Rhonda Byrne

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Rhonda Byrne spent years as a producer of Australian television, including work on the series Sensing Murder, before a personal crisis in 2004 led her to Wallace Wattles's 1910 New Thought book The Science of Getting Rich. Wattles's book argued that a specific way of thinking could draw material wealth toward a person who practiced it, an idea nearly a century old by the time Byrne encountered it, and one written for a much smaller readership than the one she would eventually bring to it.

Byrne took Wattles's central claim and developed it into a work of her own making, first as the film The Secret and then as the accompanying book, both released in 2006. The film gathered a series of speakers to present the idea directly to camera, translating a hundred year old self help text into a format built for a mass contemporary audience rather than for readers of early twentieth century tracts.

The path from a television producer reading an obscure century old book during a personal crisis to the creator of a global multimedia phenomenon ran through no religious training or prior authorship of her own, only the act of finding Wattles's argument and giving it new form. That origin, an existing idea rediscovered and repackaged rather than one invented from nothing, is the documented starting point of everything The Secret became.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Secret popularized what it called the law of attraction, the claim that focused thought and feeling shape the material outcomes a person experiences, presenting an idea drawn from Wallace Wattles's 1910 The Science of Getting Rich to a readership and viewership Wattles's own book never reached. Byrne's version reframed a specific early New Thought argument about wealth into a broader claim covering health, relationships and general life outcomes, a widening of the original book's scope that any comparison of the two texts shows plainly.

The scale of the reception matched the scale of the reframing. Byrne was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in 2007, the year after The Secret's release, a recognition that placed a work built on a century old self help text alongside global figures from politics, science and culture in the same published list.

That the law of attraction reached a Time 100 audience within a year of publication marks The Secret's reception as unusually fast even among bestselling self help works, a documented speed of uptake for an idea whose own source material had circulated in relative obscurity for nearly a hundred years before Byrne found it and built a mass audience for it.