When The Secret came out in 2006, I had already been dabbling in self-help lore. I was mainly interested in time management; my family and I had been through a lot of changes recently (moving, job changes, new kids), and I was trying to find strategies to make myself feel less overwhelmed. But since time management, at least in the many forms I found it, comes packaged with all the other self-help paraphernalia of goal setting and positive thinking, I had already come across variants of The Secret  and its focus, the “scientific” Law of Attraction.