New Thought Movement · 1928 to Present · Napoleon Hill's First Principle
There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.Napoleon Hill — Think and Grow Rich, 1937
Napoleon Hill called Definiteness of Purpose the starting point of all achievement — not the most important of his 13 principles, but the first, because without it none of the others have anywhere to go. A person may possess faith, persistence, imagination, and every other quality Hill identified, but without a definite purpose these qualities have no direction. They dissipate into general optimism or busy-ness that produces nothing in particular.
The word definite is important. Hill was not describing a vague aspiration — I want to be successful, I want to be happy, I want to make a contribution. He was describing a specific, written, dated, quantified aim toward which all of a person's energy, thought, and daily action is directed. The specificity is not incidental. It is the mechanism. A vague desire produces vague action. A specific aim produces specific action. Specific action produces specific results.
The practical discipline Hill recommended is simple: write down your purpose. Write down what you intend to achieve, when you intend to achieve it, and what you intend to give in exchange for it. Read it twice daily — once in the morning before the day's activity begins, once at night before sleep. Allow the purpose to become the lens through which you evaluate every decision and every use of time.
The concept of a life organized around a clear central aim is not Hill's invention. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics opens with the observation that every art, inquiry, action, and pursuit aims at some good — and that the good which is the highest aim of all human activity is eudaimonia, human flourishing. The entire ethical project, for Aristotle, depends on knowing what you are actually aiming at.
The Stoics called it hegemonikon — the governing faculty — the rational part of the mind that has the authority to direct all other mental activity. Epictetus taught that the first and most important philosophical exercise was to make clear to yourself what you actually want and whether what you actually want is worth wanting. Most people, he observed, pursue what they have been told to want rather than what a careful examination of their own nature would reveal.
Viktor Frankl's will to meaning is the existential version of the same insight: the person who knows what they are for can bear almost any how. The purpose is not a luxury — it is the organizing principle that makes everything else make sense.
The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder — a waif, a nothing, a no man.Thomas Carlyle — Sartor Resartus, 1836