The key ideas

The Secret

Rhonda Byrne, 2006

One of the bestselling self-help books promises that if you think about what you want and believe it is already yours, the Universe will deliver it as though from a catalog. Science does not confirm this law, and critics see a dangerous side too. We examine where the “secret” came from, why people think it works, and which practices researchers have tested separately.

Who it is for

For anyone who has heard of the “law of attraction” and wants to distinguish belief, criticism, and practices worth considering.

Your thoughts become things!

What the book is about

Australia, 2004. Television producer Rhonda Byrne’s father dies, and, in her account, her whole life falls apart: work, money, health, mood. Her daughter gives her an old book from 1910, Wallace Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich. Byrne reads it and concludes that she has discovered a secret once known to many great people.

The discovery first became The Secret film (2006), then a book. After episodes of Oprah Winfrey’s show in 2007, it became a worldwide bestseller; the publisher reports tens of millions of copies sold.

An honest qualification first. Everything that follows about the “law of attraction” is the author’s belief and method. The law has no scientific support and has been widely criticized by psychologists and physicists. Researchers have, however, studied some of the book’s practices separately, with findings that sometimes differ from Byrne’s promises.

Idea 1. Thoughts as magnets

The book’s central idea is that like attracts like. According to Byrne, thoughts are something like signals at a particular frequency. Think good things and attract good things; think bad things and attract bad things. She says this applies to everything: money, relationships, health, and world events.

The book invokes quantum physics and names such as Plato and Einstein. Physicists and psychologists who have written about it object: quantum physics says nothing of the kind, and the law of attraction is a metaphor presented as a mechanism rather than a scientific law.

It is important to distinguish levels here. “Thoughts influence what we notice and do” is fully compatible with psychology. “Thoughts directly attract events” is the author’s belief.

Someone thinking about a new job starts noticing vacancies more often. It may look like “attraction,” although the vacancies were already there.

Thoughts most likely change your attention and actions rather than the world directly. That may already be enough to change life noticeably, without any magic.

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About the author

Rhonda Byrne is an Australian television producer and author. After her father died in 2004, she read Wallace Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich, made The Secret film (2006), and published the book of the same name, followed by sequels.

All books by this author: Rhonda Byrne

Terms from the book

  • Meta-analysis
  • Law of attraction
  • Visualization
  • Vision board: A practice from the book: gathering pictures of what you want on one sheet. Its effectiveness is unproven; success stories are individual cases.
  • Illusory correlation: A perceptual error: two events seem connected because you notice coincidences without counting occasions when none occurred.
  • Victim blaming: Reasoning that shifts responsibility for misfortune onto the person who suffered it. Critics see this in the idea that people attract illness or poverty themselves.

All terms

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