David J. Schwartz, a marketing professor, published The Magic of Thinking Big in 1959 through Wilshire Book Co. of Chatsworth, California, in an era that prized the conforming company man. By the end of 1982 it was one of Simon & Schuster’s all-time paperback bestsellers with nearly 1.5 million sales, an abridged edition followed in 1987, and by 2015 it had sold over 6 million copies. The episode explains the book’s practical method: diagnosing excusitis, the habit of blaming health, intelligence, age or luck, and replacing the thought with action, along with Schwartz’s principle that action cures fear because confidence comes after the act, not before it.
The book’s reach extended through Schwartz’s own colleagues. At Georgia State University, fellow marketing professor Thomas J. Stanley brought him a manuscript called Marketing to the Affluent, about selling luxury goods to rich people. Schwartz told him to study how those people became wealthy instead and to think big, advice that led Stanley to The Millionaire Next Door. The episode then follows the book into sports, where coaches used it to fight the fear of failure in young athletes, and ends with Forbes naming it one of the greatest self-help books of all time.
- Schwartz offered a step-by-step tool to catch a thought such as I’m not smart enough, test the evidence and replace it with a constructive action.
- Stanley’s original book would likely have been a niche text for sales teams, the hosts argue, before Schwartz redirected it.
- Football coach Lou Holtz called The Magic of Thinking Big his favorite book.
- Joe Harrington handed copies to every player on his Long Beach State basketball team in the 1980s.
- Lefty Driesell gave the book to his basketball players at the University of Maryland.
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