According to John Barry of Baltimore City Paper,

In a quirk of fate that has become part of the Bad Brains legend, [Bad Brains singer] H.R. started thumbing through a copy of Napoleon Hill’s self-help book Think and Grow Rich. ‘My father gave it to me,’ he says. ‘I was 18. I read it through cover to cover.’ It introduced him to Positive Mental Attitude: ‘It was saying, if you do it in your mind, if you get your mind right, you can do anything. It had this dramatic change in my life. I decided I would use it in my day-to-day living and I would put the lyrics and the message in the songs.’ In brief, the book lays out keys to success: ‘definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.’