Old School Positive Thinking

I was around back when New Age was all the rage the first time. I got into tarot and crystals and all of that stuff, more for entertainment than anything else. When Marianne Williamson came out wit A Return to Love and introduced A Course in Miracles to mainstream, I was right there and practically memorized that book.

Then I got tired of New Age crap. It all felt marketed and every bit as synthetic as institutionalized religions. Still, I have stacks of those books and from time to time I flip through them.

But my reading tastes graduated from hippie-dippy empowerment books to management and business reading. For a period of about ten years I read everything on the latest management trends. What I found interesting was that the management books all sounded very similar to the new age empowerment books. Then I went to grad school, and my reading material took some very strange turns. It was grad school, what can I say?

So, the other day I decided that my work room was a complete disaster. I have a book shelf that has not been organized since I moved into my condo four years ago. Mostly it holds my old theatre books and scripts. There are two or three shelves dedicated to Shakespeare. And then in front of the book shelf there are stacks of books that have never really been sorted.

I found a book by Norman Vincent Peale, written in 1974. It was with a stack of management books, yet it's an empowerment book. Written well before I started purchasing either type of book, I'm not entirely sure where I got it. It may have come from a small library at one of my jobs where a VP was trying to get his management team to better themselves. I think I'm the only one who took some books.

Anyway, the title is You Can If You Think You Can and Norman Vincent Peale was the author of The Power of Positive Thinking. It's a very light read, but basically it says that anything you think you can achieve, you can achieve. I decided it was the right thing to read as I contemplate starting my own business. It took nearly three straight days to read, but I'm finished and now I'm a NVP fan. Have to get more of his books.

But, I also have reading I must do to plan my new business. The first chapter, almost the first paragraph, is about developing the habit of positive thinking. Without it, a start-up business is doomed. This book (with a pretty generic, forgettable title) brings me almost full circle in my reading phases.

But as I prepare, I'm discovering that this business idea has legs. I've yet to hit a snag that presents a real problem.