THE STRANGEST SECRET IN THE WORLD

[Music] now it is our pleasure to present Earl Nightingale the man who devoted 20 years for the most penetrating research as to why people succeed or fail is a condensation of mr. nightingales bet ranges secret now mr. Nightingale the purpose of this film is to permit me to share a few ideas with you a few ideas I've picked up over the past 20 years or so about the most interesting creature in the world the human being and the game he plays the game called life we all want to play this game well I know you do and I do and our prospects and our customers do our youngsters do it's possible to play this game in such a fashion that we can go all through life going from one success to another knowing the joy that comes from accomplishment getting the things we want for ourselves and our families if we learn just a few rules a few rules about this game to my way of thinking the story of a man's life is the story of a search and odyssey it's the most exciting thing of course that he can do I believe that the happiest men in the world are those who know exactly what it is they seek and then devote their lives to making that come true I think all men are dreamers but i'm afraid that most men are content to pass off what they consider idle daydreaming and return to what we call the visible well marked path in life that they feel must be the best path because it carries the heaviest traffic the point I want to make today is that the road in life with the heaviest traffic is not necessarily the right road to follow and usually usually it's the wrong road to follow perhaps the best way to do this is to tell you a little bit about my own Road I spent more than 17 years looking for something that had been published in more than 50 million books something that was older than the pyramids it all started for me back in nineteen thirty three during the last great depression as a boy of twelve I couldn't justify what I saw around me with what I'd been told I had always been told that man was God's noblest creature and that he had dominion over the earth and all its creatures and yet the people in my neighborhood didn't have dominion over a steady job they were poor yet there was plenty of money around no one had buried at 1929 they had no education yet it was free and on every side of them they had very little food yet it was being raised in abundance all over the country they lived in inadequate and ugly dwellings yet there were beautiful homes for sale well it was apparent to me that these people did not have the answer to the problem they didn't have as a group the experts say they never have had why I used to ask them why are we caught in this this depression asphyx were in very human thing it seems that whenever a human being doesn't know the answer to a problem he blames other human beings they blamed the Wall Street of the Republicans and the Democrats or a minority group they didn't know the answer he repeated what they had heard and thought that would suffice but that isn't enough they looked everywhere for the answer except what it really was within themselves what I wanted to know was what separates the haves from the have-nots I don't mean that strictly in a financial sense i mean in in every possible way but one night on the beach I got an idea that has made my life exciting ever since I decided that I'd find out what the secret to achievement was my reason is a boy well that someone must have figured this thing I don't if he had either written in a book for other people to read so I decided I'd take out a library card and just read right on through until I found the answer but there was one thing that worried me a great deal if the answer to achievement were known why didn't everybody know about it like the internal combustion engine of the airplane well that bothered me and it's bothered a great many people ever since the answer has been given in our universities and from our pulpits but it was given in a very dramatic fashion not too long ago I think the answer was best given a few years ago when a a reporter was interviewing a very great man in London he was the Nobel prize-winning Burt Schweitzer the reporter asked the great man doctor what's wrong with men too a the doctor thought for a moment many replied men don't think and he was right that's the problem today that was the problem 400 years before Christ it may always be the problem why don't men think and we know the answer appears again and again in the great books why doesn't everyone know about it because about 95 or more percent of the people never read the great books we know the answer appears over and over again in the Bible why doesn't everyone know nobody reads the Bible everyone owns one because it's fashionable like a set of Shakespeare they don't read that either the answers in there too the answer appears on the public library on practically every shelf why doesn't everybody know about it because if you want to hide something from the American people put it in a public library they'll never find it as a group as a group as a majority well while it isn't absolutely necessary to have a good education in order to succeed it's a pity not to obtain one since it's free and we're surrounded by it on every side but we can still succeed without without one if we know a few of these rules we're talking about why is it that only five percent of the men in the United States succeed in life for example consider this statistic out of a hundred young men who all start even in our country at the age of 25 a hundred young men at age 25 40 years later when they would be 65 one is well to do for our independent for life five are working 36 have died 54 are stone broke dependent on others or an agency for their support why is this anybody could be wiped out disease or illness could take away their money but that isn't generally what happens they wind up broke as a group because they don't think too much about it and here's where we I think can be of real service what do they do that's wrong now before we get into that let's define success what is success success to my mind is nothing more than the progressive realization of a worthy ideal by that I mean if we're here and we want to get there and we know we want to get there we're successful as long as we know where we're going in life were successful by definition the people who do not know where they're going what they're working toward are then not successful a survey was made one time with thousands of working individuals and they asked them this question why do you get up in the morning and go to work 19 out of 20 didn't know had no idea why well the experts claim it's because they conform why do they conform they're taught to conform from the time we were a foot tall we've been conforming we're told what to do by our parents which is natural and good we get into school what's the most important thing to a young FL in school it's to be liked by the other kids right of course he wants to belong to the group do what they do laugh at the same things they laugh at it's only natural all right he gets out of school and he generally goes into service again he must conform in fact in the military service they carry conformity to an extent that would shatter the credulity of a low-grade gorilla but it's the only way you can run a military service we want them all shooting at the same people this again is perfectly natural but now we come to the tricky part this young man is 25 years old he's out of school out of service what does he do generally he goes back to his hometown that is if he's single if he's married of course he goes to his wife's hometown let's say he's still single one day he's standing on a corner in his hometown and the friend comes up and says Charlie yeah what are you doing he says nothing you know why don't you come down and go to work where I work it's a good place and they pay regularly he says okay well he does and spends the rest of his life there and that's the end of him ninety-five percent of all jobs obtained by random application which is just another way of saying that the average young man spends more time over the selection of a necktie than he does his life's career but what happens after he gets on the job generally again without thinking he conforms he begins doing his job the same way all the other fellows are doing their jobs at the same rate of excellence or whatever you want to call it he doesn't want to be too conscientious he might stand out the fellows might find some terrible way of getting even with him they might not let him on a bowling team or if they let him on the team they might not let him keep score but they'd find some way back at him what does he do then generally he marries wonderful he does the same thing I did he goes out and gets a little house that looks exactly like every other house on the block it makes him feel comfortable for two weeks he puts a brick in front of it so you'll stumble over at know which one is his and then after two weeks he can remove the brick and he'll just automatically turn into the right house he gets a little car looks like the other cars and now here's the American Dream a 40 hour a week job the highest paycheck in the history of the world he's got 50 years staring him in the face 50 years in the golden era that man has been dreaming of since the days of Pericles now what's he going to do with him while he works 40 hours a week this leaves him 72 hours a week when he's neither working nor sleeping what does he do with these 70 23 hours a week almost twice the time he spends on the job earning a living for his family generally he does the same thing with his 72 hours of free time a week that the other fellows are doing with heirs he does nothing at all with him on a typical day you'll get through work and go home and walk in the back door kiss his wife and say I'm tired no one knows why they believed that he says that because his grandfather said it back in the time when people really got tired and it's just sort of been handed down from father to son until he still says it he's a very average meal and then usually hurries into the living room where he reaches out and turns on his escape box the screen lights up and figures and horses and cowboys and things start moving around on there and so for the next four or five hours he becomes lost in a world that he must feel is superior to his own he wouldn't be so quick to jump into it would he for four or five hours he sits there and watches other people are an excellent incomes in the pursuit of their careers while he doesn't make a nickel and gets the only two things you can get from watching television red eyes and a hollow head oh there's some wonderful television shows i watch them myself I've got a television set I've got a car too but I don't go home at night and ride around the block for five or six hours in fact there's a geneticist who has said that in ages to come if things go on the way they're going now will no longer have two eyes like we have now we've only have one it'll be a pie on the forehead and it'll be shaped like a television tube it'll be up high because we will no longer have any use for a brain at all I've been watching my kids and I think their eyes are kind of moving a little bit together well enough of that before five hours he sits there watching television until his wife comes in it was a little more practical in the ears and she taps him on the shoulder and says Charlie it's time to go to bed he says what oh and then he reaches out and turns it off and he knows how to do that he just just turns it off and then he goes to bed in the next day he starts this all over again he does this for 40 years at the end of that time he's retired at sixty-five which always catches him by surprise even though he knew it was coming for 40 years and then he dies at 75 or 80 out of sheer boredom now there's nothing wrong with this if we do it deliberately if that's the way we've decided to spend our lives but i think the pity comes when it isn't the way we decided to spend it the pity comes when we're doing it by default when we're living that way just because our next door neighbor is and i think it's time to do a little thinking about it you see I believe that everyone owes it to himself to become great at something and since a man works 40 hours a week about 50 weeks a year for 40 years that's time enough to become great at anything what can we learn from all this two things I believe one if we're going to be individuals we've got to be individuals we have to have individual goals individual thinking and individual actions individual goals thinking and actions and number two we must never conform to the great mass of people we must love them we must help them wherever we can for our success will be determined by the amount of help we can give them but we should never permit ourselves to become submerged in this suffocating sea of indirection and purposelessness if we follow the crowd the odds are 95 25 we're going to miss the boat too because those are the statistics about 95 25 so before we follow the crowd let's take a look at it if we flip back through the pages of history what do we find every great thinker and leader from Socrates to the Wright brothers has been ridiculed after at pilloried burned at the stake or crucified the crowd has made a consistently grizzly game of tormenting its saviors so it's better I believe to stand out a little bit as an individual to belong to society certainly but to think for ourselves and act for ourselves if we want to emulate someone and this is a wonderful idea just pick someone worthy of emulation someone you admire and respect someone perhaps who's lived before you someone you know succeeded do what he did but don't follow the guy down the block because the odds are 95 25 he doesn't know where he's going never thought much about this wouldn't it be terrible if we were following people who were following us it could happen you know take this fact for example this to my mind is one of the most overlooked facts in America we should realize that every single job no matter what it may be every single job holes somewhere within it the road to greatness the key to everything we could possibly want if we lonely go about it a certain way if we will do what dr. Schweitzer said we're not doing if we think if we'll think about it and find an application for it that's all we have to do to look within the job we now have for the greatness that lies there and it's there if we look for it we have a choice of doing one of two things we can either compete or create if we choose to compete then let's not squawk about the rewards we get if we choose to put ourselves on the same level with everyone else in our line of business then we can pretty well figure that we're going to have minimal returns because that's just about the way it works out if we create there is no limit to what we can accomplish there is no ceiling we can do anything we want to do within the framework of our present job and go as far as we want to go one time a farmer took a little baby pumpkin and he poked at the end of a one gallon glass jug and of course it grew in there and flourished and finally it completely filled the jug and no more and when it was ripe he broke the glass and he had a pumpkin look just like a 1 gallon glass jug the moral of the story of course is that we do a similar thing with our own lives we poke ourselves into jugs beyond which we cannot grow but these limits we impose upon ourselves no one else does it another mistake that i believe the average worker makes is that he thinks he's working for the company again he's wrong each of us actually is only working for himself a great southern educator tells the story of a wealthy man who was going to go to Europe for several months and he called a builder he knew over to him and he said here's some money and I bought this lot over here I want you to build me a a beautiful home on that property and then he left well as soon as he was gone the Builder said to himself well with him out of the way I can probably cut a few corners and make myself a pile of loot on this job now this has been done you know so he did that and he built a rather shoddy house instead of a good house he should have built and when the wealthy man came back while the Builder had in the keys i said well as your house how do you like it and the wealthy man said well that's a that's a beautiful home but it's yours i wanted you to build it for yourself and your wife and children we're in the same boat every hour of the day each of us is building his own house and it will be strong or weak beautiful or ugly depending only on the methods of construction we use and the materials we put into it as individuals now each one of us is only working for himself in the last and final analysis certainly now we come to what i call the strangest secret the reason it's so important that each one of us decide what it is we want to do with our lives what our goal in life happens to be you see after the 17 years of research I made which to me was an amazing discovery I wondered why is it that people who know where they're going always get there like a ship at sea in fact that's a good analogy you might get a picture in your mind of a ship in port and let's say that its next port of call is Sydney Australia how much of your money would you bet that it would not get to Sydney well of course you wouldn't bet anything that it won't to Sydney in the insurance companies will better that will why well ships are pretty smart they know that you can only sail to one part at a time never too if you ask the captain up on the bridge of that ship what his next port of call is he'll immediately say Sydney Australia well men should be the same way you should be able to ask anybody what his next part of a call is and he should be able to tell you that also for ninety-nine percent of that journey the captain cannot see the port he's trying to reach but he knows it's there and he knows you'll get there if you'll just keep doing certain things a certain way every day until he reaches his port of call once it's been reached he can then rest and relax and then set out to a new port and that's the way our lives I think should be why is it then that people who know where they're going like this ship to us to always get there it's what I like to think of as the strangest secret all of the great men who have lived for the last 3,000 years since the beginning of Western civilization have been great because they've disagreed with one another on just about everything that's why they were great they were right too but there's one point on which they were incomplete almost unanimous agreement I believe it's the simplest and yet one of the most profound statements ever written and it's simply this we become what we think about it really so simple when you get to thinking about it yet what did dr. Schweitzer say in London he said we don't think well if we don't think how can we get anywhere we can't and unfortunately a large percentage of the people don't this is why every person must decide why he's getting out of bed in the morning and going to work what it is he's working toward this removes all the the the doubt the uncertainty of living all the little worries and problems and fears seem to disappear and a man can get all of his energies together and strike out for that what she wants with the certain knowledge that he will attain it how does this work this is an interesting thing well I think the best analogy I've run across is that it works like everything else in nature everything in nature begins with a seed and nucleus and it's the same with them with with the mind of man with a thought that he places in it now you take the farmer's land out here it doesn't care what you planned it doesn't care at all it's neutral it's only governed by one law whatever it is you plant whatever the seed is that you put in that land the land must return the little invisible picture that's in the heart of that seed must be brought up and into physical reality well the mind of man works the same way except that it's incalculably more powerful more fertile more incredible than this farmer's land and the seed that we plant in our mind is our dream our goal the thing we want more than anything else in the world to achieve once that's been established once we fertilize it with our enthusiasm and our faith it must it will always grow into reality it has to there's no other way it can do anything every person at this particular moment is really nothing more than the sum total of his thoughts to this point and five years from now he'll be the sum total of his thoughts up until that point so thinking then becomes important setting a goal becomes vital and it can always be done in the job we now have to me there's nothing more pitiful than a man who go through life jumping from one thing to another forever looking for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow and never staying with one thing long enough to find it let me give you a plan that I guarantee will bring you just about anything you want in the next five years if you can buy it with money it's an interesting little plan and it shows the power of the human mind start getting up an hour before the rest of the family does in the morning make yourself a nice fresh pot of coffee and sit down at the kitchen table or in your den with a clean sheet of paper and think of 20 ideas for improving what you now do for a living not some strange inventions or something but 20 ideas on what you now do for a living ninety-seven percent of these ideas will be worthless we know that but some of them will be good you will be getting a hundred ideas a week if you don't think on weekends now what do you think the chances are you're getting the idea you've been looking for all the days of your life the law of averages is on yours and one idea can make you rich you only need one don't need one or a while or one gold mine and it's available in what you're now doing this applies to any 120 ideas a day becoming great as a say a Salesman is no different really than becoming great at anything else if you walked into a doctor or a lawyer's office and he didn't have a big library full of books as reference material you'd probably be a little suspicious of him and rightly so but the same thing applies to selling or any other field there's no such thing as a good job or a bad winner a good profession in a bad one our job is a job or a profession only in the way we handle it and a Salesman needs just as many books as a doctor he's he's got to know about the people that he wants to sell he has to know about his product about his company and about the economy he's gotta know a lot of things and the more he knows the more he becomes a pro the more he becomes a professional who's completely above completely removed from economic cycles ups and downs in our economy this is the man who can write his own ticket regardless of economic conditions in the country what he suppose would happen if a young man wanted his job for five years the same way a dedicated medical student has to go at the study of medicine he'd be a national expert in five years a national expert and this would accomplish two things one he would have found a consuming interest because when we get interested in our job it sort of takes over and secondly he'd be economically sound for the rest of his life he wouldn't have any problems about making money we hear a lot about security these days this security business and I think most people have got it backwards you've heard people say well it isn't much of a job but at least it represents security there's no such thing as a job that represents security if you say security in the same sentence with the word job it's a non sequitur it has no meaning whatsoever if a man thinks his security rest on his job and then loses his job he's lost everything he's completely demoralized he's like those people I saw back in nineteen thirty three he's lost everything he's wiped out well if security isn't a job what is it there's only one place you can find security if it isn't there it isn't anywhere it's inside of a man inside never outside if a man has security inside where it belongs you know it his wife and children can feel it when he sits down to breakfast with him in the morning and they're warmed by it you can see it walking down the street you can feel it when he enters a room that's security and you can take away that man's job or is money or anything else take away everything but a wife who's willing to start over in all of Mar drop him in any town in America and turn him loose and you go back in the year and find him doing just as well as he was when you found him you can't keep a good man down like cream on milk you can shake it all day but the minute you set it down for a minute it's going to bounce to the top again that's security and it comes from one place doing what we do for a living surpassingly well each one of us has a private continent his own divine mind we know it contains riches beyond belief but how do you prospect a continent you dig systematically and with purpose and that's the way you prospect the mind by thinking systematically and with purpose and setting the goal you want to reach I was flying on an airplane someplace not too long ago I was reading a great play by the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Archibald MacLeish and I he ran across something in that play that made me sit bolt upright and think for about the next 15 minutes very seriously he'd written the only thing about a man that is a man is his mind everything else you can find in a pig or a horse something to think about isn't it everything that means anything to us is connected to us through our mind our love of our families our patriotism our religion everything and it's worth developing he also said this mrs. sort of interesting a man's face is his own fault after 40 and what determines what your face looks like is what you spend your evenings thinking about in summing up then set your goal think and act and stay with it because today you have virtually no competition I like what PG hammerton wrote he said a strong life is like a ship of war which has its own place in the fleet and can share in its strength and discipline but which can also go forth alone to the solitude of the infinite sea we ought to belong to society and have our place in it and yet be capable of a complete and individual existence outside of it we're living in the right country we're living in the right time in history now it's up to us what we do it and remember the strangest secret you will become what you think about I want to thank you for letting me share this half-hour with you god bless you [Music] mr. nightingales unabridged talk on the strangest secret is available in LP record form for home study for further information right Earl Nightingale at 333 north michigan avenue chicago one illinois or see your program director