he tells him where to do it, he tells him why he should do it, and importantly, he tells him how to do it, and then more important than all of these, he sees to it that the man does what he tells him. He doesn’t take no for an answer.
That’s what constitutes a great leader, a man who knows precisely what he wants and who can pass that information on to people who are subordinate to him in terms that they can understand and that will impress them.
During the war, Mr. Kaiser was engaged in a great variety of war work, manufacturing military items which the government needed badly. In order to ensure that the necessary raw materials would be at his plant when he needed them, when, for example, he would order a carload of a certain type of steel, he didn’t just send an order down to the United States Steel Corporation to ship him a carload of a certain kind of steel. He said that he wanted that steel at his plant on a certain date, and then he sent a couple of expediters over to the steel plant to ride that car through, with instructions that if any railroad man dared to set that car off on the siding for any purpose whatsoever, those expediters were to stop him from doing it, and to keep that car moving, or else not come back. Their jobs wouldn’t last any longer.
That was pretty definite, too. As a result, Mr. Kaiser made a world-famous record in the business of building ships. He never had built ships before, but he did understand the principle of definiteness. Incidentally, if you know anything about Mr. Kaiser, you know that that’s one of his outstanding qualifications today. It’s one of the reasons why he has been a successful man. He has known what he wanted to do, he’s laid out a plan for doing it, and he’s been very definite about all of his plans.
This “what to do, when to do it, where to do it, why to do it, and how to do it” is what I call my WWWWH formula. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for each of you in the audience to have a nice pin made up for your lapel or your dress with a WWWWH on it. Most people who see that pin won’t know what it means, but you will. It will keep in your mind the fact that when you tell a person to do something, you must be definite about it. You must tell him what to do, when to do it, where to do it, why to do it, how to do it, and then you must get after him and see that he does it.
I’m talking to you now about the difference between a successful man and an unsuccessful man. You take an unsuccessful person and generally, when he gives instructions or expresses his desires, he does it in a very slipshod, loose, indefinite manner, and as the results come back they are just like that, too.
When I was commissioned by Andrew Carnegie some forty-four years ago to become the author of the world’s first practical philosophy of individual achievement, I was kept at Mr. Carnegie’s house for three days and nights. He was studying me carefully, and I didn’t know that I was under observation at all. I didn’t know the purpose of it. I found out years later that what he wanted to find out about me more than everything else was if I had this quality of being definite about things that I undertook to do.
At the end of the third day, he called me into his library and he said: “We’ve been talking here for three days about a philosophy which I think the world needs, a philosophy that will give the man in the streets the know-how gained by successful men like myself who got that knowledge by a lifetime of experience through the trial-and-error method. I want a philosophy in simple terms that will give the man of the streets the benefit of all that has been learned by successful men. I want to ask you a question about that.”
Then he put this question to me. He said, “If I commission you to become the author of this philosophy, introduce you to the outstanding men of this country who will collaborate with you, the men who are authorities on the subject of success, are you willing to devote twenty years of your life to research, earning your own living as you go along, without any subsidy from me? Yes or no?” I fidgeted around for several seconds, I suppose. It seemed to me like an hour. Finally, Mr. Carnegie said, “Well,” and he started to ask me another question. I broke in. I said, “Yes, Mr. Carnegie, I not only will accept your commission, sir, but you may depend upon it that I will complete it.” He said, “That’s what I wanted to hear you say.” He also said, “I wanted to see the expression on your face when you said it, and I wanted to hear the tone of voice in which you said it.”
He made up his mind then and there to give me a commission that had been denied to other men, some of them college professors. He said that when he put that question to them, their reaction time in answering ran all the way from three hours to three years, and some of them never did give an answer. He wanted somebody who could be definite, who could make up his mind when he had all of the facts at hand, whether he would do a thing or whether he wouldn’t.
When I started the Golden Rule Magazine, beginning on Armistice Day 1918, I didn’t have any capital with which to do it. I’d been in the service of the president of the United States throughout that war. The school of which I was the president and owner had entirely disintegrated as the result of the war. But I wanted to publish a Golden Rule Magazine. I’d had that in mind for a great number of years. The time had come, I believed, when the public would welcome a magazine of that sort.
All I needed was a little matter of $100,000 to start with. That was all. If I’d gone into a bank to borrow $100,000, the chances are that they would have pressed a button secretly, and a couple of big plug-uglies would have pounced on me and turned me over to the police, because they would have thought I was out of my mind.
I couldn’t have borrowed $100,000 from private sources, because what I had to offer as security was intangible. So I worked out a plan for getting that money, or the equivalent of it, and it took me only three days to have it in hand. Before I approached the man that I intended to give the privilege of lending me this $100,000, I sat down to my typewriter and I wrote the leading editorial that I intended to publish in the front of that magazine, just as if I had the money already in hand. I closed the editorial by saying that “I will need at least $100,000 to get this magazine started. Where the money is coming from, I don’t know, but one thing I do know, and that is that I shall publish and distribute the Golden Rule Magazine this year.” That was very definite.
I took the editorial to a very wealthy printer, Mr. George B. Williams of Chicago. I allowed him to invite me to the Athletic Club of Chicago for lunch. I allowed him to spend $3.85 for a lunch which I didn’t eat, didn’t even touch. Meantime, I was talking, telling him about this magazine, and when I thought that I had told him all that he needed to know, I pulled out this editorial and handed it to him. When he read that last quotation, that I do not know where the money’s coming from, here is what he said. He said: “I like your idea, I like you. I have liked you for a long time, and I think you can do the job. You bring your copy in, I’ll print the magazine, we’ll put it on the newsstands and we’ll sell it, and when it’s sold, I’ll take my money first and if there’s anything left, you can have it.”
That, ladies and gentlemen, was the way that the Golden Rule Magazine was started, and it attained a circulation of over 500,000 the first six months, and it cleared a net profit above all expenses the first year of $3,150.
Later on, when I was writing editorials for Bernard McFadden’s magazine, I told him about this, and he said: “Hill, I’ve known you a long time, and I have great respect for your ability, but there’s something wrong with your figures. You must not have been good in mathematics when you went to school, because I happen to know that in order to start a national magazine with any degree of assurance that you’ll make it go, you have to have at least a million dollars, and the chances even then are about fifty-fifty that you’ll get none of it back.”
Well, it scared me to death after I found out that I had done something that couldn’t be done. It’s a good thing that I didn’t know that before I started. There are so many people, ladies and gentlemen, that never undertake things that they would like to do because they are afraid they can’t carry them through. Or they’re waiting for all of the circumstances to be just right before they start.
Do you know that if you wait for all circumstances to be just right before you undertake something that you’ve been planning, maybe for a great number of years, you’ll never start, because circumstances never are just right. If you want to do a thing badly enough, get together all of the information you can about it, provide yourself with all of the equipment that is available, and start where you stand to do what you can about it at that time. The chances are, as strange as it may seem, as you use the tools that you have at hand, whatever they may be, that other and better tools will sometimes miraculously be placed at your service.
I wonder if you members of my radio audience wouldn’t be interested in knowing what my definiteness of purpose is for the next five years. Would you be interested in that? I’m going to tell you about it, because you’re going to have the opportunity of seeing me in action. You’re going to hear this announcement. You’re going to watch, step by step, how I go about carrying it out.
I am going to work full-time again, ending my recent life of leisure, and resume writing books and lecturing. There’s several reasons why I am going to do this. In the first place, personally, I have as much money as I need, if I didn’t get any more the rest of my life. I have enough to see us through, according to our style of living. All excess funds are going to be used exclusively in promoting the distribution of this philosophy throughout the world. I want the philosophy published in every one of the leading languages on earth, and I’m going to see to it that that’s done.
I have found out something as the result of my coming to towns like Paris that I didn’t know before about this philosophy, and it’s given me new hope and new courage. It’s given me a new slant on definiteness of purpose, and that is that the people at the grass roots of the population, in little towns like this, are ready and hungry for this philosophy to come into their lives. Because, after all, this is a philosophy of individual economy. It’s designed to help the individual to balance his financial affairs. It’s a sound philosophy because it’s been tested by the keenest brains in the world. And it is a philosophy dealing with individual finances and material things.
We’re living in an age of frustration, an age of fear, an age of anxiety. It would be almost impossible to go through an audience like this and find a person who didn’t have some sort of personal problem that he doesn’t know how to solve for the moment. This success philosophy is intended to solve individual problems. Whether you realize it or not, each and every one of you who listens to these broadcasts will be spreading sunshine, spreading joy, and spreading courage. You will have more confidence, and you will give more confidence to those you come into contact with. You will have definiteness of purpose, too, and as a starting point you will have a purpose to improve yourselves.
Ladies and gentlemen, our time is up for tonight. Join me next time for further discussion of this most important principle, definiteness of purpose.
Copyright © 2018 by The Napoleon Hill Foundation
