The Secret

The Secret is a self-help book by Rhonda Byrne that explains how the law of attraction, which states that positive energy attracts positive things into your life, governs your thinking and actions, and how you can use the power of positive thinking to achieve anything you can imagine.

While Byrne packaged the idea in a new way, which appealed to the masses, the law of attraction itself is as old as we are: like attracts like. In Germany, we have a saying: “As you shout into the woods, so they echo back.” In essence, the law of attraction states that what you think and feel determines what you’ll attract into your life.

The concept has been written about as long as self-help books are a thing. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, for example. Rhonda herself first found it in The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles. They all describe the same thing in different forms. Let’s say you focus on all the negative feedback you get as an artist. In doing so, you’ll encourage more criticism. Similarly, a person who hates money will never become wealthy, and so on.

What the book is often criticized for is its overemphasis on the power of the law. While there is a concept in psychology called priming, that shows we intuitively act based on influences, you can’t live your entire life this way. So yes, it’s important to put yourself in the right state of mind to achieve your goals, but that alone won’t cut it.

Another case study of the law of attraction is Jim Carrey, who, funnily enough, discussed his experience with Oprah in 1997, also before she knew about The Secret. As an aspiring actor, Carrey would stop on his drive home every night, think about his future accomplishments and visualize them. He took comfort in the fact that he “[did] have these things, I just don’t have a hold of them yet, but they’re out there.” He even wrote himself a check for ten million dollars and post-dated it 5 years. Lo and behold, he did end up making the sum from Dumb and Dumber, just around the deadline. What’s remarkable about the way Carrey did it is that he always envisioned the positives that would come into his life, rather than the negatives he was trying to avoid. When it comes to our internal monologue, loss aversion is a powerful driving force. We’re a lot more worried about losing what we have, rather than getting what we want. That’s why most of us subconsciously play not to lose, instead of playing to win. In part, this is why people who take more risks have less competition. Fewer…