W. Clement Stone

W. Clement Stone (1902–2002) was an American businessman, philanthropist, and New Thought self-help author who built one of the great rags-to-riches stories of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago to an impoverished family after his father's death, Stone was selling newspapers on the South Side by age six and owned his own newsstand by thirteen. He entered the insurance business at sixteen, and by 1930 he was managing more than a thousand agents across his Combined Registry Company. Over the following decades he built Combined Insurance Company of America into a billion-dollar enterprise — a business that eventually became part of Aon Corporation. He lived to one hundred years old, his life itself a testament to the principles he preached.

Stone is best known as the co-author, with Napoleon Hill, of Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude (1960), a landmark work that crystallized the philosophy both men spent their lives championing. Stone's central creed — that a "Positive Mental Attitude" (PMA) could transform any circumstance — was not merely inspirational rhetoric but a discipline he applied rigorously to his own career and taught to the thousands of salespeople in his organization. He also wrote The Success System That Never Fails (1962) and co-founded Success Unlimited magazine with Hill in 1954, spreading the PMA message to a mass audience for decades.

Beyond business and publishing, Stone was a major philanthropist and civic figure, donating more than $275 million to charitable causes over his lifetime, including the Boys Clubs of America and arts education programs. He directed the Napoleon Hill Foundation for forty years and was inducted into the Horatio Alger Association. At Nightingale-Conant, Stone's recorded programs carry forward the conviction that shaped his extraordinary century-long life: whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.