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How to Completely Change Your Life in 30 Seconds
Here's the secret in 3 1. Suspend disbelief as you read the 2. "We Become What We Think About." - Earl Nightingale 3. Then, decide that it's true. Now, the rest of your life, you'll be testing this for yourself. You may be asking questions like - Can you actually change what you think about? - Do positive thoughts create a positive personal environment? - By being critical of anything or anyone around you actually improve conditions? - Is your health affected by negative thinking? You'll find continuing instances of how this is true and how it might not be. You'll be “haunted” by this singular thought, although the results won't make you lose sleep – instead, you'll awake with fresh inspirations from time to time about how to live your life even better than you are now. Because you've just started on a journey which has no definite end. As Earl Nightingale once "Do what the experts since the dawn of recorded history have told us to pay the price, by becoming the person you want to become. It's not nearly as difficult as living unsuccessfully. "Start today. You have nothing to lose - but you have your whole life to win."
167 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 16, 2012
157 people are currently reading
695 people want to read
About the author
Earl Nightingale
190 books549 followersEarl Nightingale was an American motivational speaker and author, known as the "Dean of Personal Development." He was the voice in the early 1950s of Sky King, the hero of a radio adventure series, and was a WGN radio show host from 1950 to 1956. Nightingale was the author of the Strangest Secret, which economist Terry Savage has called “…One of the great motivational books of all time“.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 3, 2017
I read a bunch of Earl Nightingale decades ago. How to Win Friends and Speak in Public. That sort of thing. I picked this one up because it was literally lying around the house, and figured a little motivational prose might be a good way to clear my mind from the Trumpiness of the era in which we find ourselves. "Couldn't hurt..." I thought. And it can't. Not really. Not in a material sense. Not much.... I don't think.
There's a joke/anecdote I like to tell from time to time when talking with people about our health. If I ever write a book on the subject, it'll be called Eat Less, Exercise More, and the entire text will be those four words, repeated as a mantra (or like the pages of "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy" in The Shining) and I'll just sit back and let the cash and accolades roll in. I mention it because I remember Nightingale being more than a little relentlessly cheerful from reading his work in the past, and much of that is the kind of elaboration that starts to ring as superfluous very quickly in something longer than an article in a fitness magazine. So, in this case the secret to completely changing your life in 30 seconds that Nightingale is talking about could be boiled down to four words:
Make plans; think positive.
Most of the book is an exercise in restating those four words as elaborately and with as much enthusiasm as possible. Make plans mindfully. Make positive plans. Make plans cheerfully. Make good plans. Plan to think positively. Make happy plans. Make happy plans to plan your positive plans with cheerful plans that are planned positively then plan to do your plans positively as well. It's less tiresome than that, but that's the basic idea.
Where I think Nightingale goes off the rails is in two major bits of rhetoric.
First, his use of superlatives and absolutes borders on the pathological. Saying things doesn't make them so, but you'd never know that from reading tens of thousands of words of positive affirmations that is any given Nightingale book. In fact, his zeal for optimism transcends optimism itself to become evangelical. After a few chapters of this book in particular, it becomes clear that this isn't a methodology so much as a belief system with all the saints, angels and faithful that such a religion implies (Nightingale is the pope in this metaphor.) And like any dogma, the promises of salvation are hyperbolic to an extreme. Nightingale's version of the ultimate, karmic fairness of the universe is that all effort is returned to the person who put it forth with perfect and total reciprocity. It's a "law of nature" he insists, like gravity. It is a lovely idea, but it is no natural law, and is also one that fails as soon as anyone who can gather just a moment of objectivity actually observes the real world. Very quickly Nightingale's work stops being about how to change your life, and about how to pretend your life isn't what it's really like because admitting fault and failure is tantamount to being at fault and failing. His account of the CEO who would insist at every possible problem that "That's good!" is simply insane (and probably not true. Imagine someone coming to that boss and saying he has to take three days off for bereavement to be confronted with "That's good!" like some manic version of the Joker in a business suit.) Not everything is an opportunity for growth and profit. There really are setbacks and things that must be overcome, and even in overcoming them we are less than we would be had that situation not been encountered at all. Not all tragedies are learning experiences, and anyone who tells you different is in denial. The effort to reject that basic reality is called post-rationalization and at a certain point the insistence to recast everything within such a narrow and illusory framework smacks of embracing a fantasy world more than the incremental and effortful work required to make one's life a little bit better than it was the day before. Three chapters into Nightingale's text I was pretty sure the mindset he insists is the only way to achieve success could be replicated by a blow to the head and a lifetime prescription of Prozac. Like the drug addled and delusional in a psych ward, firmly rooted in a world of perceptive illusion, those who embrace his ideal wouldn't even be able to tell the difference between accomplishment and failure. "You've got a narcissistic personality disorder," a doctor might say, only to get the standard response as if from some grinning automaton, "That's good!"
The second problem with Nightingale's rhetoric is how reductive and dismissive it is of failure. Those who fail in his estimation are utterly responsible for that failure. Reward for effort is, he insists, a fundamental law of the universe, so any failure can only be the result of a lack of effort on the part of the person putting it forth. Further, if we "become what we think about" as he repeats is the basis of all success, then people who don't achieve success are at fault on a personal and psychic level, not because the economy shifted, nor because of the circumstances of their birth, and certainly not because their efforts were stolen or sabotaged by rivals. There is no room for such things in the Nightingale worldview, and he has all the examples he needs to prove the point, no matter how much he may misrepresent those examples or how exceptional they might prove compared to reality. Yes, there are counter examples of people who succeed despite any of those things, succeed where others fail, or who take long odds and win, but those examples come from the whole of human experience, and many, if not most, of those stories are very likely the result of a bit of creative self-assessment from people who really succeeded through no meaningful effort of their own, or who succeed wildly out of proportion with the amount of effort they actually put in. Citing them has all the normative value of a lightning strike. Not only does the real world not work that way because of any number of issues ranging from random chance to the zeitgeist in which we abide, but Nightingale insists not just by implication but expressly that those who have failed have only themselves to blame (he says it in much nicer terms than that, but he does talk quite a bit about people who are at fault for their own bad attitudes and, therefore, failure in life as he assesses it.) Within the construct of Nightingale's ideas, that failure can be based on no other influence than their own mental powers of positivity that just happen to line up perfectly with his own personal success or—at least—the version of it that he is presenting himself. So, in the end, if you fail that's your fault, but if you win it's all thanks to the ideas he describes or, in short, to him. You're welcome.
Or I should say Him there, because Nightingale does use the Bible as a source for an awful lot of his ideas. The Bible spends a lot more time telling people not to eat shellfish than to think positively, but Nightingale cherry-picks from the Bible those ideas that fit into the mental construct he insists is the only right way to look at the world. And, of course, where they don't fit, he "interprets" them until they do. That's a process that certainly predates Nightingale. It's not like religious leaders, politicians and pundits didn't selectively read passages from religious texts until he came along to show them how to do it. Nightingale was not the first to apply that process to business and personal success itself either. It's not hard to hear John Harvey Kellogg echoing all the way from Battle Creek in Nightingale's pie in the sky fanciful writings, for instance. But he was almost certainly the most successful at it of his time, and though I'm sure he'd claim that was all due to the methods he applied, I'm very confident that he is just tapping into that same emotional weakness that people have to be accepted by the other primates in the jungle than much to do with actual financial, personal, social or even emotional success.
None of that is to say that a positive outlook is something of NO merit. It does have a lot of utility. There are a range of studies that show how it influences perception and how one is perceived. You can get more with a smile and a handshake than without one. Physically, a positive attitude taps into the same psychological conditions that lead to things like the placebo effect, hormonal balance and aids all kind of things like digestion and oxygen intake. It's a real thing. It's just not the end all, be all of human existence, and like moderation itself, must be taken in moderation. The guilt of failure that Nightingale puts on people is the dark side of his superlative use of language, and the zeal with which he presents his convictions. The sense of entitlement of those who have economic advantages and who justify themselves based on things that they never put effort into, were gained by chance, or even acquired unethically are all justified by the language of Nightingale's ideas. And what's worse, he doesn't just fail to acknowledge that they exist, he insists that they do not. "You are what you think about." All trouble is temporary or a blessing in disguise. In the long run, that lends itself to the most tragic kind of failure and collapse—the kind that we all must face as part of our fundamental humanity, and is incredibly vulnerable because the fragility of the logic means emotionally his ideas are even more delicate and, thus, easily shattered. To embrace optimism to the degree that Nightingale insists isn't just an impossible standard, it is to live in a desperately delusional world of denial that is always on the brink of despair. That doesn't sound like much of a route to success to me.
There's a joke/anecdote I like to tell from time to time when talking with people about our health. If I ever write a book on the subject, it'll be called Eat Less, Exercise More, and the entire text will be those four words, repeated as a mantra (or like the pages of "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy" in The Shining) and I'll just sit back and let the cash and accolades roll in. I mention it because I remember Nightingale being more than a little relentlessly cheerful from reading his work in the past, and much of that is the kind of elaboration that starts to ring as superfluous very quickly in something longer than an article in a fitness magazine. So, in this case the secret to completely changing your life in 30 seconds that Nightingale is talking about could be boiled down to four words:
Make plans; think positive.
Most of the book is an exercise in restating those four words as elaborately and with as much enthusiasm as possible. Make plans mindfully. Make positive plans. Make plans cheerfully. Make good plans. Plan to think positively. Make happy plans. Make happy plans to plan your positive plans with cheerful plans that are planned positively then plan to do your plans positively as well. It's less tiresome than that, but that's the basic idea.
Where I think Nightingale goes off the rails is in two major bits of rhetoric.
First, his use of superlatives and absolutes borders on the pathological. Saying things doesn't make them so, but you'd never know that from reading tens of thousands of words of positive affirmations that is any given Nightingale book. In fact, his zeal for optimism transcends optimism itself to become evangelical. After a few chapters of this book in particular, it becomes clear that this isn't a methodology so much as a belief system with all the saints, angels and faithful that such a religion implies (Nightingale is the pope in this metaphor.) And like any dogma, the promises of salvation are hyperbolic to an extreme. Nightingale's version of the ultimate, karmic fairness of the universe is that all effort is returned to the person who put it forth with perfect and total reciprocity. It's a "law of nature" he insists, like gravity. It is a lovely idea, but it is no natural law, and is also one that fails as soon as anyone who can gather just a moment of objectivity actually observes the real world. Very quickly Nightingale's work stops being about how to change your life, and about how to pretend your life isn't what it's really like because admitting fault and failure is tantamount to being at fault and failing. His account of the CEO who would insist at every possible problem that "That's good!" is simply insane (and probably not true. Imagine someone coming to that boss and saying he has to take three days off for bereavement to be confronted with "That's good!" like some manic version of the Joker in a business suit.) Not everything is an opportunity for growth and profit. There really are setbacks and things that must be overcome, and even in overcoming them we are less than we would be had that situation not been encountered at all. Not all tragedies are learning experiences, and anyone who tells you different is in denial. The effort to reject that basic reality is called post-rationalization and at a certain point the insistence to recast everything within such a narrow and illusory framework smacks of embracing a fantasy world more than the incremental and effortful work required to make one's life a little bit better than it was the day before. Three chapters into Nightingale's text I was pretty sure the mindset he insists is the only way to achieve success could be replicated by a blow to the head and a lifetime prescription of Prozac. Like the drug addled and delusional in a psych ward, firmly rooted in a world of perceptive illusion, those who embrace his ideal wouldn't even be able to tell the difference between accomplishment and failure. "You've got a narcissistic personality disorder," a doctor might say, only to get the standard response as if from some grinning automaton, "That's good!"
The second problem with Nightingale's rhetoric is how reductive and dismissive it is of failure. Those who fail in his estimation are utterly responsible for that failure. Reward for effort is, he insists, a fundamental law of the universe, so any failure can only be the result of a lack of effort on the part of the person putting it forth. Further, if we "become what we think about" as he repeats is the basis of all success, then people who don't achieve success are at fault on a personal and psychic level, not because the economy shifted, nor because of the circumstances of their birth, and certainly not because their efforts were stolen or sabotaged by rivals. There is no room for such things in the Nightingale worldview, and he has all the examples he needs to prove the point, no matter how much he may misrepresent those examples or how exceptional they might prove compared to reality. Yes, there are counter examples of people who succeed despite any of those things, succeed where others fail, or who take long odds and win, but those examples come from the whole of human experience, and many, if not most, of those stories are very likely the result of a bit of creative self-assessment from people who really succeeded through no meaningful effort of their own, or who succeed wildly out of proportion with the amount of effort they actually put in. Citing them has all the normative value of a lightning strike. Not only does the real world not work that way because of any number of issues ranging from random chance to the zeitgeist in which we abide, but Nightingale insists not just by implication but expressly that those who have failed have only themselves to blame (he says it in much nicer terms than that, but he does talk quite a bit about people who are at fault for their own bad attitudes and, therefore, failure in life as he assesses it.) Within the construct of Nightingale's ideas, that failure can be based on no other influence than their own mental powers of positivity that just happen to line up perfectly with his own personal success or—at least—the version of it that he is presenting himself. So, in the end, if you fail that's your fault, but if you win it's all thanks to the ideas he describes or, in short, to him. You're welcome.
Or I should say Him there, because Nightingale does use the Bible as a source for an awful lot of his ideas. The Bible spends a lot more time telling people not to eat shellfish than to think positively, but Nightingale cherry-picks from the Bible those ideas that fit into the mental construct he insists is the only right way to look at the world. And, of course, where they don't fit, he "interprets" them until they do. That's a process that certainly predates Nightingale. It's not like religious leaders, politicians and pundits didn't selectively read passages from religious texts until he came along to show them how to do it. Nightingale was not the first to apply that process to business and personal success itself either. It's not hard to hear John Harvey Kellogg echoing all the way from Battle Creek in Nightingale's pie in the sky fanciful writings, for instance. But he was almost certainly the most successful at it of his time, and though I'm sure he'd claim that was all due to the methods he applied, I'm very confident that he is just tapping into that same emotional weakness that people have to be accepted by the other primates in the jungle than much to do with actual financial, personal, social or even emotional success.
None of that is to say that a positive outlook is something of NO merit. It does have a lot of utility. There are a range of studies that show how it influences perception and how one is perceived. You can get more with a smile and a handshake than without one. Physically, a positive attitude taps into the same psychological conditions that lead to things like the placebo effect, hormonal balance and aids all kind of things like digestion and oxygen intake. It's a real thing. It's just not the end all, be all of human existence, and like moderation itself, must be taken in moderation. The guilt of failure that Nightingale puts on people is the dark side of his superlative use of language, and the zeal with which he presents his convictions. The sense of entitlement of those who have economic advantages and who justify themselves based on things that they never put effort into, were gained by chance, or even acquired unethically are all justified by the language of Nightingale's ideas. And what's worse, he doesn't just fail to acknowledge that they exist, he insists that they do not. "You are what you think about." All trouble is temporary or a blessing in disguise. In the long run, that lends itself to the most tragic kind of failure and collapse—the kind that we all must face as part of our fundamental humanity, and is incredibly vulnerable because the fragility of the logic means emotionally his ideas are even more delicate and, thus, easily shattered. To embrace optimism to the degree that Nightingale insists isn't just an impossible standard, it is to live in a desperately delusional world of denial that is always on the brink of despair. That doesn't sound like much of a route to success to me.
November 10, 2014
Some Solid Wisdom Here
There were definitely some insights here regarding goal setting and positive thinking. The fact that each chapter is short made this a good read to sneak into moments throughout the day and finish quickly. I enjoyed the first half of the book more than the last half, as much of it was geared more towards sales and business and I am not involved with either. A good read though.
There were definitely some insights here regarding goal setting and positive thinking. The fact that each chapter is short made this a good read to sneak into moments throughout the day and finish quickly. I enjoyed the first half of the book more than the last half, as much of it was geared more towards sales and business and I am not involved with either. A good read though.
August 10, 2016
Good stuff even though I've come across most of it before.
March 4, 2016
Quite interesting.
Very well written.
A positive read. Ever time I picked the book back up I found it lifting my spirits.
Very well written.
A positive read. Ever time I picked the book back up I found it lifting my spirits.
December 8, 2021
One of the best books in this genre that I've read. All content is valuable and to the point. Very dense with wisdom and practical methods as well as very motivating. Love it!
May 11, 2018
Wonderful lessons!
Great read! Good for young or old. We should suggest for our children or grandchildren. Should have read when I was younger!
Great read! Good for young or old. We should suggest for our children or grandchildren. Should have read when I was younger!
May 31, 2018
This book had a lot of great information. It was a little repetitive and unorganized, but I found a lot of value in it.
June 26, 2018
To the point
We don’t know what comes next so make the most...great tips and fast read to refocus my desires. Thank you!
We don’t know what comes next so make the most...great tips and fast read to refocus my desires. Thank you!
July 31, 2022
Op basis van de titel verwachte ik zo'n onrealistisch 'amerikaans' positive thinking boek die ik na 1 blz. weer weg zou leggen. Maar in plaats daarvan vond ik het interessant en inspirerend .
April 12, 2015
One of the masters of teaching the importance of positive thinking that influenced countless authors after him. "We become what we think about" is the big message as well as "Focus on the most important clearly defined goal". One goal at the time only. Make a conscious decision and stick with it until it is realised.
If you need a motivational start over, this book is definitely a good read.
If you need a motivational start over, this book is definitely a good read.
May 18, 2015
Good information on Goals
The desire to success is in your hands. Follow the steps in the book on goal setting is a great start. Act as if you have reached your goals. A must read to Change your Life
The desire to success is in your hands. Follow the steps in the book on goal setting is a great start. Act as if you have reached your goals. A must read to Change your Life
January 1, 2014
Great read
very well written, it's inspiration, and motivational so I highly recommend. Teaches you how to start looking to the future and live the American dream, enjoy , I did.
very well written, it's inspiration, and motivational so I highly recommend. Teaches you how to start looking to the future and live the American dream, enjoy , I did.
April 21, 2015
My rating
Very good read! Shows how quickly ideas and thought patterns can change! You literally can turn your life around just like that!
Very good read! Shows how quickly ideas and thought patterns can change! You literally can turn your life around just like that!
May 27, 2015
Didn't finish. Bible citations and oversimplifications all over the place.
July 11, 2015
Great read
Simple, easy to remember advice. Whether you're in sales, a student, or just want to improve yourself, I highly recommend this book!
Simple, easy to remember advice. Whether you're in sales, a student, or just want to improve yourself, I highly recommend this book!
August 11, 2016
Fantastic
This book should be read by everyone and we all must learn to apply the concepts and principles.
Absolutely recommended!
This book should be read by everyone and we all must learn to apply the concepts and principles.
Absolutely recommended!
January 13, 2017
The first book I ever read.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews