Earl Nightingale · 1956

The Strangest Secret

In 1956, the American radio broadcaster Earl Nightingale recorded a short spoken message about success. It became one of the best-loved recordings of its kind, and it deeply shaped Bob Proctor, who later worked alongside Nightingale and went on to co-found the Proctor Gallagher Institute, home of Thinking Into Results.

Here are its key ideas, in our own words, with the simple 30-day practice at its heart. To hear the original, visit its publisher, Nightingale-Conant.

The problem

Most of us simply don’t think

Nightingale opens with a story. When a journalist asked Albert Schweitzer what was wrong with people, the great doctor paused, then answered that people simply don’t think.

Imagine a hundred people setting out at twenty-five, each sure they will succeed. Decades later, Nightingale observed, only a handful have truly done so. Not for lack of talent, but because most of us drift, doing what everyone else does without asking where it leads.

He borrowed a striking idea from the psychologist Rollo May: the opposite of courage is not cowardice, but conformity.

A new definition

What success really is

For Nightingale, success has little to do with money or fame. It is the steady, step-by-step realisation of a worthy ideal: knowing where you are going, and moving towards it on purpose.

The teacher who teaches because she chose to, the parent raising a family with love, the shopkeeper who wanted their own shop and runs it well: each is a success, because each is deliberately becoming what they decided to become.

That phrase, a worthy ideal, sits at the very heart of Thinking Into Results. Read more in Choosing a Worthy Ideal.

A parable

The mind is fertile ground

A farmer plants two seeds in good soil: one of corn, one of deadly nightshade. He waters and tends them both. The land does not choose; it returns whatever is planted, poison as generously as grain.

The mind, Nightingale says, is far richer than any field, and it works the same way. Plant a clear, worthwhile goal and tend it, and it grows. Plant worry, confusion and fear, and those grow too.

This is Cause and Effect, the sixth Hermetic principle, at work in the garden of the mind. As you sow, so shall you reap.

The practice

The 30-day test

1. Write your one clear goal on a card. On the back, write: Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
2. Carry it. Read it on waking, through the day, and before sleep.
3. When fear or doubt appears, gently replace it with your goal.
4. Give more than you take, in your work and your relationships.
5. Don’t worry about how. Know where you are going.
6. Act as though it were impossible to fail.
7. If you slip, begin again. Persistence is simply faith in action.

The law of service

Give first

Nightingale reminds us that what we receive in life will always match the service we give. Money is not the cause of success; it is the result of it, and success grows from the value we bring to others.

He likens the opposite approach to sitting before a cold stove and asking it for heat before adding any wood.

Thinking Into Results returns to this in its lesson on leaving everyone with the impression of increase. And it is the Hermetic principle of Cause and Effect once more: give, and it is given back.