"I heard of it when Oprah had it on television and it really kind of fascinated me and I had to have it," Gabrielle Wilkins said.Īt the heart of "The Secret" is something called the Law of Attraction, which the book claims simply gives you whatever you are thinking about. Others thought that "The Secret" has something special. "I thought to myself when I was reading it, 'Oh, it's 'The Power of Positive Thinking,' you know, just re-packaged,'" Michelle said. Pawling residents gathered at Sunday Morning's request in the local book store to talk about "The Secret." I kept going through trying to find, you know, where is the 'secret'?" And some of them were very familiar to us as Peale children. "Some of these ideas are certainly not new," Everett said. Neither Byrne nor any of her collaborators on "The Secret" would sit down for an interview. And it was developed not by a psychologist, but by a former television producer, Rhoda Byrne. "These things would not be published if they weren't selling," Norcross said.īut nothing has ever sold as well as the "The Secret." The book was turned into a blockbuster by television personality Oprah Winfrey who featured it on her show not once, but twice. More importantly, he said, it means they sell. Norcross said the fact that so many self-help books exist means that they don't really work, and if they do, usually work for just a short time. We don't have to go to professional treatment." "Some people call it the Home Depot effect," Norcross said. This emptiness, says Norcross, explains the continuing boom in self-help programs, with 3,000 new books coming out every year. So when you have impossible expectations, they can't be met, and down goes the esteem." A night at home in front of a crackling fire no longer suffices. "The more we have, the more we want, the more expectations. "Some people have characterized it as the poverty of affluence," University of Scranton psychology professor John Norcross said. The book, published in 1952, still resonates today, even though the economy is no longer depressed but Americans are. "The irony is that of course she was acting more positively in this situation than he was," Everett said. "I don't know whether that's true or not, but that's the story." "But the story goes he was discouraged by it and threw it in the wastebasket and that she retrieved it from the wastebasket and sent it to the publisher," his other daughter Liz Allen said. Peale and his wife Ruth were also preaching his philosophy on a weekly inspirational television program when he decided to put it into a book. "So he began to talk in an uplifting way that they needed to believe in themselves - that God had put into them as human beings, wonderful potential and the possibility to be all that they could be," Everett said. Peale, a minister in New York City in the 1930s, wanted to inspire parishioners during the dark days of the Depression when he came up with his simple but effective philosophy: Think your life will improve and it will. "When Dad first wrote 'The Power of Positive Thinking' and it made an instant hit and became very popular," his daughter Maggie Peale Everett said, "that was the first time I think that this whole idea of positive thinking and how your thoughts can influence your actions came into the mainstream of thinking." People who go to bookstores today in record numbers to buy self-help books like "The Secret" may not realize that much of what seems so fresh and even revolutionary was - in fact - first popularized by Peale in "The Power of Positive Thinking" more than half a century ago. "I mean, I was brought up here and you know, from the time I was little: 'Well, do you know who Norman Vincent Peale was?' And you learned the history and what was important to those people, and we may not be able to say 'This is exactly why we're more positive,' but I think it really filters down."Īnd it filters down far beyond the town's borders. "We're a product of the people who lived here," Tanner said. She said Pawling is something of a modern Mayberry and Peale's influence is still evident everywhere. Which is why Christine Pikel opened a scrapbook shop here - a rather risky business many other places. There are certain names that you recognize here and that filters through the fabric."
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