John Assaraf

John Assaraf was born on October 7, 1961, in Tel Aviv, Israel, and grew up in Montreal, Canada, after his family emigrated there. By his own account a troubled teenager, he was redirected by a mentor toward goal-setting and personal development, and went on to build a series of businesses, most prominently in real estate.

He reached a wide audience through his appearance as one of the teachers in the 2006 film and book The Secret, where his often-repeated vision-board story — finding, years after making it, that he had moved into a house he had pictured on a board — became one of the work’s signature anecdotes.

Following The Secret, Assaraf shifted his public framing away from the more mystical “law of attraction” language toward the vocabulary of neuroscience and behavior change, founding the company NeuroGym (formerly Praxis Now) to sell online programs and coaching aimed at “retraining” the brain for success.

His teaching blends conventional achievement methods — clear goals, repeated visualization, emotional rehearsal — with popular accounts of neuroplasticity, priming, and the subconscious. He is a representative figure of the contemporary, science-flavored wing of success literature.

(Calm caveat: as with much of the goal-achievement and seminar-and-coaching market, Assaraf’s programs sit within an industry built on premium courses and income-style promises; the practical core — goal clarity, visualization, repetition — is better evidenced than the stronger neuro-marketing claims, and the two are worth keeping apart.)