Having just completed David Schwartz’s unabridged Magic of Thinking Big this morning, I’m sensing more than ever a missing ingredient across the board in every piece of self-help material I’ve reviewed to date. It is the one thing that could make a world of difference, if only someone would include it.
If only I knew what that missing ingredient was, perhaps then adding it to everything else preached by the “Gurus” would transform all that great self-help advice into genuine, lasting change. “But I can’t seem to find it.”
When I finished David J. Schwartz’s “The Magic of Thinking Big” this morning, I didn’t feel a surge of exhilaration from Schwartz’s core message like I’d felt in the past when reading other books on self-help or self-improvement. I guess that’s because I’ve grown immune to the “Think Bigger, Believe in Yourself, Banish the Excuses, Take Action, and Success Will Follow” brand of Cool-Aid.
This version of the Homogeneous Mixture, seemingly echoed in so many personal development classics, rests on a premise that is supposed to be empowering: that your mindset drives your reality. While I know that changing your thoughts can change your life to some extent, as a person who’s been living with blindness for a long time, “I know that cannot be the entire formula for success.”
Sure! It is true that setting bold goals, cultivating a positive attitude, building good habits, being proactive, and overcoming fear with action are powerful principles worth adopting. However, while “action cures fear” and “ideas alone won’t bring success (David Schwartz)”; visualizing your way to wealth and never letting doubt creep in (Napoleon Hill) is only a part of the true formula. There’s something that needs to be added in order for “ask, believe, receive (Rhonda Byrne)” before the Law of Attraction will manifest your desires.
But it’s not shared. It’s there, but it’s not written about openly.
Of course, if the final peace to the puzzle was revealed, it would be bad for book sales. I get that. But at the same time, is it really fair that a bunch of people, who are only successfully selling us all books on “success” are only selling those books because they only “claim” to know the secret of “success”?
I think Tim Ferriss was right in his assessment of the Self-Help book industry during a podcast he did a while back. In so many words, he summed it up quite nicely. “Most Self-Help books are such bullshit!” Many authors are writing about being successful, “When they can’t even articulate in layman terms how they did it!”