In the 1940s, / 1950s, / radio / was how America was entertained. // Television was not / widely distributed at that point. // Families would gather around the drama, the series, / like they gather around Netflix now. // And so it was drama / on the radio. // One of the radio shows was a show / in Chicago / and it was Sky King. // Now, / if you keep in mind, this is the 40s. Airplanes were still a big deal. / It was a cutting-edge / technology to fly still. // And Sky King was this guy with a great baritone voice. Of course, he was a radio voice. // And he would fly in / whatever the drama was and / he was the guy that would save the day. // And the voice behind Sky King was a guy named / Earl Nightingale. // And Earl pretty quickly realized there was no money in radio. // And he bought an insurance business, / a general agency. // And every Monday morning, he would have a sales meeting and pump up / his sales guys and send them out to sell insurance. // And he was very, very successful at it / all the way up into the late 50s. // And one of the things Earl loved more than motivational speaking or / jacking up his sales guys and getting them ready to go out and sell insurance was / he loved to fish. // And / Earl decided he was going on a fishing trip in Canada. / His sales manager came to him and he said, / you understand that the two weeks that you're gone, sales are going to go down / because when you get these guys wired up on Monday morning, / they're ready to go attack the world. // And they go out there and make sales without you here and do the pump-up, / the halftime speech for the football coach. // They're not going to do their thing, man. // And sales are going to go down. / Well, Earl thought, well, that's not good, but I'm going fishing. So I got to figure this out. // So he goes back to his old radio days / and decides he's going to record / a talk. And he goes into the studio / and records a talk just for the two-week vacation. // And the way you did a recording in those days in a studio was not tape. It was on an acetone record, / real floppy, / real thin looking record. Any of you old enough to remember getting a record on the back of your / cereal box, that kind of a thing. // There's a little thin flimsy record. It's meant to play three or four times and five times and then not meant to work after that. It didn't have a long shelf life. It was a short recording. And he went in and he recorded a 33-minute talk. // They played it. // Sales went up while he was gone. // They played it the next week. // Sales went up again while he was gone. He came back. // By the time he had gotten back, / everyone who sold anything in the entire Chicago area was abuzz / wanting a copy of / this talk. // He ended up recording the talk / formally, / pressing records, / and selling / the records. // And as best we can determine / in research that we've done in the broadcast world, / this is one of the records that sold beginning in 1959. // This is the first / recorded / talk, / not music, / but the first talk of any kind to sell a million copies. // The talk was called, / "The Strangest Secret." // And in it, / he talks about / the strangest secret is simply / that you become / what you think about. // Now, this is a biblical truth. // In Proverbs, it says, as a man thinks in his heart, / so is he. // Ralph Waldo Emerson said, / a man becomes what he thinks about / all day long. // It turns out that what we focus on, what we concentrate on, / what we think about, / we tend to gravitate towards, move towards, / become that. And if it's good or bad, we're gonna / be pulled magnetically in the direction of the things / we think about. // You become / what you think about / is the strangest secret. / As a man thinketh in his heart, / so is he. //