Earl Nightingale

Earl Nightingale was born March 12, 1921, and grew up during the Depression with an intense curiosity about how people succeed, spending much time in the Long Beach Public Library seeking answers about character and achievement. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps; while in the service he began working in radio as an announcer, and was on duty in Hawaii at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. After World War II he pursued a career in commercial radio, including work as a host and as a voice actor (notably as the voice of Sky King in the early 1950s) and as a WGN radio host from 1950–1956. Influenced by Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Nightingale developed and recorded motivational material that distilled principles of success and personal responsibility. In 1956 he produced The Strangest Secret, a spoken-word record that sold over a million copies and became the first spoken-word Gold Record; its central idea — “We become what we think about” — became a hallmark of his teaching. Nightingale used radio, recordings, live speaking and print to spread concise daily lessons about attitude, goal-setting, and self-discipline. In partnership with businessman Lloyd Conant he co-founded Nightingale-Conant, an “electronic publishing” company that produced audio programs, seminars and the five-minute daily syndicated program Our Changing World, which aired on more than 1,000 radio stations and became one of radio’s longest-running and most widely syndicated shows. Over his career he wrote and recorded thousands of radio programs and hundreds of audio programs and videos, traveling and speaking internationally and building a lasting influence in the personal development field.