I collect records. Not seriously. Somewhere over a hundred, with no system behind them. Beatles, Kenny Loggins, Bob Seger, a shelf of musicals, some Gershwin. Every one of them is either something I’d heard and liked or something I picked up because it looked cool.
That second category is how I ended up with a 1958 pressing of Earl Nightingale’s The Strangest Secret from an estate sale. I’d owned the audio for years. I had never seen the vinyl.
The back cover reads like this:
Before listening to this recording, I want you to realize that your job, regardless of what it might be, holds within it the key to success and abundance. … You and you alone determine the degree of your success. … You are bound to achieve a better way of life. Starting now.
If I saw that on a product today, every alarm I own would go off. That is grift copy, word for word. The key. You alone. Starting now. I’d have flagged it in two seconds.
I didn’t, for two reasons.
The first is that I’d already heard what’s in the grooves. The message is old, and Nightingale says so. We become what we think about. What we let into our minds shapes who we are, the work we do, and whether we’re any good at it. He doesn’t claim to have discovered that. He spends a good part of the record telling you who said it before him.
The second reason is in the copy itself, and I missed it the first few times I read it. Your job, regardless of what it might be, holds the key. The grifter’s version never says that. The grifter’s version says your job is the problem and the key is in the next thing you buy from him. Nightingale sold you a record and sent you back to work on Monday.
I’ve tried to live by that record for a long time. I’ve written here about twenty years of ideas on the back burner, and that’s true. What I have to hold in the same hand is that I wasn’t idle. I built a career in a field I enjoy and did the schooling that went with it. The creative work waited. The rest of it didn’t.
I learned early, from Dan Miller and Dave Ramsey and a shelf of others, that if I didn’t educate myself, I had nobody else to blame. And I learned that when there was no mentor in the room, there was usually one on the shelf, sometimes dead for decades and still useful.
The record sits in my office now, where I can see it from my desk, back cover out. It’s there to remind me what the grooves say, and how much the real thing sounds like the counterfeit.
