The Strangest Secret

February 13, 2023
This is the audio that inspired me to do my first MMPT 8 years ago. The Strangest Secret was a 1956 spoken word record by Earl Nightingale, which sold over one million copies and received the first Gold Record for the spoken word, helping to launch the fields of business motivation and audio publishing. In 1950, Earl Nightingale was inspired by the words "we become what we think about" in Napoleon Hill's book Think and Grow Rich around the same time he bought an insurance agency. He provided weekly motivational speeches to the agency's sales staff. In 1956, he recorded a motivational speech to be played while he was on vacation. Nightingale's employees spread word of the speech, and demand for the recording grew so large that he and friend Lloyd Conant formed the Nightingale-Conant Corporation to manage sales.