“How Are You Going to Go to College If You Can’t Even Spell College?”
By Brook, Founder
In junior high I wrote a letter to my grandparents telling them I wanted to go to college. I spelled it “colledge.” My dad saw it and said, “How are you going to go to college if you can’t even spell college?” I remember exactly what I thought: what kind of person says that to a kid? I’m going to do it anyway.
One sentence can become a ceiling
This is how most limiting beliefs get installed. Not through some dramatic event, but through one offhand sentence from someone whose opinion matters, at an age when you can’t yet tell the difference between their opinion and the truth.
A kid who hears that has two choices: agree, or decide. If I had agreed, that sentence would have run quietly in the background for years—“I’m not the smart one,” “school isn’t for people like me”—and I would have called it fate. I didn’t agree. I decided.
Then I started collecting evidence
Once I had decided, I started noticing things. My grandfather, Harry Landreth, had a PhD from Harvard and was an economics professor at Centre College. He started out in the corporate world, decided he didn’t like the commute, and became a professor so he’d have his summers off. He wrote books, including the textbook History of Economic Thought and Professoring, a critique of higher education. His wife, my grandmother Donna Landreth, was a professor too. She passed away about a year after he did. They were the ones who encouraged me to go to college.
My dad had a perfect SAT score, didn’t finish college, and had real trouble regulating his emotions. Being brilliant on paper didn’t protect him.
That taught me something I still use every day: the person handing you a limit is usually describing themselves. People who have actually done the thing you want tend to make room for you. People who are struggling tend to project. A limiting belief someone tries to give you isn’t a fact about you. It’s information about them.
Even a Harvard PhD can hand you a limit
Here’s the part I didn’t see coming: the people who believe in you can hand you limits too.
In college I taught myself HTML, built a website, and opened a wholesale drop-shipping account. I sold aftermarket accessories to car enthusiasts—this was the Fast and the Furious era—and some products earned a 40% margin with no overhead. My grandfather agreed that no overhead was a good business model. But he told me I couldn’t run a business and go to college at the same time. My grades would suffer. I had to finish school and quit the business.
He had written a whole book critiquing higher education, and he had a PhD from Harvard. I figured he must be right. So I quit.
I think if I had kept going for a decade and simply refused to accept anyone’s limiting beliefs, I could have been a successful entrepreneur by now. Not because of a number in the bank. The number is never really the point. What people actually want is freedom, and freedom isn’t all or nothing. You can have more of it at every stage.
A couple of years ago I bought back my original domain and went looking for wholesale accounts again. The company I used to work with was gone, manufacturers now only open wholesale accounts for established brick-and-mortar stores, and the JDM trend has mostly played out. Honestly, so have I. I drive a Mercedes now, and I’m more into Ferraris, where heavy modification is frowned upon and tends to hurt resale value.
But what happened instead was equally good.
Nothing was wasted
That little business got me my first job out of college: commission-only advertising sales at AT&T. I made $100,000 my first year. I started reading Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy, and I treated their mindset principles like an experiment—apply them, see if the numbers move. They absolutely did. I also learned AT&T’s consultative sales model, which is still the backbone of how I sell.
Working with entrepreneurs, I could see phone book ads were losing momentum and the internet was going to be the better investment. So I sold a lot of Google advertising programs, and redesigned clients’ print ads and landing pages so they converted better and earned a better return.
Selling to medical institutions, I was impressed by the professionalism in healthcare, and I wanted to sell something that helped people, with a stable base salary. So I went to a family-owned durable medical equipment company selling oxygen, CPAPs and BiPAPs. Then pharmaceuticals with a large corporation, for a higher base. I went to a medical sales college for people moving into surgical sales and graduated valedictorian. I became a medical device rep in the operating room and won President’s Club—and then the company laid off that entire division.
I went back to pharma. Then COVID hit, so I started a skincare business I could run from home and learned Amazon FBA. I showed a demo of that business in an interview and landed a job in tech sales. Today I work in rare-disease pharma, using skills from every one of those roles. I’ve won President’s Club multiple times.
What I’m proudest of is that I figured out how to work fewer hours and do fewer activities while getting better results. And the self-work is a big part of why I’ve stayed in my current role for four years—long enough that I now have the option to focus on my own projects and help people with what I’ve learned.
College mattered too. A degree was required for a professional job back then, and electives showed me where my strengths were: I was very good at practical financial math, abstract math was not my thing, and I did not want a career built on memorization. But being self-taught and running my own business probably taught me more than the degree did.
Adversity is fuel
Some of the most driven people I know are powered, at least in part, by someone who didn’t believe in them. Jung would call it the shadow. I call it fuel. Not bitterness you carry around forever, but energy you point at a goal.
Every hero’s story has the scene where someone says you can’t. That scene isn’t the end of the story. It’s what makes the rest of it worth telling, and it’s where the hero gets stronger and wiser. A layoff, a business you were told to quit, a sentence from your dad—each one was a scene like that for me.
I graduated. My dad has passed away, but if he were still here, I would tell him: look, I graduated despite the limiting belief you tried to project onto me.
The story my dad was carrying
For a long time I just thought my dad was hard. Now I understand more about how he got that way.
His mom, my grandmother Jean, was beautiful. She had a perfect smile and great style, and she sent me the best doll clothes. She also probably struggled with alcohol. When my dad was little, she left him waiting in a parked car outside a bar while she drank. When my grandfather found out, he was furious, and I think that’s probably why they divorced. The family blamed it on genetics. That’s a limiting belief too: a story that says this is just how we are.
My dad grew up fast. He was the oldest of three. At about two he was riding around the city on the back of a milk truck. As a young teenager, he was the one responsible when the cows got out and headed for the alfalfa. Once, walking with his brother, a big aggressive dog charged at them. My dad was ready, and he made that dog retreat. Nobody got bitten. Later he joined the Navy and became a medic. He wanted to be a sniper, but that took perfect vision. He never talked about his time in the service.
I saw who he was in a crisis. One day a van crashed outside our property: a drunk driver with his kids inside. My dad knew exactly what to do. He had me call 911 and bring down blankets, because the victims were likely to go into shock. He told me you should never move someone who has been thrown from a vehicle, because they could have a spinal injury. Then he sent me back to the house, stayed, and directed traffic until the paramedics and the medical helicopter arrived. When a woman walked over and said, in front of the little girl, that her brother was going to die, my dad told her to leave. You never say that in front of someone.
He was also an artist—that’s how he described himself. He made custom jewelry at an elite level, and he worked for a local jewelry store for $20 an hour, often bringing pieces home and working in his office late into the night. Once I asked him why he didn’t go work for Tiffany’s. He said, “I don’t know.” As an adult, I understand. He was a single dad in a system where he had to work to make ends meet, and he didn’t feel he had the luxury, or the ability, to walk in and tell Tiffany’s to hire him. That “I don’t know” is what a limiting belief sounds like from the inside.
After he died, the store’s owner said he was the best jeweler he ever had—but that he had his own sense of time. I think he was a perfectionist being paid by the hour, while another jeweler handled the fast, easy jobs. Elite skill, sold by the hour, to someone else’s business.
He had a perfect SAT score, and he never became wealthy. Intelligence was never his bottleneck. What held him back was a victim mentality and living in the survival frequency. A kid who learns early that he can’t count on the adults learns to stay on guard, and survival mode is brilliant in an emergency—when a dog charges or a van crashes outside your house. But you can’t build wealth from survival. When life feels like something that happens to you, you react instead of create, and you never stay with anything long enough for it to compound.
He did work on it. He went through AA, where the first step is admitting you have a problem. He spent a lot of time trying to regulate his emotions, like sitting alone on the porch after work to come down from the day. And he once wrote Donna a letter apologizing: he had told his dad not to marry her, and he was wrong. He was glad his dad married her—she was great for him. The letter said he had been wrong about so many people, and it dwelled on the things that hadn’t gone his way and the things he regretted. It read like betrayal trauma. But it also took courage to put “I was wrong” in writing.
He made Donna a necklace from one of his own designs. Years later, their RV caught fire. They had good insurance, so they didn’t care much about the RV—but Donna cared about that necklace. It survived, in a fireproof jewelry box, and she was so happy.
And he wasn’t wrong about everything. The family criticized him for “blowing” his $10,000 inheritance. He spent it on five acres about 30 minutes outside Austin—near where SpaceX now has a location—and the value of that land has gone through the roof. We lost it after he died, but the family’s story about him wasn’t the whole truth either.
He died of lung cancer when I was 16. He was already stage 4 when he was diagnosed, and they gave him six months. He lived a year.
He raised me like a boy, and growing up I thought he was unreasonably hard on me. Now I think sometimes a girl is her dad’s favorite boy. Discipline was his idea of the right way to raise a child. He wasn’t doing it to me. He was doing it for me.
He was carrying his own story. I didn’t have to carry it for him.
Two frequencies, one family
Humans get programmed, and it starts in childhood. But most people never take control of their programming, so they never expand to their potential. I was lucky: I had more than one model of success. Like the book Rich Dad Poor Dad, I got to watch two mindsets side by side, and see the difference in their results and their lifestyles.
In the summers, my grandfather was in Venice with Donna. My dad was mowing his own lawn. My dad believed that family members with money had a responsibility to help the rest of the family financially, and he identified as someone who was poor. My grandfather believed in tough love: let people learn their own lessons and live with their own consequences.
That was the whole family’s philosophy. They believed that inheriting too much money and never having to work ruins children, so instead of handing out money, they set up an educational trust: teach the kids to fish instead of giving them fish. His sister Mary, a nurse, invested so well that one day she realized she would never have to work again. She quit her job and played golf for fun, and in her will she gave back to education.
That’s the difference in frequency. My dad lived in survival, where life happens to you and the answer is for someone else to step in. My grandfather lived largely in the creator frequency, especially when he was writing his books. He could detach from other people’s narratives, focus on reaching his own potential, live his best life, and keep moving forward. The summers in Venice were the reward: stability, freedom and options. Both men were brilliant. Their results were worlds apart.
Neither of them was a villain, and both handed me limits. But I got to choose which frequency to tune into. So do you.
The bridge: the seeker frequency
Survival and peak performance aren’t the only two options. At Good Frequency we map four: survival, seeker, creator and peak performance. Most people don’t jump straight from survival to peak performance. They cross a bridge first.
The seeker frequency is that bridge. It’s the moment you realize there’s a better way and go looking for it: books, courses, podcasts, mentors. That was me in my first sales job, reading Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy. Seeking is how you level up your skills, and it’s a real step up from survival. You’ve stopped asking why life keeps happening to you and started asking how it works.
But it’s a bridge, not a place to live. You can get trapped there: analysis paralysis, one more course before you start, handing your decisions to a guru, consuming far more than you create. Learning starts to feel like progress, and it quietly replaces the action it was supposed to lead to.
The way across is to put what you learn to work. I treated Ziglar and Tracy like an experiment: apply it on real calls and see if the numbers move. That’s what turns seeking into creating. The creator frequency is where you make your own decisions, take consistent action and build with your skills. Every step up comes with growing pains. That’s what expansion really is: not a frequency, but the stretch between them. Your identity is getting bigger, you’re finding the courage to do new things, and you’re no longer comfortable. Leila Hormozi talks about having to overcome limiting beliefs like a fear of public speaking to get where she is. She had to feel her emotions without letting them control her, and teach herself that fear is a mile wide and an inch deep. It feels like crossing an ocean. It turns out to be stepping into a puddle.
Peak performance is what creating looks like once it becomes who you are. It’s the state Olympic athletes train for to win gold medals, and champions train for to win titles: focus, confidence and calm under pressure, until the hard thing feels like flow. You don’t arrive there once and stay. The goal is to spend more and more of your time there, and that state can be trained, with the same mental rehearsal athletes use and the self-image work Maxwell Maltz describes in Psycho-Cybernetics. I use mental rehearsal before every important meeting: I relax, close my eyes and play the conversation through in my mind, from the first hello to the yes. When my calendar is packed, I do it on a plane.
Here’s a simple test: this week, did you create more than you consumed? If you’ve read three books about starting a business and haven’t made your first offer, you know which frequency you’re in. Make the offer.
Choose your role model
My grandfather was a great model of a stable, free life. But for someone who wants to scale a business, compete, win and grow their impact, he wasn’t the right example.
I did have that example in the family. I just never got to learn from him. I visited him once as a kid, more than 30 years ago. He sold wild rice and manufactured gun cabinets for hunters, and I still remember his mansion full of elite hunting trophies from exotic destinations around the world. As the family story goes, he became a millionaire, lost it all and hit rock bottom financially, then used his mindset and skills to become a millionaire all over again. That’s peak performance. The money could be lost. The person who made it couldn’t.
Now imagine if I’d really known him. When I told him about my drop-shipping business, I don’t think he would have told me to quit. I imagine he’d have said, “40% margins and no overhead? Keep going. Here’s how to run it alongside school.” I would have had a living example of the road I wanted to walk, and I could have modeled every step.
Here’s the lesson: you don’t have to be born into that example. You can choose it. Pick someone who is living the success you want—a mentor, an author, a founder you admire—and study them. How do they think about money and risk? How do they spend their mornings? What do they say yes to, and what do they refuse? Then model them on your own road. A role model is a map, not a driver: study them, then make your own decisions. Handing your choices over to them is the seeker trap.
Wallace D. Wattles made the same point in The Science of Getting Rich: don’t give your attention to poverty or make a study of it. Put your attention on wealth, and on the people who have built it. I started young: as a teenager, visiting my grandfather’s summer house near Yellowstone, I read Suze Orman. What you study, you become.
You don’t have to relive it to rewrite it
I don’t believe you have to tell the worst moments of your past over and over to move past them. Retelling keeps you focused on it, and what you focus on grows.
There are better tools. Revision: replay the scene in your imagination the way you wish it had gone, or with who you are now stepping in. Reframe: ask what it taught you and who you became because of it. And then the only question that really matters: okay, that happened—what are we doing now?
Try it with your own sentence
Write down the sentence someone handed you. Then ask yourself three things. Whose belief is this, really? What were they going through when they said it? And who in your life—who has actually done what you want to do—believed in you?
Then write one line that starts with “I’m the type of person who…” and one action you’ll take this week that proves it. That’s the work Good Frequency is built around: noticing the belief, choosing a new one, and acting from it until it’s simply who you are. And today we have technology that shortens the learning curve I had to walk the long way.
None of this comes from a study. It comes from my life. Sometimes your own life is the evidence.
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