Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz

I read this book when I was a teenager and it blew me away. I decided that I needed to brush the dust off it and give it a re-read.

This book was written by a plastic surgeon who noticed something interesting in his practice. He would operate on people who might have had a disfigurement or small flaw. And after the procedure, some people were ultimately happier, and others still saw themselves the same way.

He sums it up this way, “You act, and feel, not according to what things are really like, but according to the image your mind holds of what they are like.” 

In other words, our thoughts have way more power than we usually consider. Did you know that your body can’t tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real one?

We can even hold false truths that hold us back from achieving what we want to. Maltz says, “every human being is hypnotized to some extent, either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others, or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true.”

There are chapters in this book that deal with creativity and where it comes from. He tells us how we can nurture ideas and even shares with us his “Five Rules for For Freeing Your Creative Machinery”

He believes that we are machines and within each of us is a success mechanism. He shows us how to unlock that, how to get what we want in life, and how to be happy. And that all comes down to our thoughts.

Abarham Lincoln said it best, “Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

Maltz says . . .

We can acquire the “habit of success”; we can build into our gray matter patterns and feelings of success at any time and at any age.”

This book is so full of wisdom. I highly recommend it! I’m glad I re-read it, but most of his lessons stuck with me over the past twenty years. It truly was a game changer for me.

I hope you enjoy it too!

My List of 2015 Reads – my annual reading log (now complete)