This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Rhonda Byrne spent years as a producer of Australian television, including work on the series Sensing Murder, before a personal crisis in 2004 led her to Wallace Wattles's 1910 New Thought book The Science of Getting Rich. Wattles's book argued that a specific way of thinking could draw material wealth toward a person who practiced it, an idea nearly a century old by the time Byrne encountered it, and one written for a much smaller readership than the one she would eventually bring to it.
Byrne took Wattles's central claim and developed it into a work of her own making, first as the film The Secret and then as the accompanying book, both released in 2006. The film gathered a series of speakers to present the idea directly to camera, translating a hundred year old self help text into a format built for a mass contemporary audience rather than for readers of early twentieth century tracts.
The path from a television producer reading an obscure century old book during a personal crisis to the creator of a global multimedia phenomenon ran through no religious training or prior authorship of her own, only the act of finding Wattles's argument and giving it new form. That origin, an existing idea rediscovered and repackaged rather than one invented from nothing, is the documented starting point of everything The Secret became.