I was raiding my room this morning, searching for things to clear out for my seasonal Amazon and eBay sales when I started to take a critical look at my bookshelf. At the beginning of every school semester, it is customary for me to unload all of my unused school books in order supplement the price of the new ones, but I started to wonder if I had any personal books that could be of value to someone else too. It wasn't long before my eyes fell to "How I Retired at Age 26" by Asha Tyson, a book I hadn't read in a while sitting in the corner of my bookshelf.I picked up the book and stared at it longingly with mixed feelings. I loved the book in some parts and cared less for it in others, but I allowed the book to remain in my collection so long because it stood less as a business book and more as a guide to an alternative way of thinking. The retirement Asha describes is not retirement in the traditional sense. Though she never says whether or not she has reached financial retirement, throughout the book she talks about how her life story has led her to the "retirement" of negative beliefs.A "rough life" is a gross understatement for the pain and suffering Asha endured growing up. Born in Detroit to a mentally-ill mother who blamed Asha for her father's early departure from their lives, Asha faced homelessness, all kinds of abuse, and apathetic teachers and social workers who refused to take action to Asha's plight. Yet with no money and no family to support her, Asha managed to go to college and earn both her undergraduate and masters degree. By all measures of success, Asha had "made it".Yet everything she had--including all the new possessions she bough on credit--accompanied what Asha describes as underlying feelings of inadequacy, propelling her to get all the trappings of success to prove to no one in particular that she was worthwhile. It was at that point that Asha vowed to "retire" from harboring such limiting thoughts and has been living that manifesto ever since.While the first part of the book was extremely compelling for the story summarized above, the second half of the book unfortunately left much to be desired. By extolling redundant self-help advice that did her personal story no justice, what could have ended as an amazing book simply fell flat. Additionally, many of the links listed in her book are now defunct and the links that are still available convey a sense of desperation with the way her informational products are presented.That said, I still enjoyed the personal introspection that Asha's story provoked even months after the fact. I thought about how the parallels of our stories could diverge so greatly yet could leave us both facing similar issues in the end. We are two black girls from Detroit, one of us raised in unspeakable abuse and the other in middle-class normalcy. The fact that we could we could even share similar mental blocks when we each faced incredibly different circumstances speaks the fact that success is more of a function of what you choose to believe and less about where you came from.As many things that I want to do, there have been time when I wouldn't even give myself the green light because I just couldn't get my thinking together. Write a book? Oh, no one would read it. Speak at a conference? Oh, I don't have the authority to do that. Teach a class on some of the things I know? Oh, no one will show up. Start a consulting business to help other would-be entrepreneurs? Oh, no one will pay you for that. There definitely have been days when I felt inadequate for no reason, and because of it, I refused to let myself move forward with some of the goals I wanted to accomplish most. It's funny, but Asha's story taught me how to retire so that I could learn how to get back to work.***Have you ever had persistent negative thinking that you simply just had to retire? How did you get over the hump? Share your comments below.