In 1926, Roy Herbert Jarrett, a 52-year-old printer and typewriter salesman at the American Multigraph Sales Company in Chicago wrote a small 28-page self-help pamphlet on harnessing your inner power to live the life you want.

Before finding a publisher, he sent the small book to his friend Jewell F Stevens, who owned a local ad agency specializing in religious items and books, and asked for feedback.

Jewell read the book and sent back a two-word note: “It Works.”

Jarrett decided that was a suitable title.

Instead of using his full name, he chose to remain anonymous and went by his initials, RHJ.

Jarrett had spent years studying metaphysics, and drawing on the law of psychic phenomena, believed that we all had a “mighty power” within us to draw upon and get what we wanted. He felt that everyone could benefit from learning about and practicing autosuggestion and mental conditioning.

He’d taken an avid interest in motivational philosophy and ideas of this nature after hearing from a French pharmacist who studied self-programming, hypnotism, and psychology, named Emile Coue, who had passed through Chicago on a short visit.

Perhaps the original self-help guru, Coué created a formula for using simple affirmations, or mantras, to recondition our sense of confidence and well-being.

The mantra that formed the centerpiece of his approach was…