Books always fascinated me. 

When I was a little child, my mother sat me on her lap and read to me.  She read mostly fairy tales. For a special treat, if dad was home, I could con him into reading me Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories”, and that was like manna from heaven. 

Once I was able to read better on my own, daddy would take me to the library on Saturday. (It was MUCH more fun than the hardware store!)

Libraries are magical. Entry is free, they are quiet and peaceful, and there is respect in the air: it’s the same respect I feel in Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame Cathedral, the temple of the Golden Buddha, the Louvre, or Fallingwater. You know the feeling. It’s almost like church. The difference to me is that the library embraces you. The books whisper, “Come here…open me…I have what you’re looking for”

It was there in those mysterious mazes aisles and bookshelves, I discovered the Chronicles of Narnia, Dr. Doolittle, and found my new friends Pippi Longstocking and Nancy Drew. I also found a biography series about fascinating real people, like Florence Nightengale, Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and Genghis Kahn.  I think there were about two dozen books in that series (written at about 3rd /4th grade level) and I devoured them all.

Daddy would get lost for hours, but I was never afraid because I knew he was in this safe, warm building, so I followed suit, rifling through random books in aisles that looked interesting to me, and after many hours, we would leave, each with a stack of books piled high in our arms, and walk home together.

As the tweenie and teen years came and went, I read what was required in school, along with anything else I could squeeze in, like the Songbooks of Bob Dylan and Judy Collins, and the occasional “Mad” Magazine. Life was busy. In high school, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens were my favorites. 

In college, something went wrong. The required textbooks (especially chemistry for pre-med students… ugh) were not like the juicy, rich books I had savored in the past. They were dry and tasteless and made me choke. I felt sorry for my daddy that he had to pay so much money for those big doorstops.

POSSIBILITY Books
In 1980, I was exposed for the first time, by a friend, to positive and life-changing books that would probably fall under the category of “self-improvement” books. These were the books that began to open doors of possibility to me. Here are the six that caused me to make big changes in my life and career.

I call these “Possibility Books” because they open up so many possibilities to you:

• “Life is Tremendous” by Charles T. Jones
• “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
• “Acres of Diamonds” by Russell Conwell               
• “How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling” by Frank Bettger
• “See You at the Top” by Zig Ziglar
• “The Secret of Success” by R.C. Allen

After reading those books, a shift happened. The books that had shaped me, growing up, were about the Past. Possibility Books were about what was possible for me in the Future. Both are great. In fact, I never really met a book I didn’t like. Opening doors to the past is great for learning. Opening doors to the future is great for making changes and taking action.