The Secret/YMMV

• Adaptation Displacement: Most people think of The Secret as a self-help book, not realizing that it was based on a film that Byrne had released eight months earlier (she was, after all, a TV producer before she became a self-help guru). A fairly mild case, though, as the reason the book was released in the first place was because the film was such a runaway success.
• Colbert Bump: Byrne's appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show almost singlehandedly turned The Secret into the phenomenon that it is now.
• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Snark Bait aside, the book's YouTube channel has a video showing the beauty of nature with beautiful music playing in the background. The video is highly uplifting.
• Fridge Logic: Glacier Logic more like.
• Older Than They Think: The Secret is basically a more secular version of prayer.
• Unfortunate Implications: Hoo boy. This book's basic message is "You don't need to actually work for anything in your life -- all you need is to want it badly enough, and it will come to you!" The inverse, meanwhile, is also true -- bad thoughts create bad luck. So does this mean that, if you lost your family in the Holocaust, on 9/11, or in the 2004 tsunami, it was because you weren't thinking positively enough?
  • It gets worse. If you prepare for an emergency or disaster, you are essentially telling the universe that you want that emergency or disaster to happen to you. So if you take precautions against rape, you're literally asking for it.