Critical Essay on The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

Several years ago this book and a subsequent film with the same name attracted a lot of attention of society, mostly due to effective advertising campaign. Positioned as a self-help book that would change the life of every person who will read it and believe in what it says, it sold more than 4 million copies, with the DVDs with film selling about 2 million copies.

However, the reason of such a tremendous success is not a unique nature of knowledge presented in the book, but, in my opinion, its over-simplistic character and mass advertising. The industry of self-help and self-development books has been in existence for more than a century and is represented by hundreds of authors and thousands of titles; and The Secret doesn’t bring anything even remotely new into this trend. Everything it has is the repetition of several ideas, mostly the same that are promoted by the authors of this kind of texts, in over-primitive manner flavored with some underlying mysticism to attract the mass reader.

It, for example, says that positive thinking (although it is called somewhat differently) is the key to success – the thing that is present in about 99% of books belonging to this trend. Or that in order to achieve something, you should be very particular in your wish to do so. And, while some other authors create entire elaborate systems of thought, The Secret simply repeats these two ideas over and over again, interspersing them with…