This book is for you if your life is a series of shattered dreams. This book is for you if you have no dreams at all. It's for you if you've bought the lie that you'll never amount to anything. That's not true. Your life is BIG-far bigger than you've imagined. Inside these pages lie the keys to recognizing the full potential of your life. You won't necessarily become a millionaire (though you might), but you will attain a life that is rewarding, significant, and more fruitful than you ever thought possible. The author of this book knows about hardship. Ben Carson grew up in inner-city Detroit. His mother was illiterate. His father had left the family. His grade-school classmates considered Ben stupid. He struggled with a violent temper. In every respect, Ben's harsh circumstances seemed only to point to a harsher future and a bad end. But that's not what happened. By applying the principles in this book, Ben rose from his tough life to one of amazing accomplishments and international renown. He learned that he had potential, he learned how to unleash it, and he did. You can too. Put the principles in this book in motion. Things won't change overnight, but they will change. You can transform your life into one you'll love, bigger than you've ever dreamed.

Think Big
Copyright 1992 by Benjamin Carson, M.D.
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carson, Ben.
Think big : unleashing your potential for excellence / by Ben Carson with Cecil
Murphey.
p. cm.
ISBN-10: 0-310-26900-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-26900-7
1. Excellence — Religious aspects — Christianity.
2. Success — Religious
aspects — Christianity.
3. Christian
life — 1960 – 4. Carson, Ben. 5. Christian
biography — United States. 6. Neurosurgeons — United States — biography.
I. Murphey, Cecil B. II. Title.
BV4509.5.C5C37 1992
248.4 — dc20
91 — 27217
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible:
New International Version. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International
Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy,
recording, or any other — except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without
the prior permission of the publisher.
Edited by Mary McCormick
Interior design by Beth Shagene
Printed in the United States of America
05 06 07 08 09 10 11 • 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Do It Better!
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with
superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give
us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into
ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the
distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of
past ages. Books are true levelers. They give to all who will
faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the
best and greatest of our race.
William Ellery Channing
Benjamin, is this your report card?” my mother asked as she
picked up the folded white card from the table.
“Uh, yeah,” I said, trying to sound casual. Too ashamed to
hand it to her, I had dropped it on the table, hoping that she
wouldn’t notice until after I went to bed.
It was the first report card I had received from Higgins
Elementary School since we had moved back from Boston to
Detroit, only a few months earlier.
I had been in the fifth grade not even two weeks before
everyone considered me the dumbest kid in the class and frequently
made jokes about me. Before long I too began to feel as
though I really was the most stupid kid in fifth grade. Despite
Mother’s frequently saying, “You’re smart, Bennie. You can do
anything you want to do,” I did not believe her.
No one else in school thought I was smart, either.
Now, as Mother examined my report card, she asked,
“What’s this grade in reading?” (Her tone of voice told me that I
was in trouble.) Although I was embarrassed, I did not think too
much about it. Mother knew that I wasn’t doing well in math,
but she did not know I was doing so poorly in every subject.
While she slowly read my report card, reading everything
one word at a time, I hurried into my room and started to
get ready for bed. A few minutes later, Mother came into my
bedroom.
“Benjamin,” she said, “are these your grades?” She held the
card in front of me as if I hadn’t seen it before.
“Oh, yeah, but you know, it doesn’t mean much.”
“No, that’s not true, Bennie. It means a lot.”
“Just a report card.”
“But it’s more than that.”
Knowing I was in for it now, I prepared to listen, yet I was
not all that interested. I did not like school very much and there
was no reason why I should. Inasmuch as I was the dumbest
kid in the class, what did I have to look forward to? The others
laughed at me and made jokes about me every day.
“Education is the only way you’re ever going to escape poverty,”
she said. “It’s the only way you’re ever going to get ahead
in life and be successful. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, Mother,” I mumbled.
“If you keep on getting these kinds of grades you’re going
to spend the rest of your life on skid row, or at best sweeping
floors in a factory. That’s not the kind of life that I want for
you. That’s not the kind of life that God wants for you.”
I hung my head, genuinely ashamed. My mother had been
raising me and my older brother, Curtis, by herself. Having only
a third-grade education herself, she knew the value of what she
did not have. Daily she drummed into Curtis and me that we
had to do our best in school.
“You’re just not living up to your potential,” she said. “I’ve
got two mighty smart boys and I know they can do better.”
I had done my best — at least I had when I first started at
Higgins Elementary School. How could I do much when I did
not understand anything going on in our class?
In Boston we had attended a parochial school, but I hadn’t
learned much because of a teacher who seemed more interested
in talking to another female teacher than in teaching us. Possibly,
this teacher was not solely to blame — perhaps I wasn’t
emotionally able to learn much. My parents had separated
just before we went to Boston, when I was eight years old. I
loved both my mother and father and went through considerable
trauma over their separating. For months afterward, I
kept thinking that my parents would get back together, that my
daddy would come home again the way he used to, and that
we could be the same old family again — but he never came
back. Consequently, we moved to Boston and lived with Aunt
Jean and Uncle William Avery in a tenement building for two
years until Mother had saved enough money to bring us back
to Detroit.
Mother kept shaking the report card at me as she sat on the side
of my bed. “You have to work harder. You have to use that good
brain that God gave you, Bennie. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, Mother.” Each time she paused, I would dutifully say
those words.
“I work among rich people,
people
who are educated,” she
said. “I watch how they act, and I know they can do anything
they want to do. And so can you.” She put her arm on my
shoulder. “Bennie, you can do anything they can do — only you
can do it better!”
Mother had said those words before. Often. At the time, they
did not mean much to me. Why should they? I really believed
that I was the dumbest kid in fifth grade, but of course, I never
told her that.
“I just don’t know what to do about you boys,” she said.
“I’m going to talk to God about you and Curtis.” She paused,
stared into space, then said (more to herself than to me), “I need
the Lord’s guidance on what to do. You just can’t bring in any

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Excerpted from Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence by Benjamin S. Carson
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