THE MAGIC OF THINKING BIG-DAVID SCHWATZ

This book abstract is intended to provide just a glimpse of this wonderful book with the hope that
you may like to read the original book at leisure and enjoy its real beauty.

The successful person thinks bigger than an average person.

Shakespeare: There is nothing either good or bad except that thinking makes it so.

Think big and you will live big in happiness and in accomplishments.

Chapter 1: Believe You Can Succeed and You Will

Belief, the “I am positive-I-can” attitude, generates the power, skill, and energy needed to do. Then,
how-to = do it develops.

Respect a leader, learn from him. Observe him. Study him. But don’t worship him. Believe you can
surpass him.

Write down names of 5 persons who surpassed you. Study what do they do that you don’t. take initiative.

How to Develop the Power of Belief

1. Think success.
2. Remind yourself regularly that you are better than you think you are.
3. Believe big.

Undertake self-development. No one is going to force you to do that.

Any training program: Content-what-to-do, method-how-to-do, get results

Only you can understand yourself. Only can command yourself. Only you can evaluate yourself. Only
you can take corrective action

We must train ourselves to observe.

Chapter 2: Cure Yourself of Excusitis, The Failure Disease

I am going to live until I die. Have positive attitude toward physical condition.

Refuse to talk about your health. Refuse to worry about your health. Be grateful when health is good.

We underestimate our brainpower. We overestimate fellow’s brainpower.

Chapter 3: Build Confidence and Destroy Fear

Fear is real. It is a powerful force.

Action cures fear.

Isolate your fear. Pin it down. Then take action.

1. Your brain is like a bank. You can make positive or negative deposits, and you can withdraw
whatever you want +/-ve. So consciously deposit only positive things and withdraw only positive
things.
2. Get a balanced view of the other fellow.
3. Develop an understanding attitude.

Effects of cheating: when you do anything against your conscience, you feel guilty. It jams your thought
process due to fear of getting caught. Criminals are caught not because of any clues they leave but
because they act guilty and self-conscious.

Chapter4: How to Think Big

One main thing for screening interview is motivation. One who can direct major projects, and contribute
to the company.

For success people are not measured by college degrees or family background, but by the size of thinking.

Probably the greatest human weakness is self-deprecation.

Know thyself doesn’t just mean knowing negative self, although that also is useful to know where we can
improve.

Here is an exercise to measure your true size.

1. Determine your 5 chief assets. Invite objective friend, parent for help. These could include-
education, experience, technical skills, appearance, attitudes, personality and initiative.
2. Next, under each asset, write names of three persons who have achieved large success but who do
not have this asset to as great degree as you.

The effect of our vocabulary on our own and other’s thinking is important. It must convey positive thing-
hope, fun.

Four ways to develop the Big Thinker’s Vocabulary.

1. Use big, positive, cheerful words and phrases to describe how you feel. To a “How are you?”
respond with “great or fine.”
2. Use bright, cheerful, favorable words and phrases to describe others.
3. Use positive language to encourage others. Compliment others at every opportunity. Everyone
craves for praise.
4. Use positive words to outline plans to others. Promise victory, build castles, don’t dig graves.
See what can be, not just what is with your potential. Make that projection exciting. Look at what you can
be after few years.

Practice adding value to things, yourself and others. Ask everyday “What can I do to add value to yourself
or others?”

Make your company business your business.

How to make a good speech?

Don’t concentrate on petty, trivial qualities of good speaker like-dress, posture, voice, mannerism and
grammar. Focus on important content and an intense desire to tell it to others.

Chapter 5: How to think and dream effectively

Creative thinking is: A low income family planning to send son to a leading university. A family turns an
ugly neighborhood into a beauty spot.

It is simply finding new improved ways of doing anything.

Believe that it can be done. Then your mind finds ways of how to do it.

Become receptive to ideas. Be a sponge for all good ideas. Whatever be your work, get interested in allied
areas.

“How can I improve the quality of my performance?”

Absolute perfection is unattainable. Hence, there is endless scope for improvement.

Develop a weekly improvement program. Divide job into different aspects and jot down how you can
improve every aspect.

Do what you do better and more.

Big people are better listeners. Small people talk more.

Ask for suggestions, not direct solutions. Discuss stimulating ideas.

Chapter 6: You Are What You Think You Are

You will observe that some people command confidence, loyalty, and admiration. They are also more
successful.

To be important, we must think we are important. Self-respect makes others respect you.

Look important. Your appearance talks. Use clothing to lift your spirits, and build confidence.

Dress well for important examinations. Look sharp because it will help you think sharp.

An executive looks like one if you dress like one. Properly packaged things sell better.
If you are short of money, pay twice as much and buy half as many.

You owe it to yourself and others to look best.

Think your work is important. Even if you are changing job, you must feel the present job as important.

Employers encourage applicants to talk about what they want to do. A positive person wants a chance to
do better. He doesn’t just focus on security, wages, leave policy.

To develop enthusiasm, think enthusiastically.

Give yourself a pep talk several times daily.

Tom Staley is a really important person. You are a big thinker about everything. You have got plenty of
ability to do a great job.

Tom, you believe in happiness, progress and prosperity. So talk happiness, progress and prosperity. You
have lots of drive. Tom, you are enthusiastic. Let your enthusiasm show through.

Tom, you look and feel good. Stay that way.

Tom, you were a great fellow yesterday and you are going to be even greater fellow today.

Select your assets-best qualities. Put these on paper. Read the way Tom does.

Practice this aloud in private at least once a day in front of a mirror with feeling. Read it several times a
day. Read it every time you feel down, and before anything important.

Upgrade your thinking. Think like important people think.

Think of a situation and ask yourself how a successful or important person would think.

Chapter 7: Manage your environment: Go first class

The body and mind are what they are fed.

Make it a rule to seek advice from successful people you know.

Executives realize that what happens on week-ends and between 6 P.M. and 9 A.M. affects the person’s
performance between 9 A.M. to 6 P.M. They have a constructive off-the-job life.

Do circulate in new groups. Make new friends. Select friends who have different views.

Avoid gossip participation. It’s extremely harmful.

Chapter 8: Make Your Attitudes Your Allies

When our attitude is right, our abilities reach a maximum of effectiveness and good results inevitably
follow in everything you do.

1. Grow the attitude of “I am activated.”

 2. Grow the attitude of “You are important.”
3. Grow the attitude of service first.

To make others enthusiastic, you must first be enthusiastic yourself.

Three step procedure to develop power of enthusiasm.

1. Dig in deeper. To get enthusiastic, learn more about the thing you are not enthusiastic about. This
includes job, hobby, persons, fitness.
2. In everything you do, life it up-warm handshake and warm smile, sincere thank you.
3. Broadcast good news to your colleagues, friends, family. Gives you 100 % attention. Convey how
good you feel.
Make a person feel better after talking to you.

Grow the “you are important” attitude

Make others feel important. Then they will do more for you. It pays to make “little” people feel like big
people.

When you help others feel important, you help yourself feel important.

1. Practice appreciation with a warm and sincere smile. Make it a rule. Use honest, personalized
compliments. Compliment for small as well as big things. Compliment everyone without
discrimination.
2. Practice calling people by their names. Pronounce names correctly, spell correctly.
3. Don’t hog glory, invest instead.

Praise is power. Think everyday “What can I do to make my family, friends happy?” do something
special for family, friends, colleagues often. Not expensive but thoughtful.

Get your family on your team.

Want to make money? Then get the Put-service-first attitude

Always give people more than they expect to get.

Chapter 9: Think Right Toward People

Success depends on the support of other people. You can’t force others to support. To win support think
right toward people.

For promotion recommendation, likability of the person is the first thing to be mentioned, and given far
more weight than the technical one.

We are lifted up by those who like us. Being likable makes us lighter to lift.

How to like others:

1. Learn to remember names

 2. Be comfortable person so that there is no strain in being with you.
3. Acquire the quality of relaxed easy-going so that things don’t ruffle you.
4. Don’t be egotistical.
5. Cultivate the quality of being interesting to people.
6. Study to get out scratchy elements of your personality.
7. Sincerely attempt to heal, on honest basis, every misunderstanding you have had or now have.
8. Practice liking people until you learn to like them genuinely.
9. Never miss an opportunity to congratulate upon anyone’s achievement, or express sympathy in
sorrow or disappointment.
10. Give spiritual strength to people, and they will give genuine affection to you.

The most important person in a gathering is the one most active in introducing himself.

I may not be important to him, but he is important to me.

When you make a pleasant remark to a stranger, you make him feel one degree better. This makes you
feel better and helps you relax.

Six ways to win friends

1. Introduce yourself to others at every possible opportunity.

2. Be sure to get your name straight.
3. Be sure you can pronounce other person’s name properly.
4. Write down the other person’s name with correct spelling.
5. Drop a note or call whom you want to know better.
6. Say pleasant things to strangers.

Recognize the fact that no person is perfect. Recognize the fact that the other fellow has a right to be
different. Don’t be a reformer. Live and let live.

No person is all good or all bad. Thinking right, we can find qualities to admire in the same person. We
have both positive and negative channels in our broadcasting station. We can choose which one to
operate. If sometimes you find yourself on a wrong channel, switch to better one immediately.

Success depends on genuinely liking people. For that we need to find reasons to like them. Before you
meet a person, review why you like him. It becomes mutual soon.

Conversation generosity wins friends. It also helps you learn more about people. Be a good listener to win
friends and learn.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

I never had a teacher and boss I hated.

Ask yourself, “What can I do to make myself more deserving of the next opportunity?” Don’t waste time
being discouraged. Don’t berate yourself. Plan to win next time.
Chapter 10: Get the Action Habit

There is plenty of room at the top. There are many qualified people, but there is one success ingredient
almost missing: that is the ability to get things done, to get results. For big job, you need to be a self-
starter.

There are people who love action and others who are passive. The former gets confidence, inner security,
and more income as a by-product.

Many people don’t act because they keep waiting for things to be 100 % favorable before taking action.

Expect future obstacles and difficulties. Every venture presents risks, problems, and uncertainties. Meet
obstacles and problems as they arise. The test of a successful person is not the ability to eliminate all
problems before he takes action, but rather the ability to find solutions to difficulties when he encounters
them. In business, marriage, or any activity, cross bridge when you come to them.

Every day thousands of people bury good ideas because they are afraid to act on them. Afterwards, the
ghosts of those ideas come back to haunt them. First, give ideas value by acting on them. Regardless of
how good the idea, unless you do something with it, you gain nothing. Acting on your ideas gives your
mind tranquility.

Use action to cure fear and gain confidence. Even seasoned actors or newscasters perspire before the
event, but once they begin, fear disappears.

Start your mental engine-mechanically

A successful person uses ‘Mind- force’ technique. He has deadlines to meet and can’t wait for the spirit to
move me, he has to move his spirit. He sits down at his desk. Then picks up a pencil and goes through the
mechanical motions of writing. He puts down anything, even doodling. He gets his fingers and arm in
motion, and sooner or later, without being conscious of it, his mind gets on the track. Sometimes, he gets
ideas from the blue, but most of his good ideas come from just getting to work.

Action must precede action. That’s the law of nature. The only way to start is start. Don’t deliberate. Just
do it.

Use mechanical way to accomplish simple but sometimes unpleasant business and household chores.

A special technique to help you: Use a Pencil and Paper. It’s the greatest concentration tool money can
buy. With paper and pencil you can tie your mind to a problem. When you write a thought on paper, your
full attention is automatically focused on that thought. And while you do that you write on the mind, too.
Tests conclusively prove that you remember something much longer and much more exactly if you write
the thought on paper. And once you master this technique for concentration, you can think in noisy or
other distracting situations.

Now is the magic word of success. Tomorrow, next week, later, sometime, someday are synonymous for
the failure word.

An Ad: it’s easier to spend what’s left over after savings than it is to save what’s left after spending.
Get the speak-up habit. Each time you do you strengthen yourself. Come up with your constructive ideas.

Be a crusader. When you see something that you believe ought to be done, do it right away.

Be a volunteer.

Chapter 11: how to Turn Defeat into Victory

Be a persistent man who is never defeated. Learn from failures.

The football coach who wins more games than he loses goes over the details of each game with his team
to point out their mistakes.

Salvage something from every setback. If we get emotionally upset we fail to learn.

In the total scheme of life, this course content won’t make or break you. But your attitude toward this
course may.

Important lesson: If you don’t produce, you don’t get where you want to go. Learn this lesson, and in 5
years from now you will regard it as one of the most profitable lessons you learned in all the time you
invested here.

Defeat is only a state of mind, and nothing more.

Put yourself in a glass tube and look at yourself as a disinterested third party would look at the situation.
See if you have weaknesses that you have never noticed before. If you have, take action to correct it.
Have courage to face your faults

Being self-critical is constructive. It helps you to build the personal strength and efficiency needed for
success. Blaming others is destructive.

Combine persistence with experimentation for being successful. Edison did both.

Tell yourself, “There is a way.” Then, back off and start afresh. Often we are so close to a problem for so
long that we can’t see new solutions or new approaches.

When I live with tough design problems for a long stretch, I’ve got to get away and let some new ideas
soak in. you would be surprised to know how many engineering ideas come to me when I am just sitting
beside a tree holding a water hose on the grass.

President Eisenhower was asked why he took so many weekend vacations. He said. “I do not believe that
any individual, whether he is running General Motors or USA can do the best job just by sitting at a desk
and putting his face in a bunch of papers. Actually, a president ought to be trying to be trying to keep his
mind free of inconsequential details and doing his own thinking on basic principles and factors. So that he
can make clear and better judgments.”

If you don’t like a job, you won’t go far.

All things do work together for good if you’ll just develop clear vision.
Chapter 12: Goals

The important thing is not where you were or where you are but where you want to go.

You can’t go to an airline counter and say, “Give me a ticket.”

New plant capacity is not built not for today’s need but rather needs five to ten years in future.

Trial and error is a poor way to select a career.

An Image of me 10 years from now

Work: What income level do I want? What level of responsibility? How much authority? What prestige?

Home: What standard of living do I provide for the family? What kind of house I want? What kind of
vacations? What kind of financial support for children?

Social: What kind of friends do I want to have? What social groups I want to join? What community
leadership position? What worthwhile causes I want to champion?

The three departments of your life are closely interrelated. But work department has the maximum
influence on the others.

Don’t allow self-deprecation, security, competition, parental dictation, and family responsibility to hold
you back.

Surrender to a goal. Let it obsess you. Intense goals keep you alive.

Progress is made one step at a time. Prepare to take detours in your stride.

Biggest investment is self-investment. Invest in education. Invest in idea starters-books and magazines.

Chapter 13: How to think like a leader

Rule 1: trade minds with the people you want to influence.

Rule 2: think: What is the human way to handle this.

Rule 3: Think progress, believe in progress and push for progress.

Think improvements in everything you do. Think high standards in everything you do.

Rule 4: Take time out to confer with your-self and tap your supreme thinking power.