Napoleon Hill and "The Secret" are BS

In My Humble Opinion
1

I haven’t seen The Secret, the latest BS that Oprah is flogging, but I’ve heard enough about it to know that it’s exactly the same crap in Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

Basically, you envision what you want, write it down, say it again and again, etc., and you’ll attract that thing to you.

My nuking of The Secret shall consist merely of pointing out that it’s an old idea pretty much ripped without credit from Napoleon Hill and restated, but not much differently, for the year 2007. Hill even refers to “the secret” constantly within his book.

Plus, it’s not a very good system, which I shall now explain. I shall refer to the secret or the system simply as “the system” hereafter.

The atheists on the SDMB will dismiss the system out of hand for obvious reasons: namely, that the system is really just using prayer and magic to try to get what you want. Being a New Ager, I have no problem, personally, with the concepts of prayer and magic. Both work to some extent. Even if you are a mateialist, I think most people would grant that the psychology behind focusing on an idea will tend to have at least a small beneficial effect. So does the “positive thinking” that is constantly touted throughout the book.

The trouble with the system as conceived by Hill is that he says that it “works.” Never mind that it has only worked for a few spiritual lights like Andrew Carnegie :dubious:. And if it doesn’t work for you? Then you didn’t work the system right. It’s your fault!

Another thing I don’t like about Hill’s system and its modern incarnations is that they don’t recognize the role of talent in accomplishing certain goals. Sure, perhaps not particular talent is required to make lots of money; one way or another you might be able to do it. But if you don’t have a great voice, you can’t be an opera star, and if you truly lack talent in acting, you won’t become a famous actor, and if you have talent in art you won’t become a great painter. And I know from my own experience of teaching English and becoming fluent in Japanese that, if you don’t have natural talent in languages you’ll never become fluent in a foreign language no matter how hard you try. All the visualizations and positive thinking in the world won’t help you, either. They’ll just lead you to waste your time.

Yet another thing I don’t like about the system is that it doesn’t recognize the pertinence of limited resources. Not everyone can be a millionaire, so not everyone can use the system to acquire vast riches.

But what I really don’t like about how-to-succeed books of all stripes is the underlying falacious assumption of their creation: That the writer didn’t succeed through luck. You might have 1,000 aggressive, creative, etc., people all using the same system, and only one of them goes on to make a billion dollars. But that person will say, “I know something that others don’t!” and will write a book. And people will believe it.

How-to books are good when they deliniate systems that the majority of users can use profitably, or at least recognize that only a limited number can succeed.

Books like Hill’s are spiritual snake oil.

2

Cite?

3

I concur. The Secret is simply embarrassing. It’s the “power” wishful thinking coupled with the encouragement of increased risk taking (which may or may not a good idea: it depends on the situation) followed up with a selective confirmation bias about whether that risk taking pays off (i.e. The Secret basically leads you to ignore and excuse misses and only credit hits in much the same way cold reading works) over and above whether those risks were justified and sensible.

It’s also a little grating to see people getting away with complete mumbo-jumbo about how all of this stuff is scientifically supported. They even call their principle the “Law” of Attraction, which, tied into their ultimately incoherent ramblings about electromagnetism and quantum theory, give the whole enterprise enough of a whiff of legitimacy to fool people.

And so now we have Oprah and her pals talking about “good vibrations” shooting out of people and accomplishing things. Wonderful.

4

This has been shilled and sold at least a hundred times in the last fifty years, and a million times if you count religion and prayer.

Hell, Scott Adams was trying to push it (“Affirmations.”) And yes, he cited quantum theory and the butterfly effect.

It’s pure confirmation bias. If you say you want a pony and you get one, you’ll credit the fact that you said it. If you say you want a pony and don’t get one you’ll probably rationalize it somehow, and anyway you’re not going to tell your friends that you fell for New Age bullshit.

5

I doubt there is going to be much debate here, but I’ll chime in and say I agree.

A friend of mine is reading one of these books, I forget which one, it doesn’t matter. When I saw it, and flipped through, I kind of scoffed, and made some remark like, “Do you actually believe this? You’re not trying this, are you?” He sort of tried to defend it, and I said, "Whatever, fine, you know if it makes you happy. It sounds like BS to me though, " and he just smiled serenely and said, “You don’t believe it, that’s why it won’t work for you.” Well, you got me there. :rolleyes:

6

Shun the unbeliever!

Shunnnnnn-n-n-n-n-nuh

Here’s MY secret for how to get rich:

  1. Write a book that is at least mildly readable (but says nothing).
  2. Somehow get on Oprah’s show or have her tell people to buy it.
  3. Sit back and enjoy the all the money that idiot sheep give you.

#1 is do-able by almost anybody, a few Dopers excluded, and #3 will just fall into place if #s 1 & 2 are completed. #2 is the tricky part.

7

Send me $100 and I will send you by return post a copy of my new book, Think Your Way To Oprah: The Success Secrets of the Ancients.

8

Since I really doubt that shills for Beyond Words Publishing or the Oprah show are going to rush in here to dispute anything, I do not see any debate developing.

Off to IMHO.

9

This type of thinking always unnerves me, too. If someone hits me in the hand with a hammer, it’s going to hurt no matter how hard I try to “believe” the hammer doesn’t exist.
LilShieste

10

There is no spoon

11

You forgot the first step, which is ‘Abandon all your principles’. I’d be so rich if only…

I think all this garbage is dreadful. Yes, people need to have healthy feelings of self-esteem and self-efficacy and yes, positive thinking and optimism help simply because they allow people to feel energized enough to persevere, but this stupid ‘Secret’ basically says that all your troubles are your fault and that even if you don’t think bad things, your subconscious brain has ‘drawn’ the bad to you :eek:

So endless numbers of naive people will, upon not realizing their fondest dreams or upon suffering unpleasant events, then feel worse because they’ll think there’s something ‘wrong’ with them; that somehow they are to blame. It couldn’t be a sicker or more perverse take on the concept of positive thinking.

12

Everybody keeps quoting me …

!
I should write a book!

13

I’m not going to defend “The Secret” and others of that ilk, but when a process like this ‘works’ its not always due to chance.

What’s also happening is that if you have a goal and keep it in the forefront of your brain, by reading or writing it every day or whatever – it serves to keep your brain/attention attuned to that goal, and thus you notice and can take advantage of opportunities you would likely not notice otherwise.

For example, my sister decide back in junior high that she wanted to grow plants. Specifically, she wanted to grow flowers and such and sell them at a nursery type place. Today she owns, yes, a quite successful nursery and landscaping business.

But she didn’t sit around just ‘thinking’ about it.

Soon after she decided on this career, she decided to get started by having a greenhouse and selling potted plants on a small scale. We didn’t have a greenhouse, and money was tight so there was no way our parents could afford to buy one or have it built. But Elaine (not her real name) noticed a house that was being rehabbed – and talked them into letting her take the window frames they were removing. Those plus some also ‘found’ wood turned into cold frames. Later on a neighbor said they wanted to get rid of one of those free-standing screenhouse things. In exchange for having it taken down and cleared away, Elaine ended up with enough tubular aluminum to build the skeleton of what became her first green house.

And so on, and so on. She ‘found’ free pots and manure and heavy plastic sheeting and I don’t know what all. She got tons of clippings to root and starts for perennials by trading her labor to groom and divide other people’s plants. She talked the crabby old owner of a ramshackle nursery into taking her on as an apprentice one summer and thus got to learn the tricks of the trade from someone with decades of experience.

I really don’t think she’d had ‘found’ any of these opportunites EXCEPT that she was always doodling and working on her business plan and so her mind was ‘primed’ to see what otherwise it wouldn’t have.

But, no, absolutely, just sitting there and wanting something isn’t going to do it.

14

It’s encouraging that The Secret is already being ridiculed – Boston Legal had a go at it last week when Shatner envisioned Raquel Welch and got Phyllis Diller. Bill Maher and other talk show hosts have made fun of it too.

When this filters down to Oprah, will she expose The Secret’s authors like she did Frey? She can’t – she’d lose any credibility she might still have.

15

Oh, i DON’T KNOW … oPRAH STILL SEEMS TO HAVE SOME CREDIBILITY (oops, sorry! I’ll turn off my government spy mode thingies…), regardless of any backpeddling she may be forced into. At least, she has it with her regular viewers, of whom some seem to view her as some sort of sage or something. (I love the M and S sounds, don’t you?)

Yersterday, while painting a den for a client, she had the Orpah lady on the TV. The show was about various internet scams. I found it to be somewhat entertaining, as well as mildly informative. Tho the previous sentence has nothing to do with the subject at hand, I think that, if it can be spun in a way that makes her look good, it would be easy to envision Oprah ragging on a certain author.

16

Even though, I haven’t read the secret or anything, and I have only a limited understanding of its subject matter, mostly through negative espousals as filtered through the Dope, I think it’s legitimate and for some effective as a cognitive tool. It even has a fairly sound scientific correlate and counterpart in modern cognitive therapy.

17

StarvingButStrong raised some good points.

I think a main problem of such systems is that they don’t distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions for success. To be fair, in Hill’s system, there are a bunch of things you have to do; it’s not just “Wish Upon a Star.” But also to be fair, if you do all those other things (such as planning, never giving up, etc.), you are quite likely to succeed without even without the prayer and magic.

To the poster who wanted a cite that prayer and magic work, I will say that on a common sense level intently desiring something and keeping it within one’s mind is, in most cases, a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for success, and prayer and magic can serve as methods for doing this.

18

If there was any truth to this “The Secret” thing, I’d be absolutely drowning in boobies right now. :frowning:

19

I can tell you right now that you’ll never be successful. Your target audience probably has never paid $100.00 for a book and isn’t about to. You need to get more realistic and get the price down to something more equivalent to taking the family out for dinner at MacDonalds.