The 1910 Sales Book Nobody Talks About: What Wallace Wattles Actually Said
In 1910, a socialist from Indiana published a short book called The Science of Getting Rich. He died the next year. He wasn't wealthy. He wasn't famous. He was a guy who'd run for office, lost, and spent his later years writing about how money actually works.
The book is 17 chapters. You can read it in an afternoon. It's in the public domain, free on Project Gutenberg, and most people who've heard of it associate it with one thing... "The Secret."
That association has done more damage to this book's reputation than anything else.
Rhonda Byrne credited Wallace Wattles as a primary inspiration for The Secret in 2006. And from that point on, the internet filed The Science of Getting Rich under "manifestation" and moved on. Think positive. Visualize wealth. The universe provides.
Wattles would've hated that.
The Book Says Something Different Than You Think
If you actually read The Science of Getting Rich instead of reading summaries of it, the structure tells you everything. The first half of the book (chapters 4 through 10) covers thinking. How to form a clear mental picture of what you want, how to hold that picture with conviction, how gratitude factors in.
The second half (chapters 11 through 17) is entirely about action. Daily action. Efficient action. Acting right now, in your current situation, with whatever you have.
Most summaries of this book skip the second half entirely. They pull quotes about thinking and visualization, slap "law of attraction" on the cover, and call it done. The actual text is blunt about this...
"You must not rely upon thought alone, paying no attention to personal action. That is the rock upon which many otherwise scientific metaphysical thinkers meet shipwreck."
That's Wattles in Chapter 11. The guy who supposedly wrote the ur-text of "think and it shall appear" literally warns you that thinking alone will wreck you.
"The Certain Way" Is a Process
Wattles' central idea is that getting rich comes from doing things "in a certain way." That phrase shows up constantly throughout the book. He's specific about what it means, and it has nothing to do with luck, talent, or being in the right industry.
"The ownership of money and property comes as a result of doing things in a certain way; those who do things in this Certain Way... get rich."
Strip away the 1910 language and what you've got is a description of methodology. A repeatable process that produces consistent results regardless of who follows it.
That should sound familiar to anyone who's been in sales for more than six months.
The best salespeople don't wing their calls. They prepare. They follow a structure. They know what they're going to say before they pick up the phone, and they adjust based on what the prospect gives them. They've done this enough times that the process feels natural, but it is a process. There's a "certain way" they operate, and it's why they consistently outperform people who improvise.
Wattles describes his "certain way" as a combination of several things... clarity about what you want, genuine belief that your offer has value, thorough preparation, gratitude (which he frames as a mental state that keeps you focused on abundance rather than scarcity), and then daily, disciplined execution.
Through the lens of a sales methodology, the overlap is hard to miss. Clarity about the outcome you want from a call. Belief in the product you're selling. Preparation before you dial. A mental frame that keeps rejection from derailing you. And then consistent execution, call after call, day after day.
That's not manifestation. That's a sales process.
Creation Over Competition
One of the strongest ideas in the book, and the one that maps most directly to how the best salespeople actually operate, is Wattles' argument about competition versus creation.
"You must get rid of the thought of competition. You are to create, not to compete for what is already created."
In 1910, this was a philosophical argument about abundance. In 2026, it's a practical description of what separates consultative sellers from everyone else.
The competitive mindset in sales looks like this... fighting over the same prospects, racing to the bottom on price, treating every deal like a zero-sum game where you win only if someone else loses. Trash-talking competitors on calls. Positioning your product by tearing down alternatives.
The creative mindset looks different. You show up to a conversation and help the prospect think more clearly about their own problem. You ask questions they haven't considered. You share perspective that makes them see their situation differently. Whether they buy from you or not, they leave the conversation having gained something.
Wattles puts it in business terms... "Give every man more in use value than you take from him in cash value; then you are adding to the life of the world by every business transaction."
That sentence was written 116 years ago. It's still the clearest description of consultative selling anyone has produced.
The idea is straightforward. If the conversation itself is valuable, if the prospect learns something or sees their problem more clearly just by talking to you, then selling stops being an extraction and starts being a service. You're creating value in every interaction, not competing for scraps.
This also explains something that a lot of salespeople feel but can't articulate... the guilt. Many people in sales carry a low-grade sense that they're bothering people, that asking for money is somehow inappropriate, that they're taking something rather than giving something. Wattles addresses this directly. If you're genuinely giving more value than you're extracting, you're doing the world a favor. The guilt is misplaced.
That doesn't mean you get to be sloppy about it. You actually have to deliver that value. But the frame shift matters.
What "The Secret" Got Wrong
The history is where things get interesting, and where Wattles' ideas went sideways.
When Rhonda Byrne adapted this book into The Secret, she kept the thinking and visualization elements. The clear mental picture. The emotional conviction. The belief that what you want is already coming to you.
She mostly dropped the action component.
The Secret became the dominant version of these ideas in popular culture, and it spread a specific message... think about what you want with enough intensity and the universe will deliver it. Wattles' actual message was different, and he was explicit about the difference.
He told you to think clearly, yes. But then he told you to get up and go do the work. Every day. He dedicated seven chapters to action. He warned against relying on thought alone. He used the word "efficient" repeatedly, talking about the quality of your daily actions.
The self-help world took a book that was roughly 50% about thinking and 50% about doing, and turned it into a book that was 100% about thinking. What got lost in translation was the most practical part.
This matters for salespeople because a version of this mistake plays out in sales culture all the time. The "mindset" industry has trained a generation of sellers to believe that confidence comes from affirmations, that visualization produces results, that believing in yourself is the primary driver of performance.
Belief matters. Mental preparation matters. But Wattles was clear that belief without daily efficient action produces nothing. You can visualize yourself closing a $50K deal all morning. If you don't pick up the phone, nothing happens. He literally wrote... "By thought, the thing you want is brought to you; by action you receive it."
Both parts. Not one.
The Flaws Are Real
This isn't a perfect book. We should be honest about that.
Wattles calls it "science" when it's really philosophy. He asks you to accept his principles on faith, which is the opposite of how science works. The gender language is entirely male-centric, a product of 1910. Some of the metaphysical claims about "thinking substance" and "formless intelligence" feel dated and ungrounded.
George Kao, who wrote a thoughtful critical review, pointed out that labeling this "science" is disrespectful to actual scientific method. That's a fair critique.
But the practical framework underneath the dated language holds up surprisingly well. Clear thinking plus daily efficient action plus genuine value creation is not a bad operating system for selling. Or for much of anything else.
You don't have to treat the book as gospel to extract what's useful from it. The 1910 packaging is awkward. The core advice about combining mental preparation with disciplined daily execution is solid.
So Why Does This Matter for Sales?
Wattles described something that the best salespeople already do instinctively. They get clear on what they're trying to accomplish before a call. They believe in what they're selling. They prepare. They execute consistently. They focus on creating value rather than competing on price. And they do this every day, not just when they feel inspired.
He called it "the certain way." Modern sales training calls it methodology, process, framework. The labels change. The underlying pattern doesn't.
But Wattles left one thing out, and it's the biggest gap in his entire system. He described what to do. He described why it works. He never addressed the obvious question... how do you actually get good enough to do it consistently, especially under pressure?
Knowing the "certain way" and executing it when a prospect hits you with an objection you didn't expect are two very different things.
That gap between knowing and doing is where Part 2 of this series picks up. We'll map Wattles' framework onto modern sales methodology, principle by principle, and look at what it actually takes to turn these ideas into something you can use on your next call.
This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on The Science of Getting Rich and modern sales. Part 2 breaks down the "Certain Way" as a sales framework. Part 3 tackles the practice gap between knowing what to do and doing it under pressure.