Nghĩ Giàu Làm Giàu (Think and Grow Rich, Vietnamese edition, Yuan Phong translation)

Think and Grow Rich grew out of a twenty-year research project Napoleon Hill said he undertook at the urging of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who wanted someone to distill the common traits of America's wealthiest self-made men into a teachable system. Hill interviewed and studied hundreds of successful figures — among them Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Carnegie himself — and organized what he found into thirteen "steps" or principles that, he argued, explain why some people convert ambition into fortune while others with equal or greater talent do not. The core claim of the book is not that money follows luck or connections, but that it follows a specific, repeatable state of mind: a burning, specific desire converted into a definite plan and backed by unwavering persistence.

The book opens with the idea that "thoughts are things" — that a clearly defined desire, held with faith and translated into a written, dated plan, sets in motion behavior that eventually produces its physical equivalent. From there Hill builds outward through faith, autosuggestion (the deliberate, repeated impression of a goal on the subconscious mind), specialized knowledge (as distinct from general education), imagination, organized planning, and decision. He is emphatic that indecision and procrastination are close cousins of fear, and that the wealthy men he studied were almost uniformly fast, firm decision-makers who were slow to change their minds once a decision was made.

A second major thread concerns persistence and the "Mastermind" principle — the idea that two or more minds working in harmony toward a definite purpose generate a third, intangible force greater than the sum of the individuals involved. Hill also devotes substantial space to the transmutation of sexual energy into creative and entrepreneurial drive, a section that was considered daring for its time and remains one of the book's more debated chapters. He closes with a discussion of the subconscious mind, the brain as a broadcasting and receiving station for thought, the sixth sense, and a final chapter cataloguing the "six ghosts of fear" — the fears of poverty, criticism, ill health, loss of love, old age, and death — that he argues sabotage most people's pursuit of their definite chief aim.

Running underneath all thirteen principles is a single mechanical claim that gives the book its title: intense, specific, faith-backed desire, repeated to the subconscious mind and acted on with a definite plan, will reorganize a person's behavior and circumstances toward the object of that desire. Hill frames this as a discoverable natural law rather than motivational rhetoric, and structures the book so each chapter both stands alone as a lesson and builds toward this cumulative thesis. Nearly a century after its 1937 publication, it remains one of the best-selling personal-development books ever written and the direct ancestor of much of the modern "mindset" and goal-setting literature.