It Works by R.H. Jarrett Book Review: The 1926 Pocket Plan
It Works! by R.H. Jarrett is a pocket booklet from 1926, and its full title is the whole sales pitch: It Works! The Famous Little Red Book That Makes Your Dreams Come True! Kevin Trudeau's students keep circling back to it. Roy Herbert Jarrett was a Chicago sales and advertising executive, and he wrote the shortest instruction manual in this entire genre: write down what you want in order of importance, read that list three times a day, think about it as often as you can, and tell nobody. That is the book. Read it if you want a procedure. Skip it if you want an explanation, because Jarrett openly declines to give one. Rule three is why this little red book outlived shelves of longer ones.
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The DeVorss pocket edition runs 28 pages. You can read it before your coffee goes cold, then spend thirty days actually doing it.
What It Works Actually Tells You to Do
Jarrett opens by asking what the real secret of obtaining desirable possessions is. He never answers that question in the way a modern author would. He gives you a procedure instead and walks away.
The little book is organized into a handful of short sections, among them The Plan, Three Positive Rules of Accomplishment, Caution, and a closing letter from the author to the reader. There are no chapters in the ordinary sense. There is no case study. There is no bibliography.
The Plan
Jarrett's instruction is to write down on paper, in order of their importance, the things and conditions you really want. Order of importance is the part most readers skim past, and it is the part that does the work. A list of forty desires ranked at random is a wish. A list ranked honestly forces you to admit which one you would trade the other thirty-nine for.
He tells you to keep revising, adding and subtracting, until it reads right. A working document, not a vision statement you write once and frame.
The Three Positive Rules of Accomplishment
This is the load-bearing page of the book. Three rules, stated plainly.
| Rule | What Jarrett tells you to do | What it costs you daily |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Read your list three times every day: morning, noon and night. | Perhaps three minutes, split into three sittings. |
| 2 | Keep what you want in mind as often as you can. Keeping it there is the whole rule. | Nothing, and everything. This is the hard one. |
| 3 | Discuss the plan with no one except the Great Power within you. | Your favorite social habit, which is announcing goals. |
Rule one is mechanical and anyone can do it. Rule two is a practice. Rule three is what separates this little book from every goal-setting book written since, and it is the reason readers still try it a century later.
The Caution
There is a short warning section, and it is more careful than the genre usually is. Jarrett tells the reader that it is possible to want things that would make you miserable or wreck the happiness of other people, and he tells you to plan wants that serve others as well as yourself. He also states outright that from a scientific, psychological, or theological viewpoint some of his statements may be read as incorrect.
How to Run the Plan Without Getting It Wrong
The plan in practice, with the steps readers quietly drop.
- Write the list on paper. Jarrett says paper, not a notes app. The things and conditions you really want, in the order you really want them.
- Rank it honestly. This step does the work, and almost everybody fudges it. If two items feel tied, they are not tied. You have not decided yet.
- Keep revising. Add to the list and take from it until it is about right. A list that has never changed is a list you have never really read.
- Read it three times: morning, noon and night. Three sittings, not one long one. The schedule is the rule, not the total minutes.
- Hold what you want in mind between readings. Rule two has no procedure attached, which is what makes it the hard one.
- Tell nobody. Not your partner, not the group chat. Rule three is absolute in the text, with one exception: what Jarrett calls the Great Power within you.
- Read the Caution before you finalise anything. He warns that a person can want things that would wreck the happiness of other people, and tells you to plan wants that serve others as well as yourself.
None of that is difficult. All of it is easy to start and easy to abandon, which is a different problem, and one Jarrett does not help you with.
It Works at a Glance
| Detail | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| Full title | It Works! The Famous Little Red Book That Makes Your Dreams Come True! |
| Author | Roy Herbert Jarrett, 1874 to 1937, Chicago sales executive and advertising man |
| First published | 1926 |
| Edition reviewed | DeVorss Publications pocket edition, 28 pages |
| Sections | The Plan, Three Positive Rules of Accomplishment, Caution, a closing summary, and the author's letter to the reader |
| The method | A written list of wants in order of importance, read three times daily, kept private |
| Publisher's framing | Three hundred pages boiled down to ten minutes of interesting facts |
| Reach | More than 1.5 million copies, according to the publisher's author page |
| Follow-up book | The Meaning of the Mark, 1931, which the publisher calls the inner key to It Works |
| Our rating | 4 out of 5 |
What the Famous Little Red Book Promises, and What It Delivers
Before you spend anything, read the publisher's own copy. DeVorss has been printing this title for decades and the description has barely moved:
"IT WORKS presents a concise, definite plan for bettering your conditions in life. It shows you how to use the Mighty Power within that is anxious and willing to serve you if you know how to use it."
The rest of the blurb goes further. It says all scientific, psychological and theological explanations are eliminated. It says three hundred pages are boiled down to ten minutes of interesting facts, a concise definite plan and three short rules of accomplishment. It says millions have tried the plan it presents and know in truth that it does work. It calls this a simple book that defies tradition and experience.
Some of that is checkable. Some of it is advertising. Here is the split.
| What the publisher presents | What the booklet delivers |
|---|---|
| A concise, definite plan for bettering your conditions in life | Accurate. The plan is a written, ranked list of what you want, and it fits on one page. |
| Three hundred pages boiled down to ten minutes of interesting facts | Accurate on length, generous on facts. There are almost no facts here, only instructions. |
| Scientific, psychological and theological explanations eliminated | Accurate, and deliberate. Jarrett states the Power is beyond understanding and tells you not to try. |
| Three short rules of accomplishment | Accurate. Read three times daily, keep it in mind, tell no one. Nothing here helps when one of the three slips. |
| The Mighty Power within that is anxious and willing to serve you | Jarrett's framing, not a finding. He offers no way to test it and, by his own instruction, no explanation. |
| Millions have tried the plan and know in truth that it does work | Unverifiable. No sample, no follow-up, no count of the people it did nothing for. A publisher's claim. |
That last row is the point. Selling a simple book is easy. Proving it is not, and Jarrett never tries.
Who R.H. Jarrett Was, and Why the Initials
Roy Herbert Jarrett lived from 1874 to 1937 and worked in Chicago as a sales executive and advertising man. He published the booklet under the initials RHJ rather than his name. He spent years reading metaphysical success material before writing anything, and in 1931 he published a second and final book, The Meaning of the Mark, which his publisher describes as the inner key to the first one.
The advertising background is visible in every line. Jarrett writes like a man paid by the word to be short. No throat-clearing. No credential display. He states the offer, states the terms, gets out.
The objective mind, the subjective mind, and where the plan came from
Where he does gesture at a source, he points at Thomson Jay Hudson. Hudson lived from 1834 to 1903, worked as a journalist and as chief examiner of the US Patent Office, and in 1893 published The Law of Psychic Phenomena, which argued that a person has two minds. The objective mind is the waking, reasoning one you are using to read this sentence. The subjective mind, in Hudson's model, is highly suggestible: it takes what it is handed rather than arguing with it.
Hold that split next to the three rules and the design stops looking arbitrary. Reading the list morning, noon and night is repetition aimed past the objective mind. Telling nobody stops other people feeding the subjective mind a competing thought. Jarrett never spells this out and never once uses the word suggestion. Every rule behaves as though he believed it anyway.
Hudson's two-minds model was picked up by Thomas Troward and fed into New Thought. That New Thought current also produced The Science of Getting Rich in 1910. It runs on through Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich in 1937, Claude Bristol's The Magic of Believing in 1948, and eventually The Secret. Jarrett got there first, with a pamphlet.
So Jarrett was not inventing. He was compressing. That distinction matters when you decide what to expect from 28 pages.
Why This Booklet Keeps Coming Up Around Kevin Trudeau's Work
Three things in Jarrett line up almost exactly with what Trudeau teaches, and one thing is missing entirely. Both are worth knowing before you buy.
The written list maps to the desire stage
Trudeau's four-step manifestation formula starts with desire, and his complaint about most people is that their desire is vague. Jarrett solved that in 1926 with a pencil and a ranking. Writing wants in order of importance is a forcing function. You cannot rank things you have not defined.
Three readings a day maps to repetition and suggestion
Trudeau's claim about the THETA state is that suggestion lands differently depending on the mental state you are in, and that morning and night are the useful windows. Jarrett, with no brainwave vocabulary available to him, arrived at morning, noon and night by trial and error. The instruction is the same. Only the explanation differs, and Jarrett declines to offer one at all.
Rule three maps to Trudeau's whole framing on secrecy
Jarrett's third rule begins: "Do not talk to any one about your plan." That is the most interesting sentence in the book, and it is the one that connects hardest to what Trudeau teaches about the Brotherhood and about why he says certain material was kept out of public circulation. Jarrett's stated reason is spiritual. The practical effect is that announcing a goal buys you the social reward of the goal before you have done any of the work, which kills the pressure that would have made you do it.
What Jarrett does not have
Jarrett has no concept of resistance. If you try his three rules for six months and nothing shifts, the little book has nothing further to say to you. Trudeau's answer to that gap is counterintentions, the subconscious programs he says pull against the goal you just wrote down. Whether or not you accept his model, the gap in Jarrett is real and you will hit it.
One more contrast worth noting. Jarrett works entirely on the list. Trudeau's attractor field idea works on the room the list lives in, which is a different lever on the same problem.
Where It Works Sits Next to the Global Information Network
Trudeau founded the Global Information Network in 2009 as a private membership club, built on his claim that the most useful knowledge about wealth and success had been deliberately kept from general circulation. His own material, including Your Wish Is Your Command, runs as a long sequence with diagnostics, stages, and correction steps.
Jarrett is the opposite shape. One page and a handshake.
That is not a criticism of either. A 28-page booklet from 1926 is the seed. A structured program is the orchard. If you want a practice you can start tonight with a pen and an index card, Jarrett is the fastest entry point in print. If you want to understand why it stalls, you go elsewhere, and Trudeau's material is one of those places. The broader manifestation process is where the two meet.
Common Criticisms of It Works
The booklet has real defenders and real problems. These are the three objections worth knowing before you buy. Jarrett gets partial credit on all three, because he states that from a scientific, psychological or theological viewpoint some of his own statements may be interpreted as incorrect. A modern publisher would have cut that line.
The evidence is success stories and nothing else
Everything offered here as proof arrives in the form of success stories. The publisher says millions have tried the plan and know in truth that it does work. Jarrett writes as though the results are settled. Nobody counts the readers who followed the same three rules for a year and got nothing, which is the standing weakness of reasoning backward from winners. That is not a reason to skip the book. It is a reason to read the claims as claims.
There is no diagnosis for the day the plan produces nothing
This is the gap that shows up fastest in practice. Follow all three rules for six months, get no movement, and the booklet has nothing further to say. It cannot tell you whether the want was wrong, the ranking was dishonest, or something underneath was pulling the other way. A procedure with no troubleshooting section strands anyone whose first attempt fails.
The religious framing is not optional
Jarrett calls it the Great Power within you, and elsewhere Emmanuel, God in us. There is no secular edition, and no clean way to run the plan as written while quietly deleting that part. A reader who wants a psychological account of why a written, ranked, reread list might change behaviour will not find one, and Jarrett says plainly that he will not supply it.
Who Should Read It Works, and Who Should Skip It
Read it if you have read a shelf of this material and executed none of it. Jarrett gives you nothing to think about and everything to do, which is the correct medicine for a chronic reader. Read it if you want the source material behind a hundred later books that say the same thing at ten times the length. Read it if the privacy rule intrigues you, because that idea is largely absent from modern goal-setting advice and it is the most testable claim in the booklet.
Skip it if you need to know why something works before you will try it. If Jarrett's flat refusal to explain irritates you, this booklet will irritate you for 28 straight pages.
Skip it if the religious framing is a barrier, for the reason set out above.
Skip it if you already keep a written, ranked, daily-reviewed goals list. You are already doing the book. Save your money and go deeper somewhere else, perhaps starting with why Kevin Trudeau argues positive thinking alone falls short.
Our rating: 4 out of 5. It does exactly what it promises, in the fewest possible pages, with a specific and repeatable procedure and a warning section that shows more care than the genre norm. It loses a point for the total absence of mechanism and for having no answer at all when the plan produces nothing.
If you have read this far you already know whether rule three sounds like a relief or an annoyance. That answer, and not any fact about the author, is your buying decision.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the three rules in It Works by R.H. Jarrett?
Read your list three times every day, morning, noon and night. Keep what you want in mind as often as you can. Discuss the plan with no one except the Great Power within you. Jarrett calls these the Three Positive Rules of Accomplishment.
How long is It Works and how long does it take to read?
The DeVorss pocket edition runs 28 pages. The publisher describes it as three hundred pages boiled down to ten minutes of interesting facts, and that is close to accurate. Reading it is the easy part.
Who was R.H. Jarrett?
Roy Herbert Jarrett, 1874 to 1937, a Chicago sales executive and advertising man. He published It Works in 1926 under his initials and followed it in 1931 with The Meaning of the Mark, his second and final book.
Why does It Works tell you to keep your plan secret?
Jarrett's third rule instructs the reader not to discuss the plan with anyone. His own reason is spiritual. The practical argument is that talking about a goal delivers some of the satisfaction of achieving it, which removes the pressure to act.
Does It Works explain how or why the method works?
No, and it says so. Jarrett writes that the Power and what it does is beyond understanding and tells the reader not to try to understand it. He also notes that some of his statements may be read as incorrect from a scientific, psychological or theological viewpoint.
Why is It Works called the famous little red book?
Because that is its full title: It Works! The Famous Little Red Book That Makes Your Dreams Come True! The nickname comes from the title and from the format, a small pamphlet you can carry in a pocket. Jarrett published it under the initials RHJ rather than under his own name.
Does It Works offer any evidence that the plan works?
No. The publisher states that millions have tried the plan it presents and know in truth that it does work, and Jarrett writes as though the outcome is settled, but the booklet contains no study, no sample and no follow-up. All scientific, psychological and theological explanations are eliminated by design. Read the claims as claims.
Is It Works still worth reading a century later?
Yes, if you want a procedure rather than a theory. It takes minutes to read and gives you something specific to do daily. It is worth less if you already keep a ranked written goals list, since that practice is the entire book.