Outwitting the Devil is a self-help book that describes how you can resist the Devil’s influence and find personal and financial success in life by choosing clear goals, pursuing them single-mindedly, and surrounding yourself with positive influences. Businessman and author Napoleon Hill emphasizes the law of attraction and the power of positive thinking as the primary tools that will keep you from drifting aimlessly through life or spiraling into failure.
Writing shortly after the Great Depression and on the cusp of World War II, Hill discusses how you can find success even in unfavorable circumstances. He himself spent much of the previous two decades moving from one failed venture to another, only achieving happiness and wealth when he decided to pursue his true calling of teaching and writing, beginning with his 1937 bestseller Think and Grow Rich. This taught him that if you refuse to accept failure, no matter how many times it comes, you can overcome any obstacle. Outwitting the Devil aims to help readers do the same.
Think and Grow Rich examined the lives of hundreds of American businessmen and concluded that persistence and positive thinking were key to success. While Outwitting the Devil repeats these points, it takes a closer look at failure and considers how negative influences keep people from reaching their fullest potential, through an explicitly religious lens. Hill structures the book as a conversation—arguably more of an interrogation—between a version of himself, called Mr. Earthbound, and the Devil, who insists on being called “Your Majesty.”
This approach is the most controversial aspect of the book, since it seems to convey respect and involves more direct engagement with the Devil than some Christians, like Hill’s wife Annie Lou Norman, were comfortable with. Because of her objections, the book went unpublished until 2012, when the Napoleon Hill Foundation released a newly edited version.
Hill avoids the question of whether the Devil he interviews is real or imagined, but justifies his choice to structure the book this way by arguing that there is more to learn from failure than from success. The Devil, as humanity’s greatest obstacle, will have more useful advice to offer than any other being on how his own machinations can be avoided.
This guide will focus on five main topics:
We’ll also explore how other self-help authors, such as Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking) and Rhonda Byrne (The Secret) build on Hill’s ideas in the 20th and 21st centuries and examine how Hill’s ideas correspond with theirs.
Taking Advice from Hell
Hill is not the only author to go to the underworld for advice on how to live. In 1942, C. S. Lewis (best known as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia series) would publish The Screwtape Letters, a novel structured as a series of letters between a “senior” demon named Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood. Screwtape advises Wormwood on how to guide a British man towards damnation, and in turn the reader learns how to resist Hell’s subtle influences.
While it’s unlikely that Hill and Lewis were aware of one another’s ideas, since Outwitting the Devil was written in 1938 but went unpublished until well after the death of both authors, there are striking similarities in their philosophies. Both Hill and Lewis point to indifference and inaction as the primary tools through which humans may be manipulated, and decisive action as the path towards salvation or success.
Many of Hill’s ideas overlap with the teachings of the New Thought movement, a 19th-century spiritual movement that grew out of metaphysics and the practices of hypnotists and “mental healers” like movement founder Phineas Quimby. The core beliefs of the movement were that the mind was in control of the body, that illness was an outgrowth of negative or “false” thinking, and that any sickness could be healed through faith and positive thinking.
Around the turn of the century, the movement’s focus shifted away from healing and towards personal and financial success. New Thought thinkers taught that God rewarded the faithful and that strong belief, rather than government oversight, was the key to lifting people out of poverty. It’s this aspect of the movement that remains most influential today.
Though Hill never publicly identified as a follower of the New Thought movement, its influence can be seen throughout all his works. Hill’s theories about faith, positive thinking, and failure clearly have their origins in the movement, as does some of the language he uses, such as “Infinite Intelligence” and the “law of attraction.” In fact, Hill is largely responsible for introducing New Thought ideas into the self-help genre, where they became incredibly popular.
The New Thought beliefs which had the greatest impact on Hill are:
Every person has a personal connection to God or to the universe and is capable of calling upon that connection through prayer. This is a common Protestant belief, and part of a larger debate within Christianity about how much “access” an individual has to God. Is your relationship with God solely dependent on your belief, or do you need to attend church and practice Christian rituals regularly in order to be truly faithful? While the New Thought movement takes the idea of a personal relationship to the extreme, Catholic and Orthodox churches place more emphasis on church attendance and rites.
Physical ailments or negative circumstances are outgrowths of a person’s mental state and can be changed through the power of directed thought. Christian Scientists share this faith in the power of thought, and will often refuse traditional medicine when injured or sick, believing that God alone has the power to heal them. Although the New Thought movement and Christian Science are not strictly connected, founder of Christian Science Mary Baker Eddy did follow the movement for several years before breaking off to form her own church.
God rewards the faithful not just after death, but with material benefits on Earth as well. This is known as prosperity doctrine and plays a role in a number of evangelical movements. While some Christian denominations, such as Quakers and Mennonites, emphasize humility and simple living as the path to godliness, evangelical churches often argue that physical health and prosperity are evidence of God’s love, and so there is no shame in wealth.
We’ll discuss the law of attraction in more detail later, but it can be roughly summarized as positive thoughts attract positive outcomes, while negative thoughts attract negative outcomes.
The New Thought movement survives today in both spiritual and secular forms. The former consists of organizations like the Association for Global New Thought, co-founded by the modern self-help author and minister Michael Bernard Beckwith, who wrote the foreword to Outwitting the Devil. The latter includes self-help authors who teach about the power of positive thinking without an explicitly religious angle, such as Louise Hay, Tony Robbins, and Rhonda Byrne. Many of these modern writers cite Napoleon Hill as an influence.
Criticisms of the New Thought Movement
The New Thought movement has had many critics over the years. Some Christians regard its teachings as heretical, directly contradicting those passages of the Bible that emphasize humility and sacrifice over personal gain—often quoted are Matthew 6:19-20, 1 Timothy 6:7-10, and of course Mark 10:25; “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Others argue that the movement’s beliefs are manipulative and toxic in their own right, akin to victim-blaming. After all, if success lies wholly in your own hands, doesn’t that mean that failure is evidence of your own weakness or lack of faith? If God rewards those who work hard, does that imply that those who suffer are undeserving?
The three main characteristics of the Devil as Hill describes him are:
Hill argues that the primary threat the Devil poses to you is not after death, but in the course of your life, and so you must commit to resisting him each and every day. While the Devil cannot be permanently defeated, he can be avoided by someone who is strong of character and who commits to practicing Hill’s principles for success.
Different Visions of the Devil
The Devil, or Satan, has been imagined in radically different ways throughout history. At various points in Christian theology, he has been described as the snake in the Garden of Eden, a fallen angel, and a red creature with goat hooves, horns, a tail, and a pitchfork. His role has also changed, from an instrument of God used to punish and accuse sinful humans, to the personification of all evil and God’s opposite.
In his description, Hill seems to subscribe to the theory that Satan is both the source of all evil and a part of God’s plan. He describes the Devil as a needed part of the universe and dismisses the idea that his role is to be a “punisher” in Hell, focusing instead on his ability to “test” people by entering their minds and tempting them to indulge their desires. According to Hill, you should not fear Satan, but recognize his attempts to manipulate you and resist them—this will bring you closer to godliness, and, therefore, to success. This aligns with a more contemporary view of the Devil that emphasizes his usefulness as a vehicle for personal growth over his punitive instincts.
Hill claims that the Devil has two ways of manipulating people away from professional success and personal fulfillment: through their desires and through their fears. We’ll explore each of these in the following sections.
Hill argues that the Devil can manipulate people’s desires to turn them towards bad habits, which position their bodies and immobilize their minds, keeping their focus on short-term gratification rather than long-term goals. These habits include things like smoking, excessive drinking, gambling, or excessive spending.
The ten desires Hill names are:
All of these desires are natural to have, but the Devil encourages you to pursue them recklessly, with no regard for the long-term consequences or any kind of plan. In the end, his influence leads you to those bad habits which damage your mind and body.
The Seven Deadly Sins
Hill’s description of these desires has some commonalities with Christian understandings of the seven deadly sins: lust (desire for sex), gluttony (desire for food and knowledge), greed (desire for life after death, wealth, and power), sloth, wrath, envy (desire to be like others), and pride (desire for self-expression and to be better than others).
While traditionally a Catholic theory of sinful behavior, the idea of the seven sins was popularized by famous works of literature like Dante’s Inferno and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and provides a framework for confession and acts of penance in many different Christian churches today. The sins are often paired with the seven heavenly virtues, which describe the ideal of how you should behave in the face of your desires: chastity, temperance, generosity, diligence, patience, gratitude, and humility.
These heavenly virtues take work to achieve, but practicing them is believed to make you stronger, healthier, and more compassionate over the course of your life. In contrast, indulging your desires may be pleasant in the short term, but this lack of self-control will ultimately damage your willpower and your relationships.
While desires matter, Hill argues that the Devil does not claim the majority of his victims through excesses in their behavior but rather through immobilization—he uses fear to keep people from taking any action, or, at the very least, from taking risks that might lead them to profit. When you are controlled by fear, you aren’t able to focus on thinking about your goals or what you want out of life, and even if you could, you don’t have the confidence to pursue those things.
According to Hill, the Devil preys on seven distinct types of fear:
Of these fears, Hill names the fear of death and the fear of poverty as the most powerful. People will do almost anything in the hope of escaping them, leading to impulsive decisions regarding their finances or health.
(Shortform note: While, as Hill argues, fear can keep us from taking risks, fear can also be an incredible motivator. The fight-or-flight instinct is ingrained in us as a natural response to danger, and just as it’s natural to want things like money or food, it’s natural to be afraid of things that could harm us or make us unhappy. However, actions motivated by fear are often impulsive, short-sighted, and directionless. When you act out of fear, you’re not in control of yourself, and according to Hill, that provides an opportunity for the Devil. Your decision-making should be directed, cautious, and forward-thinking whenever possible.)
Hill writes that the Devil distinguishes between two types of people: those under his control, whom he claims make up nearly 98% of all people on Earth; and those who have escaped his influence. What separates these two groups is that those under his influence take a fundamentally passive role in their own lives, while those who have resisted take a more active role. Much of Hill’s advice to the reader encourages them to take on a more active role, taking control of what happens to them out of the Devil’s hands and into their own.
Hill describes those under the Devil’s control as “drifting” through life, suffering from something that we’ll call indifference. Someone suffering from indifference has no goals, no motivation, and no self-control. They fall easily into bad habits and failure, and they’ll never achieve true happiness or success. They’re always procrastinating, never proactive, and they avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. Above all, Hill says, they’re bound to be manipulated by people with stronger personalities, and the circumstances of their lives are ultimately controlled by the Devil.
The primary characteristics of an indifferent person are as follows:
Taking Responsibility
Hill repeatedly emphasizes the role of personal responsibility in escaping the Devil’s influence. Though the Devil works against you to make you drift, you’re still complicit in your indifferent behavior by failing to break yourself out of bad habits or by making excuses for yourself. Improving takes hard work and, as Hill will tell us, only a proactive person can find success.
We see similar approaches to Hill in a number of Christian self-help movements, perhaps most famously in Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve-step process. AA simultaneously encourages you to accept that you can’t control everything and put your faith into a higher power, and asks you to acknowledge the ways in which you’ve failed or hurt the people in your life. The program’s steps are designed to instill changes that will counteract the traits of indifferent people that Hill describes: They prompt you to commit to a direction by keeping your eye on a goal (sobriety), to become a better partner to others by admitting wrongdoing and making amends, and to develop healthy habits that will deliver you toward your goal rather than distract you from it.
These experts agree that whether you’re trying to escape bad circumstances or just want to improve your life, you need to take responsibility for yourself and how you behave to have any hope of success. Complacency, more than anything else, will keep you under the Devil’s influence.
To avoid indifference and coming under the Devil’s control, according to Hill, you must set clear goals and pursue them passionately. The person who knows what they want, thinks for themselves, and refuses to be discouraged by setbacks has escaped the Devil’s influence. We’ll call these people independent thinkers, since Hill repeatedly stresses that their thoughtfulness and questioning of the world around them is what sets them apart.
The characteristics of an independent thinker are as follows:
Independent Thinkers Make for Better Leaders
Hill’s description of an independent person has much in common with professor and businessman Stephen Covey’s description of mature and effective leaders from his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. According to Covey, what makes someone professionally successful is their ability to prioritize and devote themselves toward a single goal, their willingness to listen to and try to understand others, and their dedication to constantly improving themselves—roughly aligning with Hill’s three characteristics.
Hill and Covey differ slightly in that Hill is more interested in taking control of your own life, while Covey focuses on negotiation and working well with others (we especially see this difference in focus in Covey’s follow-up book, The 8th Habit). Even so, Hill makes a point to stress that an independent person doesn’t just improve their own lives, but the lives of the people around them as well, becoming a more productive member of society and better partners to those who are similarly motivated.
Any indifferent person can become an independent thinker, but the longer you’ve been caught in the cycle of indifference, the harder it will be to break your old patterns and commit to the hard work that success requires. The same actions, beliefs, and thoughts, repeated over and over, become a kind of rhythm or pattern that, like a current, is easier to flow with than to swim out of.
This is what Hill calls a pattern of behavior. Nature is given to cycles or patterns, with the same processes repeating every season, every day, or every second. Humans are aspects of nature and therefore subject to the same laws. That said, he stresses that if you recognize that you’re caught in this pattern of indifferent behavior, you can break yourself out of it, and you can even turn this aspect of nature to your advantage by establishing a new pattern.
Hill argues that positive actions or thoughts, repeated over and over, will become easier and easier, and will attract greater rewards. While there is always a risk of slipping back into old habits, a long-term commitment to independent thought and pursuing your goals will strengthen you against the Devil’s influence.
Setting Patterns
It’s an established belief among scientific experts that practice and repetition, rather than inborn skill, is the key to success. In The Willpower Instinct, psychology professor Kelly McGonigal argues that developing good habits by establishing a routine and rewarding yourself for following it is a more reliable source of personal change than relying on willpower or self-control, which can be shaken by bad circumstances or failure.
Hill’s ideas have also been adapted by the modern self-help movement in the form of habit- or routine-setting. In Atomic Habits, writer and entrepreneur James Clear suggests recognizing the behaviors you repeat daily and adjusting them to be more positive, or to link rewards you give yourself (such as having a beer after dinner) with tasks you want to turn into habits (after dinner, you write for an hour, and only then have the beer). In his view, these habits will compound over time, not only becoming easier to do, but also encouraging you to pick up more good habits and discard more bad ones.
Hill offers several steps to start you on this process:
Hill advises that to start creating positive habits, you’ll need to set a specific goal for your life, make a plan to achieve it, and be prepared to sacrifice anything for it. Be prepared to work hard and to give as much as you get, since Hill warns that no lasting success can be achieved without effort.
How to Set a Goal
Finding a goal around which to base your entire life is easier said than done. Though Hill’s focus is on professional or financial goals, your goal can be more personally or spiritually motivated. A good starting point is to ask yourself what makes you happiest—is it your family? Your job, or a job you dream of having? A hobby or sport? Being in a particular place? What are your dreams, and how can you, as much as possible, prioritize the things that make you happy?
In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, motivational author Mark Manson argues that most of our struggles and frustrations come from having been misled by parents, friends, and social media to focus on the wrong things, rather than on what makes us happy. On his website, he poses seven questions designed to help you set a goal in the most stress-free way possible, beginning with “What’s your favorite flavor of shit sandwich?” Like Hill, Manson emphasizes the need for sacrifice, noting that one way to find your passion is to identify the thing that you are most willing to suffer for. If you’re willing to sacrifice for something, even when you’re not supported by the people around you and even when it doesn’t produce immediate rewards, that may be your goal or a step towards it.
Hill encourages you to remain confident that your goal can be achieved, no matter how long it takes. Don’t let fear of failure or its consequences discourage you, and have faith both in yourself and in a higher power, be it God or the universe more generally. If you pray, you should be clear about what you want and what you’re willing to sacrifice to get it—avoid begging or praying only when you’re desperate, since this removes your own agency and is a more negative-minded approach to achieving your goals. Hill argues that only a positive approach to your relationship with God will yield positive results.
Choosing Faith and Norman Vincent Peale
Norman Vincent Peale, a pastor and contemporary of Hill who knew him through their mutual publisher W. Clement Stone, wrote on “choosing faith” in a way similar to Hill in his 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking. While Peale is a controversial figure today, both for his connections to the New Thought movement and his personal relationship with Donald Trump, his book was a bestseller. Like Hill, he argued that our attitudes and thoughts give us the power to overcome any obstacle, no matter how serious.
For Peale, positive thinking and positive prayer go hand-in-hand. He described prayer as a manifestation of energy and emphasized the importance of placing absolute faith in yourself and in God to achieve positive results. Of the ten steps that he recommended readers practice daily, over half involved positive visualizations or repeating phrases that affirm your trust in God. Though Peale’s approach is more explicitly Christian in its goals, he and Hill agree on the power of the mind and of faith to change your life.
Connected to the idea of choosing faith, Hill repeatedly stresses that you should never give up or compromise on your goals, no matter what setbacks or failures you experience. Life is short, so you should value your time and refuse to settle for anything but achieving exactly what you want.
(Shortform note: “Never compromise” may seem like poor advice, but Hill’s point is not that we should refuse to work with others and meet their needs, but that we should refuse to accept failure, even when it comes in the form of a proposed alternative or watered-down version of our goal. Many modern self-help writers, writing in Hill’s tradition, agree: Never settle. If your dream is to work as an artist full-time, you shouldn’t accept the offer of a high-paying job that’s in the same field but nothing like what you really want to do. Part of having faith is knowing that these supposedly “more realistic” alternatives won’t make you happy, and that your true goal is worth holding out for.)
The overarching principle of these steps is to be confident and committed in everything you do. Hill does offer a fourth step in his advice on how to create positive habits: practicing the law of attraction, which we’ll discuss next.
The law of attraction proposes that thinking positive thoughts will attract success, while thinking negative thoughts will lead to failure. It suggests that “like attracts like,” and so the first step towards achieving success is to believe that success will come.
Hill does not go so far as to say that all failure is the result of negative thinking—he acknowledges that people are born into very different circumstances, and with various social advantages or disadvantages. However, he still insists that there is no such thing as luck, and that if you have a clear goal you’re determined to achieve, you fully believe that you’re capable of achieving it, and you insist on thinking positively about what you’re doing, you will eventually find success.
Hill also argues that the law of attraction can act as a guide in prayer. He believes that anyone who prays while doubting that their prayer will be answered has guaranteed that that’s exactly what will happen. Absolute faith in both yourself and in a higher power is necessary for prayers to be effective. You should also pray regularly, and pray to express gratitude as much as you pray to ask for things. Finally, be prepared to take initiative and make sacrifices in order for your prayers to be realized, making the act of praying into more of a request for help or God’s blessing than for a miracle.
Criticisms of the Law of Attraction
The law of attraction is a cornerstone of New Thought and shows up in nearly all of Hill’s writings. It’s also one of the most misunderstood of New Thought beliefs, and the most ridiculed by critics. After the documentary film version of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret was released in 2006, many bloggers tested its theories by praying for material goods and waiting for them to arrive.
However, the law of attraction is not about wishing for something, such as a new desk, and expecting that it will come to you with no effort on your part. Rather, it argues that pursuing a goal with absolute confidence that you will succeed, and that God or a higher power has heard your desire and is supporting you in achieving it, makes it more likely that you will succeed.
Even if you yourself are not religious, there’s no denying that greater self-confidence leads to greater success, if for no other reason than that it makes you more empowered to ask for what you want. There are still valid criticisms to be made of the theory of the law of attraction (for example, Mark Manson claims that it’s little more than confirmation bias encouraging you to see God’s will in what might be random coincidence, and rejects “absolute faith” as a form of “delusional positive thinking” that will only distract you from your real obstacles), but these overly literal readings misrepresent New Thought ideas.
Having explained how your success or failure is determined by the patterns of behavior that you’ve fallen into, as well as the significance of the law of attraction, Hill now names the six things a person needs to do in order to escape the Devil’s influence and live a successful life. We’ll explore each one in detail:
Hill argues that you can’t break yourself out of unhealthy habits or an indifferent pattern of behavior unless you have a clear goal that you’re working towards. Without knowing what you want and having a plan to achieve it, you’re likely to drift through life, allowing your circumstances to shape you rather than you shaping your circumstances.
Hill sets no limits on what your goal may be, and in his own case, his goal was not a business but his desire to write self-help books and to teach others to find success, to the point that he abandoned several other business ventures to pursue his goal. Without a clear purpose, he struggled to find happiness.
(Shortform note: Experts note that conviction and hard work are difficult to maintain over time, and on some level, the work needs to be its own reward if you’re going to sustain enough motivation to reach your goals. Don’t choose a particular goal because it’ll be profitable or seems likely to impress others; pick something you’re truly passionate about. It may not be the first thing you try, or the thing that gets the most public recognition, but it will be the thing that makes you happiest and that justifies whatever struggles and setbacks you endure.)
Earlier in this guide, we listed ten desires through which the Devil can manipulate human beings. Hill argues that three of these desires—the desire for self-expression, the desire for food, and the desire for sex—are the most dangerous and require the most regulation. While, as we mentioned earlier, sex, food, and self-expression are all normal appetites that can be fed in moderation, when you over-indulge in them, they can distract you from your goals and are ultimately unhealthy for your body.
When it comes to self-expression, Hill suggests that rather than being overly talkative or trying to impress others, you should spend more time listening, and only speak when you are confident in what you have to say. When it comes to food, rather than eating constantly or eating unhealthy foods, you should try to eat foods that are healthy and will give you more energy. Finally, when it comes to sexual desires, Hill argues that sex should be pursued through positive long-term relationships, and that you should channel any leftover sexual energy into working towards your goals, rather than allowing sex to be a motivator in and of itself.
The Extremes of Hill’s Thoughts on Sex
Though he mentions it only briefly here, in Think and Grow Rich Hill makes an extended argument about the power of sexual energy to motivate your work. He argues that by abstaining from sex, or focusing your sexual desires into a single, stable relationship, that you will then have an excess of energy and motivation, which you can channel into your work instead.
There’s little scientific basis for this belief, but it remains popular among some anti-pornography advocates and in the online community known as #NoFap, which began on Reddit in 2011. Those who practice #NoFap, or abstaining from masturbation for months or years at a time, believe that doing so will improve their physical health and allow them to think more clearly and be better romantic partners.
While it’s had connections to the far right and various anti-women communities in the past, in recent years the #NoFap movement has rebranded as a porn addiction recovery community. Many members emphasize how the movement’s advice helped them cope with compulsive sexual behavior, shame surrounding sex, and even erectile dysfunction. Therefore, even if Hill’s theories of self-control don’t lead to financial success, they may at least have some psychological benefits.
We’ve already mentioned that fear of failure is one of the tools the Devil uses to keep you from taking action. Hill cautions that while you can’t avoid some degree of failure in your life, you can control how you respond to that failure when it comes. Rather than allowing failure to discourage you from your goals, take it as an opportunity to question your purpose, think about what is and isn’t working, and try new tactics where old ones failed.
According to Hill, what sets a successful person apart from an unsuccessful person is how well they react to failure. Do they accept it as part of the process or allow it to persuade them to give up? Even a particularly brutal failure, such as the business failures Hill experienced before and during the Great Depression, should be taken as a sign that change is required, rather than a reason to abandon everything you’ve worked for. Above all, failure should be an opportunity to test yourself and your limits.
The Benefits of Failure
Hill’s belief that failure is a necessary part of success is a staple of professional advice today, repeated by everyone from business owners to athletes to psychologists. In Black Box Thinking, journalist and former Olympic tennis player Matthew Syed argues that progress is impossible without failure, and that a streak of unsuccessful ventures shows an inability or unwillingness to learn from past mistakes.
While Hill’s argument that even the Great Depression was a failure to be learned from may initially seem harsh, many social scientists and politicians have argued that large-scale disasters expose problems built into a system and are an opportunity to learn, not so much on an individual level but as a society dedicated to equal opportunity and independence.
The Devil is able to exert his influence more strongly over people who feel isolated or discouraged. In both the professional world and your personal life, it’s important to choose partnerships that will help you improve yourself and achieve your dreams. Be careful who you decide to work with, and avoid relationships with people who are a distraction or who don’t seem interested in your goals.
The strongest partnership, according to Hill, is the one that you can form with a spouse who fully understands and supports you. He credits his relationship with his wife as giving him the strength to stand up to the Devil and to continue in the face of repeated failure. Working together, two people or a group of people can achieve things that it would be impossible to do alone.
Hill acknowledges that being so pragmatic in your relationships might seem cold, but argues that your first duty is to yourself, to choose relationships that help both parties to find happiness and success in their lives. Toxic relationships, even familial ones, will only drag you down and must be broken off if you ever hope to find success. In this vein, he also argues in favor of divorce, since unhappy marriages only make you weaker and thus more vulnerable to the Devil’s influence.
Defending Divorce
Divorce was uncommon when Hill was writing, but he had personal reasons to support it. By 1937 he had already been divorced twice, and he would divorce a third time in 1940. At the time of writing Outwitting the Devil, he was married to Rosa Lee Beeland, a self-help author in her own right. While their marriage wouldn’t last, she was unquestionably a valuable partner to him, both personally and professionally—Hill’s biographers credit her as being the unsung coauthor of Hill’s most successful book, Think and Grow Rich.
After his relationship with Beeland ended, Hill married again in 1943, and his marriage to Annie Lou Norman lasted until his death in 1970. Today, it’s widely accepted that divorce is a social good, improving the mental and physical health of both partners and their children. There’s even evidence to suggest that rising divorce rates are better for the economy.
Throughout the book, Hill argues that resisting the Devil’s influence is primarily a matter of self-assessment—understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, recognizing patterns in your behavior, and making the best decisions to help you achieve your goal. He defines these skills as being a form of wisdom, distinct from knowledge or intelligence, and which can only be acquired through experience. Wisdom is about judging what the right decision is and how and when to make it, be it a decision about work, relating to others, or just how you respond to the unexpected.
What Is Wisdom?
Wisdom has been defined differently throughout history—as what distinguishes moral men from intelligent men, as the ability to recognize the limitations of knowledge, or as a skill for rational decision-making—but modern definitions tend to argue that wisdom is the ability to make direct connections between your abstract knowledge, i.e. the things you learned in school, and your experiences. In his book From Knowledge to Wisdom, British philosopher and professor Nicholas Maxwell argues that the education system should emphasize the practical applications of what they teach, showing students the connections between things like statistics and studying climate change solutions. In Hill’s view, this kind of practical thinking is necessary to take the steps required to escape the Devil.
Hill points out that many celebrities or wealthy business owners have fallen from grace at what seemed like the height of their power, suggesting that they became complacent in their success and fell back under the Devil’s control. Even if you’ve already achieved some level of personal or financial success, there are many things that can go wrong. Economic depressions disrupt businesses, relationships break down, and there will always be someone hoping to take advantage of you or to use your success as a stepping stone towards their own.
The truly successful person always plans ahead, takes nothing for granted, and chooses relationships carefully, never relying on someone else unless they deserve that trust. If you manage to achieve a goal, that shouldn’t be the end of the positive patterns of behavior you’ve established. You should set new goals, come up with plans to achieve them, and use good judgment in everything you do. Escaping the Devil is a continual process, and so you will need to practice these six steps throughout your life.
(Shortform note: Dozens of successful people, be they business owners, actors, or politicians, have lost everything at exactly the point where it seemed that they could do no wrong. Hill chalks this up to the Devil’s influence where others might suggest bad luck or a changing culture, but there’s no denying that overconfidence plays a role. If it takes wisdom to achieve success, wisdom is needed to maintain success as well.)
As Hill tells us, everyone experiences failure. What separates a successful person from an unsuccessful person is their ability to take that failure in stride, and apply the lessons learned from it towards achieving their goals.
Think back to a failure you’ve experienced in your life—a failed assignment, a missed job opportunity, a personal falling out, a lost game, etc. What happened? How did you feel? How did you choose to respond?
Looking back at this failure now, what lessons could you take away from what happened?
What lessons did you take away from it in the moment, and how did your overall approach to the assignment, job, relationship or hobby change? If you could do it over, would you react differently?