A Teacher
W. Clement Stone
Positive Mental Attitude (PMA)
The transmission
William Clement Stone was born on 4 May 1902 in Chicago, Illinois. Raised in modest circumstances, he began selling newspapers as a boy and later sold insurance for his mother’s small agency. In 1919 he founded his own insurance business, the Combined Insurance Company of America, which he grew over the following decades into a major enterprise; he is frequently described as having built a fortune from a starting stake of roughly one hundred dollars.
From his sales career Stone distilled a practical philosophy he called Positive Mental Attitude (PMA), holding that a person’s habitual mental outlook is the decisive factor in achievement. In 1960 Stone collaborated with Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, on the bestselling Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, which presented PMA as a teachable formula for changing one’s circumstances.
Stone also published The Success System That Never Fails (1962) and, with Hill, helped popularise the success-literature genre through magazines, courses, and seminars. A noted philanthropist, he gave away large sums during his lifetime. Stone died on 3 September 2002 in Evanston, Illinois, at the age of 100.
What they gave
Positive Mental Attitude (PMA): Codified the idea that a deliberately maintained optimistic outlook is the controlling variable in success, packaging it as a repeatable formula rather than a temperament.
- Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude (1960): Co-authored with Napoleon Hill, this work became a cornerstone text of twentieth-century motivational literature, carrying New Thought-derived ideas into mainstream business culture.
- Mind-as-cause in commerce: Translated metaphysical claims about belief and outcome into the practical vocabulary of sales, goal-setting, and self-motivation.
- Repetition and self-suggestion: Promoted self-motivators (short affirmational phrases repeated until habitual) as a tool for installing desired attitudes and behaviours.
In their words
There is very little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference! The little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Napoleon Hill, whose success philosophy Stone adopted and extended; the earlier American success tradition of Russell Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds” and Horatio Alger’s self-made-man narratives.
- Taught / Influenced: Og Mandino, whom Stone mentored as an editor and author; the broader motivational-speaking and personal-development industry that drew on the PMA framework.
Revelations they taught
Their Practices 3
Essential Works
- Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude1960
- The Success System That Never Fails1962
- Believe and Achieve1991