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The Magic of Thinking Big: The true secret of success
What separates people who earn five times more from those who don't isn't intelligence or luck — it's the scale of their thinking. This microbook draws on David J. Schwartz's research into real professionals to show how specific mental habits around belief, action, and environment can quietly reset the ceiling on everything you achieve.
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Who it is for
For anyone who has talked themselves out of opportunities, blamed circumstances for their stagnation, or sensed they are capable of more but can't quite break through their own mental limits.
About the Author
Born in 1927, David J. Schwartz was a professor of marketing at Georgia State University and the founder of a successful consultancy company – Creative Educational Services Inc. – which specialized in life strategy and leadership development. However, he is today most famous as the author of “The Magic of Thinking Big,” a book that catapulted him into stardom and made him “the leading American authority on motivation” throughout the 1970s. Schwartz passed away in 1987 at the age of 60.
View author profileLessons
- Recognize the four forms of excusitis — health, intelligence, age, and luck — and stop letting them set your ceiling.
- Develop the habit of acting before you feel ready, because action is the only proven cure for fear and procrastination.
- Build your environment deliberately by choosing people, habits, and inputs that expand your thinking rather than shrink it.
Key Takeaways
- Belief functions like a thermostat — set it low and your mind manufactures reasons to fail; set it high and it manufactures routes to succeed.
- The gap between successful and ordinary people is not talent or luck, but the scale on which they think about themselves and their possibilities.
- Defeat only becomes permanent when you stop treating setbacks as data — studying them the way aviation investigators study crashes turns failure into a flight path.
More knowledge in less time
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