The Staggering Bullshit of “The Secret”
I hate The Secret. There, I said it. I know I’m a self-development blogger and I’m supposed to keep everything light and airy and full of poop jokes, but fuck it — I hate it. It’s an awful book. And it needs to be said.
Every generation in the past century has had a breakout self-help book that sells a bazillion copies and bulldozes through a few million people’s wallets. Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich did it first in 1936. Then it was Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking about 20 years later. Then Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Giant Within came along in the ’80s. This last go-round, it’s been Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, a short and pithy read that describes the (in)famous ‘Law of Attraction.’
Note that Byrne didn’t come up with ‘The Law of Attraction’ — Earl Nightingale, a self-help writer from the 1950s did.
The funny thing about all of these books is that they all more or less say the same thing: mind your own thoughts, stay positive and focused on your goals, ignore self-doubt and criticism, visualize and concentrate …
