Everything Holding You Back Is a Choice (And You Know It)

There are two core ideas that should be engrained into your operating system:

1. You are not defined by your past.
2. You are in control of your future.

But so much of modern culture runs counter to these truths. We’re swimming in the language of limitation.

“Trauma responses.” “Generational patterns.” “The system is rigged.”

Entire online ecosystems are built around explaining to people why they’re stuck and giving them the vocabulary to stay there. The implicit message is you are what happened to you, and the best you can do is manage the damage.

Then there’s the other side of the coin.

The narrative that says the game is already decided before you play it. That your location determines your destiny. That the barriers are too structural, too embedded, too real for individual agency to matter.

You’ll hear it dressed up in sophisticated language. “Systemic disadvantage.” “Opportunity gaps.” “The myth of meritocracy.” And some of it points to real problems.

But the conclusion it leads people to is poison: why bother?

These ideas are not rooted in absolute truth. If they were, there wouldn’t be counter examples.

We wouldn’t have a robust history of exceptional outcomes delivered by people that, on paper, would be considered the least advantaged. With histories that should have held them back. And futures they shouldn’t have been in control of.

You Are Not Defined by Your Past

Without conquering this idea, growth is a lost cause.

You’ll continually ruminate on past events and make excuses about why they hold you back.

Adlerian psychology is the best reframing for this problem.

Alfred Adler was a contemporary of Freud, but he broke from him on the most fundamental question in psychology: does your past create your present?

Freud said yes. Your childhood, your trauma, your early experiences. They’re the engine driving everything. You’re a product of what happened to you.

Adler said no. And his reasoning is uncomfortable, which is exactly why it works.

Adler argued that we don’t act because of past events. We act in service of present goals. The past doesn’t cause your behavior. You select and interpret your past to justify the behavior you’ve already chosen.

That’s a massive distinction.

The person who says “I can’t trust people because I was betrayed” isn’t being driven by betrayal. They’re choosing not to trust and reaching back for a story that explains it. The event is real. The interpretation is a choice.

Adler called this “teleology.” The idea that human behavior is goal-directed, not cause-driven. You’re not broken by your history. You’re using your history as a tool. Sometimes to protect yourself. Sometimes to hold yourself back.

The implication is brutal and liberating in equal measure: if you’re using the past as a reason not to move forward, that’s a decision you’re making right now. Not something that was made for you.

Think about it in training terms. Every athlete carries injuries, bad races, seasons that went sideways. You can let a DNF at nationals become the story of who you are. Or you can recognize it as data. Something that happened, not something that defines what happens next.

The bike doesn’t care about your last race. Neither does the start line.

In business, it’s the same. Every founder carries failures. A product launch that cratered. A hire that imploded. A year where the numbers made you sick. You can let that become your identity: I’m the person who made that mistake. Or you can do what Adler suggests. Recognize you’re selecting that narrative, and choose a different one.

Serena Williams started hitting tennis balls on cracked public courts in Compton. A Black girl in a country club sport, coached by a father with no tennis background and a 78-page plan he wrote before she was born.

She went pro at 14, was doubted at every turn, and spent her career being told she was too muscular, too aggressive, too different for the sport. She won 23 Grand Slam singles titles. The most in the Open Era. Every piece of her past said she didn’t belong on that court, and she made it the most dominant stage of her life.

Adler would say Serena never let Compton, the doubters, or the sport’s gatekeepers become the cause of her behavior. She had a goal. Dominance. And she selected from her past only what served it. The cracked courts became proof of her toughness, not evidence of her limitation.

Richard Branson was a dyslexic kid who dropped out of school at 16 and started a student magazine from a phone booth. No degree, no connections, no industry knowledge.

He launched Virgin Records from the crypt of a church, nearly went bankrupt multiple times, and was told repeatedly he had no business entering airlines, telecoms, or space travel. He entered all of them. Built a conglomerate of over 400 companies. Not because his past set him up for it, but because he refused to let his past set the boundaries.

Through Adler’s lens, Branson didn’t succeed despite his dyslexia and lack of education. He reinterpreted them. The dyslexia forced him to simplify everything, which became Virgin’s brand. Dropping out meant he had no template to follow, so he wrote his own. He didn’t overcome his past. He repurposed it.

You Are in Control of Your Future

Unencumbered by the past sets you free to tackle the future. To manifest your destiny.

Joe Dispenza makes the scientific case for this in the first chapter of Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.

He starts with a simple fact from quantum physics: an atom is 99.99999% energy and only 0.00001% physical matter. Almost everything we think of as “real,” our bodies, our environment, our circumstances, is overwhelmingly energy, not stuff. We just act like the physical world is all there is.

Then he introduces the Observer Effect. A phenomenon in quantum physics where the act of observing a subatomic particle actually changes its behavior. The particle exists in a state of infinite possibility until someone pays attention to it. Then it collapses into one outcome.

Dispenza’s argument is that your mind works the same way. Where you direct your attention, your focused thoughts, your emotions, your intention, is where you direct your energy. And that energy influences what materializes in your life. Not in a vision-board, wish-it-into-existence way. In a neurological, measurable way.

Your thoughts trigger chemical signals in your brain. Those chemicals create feelings in your body. Those feelings reinforce the thoughts. And that loop, thought, chemical, feeling, repeat, becomes your identity.

Here’s the problem:

Most people are running that loop on autopilot. Recycling the same thoughts they had yesterday, which came from the same experiences they had last year, which are rooted in the same story they’ve been telling themselves for a decade. They’re literally re-creating their past every single day and calling it their life.

Dispenza’s point is that if you want a different future, you have to break that cycle. You have to think beyond your current circumstances, feel beyond your current emotions, and act beyond your current habits. You have to become, neurologically, chemically, energetically, someone new before the new reality shows up.

The future you want requires a version of you that doesn’t exist yet. And the only thing stopping you from becoming that person is the habit of being who you already are.

That’s not self-help. That’s physics.

Jim Carrey’s story is one of the most concrete examples of this principle in action.

In 1990, Carrey was a broke comedian in LA. Getting by on open mic nights and bit parts that went nowhere. But every night, he’d drive his beat-up Toyota up to Mulholland Drive, park overlooking the city, and sit there. Not moping. Visualizing. He’d picture directors he admired wanting to work with him. He’d imagine being told he was brilliant. He’d mentally rehearse a future that had zero evidence of existing.

Then he wrote himself a check. Ten million dollars. Dated it Thanksgiving 1995. Memo line: “for acting services rendered.” He folded it up and kept it in his wallet.

This wasn’t delusional optimism. This was a man deliberately breaking the loop Dispenza describes. Refusing to let his current circumstances dictate his internal state. Every night on that hill, Carrey was chemically, neurologically becoming the version of himself that could earn that check. He was feeling the emotions of success before the success arrived. Thinking beyond his environment. Acting beyond his reality.

In 1994, he landed Dumb and Dumber. His payday: ten million dollars.

You can call that coincidence. But Dispenza would call it exactly what the science predicts. A man who stopped recycling his past and started rehearsing his future until his biology caught up.

The Map Is Already Drawn

None of this is new. The psychology exists. The science exists. The examples exist. The map for how to take charge of your life has already been drawn by people who had every reason not to.

Adler told us over a century ago that the past doesn’t drive your behavior. You do.

Dispenza showed us the neurological mechanism for why people stay stuck and how to break the loop.

Serena, Branson, Carrey. Consciously or not, they rejected the story the world handed them and wrote a new one.

The modern narratives of limitation aren’t evil. Some of them describe real problems. But when you adopt them as your operating system, when you let “the system is rigged” become the reason you don’t try, when you let your worst chapter become your whole story, you are making a choice. Adler would tell you that. Dispenza would show you the brain chemistry that proves it.

You have two options.

You can keep recycling the thoughts, feelings, and identity of who you’ve been. You can keep pointing to your past as the reason your future won’t change. You can keep accepting the cultural narrative that says the deck is stacked and your hands are tied.

Or you can reject it.

Not with blind optimism. Not with a vision board and a prayer. With the understanding that the science, the psychology, and the lived proof of hundreds of exceptional people all point to the same conclusion:

You are not defined by your past. You are in control of your future.

The only question left is whether you’ll act like it.

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