Overview
David Schwartz argues that the size of your success is determined by the size of your thinking, and provides a practical program for thinking and behaving in ways that produce big results.
Schwartz, a Georgia State University professor of marketing, published The Magic of Thinking Big in 1959. The book draws heavily on the New Thought tradition running through Napoleon Hill and Norman Vincent Peale, arguing that the limits most people experience are psychological rather than real. It has remained in print continuously for more than sixty years.
Key Ideas
Believe You Can Succeed
Belief triggers the power to find the way; when you genuinely believe something is possible, your mind works overtime to figure out how to make it happen.
Cure Yourself of Excusitis
The failure disease is making excuses about health, intelligence, age, or luck; successful people refuse to let these rationalizations take root.
Think and Dream Creatively
Believing that something can be done sets the mind in motion to find a way to do it.
Who should read this
Readers drawn to mid-century American optimism and the style of confident self-help that preceded the more measured modern genre. Schwartz's voice is earnest, direct, and almost naive by current standards, and for readers in the right mood that simplicity is part of the appeal.
Who might skip it
Skip if you want contemporary research or nuance — the book predates most modern psychology of motivation. Skip also if 1950s American cultural assumptions about work, gender, and success grate; those assumptions are embedded throughout.
The verdict
A book that is more interesting historically than practically. Much of its advice has been rediscovered, better-supported, and re-sold by subsequent authors. But there is something refreshing about an unironic 1959 book with no notion that irony exists. Read if you want to understand the genre's lineage.
"Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, really believe, your mind will find the ways to do it."
— David Schwartz, The Magic of Thinking Big
If you liked this
How to Win Friends and Influence People is the better contemporary equivalent. Think and Grow Rich for the earlier version of the same tradition.