The Secret
Fragments of a Great Secret have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies throughout the centuries. For the first time, all the pieces of The Secret come together in an incredible revelation that will be life-transforming for all who experience it. In this book, you'll learn how to use The Secret in every aspect of your life - money, health, relationships, happiness, and in every interaction you have in the world. You'll begin to understand the hidden, untapped power that's within you, and this revelation can bring joy to every aspect of your life. The Secret contains wisdom from modern-day teachers - men and women who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness. By applying the knowledge of The Secret, they bring to light compelling stories of eradicating disease, acquiring massive wealth, overcoming obstacles, and achieving what many would regard as impossible.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
14mentions
14people
2008–2026years
21% recommend21% neutral57% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Books that stood out to me as a teenager: - A series of Unfortunate Events (all of them)
because I liked the never ending mystery of it all, and I was both annoyed, and pleased by the fact that you never actually find out what actually happened to the parents. I know it was a fictional series, but it was, and still is, the only fictional books I’ve ever read. I was particularly impressed by the author’s playful use of words and punctuation that could draw me in and keep me interested and curious. He kind of inspired me to be more creative with the way I use words when I write. Not that I’ve done much writing for fun lately, but occasionally I do.
The other book, I’m almost embarrassed to admit was:
- The secret by Rhonda Byrne.
I got particularly obsessed with this book, I think partly because I grew up in quite adverse circumstances, I started to think that if I was just more positive, more positive things would happen for me. I really developed quite a strong positive and optimistic attitude to life, believing that if I just thought about good things often enough, good things would happen. In practicality this often meant that as a teenager sometimes I came across optimistic to the point of seeming delusional. As I’ve got older, I’ve really come to the conclusion that the book “the secret” is a load of crap. However, I do think that I cope better in life with adversity than some of the people I went to school with have because of how I frame life events, often choosing the frame them as the next opportunity and frame them in more positive ways. I think that’s something I gained from reading that book, even if it was mainly a bunch of nonsense.
The rest of the books I read as a teenager were to do with serial killers. Particularly Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy, and other stuff to do with weird, horrible, violent crimes.
- - "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie
- "The art of thinking clearly" by Ralf Dobelli
- "Sources of power" by Gary Klein
- "The 8 pillars of motivation" by Farnoosh Brock
- "ReWork" by Jason Fried and David Hansson
- "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug
- "The art of explanation" by Lee LeFever
- "Getting real" by 37Signals
- "The secret" by Rhonda Byrne
- WATCH or READ THE SECRET by Rhonda Byrne
- If this were genuinely a consultant's writing, they would need to present a modeling hypothesis for why failure occurs in organizations and support it with metrics. But claiming their own observation of 0% is not a hypothesis.
Of course, they can write it on a personal blog. That's not inherently bad.
But when they're rejecting client requests while offering no opinion on how to model the metrics that would define success—that's the problem. This type of writing is just an illusionary piece that claims to offer insight. It's a bad form of human writing. I like to call this style the 'Rhonda Byrne Secret type.'
At the very least, a consultant should provide modeling of their hypothesis and actionable advice.
Explaining everything with a single reason—that people are afraid of being laid off if they don't adopt AI—is just a cop-out. There's no hypothesis, no reasoning behind why that claim holds. It's trying to explain everything with just that one assertion. I'm not even sure if that holds up organizationally
The OP offers no logical reasoning about how decisions are made or why they break down.
A proper piece of writing would have looked like this:
Why did the client want to adopt LLMs?
What problems arose during the client's process of adopting LLMs?
How does this connect to the organization's internal issues and disrupt its pipeline?
You need at least that level of description. This is just an emotional post that seems to say 'I wish LLMs would fail.
If they had really explained organizational dynamics, they would have talked about the asymmetry of expected costs.
Professional managers and mid-level managers prioritize career defense above all else, so they're extremely risk-averse. They would have explained the costs of adopting AI versus the costs of failing to adopt AI.
If they reject AI adoption, shareholders or the board would say they're 'failing to read the trend.' If they adopt AI and fail, they can package it as 'early market entry costs'—a defensible risk.
Providing that kind of defensive logic to decision-makers is exactly what consultants do.
It's described as being held at gunpoint, but it's really just a prisoner's dilemma. In a market where competitors and vendors are all lying and saying 'we've achieved 100x productivity with AI,' the moment someone tells the truth and says 'we don't need AI for our business,' they become a political target both inside and outside the organization. In the end, everyone knows it's useless, but they approve budgets for 'fake AI projects' anyway. I can offer that kind of cheap insight too—it's a Nash equilibrium where the system has been driven to a race to the bottom.
And I'm not even a consultant
- It is hard to know what is going on with the EU.
Europe has gone from 90% of U.S. GDP to 65% over the last 10+ years, that's a fact. And this doesn't really account yet for all the effects of the war in Ukraine.
One thing I have witnessed for sure is Europe have seen the entire computer / Internet revolution passing it by in the last 30-25 years. Keep in mind Western Europe was absolutely very well positioned to become a major actor at the time (as well positioned as the US in many regards). A lot of talents to who ended up emigrating to the US.
This failure cannot be blamed on the EU institutions but individual countries. The EU had in fact nothing to do with it, they were still busy thinking mostly about agriculture, industry and other things.
But there have been a growing interest from the EU institutions in digital in the last 10 years and quite some money spent. I have been involved in some of them, it is usually so twisted that nobody involved even believe in it.
In 2019 the EU cloud was supposed to be something called Gaia-X, now there is something called Eurostack.
There is a huge problem with the EU type that is they truly believe if they think of something, declare it, it will happen. It is very similar to Byrne's book idea "The Secret to the Law of Attraction".
I get very nervous when they apply this to defense. Because the EU has literately let its armies and defense industry die in the last 50 years, but suddenly get very belligerent (maybe for good reasons, I am not an expert) and at the same time rush into trying to rebuild its capabilities. I must have missed that chapter in Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.
Same with the Cloud & co, they have been very belligerent with Big Tech but have nothing to escape to right now, it is just another vision. The EU runs on the Microsoft stacks, last time we talked it was on MS Teams.
What I mean is the EU took a very central / leading role in many things in the last 5 years but it seems they have no idea what they are doing. It might actually be a system designed to integrate and fix economies post war (WWII and Cold war) but nothing more.
- > Our expectations tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Separating an expected outcome from the factual evidence and artifacts of a situation is arguably why the justice system exists at all.
Politics isn't Byrne's The Secret, you can't materialize good leadership by ignoring every issue and praying to a higher power.
