What Is If You Can Count to Four?

If You Can Count to Four: Here’s How to Get Everything You Want Out of Life is a classic self-help book first published in June 1957 by Whitehorn Publishing Co., Inc. Its central argument is disarmingly simple: success is not a matter of luck, privilege, or IQ. It is governed by universal laws — and those laws work for anyone who learns them, just as electricity works for anyone who flips a switch.

The book proved immediately popular. Within a year of publication it had gone through four printings. A fifth revised and enlarged edition appeared in 1966, published by Taplinger Publishing Co. It has since been reprinted multiple times and remains available today in paperback and Kindle editions — more than 65 years after it first appeared on shelves.

Who Was Dr. James Breckenridge Jones?

Jones’s biography is, itself, one of the book’s most compelling arguments. He did not theorize about success from a position of inherited advantage. He clawed his way up from genuine poverty, and the principles in this book are the ones he actually used. His collaboration with Napoleon Hill — the legendary author of Think and Grow Rich — further validated his place in the canon of American success literature.

In the early 1950s, Jones traveled the country delivering lectures on what he called “The Alpha and Omega” — the beginning and end of human achievement. Those lectures became the foundation for this book.

The Core Premise: Laws, Not Luck

The philosophical spine of If You Can Count to Four is this: the universe operates according to fixed, discoverable laws, and those laws do not discriminate. Just as the law of gravity applies to everyone equally, the laws of success apply to everyone equally — regardless of race, gender, education, social class, or geography.

“Millions of people have been led to believe the rules of success are so difficult and complicated that they could never learn them. Jones found the opposite to be true — anyone can be genuinely successful if they learn the same rules that successful people use.” — Core thesis of the book

This was not a message of empty optimism. Jones backed it with his own life story and with decades of observing what separated people who achieved their goals from those who didn’t. His answer was not talent. It was not connections. It was not even hard work alone. It was the deliberate, disciplined application of four specific mental and practical steps.

The Four Phases: A Complete Breakdown

The book’s title promises that if you can count to four, you have everything you need to begin. Here is what each of those four counts actually means:

What makes the four-phase structure so durable is its sequencing. Phase one is clarity. Phase two is identity. Phase three is visualization. Phase four is execution. Many modern personal development frameworks follow exactly this arc — often without crediting Jones.

Why This Book Still Matters in 2026

A natural question arises: why read a 1957 self-help book when you can attend a Tony Robbins seminar or listen to a Grant Cardone podcast? The answer, interestingly, cuts the other direction. Readers who have studied both Jones’s work and modern success literature consistently note that much of what today’s top coaches teach originates — often nearly verbatim — in books like this one.

The concepts of clarity of desire, identity-level change, mental rehearsal, and deliberate action are not inventions of the 21st century. They are principles that Jones, Napoleon Hill, and their contemporaries were systematically documenting and teaching in the mid-twentieth century, based on patterns they observed across generations of successful people.

Reading the source material offers several advantages. Jones writes without the showmanship and upsells of modern seminars. He writes as someone who genuinely needed these ideas to work — because his life depended on them. That urgency gives the book a weight that polished keynote speeches sometimes lack.

The Napoleon Hill Connection

Jones’s relationship with Napoleon Hill — arguably the most influential figure in American success literature — is worth understanding. Jones was a certified lecturer in the Napoleon Hill Philosophy of Achievement and co-authored The Think and Grow Rich Success Quadrant with Hill. This means Jones was not simply inspired by Hill; he was an authorized transmitter of Hill’s philosophy, expanding and applying it through his own experience and teachings.

Readers of Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937) will find If You Can Count to Four to be a natural companion: more accessible in tone, grounded in a compelling personal narrative, and organized around a framework simple enough to apply immediately.

Key Takeaways

Who Should Read If You Can Count to Four?

This book is best suited for readers who are earlier in their personal development journey and want a foundational framework, anyone who has read Napoleon Hill and wants to go deeper into his circle of influence, people who find modern self-help exhausting in its complexity and are looking for something stripped to first principles, and readers who value the authenticity of a voice that earned its authority through lived experience rather than platform-building.

It is also an excellent gift. Short, readable, and grounded — it is the kind of book that sits on someone’s shelf for decades and gets re-read at inflection points in their life.

Final Verdict

If You Can Count to Four is a quiet book with a loud legacy. It doesn’t promise shortcuts or overnight transformation. What it offers is a clear, memorable, and genuinely tested framework for getting from where you are to where you want to be — built not from theory, but from the autobiography of a man who had every reason to fail and chose not to.

In an era of relentless self-optimization content, there is something almost radical about a 68-year-old book that still manages to say everything that needs to be said in four steps. If you can count to four, you already have what it takes to begin.