What Napoleon taught me about life

“When I was a teenager looking for empowerment in my life, I found it in Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich. To this day it is still the most amazing book I ever read. It gave me the idea that life was going to give back to me whatever I put into it.”
By Kari Fulmek

Guides to help empower you in life aren’t always people or horses. Sometimes they are books, and for me. Hill’s book inspired me to create vision boards of what I desired in life.

I even included on my board the vision of the house I wanted to live in someday, a real home where I could lay down real roots. It took me years, but I live in that house now.

So what were the amazing lessons that inspired me from this book? There were five that stand out in particular.

Good, quick decisions

Most self-help authors encourage a lot of thinking, pondering every angle and knowing every step before you begin a new project. From Hill, I learned that it was possible to make quick decisions that were good decisions. All decisions have an element of risk involved, and if you are too timid, it will stall your life.

There is no template to exactly what will happen when you start down a new road in life. If you want to start a new business, start it. If you debate endlessly about what could happen under a variety of different scenarios, you will waste a lot of precious time worrying about stuff that never happens anyhow. That is time you could have spent growing your business and figuring it out as you go along.

Have a purpose, a passion, an ambition

Hill said the one weakness people have that can be fixed is a universal weakness of lack of ambition. He believed that people are either self-motivated or they aren’t. Right then and there I decided to be someone who was. If you don’t have purpose, passion and ambition in your life, your odds for achieving success aren’t much more likely than a stone becoming a butterfly.

Success is not a surprise gift in life. You only get it if you know what it looks like and go after it.

Learning something new constantly

You may run a business, but you are still a student of it. You need to learn everything you possibly can about your industry, and then learn more after that.

Hill’s foresight in advocating life-long learning has never been more impressive since today we see a pace of change he could hardly have anticipated. If you are not constantly learning new things and new ways to deliver your offerings, it won’t take long until you are no longer relevant.

Getting older does mean getting wiser

It is a myth that the world of business belongs to the millennials. They are into it, they are doing great, and they will grow in wisdom.

But the reality is that it takes most of us at least 20 years of toil to figure life and work out and determine what it is that we really want to do with our days.

There is no right age to become empowered enough to live life authentically and use your special gift to benefit others. When you figure out what you want to do, go do it, no matter what your age is.

What you can conceive and believe, you can achieve.

How far you get in achieving your intent and purpose in life depends on your attitude. If you fill your head with doubt, it is unlikely you will get where you are going. If you believe in your personal power and your special gift and just get out there and do it, you will succeed. What you think is what will happen.

Kari Fulmek is the author of “Two Weeks to Empowerment: How to take charge of your life and find your true purpose” and the founder and owner of Equine Connection – The Academy of Equine Assisted Learning Inc. She is a Certified Master EAL Instructor and a Certified EAL Facilitator. From her base near Calgary, AB in the foothills of Canada’s Rocky Mountains, she travels the globe to empower clients. To learn more about Kari, visit her website at: https://equineconnection.ca.