Napoleon Hill

He started the steam shovels to work on the Panama Canal. Every President, from Washington on up to Roosevelt, could have started the canal and it would have been completed, but it seemed such a colossal undertaking that it required not only imagination but daring courage as well.

Roosevelt had both, and the people of the United States have the canal. At the age of forty - the age at which the average man begins to think he is too old to start anything new - James J. Hill was still sitting at the telegraph key, at a salary of $30.00 per month. He had no capital. He had no influential friends with capital, but he did have that which is more powerful than either - imagination.

THE reason most people do not like to hear the story of your troubles is that they have a big flock of their own. In his mind's eye he saw a great railway system that would penetrate the undeveloped northwest and unite the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. So vivid was his imagination that he made others see the advantages of such a railway system, and from there on the story is familiar enough to every school-boy.

I would emphasize the part of the story that most people never mention - that Hill's Great Northern Railway system became a reality in his own imagination first. The railroad was built with steel rails and wooden cross ties, just as other railroads are built, and these things were paid for with capital that was secured in very much the same manner that capital for all railroads is secured, but if you want the real story of James J. Hill's success you must go back to that little country railway station where he worked at $30.00 a month and there pick up the little threads that he wove into a mighty railroad, with materials no more visible than the thoughts which he organized in his imagination.

What a mighty power is imagination, the workshop of the soul, in which thoughts are woven into railroads and skyscrapers and mills and factories and all manner of material wealth. "I hold it true that thoughts are things; They're endowed with bodies and breath and wings; And that we send them forth to fill The world with good results or ill. That which we call our secret thought Speeds forth to earth's remotest spot, Leaving its blessings or its woes, Like tracks behind it as it goes. We build our future, thought by thought, For good or ill, yet know it not, Yet so the universe was wrought.

Thought is another name for fate; Choose, then, thy destiny and wait, For love brings love and hate brings hate." If your imagination is the mirror of your soul, then you have a perfect right to stand before that mirror and see yourself as you wish to be.

You have the right to see reflected in that magic mirror the mansion you intend to own, the factory you intend to manage, the bank of which you intend to be president, the station in life you intend to occupy. Your imagination belongs to you! Use it!

The more you use it the more efficiently it will serve you.