tl;dr: Collating some useful resources for the talk titled The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale that I created to understand the talk better. Curious on how these came about? Read the long story that follows the resources.
The Strangest Secret – English MindMap
Video:
Browse the English Mind Map online: https://bit.ly/3dm7Tvm
PDF version for offline use: Resources
The Strangest Secret – Hindi MindMap
Video:
Browse the Hindi Mind Map online: https://bit.ly/2E8ZyNw
PDF version for offline use: Resources
The Long Story
If you’re interested in learning more about this talk and how these resources came about, read on.
Last year I attended a program which recommended participants to listen to a talk titled The Strangest Secret (aka TSS) by Earl Nightingale, every day. This is a 31 minute talk which was recorded in 1956 and won the first Gold record in the Spoken Word category. With my short attention span, the talk seemed a tad long. As I started listening to this talk, I found that it had a wealth of useful ideas. But if you got distracted while listening to it, you would totally lose the plot. Since this was an audio-only talk, I found I was engaging with it on an auditory level but not at a visual level, which was triggering my distractions.
To address this, I initially started taking notes when listening to the talk which helped me engage better with the content. Around the same time, I leant about a technique called Mind Mapping which allows you to break down any concept and capture its key points. I decided to try it out to organise my TSS notes. The MindMap I initially created was huge and it was becoming difficult to traverse it. Moreover, it was also challenging to define the order in which the nodes should be traversed. After trying out different formats and tools, I zeroed in on the Org Chart format offered by MindMeister. With this format, the nodes were manageable and the canvas had to be traversed in an intuitive left-to-right order. I started browsing this MindMap while listening to The Strangest Secret talk everyday, and found that it helped me engage much better. Being lazy, I wanted to take out the manual browsing aspect as well, so I screen recorded the browsing part with the talk playing in tandem. Now, I could just watch this screen recorded video everyday.
To get variety into my routine, I used to listen to a Hindi translation of this talk as well. Since the Mind Map technique had worked well with the English version, I decided to repeat the same process for Hindi as well. This turned out to be a project in itself since unlike the english version, the transcript of the Hindi talk wasn’t available for reference. So I had to type out the key points from the Hindi talk which took a few days to complete. I also made use of Google Translate for some word translations.
This has been quite an interesting side-project, experimenting with Mind Map formats and creating these resources. I’m collating all these resources in this post so anyone who’s interested can find them in one place easily and use them. You can find the links to the YouTube Videos, the online MindMaps and also downloadable PDFs.
A printed version of this talk is also available in book format on Amazon, check this link. This talk is inspired from the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. If you haven’t read the book, I recommend it very highly. I have this Deluxe Hardbound version of the book; this Purple and Yellow version is also good.
Notice: The audio talk and its transcripts are all available in the public domain. These resources are being shared for learning purposes. The links to the printed books are all affiliate links.
