The Books
The Strangest Secret
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Who grew up in poverty during the Depression, survived Pearl Harbor, discovered Think and Grow Rich in a public library, and became the first person to sell a million copies of a spoken-word recording.
We become what we think about most of the time.Earl Nightingale — The Strangest Secret, 1956
Earl Nightingale was born in Los Angeles in 1921. His father abandoned the family when he was twelve. He grew up during the Great Depression in a tenement in Long Beach, California, with his mother and two brothers — poor in the way that the 1930s produced, where there was genuinely not enough. From childhood he was obsessed with a single question: why do some people succeed and others fail? He read everything he could find in the public library that might answer it.
At seventeen he enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and was one of twelve survivors of the USS Arizona's forward gun turret. He spent the rest of the war in the Pacific, returned, and discovered Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. He later described the experience of reading it as the moment when the question he had been carrying since childhood was finally answered.
After the war he worked in radio, eventually hosting his own program in Chicago and building considerable success. In 1956 he needed to leave town for several weeks and recorded a message for his sales team explaining the philosophy that had guided his work. He called it The Strangest Secret. The message was duplicated and distributed, and requests came from everywhere. Columbia Records pressed it commercially. It became the first spoken-word recording to sell a million copies and the first to receive a Gold Record.
The Strangest Secret is built around a single idea: we become what we think about. Nightingale's genius was not the idea — it comes from James Allen, Napoleon Hill, and William James before him — but the compression and the delivery. In thirty minutes of recorded speech, he distilled the central insight of an entire tradition and made it accessible to people who had never heard of any of those sources.
The strange secret, he explained, is strange only because so few people actually apply it despite knowing it. George Bernard Shaw had said it: people are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them. This is not magic. It is the practical consequence of directing your habitual attention toward a clear, specific goal rather than allowing it to drift wherever circumstance and distraction happen to push it.
Nightingale co-founded the Nightingale-Conant Corporation, which became the largest producer of audio self-improvement programs in the world. He trained a generation of speakers and authors, including many whose names are now more recognizable than his. His voice — warm, measured, unhurried — reached people in their cars and homes who would never have sat down with a book, and delivered to them a philosophy that had taken three thousand years to develop.
All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.Earl Nightingale — The Strangest Secret, 1956
Thirty minutes of audio — the most concentrated statement of the mind-goal relationship ever recorded. Listen to the original recording if you can find it.
This page contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, Classic Motivation may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.