My childhood friends are all in prison.
A few went to prison for breaking into the little old lady next door’s home in the middle of the night while she was home—she easily IDed them to the cops.
Two of them, brothers, couldn’t make it to their dad’s funeral a few months ago because they were already in prison for selling drugs—he died of an overdose.
I grew up a poor kid in rural Appalachia—like food stamps, public housing, and the occasional church donation for Thanksgiving dinner kind of poor.
My friends were the same—poor kids.
Everyone I knew growing up was the same—poor kids.
When you’re a poor kid, you see a lot of failure, hopelessness, and insecurity.
And because of this, I used to think fear of failure held me back from success.
But I was wrong, and it took me almost 25 years to learn the truth…
•••
Daydreaming and Delinquency
When we were growing up, my friends and I were too poor to afford to go to the local amusement park.
So we’d walk along the flood wall, past the junk yard (and occasionally get chased by junkyard dogs—one of them was named Thunder), until we got to the fence of the park. One of the guys carried bolt cutters so we could cut a hole in the fence to sneak in. Every time they fixed the fence, we’d cut a hole in it a week later—they never caught us. We’d walk straight through to the park exit, get our hands stamped for readmission, walk to the nearby gas station for snacks, then spend the rest of the day at the park for free.
This is how I spent my childhood summers—with this group of rapscallions.
I daydreamed about a better life—a life where I had money, fame, and freedom.
We’ve all heard the phrase, “You’re the average of the five people you surround yourself with.” A more accurate version is, “Your immediate environment influences your perception of reality and how you interact with it,” but that’s not as pithy.
Well my environment, when I was around these guys, normalized abnormal things that most people would consider maladaptive or even traumatic.
For example, I remember going to one of my friend’s houses and seeing burnt spoons on the table from where his dad had just shot up—it was as normal and uneventful as if he’d left out his cereal spoon (he’s the one who had the funeral recently). Seeing someone passed out from drugs? Normal. Someone having a pocket full of pills? Normal. Having a special knock so the person on the other side of the door knows it’s not the cops? Normal.
So my perception of reality, of what was normal, was skewed from an early age. Plus other stuff I’ve talked about more in depth in What to Do When You Feel Like a Victim: Untangling a Lifetime of Anger and Fear.
We were poor kids, and this was normal for poor kids like us.
Over time, our antics escalated to what I used to think was just juvenile delinquency—but my fiancé, who’s getting her doctorate in Criminal Justice, has since informed me was straight up felony behavior…allegedly.
But at a certain point, I stopped hanging out with them. Breaking into an amusement park is one thing (no one gets hurt, and businesses price gouge anyway). But breaking into someone’s home, dealing drugs, or robbing people? Not my bag—count me out.
My friends believed they were destined…damned…to that life. But I believed there had to be a different path, that I was capable of taking a different path.
So I escaped.
Not just the path of criminality they’d chosen to go down, but also the limiting beliefs they’d inherited from their own environment that kept them from believing they could be anything more than what they were.
Because lack of money, intelligence, or resources aren’t what hold most people back—limiting beliefs are.
I wanted to break the cycle of poverty and limiting beliefs—for myself and my family—and the only way to do that was to succeed by becoming educated and “making something” of myself.
So I went to college and became the first in my family to get a four-year degree. Then I got a masters. Then a doctorate. Then became a behavioral health provider specializing in addiction treatment. Within a year of getting my doctorate, I was already at the top of my field and had supreme job security because I specialized in a high-need and underserved area (the only promotion left to get was to become a director, and I didn’t want to do that). I thought this was what success looked like, but I was wrong.
But when I got fired during COVID and couldn’t get another job (here’s the rundown of what happened), all the insecurities I thought I’d left behind in my childhood came flooding back.
Would I ever be anything more than the poor kid?
Could I ever become anything more than the poor kid?
•••
Entrepreneurship: A Euphemism for Personal Development
So I dove into entrepreneurship and everything it entailed.
I didn’t have a business background—remember, I grew up poor, was the first in my family to get a 4-year degree, and I never studied business in college. So I had no idea how to start or run a business.
But thanks to some frantic Googling, YouTubing, and meeting some incredible people on Twitter, I slowly Frankensteined together the semblance of a business.
I never felt pressure from my family to succeed—they supported me and my decisions unconditionally because they just wanted me to be happy.
No, all the pressure I felt was self-imposed. I knew I was capable of more, that I had a responsibility to reach my potential and make something of myself.
Success was the only option.
And thanks to getting fired and realizing I didn’t want to practice therapy anymore, success as an entrepreneur was the only option.
Yet despite all my hard work, luck, and ambition, I still felt like something was holding me back.
I must just be afraid of failing because I put so much pressure on myself. That’s gotta be what’s holding me back, I thought.
The issue is when you misdiagnose the problem, you develop the wrong intervention to solve it.
I scoured the productivity and self-help niches to try to figure out how to deal with my fear (and the self-sabotaging behaviors related to it like procrastination and perfectionism), but nothing worked.
Then I realized I wasn’t afraid of failure.
Because even if I failed, I’d wind up back where I started—poor, surrounded by people with limiting beliefs of their own, and trapped in an economically challenged area without much room to grow.
No, I wasn’t actually afraid of failure, it was just easy to blame fear of failure for what I was actually afraid of—success.
Because the identity that I’d carried with me all my life—the poor kid—would get lost if I succeeded.
I wouldn’t be the poor kid anymore. I wouldn’t be the underdog anymore. I wouldn’t be the scrappy, underprivileged, underestimated kid anymore.
And that version of me was foreign, alien, terrifying.
Fear of success holds more people back than fear of failure ever will.
See, if you’ve never achieved major success—however you define it—becoming successful represents crossing a threshold. If you’ve never succeeded, the only version of yourself you know is the “pre-success” version. Post-success you is unfamiliar, unrecognizable, unrelatable.
- I can relate to poor kids.
- I can relate to people who feel trapped.
- I can relate to people surrounded by frustration, hopelessness, and limiting beliefs.
Don’t get me wrong, I would’ve loved to be able to relate to rich people, to free people, to joyfully fulfilled people.
But damn, the closest I ever got to that was daydreaming about maybe one day being like those people. But people like me, where I’m from, just don’t become that—we spend our lives daydreaming about becoming that, which keeps us going through our life of mediocrity.
So I read books about successful entrepreneurs, I listened to podcasts about successful entrepreneurs, I watched YouTube videos about how to build a successful business, I bought courses about how to grow a successful business.
But it still felt like a fantasy—something I used to distract myself from my mediocre life—it gave me something to stay busy, but I still held onto the identity of the poor kid.
But Corey, you escaped that life. You got a doctorate in clinical psychology. You started your own business. You moved away from that area. You don’t do drugs. You have a supportive family. You’re actively pursuing your definition of success—how in the fuck could you be afraid of the thing you claim to want?
Because if I succeeded, I wouldn’t be that kid anymore—and that kid was all I’d ever known…all I’d ever been.
•••
Paradigm Shifts and Evolving Identities
I started sharing my ideas online, which allowed me to meet other people—founders, leaders, creators—on a similar journey. Some were early in the journey like me, others were years ahead and had 6-, 7-, even 8-figures in revenue and audience size.
Yes, some of them gave me tactical tips to succeed.
But more than anything, they gave me a model for what success can look like.
See, when you grow up a poor kid, success—and successful people—are alien. So that lifestyle, and the people who live it, seem fantastical and wholly unattainable.
I had tons of apprehensions about the consequences of becoming successful—would I lose my identity? Would it make me lose touch with my upbringing? Would it cause me to lose my humility or scrappiness?
But then I met people like Khe Hy, Nat Eliason, Ali Abdaal, Christine Carrillo, Dan Koe, Kieran Drew, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tim Stoddart, Lex Fridman, Steve Schlafman, and so many more who were incredibly successful across multiple metrics yet who were also incredibly thoughtful, compassionate, inspiring people.
As I got to develop friendships with them, I started to get to know the real them. They weren’t snobbish. They weren’t arrogant. They weren’t alien. They were regular people who just so happened to be successful in life and business.
Suddenly, the successful version of myself stopped feeling so alien, too.
If these people can be successful and still be who they are, maybe I can be too.
Because I realized, success doesn’t have to mean that you leave your old identity behind—you can choose to add new layers onto your identity.
As humans, we’re meant to evolve—it’s how we survive. We adapt to our environment. We learn. We change. We grow.
Our identities can empower or enslave us—and we have the power to choose our identities and how they evolve.
I’ll always be the poor kid from rural Appalachia who grew up on food stamps and public housing assistance.
But nothing says I only have to be that kid.
Because that kid daydreamed about becoming something, someone, more.
For too long, I was afraid of success because I didn’t want to leave that kid behind.
I’ve learned, that kid will always be a part of who I am.
But that doesn’t have to define me, to confine me.
I deserve to become what that kid daydreamed about becoming.
Success isn’t to be feared. It’s to be embraced.
Because success isn’t destructive—I won’t lose that part of me by succeeding. I’ll create a new, evolved, holistic identity that includes that kid.
Because that kid deserves for the life he daydreamed about to become a reality.
So instead of holding myself back to stay behind with that kid, I choose to take that kid by the hand and bring him with me…into the life we both deserve.
I hope you choose to do the same.
Read Next: Check out The Four Horsemen of Fear if you want a deep dive into the most common limiting beliefs holding you back in life and business.
