55 pages • 1 hour read
Dr. David SchwartzThe Magic Of Thinking Big
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1959A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Psycho-Philosophical Context: Positive Thinking
The Magic of Thinking Big is part of the self-help genre that traces its origins to New Thought, a system of beliefs that became popular in America during the 1800s. New Thought holds that thoughts create reality, and that the way people think about themselves, good or bad, determines the outcomes in their lives.
As part of the can-do traditions forming at that time in American culture, New Thought drew some of its precepts from transcendentalism, a philosophy popularized by American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and, to some degree, the Unitarian Church. They held that goodness and the spiritual were inherent in the physical world, not separate from it, that people become corrupted by their interactions with society, and that true independence of thought revives creative insight and returns individuals, thus revived, to a better sense of community.
In the middle 1800s, American clockmaker and mentalist Phineas Quimby taught an early version of what would become New Thought. One of his students was Mary Baker Eddy, who believed that illness was an illusion and that Jesus taught as much. She formed a breakaway Protestant church, Christian Science, whose congregations grew rapidly during the late 1800s and early-to-mid 1900s.
New Thought also borrows from the theories of hypnotism and auto-hypnosis that first became widely known in the early 1800s in Europe and the US. These theories hold that focused attention on spoken, guided “suggestions” cures illness and improves a person’s behaviors. Hypnotic techniques still find application in medicine and psychology in the present day.
Chief among the beliefs of New Thought is the “law of attraction,” by which thoughts attract similar things: Positive thoughts attract positive results, while negative thoughts attract the negative. Thus, thought is a power that brings about the things that people envision. A constant, steady focus on anything, good or bad, will cause it to manifest in reality.
During the 1900s and into the 2000s, self-help books on positive thought focused on this “law of attraction” or simply on the theory that people’s beliefs determine outcomes. Among the most famous such books are Think and Grow Rich (1937) by Napoleon Hill, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) by Norman Vincent Peale, Psycho-Cybernetics (1960) by Maxwell Maltz, and, more recently, the books and lectures of Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books and TV shows. In 2006, a film, The Secret, revived interest in the law of attraction.
Researchers have reached a more modest conclusion—that positive thoughts cause people to be more optimistic, which in turn permits them to work more persistently toward reaching their goals. There’s also a large dose of the placebo effect: Patients who take medicine hopefully often get better even when the “medicine” contains no curative chemicals (Flatow, Ira. “One Scholar’s Take On The Power of The Placebo.” NPR Talks of the Nation, 6 Jan 2012).
Thus, there seems to be some scientific evidence that positive thoughts can affect people’s lives for the better. Exactly how that works, and by how much, remains an unsettled question.
Literary Context: Techniques of the Self-Help Genre
David Schwartz’s book has influenced millions of readers with its direct writing, relentlessly positive and upbeat tone, and directions for applying success thinking to everyday situations. The book also employs several techniques common to the self-help category, including chapter summaries, anecdotes, numbered lists, and calls to action.
At the end of a chapter, Schwartz summarizes the chapter with a brief list of principles. The book thus can be treated informally as a reference manual on success thinking.
Schwartz also uses another technique widely employed in self-help books: He gives lots of examples from real life about people who benefit from the principles described—and, by contrast, he presents cases where people who fail to use those methods struggle in their pursuits. These anecdotes and testimonials serve as mini-stories that illustrate his ideas.
Schwartz arranges many of his ideas into numbered lists of success tips. He does this several times in each chapter. It’s a technique designed to simplify the process of absorbing a lot of information. In recent decades, advice books often replace such numbers with bold dots in the form of bulleted lists, but the principle is the same.
The author’s advice is often couched in calls to action. Examples include the following: “Give yourself a pep talk several times daily” (145), and “Create your first thirty-day improvement guide right now” (269). This encourages readers to commit to the process and get results; it’s a technique often seen in self-help books that stress positive thinking.
Schwartz thus presents ideas, gives examples of their use in real life, summarizes the concepts with short lists of techniques to remember, and then briefly restates the main principles at the end of each chapter. Many other self-help books draw on the same techniques, and their tone, like that of The Magic of Thinking Big, tends to be unstintingly optimistic. These traits have become common markers of the genre.
