Almost everyone goes through a difficult time in their lives, but not everyone stands up for themselves and decides to take responsibility for their own success. Yet that’s exactly what Rhonda Byrne did in 2005: She took her life experience and struck out on a whole new path.
Rhonda began her television career with the Nine Network in Sydney, Australia in the 1980s. She quickly rose through the ranks and became a leading producer on some popular shows, including a stint as a segment producer on The Don Lane Show. In the early 1990s, Rhonda was a developer and senior producer on What’s Cooking. She then went to Melbourne to produce the “Midday Show”.
After 20 years in the business, he left Nine Networks in 1994 to found his own production company, Prime Time Productions. His sister, Glenda, also left Nine to help with the start-up. As the vision behind the company, Rhonda launched and led the development of television shows for various client networks. Now that she is self-employed, she was able to take on, with her production team, the creation of reality shows and docu-dramas such as:
- Encounters with Oz — UFOs in Australia
- Australia is misbehaving
- Students
- Marry me
- loves me loves me not
- The best commercials in the world
- murder detection
Ten years later, his father died, leaving his mother unwilling to move on without him. Her busy schedule as a busy television executive made her unable to maintain healthy relationships with friends and colleagues. Her financial problems threatened to bankrupt her company. Also, after so many years of working successfully in commercial television, she found herself working on a very hectic and trouble-ridden show, “Sensing Murder.” Her subsequent depression was a challenging personal and emotional breakdown, crying all the time and with no sense of direction in her life.
Her daughter, concerned for her well-being, brought her a book she had found that she hoped her mother could use to visualize herself out of her depression: it was Wallace Wattles’s 1910 book, The science of getting rich. She became fascinated with the idea of viewing the world in a way that was more favorable to her well-being.
Rhonda immediately began researching other similar ideas throughout the last 4,000 years of recorded history to document what each had in common. For two whole months she read reams of books, searching for connections between successful people throughout history who seemed to be in control of their own destiny. Thus, Ronda elaborated her original concepts of her for “El secreto”.
So, at age 35, she was able to find not only a new purpose and a force that propelled her into action, but also financial security. She was engaged in the production of a new film- The secret – who would share this timeless and timely knowledge with a wide audience. In an unusual move for her, she even appears in her own film as both a subject and an interviewee.
Through a series of unlikely events, Prime Time found itself getting the breaks it needed to gather resources for the production: 10% of the $3 million dollars ultimately spent on the production came from the Nine Network itself.
When they found themselves going to the United States to start interviewing people, Rhonda and the Prime Time team had no idea who to start talking to. She simply followed what she believed to be the opportunities that appeared around her; good luck seemed to follow her. Eventually, more than two dozen scientists, spiritual figures, entrepreneurs, and authors endorsed this idea that the Universal Law of Attraction is at your disposal by training the mind to keep very specific visualized goals in focus at all times.
In November 2006, Rhonda also became the author of a companion book to the film, also called, The secret. Published by Atria Books/Beyond Words Publishing (a division of Simon and Schuster), the hardcover topped the New York Times advice bestseller list. Five months after a long-awaited release that propelled it immediately to the top of Amazon’s best-seller rankings, and even five months later, it’s still the No. 2 book, right behind Harry Potter, with nearly 5.5 million copies. sold. His appearances on Larry King Live and a two-hour special on Oprah have further enhanced the success of The secret. Without even having a major distribution partner, Prime Time has managed to sell 250,000 copies of the DVD and many more thousands of views online.
The amazing success of The secret has forced Rhonda to alter the direction of Prime Time’s future dealings with a continued dedication to spreading the word about the idea that changed the course of her life forever.