Faith — The Second Step Toward Riches

Core idea

Faith is a state of mind, not a religious commitment

Hill carefully redefines the word "faith" before using it. He is not asking the reader to believe in any deity, doctrine, or metaphysical claim. He is using faith as a technical term for a specific psychological state: the felt-certainty that a desired outcome will be attained. The state is functional, not theological. It produces visible effects on behavior — courage, decisiveness, persistence, openness to opportunity — that absence of the state does not produce.

His more interesting claim is that this state can be deliberately induced rather than waited for. The traditional religious view treats faith as a gift; Hill treats it as a discipline. Specifically, he claims that faith is produced by repeated, emotionalized suggestion to the subconscious mind — what he calls auto-suggestion, the subject of the next topic.

The subconscious does not distinguish true from false

The mechanism Hill proposes is psychologically aggressive. The subconscious mind, he argues, treats any thought that is repeated and emotionalized as true, regardless of whether it corresponds to current reality. This is the same mechanism that turns a person who repeatedly hears that they are stupid into someone who behaves as if they are. It runs in both directions. If repeated negative suggestion can install limiting beliefs, then repeated positive suggestion can install enabling ones.

Author's argument: "It is a well known fact that one comes, finally, to BELIEVE whatever one repeats to one's self, whether the statement be true or false. If a man repeats a lie over and over, he will eventually accept the lie as truth."

The strongest version of Hill's claim is that the same subconscious mechanism that creates "bad luck" — people who repeatedly affirm to themselves that they are doomed, and who then act accordingly — can be hijacked to create the opposite condition. The intervention is to repeatedly affirm the desired outcome until the subconscious treats it as fact, and behavior reorganizes around the new "fact."

Why it matters

Hill anticipates self-efficacy by forty years

The psychologist Albert Bandura introduced the concept of self-efficacy in 1977 — the belief that one is capable of producing a desired outcome — and showed in hundreds of studies that self-efficacy beliefs predict performance better than actual ability does, mediate the effect of training, and can be deliberately built through mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and emotional state management. Hill's "faith" is recognizably a precursor of Bandura's self-efficacy, and his prescription — verbal self-suggestion delivered with emotion — overlaps three of Bandura's four self-efficacy sources.

The inner trinity: desire feeds faith feeds auto-suggestion

This topic is the structural hinge of the book's psychological model. The previous topic (Desire) gave you the content of the suggestion — the specific, dated, written goal. This topic argues that the content alone is inert unless emotionalized into faith. The next topic (Auto-Suggestion) gives you the delivery mechanism — the daily repetition that installs the emotionalized content in the subconscious. The three topics are not three independent ideas; they are three stages of one operation.

Key takeaways

Mental model

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Practical application

The Self-Confidence Formula

Hill prescribes a five-part written affirmation to be memorized and repeated aloud daily. The formula is the operational core of this topic:

1. "I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my Definite Purpose in life, therefore, I demand of myself persistent, continuous action toward its attainment, and I here and now promise to render such action."

2. "I realize the dominating thoughts of my mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward, physical action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality, therefore, I will concentrate my thoughts for thirty minutes daily, upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to become."

3. "I know through the principle of auto-suggestion, any desire that I persistently hold in my mind will eventually seek expression through some practical means of attaining the object back of it, therefore, I will devote ten minutes daily to demanding of myself the development of self-confidence."

4. "I have clearly written down a description of my Definite Chief Aim in life, and I will never stop trying until I shall have developed sufficient self-confidence for its attainment."

5. "I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure unless built upon truth and justice, therefore, I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects. I will succeed by attracting to myself the forces I wish to use, and the cooperation of other people. I will induce others to serve me, because of my willingness to serve them. I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness, and cynicism, by developing love for all humanity, because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success."

How to actually use it

Write the formula in your own handwriting. Read it aloud — actually aloud, not silently — once on rising and once before sleep. Read with emotion: imagine the future state vividly, feel what it will feel like to be the person who has attained the goal. Hill's repeated insistence is that unemotional repetition does nothing. The subconscious responds to feeling, not to syllables.

Example

Faith without religion: the Charles Schwab story Hill references

Hill alludes to Charles M. Schwab, the young steelworker who rose to head U.S. Steel — at the time the largest corporation in the world — at age forty. Schwab's biography is full of moments where he committed to outcomes that had no rational basis in his current circumstances: pricing decisions, plant capacity bets, the famous J.P. Morgan dinner where he laid out the case for the steel merger that created U.S. Steel. Each of these required Schwab to act as if a future state were already real before any of the evidence supported it.

Hill's claim is not that Schwab was deluded. His claim is that Schwab had deliberately installed — through years of disciplined visualization and self-suggestion — a felt-certainty about industrial outcomes that allowed him to act decisively in situations where most people would have hesitated. The hesitation costs the opportunity; the decisive action captures it. Faith, in Hill's sense, is the input that produces decisiveness as output.

Negative faith: the modern equivalent

The clearest modern parallel to Hill's argument is the literature on stereotype threat. When a person from a stigmatized group is reminded of a negative stereotype about their group before a test, their performance drops measurably — sometimes by a full standard deviation — even when their underlying ability is unchanged. The mechanism is exactly the one Hill describes in reverse: a repeated, emotionalized belief ("people like me don't do well at this") is treated by the system as fact, and behavior reorganizes around the "fact." The intervention is also exactly the one Hill prescribes in reverse: deliberately install a counter-belief, repeated and emotionalized, until the system reorganizes around the new content.

The 1937 vocabulary and the 2020s vocabulary do not always overlap, but the underlying phenomenon — that belief about capability shapes performance through a self-installing mechanism — is the same.

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