2.0｜Chapter 2 Can Everyone Truly Succeed?
Chapter 2 | Can Everyone Truly Succeed? — Why Traditional Successology Works for Only a Few
The predecessor of all success movements, honored by many as the "Grandfather of Success," is Napoleon Hill. One of his books was translated into Chinese with a direct and striking title: Everyone Can Succeed. I first encountered it during my high school years, and the title gripped me instantly. That book would go on to accompany me throughout my entire youth; it was read so often that it turned from a pristine volume to a tattered relic, with some of the most frequently visited pages nearly falling out. I have lost count of how many times I read it, and how many classmates and friends I recommended it to.
It is no exaggeration to say that this book largely reshaped my life. From the moment it entered my world, my adolescence was spent immersed in self-motivation and the practice of imitating the habits of successful individuals. One of the core sources of my confidence during that time was Everyone Can Succeed. Following that, I read every work by Napoleon Hill I could find. I believed in his theories without a shadow of a doubt. He was the first person to make me feel that, even as a youth from a small town, I might have the opportunity to build a career and achieve accomplishments I had previously not even dared to imagine.
Inspired by Andrew Carnegie, Mr. Hill spent twenty years interviewing hundreds of billionaires. Through long-term observation and documentation, he summarized the so-called "secrets of success." For a young Chinese person in the 1990s—living in an environment starved for information and knowledge, in an era where most people were still strangers to the world of commerce—this experience was a treasure that was virtually out of reach. It was an intellectual diamond in the crown, a rare cognition.
The original English title of this book is the globally renowned classic Think and Grow Rich. To this day, I still remember many passages from its pages. Like countless other small-town Chinese youths of that era who yearned for a breakthrough and a change of destiny, I began a lifelong, passionate pursuit and a thirsty study of one subject: Successology.
Anthony Robbins, the Law of Attraction, NLP... as long as I could get my hands on it, I studied it. When I was very young, I even took the initiative to contact a well-known success training organization in the United States, hoping to become the promoter and operator of their personal growth courses in the Greater China region. That was my first true attempt at entrepreneurship.
If that venture had succeeded, we might have become one of the earliest companies to introduce and promote successology in China. However, because China had just joined the WTO at the time, the American company was concerned that copyright protections were not yet fully implemented and wished to wait for more clarity in policy before entering the market. Consequently, the collaboration did not materialize.
Despite this, my research and practice in successology have continued to this day. From the perspective of study and application alone, I now have over twenty years of experience. Throughout these decades, my entrepreneurial impulses, my ideals, the acquisition of my "first pot of gold," my subsequent startups and investments—all my life’s adventures have been directly or indirectly related to successology. At different stages of entrepreneurship, investment, and consulting, I have constantly recommended these books to classmates, friends, teams, and partners. I have also continuously validated these theories through exchanges with countless exceptional entrepreneurs.
But the deeper I researched, the more I discovered that these great works actually possess obvious and profound limitations. Based on the various systems I have encountered over the past twenty years, I have roughly categorized successology into three types (though this is not an exhaustive list):
- Traditional Successology (represented by Napoleon Hill): Centered on summarizing the experiences of successful people.
- The Manifesting School (represented by The Secret and the Law of Attraction): Focused on the universal manifestation system.
- The Psychological Engineering School (represented by Anthony Robbins and NLP): Focused on changing behavior through psychological structures.
While this classification may not be strictly academic, for me personally, they represent three major perspectives: Empirical Summary $\to$ Universal Manifestation $\to$ Psychological Engineering.
In the following sections, I will analyze their problems and limitations in turn.
