b'THE MARATHON SALESPERSON|19Napoleon Hill put it this way: It may not be literally true that thoughts are things but it is true that thoughts create things, and the things they create are striking duplicates of the thought-patternsfromwhichtheyarefashioned.2He wentontopostulatethatoneofthegreatest powers we possess is the ability to control our own thoughts. To be fair, Hills philosophy en-countered criticism. Basically, the critics argued that if Hills ideas were true, anyone could just think himself or herself out of poverty, illness, or conflict. However, I believe the criticism ig-nored one key component of Hills philosophy: thecrucialrolethesubconscious mindplaysin determiningourthought-patternsand,hence, our winning or losing behavior. Hill wrote ex-tensivelyabouttheimportanceofgoodhabits inthecreationofadesirablerealityfromthe subconscious. Earlier, Americas founding father Benjamin Franklin had put it in business language when he said, Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad hab-its are subtracted from your good ones. Later, other contemporary authors and entrepreneurs, notably Stephen R. Covey, studied, researched, and concluded that habits can literally make you'