Earl Nightingale’s The Strangest Secret: 12 ideas on success

Recently one of our readers sent us a post from InspirationPro about Earl Nightingale, one of the oldest and most prominent motivational speakers of all time.

After a long career in radio and television, The Strangest Secret, recorded in 1956, became one of his greatest successes and one of the greatest motivational works of all time, and many authors later took its content and adapted it for their own talks. Personally, I’ve found a lot of similarity between Earl Nightingale’s message and that of Napoleon Hill.

Here are some of the ideas taken from the recording, which is without doubt a source of motivation and excellent advice, explaining in very simple terms what the secret of success is for anyone.

(See also: 10 ways the rich think differently from everyone else)

1. Stop thinking about all the reasons why you can’t succeed, and start thinking about all the reasons why you can.

2. If a person has a set goal, knows where they’re going and gets to work on it, that person will succeed. If they aren’t doing that, they will fail.

3. In our society, the opposite of courage isn’t cowardice; it’s conformity.

4. A successful person is someone who is doing work they deliberately chose, because it’s what they wanted to do. The problem is that only 1 in 20 people are in that position.

5. The key to success is the same as the key to failure: we become what we think.

6. People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. Successful people are the ones who look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, they create them themselves.

7. Each of us is the sum total of our own thoughts.

8. It’s easier for human beings to think negatively than positively. That’s why only 5% of people succeed.

9. The moment you set yourself a goal and decide to work towards it, you immediately become a successful person, because you join that rare group of people who know where they’re going. Out of every 100 people, you belong to that select 5%.

10. You will reap what you sow. If you sow negative thoughts, your life will be full of negative things. If you sow positive thoughts, your life will be cheerful, positive and successful.

11. The best way to make money is to provide people with services and products that are necessary and useful.

12. No one can make themselves rich unless they enrich other people.

Featured image: Roadside Guitars, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.