An Unbelievable Secret

Psssst: A self-help bestseller is blowing sunshine up our skirts.

If your widget business is not a success, it's because your negative thoughts are crippling sales. You are killing deals and strangling opportunities with your dark thoughts.

That's what a book called The Secret, suggests, anyway. Edited by Rhonda Byrne, and excerpted here, The Secret has sold an estimated 1.75 million copies. That's more than the latest Harry Potter. A DVD version has sold upwards of 1.5 million copies.

"The main idea of The Secret is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it", writes Peter Birkenhed on Salon.com. This idea is called "The Law of Attraction" and Oprah Winfrey, one of the world's wealthiest and most influential women, endorses the notion.

Birkenhed skewers her for it: "By continuing to hawk 'The Secret', a mishmash of offensive self-help cliches, Oprah Winfrey is squandering her goodwill and influence," he writes.

The book has a blame-the-victim stink to it:

If you can no longer comfortably button your coat, don't blame the gobs of ice cream you shovel down your piehole nightly. Blame your traitorous mind:

Yup, there it goes again. Your infernal mind wants to keep your pockets empty and your pants too tight.

What, you don't buy it? Neither do I. If I did, I'd have to believe that anyone who is sick, out of work, poor… or fat is that way simply because he doesn't want badly enough to be healthy, happy, and prosperous. I'd have to believe that uninvited misery, misfortune, bad mojo -- call it what you like -- has no role in the outcome of any person's life.

Still think The Secret sounds plausible? Ask the soldiers housed at Walter Reed Army Hospital's Building 18 what they think of Byrne's book.

Or consider how one reader responded to Birkenhed's article about The Secret on Salon.com: "I have been daily visualizing George Clooney in my life for at least a decade. It hasn't worked yet."

What do you think of The Secret? Post a comment below.

- Cora Nucci is Editor of Small Biz Resource. You can email her here.