It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed, Napoleon Hill.
There are a number of quotes or ideas similar to this one that I have heard over the years, but this quote represents the earliest appearance of this idea in secular literature I can recall, it was in the late 1950s or so. Napoleon Hill is considered to have influenced more people in success and self-empowerment than any other person in history. Napoleon Hill was a journalist who was hired by one of the wealthiest business tycoons of the time Dale Carnegie, to put together the first real book on success and self-empowerment, which became the “Philosophy of Personal Achievement”, an outline of the best success and self-empowerment ideas and practices ever. Hill is most famous for the book, Think and Grow Rich one of the best selling books of all time, which is where our quote comes from today.
Think and Grow Rich was the result of interviewing some of the best minds in the world at that time such as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Charles M. Schwab, F.W. Woolworth, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow...