How to Use the Power of Imagination to Get Success

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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How can you use the power of imagination to achieve success? How do you boost your imagination?

Your creative imagination can spark ideas that will lead to immense riches. All great fortunes start with excellent ideas generated by imagination. You can boost your power of imagination by constantly dreaming big.

Read on to understand why you should harness the power of imagination.

The Power of Imagination

Your imagination is a crucial tool for converting your thoughts into riches. You can create anything you can imagine.

Your power of imagination can spark both ideas and plans for achieving them. Your powers of imagination decline if you don’t regularly use them, but they also improve with use. Keep thinking about big, ambitious ideas. 

There are two types of imagination — synthetic and creative — and both can play a role in the transformation process. The synthetic imagination rearranges existing ideas and concepts in new ways. The creative imagination, which works in the subconscious, generates new ideas, and through hunches and inspiration, it produces the plan you need to follow to achieve your goal. 

The world’s greatest business leaders, thinkers and artists used their creative imagination to come up with works of art, inventions, and products. Great fortunes start with ideas generated by imagination. Here are two examples of the role imagination played in creating ideas that produced riches:

  • A doctor had come up with a recipe for a syrupy soda fountain beverage, but it didn’t sell very well. Eventually, to pay off his debts, he sold the formula, a kettle, and soda fountain equipment to a drugstore clerk for $500. The drugstore clerk, Asa Candler, applied imagination to come up with an innovative promotion and marketing campaign that transformed the beverage into a household name, Coca-Cola. One of his ideas, which became legendary, was touting Coca-Cola as having a “secret” ingredient. This gave it the competitive advantage of seeming mysterious and unique, and it’s still quoted today.
  • A clergyman had an idea to start a technical school to train students in practical applications of technology, but he needed $1 million to do it. Through imagination he came up with a bold plan to get it — he gave a sermon titled “What I would do with $1 million.” Soon after the speech, a member of the audience gave him the money to start the training institute.

Don’t forget that ideas are just ideas, and they need to be acted on to become real. But great ideas can take on a momentum of their own, spurring you to act and persist until they transform into reality.

How to Use the Power of Imagination to Gain Success

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Joseph Adebisi

Joseph has had a lifelong obsession with reading and acquiring new knowledge. He reads and writes for a living, and reads some more when he is supposedly taking a break from work. The first literature he read as a kid were Shakespeare's plays. Not surprisingly, he barely understood any of it. His favorite fiction authors are Tom Clancy, Ted Bell, and John Grisham. His preferred non-fiction genres are history, philosophy, business & economics, and instructional guides.

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