PROFITING BY FAILURE 879these turning points of my life, until it finally burst forth in terms
of action. Or it may be that there was another plan, over which I
had no control, that urged me on and on, never giving me any rest
in any other line of work, until I began the publication of my first
magazine. But the important thing is that I found my proper niche.
COMMENTARY
Referring once again to Michael Ritt's A Lifetime of Riches: The Biography
of Napoleon Hill, and as we also noted in Lesson Nine, Hill took the fore-
going postwar essay to George B. Williams, a Chicago printer he had met
while working at the White House, and by early January of 1919 Hill's
Golden Rule magazine was on the newsstands.
The first issue was forty-eight pages. In the beginning, with no money
to pay anyone else, Hill wrote and edited every word himself, changing
his writing style for each article as well as using a variety of pen names.
Additional staff was hired later, which soon led to problems on the inside
and on the outside, and Williams attempted to buyout Hill's share of the
business. But when Hill realized that one stipulation of the buyout prevented
him from any involvement in a competing publication, in October of 1920
he simply left.
By April of 1921 Hill had raised the money for a new publication,
Napoleon Hill's Magazine, the foundation of which was again the Golden
Rule, but it also expanded into presenting many of the principles of
success that would become the basis of his later books. The magazine's
acceptance and success a/so led to Hill's success as a speaker and
motivator, which led to even greater success for the magazine.
At the same time, Napoleon Hill was working with one of the inmates
of a penitentiary to develop a correspondence course which he took to
the prisons to encourage prisoner rehabilitation. Most everything Hill did
during this time was successful, and the success of the prison program
was significant. But the greed of two members of the board of directors,