The Magic of Thinking Big

Belief is the precursor to action. If you have a true belief in yourself and conquer your fears, you will start achieving success. Also, the size of your success depends on the magnitude of your thinking. Think big, act big, achieve big. The Magic of Thinking Big shows us how.

David Schwartz shows us The Magic of Thinking Big through 13 different chapters:

1. Believe you can succeed and you will
2. Cure Yourself of Excusitis, the Failure Disease
3. Build Confidence and Destroy Fear
4. How to Think Big
5. How to Think and Dream Creatively
6. You Are What You Think You Are
7. Manage Your Environment: Go First Class
8. Make your Attitudes your Allies
9. Think Right Toward People
10. Get the Action Habit
11. How to turn Defeat into Victory
12. Use Goals to help you Grow
13. How to Think like a Leader

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If you’d prefer to read instead of listen, you can check out Adam Ashton’s blog. There’s a full summary of The Magic of Thinking Big here.

The Magic of Thinking Big Summary

“Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, really believe, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing a solution paves the way to solution.”

Success means different things to different people. You might value money, security, a nice home, a fancy car, an impressive job title, or it might be other factors like earning the admiration of others, having people working for you, being free from worries and fears, giving to your children, going on holidays around the world. ‘Success’ is a broad term, but there are a few universal constants: everyone wants success, everyone wants the best that this life can delivery, no one enjoys mediocrity, no one enjoys crawling or feeling as though they are second class.

One big theme of this book is ‘belief‘. Believe big, Schwartz says, because the size of your success is determined by the size of your belief. Belief gives you can ‘I Can’ attitude that generates the power, skill and energy to do great things. Disbelief, on the other hand, is a negative power that leads to doubt and failure. Belief is the precursor to action – once you believe that you can do it, the mind moves on to finding the ‘how’. Once you believe that you can, then you start looking for the tangible ways to get it done. If you don’t believe in yourself, your mind will be trapped in endless second-guessing, never being free to explore its potential.

After belief comes action. Stepping up to the plate a taking a swing – actually doing something is necessary to achievement. It sounds obvious, but many mediocre are paralysed and never actually take any serious action, preferring to stay safe and comfortable and do the bare minimum. Action cures fear, indecision and postponement fertilise fear. It’s always going to be scary whenever you step outside your comfort zone and try something new. You might think that you need to build up your courage and extinguish all fear before you can be unshackled and move forward into powerful action, but Schwartz says it actually works the other way around – rather than removing the fear to allow you to take action, if you step up and take action fist then the fear will disappear. The more you sit back and wait and ‘um and ah’ and try to talk yourself out of your fears, the more this indecision and postponement of action will actually galvanise the fear within you. The longer you wait, the harder it becomes to take action.

This is easy to say, but obviously harder to do. Fear is a big part of what holds us back from achieving big things. In the book, the author lists 8 of the biggest and most common fears that stop people, then offers a solution to that fear. They all boil down to a simply two-step process: 1. if you’re feeling fear, try to isolate what it is and boil it done to something very specific, 2. take action anyway. One common fear is the fear of people, specifically the fear of what other people might say or think if you try to do something new and different. If you identify this as a big fear that’s holding you back, think about what the opposite might be – instead of trying something new and different, something that you might fail at and something that might make you look silly if it doesn’t work, then the opposite of that would be doing the same things as everyone else, following the herd, and getting mediocre results by living a normal life. Which is worse? Also, think about the types of people who would laugh behind you back for trying something – are these the types of people you want to be friends with? Are these the types of people you respect (and want to be respected by)? Are these people trying things of their own? Or are they the people who are sitting back and following instructions, never making any mistakes because they’ve never tried anything difficult?

Confidence is an important trait for conquering your fears, taking action and ultimately achieving great things. We’ve read it a lot, that “it’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way to a new way of acting”. Rather than telling yourself ‘I’m feel confident’ and saying affirmations and trying to verbally pump yourself up, just got out there and start acting more confident and eventually your physiology will start to guide your emotions. Stand up tall and straight, shoulders back, chest out, walk a little fast, smile big, make eye contact with people – these are all things that confident people do. If you start doing these, you can’t help but feel more confident. If you do the opposite – slouch, hunch, avoid eye contact, have a blank or timid look on your face – it’s no wonder you’re not feeling any sense of confidence. 

The more successful you become, the less need to have to find excuses. ‘Excuse-it is’ is the failure disease – unsuccessful people are always looking for excuses as to why they can’t take action or why they are unsuccessful. They’re generally looking outside themselves to find external excuses, why the world is out to get them, why the odds are stacked against them, why it’s going to be impossible for them to ever achieve the big dreams they strive for. You need to find a cure for your Excusitis. Some of the more common excuses: “I’m not smart enough to succeed”, “I’m too young”, “I’m too old”, “I’m not lucky”. These are all just excuses and if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that none of these things are really holding you back.