Napoleon Hill’s book has outsold almost everything in its category for ninety years. These next ten are the ones worth reading next — starting with the one that answers the question Hill never asked.
Think and Grow Rich came out in 1937, in the middle of the Depression, and it has never really gone away. Thirteen principles. Definiteness of purpose. The Master Mind. A burning desire backed by a plan and a refusal to quit. Whole industries of motivational speaking have been built out of that structure, and most of the success books published since are variations on it.
One thing is worth knowing before you go looking for more of the same. Hill’s authority rests on a story: that Andrew Carnegie commissioned him in 1908 to spend twenty years studying five hundred successful men. Hill started telling that story after Carnegie died in 1919, and Carnegie’s biographer, David Nasaw, has said he found no evidence the two ever met. Hill’s own authorized biographers acknowledged that an earlier Carnegie book of his was “largely fiction.”
The advice is still powerful. Persistence and clarity of aim do not stop working because the pedigree was invented. But it is a useful frame for what follows, because the honest question underneath Think and Grow Rich is not “how do I get more” — it is “what actually produces a life that works.” Several of the books below answer that better than Hill did.
The first one answers a question Hill never got around to asking.
1. GRP The Golden Rule Paradox — The Real Secret to Success, Happiness, and a Better World
Ross Fischer · Why it’s first
Hill’s book tells you how to get what you want. It is almost entirely silent on what happens once you have it, and on whether the thing you were chasing does what you expected.
GRP The Golden Rule Paradox opens exactly there. Its first pages describe a well known NFL quarterback, who won the biggest game of his career, yet found himself thinking, in the middle of the celebration, is that all there is? GRP shows that this is not an outlier. It is a repeating pattern, based on 3,000 years of human history.
GRP inverts the success genre’s core assumption. Look after yourself first and the returns shrink. Point the same energy outward and they arrive, from directions you were not watching. He calls it a paradox because it is the precise reverse of what modern culture teaches today: “To be happy, you need x”. If that were the case then once we got what we want we would all be content! But as we well know… our minds work the opposite.
However what truly makes us happy, is when we do for others first!
What makes GRP more than an assertion is the range of the evidence — nine years of it, moving through psychology, medicine, history and more; Adam Grant’s data on why generous professionals cluster at both the bottom and the top of performance rankings; how GRP affects our health and longevity. In later chapters, GRP changes the paradigm from personal growth, to the effects on institutions: financial markets, social media, politics and more. Fischer is also a working entrepreneur with more than thirty years building companies and training sales people, and he writes about his own failures with a candor Hill never attempted: a business that collapsed, two houses lost in 2008, a month where he spent unable to get out of bed. In fact, how he was able to rebound out of that darkest period, is the foundation of GRP. In the end, the book makes a claim that is powerful—and readers have agreed:
“An idea so simple it feels like common sense. Yet so profound, it has the power to change the way you see everything”
Read it if: you enjoy the success canon, with two added ingredients: How you achieve that success is more important than the achievement itself , and how that success applies to the world around you is what truly makes us content.
Get GRP The Golden Rule Paradox on Amazon
2. The Richest Man in Babylon
George S. Clason, 1926 · The one that changed the most behavior
Clason wrote these as pamphlets for banks and insurance companies, and they were later collected into a book. They are parables set in ancient Babylon, and the setting is entirely invented, and none of that matters.
What matters is that the advice is concrete in a way Hill’s rarely is. Pay yourself first: a tenth of everything you earn, before anything else. Control your expenditures. Make your gold work. Guard it against loss by taking advice only from people competent in the matter at hand.
If Think and Grow Rich is about the state of mind, this is about the mechanics, and it is the one on this list most likely to change what you actually do on payday.
Read it if: you want a rule you can follow on Friday rather than a philosophy.
3. How to Win Friends and Influence People
Dale Carnegie, 1936 · The exact contemporary
Published one year before Hill’s book, and still the better one. Carnegie’s material is about the part of success that happens between people: remembering names, arguing less, letting the other person feel the idea was theirs.
The reason it has outlasted almost everything from its era is that Carnegie noticed something Hill did not. Most of what people call ambition is actually a hunger to feel important, and the fastest route to any outcome that involves other human beings is to satisfy that hunger in them rather than demanding it for yourself.
Read closely, it is a book about attention — where you point it and what happens when you do. Which makes it the closest ancestor on this list to the argument at number one.
Read it if: you only read one book from the 1930s, make it this one.
4. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen R. Covey, 1989 · The modern rewrite of the whole genre
Covey’s opening move is the most important thing in the book. He went back through two hundred years of American success literature and found a break: the older material was about character — integrity, humility, industry — and the newer material was about personality, technique and image. He argued the field had gone shallow, and set out to put it back.
The seven habits themselves are well known. Be proactive. Begin with the end in mind. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. What is easy to miss is the sequence: private victory before public victory, and no shortcut through it.
It is the most demanding book on this list and the most rewarding, and its diagnosis — that success writing drifted from character to appearance — has only become more obviously right.
Read it if: you want the version of this material that treats you as an adult.
5. The Science of Getting Rich
Wallace D. Wattles, 1910 · Where Hill’s tradition starts
A hundred pages, written twenty-seven years before Think and Grow Rich, and the direct ancestor of most of it. Wattles claims there is a “certain way” of thinking and acting that produces wealth, available to anyone who applies it.
The surprise for modern readers is how insistent he is on action. Do, today, everything that can be done today, in the place where you already are — the visualization is supposed to point the work, not replace it. It is a much less passive book than its descendants.
Public domain, so it costs nothing.
Read it if: you want to see the headwater of the whole river.
6. As a Man Thinketh
James Allen, 1903 · Thirty pages, no filler
Allen was an English clerk who left his job to write and died four years later. His argument is that a man is literally what he thinks, that character is the sum of thought, and that circumstance grows from thought the way a plant grows from seed.
He offers no technique and makes no promises about money. It is closer to a moral treatise than a manual, and it is the least commercial thing in this entire genre.
Read it if: you want the idea before anyone worked out how to sell it.
7. The Millionaire Next Door
Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko, 1996 · The research answer
Stanley and Danko went and looked. They surveyed people with real net worth and found that the American millionaire, in the aggregate, was not the person on the magazine cover. He drove a used vehicle, lived in a house he had been in for years, and had never earned a spectacular income.
The finding that sticks is the distinction between income and wealth. Plenty of high earners are broke, because consumption scales with pay. The accumulators were the ones who kept the gap open.
Two caveats worth keeping. The data is a 1990s snapshot, and the methodology has been criticized for selection effects. The core observation about spending and accumulation has held up anyway.
Read it if: you want the empirical version of Clason’s rule.
8. The Psychology of Money
Morgan Housel, 2020 · The best modern entry
Nineteen short chapters on why intelligent people make terrible financial decisions. Housel’s central claim is that doing well with money has almost nothing to do with what you know and almost everything to do with how you behave, and that behavior is not teachable through spreadsheets.
He is very good on the things the older books ignore entirely: luck and risk as the same thing viewed from different sides, the enormous role of the era you happened to be born into, and the fact that the highest return money buys is control over your own time.
That last idea is the one that quietly dismantles the premise of half this list.
Read it if: you want one book from the last decade and you want it to be the smartest one.
9. Atomic Habits
James Clear, 2018 · What Hill’s “persistence” chapter should have been
Hill devotes a chapter to persistence and essentially tells you to have more of it. Clear’s book is the operational version: how the behavior actually gets installed.
Make it obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. Change the environment rather than relying on willpower. And the reframe that does the most work — decide who you are trying to become, and let each small action be a vote for that identity, rather than chasing an outcome and hoping the habit follows.
It is the most practically useful book on this list by a distance.
Read it if: you know what to do and cannot get yourself to do it consistently.
10. Rich Dad Poor Dad
Robert Kiyosaki with Sharon Lechter, 1997 · Included with reservations
It belongs here because it is the book most often bought alongside Think and Grow Rich, and because one idea in it genuinely reframes things for a lot of readers: the distinction between assets that put money in your pocket and liabilities that take it out, and the observation that most people acquire the second while believing they are acquiring the first.
Read it with the same skepticism you should bring to Hill. Kiyosaki declined for years to identify the “rich dad” whose advice frames the book, journalists who tried to verify the man’s existence could not, and the specific investment advice has been sharply criticized by financial writers. The conceptual frame is the value. The particulars are not.
Note that Sharon Lechter is the co-author and is routinely left off the cover conversation.
Read it if: you want the asset-versus-liability idea, and you can take the rest with salt.
Where to start
For the mechanics of money, read Clason then Housel. That pairing will do more for your finances than the rest of the list combined.
For the mechanics of behavior, read Clear.
For the part Think and Grow Rich left out entirely — what the pursuit costs, and what happens when you get there — start with GRP The Golden Rule Paradox. Hill wrote a book about how to acquire. Fischer wrote the one about what it actually pays.
Frequently asked questions
Is Think and Grow Rich still worth reading?
Yes, as the foundational text of the genre, provided you know that Hill’s Carnegie story has never been substantiated and that his case studies should be treated as illustrative rather than documentary.
What should I read after Think and Grow Rich?
Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People for the interpersonal half, Clason for the financial mechanics, and GRP for the question of whether the goal itself was the right one.
Which book is most like Think and Grow Rich?
Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich is the closest in spirit and predates it by twenty-seven years. Hill’s structure and much of his framing come directly out of that tradition.
