TL;DR: Bob Proctor’s Science of Getting Rich is his seminar treatment of Wallace Wattles’ 1910 book. Proctor, the Canadian speaker most people met through the 2006 film The Secret, built his whole career on that text. This is mindset and philosophy material about gratitude, abundance thinking and self concept. No financial outcome is promised.
Who Bob Proctor Was
Bob Proctor (1934 to 2022) was a Canadian author and speaker working in the New Thought tradition. Most people met him through The Secret, or through his book You Were Born Rich. He died on 3 February 2022, so nothing here involves live coaching or personal contact with him. What survives is the seminar material, and his teaching voice in it is the reason people still seek this program out. He never pretended the ideas were his own.
What the Science of Getting Rich Actually Teaches
The source text is a short 1910 book by Wallace Wattles, which Proctor credited as the foundation of everything he later wrote. Wattles argued that prosperity follows from a particular mental posture: gratitude practised daily, a shift from scarcity thinking toward abundance thinking, and a move from what he called a competitive mindset to a creative one. Proctor taught that formula in his own language, adding his emphasis on paradigms and on acting in the present instead of waiting for conditions to improve. In this framework, thought precedes circumstance. That is the claim. It is a philosophical position, not a finding.
Getting Rich Compared To A Tactical Business Course
This is where most buyers misjudge it. A tactical course teaches a skill you can audit: run this ad, write this email sequence, price this offer. The Science of Getting Rich works one level below that, on self concept and belief. There are no funnels here, no scripts, no marketing steps. Judged as a business system it fails immediately, because it never tried to be one. Judged as what it is, a structured argument about how you talk to yourself about money, it holds up better than its reputation suggests. Adherents describe it as the thing that made their tactical work stick.
The Honest Limitations
Three things need saying plainly. First, the claims are unfalsifiable. Nothing in this tradition can be tested the way a marketing claim can, and calling it a science does not make it one. Second, there is nothing operational here. If you need to learn to sell, write copy, or find clients, this is the wrong shelf entirely. Third, the ideas are over a century old in origin, which readers split on: some find that a mark of durability, others find it dated. And to be explicit, this is mindset and philosophy material.
Science of Getting Rich: Common Questions Answered
Is the Science of Getting Rich legit?
It is genuinely Proctor’s treatment of Wattles’ 1910 text, and we describe it as what it is: New Thought philosophy. Legitimate as self development material. Not science, and we would not present it as such.
Is Bob Proctor still teaching this personally?
No. He died in 2022. The program preserves his teaching of the material, and there is no live coaching or personal access attached to it.
Do I need to read Wattles’ book first?
No, though it helps. The book is short and in the public domain. Proctor works through the same arguments in his own words, so the seminar stands on its own.
Does this teach any business tactics?
None. There is no marketing, sales or operations content anywhere in it. Anyone looking for a skill to apply on Monday morning should choose a tactical program instead.
Who is this actually for?
People who suspect their own thinking about money is the bottleneck, and who are comfortable with a philosophical rather than an evidence based approach. Anyone who wants claims backed by research will bounce off it fast.
Is the Science of Getting Rich Worth It?
Our verdict: worth it for the right reader, and a wasted evening for the wrong one. If you want a mindset text with real historical weight, delivered by the man who spent fifty years teaching it, this is the cleanest version of that material we have looked at in 2026. If you want a method with evidence behind it, or a tactic you can execute tomorrow, this is not that and never claimed to be. Know which one you are before you start.

