I want to tell you something that might surprise you about Think and Grow Rich. It’s not really a book about money.
Yes, Napoleon Hill wrote it during the Great Depression. Yes, it’s sold tens of millions of copies on the back of its reputation as a wealth-creation manual. And yes, there’s plenty in there about financial success, burning desire, and visualising outcomes. But the principle that stuck with me, the one I keep coming back to, is the mastermind.
Here’s the thing: I’d already built one before I read Think and Grow Rich.
The Technicians’ Network
When I was a Senior Laboratory Technician for the London Borough of Waltham Forest, I noticed something. Science technicians in schools are a peculiar professional group. Each of us faced unique problems specific to our school, our equipment, and our department, and most of us solved them in isolation. There was no forum, no peer group, no way to tap into what colleagues two miles away had already figured out.
So I set one up. A network for all the laboratory technicians in the borough. We met once a term, organised training, shared knowledge, and gave each other second opinions on the kind of problems that don’t have a manual. It worked. It proved so popular that the borough’s Design and Technology departments asked me to come in as a consultant and advise on setting up something similar. That worked too.
But the practical benefits were only part of it. One of the technicians once described herself to me as ancillary, as if her role were an afterthought to the school’s real work. That word stuck with me. Part of what the network achieved, beyond the training and the shared problem-solving, was helping a group of skilled professionals understand that they weren’t subservient to anybody. They were a body of professionals in their own right, and they deserved to be treated as such.
The network grew to around 250 members, which attracted the attention of equipment suppliers. They wanted access to that audience, so I turned their product demonstrations into proper training sessions. The companies provided the trainers and covered the cost of lunch. We received free, hands-on training on the latest scientific equipment, delivered in our own laboratories. Not everyone could make it, as most schools couldn’t release all their staff, but twenty or so would turn up each time, and the knowledge spread from there. My manager encouraged the work throughout, and our department benefited directly. Over time, we also helped train teachers to use the latest science and technology. The people who had once been dismissed as ancillary were now upskilling the teaching staff.
I didn’t have a name for what I’d built at the time. It just felt like the obvious thing to do.
Then I Read Think and Grow Rich
Hill defines a mastermind as the coordination of knowledge and effort between two or more people who work toward a definite purpose in a spirit of harmony. When I eventually read Think and Grow Rich, I got about halfway through that definition and thought: that’s exactly what I built in Waltham Forest.
The technicians’ network wasn’t a management initiative or a training programme. It was a group of people with complementary knowledge, a shared purpose, and genuine goodwill toward each other’s success. Better-trained technicians, better-supported departments, problems solved faster. All of it followed naturally from the structure.
Reading Hill’s explanation of the principle didn’t teach me anything new. It gave me the language for something I’d already discovered by instinct. And that, if anything, is the best possible endorsement of an idea: that people arrive at it independently, without being told.
Why Most People Miss This
The majority of Think and Grow Rich reviews focus on desire, faith, and autosuggestion. The more mystical end of Hill’s philosophy. I understand why. Those chapters are dramatic. But in my experience, the mastermind principle is the most immediately actionable idea in the book, and the most underrated.
You don’t need to believe in the law of attraction to build a mastermind. You just need to find people who know things you don’t, who face problems you understand, and who are willing to show up and contribute. The rest follows.
I’ve applied this principle in various forms ever since: in business, in creative projects, and in the informal networks that form when people with shared interests meet. It works every time, for the same reasons it worked in a school science department in Waltham Forest in the 1980s.
The most informal version I experienced was a series of business lunches in London organised by my good friend Martin Avis, who had a knack for bringing the right people into the same room. We met roughly every two months. Martin charged a modest fee, but it covered only the cost of the food. The lunches themselves were structured enough, but afterwards, a group of us would retire to the hotel bar and the real conversations would start. People hopped between tables, shared ideas, gave advice freely, and took inspiration in equal measure. Martin steered things gently for the first few gatherings, then it took on a life of its own. It was just a room full of people who were figuring things out and willing to help each other do the same. I know of a handful of people from those afternoons who took what they heard and ran with it. Some of them are now very well known. Several are self-made millionaires. That’s the mastermind principle working without anyone calling it that.
Several joint ventures were successfully put together after those dinners, too. I was even approached by a well-known online author to write software to convert old websites into what was then a new platform called WordPress. I didn’t have the bandwidth to take it on at the time, but the fact that the ask was made says something about the calibre of people in that room and the trust that had been built up between us.
Is It Worth Reading?
Yes, but go in with the right expectations. Some of it is dated. Some of the language is overwrought. And if you approach it purely as a get-rich manual, you’ll either be disappointed or you’ll become insufferable at dinner parties.
Approach it instead as a study in how successful people think and organise themselves, and you’ll find more in it than the title suggests. The mastermind chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
I know because I built one before I knew what it was called.
