Skip to content

The Strangest Secret (1956) by Earl Nightingale

Channel: Master Key Society
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOY_2nVozLA

Earl Nightingale's classic 1956 spoken-word essay, whose single "strangest secret" is that "we become what we think about" - a person's life is the harvest of his own habitual thoughts, so a definite goal held in mind is the key to success.

Key points

  • The opening problem. Nightingale cites Albert Schweitzer's answer to "what's wrong with men today" - "men simply don't think." Despite living in the richest land ever known, most people drift. Of 100 men starting even at age 25, by 65 one is rich, four financially independent, five still working, and 54 are broke.
  • Definition of success. "Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal." Anyone deliberately working toward a predetermined goal he chose - schoolteacher, wife and mother, gas-station owner, salesman - is a success; anyone who is not is a failure. Only about 1 in 20 does this.
  • Conformity is the enemy. Quoting psychiatrist Rollo May, the opposite of courage is not cowardice but conformity. Most people are "outer-directed," believing their lives are shaped by circumstances and outside forces; asked why they get up and go to work, 19 of 20 have no idea beyond "everyone does it."
  • The goal / ship analogy. A ship with a captain, crew, and mapped voyage almost always reaches port; an unmanned ship with no destination drifts, sinks, or runs aground. A human being works the same way - people with goals succeed because they know where they are going, and success (and failure) tend to compound on themselves.

  • The "convoy" economy. The modern economy is slowed to protect its weakest link, like a wartime convoy moving at the speed of its slowest ship, so making a mere living takes no special talent. That creates a plateau of so-called security; the individual must decide how far above the plateau he wants to aim. There is little real competition - instead of competing, you only have to create.

  • The secret itself: "We become what we think about." Nightingale presents this as the one point on which all the great wise men, philosophers, and prophets are in complete agreement, stacking up authorities: Marcus Aurelius ("a man's life is what his thoughts make of it"), Disraeli, Emerson ("a man is what he thinks about all day long"), William James (we can alter our lives by altering our attitudes of mind; if you care enough for a result you will almost certainly attain it), Mark 9:23 ("if thou canst believe, all things are possible"), Norman Vincent Peale ("believe and succeed"), Shakespeare ("our doubts are traitors"), and George Bernard Shaw (successful people make the circumstances they want). A person thinking about a worthwhile goal reaches it; a person with no goal fills his mind with confusion, fear, anxiety, and worry, and becomes that instead.

  • The farmer-and-land analogy (how it works). The mind is like fertile land that does not care what is planted in it - plant corn or nightshade and it returns each in equal abundance ("as ye sow, so shall ye reap"). The human mind is far more fertile still and the last unexplored continent; it will return whatever we plant, success or failure.

  • Why the mind goes unused. It comes free as standard equipment at birth, and we undervalue what costs nothing - yet everything truly worthwhile (mind, soul, body, hopes, love of family) is free and irreplaceable, while things bought with money are cheap and replaceable. Familiarity breeds contempt; universities have shown most people operate on about 10% of their abilities.

  • The instruction / technique. Decide now what you want and plant that goal in your mind - the most important decision of your life. Then care for it, work steadily toward it, and it must become reality, because this is a law as inflexible as gravity (jump off a building and you always go down). Think about the goal in a relaxed, positive way; picture yourself in your mind's eye as having already achieved it, seeing yourself doing what you will do once you reach it.

  • You are the sum of your thoughts. In this "age of ulcers and nervous breakdowns," people worry themselves into early graves rather than learn a few great laws. Each of us is where he is because that is where he really wants to be; we live off the fruit of our thoughts, and what we think today and tomorrow molds our future.
  • The Earth-mover image. A tiny man perched atop a giant, powerful Earth-moving machine, guiding it with the wheel, mirrors the mind: you sit at the controls of a vast source of energy - keep both hands on the wheel and direct it, or let it run into a ditch. You are in the driver's seat.
  • A two-edged sword. The same law that leads to wealth, happiness, and everything one has dreamed of can just as surely lead a man into the gutter; it depends entirely on how he uses it. This is why we must control our thinking.
  • Why "strange" and "secret." It is no real secret - it was taught by the earliest wise men and appears throughout the Bible - but so few people understand or apply it that you could ask man after man the secret of success and scarcely find one in a month who could tell you. Nightingale closes that life should be an exciting adventure, that "the architect of the universe didn't build a stairway leading nowhere," and with the Galilean carpenter's line: "as ye believe, so shall it be done unto you."