The Impostor Syndrome: Breaking Barriers to Achieve Wealth and Success

To say that I was a quiet kid would be understating it to the extreme. I can recall going days without speaking to other kids at school. I was too shy and full of self-doubt that I felt if I didn’t say anything then I wouldn’t be teased for saying something stupid.

On the positive side, the fear that I might be judged as being inadequate for the task or endeavor drove me to study, research and develop a true hunger for information, learning, wealth and success. As I entered any new field or endeavor, I would invest time and money into learning how the best of the best made a success of it and then I would model those key behaviors and strategies.

There is no doubt that the martial arts has played a key role in me gaining the self-confidence to give myself a chance at success. From my first karate class on February 12, 1974, I knew I had found my calling.   As my competence in the martial arts improved, my confidence in many areas of life improved. If I could learn to jump over two people and break three boards, certainly I could learn to drive a car. Again, competence leads to confidence.

I didn’t have to work many hours and I had Friday through Sunday off. As a young man, you don’t have many needs nor does anyone expect you to be well off.  So, I always had a little cash in my pocket. Being a champion karate instructor in my early 20s had all kinds of social benefits from meeting girls to being treated like a local celebrity.

However, my friends at the time were following a more traditional path. They were going to college and/or working at jobs they hated. They were broke but I always had some cash to play with. They would tease me about getting a real job while envying my position.

One weekend, I was in Gainesville to fight in a tournament and came up a day early to have lunch with a former girlfriend.  Over a nice outdoor lunch, I described to her my growing feelings of self-doubt and guilt, “I work maybe three hours a day, Monday through Thursday. I make enough money to get by. On the other hand, my friends are all working 40 or more hours and struggling. How can that be?” She looked me straight in the eyes and said, “John, I know you. You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

There are moments in your life that I call emotional thresholds. These are thresholds that once you break through them, you begin to destroy all self-doubt related to that area of your life. This was one of those moments for me. When she told me that, it was as though I was given permission to succeed and achieve the life that I wanted, rather than follow the path of a fresh rat in the race. While it didn’t entirely erase my self-doubt it gave me a surge of momentum in the right direction. That sense of getting permission to live life on my terms was a huge moment for me so let me share this with you right now. You, like me, have permission to create the life you want.

As a direct result of me crashing through that emotional threshold after that lunch with my friend, I have had a rewarding career in the martial arts. I say this because the martial arts is not an industry that produces achieved, wealthy high-income earners. Martial arts schools are usually mom and pop labors of love.

One of my successful mentors was an acclaimed, wealthy plastic surgeon. He told me once that he was a millionaire by the age of 37. I made goal to do the same. I beat him by six months.

Wealth building and entrepreneurship is like a foreign language in many families. Not necessarily because the parents are against it as much as they just don’t know anything about designing a successful, wealthy professional life. Though we were programmed to follow a traditional path of doing well in school in order to get a good job, 74% of millionaires are self-employed.

You rarely build wealth working for someone else. There’s a great line that I heard somewhere. A small yet successful business owner puts his hand on his employee’s shoulder and points to a big house on a hill and says, “You see that big beautiful home? If you work really hard, I can have that one day.”