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.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “How to Think Big”
A recruiter for an executive training course told Schwartz that most of the college students she interviewed seem more interested in career safety than personal success. They’re selling themselves short. One way to get a better perspective is to make a list of one’s assets, then for each asset list three successful people who don’t have that strength—“you will find you outrank many successful people on at least one asset” (77).
The mind thinks, not in words, but in pictures, and these images affect the attitude of both speaker and listener. Instead of saying that something is a problem, which creates a sense of difficulty and trouble, Schwartz advises to instead describe it as a challenge, which implies fun or adventure. Likewise, an expense, which suggests loss, can be described as an investment, which implies future profit.
When asked how you feel today, say: “Wonderful!” Describe others positively and favorably; back-biting will come back to bite you. Compliment and encourage others. Present plans in positive terms. Instead of, “Whether we like it or not, we’ve got a job to do,” say, “Here is some good news. We face a genuine opportunity . . .” (82).
Those who think big look at things not as they are, but how they could be. One realtor sold empty farm acreage on how it might be transformed—in one case, from empty property to a riding stable, a tree farm, or a poultry and tree farm—and sold more properties. Buyers wanted not merely the land, but what it could be used for.
Customers should never be judged on how much they spend on a sale. What matters is seeing them as long-term patrons. Helping a customer with a small purchase builds tremendous goodwill that leads to many more sales in the future. In general, seeing the potential in people gets better results than merely seeing what they’re willing to do today. This applies to everyone, from sales prospects to poor people, and it applies to oneself.
Practice creating value in things around you—a room, a lot, a business—by thinking of ways to improve them. Practice also adding value to subordinates by imagining what they can become. Find ways to add value to yourself by visualizing what you can be; the specifics will then suggest themselves.
The owner of a printing company hired a young accountant, Harry, who began to help people throughout the firm. He found a way to reduce worker turnover, developed a plan that improved sales, and helped new hires get oriented. Harry saw his work, not simply as that of an accountant, but as a participant in the business as a whole. When the owner retired five years later, he made Harry the president.
Likewise, domestic or business quarrels are often over petty things that are better ignored. Four young executives received offices in a new building, but one of them got a smaller and less well-appointed one. Fuming over the insult, he began to work against the others. His own work deteriorated, and three months later, he was let go. In fact, the firm was growing quickly, and office assignments were handed out in a hurry without regard to status. The young man fumed over nothing and lost his job. Thus, it’s much better to focus, not on trivialities, but on the big picture—the real purpose of everyone’s efforts.
Chapter 5 Summary: “How to Think and Dream Creatively”
Creative thinking isn’t just for scientists and artists. Families, businesses, and just about anybody can use creativity to solve problems.
The first step is believing that it can be done. Schwartz gave trainings where he’d ask if those present believed jails could be eliminated in 30 years. They replied that jails are necessary and chaos would reign without them. Schwartz then asked if, just “for kicks,” the group would think about ways to eliminate jails. Within minutes, they came up with many suggestions, including more youth centers, reducing poverty, retraining the police, pinpointing crime hot spots, and medical interventions: “Belief releases creative powers,” Schwartz writes. “Disbelief puts the brakes on” (103).
One client, a young man with a wife and kid but only a year or so of college, wanted to get a better job but believed he had no time to finish his schooling. Schwartz told him first to return to school, and then think of ways that he could do this. The man did, found a scholarship, rearranged his work schedule, completed his degree, and immediately started a new job as a management trainee.
The first step is to remove the word “impossible” from one’s vocabulary. Next is to make a list of the reasons why one’s goals can be achieved. Sidestep appeals to tradition and avoid jealous people who don’t want you to succeed. Remember that there’s no one best way to do a thing, but as many ways as people who do it. To succeed, stay open to new ideas; experiment with new ways of doing things; at work, learn about departments other than your own; and look to the future rather than the past for answers.
One of Schwartz’s former students owned three hardware stores and just opened a fourth. She explained that her competitors work long hours just like she does, but she has a policy of finding constantly finding better ways to run her business. A technique for suggesting useful purchases to customers, a sales contest during a business slump, a credit plan to help customers who were on strike elsewhere, small toys for kids who pulled their folks to the stores: Each problem inspired a new solution that helped make her shops do better.
One way to do better is to figure out how to do more. An executive left a bank suddenly, and the manager interviewed three of his subordinates to see if they could take on the workload until they found a replacement. Two executives begged off, but the third volunteered to take on all the added tasks. He found and removed inefficiencies in his work flow, shifted his phone calls to specific time periods, and shortened his meetings. His assistant also took on some of the tasks.
In short order, he was handling twice the workload in the same amount of time. The manager decided not to search for a replacement but instead gave both jobs permanently to the young executive, along with a big raise. The most effective people are always busy; it’s unwise to give a task to someone with plenty of free time.
Another sign of a competent person is that, instead of doing all the talking, they do most of the listening. At one of Schwartz’s executive training seminars, each week a different participant would describe the biggest management problem they faced and how they solved it. Near the end of the series, a participant asked for help in solving the problem he faced; his assistant took down the answers. The room was filled with smart people, and he took advantage of it. His clever reversal of the process proved instructive and useful for everyone.
Asking for information and advice provides raw material for creative ideas. It also makes people like you more. Ask for people’s opinions of your own ideas; their critiques can help sharpen your thinking. Don’t wait impatiently for your turn to talk; instead, listen carefully to the answers and absorb the useful information they contain. It becomes “mind food.”
Good sources of people to talk to include professional groups in your area of expertise. Also helpful are groups outside your specialty: Listening to people in other fields expands perspective and can lead to powerful insights in one’s own career.
Ideas are fragile. To protect them, first write them down. Then, review them. Third, take the best ones and do further thinking and research on them. When they’re ready, make active use of them. Writing makes the idea visible and easier to gauge. Continue with it, adding diagrams as needed, until it can serve as a clear and easy-to-understand presentation for others.
Chapter 6 Summary: “You Are What You Think You Are”
The way people see themselves affects how they behave, and this, in turn, affects how others view them. When they believe they’re not worth much, they’ll treat themselves that way in public, and soon others will, too. If they view themselves as worthwhile, so will others.
How we dress affects how we see ourselves and how others perceive us. Different types of clothing can make us feel different about ourselves. Dressing up can help us feel smarter and more valuable. Others judge us by our appearance, and well-dressed people often get better treatment. This may seem unfair, but using it to one’s advantage improves one’s outcomes. One way to afford good-looking clothes is: “Pay twice as much and buy half as many” (131).
How people think about their jobs affects their prospects. Many people see their work simply as a way to pay the bills, a “necessary evil.” Some, though, view their position as important in its own right, part of a worthwhile project. Managers promote those who treat their current job with care and respect, because they know those employees will do the same in higher positions.
Employee attitudes tend to reflect those for whom they work. Executives’ attitudes, good or bad, percolate down to their employees. Their enthusiasms infuse their teams, but if they cheat on expenses or arrive late to work, that, too, will become the group norm. The best managers take a positive approach, and they evaluate their own behaviors to make sure they’re worthy of imitation.
At the start of a workday, some people spend time fearing the problems they’ll have and the bad day that will likely ensue. This reinforces the likelihood of failure. Instead of practicing “self-punishment,” people can practice “self-praise” by giving themselves brief pep talks in the morning (141).
To do this, write down a list of your best qualities, and from them compose a statement that boldly asserts your excellence. Once a day, in private, read this statement aloud, then read it silently several more times during the day, especially when a big challenge tests your courage. During the day, observe your appearance, ideas, conversations, sense of humor, and work attitudes, and ask yourself whether a successful person would have these traits. Modify them accordingly.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These chapters continue to explore the book’s main theme, The Importance of Believing in Success, by delving deeper into the methods by which people use their minds to create success. Schwartz goes into the nuts and bolts of how to think positively, develop good ideas, find good advice and resources, and present oneself as important.
Though the book’s main thesis is that belief in oneself is central to success, most of its pages are devoted to specific techniques, or how-to’s, that portray success in business and social situations. The book provides detailed images of what success looks like, images that readers can then use when visualizing success in their own lives.
Some people may complain that speaking only positively about people and projects ignores the problems they pose. Schwartz’s purpose, though, is to set the tone for encounters with others: If things are phrased in positive ways, everyone will tend to orient toward success, and problems that arise will be more easily handled. Seeing people as flawed, or projects as doubtful, does a disservice to those who will deal with them; people will tense up against trouble instead of moving forward to solve the situation.
Chapter 4 discusses thinking big about all sorts of things. It’s an idea that’s not restricted to self-help guides. President Kennedy and his brothers liked to quote Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who wrote: “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” (Shaw, George Bernard. Back to Methuselah. Penguin, 1949). That simple change in perspective can make all the difference.
Positive visualization triggers the mind to search for, or invent, new and better ways to do things. In Chapter 4, Schwartz writes: “Visualize yourself not as you are but as you can be. Then specific ways for attaining your potential value will suggest themselves” (89). He means that answers will begin to pop into your mind once you decide that you will find them. They don’t need to be forced, merely encouraged. Sometimes no ideas occur at first, but there’s no need to panic: Eventually they come, often when someone is doing something else entirely.
In Chapter 5, Schwartz mentions a former student who owned several hardware stores and attributed her success to a weekly plan for making constant improvements at her outlets. Beginning in the late 1940s, an efficiency expert, W. Edwards Deming, tried to get his theory of continuous quality improvement adopted by American corporations, but they weren’t interested. Deming found that Japanese business leaders were more receptive to his ideas. They adopted his quality-control system, which uses statistical analysis and input from employees to generate a constant improvement of manufacturing processes.
Soon many Japanese products were outselling American products. This was especially true during the 1970s, when US car companies found themselves in hot competition with Japanese firms, whose more efficient cars were flowing into the American market. Not until the 1980s did American manufacturers finally wake up to Deming’s system of innovation in quality control.
It thus took Japanese manufacturing competition to force US corporations to adopt quality-control methods originally developed in America. Good ideas can be invented, but if people don’t search for and apply them, others will, and they’ll enjoy the success that was left on the table. (For more on Deming’s methods, see: Salsburg, David. The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century. Henry Holt, 2001, Chapter 24.)
This section shows the gap between American culture at the time of the book’s publication and now, in 2023. Chapter 6 discusses personal appearance and its effects on others. The book was first published in the late 1950s, when formal attire was the rule at the office, and school dress codes were much more strict than they are today. Back then, being underdressed could be taken as a sign of low self-esteem; today, it’s a sign of personal independence and more casual social and work environments.
During the early 1900s, appearing anywhere in a T-shirt was tantamount to walking around in one’s underwear. Today, in much of the US, the casual look—including T-shirts, shorts, and sandals—is the norm; even at the office, informal clothing often is fine. Many would argue that it’s still possible, however, to signal self-respect by the care with which one chooses their clothing. Wearing raggedy, old clothes to a job interview, especially at a more formal office, would likely mean the candidate does not get the job.
Chapter 6 promotes self-care, a concept that modern readers may be familiar with, and describes how to write up a self-affirming short speech. The speech should describe you as if you’re learning about yourself from a commercial, with phrases such as, “You’ve got plenty of ability” and “you’re enthusiastic” (142-43). Other positive visualization books suggest that a way to supercharge these statements is to replace “you” with “I,” as in “I’ve got plenty of ability” and “I’m enthusiastic.” This first-person perspective generates a sense of directly experiencing ability and enthusiasm; as such, it’s a direct rehearsal of how those traits will feel during the day ahead.
