One Simple Idea (30 page)

At the age of seventeen, Earl was no closer to solving his riddle.
Yearning for independence and needing three meals a day, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps on the eve of World War II. In 1941, he became one of twelve survivors out of a company of a hundred Marines aboard the U.S.S.
Arizona
during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Nightingale made it through the war, emerging not only with his physical well-being but also with the full maturation of a personal gift. He possessed a remarkable speaking voice—rich, deep, sonorous. His intonation was flawless. When stationed after the war as an instructor at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Nightingale moonlighted as an announcer with a local radio station. From there he found radio jobs in Phoenix and then at a CBS affiliate in Chicago.

At CBS in 1950, the twenty-nine-year-old became the voice of the aviator-cowboy adventurer Sky King on a radio serial of the same name. It was the type of rock-’em-sock-’em role in which Reagan had once excelled.

But a more fateful development happened in Nightingale’s life around that time. He finally discovered his secret to success.

After reading hundreds of works of psychology, religion, mysticism, and ethics, the ex-Marine and radio announcer underwent a revelation. It came while he was reading Napoleon Hill’s
Think and Grow Rich
. Nightingale realized that in the writings of every era, from the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tzu to the Stoic meditations of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius to the Transcendentalist essays of Emerson, the same truth appeared, over and over. He had been reading it for years and simply not seeing it. It came down to six words:
We become what we think about
.

That was it.
We become what we think about
. It was the “answer” for which he had been searching.

Nightingale left the CBS station, though he remained the voice of Sky King for several years. He moved to a new radio gig, which allowed him to write his own spots. At Chicago’s WGN, Nightingale not only wrote and hosted his own hour-and-a-half talk show—where he was able to expound on bits of philosophy, stories, and slice-of-life anecdotes—but he also worked out a deal to profit from products he sold on the air.

He promoted
Think and Grow Rich
through a local bookstore and received a cut of every copy sold. He followed suit with other products, literally from soup to soap. He soon began pitching retirement-insurance policies sold by the Franklin Life Insurance Company. This enterprise was less successful. Nightingale’s pitches moved few policies. Then he seized upon a different idea: Rather than selling policies, he would recruit salesmen for the company.

“If you, my listener, are a sales person or a wife of a sales person and your husband is making less than twenty thousand a year, I came across an idea that is fantastic,” Nightingale intoned. He asked people to mail in cards with their addresses, and he invited respondents to recruitment meetings for Franklin Life. Nightingale brought top salesmen into Franklin’s fold that way. Some of them remained with the firm for decades, a Franklin executive recalled. Nightingale was a pitch artist—but he sold a fair deal.

The radio announcer discovered that he was better at recruiting and revving up salesmen than at selling goods or policies himself. From that time forward, Nightingale’s number-one product became motivating other people. In the mid-1950s, Nightingale purchased his own franchise office of Franklin Life, an idea probably put to him by a new friend, W. Clement Stone, a highly successful Chicago insurance man who had collaborated on books with Napoleon Hill.

Nightingale got into a routine of delivering inspiring talks to his salesmen. One day in 1956, before taking a long vacation from the office, Nightingale privately recorded a motivational message for the men to hear in his absence. His thirty-minute message told the story of his discovery of the six-word formula:
We become what we think about
. He called the presentation “The Strangest Secret.” In clear, simple terms Nightingale described how this formula was the fulcrum on which all practical philosophies rested. It was a “secret,” he explained, only insofar as we overlook it, just as we undervalue or ignore those things we are given freely: love, health, sensations, and, above all, the uses of our minds.

“The human mind
isn’t used
,” he said, “merely because we take it for granted.”

The vinyl phonograph record electrified everyone who heard it. It got passed around, shared, and borrowed. Nightingale returned home surprised by the demand for it. No commercial advice record had ever before been produced. But the pitchman saw the possibilities. Calling on friends in the record business, Nightingale made a professional version of “The Strangest Secret,” and Columbia Records agreed to distribute the album.
The Strangest Secret
became the first spoken-word album to receive a Gold Record, for sales in excess of one million copies.

With orders booming, Nightingale partnered in 1959 with another Chicagoan, a direct-mail advertiser named Lloyd Conant. Together they formed Nightingale-Conant, which became the nation’s first recording company focused on motivational fare. The company offered Nightingale’s recordings, first on vinyl and later on cassettes. In decades ahead its catalogue expanded to include self-help figures such as Anthony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki, and Deepak Chopra.

Nightingale had minted an industry. And in his search for the truth about human nature, he had stumbled upon a new kind of product:
selling people on the promise within themselves
. He made himself the field’s first marketer and promoter. Like the radioman that he was, Nightingale performed and produced the early merchandise, first in the form of
The Strangest Secret
, and later in his widely syndicated radio program,
Our Changing World
, which he wrote and narrated beginning in 1959.

Nightingale was evangelizer, philosopher, and pitchman rolled into one. In partnership with mail-order expert Conant, he also became manufacturer, fulfillment manager, and catalogue retailer. Nightingale’s business model was simple: Do it all.

Nightingale’s commercial outlook was more than the result of Depression-era determination and personal guile. Critics of Nightingale and other motivational pitchmen often made the mistake of contrasting selling with believing, as though one must naturally preclude the other. Nightingale was, above all, a believer. To listeners eager for his message,
Nightingale’s voice and viewpoint were sincere, deeply affecting, and practical. He encouraged the honing of individual ability. He read voraciously and urged his listeners to do the same. He inveighed against the conformity and thoughtlessness that characterized many human lives.

By the time Nightingale received his Gold Record in 1971, he left no question about the potential of the motivational field. When he died of heart failure in 1989, soon after his sixty-eighth birthday, Nightingale had lived just long enough to see the motivational genre grow into a profitable business of publishers, organizations, and individuals. Within a decade of Nightingale’s passing, the medium of records and cassette tapes that he knew gave way to CDs, DVDs, and, finally, digital downloads. Today whenever a psychology, self-help, or marketing lecture is clicked on, downloaded, or viewed through websites such as TED or BigThink, an echo is being heard from the day in 1956 when Earl Nightingale first recorded his “Strangest Secret.”

In the years following Nightingale, the positive-thinking philosophy completed its transformation into a methodology of winning. It abounded in both business and religious circles. Money and ethical issues were sometimes at stake. Some of the leading inspirational evangelists, and several longtime New Thought figures, prescribed tithing (the ancient practice of giving away 10 percent of one’s income) as a means to wealth attraction.

As the practice frequently unfolded, tithes were supposed to be directed not to charities but to the institutions where a congregant was “spiritually fed”—often enough back to the prosperity ministries themselves.

“The purpose of it is to acknowledge that we know that God is our source,” Unity prosperity minister Edwene Gaines said in 2002. “It is very important that the tithe go to where we are fed spiritually, not to charity.”

The formula, as oft-stated by Christian evangelists and New-Thoughters alike, was that certain Scriptural verses promised riches to those who gave their 10 percent. One example was Malachi 3:10: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.”

The practice could be brutally utilitarian. Discussions abounded on whether a tithe was supposed to be based on net or gross income, or whether a person could tithe time rather than cash. (On the latter question, the prosperity minister Gaines once saucily told a workshop attendee: “If you tithe time what you’ll get is all the time you need. Now, if you want more money in your life you got to tithe money.… Look for the loophole, honey, you’re not gonna find it.”)

Not all New Thoughters were quite so settled on the matter. One of the movement’s most intellectually vibrant figures was an ex–Christian Scientist, Joel Goldsmith, who wrote, “One must not tithe for reward, for then it becomes a business proposition.” In a departure from prosperity theologians, Goldsmith insisted that tithing to spiritual institutions was an archaic practice; he encouraged tithing to philanthropies and charities. But even Goldsmith’s subtler interpretation rested on the premise that what was given in secret would be rewarded openly. No matter how tithing was framed, it proved difficult for congregants, of either New Thought or larger evangelical prosperity ministries, to avoid seeing tithing as a quid pro quo—a harnessing of spiritual laws where, if certain rules were followed, the house would always pay up.

Although tithing had Biblical roots, it was, until the early twentieth century, a fairly rarified practice in modern life. How did an ancient Biblical financial custom return to prominence on the modern scene? Tithing seems to have been reintroduced into the popular spiritual culture through New Thought, particularly Charles Fillmore’s Unity ministry. Around 1905, discussions of tithing started to regularly appear in Fillmore’s
Unity
journal. “It seems to me that tithing is a good thing to
teach in regard to giving,” wrote a reader in the issue of July 1905. “I have practiced it about three or four years, and have always something on hand to give. Also my income has increased.” The next month a subscriber wrote enthusiastically of wanting to give “a tithe of the benefit I have received from Unity.” It is significant that these exchanges occurred in 1905, which was one year before the Pentecostal movement is generally considered to have commenced with a series of revival meetings at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles.

Early Pentecostal congregations emphasized the manifestation of miracles, spontaneous healings, and speaking in tongues. This modern embrace of “signs and wonders” cracked open the door for evangelical prosperity ministries of the 1970s, which variously endorsed tithing, prayer, and affirmation as means to wealth attraction. This approach proved massively popular. It is today estimated that of America’s twelve largest churches, three are prosperity oriented: Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston; T.D. Jakes’s Potter’s House in Dallas; and Tommy Barnett’s Phoenix First in Arizona. Some of the nation’s most popular media ministers are also, in some measure, prosperity oriented, such as Kenneth Copeland, Eddie Long, Benny Hinn, Paul and Janice Crouch, and Joyce Meyer.

To be sure, many contemporary evangelical worshippers are critical of the prosperity gospel. And theological disputes persist among prosperity gospelers themselves. Evangelical critics of the prosperity gospel generally (and rightly) trace its roots to New Thought, which for them is cause for deep concern. New Thought, when it is heard-of at all in the evangelical culture, is considered a “quasi-Christian heresy,” as Christian scholars David W. Jones and Russell S. Woodbridge put it in a critical history of the prosperity gospel. “Although the New Thought movement is unknown by name to most contemporary Christians,” Jones and Woodbridge wrote, “the prosperity gospel consists largely of the ideas of the New Thought movement repackaged with new faces, new technology, new venues, and a slightly altered message.”

Their analysis was astute. While today’s prosperity megachurches
are far bigger and better known than even the largest Unity or New Thought congregations, there is no question that New Thought provided the template for the prosperity gospel, often down to specific phraseology. Compare, for example, the words of Unity minister Edwene Gaines, from a talk she delivered in the 1980s before several hundred attendees at a Tucson Unity church, to sentiments heard in 2006 from Georgia-based prosperity minister Creflo Dollar, a popular prosperity gospeler whose television audiences number in the millions:

A large and popular evangelical movement called Word of Faith attracts particular controversy today among critics of the prosperity gospel. Rising to popularity in the late 1960s through the ministry of Kenneth E. Hagin, Word of Faith theology espouses “positive confession.” Positive confession entails repeating, in affirmation style, certain Biblical passages for health, wealth, or the fulfillment of personal needs. Word of Faith ministers include some of the past century’s best-known (and often most controversial) evangelists, including Jimmy Swaggart, Kenneth Copeland, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.