The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles is a practical study of wealth, thought, faith, gratitude, purpose, action, business, service, and what Wattles calls the “Certain Way.” Rather than presenting riches primarily as the product of competition, he argues that prosperity begins with a creative orientation toward life in which thought, expectation, useful action, and increasing value work together. Money is treated not merely as accumulation, but as a means through which a person can develop abilities, experience more of life, serve others, and increase his capacity to give.
Published in 1910, the book became one of the foundational works of the New Thought prosperity tradition. Some of Wattles' observations have strong biblical parallels, especially gratitude, diligent work, asking and receiving, sowing and reaping, increasing value, refusing anxious competition, and trusting God as the source of provision. His metaphysical teaching concerning a universal “Thinking Substance” should nevertheless be tested through the King James Bible, preserving God as Creator, Christ as the believer's life, and wealth as stewardship rather than an independent spiritual law.
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Wallace D. Wattles • Complete audiobook
About The Science of Getting Rich
Wallace Wattles begins from the position that material resources matter because life requires tools, time, space, opportunity, education, and freedom of action. Poverty is not romanticized as though lack itself were a spiritual virtue, nor does he treat money as evil simply because it can be misused. His argument is that greater resources can enlarge a person's ability to live, develop, create, give, and serve when those resources remain properly governed.
Scripture likewise refuses to identify money itself as evil. Paul specifically identifies the love of money as the root of all evil, while elsewhere Scripture presents wealth as something that can be received, stewarded, given, multiplied, inherited, or abused. The central biblical issue is therefore not merely whether a person possesses money, but what place money occupies in relation to God.
The Right to Be Rich
Wattles begins provocatively by defending the desire for greater material abundance. He argues that development requires resources and that a person cannot fully use his talents if he permanently lacks the means necessary to develop or express them. His purpose is not simply accumulation for its own sake, but expansion of life through greater ability to use, create, experience, and contribute.
Scripture certainly contains warnings concerning riches, yet it also presents God as the One who gives power to produce wealth. Wealth is therefore neither automatically righteous nor automatically corrupt. Its spiritual character depends upon source, identity, stewardship, motive, and use.
Money Is Energy in an Exchange System
Money functions as stored purchasing power within a network of human exchange. Someone creates value, another person recognizes that value, and money transfers as a claim upon other goods and services. Wealth therefore becomes closely connected with the ability to create, organize, preserve, multiply, or exchange useful value.
This gives prosperity a practical dimension beyond merely thinking about money. Faith may affect expectation and direction, but value must still move through actual systems of work, trade, ownership, service, production, investment, and stewardship. Scripture repeatedly joins increase with faithful handling of what has already been placed in someone's hands.
There Is a Science of Getting Rich
Wattles calls wealth creation a science because he believes prosperity follows repeatable principles rather than pure accident. His strongest claim is that people who think and act in what he calls a Certain Way can produce increasing results regardless of where they begin. Scripture does not promise a mechanical formula that guarantees every person the same amount of money, but it does contain repeatable principles concerning diligence, wisdom, value, stewardship, sowing, generosity, patience, and increase.
This means financial outcomes are not entirely random. Choices matter, skills matter, value matters, ownership matters, timing matters, relationships matter, and stewardship matters. Faith does not eliminate these principles; it changes the source and identity from which they are practiced.
Opportunity Is Not Monopolized
Wattles rejects the belief that all opportunity has already been captured by someone else. Even where markets appear crowded, new needs, technologies, services, combinations, locations, efficiencies, and forms of value continue appearing. His emphasis is creative rather than purely competitive: the existence of another successful person does not necessarily prove that there is no room for another useful contribution.
Scarcity thinking interprets someone else's increase as evidence that less remains available. Creative thinking asks what new value can still be produced. Scripture repeatedly presents God as possessing abundance beyond the immediate visible supply.
Creation Is Greater Than Competition
One of Wattles' strongest practical principles is that the person seeking wealth should move from a competitive mentality toward a creative mentality. Competition asks how to take a larger portion of what already exists, while creation asks how to increase the total value available. The distinction matters because durable businesses are generally built by solving problems, improving systems, saving time, increasing quality, or producing something people genuinely want.
Scripture gives a similar principle through service. Greatness in the Kingdom is not defined merely through domination over others but through becoming useful to them. This does not eliminate competition in markets, but it changes the governing motive from destruction toward increase.
The First Principle
Wattles' metaphysics begins with the idea that thought interacts with an underlying creative substance from which physical forms emerge. This is one of the places where his system must be distinguished carefully from Scripture. The Bible certainly begins creation with an unseen source, but that source is not an impersonal substance waiting for human thought to direct it.
Scripture begins with God. Creation responds to His Word because He is Creator, and the believer participates in His life through relationship rather than replacing Him as the independent source. Human thought can influence action, expectation, imagination, invention, and participation without becoming the Creator itself.
Thought Still Matters
Correcting Wattles' metaphysics does not require reducing thought to something meaningless. Every business, building, invention, book, product, and organized system exists first as an idea before becoming physical form. Thought organizes possibilities, imagination allows new arrangements to be conceived, and belief affects whether a person ever acts upon what has been conceived.
Scripture explicitly connects transformation with renewal of the mind. The mind therefore matters greatly, but its proper function is agreement with truth rather than autonomous creation apart from God.
Increasing Life
Wattles repeatedly uses the phrase “increasing life.” His highest conception of wealth is not merely acquiring more objects, but becoming capable of expressing more intelligence, creativity, beauty, usefulness, freedom, experience, and contribution. In that sense, money becomes one tool through which greater life can sometimes be expressed.
Jesus speaks explicitly of abundant life. The biblical center, however, remains Christ rather than wealth itself. Money may support abundant living, but money does not become the life.
Increase Should Flow Through You
Wealth becomes unhealthy when accumulation terminates entirely upon the possessor. A living system requires flow. Resources received can support family, employees, customers, suppliers, investment, generosity, new ventures, education, and useful work.
Scripture repeatedly describes giving and receiving as connected movements rather than enemies. The receiver can become a giver, while the giver can remain open to receiving again.
How Riches Come to You
Wattles strongly rejects coercing or mentally controlling other people in order to obtain wealth. Prosperity should come through exchange in which other people receive value rather than being treated merely as obstacles or instruments. This becomes especially relevant in business because durable wealth normally depends upon recurring relationships with people who believe an exchange benefited them.
Scripture establishes the same ethical boundary through honest weights and measures. Profit is not condemned, but dishonest gain violates the relationship through which genuine exchange operates.
Give More Value Than You Take
One of Wattles' most useful business principles is that every transaction should leave the buyer with greater use value than the cash value paid. The seller can still make a healthy profit while the customer believes the product or service was worth more to him than the money surrendered. This produces voluntary exchange in which both parties can become better off.
The principle scales well beyond individual transactions. Businesses that consistently save people time, increase revenue, reduce pain, create convenience, improve reliability, or deliver superior quality naturally create stronger reasons for continued exchange.
Gratitude
Wattles gives gratitude an entire chapter because he sees it as the mental movement that keeps consciousness connected with abundance rather than continually returning toward perceived absence. Gratitude changes attention. Instead of seeing only what remains missing, consciousness becomes capable of recognizing what has already been received and what resources are presently available for use.
Scripture gives thanksgiving a central place in prayer. Gratitude is not denial of an unmet desire; it is recognition that present lack does not erase everything God has already given.
Gratitude Changes the Perception of Supply
Two people can possess identical resources while perceiving radically different possibilities. One sees only what is absent and becomes immobilized, while another recognizes existing skills, relationships, knowledge, time, tools, customers, capital, or opportunity that can be rearranged into something greater. Gratitude can therefore become strategically useful because it improves awareness of resources already present.
Jesus demonstrates this pattern before multiplying the loaves. He does not begin by complaining about how little is available. What is present is received with thanksgiving before increase becomes visible.
Thinking in a Certain Way
Wattles teaches the reader to form a clear mental picture of the life desired and to hold that vision with faith. The usefulness of this practice is straightforward: a clear objective gives decisions a direction. Someone who knows what he is building can evaluate opportunities, expenses, skills, partnerships, and daily actions in relation to a coherent destination.
Scripture also connects faith with things hoped for before they are seen. Vision therefore does not require pretending that the finished condition already exists physically. It allows consciousness to organize present action around something not yet visible.
Vision Without Action Becomes Fantasy
Wattles does not teach thought alone. One of the strongest features of the book is his insistence that thinking in the Certain Way must eventually be joined with acting in the Certain Way. A vision that never affects behavior remains disconnected from the systems through which physical results normally appear.
Scripture makes the same distinction between hearing and doing. Faith becomes embodied as action begins agreeing with what is believed.
How to Use the Will
Wattles' teaching concerning will is primarily inward. Rather than using willpower to dominate other people, the individual uses it to govern his own attention, choices, and response. The first territory to rule is therefore not another person's mind but one's own direction.
Scripture gives self-government significant importance. A person capable of conquering external opponents while remaining unable to govern himself has not achieved true mastery.
Do Not Use Faith to Control People
This boundary is especially important whenever metaphysical ideas are applied to relationships or business. Other people are not objects whose will exists merely to satisfy ours. Persuasion, sales, negotiation, leadership, and influence can all operate ethically while still respecting the agency of the other person.
Christ's model of greatness points toward service rather than domination. Power reaches its proper expression when it increases life instead of reducing another person's freedom for private gain.
Further Use of the Will
Wattles warns against continually feeding the mind with images of poverty, failure, competition, and impossibility. His point is not that acknowledging a problem magically creates it, but that sustained attention influences expectation and action. Someone who studies only reasons something cannot work may become highly skilled at proving his own conclusion.
Scripture deliberately directs attention toward what is worthy of continued meditation. The renewed mind is not required to deny problems, but it does refuse to nourish fear as though fear were wisdom.
Acting in the Certain Way
Wattles now moves decisively from inward state to outward execution. The future cannot be acted in directly because action occurs in the present. Whatever vision a person holds must therefore become translated into something useful that can be done now.
This protects faith from becoming endless waiting. The person acts upon the resources, opportunities, knowledge, responsibilities, and relationships available today while remaining open to greater opportunities that may emerge tomorrow.
Do Not Wait for Perfect Conditions
Many people postpone action until every uncertainty disappears. They believe they need more capital, more confidence, more knowledge, more time, the perfect market, or complete assurance that the attempt cannot fail. The result is that potential remains permanently unrealized because the future condition required for beginning never arrives.
Scripture repeatedly values faithful use of what is already present. Increase often begins with stewardship of the current portion rather than waiting for a larger portion before becoming faithful.
Efficient Action
Wattles distinguishes simply doing many things from doing the right things effectively. Activity is not automatically productivity. A person can spend an entire day moving rapidly while advancing almost nothing that materially contributes to the objective.
Efficient action means bringing purpose into individual tasks. Each day should contain actions capable of moving value, skill, relationships, production, sales, or ownership forward rather than merely creating the feeling of being busy.
Speed Is Not the Same as Efficiency
Wattles makes a useful distinction between moving quickly and hurrying. Hurry often comes from fear that there is not enough time, opportunity, or supply. That emotional state can produce mistakes, unnecessary risk, scattered attention, and unfinished work.
Efficient action can still be aggressive and decisive without becoming frantic. Faith allows urgency where urgency is useful while refusing to make fear the engine of execution.
Getting Into the Right Business
Wattles teaches that the right business is connected with both ability and desire. Natural aptitude matters, but ability can also be developed through practice, education, repetition, experience, and disciplined attention. A person should therefore examine where talent, desire, market need, and opportunity intersect rather than simply copying whatever someone else is doing.
Scripture recognizes differing gifts and functions within one body. Not everyone is designed to perform the same role, which means comparison can become a poor substitute for discovering where one's own contribution creates the greatest value.
Desire Can Be a Compass
Wattles treats persistent desire as information concerning potential expression. Desire alone does not establish that every method of fulfillment is wise or lawful, but it can reveal where life seeks greater expression. Someone drawn repeatedly toward building, creating, teaching, selling, investing, designing, serving, or solving may be discovering a genuine direction that deserves development.
Scripture does not require treating desire as automatically corrupt. Desire can be examined, refined, submitted to wisdom, and pursued through lawful means.
The Impression of Increase
One of the strongest chapters for business concerns what Wattles calls the impression of increase. People naturally prefer relationships and exchanges that make them better off. A customer wants a product that improves life, an employee wants work that produces useful reward and development, and a business partner wants the relationship to create more value than either party could create alone.
The principle becomes simple: leave people with the impression that interacting with you increases rather than diminishes them. This requires actual value, not merely branding or persuasion.
Quality Creates the Impression of Increase
Cheapness can win a transaction, but quality can build a relationship. A durable product, reliable service, clear communication, thoughtful support, and performance beyond the minimum expectation communicate increase because the customer receives more usefulness from the exchange. Price still matters, but the strongest position is rarely becoming the cheapest option regardless of quality.
Scripture repeatedly connects faithful service with giving more than the minimum required. The governing question becomes whether the person receiving the work is actually better off because the exchange occurred.
The Advancing Man
Wattles describes the advancing person as someone whose presence communicates possibility and growth. He is not merely trying to extract money from everyone around him. His own development produces greater competence, better judgment, more useful relationships, and a capacity to create increasingly valuable outcomes.
Biblical advancement similarly moves toward greater stewardship. Increase brings greater responsibility because larger resources create larger opportunities to serve, give, build, protect, and multiply what has been entrusted.
Wealth Should Increase Capacity
Money is most useful when it expands capability. Capital can buy equipment, education, inventory, advertising, property, labor, technology, time, or ownership in productive assets. These resources can then generate further value instead of merely being consumed.
Scripture's parable of the talents illustrates stewardship through multiplication. The servants are evaluated not merely on possession but on what they did with what was entrusted to them.
Prosperity Without Covetousness
Desire for abundance and covetousness are not identical. Covetousness reaches for what belongs to another person as though another person's possession is required for our own life. Creative prosperity asks how greater value can be produced without needing to diminish another person.
This distinction is central to Wattles' move from competition toward creation. Biblical stewardship permits ownership and increase while forbidding the heart from making another person's possessions the object through which life must be obtained.
Riches Are Not Identity
The strongest safeguard against worshiping wealth is establishing identity somewhere money cannot reach. If money must prove worth, every financial decline becomes an identity crisis. If success must prove belovedness, every failed venture becomes condemnation.
Scripture places completeness in Christ before the account balance is examined.
Wealth can then become a tool rather than a god. The believer can pursue increase aggressively without asking money to manufacture a self that God has already established in Christ.
Seek First the Kingdom
This becomes the proper order for biblical prosperity. Jesus does not say material things do not matter. He says they are not first.
Kingdom first does not mean money never arrives. It means money arrives as addition rather than identity, source, master, or god.
Faith and Wealth
Wattles constantly joins wealth creation with faith because new results frequently require acting before the outcome is certain. Every business launch, investment, product, sale, hire, expansion, or career change contains some degree of uncertainty. If action required complete visible assurance before beginning, very little creation would ever occur.
Scripture gives faith a relationship with what is not presently seen.
Faith does not eliminate risk. It prevents present uncertainty from automatically becoming a command to remain stationary.
Believe That You Receive
Prosperity teaching becomes especially interesting beside Jesus' instruction concerning prayer. Christ places believing before visible possession and speaks directly of the things a person desires. The inward state therefore changes before the external condition necessarily does.
Biblical faith is not confidence in an impersonal substance. Jesus places prayer within relationship with God, while the Father remains the Giver.
The Father Gives
The Father is not presented as permanently hostile to increase. Giving belongs to His character, though Scripture also calls the receiver toward stewardship, wisdom, generosity, and freedom from covetousness.
Faith therefore does not make God generous. Faith receives from the God Christ already reveals as Giver.
Grace Prevents Prosperity From Becoming Another Law
Wattles sometimes speaks with mathematical certainty about his method. This can become harmful if every financial setback is interpreted as proof that someone failed mentally or spiritually. Markets change, people exercise agency, businesses fail, accidents occur, competition exists, and not every economic variable is under one person's control.
Scripture gives genuine responsibility without requiring total sovereignty. A person can improve thought, skills, discipline, execution, and stewardship while remaining dependent upon grace.
A Biblical Practice of Getting Rich
Establish the source.
Money is a tool. God remains the source of life, wisdom, opportunity, ability, and increase.
Define what wealth is for.
Determine how greater resources would increase your ability to live, build, serve, give, create, and steward.
Create rather than merely compete.
Look for unmet needs, inefficiencies, problems, and opportunities where new value can be produced.
Form a clear vision.
Know what you are building well enough that present decisions can be judged in relation to it.
Practice gratitude.
Recognize the resources, skills, relationships, knowledge, and opportunities already available for use.
Give more value than you take.
Build exchanges in which customers genuinely believe they received more usefulness than the money surrendered.
Act today.
Translate vision into useful work with the resources presently available rather than waiting indefinitely for perfect conditions.
Increase efficiency.
Distinguish productive movement from mere activity and direct attention toward work that materially advances the objective.
Steward the increase.
When more arrives, use it to expand capacity rather than immediately consuming everything produced.
Keep the Kingdom first.
Let money remain an addition rather than becoming identity, source, master, or god.
Reading Wallace Wattles Through Scripture
The Science of Getting Rich contains durable principles concerning gratitude, creativity, vision, useful service, value creation, efficient action, business, stewardship, and refusing to interpret another person's prosperity as proof that opportunity has disappeared. These ideas remain practical because they affect how people actually build, sell, invest, work, and exchange value.
Scripture supplies the governing correction. God is not an impersonal substance. Human thought is not the independent Creator. Wealth does not establish identity, and faithful thinking does not guarantee total control over every economic circumstance. Yet Scripture still leaves substantial room for abundance, diligent creation, multiplication, asking, receiving, giving, stewardship, and increasing life under God.
- Does God remain the source?
- Am I creating useful value or merely trying to take value?
- Does the customer genuinely receive increase?
- Is gratitude sharpening my perception of present resources?
- Is vision producing useful action?
- Am I stewarding increase rather than merely consuming it?
- Does wealth expand my ability to serve and create?
- Does the Kingdom remain first?
The Central Principle
Wattles' strongest idea is not simply that a person should think about money until money appears. His system joins thought with faith, gratitude, purpose, creation, service, efficient action, and increasing value. Wealth is produced through a living flow in which inward direction eventually becomes outward participation.
Scripture takes that principle deeper. God remains the source, Christ establishes identity, the Kingdom remains first, and wealth becomes stewardship. The believer can desire increase, believe beyond present appearances, build aggressively, create superior value, receive payment without shame, and multiply resources without making money his life.
The science becomes safest when prosperity remains under the Kingdom. Think clearly, give thanks, create rather than merely compete, act efficiently, increase the lives of those you serve, steward what returns, and remember the source of the power through which increase became possible.