I heard the following in audio version of Outwitting the Devil written in 1938 (although the book was so controversial it didn't get published until recently. After some Googling I found the quote on a PUA forum: Napoleon: Just what damage is there in the over-indulgence of sex? (Ie porn addiction can be related to this) Devil: The greatest damage is that it depletes the source of a man's driving force, and wastes, without adequate compensation, man's creative energy. It dissipates energy needed by nature to maintain physical health. Sex is nature's most therapeutic force. It depletes the magnetic energy which is the source of an attractive, pleasing personality. It removes the sparkle from one's eyes and sets up discord in the tone of one's voice. it destroys enthusiasm, subdues ambition, and leads inevitably to the habit of drifting on all subjects. He then goes on about what is known today as "sexual energy transmutation" Devil: Controlled sex supplies the magnetic force that attracts people to one another. It is the most important factor of a pleasing personality. It gives quality to the tone of one's voice and enables one to convey through the voice any feeling desired. it serves, as nothing else can serve, to give motive-power to one's desires. It keeps the nervous system charged with the energy needed to carry on the work of maintaining the body. It sharpens the imagination and enables one to create useful ideas. It gives quickness and definiteness to one's physical and mental movements. It gives one persistence and perseverance in the pursuit of one's major purpose in life. It is a great antidote for fear. It gives one immunity against discouragement. It helps to master laziness and procrastination. It gives one physical and mental endurance while undergoing any form of opposition or defeat. It gives one the fighting qualities necessary under all circumstances for self-defense. In brief, it makes winners not quitters. Incredible! Especially around tone of voice, energy and attraction! The secret has been known for years! This was written in 1938.
He's right, but the guy who wrote that is a con man, Hill was one of those self-help authors that was a total failure himself apart from selling his books on how to be successful. Imagine that, the irony of being a multi-time failure and growing rich telling others how to be a success! Also he was a kook, he claimed to get the information in his books from spirits that visited him and gave him 'secret knowledge'. OOOH! He was in short, and out and out conman, which is why it's no surprise his books sold so well.
Perhaps but I also personally know several multi millionaires who qoute his books as having helped them. Hill also made multiple fortunes his problem seemed to be keeping them!! I try not to be black and white about people learn the good stuff, ignore the bad.
Maybe he did communicate with spirits. Simply because you do not believe that stuff does not mean it's not real.
He also spoke and interviewed many of the most successful and richest men during his times about their personal success recipes. He had a son, who was born deaf and Hill desrcibes how he did not accept when the doctors told he, that the kid would never be able to hear any sound and that he believed all the time, that his son would be able to hear someday and how it became true. I have never noticed him before he was mentioned here in the NoFap forums sometimes, because he is a very US-american phenomen and his books were popular rather a long time ago there. So my first ideas about him were like the same direction: yeah, another typical self motivation collection blabla author - how to hex and program my brain to get all the mola. It´s not, I was positivly suprised by reading his books then. The one about his "Conversation with the Devil" is even more interesting, by analyzing how the masses can be mentally enslaved, boundaged and manipulated so easily.
These "secrets" go back far further than 1938, since they are based on Eastern philosophical/spiritual practises of Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Vedic traditions etc... which themselves are based on earlier work from before written history, such as the Shamans and Monks in the mountains of China and India 7-10,000 years ago, and likely have existed since the dawn of humanity.
Check out the works of Manly P. Hall (33rd degree Freemason) who was writing and doing lectures on similar topics around the same time and earlier. (Concerning his 1928 book "The Secret Teachings of All Ages", probably Napolean Hill "borrowed" many ideas from Manly P. Hall)