Written by SAORI | May 1, 2023
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The book in 3 sentences
Outwitting The Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success by Napoleon Hill is a personal development book structured as an interview between the author and the Devil. Throughout the conversation, the Devil reveals the roots of evil in humans and, thus, indirectly gives the reader the tools to escape from it and achieve personal success.
Due to its controversial title and content, Hill’s breakthrough work was published only in 2011, 72 years after it was originally written.
Concepts & terminology
Who is the Devil and what does he do?
The Devil consists of the negative energy that lives in the unused space of humans’ minds who fear him.
He enters a person’s brain by instilling negative thoughts in it.
Fear, superstition, avarice, greed, lust, revenge, anger, vanity, and plain laziness are the most powerful thoughts the Devil uses to access and take control of a person’s mind.
Fear of poverty, criticism, ill health, loss of love, old age, and death are the six major fears that the Devil uses to take control.
What are opposite forces of the Devil?
The Devil’s opponent controls all the positive forces of the world, such as love, faith, hope, and optimism.
What does it mean to think accurately?
Accurate thinking refers to the formation of constructive thoughts in terms of faith, courage, hope, and definiteness of purpose rather than fear, discouragement, hopelessness, and destructiveness.
Accurate thinking allows you to automatically become an ally of the Devil’s opposition and block him from entering your mind.
Who are Drifters?
Drifters are persons who accept whatever life throws in their way without making a protest or putting up a fight; they are individuals who don’t know what they want from life and, therefore, spend all of their time getting just that.
Drifters do little or no thinking for themselves, they are too lazy mentally to use their own brain.
What is the law of hypnotic rhythm?
The law of hypnotic rhythm solidifies and makes permanent your thought-habits, good or bad alike.
This law forces every person to form thought-habits that harmonize with the dominating influences of their enviroment, especially that part which is made of one’s association with other minds.
You cannot control, influence, or evade the law of hypnotic rhythm. However, you can relate to it so as to benefit by its relentless operation.
What is faith?
Faith is the absence of all forms of negative thought; it is definiteness of purpose backed by the belief in the attainment of the object of that purpose.
How do you develop your sixth sense?
Faith is the state of mind that opens the medium of a sixth sense through which you can communicate with source of power and information far surpassing any available through the five physical senses.
With the development of your sixth sense comes a strange power which opens to you at all times the door to the Temple of Wisdom.
What is the emotion of sex?
The emotion of sex is one of the greatest of all forces that motivate humans and, therefore, it is also one of the most dangerous ones.
The desire for sexual expression is natural and you cannot kill it. If you turn off the emotion of sex from its natural manner of expression, it will break out in some other less desirable form.
Sexual energy is a virtue when controlled and directed to the achievement of desirable ends; it is a fault when neglected and permitted to lead to acts of lust.
Key learnings
Being a drifter will make you fail in life
Drifting is the most common cause of failure in every walk of life because it allows the Devil to take control of your mind. The reason for this is twofold:
- Drifters don’t have the power of individual initiative, they are putty. This allows the Devil to mold them into whatever he desires
- Since the Devil’s opposition is not attracted to anything that is soft and useless, drfiters cannot get help from it
Habits are contagious
Every habit attracts a flock of its relatives:
- The habit of doing anything that is useless leads to the formation of other futile habits, especially the habit of drifting
- The habit of doing something useful leads to the formation of other productive, healthy habits
The benefits of failure
According to the Devil, “every failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent success.”
In effect, if you look into the lives of people who achieved lasting success you will find, without exception, that their success has been in exact proportion to the extent that they surmounted failure.
As the Devil states, “capacity to surmount failure without being discouraged” is “the chief asset of every man who attains outstanding success in any calling.”
The seed of success that comes with failure consists of some form of knowledge, idea, plan, or opportunity which would not have been available to you without the change of thought-habits forced by the adversity.
The seed will germinate only if you acknolwedge that most failures are only temporary defeat, and if you never – under any circumstances – accept it as an excuse for drifting.
Here are some benefits that can come with failure if you do not let it make you quit trying / start drifting:
- It can compel you to depend less upon material forces and more upon spiritual forces
- It can force you to acquire knowledge or to cultivate habits that lead you to the attainment of your major purpose in life
- It can provide you an opportunity to break the grip of hypnotic rhythm and set up a new set of thought-habits. In other words, it can force you to change your thought-habits, thus breaking and redirecting the force of hypnotic rhythm
Keep in mind: The Devil induces as many people as he can to fail as often as possible because “not one out of ten thousand will keep on trying after failing two or three times”.
Don’t fall into the trap, keep trying and do not let adversity stop you.
Talking too much can be dangerous
According to the Devil, if you talk too much, you inform the world of your aims and plans and give others the opportunity to profit by your ideas.
Wise persons keep their plans to themselves and avoid expressing uninvited opinions. This prevents others from appropriating their ideas and makes it complex for others to interfere with their plans.
Expressing loosely organized opinions will get you into the habit of drifting
For this concept, I will directly quote Napoleon Hill’s words:
“The habit of expressing loosely organized opinions is one of the most destructive of habits. Its destructiveness consists in its tendency to influence people to guess instead of searching for the facts when they form opinions, create ideas, or organize plans.
The habit develops a grasshopper mind—one that jumps from one thing to another but never completes anything. And of course, carelessness in the expression of opinions leads to the habit of drifting. From there it is only a step or two until one is bound by the law of hypnotic rhythm which automatically prohibits accurate thinking.”
The seven most common forms of sin
According to the Devil, the seven most common forms of sin are:
- Overeating, because it leads to sickness and misery
- Overindulging in sex, because it breaks down your willpower and generates the habit of drifting
- Letting your mind being dominated by negative thoughts of envy, greed, fear, hatred, intolerance, vanity, self-pity, or discouragement, because these states of mind lead you into the habit of drifting
- Cheating, lying, and stealing, because they destroy self-respect, subdue your conscience, and lead to unhappiness
- Staying ignorant, because it leads to poverty and loss of self-reliance
- Accepting from life anything you do not want, because it is indicative of a neglect to use your mind
- Drifting through life without a definite goal, plan or purpose, because it leads to poverty and destroys the priviledge of self-determination and of using your own mind as a medium of contact with Infinite Intelligence
The Devil’s bribes
There are six main bribes through which the Devil gets you into habit of drifting:
- Love
- The thirst for sex expression
- Covetousness for money
- The obsessive desire to gain something for nothing—gambling
- Vanity in women
- Egotism in men
The benefits of controlled sex
According to the Devil, a controlled, mastered, and transmuted emotion of sex has several benefits:
- It provides the magnetic force that attracts people to one another. In effect, is the most important factor of a pleasing personality
- It gives quality to the tone of voice and allows you to convey through the voice any feeling desired
- It serves to give motive-power to your desires
- It keeps your nervous system charged with the energy required to carry on the work of maintaining the body
- It sharpens your imagination and enables you to form useful ideas
- It gives you rapidity and definiteness to your physical and mental movements
- It gives you persistence and perseverance in the pursuit of your major life purpose
- It is a considerable antidote for all fear
- It gives you immunity against discouragement
- It helps your to master laziness and procrastination
- It gives you physical and mental endurance while undergoing any type of opposition or defeat
- It gives you the fighting qualities required under all circumstances for self-defense
The perils of uncontrolled sex
Over-indulgence of sex will:
- Deplete the source of your greatest driving forces and waste your creative energy
- Dissipate the energy required by nature to maitain your physical health
- Deplete your magnetic energy, which is the source of an attractive, pleasing personality
- Eliminate the sparkle from your eyes and set up discord in the tone of your voice
- Destroy enthusiasm, subdue ambition, and lead you to the habit of drifting on all subjects
In addition to these perils, uncontrolled sex will also lead you to poverty.
According to the Devil, in fact, “if humans would control their sex desires and transmute them into a driving force with which to carry on their occupation—that is, if they spent on their work one half the time they dissipate in pursuit of sex, they would never know poverty.”
Why your relationships matter
Relationships are fundamental to your success because of three reasons:
- No individual is an entity unto himself
- Completeness of mind can be attained only by harmony of purpose and deed between two or more minds. In fact, “outstanding achievement is impossible without the friendly cooperation of others”.
- Your environment – especially your association with others – constitutes the material that feeds your thoughts. You absorb and take over, either consciously or unconsciously, the thought-habits of those with whom you associate closely
To cultivate beneficial relationships, you have to select your close associates with as much care as you choose the food with which you feed your body, with the goal of always of associating with individuals whose dominating thoughts are positive, friendly, and hamonious.
The types of associates who have the greatest influence on your are your partner in marriage and in the home, and your associates in your occupation. After that come your close friends and acquaintances.
Casual acquaintances and strangers have little to no influence on you.
Your relationship of marriage is the most influential because it bring you and your partner under the influence of “spiritual forces of such weight that they become dominating forces of the mind”.
Why time matters
Time is your greatest asset and it matters because, besides the power of thought, is the only thing you own completely and the one thing which can be shaped into whatever material things you want.
How can you develop and maitain positive thought-habits?
The most effective way to cultivate and maintain positive thought-habits is to create Master Mind, i.e., a friendly alliance of a group of people who will obligate themselves to assist one another in achieving the object of some definite purpose.
The 10 basic motives or desires that inspire action
According to the Devil, there are ten common motives which inspire most of a person’s thought-action, namely:
- The desire for sex expression and love
- The desire for physical food
- The desire for spiritual, mental, and physical self-expression
- The desire for perpetuation of life after death
- The desire for power over others
- The desire for material wealth
- The desire for knowledge
- The desire to imitate other
- The desire to excel others
- The seven basic fears
Actionable insights
How to stop being a drifter in life
- Always do your own thinking
- Think accurately
- Decide definitely what you want from life. Then, create a plan for reaching it and, if necessary, be willing to sacrifice everything else.
- Examine temporary defeats and extract from them the seed of equivalent advantage
- Be willing to provide useful service equivalent to the value of all material things you demand of life and provide the service first
- Express your opinions carefully
- Do not impose a speech upon others if you’re not invited to do so
- Acknowledge that your mind is a receiver that can be attuned to receive communications from the universal repository of Infinite Intelligence to help you transform your wants into their physical equivalent
- Make sure to budget your time so that you don’t waste none of it
- Fill your headspace with faith in your capacity to make life provide you with whatever you demand of it
- When you pray, don’t beg! Ask for what you desire and insist upon getting exactly that, with no replacements
- Acknowledge that you either master life or it masters you and there is no half-way or compromising point. Never accept from life anything you do not want
- Always remember that, through the definite law of nature, your dominating thoughts attract their physical counterpart
- Never leave unfinished thoughts in the mind
- Create the habit of reaching definite decisions on all subjects
- Be cautious. People drift into all sorts of risky circumances because they aren’t cautious by planning their moves in advance.
- Do not procrastinate. Drifting and procrastination are the same; any habit that leads you to procrastinate— to put off reaching a definite decision—generates the habit of drifting
- Surround yourself with an environment that inspires positive thought
- Don’t let temporary defeat discourage you. Don’t quit and keep trying
How to master yourself
Self mastery is a requirement to move with definiteness of purpose at all times and, thus, being able to escape the habit of drifting.
As the Devil says, “lack of self-mastery is, of itself, the most destructive form of indefiniteness”.
You can master yourself by conquering the three appetites accountable for most of one’s lack of self-discipline:
- Desire for food. As the Devil says, “people who eat wisely and keep their body sewers clean handicap me because a clean body sewer generally means a sound body and a brain that functions properly”
- Desire for expression of sex
- The desire to express loosely organized opinions
How to benefit from the law of hyptnotic rhythm
To develop a harmonious relationship with the law of hypnotic rhythm, you have to change your habits so that they represent the circumstances and the things that you desire and you are willing to accept.
Remember: “no one can change the law of hypnotic rhythm any more than one can change the law of gravity, but everyone can change himself.”
How to approach Infinite Intelligence
One powerful way to approach Infinite Intelligence is to express gratitude for what you already have and to ask for more, and for guidance.
Take inventory of your intangible assets, it will help you disclosing possessions of pricesless value.
How to build successful relationshps
According to the Devil, some minds harmonize naturally while others naturally clash.
Thus, to cultivate successful human relationships, you must associate with people whose minds naturally harmonize with yours.
Common interests alone will not suffice to build meaningful and enduring relationships .
How to master the emotion of sex
To benefit from the emotion of sex, you have to comprehend it, master it, and make it serve you.
You can master the emotion of sex by transumiting it into constructive activities other than copulation, for example by translating it into a driving force with which you carry out your occupation.
According to the Devil, great leaders are highly sexed, but they follow the habit of controlling their sex desires by switching them into a driving force behind their job.
Notes
Signs of a drifter
- Lack of major purpose in life
- Lack of self-confidence
- Incapacity to accomplish anything requiring thought and effort
- Incapacity to save money
- Lack of imagination
- Lack of enthusiasm and initiative to start anything he/she is not forced to undertake
- Ill-temperness
- Lack of emotional control
- Non-magnetic and unattractive personality
- Expression of opinions on everything but accurate knowledge on nothing
- Being jack of all trades but good at none
- Neglection of cooperation with those who surround him/her
- Repetition of the same mistakes over and over again, without profiting by failure
- Narrow-mindedness and intolerance on all subjects
- Readiness to crucify those who may disagree with him/her
- Expectations to get everything from others but willingness to give little to nothing in return
- Strong polemicization of the government but no expression of how it can be improved
- Avoidance of making decisions on anything if possible and if he/she is forced to decide, he/she will reverse himself/herself at the first opportunity
- Overeating
- Undexercising
- Getting a drink of liquor if someone else will pay for it
- Willingness to gamble if it can be done “on the cuff”
- Criticism against people who are succeding in their chosen calling
- Willingness to work harder to get out of thinking than most others work in earning a good living
- Telling of a lie rather than admitting ignorance on any topic
- If he/she works for others, he/she will criticize them on their backs and flatter them to their faces
- He/she always moves without exercising caution. He/she acts first and thinks later, if at all
Signs of a non-drifter
- He/she is always engaged in doing something definite, through some well-organized plan which is definite
- He/she has a major goal in life toward which he is always working, and many minor goals, all of which lead toward his/her central scheme.
- He/she has a mind of his/her own and uses it for all purposes
- He/she is not easily flattered
Quotes
- “New habits offer the only way out for people who fail”
- “Life gives no one immunity against adversity, but life gives to everyone the power of positive thought, which is sufficient to master all circumstances of adversity and convert them into benefits.”
- “All negative desires are nothing but frustrations of positive desires. They are inspired by some form of defeat, failure, or neglect by human beings to adapt themselves to nature’s laws in a positive way.”
- “Negative influences are forced into association with one another, no matter where they may be. Positive influences are just as definitely forced into association with one another.”
- “A negative mind-set and self-doubt can be the primary obstacle to success.”
- “You make an impression on everyone you meet, just as everyone you meet makes an impression on you. You never know when an acquaintance may become a business associate. There is great power in your network.”
- “Next to the habit of drifting, the most dangerous human trait is the lack of caution.”
- “This is your testing time. You have been reduced to poverty and humiliated in order that you might be forced to discover your ‘other self.’”
- The “other self” may “meet with temporary defeat, but not with permanent failure.”
- “There is something infinitely worse than being forced to work. It is being forced not to work.”
- “The person who has self-discipline understands the emotion of sex, respects it, and learns to control and transmute it into constructive activities.”
Wrap up
I hope that you enjoyed my notes of Outwitting The Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success by Napoleon Hill. Besides Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life by Max Lugavere, this was the most life-changing book for me so, if my summary intrigued you, I highly recommend you to read it.
If you have any thoughts or comments, feel free to share them in the comments below or even dm me on Social Media! I’d love to discuss this amazing book with you ✨
I wish you a wonderful day and remember, you are, have always been and will always be, enough.
Love Saori