Most people use their subconscious mind against themselves. They feed it fear, doubt, and negativity through repeated thoughts and media consumption — and then wonder why they keep getting the same results. Napoleon Hill spent a chapter in Think and Grow Rich specifically on the subconscious mind because he believed — based on his research — that it is the most powerful tool available to any person seeking success. The catch: you have to learn how to use it intentionally.
What the Subconscious Mind Actually Does
The subconscious mind is active 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While your conscious mind sleeps, the subconscious keeps working — processing information, making connections, generating ideas, and sending guidance through what most people experience as gut feelings, hunches, or sudden moments of inspiration. Hill calls this the "connecting link" between the conscious mind and what he terms "Infinite Intelligence" — a concept you can interpret spiritually or simply as the accumulated knowledge and pattern-recognition ability of the deeper mind.
Here's what matters practically: the subconscious mind takes instructions. Specifically, it takes the thoughts and emotions you feed it most consistently and treats them as commands. It then organizes your perceptions, behavior, and even your physical sensations to align with those commands. This is why mindset work isn't optional if you want different results — it's literally programming the system that runs your life.
Seven Positive Emotions to Feed It
Hill lists the seven major positive emotions that the subconscious responds to most powerfully: desire, faith, love, sex (as in creative life force energy), enthusiasm, romance, and hope. These emotions, when attached to a specific goal and fed to the subconscious through affirmation and visualization, are what turn desire into achievement.
He also lists seven major negative emotions — fear, jealousy, hatred, revenge, greed, superstition, and anger — and notes that these are equally powerful as programming inputs. The subconscious doesn't discriminate between positive and negative. It amplifies whatever it receives most. This is both the most liberating and most sobering truth in the book.
How to Program It Intentionally
The technique is the same as auto-suggestion: repeated, emotionally charged statements of your definite goal, delivered during relaxed states when the subconscious is most receptive. Bedtime is the most powerful window because the critical, skeptical conscious mind is at its lowest guard.
But Hill adds something here that's often missed: you can't just program it with words. You need to accompany the words with genuine feeling. The subconscious responds to emotion, not logic. A half-hearted affirmation delivered mechanically does almost nothing. The same statement delivered with genuine conviction and emotional resonance sends a powerful signal.
The Bottom Line
You are always programming your subconscious. The question is whether you're doing it intentionally or by default. Default programming comes from your environment, your past experiences, and your habitual thought patterns — and for most people, it produces a mix of useful and deeply unhelpful beliefs. Intentional programming, through the methods Hill describes, gives you the ability to overwrite the unhelpful beliefs and install new ones that serve your goals. It's not instant. But it is reliable. And it works while you sleep.
