Ask, Believe, Receive

Rhonda Byrne, an Australian television producer, has said she began developing The Secret in 2004 after her daughter gave her a copy of Wallace Wattles's 1910 New Thought book The Science of Getting Rich during a period of personal difficulty. She produced a film of the same name, released in March 2006, built around interviews with self-help authors and speakers, followed later that year by a companion book published by Atria Books and Beyond Words.

Byrne's central claim is the law of attraction: that the universe responds to a person's dominant thoughts and feelings by delivering matching circumstances, so that wealth, health and relationships can be obtained by sustained wanting and believing rather than only by action. She summarizes the process as a three step formula, ask, believe, receive, and cites Matthew 21:22's promise that whatever is asked in prayer with faith will be given as a scriptural parallel to her claim. The book explicitly stands in the lineage of New Thought, the American movement that also produced Christian Science and the Unity Church, presenting the law of attraction as a hidden constant that history's successful and famous figures are said to have quietly understood and used, rather than as a specifically religious teaching.