This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Secret popularized what it called the law of attraction, the claim that focused thought and feeling shape the material outcomes a person experiences, presenting an idea drawn from Wallace Wattles's 1910 The Science of Getting Rich to a readership and viewership Wattles's own book never reached. Byrne's version reframed a specific early New Thought argument about wealth into a broader claim covering health, relationships and general life outcomes, a widening of the original book's scope that any comparison of the two texts shows plainly.
The scale of the reception matched the scale of the reframing. Byrne was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in 2007, the year after The Secret's release, a recognition that placed a work built on a century old self help text alongside global figures from politics, science and culture in the same published list.
That the law of attraction reached a Time 100 audience within a year of publication marks The Secret's reception as unusually fast even among bestselling self help works, a documented speed of uptake for an idea whose own source material had circulated in relative obscurity for nearly a hundred years before Byrne found it and built a mass audience for it.