Key # 1: Develop Definiteness of Purpose
Your progress toward success begins with a fundamental question: Where are you going? Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement, and its lack is the stumbling block for ninety-eight out of every hundred people simply because they never really define their goals and start toward them.

Key # 2: Establish A Mastermind Alliance
A mastermind alliance is built of two or more minds working together in perfect harmony toward a common definite object. The mastermind principle lets you appropriate and use the full strength of the experience, training, and knowledge of other people just as if they were your own.

Key # 3: Assemble an Attractive Personality
The third step in achieving lasting success is to develop an attractive personality. A pleasant personality is a well-rounded one: Accordingly there are twenty-five different aspects of your personality which you must strive to improve.

Key # 4: Use Applied Faith
Faith is your awareness of, belief in, and harmonizing with the universal powers. You should not simply have faith; you must use it. No doubt you have heard and read numerous deifnitions of faith, many of which involve religious convictions. For the purpose of this Course, your own spiritual beliefs are not important, except that you will learn to put them - and much more into daily practice.

Key # 5: Go The Extra Mile
Render more and better service than you are paid for, and sooner or later you will receive compound interest from your investment. It is inevitable that every seed of useful service you sow will sprout and reward you with an abundant harvest. Going the extra mile is not the sort of principle that can be put into practice in a few easy steps. Instead it is a state of mind that you must develop, so that it is a part of everything you do.

Key # 6: Create Personal Initiative
One of the biggest benefits from going the extra mile is the emphasis it requires you to place on personal initiative. This Key to Success will round out your understanding of personal initiative, and through example it will show you how to multipy that quality in yourself. Personal Initiative is absolutely necessary if you are going to realize your goal. It will bring you advancement, attention, and opportunity.

Key # 8: Control Your Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm bears the same relationship to your PMA and your progress toward success as petrol to a car's engine; it is the fuel that drives things forward. Enthusiasm is power. With faith, it can transform adversity, failure, and temporary defeat into action.

Key # 9: Enforce Self-Discipline
Earlier Keys to Success have placed heavy emphasis on the importance of taking control of your mind. This control is pivotal to your personal intiative, positive mental attitude, and controlled enthusiasm. Self-discipline is the process that ties all these efforts together for you.

Key # 10: Think Accurately
Think of your mind as a piece of land. Through diligent, planned work, it can be cultivated into a beautiful and productive garden. Or it can lie fallow, overrun by weeds sprouting from seed carried by passing birds and the wind. Harvesting the bounty of your mind depends on careful effort and preparation by you, the gardener.

Key # 11: Control Your Attention
Controlled attention is the act of coordinating all the faculties of the mind and directing their combined power to a given end. It is both an outgrowth of many of the other principles of success and an important aid to them. By adopting a definite major purpose, you have selected an object on which you have to focus your controlled attention.

Key # 12: Inspire Teamwork
Cooperation, like love and friendship, is something you get by giving. There are many travelers on the road that leads to happiness. You will need their cooperation, and they will need yours. And there will be other generations after ours. Their lot in life wil depend largely on the inheritance we leave them. We all must become bridge builders, not only for the present generation but for generations yet unborn.

Key # 13: Learn from Adversity and Defeat
Failure and pain are one language through which nature speaks to every living creature, pointing out mistakes. Animals may become timid so that they avoid a threatening situation when it arises again; you must become humble so that you can acquire wisdom and understanding. Realize that the turning point at which you begin to attain success is usually defined by some form of defeat or failure.

Key # 14: Cultivate Creative Vision
Creative vision requires you to stimulate your imagination to work toward your definite major purpose and to put the results of that imagination to work. Creative vision belongs only to people who have the habit of going the extra mile, for it recognizes no nine-to-five working hours and it isn't concerned with monetary rewards. Its aim is doing the impossible.

Key # 15: Maintain Sound Health
You want to get the greatest vigor and fullest use from your body. You can do this if you understand two important points:

1. Your body and mind are one, effectively a mind-body.
2. Your mind-body is, in turn, one with nature.

Remember: you can only do what you want to do when you are healthy.

Key # 16: Budget your Time and Money
Tell me how you use your time and how you spend your money, and I will tell you where and what you will be ten years from now. time and money are precious resources, and few people striving for success ever believe they possess either one in excess. Understanding how you use them is an important part of evaluating your progress toward success and analyzing what may be holding you back.

Key # 17: Use Cosmic Habitforce
You are where you are and what you are because of your established habits. The aim of this course has been to force you to examine those habits and teach you ways to change them. To do this, you need to understand and apply a universal principle called by Napoleon Hill, cosmic habitforce.