Og Mandino

Augustine “Og” Mandino II was born on December 12, 1923, in Boston, Massachusetts. After serving as a bombardier in the Second World War, he drifted through a difficult decade of failed jobs and heavy drinking that, by his own later account, brought him to the edge of suicide.

The turning point, as he told it, came in a public library, where he began reading widely in the success and self-help literature and encountered W. Clement Stone’s Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude.

Adopting Stone’s positive-mental-attitude doctrine, Mandino rebuilt his life and, in 1965, joined Stone’s Success Unlimited magazine, rising to become its editor and later president. Out of that editorial work came The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968), a short parable about Hafid, a poor camel boy who rises to wealth by following ten ancient “scrolls,” each to be read aloud three times a day for thirty days until its principle becomes habit.

The book sold in the tens of millions and made Mandino one of the most widely read inspirational authors of the twentieth century. He wrote some eighteen books in a warm, parable-driven, lightly religious style, and continued speaking and writing until his death on September 3, 1996.

His work sits at the gentle, devotional end of success literature: less a wealth technology than a program of character and persistence.