Earl Nightingale - The Six-Word Secret to Success

In order to fully enjoy prosperity and its accompanying sense of achievement, one needs to have known poverty and an environment in which daily survival is the purpose of life. As a youngster, I didnt know anything about a sense of achievement, but I was all too aware of being poor. It didnt seem to bother the other kids, but it bothered me. What made it all the more exasperating to me, as a boy of twelve, was to be poor in Southern California, where there seemed to be so many who were rich. In fact, anyone who had an automobile, an electric refrigerator, and wall-to-wall carpeting was rich in my book, and the children of such people seemed to me to be fortunate indeed. I decided to find out why some people were rich while so very many of us were poor.

The year was 1933the bottom of the Great Depression. Millions were unemployed. My two brothers and I were fortunate; although our father had disappeared in search of greener pastures, our mother never missed a day at her Works Progress Administration (WPA) sewing factory job. Her earnings, as I recall, were fifty-five dollars a month, which produced survival. We lived in Tent City behind the old Mariner Apartments on the waterfront in Long Beach, California.

What makes the difference? I asked myself. Why are some people well off financially and others poor? Why are some so well paid while others are so poorly paid? Whats the difference? Whats going on here?

I tried asking the adults who lived in our neighborhood and soon discovered they didnt know any more than I did. In fact, I made what was to me an astonishing discovery: The adults in our neighborhood didnt know anything at all. They were pitifully uneducateddriven by instinct, other-directed.

My mother had many endearing qualities. One was her unfailing good cheer; another was her love of books. She haunted the public library, and my fondest memory of her is of her eating oatmeal and milk early in the morning under a dangling, naked, underpowered light bulb with a book propped up in front of her. She loved travel books, especially. Never able to travel herself, she explored the earth from pole to pole through her books on travel and adventure. Im sure it helped save her sanity during those hard years. She was an attractive woman, still young but completely dedicated to the raising of her boys. Her books and our battered radio were her only entertainment. She read on her long Pacific Electric train rides to and from work in Los Angeles as well as after we boys had gone to bed at night. On weekends, after cleaning and doing the laundry, her books again filled her world with exciting travel and high adventure. Later in life, I realized she never had to stand in a sweltering customs shed, or see her luggage disappear into three Italian taxis, or struggle with a foreign language or currency, yet she had traveled from one end of the earth to the other and was intimate with the most remote places on the planet. That she was able to do so without ever leaving Los Angeles County was a tribute to the excellent public library system. It didnt cost her a dime.

And so it was to the Long Beach Public Library that I went seeking the elusive secret of success. I didnt know where to look among thousands of titles, but I felt sure the secret was there somewhere. It seemed to me that if anyone had ever figured it out, he or she would surely have written a book about it. After I began my search, I soon found myself sidetracked into the world of the most exciting fiction: the Hardy Boys, the great mind-expanding stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the Westerns of Zane Grey. Then came the fascinating stories of the Plains Indians by Stanley Vestal, and before I knew it I was as addicted to books as my mother. I learned about the importance of honesty, personal integrity, and courage and of believing in what is right and being willing to fight for it. I know that it was my early love affair with books that resulted in my getting a better-than-average education.

Later, as World War II loomed on the horizon, I left school and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. However, I continued my studiesI read everything I could lay my hands on.

I made two decisions that guided the remainder of my life. The first was to discover the secret of success. The second was to become a writer. I loved books and wanted to write them myself. Toward the end of the war, I found myself back in the States working as an instructor at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Driving between the base and nearby Jacksonville, I noticed a radio station under construction. I decided to apply for an announcing job, working nights and weekends. I auditioned and was hired. Sitting before the microphone at that small radio station, WJNC Jacksonville, North Carolina, was the beginning of my radio career. The owner-manager, Lester Gould, and I became good friends.

I took to broadcasting like nothing before in my life. I was in my element, and more than forty years later, Im still in it. But my desire to write did not lessen, and gradually I began planning for the day when I would write my own programs. In the meantime, I learned the business, doing commercials, news, and station breaks. It was extra income and would prove to be valuable experience after I was mustered out of the Marine Corps.

My reading and search for the secret of success continued without letup, I studied the worlds great religions. I found myself especially fascinated with philosophy and psychology. But it wasnt until one weekend when I was twenty-nine and working for CBS in Chicago that enlightenment came. While reading, it suddenly dawned upon me that I had been reading the same truth over and over again for many years. I had read it in the New Testament, in the sayings of Buddha, in the writings of Lao Tse, in the works of Emerson. And all of a sudden, there they were, the words, in the proper order that I had been looking for, for seventeen years. The astonishing truth that we become what we think about.