The Science of Getting Rich

The Science of Getting Rich

Wallace D. Wattles, 1910

A small-town Indiana writer sits at his desk in 1910. He has been broke most of his life. He has tried preaching, he has tried socialism, he has tried business, and none of it has held. He is in his fifties. He has roughly two years left to live, though he does not know that yet. His daughter will later write that these were the calmest, most confident years of his life. He had stopped striving in the old way. He had started doing what he was about to write down. And in this stretch of time, in a slim manuscript of fewer than 30,000 words, he writes a book that will quietly outsell almost every business manual of its century, get plagiarized by Napoleon Hill, get repackaged by Rhonda Byrne as *The Secret*, and end up dog-eared on the nightstands of Silicon Valley founders a hundred years later.

The book has one strange premise. It says wealth is not a matter of luck, talent, or location. It is the result of doing things in what Wattles calls "a Certain Way." Get the Way right, the money follows. Get it wrong, you can work yourself to death and stay poor. He treats this as exact and repeatable. Not a knack. Not a personality trait. A practice anyone can learn, in the same way anyone can learn arithmetic.

Most of the book reads like a religious tract dressed up in business language. There is a "Thinking Substance" that fills the universe. There is a "Formless Intelligence" that responds to your mental images. There is a near-magical claim that if you hold the picture of the thing you want, with gratitude and faith, the universe will rearrange itself to deliver it. He uses the word *science* with a straight face, applying it to a metaphysics that no laboratory has ever confirmed.