PDF Summary:Outwitting the Devil, by Napoleon Hill

In his 1937 bestseller Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill interviewed hundreds of American businessmen to gather their wisdom on how to achieve professional success. In his follow-up, Outwitting the Devil, Hill examines how failure and bad habits keep people from reaching their fullest potential, this time through a single interview—with the Devil himself.

Outwitting the Devil describes how you can escape the Devil’s influence and avoid being turned toward inaction and evil by dedicating yourself to concrete goals, embracing positive habits, and refusing to be defeated by failure. He argues that in doing so, you can find your way to professional and financial success. In our guide, we’ll explore HIll’s ideas and will examine their connections to the New Thought spiritual movement, as well as the impact his works had on the self-help world today, such as the works of Norman Vincent Peale and Rhonda Byrne.

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We see similar approaches to Hill in a number of Christian self-help movements, perhaps most famously in Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve-step process. AA simultaneously encourages you to accept that you can’t control everything and put your faith into a higher power, and asks you to acknowledge the ways in which you’ve failed or hurt the people in your life. The program’s steps are designed to instill changes that will counteract the traits of indifferent people that Hill describes: They prompt you to commit to a direction by keeping your eye on a goal (sobriety), to become a better partner to others by admitting wrongdoing and making amends, and to develop healthy habits that will deliver you toward your goal rather than distract you from it.

These experts agree that whether you’re trying to escape bad circumstances or just want to improve your life, you need to take responsibility for yourself and how you behave to have any hope of success. Complacency, more than anything else, will keep you under the Devil’s influence.

Independent Thinkers

To avoid indifference and coming under the Devil’s control, according to Hill, you must set clear goals and pursue them passionately. The person who knows what they want, thinks for themselves, and refuses to be discouraged by setbacks has escaped the Devil’s influence. We’ll call these people independent thinkers, since Hill repeatedly stresses that their thoughtfulness and questioning of the world around them is what sets them apart.

The characteristics of an independent thinker are as follows:

• They are highly motivated in the pursuit of concrete goals and learn from failure when it comes.
• They make strong personal and professional partners, being confident, generous, honest, and always willing to admit and take responsibility for their mistakes.
• Their goals are the main focus of their lives, and they avoid distractions and unhealthy habits.

Independent Thinkers Make for Better Leaders

Hill’s description of an independent person has much in common with professor and businessman Stephen Covey’s description of mature and effective leaders from his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. According to Covey, what makes someone professionally successful is their ability to prioritize and devote themselves toward a single goal, their willingness to listen to and try to understand others, and their dedication to constantly improving themselves—roughly aligning with Hill’s three characteristics.

Hill and Covey differ slightly in that Hill is more interested in taking control of your own life, while Covey focuses on negotiation and working well with others (we especially see this difference in focus in Covey’s follow-up book, The 8th Habit). Even so, Hill makes a point to stress that an independent person doesn’t just improve their own lives, but the lives of the people around them as well, becoming a more productive member of society and better partners to those who are similarly motivated.

How Patterns of Behavior Drive Us

Any indifferent person can become an independent thinker, but the longer you’ve been caught in the cycle of indifference, the harder it will be to break your old patterns and commit to the hard work that success requires. The same actions, beliefs, and thoughts, repeated over and over, become a kind of rhythm or pattern that, like a current, is easier to flow with than to swim out of.

This is what Hill calls a pattern of behavior. Nature is given to cycles or patterns, with the same processes repeating every season, every day, or every second. Humans are aspects of nature and therefore subject to the same laws. That said, he stresses that if you recognize that you’re caught in this pattern of indifferent behavior, you can break yourself out of it, and you can even turn this aspect of nature to your advantage by establishing a new pattern.

Hill argues that positive actions or thoughts, repeated over and over, will become easier and easier, and will attract greater rewards. While there is always a risk of slipping back into old habits, a long-term commitment to independent thought and pursuing your goals will strengthen you against the Devil’s influence.

Setting Patterns

It’s an established belief among scientific experts that practice and repetition, rather than inborn skill, is the key to success. In The Willpower Instinct, psychology professor Kelly McGonigal argues that developing good habits by establishing a routine and rewarding yourself for following it is a more reliable source of personal change than relying on willpower or self-control, which can be shaken by bad circumstances or failure.

Hill’s ideas have also been adapted by the modern self-help movement in the form of habit- or routine-setting. In Atomic Habits, writer and entrepreneur James Clear suggests recognizing the behaviors you repeat daily and adjusting them to be more positive, or to link rewards you give yourself (such as having a beer after dinner) with tasks you want to turn into habits (after dinner, you write for an hour, and only then have the beer). In his view, these habits will compound over time, not only becoming easier to do, but also encouraging you to pick up more good habits and discard more bad ones.

Hill offers several steps to start you on this process:

Set a Goal for Your Life

Hill advises that to start creating positive habits, you’ll need to set a specific goal for your life, make a plan to achieve it, and be prepared to sacrifice anything for it. Be prepared to work hard and to give as much as you get, since Hill warns that no lasting success can be achieved without effort.

How to Set a Goal

Finding a goal around which to base your entire life is easier said than done. Though Hill’s focus is on professional or financial goals, your goal can be more personally or spiritually motivated. A good starting point is to ask yourself what makes you happiest—is it your family? Your job, or a job you dream of having? A hobby or sport? Being in a particular place? What are your dreams, and how can you, as much as possible, prioritize the things that make you happy?

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, motivational author Mark Manson argues that most of our struggles and frustrations come from having been misled by parents, friends, and social media to focus on the wrong things, rather than on what makes us happy. On his website, he poses seven questions designed to help you set a goal in the most stress-free way possible, beginning with “What’s your favorite flavor of shit sandwich?” Like Hill, Manson emphasizes the need for sacrifice, noting that one way to find your passion is to identify the thing that you are most willing to suffer for. If you’re willing to sacrifice for something, even when you’re not supported by the people around you and even when it doesn’t produce immediate rewards, that may be your goal or a step towards it.

Choose Faith Over Fear

Hill encourages you to remain confident that your goal can be achieved, no matter how long it takes. Don’t let fear of failure or its consequences discourage you, and have faith both in yourself and in a higher power, be it God or the universe more generally. If you pray, you should be clear about what you want and what you’re willing to sacrifice to get it—avoid begging or praying only when you’re desperate, since this removes your own agency and is a more negative-minded approach to achieving your goals. Hill argues that only a positive approach to your relationship with God will yield positive results.

Choosing Faith and Norman Vincent Peale

Norman Vincent Peale, a pastor and contemporary of Hill who knew him through their mutual publisher W. Clement Stone, wrote on “choosing faith” in a way similar to Hill in his 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking. While Peale is a controversial figure today, both for his connections to the New Thought movement and his personal relationship with Donald Trump, his book was a bestseller. Like Hill, he argued that our attitudes and thoughts give us the power to overcome any obstacle, no matter how serious.

For Peale, positive thinking and positive prayer go hand-in-hand. He described prayer as a manifestation of energy and emphasized the importance of placing absolute faith in yourself and in God to achieve positive results. Of the ten steps that he recommended readers practice daily, over half involved positive visualizations or repeating phrases that affirm your trust in God. Though Peale’s approach is more explicitly Christian in its goals, he and Hill agree on the power of the mind and of faith to change your life.

Never Accept Less Than What You Deserve

Connected to the idea of choosing faith, Hill repeatedly stresses that you should never give up or compromise on your goals, no matter what setbacks or failures you experience. Life is short, so you should value your time and refuse to settle for anything but achieving exactly what you want.

(Shortform note: “Never compromise” may seem like poor advice, but Hill’s point is not that we should refuse to work with others and meet their needs, but that we should refuse to accept failure, even when it comes in the form of a proposed alternative or watered-down version of our goal. Many modern self-help writers, writing in Hill’s tradition, agree: Never settle. If your dream is to work as an artist full-time, you shouldn’t accept the offer of a high-paying job that’s in the same field but nothing like what you really want to do. Part of having faith is knowing that these supposedly “more realistic” alternatives won’t make you happy, and that your true goal is worth holding out for.)

The overarching principle of these steps is to be confident and committed in everything you do. Hill does offer a fourth step in his advice on how to create positive habits: practicing the law of attraction, which we’ll discuss next.

The Law of Attraction

The law of attraction proposes that thinking positive thoughts will attract success, while thinking negative thoughts will lead to failure. It suggests that “like attracts like,” and so the first step towards achieving success is to believe that success will come.

Hill does not go so far as to say that all failure is the result of negative thinking—he acknowledges that people are born into very different circumstances, and with various social advantages or disadvantages. However, he still insists that there is no such thing as luck, and that if you have a clear goal you’re determined to achieve, you fully believe that you’re capable of achieving it, and you insist on thinking positively about what you’re doing, you will eventually find success.

Hill also argues that the law of attraction can act as a guide in prayer. He believes that anyone who prays while doubting that their prayer will be answered has guaranteed that that’s exactly what will happen. Absolute faith in both yourself and in a higher power is necessary for prayers to be effective. You should also pray regularly, and pray to express gratitude as much as you pray to ask for things. Finally, be prepared to take initiative and make sacrifices in order for your prayers to be realized, making the act of praying into more of a request for help or God’s blessing than for a miracle.

Criticisms of the Law of Attraction

The law of attraction is a cornerstone of New Thought and shows up in nearly all of Hill’s writings. It’s also one of the most misunderstood of New Thought beliefs, and the most ridiculed by critics. After the documentary film version of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret was released in 2006, many bloggers tested its theories by praying for material goods and waiting for them to arrive.

However, the law of attraction is not about wishing for something, such as a new desk, and expecting that it will come to you with no effort on your part. Rather, it argues that pursuing a goal with absolute confidence that you will succeed, and that God or a higher power has heard your desire and is supporting you in achieving it, makes it more likely that you will succeed.

Even if you yourself are not religious, there’s no denying that greater self-confidence leads to greater success, if for no other reason than that it makes you more empowered to ask for what you want. There are still valid criticisms to be made of the theory of the law of attraction (for example, Mark Manson claims that it’s little more than confirmation bias encouraging you to see God’s will in what might be random coincidence, and rejects “absolute faith” as a form of “delusional positive thinking” that will only distract you from your real obstacles), but these overly literal readings misrepresent New Thought ideas.

How to Escape the Devil’s Influence

Having explained how your success or failure is determined by the patterns of behavior that you’ve fallen into, as well as the significance of the law of attraction, Hill now names the six things a person needs to do in order to escape the Devil’s influence and live a successful life. We’ll explore each one in detail:

1. Have clear purpose and conviction
2. Practice self-control
3. Don’t let failure defeat you
4. Choose your relationships and environments carefully
5. Pursue wisdom
6. Practice caution and forethought

Have Clear Purpose and Conviction

Hill argues that you can’t break yourself out of unhealthy habits or an indifferent pattern of behavior unless you have a clear goal that you’re working towards. Without knowing what you want and having a plan to achieve it, you’re likely to drift through life, allowing your circumstances to shape you rather than you shaping your circumstances.

Hill sets no limits on what your goal may be, and in his own case, his goal was not a business but his desire to write self-help books and to teach others to find success, to the point that he abandoned several other business ventures to pursue his goal. Without a clear purpose, he struggled to find happiness.

(Shortform note: Experts note that conviction and hard work are difficult to maintain over time, and on some level, the work needs to be its own reward if you’re going to sustain enough motivation to reach your goals. Don’t choose a particular goal because it’ll be profitable or seems likely to impress others; pick something you’re truly passionate about. It may not be the first thing you try, or the thing that gets the most public recognition, but it will be the thing that makes you happiest and that justifies whatever struggles and setbacks you endure.)

Practice Self-Control

Earlier in this guide, we listed ten desires through which the Devil can manipulate human beings. Hill argues that three of these desires—the desire for self-expression, the desire for food, and the desire for sex—are the most dangerous and require the most regulation. While, as we mentioned earlier, sex, food, and self-expression are all normal appetites that can be fed in moderation, when you over-indulge in them, they can distract you from your goals and are ultimately unhealthy for your body.

When it comes to self-expression, Hill suggests that rather than being overly talkative or trying to impress others, you should spend more time listening, and only speak when you are confident in what you have to say. When it comes to food, rather than eating constantly or eating unhealthy foods, you should try to eat foods that are healthy and will give you more energy. Finally, when it comes to sexual desires, Hill argues that sex should be pursued through positive long-term relationships, and that you should channel any leftover sexual energy into working towards your goals, rather than allowing sex to be a motivator in and of itself.

The Extremes of Hill’s Thoughts on Sex

Though he mentions it only briefly here, in Think and Grow Rich Hill makes an extended argument about the power of sexual energy to motivate your work. He argues that by abstaining from sex, or focusing your sexual desires into a single, stable relationship, that you will then have an excess of energy and motivation, which you can channel into your work instead.

There’s little scientific basis for this belief, but it remains popular among some anti-pornography advocates and in the online community known as #NoFap, which began on Reddit in 2011. Those who practice #NoFap, or abstaining from masturbation for months or years at a time, believe that doing so will improve their physical health and allow them to think more clearly and be better romantic partners.

While it’s had connections to the far right and various anti-women communities in the past, in recent years the #NoFap movement has rebranded as a porn addiction recovery community. Many members emphasize how the movement’s advice helped them cope with compulsive sexual behavior, shame surrounding sex, and even erectile dysfunction. Therefore, even if Hill’s theories of self-control don’t lead to financial success, they may at least have some psychological benefits.

Don’t Let Failure Defeat You

We’ve already mentioned that fear of failure is one of the tools the Devil uses to keep you from taking action. Hill cautions that while you can’t avoid some degree of failure in your life, you can control how you respond to that failure when it comes. Rather than allowing failure to discourage you from your goals, take it as an opportunity to question your purpose, think about what is and isn’t working, and try new tactics where old ones failed.

According to Hill, what sets a successful person apart from an unsuccessful person is how well they react to failure. Do they accept it as part of the process or allow it to persuade them to give up? Even a particularly brutal failure, such as the business failures Hill experienced before and during the Great Depression, should be taken as a sign that change is required, rather than a reason to abandon everything you’ve worked for. Above all, failure should be an opportunity to test yourself and your limits.

The Benefits of Failure

Hill’s belief that failure is a necessary part of success is a staple of professional advice today, repeated by everyone from business owners to athletes to psychologists. In Black Box Thinking, journalist and former Olympic tennis player Matthew Syed argues that progress is impossible without failure, and that a streak of unsuccessful ventures shows an inability or unwillingness to learn from past mistakes.

While Hill’s argument that even the Great Depression was a failure to be learned from may initially seem harsh, many social scientists and politicians have argued that large-scale disasters expose problems built into a system and are an opportunity to learn, not so much on an individual level but as a society dedicated to equal opportunity and independence.

Choose Your Relationships and Environments Carefully

The Devil is able to exert his influence more strongly over people who feel isolated or discouraged. In both the professional world and your personal life, it’s important to choose partnerships that will help you improve yourself and achieve your dreams. Be careful who you decide to work with, and avoid relationships with people who are a distraction or who don’t seem interested in your goals.

The strongest partnership, according to Hill, is the one that you can form with a spouse who fully understands and supports you. He credits his relationship with his wife as giving him the strength to stand up to the Devil and to continue in the face of repeated failure. Working together, two people or a group of people can achieve things that it would be impossible to do alone.

Hill acknowledges that being so pragmatic in your relationships might seem cold, but argues that your first duty is to yourself, to choose relationships that help both parties to find happiness and success in their lives. Toxic relationships, even familial ones, will only drag you down and must be broken off if you ever hope to find success. In this vein, he also argues in favor of divorce, since unhappy marriages only make you weaker and thus more vulnerable to the Devil’s influence.

Defending Divorce

Divorce was uncommon when Hill was writing, but he had personal reasons to support it. By 1937 he had already been divorced twice, and he would divorce a third time in 1940. At the time of writing Outwitting the Devil, he was married to Rosa Lee Beeland, a self-help author in her own right. While their marriage wouldn’t last, she was unquestionably a valuable partner to him, both personally and professionally—Hill’s biographers credit her as being the unsung coauthor of Hill’s most successful book, Think and Grow Rich.

After his relationship with Beeland ended, Hill married again in 1943, and his marriage to Annie Lou Norman lasted until his death in 1970. Today, it’s widely accepted that divorce is a social good, improving the mental and physical health of both partners and their children. There’s even evidence to suggest that rising divorce rates are better for the economy.

Pursue Wisdom

Throughout the book, Hill argues that resisting the Devil’s influence is primarily a matter of self-assessment—understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, recognizing patterns in your behavior, and making the best decisions to help you achieve your goal. He defines these skills as being a form of wisdom, distinct from knowledge or intelligence, and which can only be acquired through experience. Wisdom is about judging what the right decision is and how and when to make it, be it a decision about work, relating to others, or just how you respond to the unexpected.

What Is Wisdom?

Wisdom has been defined differently throughout history—as what distinguishes moral men from intelligent men, as the ability to recognize the limitations of knowledge, or as a skill for rational decision-making—but modern definitions tend to argue that wisdom is the ability to make direct connections between your abstract knowledge, i.e. the things you learned in school, and your experiences. In his book From Knowledge to Wisdom, British philosopher and professor Nicholas Maxwell argues that the education system should emphasize the practical applications of what they teach, showing students the connections between things like statistics and studying climate change solutions. In Hill’s view, this kind of practical thinking is necessary to take the steps required to escape the Devil.

Practice Caution and Forethought

Hill points out that many celebrities or wealthy business owners have fallen from grace at what seemed like the height of their power, suggesting that they became complacent in their success and fell back under the Devil’s control. Even if you’ve already achieved some level of personal or financial success, there are many things that can go wrong. Economic depressions disrupt businesses, relationships break down, and there will always be someone hoping to take advantage of you or to use your success as a stepping stone towards their own.

The truly successful person always plans ahead, takes nothing for granted, and chooses relationships carefully, never relying on someone else unless they deserve that trust. If you manage to achieve a goal, that shouldn’t be the end of the positive patterns of behavior you’ve established. You should set new goals, come up with plans to achieve them, and use good judgment in everything you do. Escaping the Devil is a continual process, and so you will need to practice these six steps throughout your life.

(Shortform note: Dozens of successful people, be they business owners, actors, or politicians, have lost everything at exactly the point where it seemed that they could do no wrong. Hill chalks this up to the Devil’s influence where others might suggest bad luck or a changing culture, but there’s no denying that overconfidence plays a role. If it takes wisdom to achieve success, wisdom is needed to maintain success as well.)