The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz Book Review (2026)
The Magic of Thinking Big is David J. Schwartz's 1959 book on self-image, and Kevin Trudeau recommends it. Schwartz was not a motivational speaker by trade. He was a professor of marketing at Georgia State University holding a PhD from Ohio State, and the book reads like a man who taught for a living: thirteen numbered chapters, one argument each, plain sentences. His thesis is that the size of your thinking sets the ceiling on your results. Read it if you suspect your ceiling is self-imposed. Skip it if anecdote as evidence bothers you.
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This The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz book review covers the thirteen chapters, the valuable lessons that still hold, the criticisms the book has never answered, where it sits among the other self help books on achieving success, and why Kevin Trudeau points people at a marketing professor instead of a stage speaker.
The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz Book Review: The Short Verdict
- Published: 1959 by Prentice-Hall. The Open Library record for that printing lists 246 pages.
- Author: David J. Schwartz, professor of marketing and department chairman at Georgia State University.
- Core claim: self-appraisal, not ability, sets the ceiling on what you achieve.
- Structure: thirteen numbered chapters, one argument each, no theory section.
- Strongest chapters: two, six and ten.
- Weakest thing about it: not one claim in the book is sourced.
- Our rating: 4 out of 5.
What The Magic of Thinking Big Actually Teaches
Schwartz opens with six words: "Success means many wonderful, positive things." Then he spends the rest of the book arguing that the limit on those things is rarely ability. In his account it is self-appraisal, and self-appraisal is something you set rather than something you inherit.
Who David J. Schwartz was
Schwartz lived from 1927 to 1987. He took a BS from the University of Nebraska in 1948 and a PhD from Ohio State in 1953. His working life was spent at Georgia State University as professor of marketing, chairman of the department and Chair of Consumer Finance, and he ran a leadership development consultancy on the side called Creative Educational Services Inc.
That biography explains the book's odd texture. Schwartz was teaching consumer behavior during the week. He knew what evidence looked like and chose not to supply any, because he was writing for readers who would never finish an academic paper.
The thirteen chapters, and what each is for
Chapter one states the premise: belief is a mechanism, not a mood. Chapter two is the famous one, and Schwartz invented a word for it. Excusitis is his label for the reflex of producing a reason instead of a result. He sorts those reasons into four families, built on health, intelligence, age and luck. He is writing about the sentence, not the circumstance, and a modern reader will find his handling of the first family the most dated thing in the book.
Chapters three through six work the interior. Build Confidence and Destroy Fear. How to Think Big. How to Think and Dream Creatively. Then the chapter with the best title he ever wrote, You Are What You Think You Are, which is the argument the whole book is named for.
Chapter seven turns outward: Manage Your Environment, Go First Class. Chapters eight and nine handle attitude and other people. Chapter ten is Get the Action Habit. The last three chapters take on setbacks, goals and leadership: How to Turn Defeat Into Victory, Use Goals to Help You Grow, and How to Think Like a Leader.
The pagination tells the same story. In the 1987 Simon and Schuster printing catalogued by Open Library, chapter two starts on page 29 and chapter ten, the only chapter whose title names action, does not arrive until page 165. You work on your own head for a long stretch before Schwartz asks you to move.
How Schwartz actually argues
By example, almost exclusively. A man he knows. A salesman he met. A student who did the opposite. The examples are unnamed and unverifiable, and that is the book's real weakness. Schwartz held a PhD and chaired a university department, then wrote a popular book and left the citations at the office. What he did keep from the day job is structure. Each chapter carries one claim and works it through in order, which makes the book navigable in a way most of its shelf-mates never were. It is a teacher's book rather than a speaker's book. That is probably why it outlived them.
The Valuable Lessons That Hold Up for Achieving Success
Strip out the 1950s office and six practical ideas are left standing. These are the valuable lessons readers quote back decades later, and each one is a step you can take without accepting anything unusual about how the mind works.
- Excuses are a habit, not a diagnosis. Schwartz treats the reason you produce as behavior you can catch and stop repeating. His four families still cover most of what people say when a goal looks too big.
- Your vocabulary sets the size of the thought. Choose words that build big, positive pictures instead of shrinking ones, and cut the negative shorthand people use about their own work.
- Others take your valuation of yourself at face value. Raise your estimate first and watch the room adjust. That one idea is why the book has a reputation for building confidence.
- Environment feeds thinking. Change what and who is around you rather than fighting your mood. Schwartz wants successful people in the room, not cheerful ones.
- Action is what cures fear. Waiting for conditions to be right is another form of the excuse habit. Start before you feel ready and let momentum overcome the hesitation.
- Defeat is information. Chapter eleven treats a failure as a study rather than a verdict, and counts the small achievements on the way back.
Notice what is missing. No affirmations, no visualization ritual, no mystical mechanism, nothing to buy. Schwartz will not tell you that dreams arrive on their own. The instructions are plain enough to test this week, which is why a book about personal mindset still sells to readers who avoid manifestation titles.
Key Takeaways From The Magic of Thinking Big
| Chapter | Schwartz's claim | What he asks you to do |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Believe You Can Succeed and You Will | Belief is the operating condition for everything after it | Decide the outcome is possible before working out the method |
| 2. Excusitis | Excuses are a habit with four standard shapes | Catch the reason as you produce it and refuse to repeat it |
| 4. How to Think Big | Vocabulary sets the size of the thought | Choose words that produce big, positive mental pictures instead of shrinking ones |
| 6. You Are What You Think You Are | Other people take your own valuation of yourself at face value | Raise your own valuation first and watch how others adjust to it |
| 7. Manage Your Environment: Go First Class | Your surroundings feed your thinking, cheaply or well | Change what and who is around you rather than white-knuckling your mood |
| 10. Get the Action Habit | Waiting for conditions to be right is a form of the excuse habit | Start before you feel ready and use momentum as the fuel |
Common Criticisms of The Magic of Thinking Big
An honest review of a book this old has to name what it gets wrong, and there are three things worth knowing before you spend money.
The evidence problem
Nothing here is cited. Every example is a person Schwartz says he knew, described without a name or a date, and several read as composites built to land a point. A man with a PhD in the field knew what he was withholding. You cannot check a single claim, so a reader who wants to know whether thinking bigger helps anyone achieve more gets a story instead of a study. That criticism follows the whole 1950s self help shelf around, and Norman Vincent Peale took the same hit for the same reason. It matters more here because Schwartz had the training to do better.
Is it a good book, or just a famous one?
Both, in different chapters. The middle repeats itself badly: the same idea returns in chapters four, six and eight in different clothes, and an attentive reader starts skimming near the halfway mark. The setting has not aged either. The reader is assumed to be a man and the spouse is assumed to be at home.
There is also a limit the book never admits. A person can hold an accurate opinion of their own ability and still be blocked by money or circumstance, and Schwartz has nothing for that reader. He would tell them their thinking is small. Sometimes it is not. Read it as a good book with a soft middle rather than the flawless classic the cover copy sells.
How It Compares to Other Self Help Books on Achieving Success
Five titles from the same tradition share most people's shelves, and buyers want to know which to open first. They are not interchangeable. Each locates the cause of results somewhere different.
| Book | Where it says results come from | Read it first if |
|---|---|---|
| How to Win Friends and Influence People, Carnegie, 1936 | How you treat the person in front of you | Your work depends on cooperation you cannot order |
| Think and Grow Rich, Hill, 1937 | A burning desire held with definiteness of purpose | You want the money question answered directly |
| The Power of Positive Thinking, Peale, 1952 | Faith and a deliberately optimistic mental habit | You want the religious framing rather than the secular one |
| The Magic of Thinking Big, Schwartz, 1959 | The size of your self-appraisal | You are competent, employed and quietly aiming low |
| Psycho-Cybernetics, Maltz, 1960 | A self-image that behaves like a servo mechanism | You want a stated model of why self-appraisal governs behavior |
Read in that order and the shelf makes sense. Carnegie handles other people, Hill handles wanting, Peale handles faith, Schwartz handles the estimate you carry of yourself, and Maltz arrives a year later with the mechanism Schwartz never supplies. Each treats achieving success as a different first step. Anyone who found Schwartz persuasive but unexplained should read Maltz next.
Is it a motivational book or a marketing professor's textbook?
It gets shelved as a motivational book and sold as one, and Wikipedia's entry notes that Forbes called it one of the greatest self help books. The motivational book label still fits badly. Motivation is a feeling and it drains; Schwartz is arguing about a standing estimate you hold of yourself, which is closer to a setting than a mood. The same entry records Lou Holtz naming it his favorite book and Thomas J. Stanley crediting Schwartz's instruction to think big as the reason he wrote The Millionaire Next Door. Neither describes being motivated. Both describe changing what they thought was available to them.
Why Kevin Trudeau Recommends The Magic of Thinking Big
The clearest reason is sitting in the table of contents, and most readers walk straight past it.
Exactly one of the thirteen chapter titles names action. Get the Action Habit is chapter ten, and it is alone. The other twelve are about belief, fear, the size of the thought, self-appraisal, environment, attitude, other people, setbacks, goals and leadership. Schwartz built his book with roughly twelve parts interior to one part doing, and he did it without ever stating a ratio.
Trudeau states one. His Training Balance Scale puts success at 90% internal alignment and 10% physical action, and he argues that most people invert it, pouring their energy into hustle and their leftovers into the internal work. Schwartz's chapter count lands close to Trudeau's split by structure rather than by intention, which is why Trudeau points people here instead of at a productivity book. The shape of the argument already matches.
The second connection is sharper. Trudeau's Teachability Index multiplies willingness to learn by willingness to change, each on a 1 to 10 scale. A ten and a two leaves you at twenty out of a hundred. Chapter two of Schwartz is a direct assault on that second number, because an excuse is what a low change score sounds like when it is spoken out loud. Schwartz spends an entire chapter cataloguing the sentences people use to hold that number down. Trudeau supplies the arithmetic for why it matters so much that they stop.
Where the two part company is mechanism. Trudeau says counterintentions are subconscious programs running against the goal you have consciously set, and that they keep running whether or not you notice them. Schwartz has no equivalent. He tells you to think bigger, gives you drills, and assumes the drills take. Read together, Schwartz supplies the target and Trudeau supplies his account of why so many people aim at it and never achieve it.
Chapter seven is the one that maps most directly onto Trudeau's own material. Manage Your Environment, Go First Class argues that your surroundings feed your thinking, so you should upgrade what you sit in, read and stand next to. Trudeau's attractor field idea pushes the same instinct considerably further. He claims specific objects and environments pull wealth toward you. Schwartz would say the environment changes the thinking and the thinking changes the behavior. Same direction of travel, a very different claimed mechanism, and worth reading side by side precisely because the gap between them is visible.
One correction the book needs, and Trudeau supplies it. Schwartz is routinely shelved under positive thinking, and it is a bad fit. He is arguing about self-appraisal, not mood. That distinction matters because Trudeau argues that repeating a cheerful statement over a contrary belief changes nothing. On that specific point the professor and the promoter agree.
Chapter twelve, Use Goals to Help You Grow, is the natural handoff to the way Trudeau frames setting and holding a desire. Schwartz uses the goal as a planning instrument. Trudeau's version is doing something else entirely, and the contrast is instructive.
Where It Sits Next to the Global Information Network
The Global Information Network is the private success club Kevin Trudeau founded, and Schwartz is not on its syllabus. He is better understood as the plain-English version of the first thing the club's material addresses.
Trudeau's own programs, starting with Your Wish Is Your Command, are aimed at the interior: belief, subconscious programming, the 90% side of his scale. Schwartz is aimed at the same place with none of the metaphysics. He gets there through vocabulary, environment and self-appraisal, and never asks the reader to accept anything unusual about how the mind works. For a skeptical reader that makes him the easier door.
Who Should Read It, Who Should Skip It, and Which Edition to Buy
Read it if your honest read on yourself is that you aim low. Schwartz is unusually good on the reader who is competent, employed and quietly convinced that the larger version of their life belongs to somebody else. Read it if you have already worked through the tactical books on achieving success and your results did not move. Read it if you want short chapters that each make one argument rather than a theory to admire from a distance.
Skip it if you want sourcing. Nothing in this book is cited. The examples are unnamed and some read as composites, and Schwartz never once tells you how he knows.
Skip it also if 1950s office life will get in your way. The reader is assumed to be a man, the spouse is assumed to be at home, and the career ladder described no longer stands in that shape.
Check the edition before you buy. The 1959 Prentice-Hall printing runs 246 pages by its Open Library record, and Wikipedia's entry notes an abridged version published in 1987. Reprints from Wilshire, Cornerstone, Pocket, Simon and Schuster and Vermilion run from the low 200s to the high 300s of pages, so two readers can finish this book having read different amounts of it. Check the page count on the listing and buy the fuller text.
Our rating: 4 out of 5. It loses a full point for the absent sourcing, the dated setting and the repetition. It keeps four because the central argument about self-appraisal is stated more clearly here than in almost anything written since, and because the chapter structure does most of the reader's work for them.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main idea of The Magic of Thinking Big?
That the size of your thinking, not the size of your ability, sets the ceiling on your results. Schwartz argues that self-appraisal is a choice you make and then act consistently with, and that most people set theirs too low and never revisit it.
What is excusitis in The Magic of Thinking Big?
Excusitis is a word Schwartz coined for the habit of producing a reason instead of a result. He sorts the excuses into four families, built on health, intelligence, age and luck, and devotes his second chapter to it.
How many chapters does The Magic of Thinking Big have?
Thirteen numbered chapters, from Believe You Can Succeed and You Will through How to Think Like a Leader, according to the contents listed for the 1987 Simon and Schuster edition.
Who was David J. Schwartz?
David J. Schwartz lived from 1927 to 1987. He earned a PhD from Ohio State in 1953 and worked at Georgia State University as professor of marketing, chairman of the department and Chair of Consumer Finance. He also founded a leadership development consultancy called Creative Educational Services Inc.
Is The Magic of Thinking Big still relevant?
The argument is. The setting is not. Expect 1950s corporate examples and assumptions about who the reader is, and expect to do some translating as you go. The chapters on self-appraisal and excuses need no translation at all.
Which edition of The Magic of Thinking Big should I buy?
Check the page count on the listing before you order. Open Library records the 1959 Prentice-Hall printing at 246 pages, and Wikipedia's entry notes an abridged version published in 1987. Later reprints vary widely in length, so confirm the publisher and the page count rather than buying on the cover.
Why does Kevin Trudeau recommend The Magic of Thinking Big?
Because its structure already matches his Training Balance Scale. Twelve of the thirteen chapters deal with internal work and one deals with action, which mirrors his claim that success is 90% internal and 10% physical. Schwartz's chapter on excuses also lines up with the change axis of Trudeau's Teachability Index.
How many copies has The Magic of Thinking Big sold?
Wikipedia's entry on the book states that over 6 million copies had been sold by 2015, and that by the end of 1982 it was one of Simon and Schuster's best selling paperbacks with 1,494,000 sales.