Forget "Think and Grow Rich"

Anyone who has a triple-digit IQ will realize upon finishing this wrongly praised book that the main contents primarily stem from pseudoscience. In "Think and Grow Rich," Napoleon Hill basically says, "If you keep thinking about money, money will come to you."

WHAT KIND OF BULLSHIT IS THAT?

No wonder Napoleon Hill was penniless all the way up to his death. He spent too much time thinking and not enough acting.

All of these people--be they copywriters or network marketers--these people that rely on psuedoscientific concepts such as the law of attraction or NLP will likely suffer a fate similar to that of Napoleon Hill.

I hope that the readers of my blog are with me on this: There is a mindset to making money, but it's not "hope."

What I've Learned as a Copywriter

Through my experiences setting out on my own as a copywriter, I've met with a myriad of obstacles on my way to financial independence. At the outset, I never imagined I would find myself actually turning down clients. Nor did I imagine that I would be so willing to share my techniques with my potential competitors. But today, that's exactly what I want to do with you. And the following concept explains why:

• Mindset 1: Abundance. I learned this one later than I had wished. When you start out your freelance career, start with the mindset of abundance. Convince yourself that there are so many clients out there that there is no real need to worry about catching a specific one. When you enter negotiations with a prospect, if you do not have this mindset, you will be giving off hints that this prospect is important to you. That's not what you want to do. You want to make the prospect feel that you have plenty of other options. You want to make the prospect convince YOU to accept HIM. With such a mindset, negotiations will go much more smoothly, and your rate of project/contact will skyrocket.

Abundance is enough to stop you from worrying and can help you grab your first handful of clients. Abundance seems to be one of the concepts Napoleon Hill is attempting to get through in his poorly named book (it should be titled "Think to Grow Rich"), but it is not enough. Hill simply never learned that working with a mindset of abundance without action is like hitting a pinata without a bat.

Mindset 2: What Napoleon Hill Didn't Know

• Mindset 2: Proactivity. In my guide, I teach two ways to attract clients: the active way and the passive way. However, readers should note that both ways are inherently proactive. Even the passive method requires you to set up each element in the system with a clear goal. The system that drives clients to you should be an instrument of your will. The method of making money is not the same as that for finishing a high school homework assignment. In other words, you should not simply follow the directions of others, but ask yourself whether your actions are creating a path that reaches your goal.

Where many people fail is here. When you lack proactivity, you are, to put it simply, thinking too much and acting too little. We like to see successful people in a light that makes them look intelligent, and we therefore tend to emphasize those person's thoughts as being the motivators for their successes. But for every successful person you see, there are a dozen unsuccessful people working in the same field, thinking the same thoughts. What separates them? One group acts on their thoughts, while the other simply thinks.

Don't be like Napoleon Hill.