Charles Haanel

Haanel was a St. Louis businessman who wrote a twenty-four week correspondence course and sold it by post, one lesson at a time, with the next withheld until the last had been sat with. It was later collected into a single volume, and it is that volume — rather than the course — that has been reprinted more or less continuously ever since.

He belongs to a particular moment in American writing about the mind, and reading him outside it does him no favours. The confident assertions about attention, belief and result are of their period and were not supported by anything available at the time. They should not be taken as a description of how anything works, and this profile does not present them as one.

What is worth carrying is the delivery rather than the doctrine. A short idea, a week to practise it, and nothing new until that week is done is a good design, and it was a deliberate one — Haanel built the withholding into how the thing was sold. That structure is recognisably what a thirty-two day aim is, and Omzoe's debt to him is structural and stops there.

There are no quotations on this page. The text is in the public domain and easy to find, but the lines it is best known for are the ones making claims this product will not repeat, and quoting them without the argument around them would put them back into circulation under our name.