The Book I Almost Didn't Read (And the Man Who Made Me Buy It)

I was in a dark place when I first heard Steve Harvey tell his story.

Not the polished version he tells on stages now — but the raw one. The one where he talked about living in his car, about being a young man with a dream so big his teacher laughed at him in front of the whole class. He'd written down that he wanted to be on TV one day, and she held that paper up like evidence of delusion.

He kept the dream anyway.

And somewhere in the middle of that story, he mentioned a book — The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. He said it changed his life. That it gave him the framework to hold on when everything around him was falling apart.

So I bought it.

I'll be honest with you — I was uncomfortable almost immediately. The book talks about God. A lot. And at that point in my life, God and I were in a complicated place. I wasn't sure I believed. I wasn't sure I didn't. I was somewhere in the fog between faith and exhaustion, and the last thing I wanted was someone telling me to pray my way out of a problem.

But I was at ground zero. I had nothing to lose.

So I tried the practices. Reluctantly at first. Skeptically. With one eyebrow raised the entire time.

And then something small shifted. Then something else. Circumstances I had written off as impossible started cracking open. Doors I hadn't even knocked on began to open. The changes weren't loud or dramatic — they were quiet, like a dimmer switch slowly turning up the light in a room you'd forgotten could be bright.

What I realized wasn't just that positive thinking "worked." It was that my lens had been broken. I had been looking at my life — at myself — through glass that was smudged with every doubt, every failure, every voice that had ever told me I was too much or not enough. And as I kept practicing, the glass got clearer.

I started to see what I was actually capable of.

If I could send a letter to my younger self — to the woman sitting in the dark, not sure if the light was ever coming back — I would tell her this:

When it gets dark, there is always a ray of light coming from an unexpected place. Shift your focus until you find it, because it may arrive from the most random direction.

You are more capable than you believe. Take the next best step, even when you can't see through the fog. On the other side of that fog is success more beautiful than anything you dared to imagine.

Face your fear. Jump off the cliff.

You have wings. And your wings work.

Always, AnnElise