The Master Key System on Money and Success

Many people pick up The Master Key System because they want more money. That is not a misreading. Charles Haanel spent decades as a company promoter before he wrote it, and the course talks about wealth, business and success far more often than most books of its kind. But what it says is more specific, and in places more surprising, than the covers of modern reprints suggest.

This guide reports what the course says about money and success, part by part. Every quotation is copied from a public domain scan of the 1919 St. Louis edition, with Part and paragraph numbers so you can check them. Haanel's statements are his beliefs. They are reported here as history, not as financial advice.

Where money appears in the course

Some modern editions open with an introduction or foreword that frames the whole course as a path to riches. The 1919 edition we used has no foreword. It goes straight into Part One, and the very first lines already speak the language of gain:

All possession is based on consciousness. All gain is the result of an accumulative consciousness.

From there money comes up again and again. Part Two says the trained mind is how "every great financier" turned desire into concrete fact. Part Six says an understanding of mental law "cannot fail to be of inestimable value in the transaction of business." Part Nine names the three things everyone wants as "Health, Wealth and Love." Part Sixteen is largely an essay on wealth, and Part Twenty-Three is the money lesson of the course.

Money consciousness

Haanel's key term is "money consciousness." He first uses it in Part Five (paragraph 28), where he writes that "All possession is the result of the accumulative attitude of mind, or the money consciousness." Part Twenty-Three opens by defining it:

The money consciousness is an attitude of mind; it is the open door to the arteries of commerce.

Its opposite, he says, is fear, which he calls "poverty consciousness." This is the course's law of attraction applied to money. Desire draws supply in, fear turns it away, and the mental attitude comes first. Part Nine (paragraph 14) puts the same idea in terms of the Universal Mind: realizing that the "I" in you is one with a Universal Mind which is "all substance" is said to bring you "into vibration with those forces which make for success."

Service, not shortcuts

What surprises many first-time readers is how much of the money teaching is about other people. Part Twenty-Three (paragraph 3) says:

We make money by making friends, and we enlarge our circle of friends by making money for them, by helping them, by being of service to them. The first law of success then is service, and this in turn is built on integrity and justice.

Two paragraphs later he adds: "You can make a money magnet of yourself, but to do so you must first consider how you can make money for other people." He points to Morgan, Rockefeller and Carnegie and claims they grew rich "because they made money for other people." That is his reading of those men's careers, not a sourced history of them.

The same lesson insists that dishonesty does not pay. A man who "is not fair in his intention," Haanel writes, "is doomed to certain defeat." Part Five makes a related point about circulation: "The financier who wishes to make money must make use of the money he has, for only by using it can he get more."

Wealth as a means, not an end

Part Sixteen gives the course's most careful statement on wealth. It opens: "Wealth is a product of labor. Capital is an effect, not a cause; a servant, not a master; a means, not an end." Paragraph 5 then says:

Success is contingent upon a higher ideal than the mere accumulation of riches, and he who aspires to such success must formulate an ideal for which he is willing to strive.

He also warns that "Premature wealth is but the forerunner of humiliation and disaster, because we cannot permanently retain anything which we do not merit or which we have not earned." Part Twelve goes further, saying that after a loss "It is often found then that money and property are not independence at all." And the closing exercise of Part Twenty-Three states plainly: "Money is therefore of no value except to bring about the conditions which we desire."

So the course does want students to prosper. But it treats money as a result of right thinking and useful work, not as the goal itself.

How the success method is supposed to work

The practical side runs through the weekly exercises. Students begin with the sitting exercise, learning to sit still and control their thoughts, then move on to concentration and visualization exercises. Part Eight describes how successful people use them:

Successful men make it their business to hold ideals of the conditions which they wish to realize.

Part Ten is clear that the picture alone is not enough: "Abundance will not come to you out of the sky, neither will it drop into your lap." It takes, he says, a conscious use of the law, a definite purpose and the will to carry it out. Part Nine (paragraph 33) says the method of concentration is the same whether the object is health, a flower or "a complicated business proposition." In Haanel's view, much of the work is done by the subconscious mind. Part Two describes people who meet "some difficult business problem," wait, and find that "something suggests the proper solution."

Borrowed voices

Not every money passage is Haanel's own. The best known business story in the course, in Part Twenty-Three, tells of a Chicago man who was nearly "down and out" and then made a fortune in eighteen months. Haanel introduces it as told "by Mr. Atkinson in Advanced Thought," and the whole account is a quotation from that writer, who says he knew the man. Neither the man nor the company is named, and we found no way to check the story.

The same caution applies to the course's promotion. Haanel's 1919 sales booklet, which promises to unlock "the secret chambers of success," prints letters from satisfied students. One is signed with Napoleon Hill's name and credits the course for Hill's success. It appears only in Haanel's own sales material and has not been independently confirmed.

How it compares with later books

Readers who know Think and Grow Rich (1937) will find familiar ground: definite desire, a clear mental picture and persistence. The difference is emphasis. Haanel spends far more time on a theory of mind and spirit, and he keeps returning to service and fairness as conditions of lasting gain. Later, Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006) brought the law of attraction to a mass audience, and some readers see Haanel's money consciousness as an early version of that idea.

Reading it today

Some of the advice ages well. Be useful to others, deal fairly, decide what you want, keep your attention on it and act. Many business writers since have said the same in other words.

The rest is belief. The claims that thought vibrates in tune with supply, that fear itself drives money away, and that a Universal Mind answers the right mental attitude are statements of New Thought philosophy, not findings of economics or psychology. Haanel offers no evidence for them beyond assertion and anecdote.

It also helps to remember who was writing. Haanel was a St. Louis businessman who had organized plantation and vineyard companies and headed a mining company, and the course reads like it. To read the text yourself, see our guide to its public domain status and free scans. For the other side of his promise, see what he taught about health and healing. A good next step is to work through all 24 parts, one part a week, and judge the money lessons in the context of the whole course.