One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  *2 It is not clear what Hall of Fame Reagan was referring to—it may have been the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at New York’s Bronx Community College. If so, he would have been disappointed to learn that Aquarians are not overrepresented among its inventors, statesmen, and scientists.

  *3 It can seem as if songs of the affirmative have always marked presidential oratory—but not exactly. Accepting the Democratic nomination in 1960, John F. Kennedy spoke in terms that could hardly be imagined today: “There has also been a change—a slippage—in our intellectual and moral strength.… Blight has descended on our regulatory agencies—and a dry rot, beginning in Washington, is seeping into every corner of America—in the payola mentality, the expense account way of life, the confusion between what is legal and what is right.”

  chapter seven

  the spirit of success

  I, so far as I can sense the pattern of

  my mind, write of the wish that comes

  true, for some reason a terrifying concept,

  at least to my imagination.

  —James M. Cain, preface to The Butterfly, 1946

  The era of the mind-power pioneers reached a close by the Age of Reagan. The “philosophy of happiness,” as Reagan called it, appeared everywhere; the landmark texts had been written; the theology had been dispersed across mainline churches or secularized within business culture; and much of the public viewed a “positive attitude” as a naturally desirable, if elusive, aim.

  As it happens, the year Reagan took office in 1981 marked the passing of New Thought minister and metaphysical writer Joseph Murphy, who was the last real innovator from the field’s formative years. Murphy formed a link to the generation of American mystical thinkers who were unchurched, self-schooled, and made a comfortable, though not lavish, livelihood from book royalties, speaking fees, and the collection-basket offerings at metaphysical churches and meeting halls. Murphy’s death concluded the period in which New Thought was shaped by itinerant figures who lacked a significant business apparatus.

  The motivational up-and-comers of the 1970s and 1980s, by contrast, were not classifiable by any one philosophy, and were far more plugged in to the business of publishing, weekend seminars, audio programs, and for-profit teaching institutes. They included sales coaches Zig Ziglar and Og Mandino; human-potential author Stephen Covey; management experts Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson; metaphysical publisher Louise Hay; inspirational writers Jack Canfield and Richard Carlson; life coaches Anthony Robbins and Brian Tracy; plus a wide range of spiritual self-help authors, including Wayne Dyer, Jean Houston, and Marianne Williamson (who got her start as a Unity minister).

  There were also prominent voices on the evangelical circuit, often reaching millions of people, such as the spiritual healer and televangelist Oral Roberts and the provocatively audacious prosperity minister Reverend Ike, who became a media sensation in the 1970s with his claim that “God wants you to be rich.” The New Thought movement’s indispensable phrase, Law of Attraction, was retooled by Rev. Pat Robertson as Law of Reciprocity, and by popular Korean evangelist David Yonggi Cho as Law of Incubation. This concept, which began with Spiritualist medium Andrew Jackson Davis, became a staple of New-Agers and evangelical media ministers alike.

  The most distinctive evangelical figure who spread motivational philosophy in the 1970s and ’80s was Hour of Power television host and Norman Vincent Peale protégé Rev. Robert H. Schuller. From the pulpit of his massive, glass-paneled Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, Schuller preached a philosophy he called “possibility thinking.” He eschewed the politics of evangelism. As a result, Schuller attracted a following among both mainline Christians and New-Agers. He was one of very few figures of whom this was true.

  Yet Schuller’s retirement in 2006 brought disorder and financial chaos to the Crystal Cathedral organization, which filed for bankruptcy in fall 2010. The once-formidable ministry had built too ambitiously and suffered a drop in broadcast audiences. Facing a $43 million debt, the megachurch was forced to rely on volunteers to landscape its forty-acre campus.

  In 2011 the Schuller ministry announced the sale of its grounds and the 10,664-windowed Crystal Cathedral to the Catholic Church. The landmark structure, which had been designed as a four-pointed star by architect Philip Johnson, was redubbed Christ Cathedral by its new owners. In early 2012 Robert Schuller cut ties with the church amid board disputes, and most other Schuller family members departed in an atmosphere of power struggles and accusations. The remaining ministry struggled to maintain a sizable audience for the once-popular Hour of Power show.

  While the fortunes of individual figures could rise and fall, the business of motivation, from the broadcasts of Oprah Winfrey to a wideranging network of multimedia seminars and workshops, was a staple of the American scene by the late twentieth century. The persona of the motivational coach was sufficiently recognizable to be routinely satirized in movies and on television, including in Saturday Night Live actor Chris Farley’s 1990 sendup of motivational speaker “Matt Foley,” who bellowed: You’re gonna end up livin’ in a van down by the river! Either as sources of inspiration or as objects of derision, empowerment coaches became an American archetype.

  In actuality, the motivational field as a modern business phenomenon received its start from a man of reserved character and dignity. He neither charged around stages, waved his arms, nor raised his voice above the tone that one might expect from a trusted family physician. His work ignited the business motivation genre at a time when the television and recording industries were in their infancy.

  The Strangest Secret

  The emergence of business motivation as a field—one that played out in books and convention halls and also became a powerful electronic medium, first on vinyl albums and audio tapes, and then later on television, DVDs, the Internet, and apps—can be traced back to the experience of a child of the Great Depression. He was a Marine who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor, a successful broadcaster and salesman, and, above all, a relentlessly curious man who yearned to know what set apart successful people. His deep, sonorous voice became familiar to millions after he recorded “the secret” to success on a vinyl record in 1956. His name was Earl Nightingale.

  Nightingale was born in 1921 in Long Beach, California. By the time Earl was twelve, in 1933, his father had abandoned the family. Earl, his mother, and two brothers lived destitute in a “tent city” near the Long Beach waterfront, a home to people displaced in the Depression. Earl’s mother supported the family by working as a seamstress in a WPA factory. The adolescent Earl despaired not only of the family’s poverty but also of the people he came in touch with. Everyone around him seemed backbiting, sullen, and directionless.

  “I started looking for security when I was 12,” Nightingale recalled. What he specifically meant was that he wanted to determine why some people were poor while others thrived. He hungered to be a member of the latter group. As a twelve-year-old, he ignored broader socioeconomic factors. This may have reflected a certain blindness to the larger mechanics of life, not dissimilar to the outlook found in a young Ronald Reagan. But the wish to succeed also drove him to read voraciously in search of “the answer.” He haunted the Long Beach Public Library, poring over every available work of religion, psychology, and philosophy.

  At the age of seventeen, Earl was no closer to solving his riddle. Yearning for independence and needing three meals a day, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps on the eve of World War II. In 1941, he became one of twelve survivors out of a company of a hundred Marines aboard the U.S.S. Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Nightingale made it through the war, emerging not only with his physical well-being but also with the full maturation of a personal gift. He possessed a remarkable speaking voice—rich, deep, sonorous. His intonation was flawless. When stationed after the war as an instructor at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Nightingale moonlighted as an announcer with a local radio station. From there he found radio jobs in Pho
enix and then at a CBS affiliate in Chicago.

  At CBS in 1950, the twenty-nine-year-old became the voice of the aviator-cowboy adventurer Sky King on a radio serial of the same name. It was the type of rock-’em-sock-’em role in which Reagan had once excelled.

  But a more fateful development happened in Nightingale’s life around that time. He finally discovered his secret to success.

  After reading hundreds of works of psychology, religion, mysticism, and ethics, the ex-Marine and radio announcer underwent a revelation. It came while he was reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Nightingale realized that in the writings of every era, from the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tzu to the Stoic meditations of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius to the Transcendentalist essays of Emerson, the same truth appeared, over and over. He had been reading it for years and simply not seeing it. It came down to six words: We become what we think about.

  That was it. We become what we think about. It was the “answer” for which he had been searching.

  Nightingale left the CBS station, though he remained the voice of Sky King for several years. He moved to a new radio gig, which allowed him to write his own spots. At Chicago’s WGN, Nightingale not only wrote and hosted his own hour-and-a-half talk show—where he was able to expound on bits of philosophy, stories, and slice-of-life anecdotes—but he also worked out a deal to profit from products he sold on the air.

  He promoted Think and Grow Rich through a local bookstore and received a cut of every copy sold. He followed suit with other products, literally from soup to soap. He soon began pitching retirement-insurance policies sold by the Franklin Life Insurance Company. This enterprise was less successful. Nightingale’s pitches moved few policies. Then he seized upon a different idea: Rather than selling policies, he would recruit salesmen for the company.

  “If you, my listener, are a sales person or a wife of a sales person and your husband is making less than twenty thousand a year, I came across an idea that is fantastic,” Nightingale intoned. He asked people to mail in cards with their addresses, and he invited respondents to recruitment meetings for Franklin Life. Nightingale brought top salesmen into Franklin’s fold that way. Some of them remained with the firm for decades, a Franklin executive recalled. Nightingale was a pitch artist—but he sold a fair deal.

  The radio announcer discovered that he was better at recruiting and revving up salesmen than at selling goods or policies himself. From that time forward, Nightingale’s number-one product became motivating other people. In the mid-1950s, Nightingale purchased his own franchise office of Franklin Life, an idea probably put to him by a new friend, W. Clement Stone, a highly successful Chicago insurance man who had collaborated on books with Napoleon Hill.

  Nightingale got into a routine of delivering inspiring talks to his salesmen. One day in 1956, before taking a long vacation from the office, Nightingale privately recorded a motivational message for the men to hear in his absence. His thirty-minute message told the story of his discovery of the six-word formula: We become what we think about. He called the presentation “The Strangest Secret.” In clear, simple terms Nightingale described how this formula was the fulcrum on which all practical philosophies rested. It was a “secret,” he explained, only insofar as we overlook it, just as we undervalue or ignore those things we are given freely: love, health, sensations, and, above all, the uses of our minds.

  “The human mind isn’t used,” he said, “merely because we take it for granted.”

  The vinyl phonograph record electrified everyone who heard it. It got passed around, shared, and borrowed. Nightingale returned home surprised by the demand for it. No commercial advice record had ever before been produced. But the pitchman saw the possibilities. Calling on friends in the record business, Nightingale made a professional version of “The Strangest Secret,” and Columbia Records agreed to distribute the album. The Strangest Secret became the first spoken-word album to receive a Gold Record, for sales in excess of one million copies.

  With orders booming, Nightingale partnered in 1959 with another Chicagoan, a direct-mail advertiser named Lloyd Conant. Together they formed Nightingale-Conant, which became the nation’s first recording company focused on motivational fare. The company offered Nightingale’s recordings, first on vinyl and later on cassettes. In decades ahead its catalogue expanded to include self-help figures such as Anthony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki, and Deepak Chopra.

  Nightingale had minted an industry. And in his search for the truth about human nature, he had stumbled upon a new kind of product: selling people on the promise within themselves. He made himself the field’s first marketer and promoter. Like the radioman that he was, Nightingale performed and produced the early merchandise, first in the form of The Strangest Secret, and later in his widely syndicated radio program, Our Changing World, which he wrote and narrated beginning in 1959.

  Nightingale was evangelizer, philosopher, and pitchman rolled into one. In partnership with mail-order expert Conant, he also became manufacturer, fulfillment manager, and catalogue retailer. Nightingale’s business model was simple: Do it all.

  Nightingale’s commercial outlook was more than the result of Depression-era determination and personal guile. Critics of Nightingale and other motivational pitchmen often made the mistake of contrasting selling with believing, as though one must naturally preclude the other. Nightingale was, above all, a believer. To listeners eager for his message, Nightingale’s voice and viewpoint were sincere, deeply affecting, and practical. He encouraged the honing of individual ability. He read voraciously and urged his listeners to do the same. He inveighed against the conformity and thoughtlessness that characterized many human lives.

  By the time Nightingale received his Gold Record in 1971, he left no question about the potential of the motivational field. When he died of heart failure in 1989, soon after his sixty-eighth birthday, Nightingale had lived just long enough to see the motivational genre grow into a profitable business of publishers, organizations, and individuals. Within a decade of Nightingale’s passing, the medium of records and cassette tapes that he knew gave way to CDs, DVDs, and, finally, digital downloads. Today whenever a psychology, self-help, or marketing lecture is clicked on, downloaded, or viewed through websites such as TED or BigThink, an echo is being heard from the day in 1956 when Earl Nightingale first recorded his “Strangest Secret.”

  “If You Want More Money …”

  In the years following Nightingale, the positive-thinking philosophy completed its transformation into a methodology of winning. It abounded in both business and religious circles. Money and ethical issues were sometimes at stake. Some of the leading inspirational evangelists, and several longtime New Thought figures, prescribed tithing (the ancient practice of giving away 10 percent of one’s income) as a means to wealth attraction.

  As the practice frequently unfolded, tithes were supposed to be directed not to charities but to the institutions where a congregant was “spiritually fed”—often enough back to the prosperity ministries themselves.

  “The purpose of it is to acknowledge that we know that God is our source,” Unity prosperity minister Edwene Gaines said in 2002. “It is very important that the tithe go to where we are fed spiritually, not to charity.”

  The formula, as oft-stated by Christian evangelists and New-Thoughters alike, was that certain Scriptural verses promised riches to those who gave their 10 percent. One example was Malachi 3:10: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.”

  The practice could be brutally utilitarian. Discussions abounded on whether a tithe was supposed to be based on net or gross income, or whether a person could tithe time rather than cash. (On the latter question, the prosperity minister Gaines once saucily told a workshop attendee: “If you tithe time what you’ll get is all the time you need. Now, if you
want more money in your life you got to tithe money.… Look for the loophole, honey, you’re not gonna find it.”)

  Not all New Thoughters were quite so settled on the matter. One of the movement’s most intellectually vibrant figures was an ex–Christian Scientist, Joel Goldsmith, who wrote, “One must not tithe for reward, for then it becomes a business proposition.” In a departure from prosperity theologians, Goldsmith insisted that tithing to spiritual institutions was an archaic practice; he encouraged tithing to philanthropies and charities. But even Goldsmith’s subtler interpretation rested on the premise that what was given in secret would be rewarded openly. No matter how tithing was framed, it proved difficult for congregants, of either New Thought or larger evangelical prosperity ministries, to avoid seeing tithing as a quid pro quo—a harnessing of spiritual laws where, if certain rules were followed, the house would always pay up.

  Although tithing had Biblical roots, it was, until the early twentieth century, a fairly rarified practice in modern life. How did an ancient Biblical financial custom return to prominence on the modern scene? Tithing seems to have been reintroduced into the popular spiritual culture through New Thought, particularly Charles Fillmore’s Unity ministry. Around 1905, discussions of tithing started to regularly appear in Fillmore’s Unity journal. “It seems to me that tithing is a good thing to teach in regard to giving,” wrote a reader in the issue of July 1905. “I have practiced it about three or four years, and have always something on hand to give. Also my income has increased.” The next month a subscriber wrote enthusiastically of wanting to give “a tithe of the benefit I have received from Unity.” It is significant that these exchanges occurred in 1905, which was one year before the Pentecostal movement is generally considered to have commenced with a series of revival meetings at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles.