In 2006, an Australian television producer named Rhonda Byrne released a documentary film called The Secret. The film went on to sell over 30 million DVDs. The companion book, released the following year, sold over 30 million copies in 50 languages. The phrase "law of attraction" entered the global vocabulary. Oprah Winfrey featured the film twice. The Secret became, in commercial terms, one of the most successful self-help products in history.
What almost no viewer of the film was told was that it was based — extensively, and with very limited modification — on a single book published in 1910.
The book was The Science of Getting Rich. The author was a self-taught Indiana farmer's son named Wallace Wattles. He died, in obscurity, in Ruskin, Tennessee in 1911, at the age of 50. He sold fewer copies of his book during his lifetime than the average self-published author today sells in a month.
This page tells the story of that book, what it actually said, and what got left out in the modern repackaging.
Rhonda Byrne's Own Account
Byrne has, in interview after interview, given the same account of how The Secret came to be. At a moment of personal collapse, her daughter handed her a copy of Wallace Wattles' The Science of Getting Rich. What Byrne read changed her thinking. She decided to make a film about the ideas in that book and the broader tradition it came from.
This origin story is not in dispute. Byrne has credited Wattles publicly and repeatedly. The book is referenced in The Secret itself.
What is in dispute — or rather, what is rarely discussed at all — is how much of The Secret is taken directly from Wattles, and what Byrne's film softened or omitted from his original.
What Was in the Original
Wattles' opening claim in The Science of Getting Rich is uncompromising and immediate. There is, he says, an underlying intelligent substance from which all visible things are formed. A thought, held in that substance, produces the thing thought of. A person who learns the technique of impressing definite thoughts upon this substance — and who lives, simultaneously, in a particular practical manner he calls "a Certain Way" — can produce, with the regularity of any physical science, the financial outcomes she wants.
His three foundational propositions, repeated and developed throughout the book:
- There is a Thinking Substance from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates and fills the interspaces of the universe.
- A thought in this Substance produces the thing imaged by the thought.
- A person can form things in his own thought, and, by impressing those thoughts upon the formless Substance, can cause the thing imagined to be created.
This is the philosophical machinery. The rest of the book — and the rest of The Secret — is the operating manual.
What The Secret Took From It
Almost every concept that The Secret popularized has its direct equivalent in The Science of Getting Rich:
- The "Law of Attraction" — Wattles called it the action of the Thinking Substance.
- The "ask, believe, receive" formula — Wattles called it forming a definite image, accepting it as already given, and acting in the Certain Way.
- The "vision board" — Wattles called it a definite mental image, "detailed enough to describe to a stranger."
- The emphasis on gratitude — Wattles devoted an entire chapter to it; it was his most-emphasized technique.
- The injunction to think positively — Wattles was emphatic that one must never inhabit thoughts of scarcity, illness, or lack.
If you have read The Secret or watched the documentary, you have, indirectly, read Wattles. The phrasing is updated. The Australian narrators are more cinematic. But the substance is, with very minor variation, his.
What The Secret Left Out
Here is where it gets interesting.
The Secret simplified Wattles in three significant ways. Whether the simplifications matter depends on whether you want a feel-good product or a tradition that produces results.
1. The Required Action
Wattles was emphatic that the mental work alone is not enough. The practitioner must, every day, do every action of the day in the spirit of the image — not as preparation for the future but as the present life of the person to whom the image is already true. He called this doing "more than fills the present hour."
The Secret deemphasized this. The film's vibe is closer to "ask the universe and wait." Wattles, by contrast, demanded competent daily action in the direction the image suggests. The image without action does not, in his framework, produce results.
2. The Specificity Requirement
Wattles was severe on the question of clarity. Vague aspirations — "more money," "a better life," "success" — produce nothing, in his framework. The practitioner is required to form a specific, sensory, complete mental picture of the result intended. Not "wealth" but a particular house with particular furnishings; not "success" but a particular position held in a particular kind of work.
The Secret allowed for much more abstract wanting. Wattles would not have.
3. The Persistence Requirement
This is the part most softened in the modern repackaging. Wattles' method assumes the practitioner will hold the image for weeks and months, not days, regardless of what the visible evidence reports back. The Secret tended to suggest that things manifest "quickly" once you adopt the right vibration.
Wattles did not promise speed. He promised reliability — provided the practitioner did the full work, every day, indefinitely.
Why This Matters
If you tried The Secret and it didn't work for you, the most likely reason is not that the underlying tradition doesn't work. The most likely reason is that you absorbed the softened, modernized version — and missed the specificity, the action, and the persistence that the original required.
Reading Wattles directly fixes much of this. The Science of Getting Rich is short — under 30,000 words, seventeen chapters. It has been in the public domain since 1986 and is available free in dozens of editions. The third reading is, for most serious students, the one that lands.
Beyond Wattles
Wattles is the seed of the tradition. He is not the whole tradition.
The five other major figures of twentieth-century New Thought — Neville Goddard, Joseph Murphy, Napoleon Hill, Ernest Holmes, and the obscure private teacher Abdullah who trained both Neville and Murphy in 1920s Manhattan — each developed the same underlying mechanism into different and more powerful techniques.
Neville is the most rigorous. Murphy is the most accessible. Holmes is the most philosophically careful. Hill is the most commercially successful (and the most biographically questionable). Wattles is the foundation underneath all of them.
Reading any one of them is good. Reading all six, in proper context, is what the whole tradition was supposed to deliver before the modern publishing industry chopped it up and sold the pieces separately.