The Law of Success was unavailable for a long time, but in 2000 the Wilshire Book Company reprinted those 16 lessons in two volumes. Volume 2 contains lessons Eight through Sixteen.

They are: Self-Control, The Habit of Doing More Than Paid For, Pleasing Personality, Accurate Thought, Concentration, Co-Operation, Failure, Tolerance and The Golden Rule.

One thing I noticed is that, in contrast to TAGR, there’s little focus on the story of how steel magnate Andrew Carnegie “assigned” the task of discovering the secrets to success and giving him access to the most famous and successful men of his time.

It’s evident that he did interview and get to know some of those men, from Carnegie to Thomas Edison to Henry Ford. But he also mentions delivering personality tests to over 44,000 ordinary people and it’s clear he believes that his findings from the rest results taught him a lot.

In TAGR there’s reference to how he had to finance the study himself. In one of these volumes he relates how he persisted in giving personality tests even as his wife, her family and his family were all pressuring him to get a “real” job. Evidently he didn’t make much money from studying success. He does conclude that the results were worth it, implying that he learned how to succeed from his tests of those 44,000 people — not the big shots.

He reveals that as relatively late as the end of World War I he had next to nothing. He tells how he managed to get his GOLDEN RULE magazine financed, but it eventually failed. He did make money from conducting sales training, but evidently on a sporadic basis.

We also know that in the year after he began selling these lessons, he lost whatever success he had in the stock market crash. Supposedly he wrote TAGR while hiding out in a friend’s house. Not only was he as broke as much of the rest of the country, but some gangsters wanted to kill him.

Although not known as a health food pioneer, in one chapter he describes his health habits. He railed against white flour like Adele Davis would thirty years later and revealed that he took an enema every ten days.

The chapter on Failure was obviously his favorite, because he describes his long history of business successes followed by failure. (His assignment from Carnegie isn’t even mentioned.) He probably wasn’t surprised when he lost his wealth in the Great Depression. In one of the books he wrote when elderly he relates how the pain he experienced on a dental visit didn’t bother him because pain and problems were by then old friends to him.

The old-fashioned style may put off modern readers. Most of its value is in the shorter and more accessible TAGR.

However, its central message of success through cooperating with other people, observing the golden rule and giving more value than you expect to be paid for is a timeless one that can’t be repeated enough.