Rhonda Byrne

Rhonda Byrne is an Australian television producer born in 1951 who, following a period of personal and professional crisis around 2004, was reportedly given a copy of Wallace Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich (1910) by her daughter.

That century-old New Thought manual became the seed of her project: she set out to trace and popularize what she called the “law of attraction,” producing first a 2006 documentary film, The Secret, and then the companion book of the same year.

Marketed with the conceit of a long-suppressed “secret” known to history’s elites, the package fused short talking-head segments from contemporary motivational speakers with a simple, repeatable message. Byrne’s historical significance is less as an original theorist than as the single most effective popularizer in the tradition’s history.

The Secret sold tens of millions of copies, was promoted by Oprah Winfrey, and effectively re-introduced New Thought metaphysics to a global twenty-first-century mass audience under the now-ubiquitous brand “law of attraction.” She compressed the layered mechanics of Troward, Wattles, and the Hicks material into a frictionless three-beat formula—ask, believe, receive—stripped of theological or philosophical complexity, optimized for media virality, and primed for the social-media manifestation culture that followed.