Several years ago I stumbled upon the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill which had been hanging around my bookshelf for sometime. At first, the concept of the title didn’t appeal to me because it didn’t seem like work hard and get wealthy. It seemed like a get rich quick scheme that I didn’t want to waste my time on. The first edition was written in 1937 and draws on interviews from the business tycoons of the time including Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison. The basic idea was that Hill interviewed these entrepreneurial giants and saw that they had many things in common. He put these commonalities together and called them The Secret to Success.

The fact that there were so many similarities among them makes me think that the same should be true today. Do successful entrepreneurs think a certain way? Do they read certain things? Do they join certain groups? When I hear a new idea, I’m not always inclined to jump on the bandwagon, but if I hear it from three or four, five or seven or ten people who I know to be successful now it’s something that I probably would like to test. Today’s version of this book is called The Millionaire Next Door and its author does the same kind of survey of modern day millionaires to try to figure out their secrets. He makes a big differentiation between the people who look like they’re millionaires because they live in a big house in an expensive neighborhood and the guy running the drycleaner shop because drycleaners are one of the most profitable enterprises you can get up and run. He looks across all of these things to help the rest of us say yeah, you know, I can get there.