What Teachers Can Learn from Think and Grow Rich
Hill's reader chose their own definite purpose and pursued it on their own timeline. You are trying to install something like desire and persistence in students who neither chose the goal (the curriculum) nor set their own timeline (the school year), which means almost every principle in this book needs re-deriving from the perspective of the person doing the installing, not the person doing the pursuing.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for you
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Desire and Decision, for a goal students didn't choose
An assigned learning objective becomes something closer to desire when a student can state, specifically, what changes for them if they master it — not "you need this for the test," which is Hill's "desire" stripped of anything the student would define for themselves.
A teacher explains why a topic is required without ever connecting it to something the student would independently want, and mistakes compliance for the desire Hill describes.
For one unit, have students write their own specific reason the skill matters to them, before you explain why it's required.
Belief made functional, for a student who doesn't yet believe they can
Hill's self-belief assumes an adult with a track record to draw confidence from. A student building a new skill often has no track record yet, which means the teacher has to supply externally what Hill's subjects generated internally: specific, credible evidence of small competence, repeated often enough to become self-belief.
A teacher tells a struggling student to "believe in yourself" with no concrete evidence attached, which is motivational language without the functional mechanism Hill actually describes.
Name one specific, true thing the student has already done correctly, every time you ask for more effort.
Organized knowledge and imagination, scaffolded for a beginner
Hill's "specialized knowledge, organized into a plan" assumes the learner already knows how to organize information. Teaching that organizing skill explicitly — how to break a big assignment into a plan — is often the actual content being taught, more than the subject matter itself.
Persistence and the Master Mind, built before it exists
Students rarely have Hill's chosen alliance of aligned collaborators; the classroom peer group is assigned, not chosen, and can work against persistence as easily as for it. Part of a teacher's job is deliberately building small, functional peer groups that support persistence, since students won't reliably build these for themselves the way Hill's adult subjects did.
Assigned goals (what the curriculum requires) and genuine desire (what the student would choose) are in real tension, and the honest position is that not every required topic can be made to feel chosen — worth naming rather than pretending every lesson can manufacture Hill-level desire.
Name one thing, honestly
Pick a topic students resist most. Have you ever asked them to state their own reason it matters, separate from the reason you'd give?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Name one specific, true thing the student has already done correctly, every time you ask for more effort.