Success Quote by Maxwell Maltz

Maltz is quietly staging a coup against the moralistic story we like to tell about ourselves: that sheer grit runs the show. By calling willpower “so commonly believed,” he frames it as folk psychology, the comforting myth that lets us praise the disciplined and scold the “lazy.” His substitute is colder and, in a way, more merciful. Behavior isn’t primarily a heroic choice; it’s the downstream output of a “goal picture” your mind keeps rendering, then handing off to an “automatic mechanism” that executes it like a well-trained machine.

The line works because it relocates agency from the courtroom of character to the cinema of attention. “Imagination” here isn’t whimsy; it’s the mental model that preloads the system. If you repeatedly picture failure, embarrassment, rejection, your nervous system doesn’t need a dramatic act of sabotage; it simply follows the script you’ve supplied. If you picture competence and belonging, the same machinery coordinates posture, tone, timing, and persistence with less friction. Maltz’s rhetorical trick is to make automation feel empowering: you don’t have to muscle every moment if you can change the image the machine is working from.

Context matters. As a mid-century “psycho-cybernetics” thinker, Maltz wrote in an era intoxicated by control systems, feedback loops, and self-optimization. His subtext is proto-self-help with a lab coat: visualize differently, and your habits will reorganize. It’s persuasive because it flatters modern sensibilities (we’re systems!) while sneaking in an ethical pivot: stop treating failure as sin, start treating it as programming.