Every summer, one man left his mills behind, and New York, and the meetings. Andrew Carnegie, American steel, one of the great fortunes of his time. He crossed the Atlantic and went to Scotland, for months.
Out there, on the moor, stood a small cottage. Aultnagar. His wife Louise remembered it after his death: every summer, for a few weeks, they withdrew there "to enjoy the simple life." It was there, she wrote, that he did most of his writing. He had left business thinking he would finally have time. He had never had less. So he kept the writing for the moor, and page after page, he lived his early years again.
His mills, meanwhile, kept running. Every month, columns of figures reached him by mail, and he ran things from afar. The rest was his.
He knew how to bring others there, too. Every year, the principals of the Scottish universities spent a whole week at his home, Skibo. After the first one, one of them told him: "It has taken the principals of the Scotch universities five hundred years to learn how to begin our sessions. Spending a week together is the solution."
Five hundred years to learn what everyone knows deep down: some things cannot be thought through between two meetings.
You know those days. The 8:30 video call that runs into the next one. The messages piling up. The sentence you read three times because the phone rang. And that file, the one that really matters, slipping a little lower down the list every evening. You close your laptop having answered everyone. Except yourself.
Now picture another morning.
The day breaks, and the light reaches the terrace first. You step out, coffee in hand. Before you lies the whole Bay of Angels. Nothing really moves. It is a quiet, steady strength, and little by little it takes hold of you. You stay a few minutes, watching the boats glide across the sea, like everyone who has lived here before you.
Then you go back inside. Everything is quiet. You sit down at your desk and finally open that file. The first hour belongs to it. No one will come to claim it.
The days go by, and the apartment takes on your habits: your cup in its place, your notes spread across the long table, the pages adding up. In the evening, you move to the other terrace. The sun goes down over the hills, and from one side to the other you can see everything, from the sea to the ridges.
And then there are the days when the weather turns. The wind rises, whitecaps run all the way to the horizon. You are sheltered, high up, watching the full force of the elements as few people ever see it. Then you go back to your page.
Napoleon Hill saw in Carnegie, above all, a man of imagination. He had his cottage on the moor. Yours is waiting above the Bay of Angels.