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BREAKING NEWS
March 1, 2007
The Secret Is Out... ...of Stock All Over
The Secret keeps on spreading. Two million additional copies have been ordered for Rhonda Byrne's self-help phenomenon. Released last fall by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, The Secret now has 3.75 million copies in print and for days has displaced the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, from the top of Amazon.com, where The Secret currently is out of stock.

"It is a testament to the powerful attraction of The Secret that it has been selling out faster than we can supply it to our customers," Judith Curr, Atria's executive vice president and publisher, said Thursday in a statement.

The audio book, a four-CD set, is also selling fast, with 400,000 copies in print, according to Atria, which describes The Secret as containing "wisdom from modern-day teachers — men and women — who have used it to achieve health, wealth and happiness."

Created by Australian producer Byrne, The Secret began as a DVD film, released last March and, thanks to aggressive Internet marketing, became enough of a hit to be spun off into a book, which Byrne finished in less than a month.
Associated Press


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At the End of a Long Bull: DON'T Think and Grow Rich
Category: NEWS
By: Pete Kendall, March 3, 2007
It's simply not possible for people to get any more positive than they are when the act of spending creates "a positive, peaceful feeling and trust" that the spending itself creates a "vacuum for more money to come into" one's life. As any cycle theorist will you, at such times, trends can only roll back in the opposite direction.
Sociotimes, July 18, 2006

the secret

Turns out I was wrong when I said the self-help movement “couldn’t get any more positive” in the entry of  July 18. Just as the Dow Jones Indusrial Average managed to scale its January 2000 peak, the oxymoronic field of self-help just burst to a new peak experience with The Secret. According to a New York Times, the book is experiencing “staggering success,” especially lately. In just the last few weeks, as the Dow reached its all-time high, 750,000 DVD versions of the book have been sold at $34.95 each without the benefit of any advertising or theatrical release. The book has also become No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list of hardcover advice books. “Secret support groups have formed around the country,” says the Times. “In Southern California, real estate brokers show the 92-minute movie to motivate sales representatives. The Secret is the biggest thing to hit the New Age movement since the Harmonic Convergence.”  The link to the Harmonic Convergence may turn out to be significant as the 1980s greatest New Age spectacle took place in August 1987, the same month of a peak that was followed by the crash of October 19, 1987. 

The self-help genre appears to be an entrenched part of the bull market experience. On a Grand Supercyle scale, for instance, the bull market dates back to at least the late 1700s. The most powerful third wave started in either 1843 or 1857. The first personal-development “self-help” book —Self-Help" — came out in 1859. Third waves are typically the most powerful in the Elliott Wave sequence. The third or middle wave of the last Supercycle degree advance from the late 1700s hit in 1952, which is precisely when Norman Vincent Peale’s perennial bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking debuted. Since then, self-help books have carved out whole sections of book stores. But the current rush to The Secret seems to parallel a very important prior extreme in self-help,1936-1937 when How To Win Friends and Influence People (1936) by Dale Carnegie and Think and Grow Rich (1937) by Napoleon Hill appeared and Cycle wave I from 1932 was ending. In one way or another, most of the self-help books that have come since echo these two seminal works.  Think and Grow Rich is particularly important. With sales of 30 million it’s one of the best selling books of all time. As a matter of fact, it’s selling well right now. It’s No. 8 on the Business Week soft cover bestseller list, and it’s been on the list for the last 20 months. Interestingly, Hill employed a subtler form of the hidden truth idea that now has The Secret flying off shelves.  Think and Grow Rich starts by alluding to the "Carnegie Secret", which it places at the root of all success. Hill says it’s buried in every chapter, but he never reveals exactly what it is. He says instead that the possessor will know it when he has it.

At the end of the latest rally, there is nothing subtle about The Secret. As we discussed here in July and the headline from the NY Times article about The Secret suggests, “Shaking Riches Out of the Cosmos,” the focus of the latest self-help fixation is a blatant bid for materialism and wealth. “You keep saying it the way you want it to be, and if you keep saying it the way you want it to be, the universe will line up and give you exactly what you’ve said you wanted.” Obviously, such a belief can be somewhat effective in a bull market because things really do “line up” in favor of the optimists. But as columnist Anita Creamer says, “The truth is anyone who's browsed through the self-help section of any bookstore during the past 50 years already knows the secret. Clearly, positive thinking -- using whatever life hands you as inspiration for change -- is a good thing. Concentrating your energy and attention on what you want in your life, as opposed to what you want to avoid, makes sense.” Unless, of course, you happen to be in a bear market. At such times, eschewing the negative can be extremely hazardous. No matter how positive a person’s vibes, bad things are going to happen in bear markets. And when they are in one on a long-term basis for the first time, many will be surprised at how comforting gloomy thoughts of failure, pain and loss can be.

POSTSCRIPT from David Sternfeld: As global markets "go south" we may be reminded of the lyrics of "Cockeyed Optimist" from the musical South Pacific: "I could say life is just a bowl of Jello, And appear more intelligent and smart, But I'm stuck like a dope, With a thing called hope, And I can't get it out of my heart!" Jello, you may recall, quivers, shakes and is largely nutritionless water; a non-food prompting food-for-thought?

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