[3] Proctor's business model maintained the idea that a positive self-image was critical for obtaining success, frequently referencing the pseudoscientific law of attraction.
After graduating 8th grade public school, he enrolled at Danforth Tech, but dropped out a couple of months later after a bandsaw-inflicted thumb injury left him with no plans for the future (he later said, "It was dangling there.
[8] However, in the early 1960s, Proctor was working with the Toronto Fire Department, when a man named Raymond Douglas Stanford shared the book Think and Grow Rich with him.
It also caught the attention of Australian-based filmmaker Rhonda Byrne, leading her to request that Proctor participate in the 2006 movie The Secret.
[19] He suggested the reader's inner self controls all that is brought into their life and that a bad self-image, which he called a "paradigm", will lead to poor results even among those with adequate knowledge and abilities.
In a 2009 article, The Wall Street Journal opined that if any of Proctor's followers believed that they could simply choose not to participate in the recession they were "being shammed".