The Stories We Tell Ourselves Shape Everything

This morning, my son told me he hated school.

I know this to be untrue. The kid loves learning.

Where did that story come from? From us.

From 2020, when he was six months old to almost three, we told him home was safe and the world outside was dangerous. Because it was—then.

“Home is safe” was the story that helped him survive.

In 2025, it’s the story that makes the world feel scary.

So I made him tell me a better story.

It took a few minutes. A lot of eye rolls, repeated asking, stumping over one thought fragment or another. Then, finally:

“I get to sit with a friend at lunch.”

That was good enough.

Story is weird.

In one sense, they aren’t facts.

On the other, they tell everything about us.

The human psyche works in story. Stories are what we live by. My son’s story about school wasn’t about school — it was about safety, friendship, and having a place to belong.

And to find myself living a life that's based in story feels like destiny, and yet...

Made up.

The scarcity mindset would take that truth and say it's all for show. We're all living in a made-up dimension. But is it not also true that our life is not just truth, but our perception of the experience we're living?

I used to roll my eyes at the idea of manifestation. The notion that you could think yourself into being rich or fit or fulfilled felt like something for influencers, not real people.

But lately, I’ve started to see it differently.

Because whether you call it manifestation, mindset, or story—what we repeat becomes what we live.

For forty years, I’ve carried my own survival story: scarcity.

My ball wasn’t as big as my brother’s.

My car wasn’t as new as the neighbor’s.

My bank account wasn’t as full as the guy on TV’s.

Ridiculous, right? But that’s how the brain works.

It protects the story that’s kept you safe, even after that story stops serving you.

So no matter what I achieved—a rare scotch at the top of the World Trade Center, a national commercial, the birth of my children—it never felt like enough. Someone else could have lived the same story and called it abundance.

The only difference? The narrative they practiced.

The good news: stories can change.

They can be rewritten, reshot, reframed.

And the hardest, most powerful act you’ll ever take is choosing to see your life from a new perspective—

not pretending, not faking, but choosing the story that serves the future you want, not the one that once kept you safe.

Because the future you want wants to hang out with the version of you who believes it’s possible.

Every founder, artist, or leader I work with hits this same wall. They think their problem is marketing. It’s not.

It’s narrative. And what's worse, it's all in our heads. We can choose to practice the narrative where we make the deals. We win the awards. We grow our community.

When they hit the wall, they’re telling an old survival story in a world that’s moved on.

So I’ll ask you what I ask them:

What perspective are you looking from?

What story are you practicing?

And is it time to rewrite it?