"The Law of Success" by Napoleon Hill

This is one of the largest self-help books out there (or does it just feel that way because it is so boring?).  Hill was a vagabond child, then started and failed at many businesses (great learning experience though) until finally he decided to become a motivational speaker and a sort of a prophet of success (he never says that directly, but from all the hyperbolas, it is easily inferred).

This book was started with an interview with Andrew Carnegie, the Steel Baron of USA, that the Gen.X and Y-ers today barely know about, if at all, except by the names of a bunch of libraries and concert halls.  He gave Hill access to his exclusive group of top American businessmen, including Henry Ford, in order to figure out what it is that made them so successful,  despite many of them starting from dire poverty and modest beginnings.  Although The Hill Foundation makes an argument over and over again that the principles expoused are solid and timeless, many of the actual examples feel out of date and irrelevant in 2014, which is why about 50% of the audio book is a modern commentary explaining things in context.

The commentary is so voluminous (by necessity, as things aren't clear), that this 550 page book becomes over 1,000 pages when commentary is included.  The 17 principles (15 in the beginning, but then Hill added the metaphysical "MasterMind" as No.1 which is nothing more than re-stating of the occult "Egregore" and the "Cosmic Habit Forming" as No. 17 which is mostly mambo-jumbo) could be probably summarized in one paragraph each, with not too much of loss of clarity or usefulness, but that would not sell a voluminous correspondence course where each lesson was sold separately and embellished with numerous words of praise by seemingly important people, of whom almost no one is in the sphere of general knowledge today. 

The silly things like espousing telepathy and similar superstitions, instead of looking at 'cold reading' and the actual psychology of unconscious cues, detract even more from the perception of the book as a serious, scientific one.  It gives an impression more of a self-confirming bias (as Hill constantly claims that he tested everything he says many, many times) than a scientific study.  The long exposures on "Ether" as the medium of transference, which was proven wrong even before Hill was born (if he bothered to read scientific books), detracts even more from the reading experience.  Hill rightfully points out the great role of the subconscious in people's lives, but he is too lazy and too full of himself and his 'self-made' philosophy of success to bother with reading on the real science of the subconscious which was exposed by actual scientists like C.G. Jung, who was his contemporary and whose books were widely available.

Summa summarum, reading this book is mainly an exercise in patience and persistence, while the actual principles can be gathered just from their titles and short explanations floating around the web.... The rest is just pink noise.