First of all, when I was in my early teens, I wanted to go away to college but didn’t have any money. So I made arrangements with the Tazewell Business College to work my way through and took a secretarial course. When I finished, I looked around and had an inspiration that has been far-reaching and has affected millions of people—and will affect millions of people, some of them not yet born. I did something that has never been done before nor afterward, as far as I know, in the way of ensuring that I would go to work for the man that I chose.
I recognized that if I picked out a very successful, very prosperous, very wealthy man and could work for him in close contact as a secretary, that I would appropriate all of his friends and much of his knowledge and it would be worth a stupendous amount to me.
I finally chose General Rufus A. Ayers of Virginia. He owned a railroad, a chain of banks, a chain of sawmills, a chain of coal mines, and in addition to that, he was a senior member of one of the most important law firms in the state of Virginia. I made up my mind that General Ayers was going to have the great fortune of giving me my first job, and here is how I broke the news to him. I wrote him a letter saying:
Dear General Ayers,
I have just completed a secretarial course at Tazewell Business College, and I know you will be glad to hear that I have chosen you as my first employer. I am willing to go to work for you under the following conditions:
I will work for the first three months and pay you a salary of any amount you name per month for that privilege, with the understanding that if at the end of those three months you wish to continue my services, you’ll pay me that same salary. But meanwhile, you’ll allow me to put on the cuff what I’ll owe you and you can take it out of what you’ll owe me if you continue my services.
Sincerely,
Napoleon Hill
I guess that put him on the spot, didn’t it?
He didn’t answer my letter. He called my father on the telephone and said, “I want you to send me that boy. I want to look at him.” He didn’t say anything about employing me. I went to his huge law office. He got up from his desk, and he walked all the way around me three or four times, never opened his mouth.
Then he went back and sat down at his desk, and he said, “I wish to ask you just one question. Did you write that letter yourself?
Or did somebody tell you what to write?”
I said, “General Ayers, I wrote that letter myself, and I meant every word of it.”
He said, “That’s just what I thought after I looked you over, and you’ll go to work tomorrow morning in the secretarial department at the regular beginning salary.”
In those days, the “regular beginning salary” was a fabulous $50 a month!
Later on, when my brother and I matriculated at Georgetown University Law School intending to become lawyers, I looked around and made a contract with a magazine to write stories about successful men. Meanwhile, I had become a newspaper man, a cub reporter, and was fairly good at writing even then.
Fortunately, I was assigned to Andrew Carnegie, the wealthiest man in the world at that time and known worldwide as being the best picker of men. That’s how he became successful—he knew how to surround himself with Master Mind allies who could do the things that he needed to have done. And nobody—please believe me—nobody ever rises above mediocrity who does not learn to use the brains of other people, and sometimes the money of other people, too. We call it OPB and OPM—“other people’s brains” and “other people’s money.” And it takes a combination of the two, believe you me.
Source: The Science of Personal Achievement by Napoleon Hill