Where to Start with David J. Schwartz: A Reading Guide
Where to start with David J. Schwartz — how to approach The Magic of Thinking Big, his 1959 self-help classic arguing that the size of your success is determined not by talent but by the size of your thinking habits. A complete reading guide.
By Lena Fischer
David J. Schwartz (1927–1987) was an American motivational writer and professor of marketing at Georgia State University whose single major work, The Magic of Thinking Big, published in 1959, became one of the bestselling self-help books of the twentieth century. Schwartz taught and coached executives, salespeople, and students throughout his career, and the book distils what he observed about the relationship between thinking habits and achievement across those decades of professional observation. It has sold more than six million copies and remained continuously in print for over sixty years — a longevity shared by very few books of any kind.
Where to Start: The Magic of Thinking Big (1959)
The essential David J. Schwartz — and one of the most durable self-help books ever published. The Magic of Thinking Big opens with a claim that was counterintuitive in 1959 and remains counterintuitive today: that the size of your success is not primarily determined by your intelligence, your education, your talent, or your starting circumstances. It is determined by the size of your thinking — by the habitual patterns that govern what you believe is possible, what you pursue, and how you respond when things go wrong.
The excusitis diagnosis is the book’s most memorable concept. Schwartz identifies four major variants: health excusitis (I would do more if my health were better), intelligence excusitis (I’m not smart enough), age excusitis (I’m too old/too young), and luck excusitis (successful people just got the breaks). His argument is not that these factors are irrelevant but that they function primarily as excuses — that they are invoked selectively to explain inaction rather than acknowledged honestly as actual limitations. The test he proposes: find someone with the same constraint who has succeeded, and ask what they did differently.
The think-big behavioral techniques are the book’s most practical section. Schwartz argues that you cannot simply decide to think bigger and have it take effect — thinking habits are built through action habits, and the sequence runs in both directions. Act bigger than you feel (dress better, speak with more authority, sit in the front of the room) and you begin to feel bigger; feel bigger and you act bigger; act bigger and you begin to see bigger opportunities. The artificial start — behaving your way into a different self-concept — is an operational strategy, not self-delusion.
The company argument is the book’s most sociologically acute observation. Schwartz argues that thinking habits are substantially determined by the people you spend time with — that small thinkers bring each other down and that large thinkers lift each other up, and that the decision about whose company to keep is itself one of the most consequential choices a person can make. This is an empirical claim about social contagion that the subsequent psychological literature has substantially confirmed.
The dated elements — some cultural examples, some assumptions about gender and career that reflect the 1950s context — are real but do not undermine the core insights. The book is not a comprehensive theory of why people succeed; it is a targeted intervention on the subset of that question that is within individual control.
Reading David J. Schwartz
The Magic of Thinking Big is Schwartz’s essential and only widely read book. Readers who want to continue in the same tradition should explore the authors he influenced: Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking is the contemporary classic from the same era, and Brian Tracy’s Maximum Achievement applies comparable principles in a more systematic framework.
For the full David J. Schwartz bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the David J. Schwartz author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with David J. Schwartz?
The Magic of Thinking Big (1959) is Schwartz's essential and only widely known book — a self-help classic that has sold millions of copies across more than six decades without ever going out of print. Schwartz, a professor at Georgia State University, argues that the primary determinant of success is not talent, intelligence, education, or opportunity but the scale of one's thinking. Self-imposed thinking limits — what Schwartz calls the habit of thinking small — are more binding than any external circumstance, and they can be identified and replaced with specific behavioral techniques.
What is The Magic of Thinking Big about?
The book identifies the mechanisms by which small thinking perpetuates itself and provides concrete techniques for expanding it. Schwartz's central diagnostic is 'excusitis' — the habit of manufacturing reasons why success is not possible, with health, intelligence, age, and luck as the most common excuse categories. He argues that successful people in every field are not distinguished from unsuccessful ones by their absence of problems but by their refusal to let problems become excuses. The practical techniques include acting bigger than you feel, deliberately cultivating the company of ambitious people, and training yourself to ask how you can do something rather than why you cannot.
Is The Magic of Thinking Big still relevant despite being published in 1959?
The core insight — that thinking habits create effective ceilings on what people pursue and achieve — remains both counterintuitive and verifiable in everyday experience, which is why the book has outlasted almost everything published alongside it. Some of the cultural examples and some of the language are dated, and Schwartz's framework does not adequately address structural barriers that cannot be resolved through thinking alone. Read it as a contribution to the part of success that is within a person's control, not as a complete theory of why people succeed or fail. The behavioral techniques for expanding belief and changing action habits are as applicable now as they were in 1959.
What should I read after The Magic of Thinking Big?
After The Magic of Thinking Big, Carol Dweck's Mindset provides the modern psychological research foundation for Schwartz's intuitions about fixed versus growth thinking — the science behind what Schwartz observed empirically. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937) is the earlier classic in the same tradition, covering similar territory with more emphasis on the subconscious mind. Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle Is the Way applies Stoic philosophy to the same problem of how beliefs about obstacles determine responses to them — a more contemporary and more philosophically grounded treatment.
