“Faith is the ‘eternal elixir’ which gives life, power, and action to the impulse of thought!” — Napoleon Hill
When Napoleon Hill uses the word “faith,” he is not speaking primarily of religious belief. He is describing a psychological state — a condition of the mind in which a thought or desire is held with such certainty and emotional intensity that the subconscious mind accepts it as real and begins working toward its fulfillment.
This is an important distinction. Hill is not asking you to believe something supernatural or to suppress rational doubt. He is telling you that the brain does not neatly distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and an actual one — and that this fact can be consciously exploited to produce extraordinary results. When you hold a desire in mind with sufficient conviction, your subconscious mind takes it as an instruction and begins directing your behavior, sharpening your perception, and alerting you to opportunities aligned with that desire.
Faith, in Hill’s system, is a manufactured state. It is induced deliberately through repeated affirmation, visualization, and emotional engagement. You do not wait for faith to arrive. You create it.
Hill describes faith as the “head chemist of the mind.” Here is the mechanism he proposes:
This is not mysticism. It is, at least in part, how intention shapes attention. A person who believes they will find a solution to a problem notices potential solutions others miss. A person who believes they are fundamentally capable takes actions that reinforce that belief. Faith creates a self-fulfilling pattern.
The method Hill prescribes for building faith is the same as the method for building desire: repetition charged with emotion. This is what he means by “affirmation.”
Most people approach affirmations poorly — they repeat words flatly, without feeling, as a kind of magical incantation. Hill is explicit: words alone do not work. It is the emotion behind the words that reaches the subconscious. When you read your desire statement aloud with genuine feeling — seeing yourself in possession of your goal, feeling the relief, the pride, the joy, the gratitude of having achieved it — you are doing something neurologically significant. You are repeatedly firing the neural pathways associated with success, making those pathways stronger and more automatic.
Hill includes in this chapter a “Self-Confidence Formula” — a written affirmation to be memorized and repeated daily. The key elements are:
These five statements, repeated with conviction, reprogram the internal self-talk that most people never examine — and that exerts enormous control over their behavior and outcomes.
Hill makes a point that is often overlooked by readers who focus only on the positive aspect of faith: negative faith is equally powerful. The person who believes they will fail sends the same kind of charged emotional signal to their subconscious — and the subconscious obligingly works toward confirming that belief.
This is why Hill is so insistent on guarding the mind against negative thought, negative conversation, and negative people. The mind doesn’t have a preference for success or failure. It moves toward whatever it is repeatedly and emotionally fed.
Hill describes “poverty consciousness” — a deeply ingrained belief, often absorbed in childhood, that one is not destined for wealth, that money is somehow evil or unattainable, or that one’s circumstances are permanently fixed. This consciousness is as powerful as the wealth consciousness it opposes, but it works in reverse. Until it is consciously replaced through repeated affirmation and deliberate faith-building, it will undermine every effort to accumulate riches.
The remedy is exactly what Hill prescribes: new thoughts, new emotions, new repetitions. The subconscious does not care about your history. It responds to what it is currently being fed.
Hill previews the concept of auto-suggestion (developed fully in Chapter 3) by noting that thoughts reach the subconscious in two ways:
The difference between the person who accumulates wealth and the person who merely dreams of it, Hill argues, is largely a matter of which type of self-suggestion is running the show.
What do you currently believe, at the deepest level, about your capacity to succeed? Is there a quiet inner voice that doubts, qualifies, or dismisses your desires? Where did that voice come from, and when did you last examine whether its verdict was accurate? Faith begins with noticing these automatic beliefs — and deciding which ones to keep.