Thich Nhat Hanh and Positive Thinking

Through a series of small conversations, I had a delightful insight last week.
I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh (a Buddhist monk), and came across the story of a young man who wanted to take the civil service exam in Vietnam. Even though he scored very well, the heads of the school did not accept him because he was so young. Here's what the book said:
"People need to have a strong aspiration before they can become a bodhisattva who can liberate beings from suffering or someone skilled in helping the people and the nation. The young man in this case could have raged and complained. He could have given up. But he kept studying. When the young man took the exam three years later, he passed. He then ... went on to serve his country very well."
"When he failed the first time, he may have suffered. He did not know that all this was to help him grow up and do better. It is the same when we pray. We think that we did not receive what we prayed for, but we don't realize that we might have received somethign else, perhaps something greater or less than what we asked for. Our Buddha nature knows us better than we know ourselves, knows more clearly what is best for us."
My mom has told me this each time I've felt like life has dealt me a poor hand or I've suffered a blow. I did not get the owl field job I wanted one year, but then the next month got a wonderful job doing field work for a great zoologist. I did not join the Peace Corps, but I got the best dog in the world. A series of loser boyfriends break up with me, and there isn't a happy ending to this one yet. I did not keep my colt, but I met Bob, who is as close the perfect trainer for me as I will ever find.
So thinking these types of thoughts, I suddenly had a flash of positive thinking. It may or may not be true, but the buoyancy of the thought was enough for me:
Bob always makes those jokes about how I’m his retirement (his steak and lobster). I’ve always taken it to mean that I have so many problems, he will never run out of things to fix. I never once, until last week, thought of it as being that I have so much talent and potential, that he will be able to keep helping me improve. What helped me piece it together (the new way of looking at it) was something Alice said a week or so ago, about how Bob is so good that he doesn’t have to stop teaching his students or deliberately keep them at a lower level, because he always knows more to teach them. And so maybe what Bob has meant is that I have the potential that he can really help me develop into a high level rider, because he himself used to be a high level rider. (This matches with his small statement “I finally have a student who can win”.)