What a strange secret!
Earl had been tossing and turning in his bed for a couple of hours now. He was at his wits’ end. He was going away on a fishing vacation in a couple of days. He was planning to be away for two weeks, but was vexed with a problem. He had to find a solution before we went away to relax and enjoy.
It was like this. Earl had bought a small life insurance agency a few years earlier. He had a team of salesmen. He would meet them every Saturday morning and give them little pep talks. Life insurance was a product which while being immensely useful for people, was difficult to sell. The saying went that “Life insurance is not purchased. It has to be sold.” Earl’s pep talks helped his sales team to find creative ways to make their customers realize why they should buy life insurance. Now that Earl was going away for a couple of weeks, his agency manager was worried. He was concerned that without his weekly pep talks, sales would drop. Earl had the idea to record something which could be played in his absence. The trouble was that, on second thoughts, he was not sure what would be powerful enough to convey using only words, without his personal presence to transmit passion or emotion or to answer any questions.
“Ah! That’s it.” Earl had an epiphany. Kind of like what Archimedes have had while taking bath. They say that Archimedes had immediately hopped out of the bath and ran into streets to tell the king shouting, “Eureka!” On another occasion, Archimedes had reportedly said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world.” Earl felt that his message too had the power to move the world. Not literally, but the power to move hearts and minds of people. However, he did not run out into the streets. He did get up, went to his typewriter and wrote a short message. It was just six words.
We become what we think about.
Earl Nightingale was born in Los Angeles, California in 1921. When Nightingale was seventeen years old, he joined the United States Marine Corps. He was an instructor at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and was on the USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor and was one of fifteen surviving Marines aboard that day.
After the war, Nightingale began his radio career. He had a fruitful career in the “hay day” of radio. Later, Earl bought a small life insurance agency which led to his predicament and his “Eureka” moment.
Nightingale had actually learnt of the gem in just six words during the autumn of 1949 while reading “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. Later, he observed this truth being stated over and over again, from the New Testament, in the sayings of Buddha, in the writings of Lao Tse, to the works of Emerson. He called it the The Strangest Secret. He called it that because of the irony of it all. It was no “secret” and therefore was “strange” that most people did not know all about it!
As Nightingale had stated earlier, I have found this “strange secret” in many places. I found one of the most poetic descriptions in a scripture from the pre-Buddhist era, estimated to have been composed around 900 BCE to 600 BCE. It is in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The title Brihadaranyaka Upanishad literally means “great wilderness or forest Upaniṣhad”. The Sanskrit term Upaniṣhad translates to “sitting down near”, referring to the student sitting down near the teacher while receiving spiritual knowledge. The lines are —
You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
