Rebellious Success: What It Really Means to Define Success on Your Own Terms

I didn't sit down one day and decide to write a book about success. If anything, I wrote this book because I realized I had been asking the wrong questions for most of my adult life.

Like many people, I believed success had a fairly straightforward formula. Work hard. Earn the promotion. Make more money. Buy the house. Build the career. Stay busy. Keep climbing. If you accomplished enough of those things, happiness and fulfillment were supposed to naturally follow.

The interesting thing is that, for a while, they did.

I've been fortunate to build a career that I genuinely love. Leading the Kalamazoo Wings has challenged me, stretched me, and given me opportunities I never imagined growing up in Kalamazoo. Along the way I've been able to coach incredible people, speak on stages around the country, launch a podcast, and now write my first book. Looking strictly at accomplishments, I had every reason to feel successful.

Yet I kept coming back to a question that wouldn't leave me alone.

Whose definition of success am I actually living?

The older I get, the more convinced I become that many of us never intentionally define success for ourselves. Instead, we inherit it. We absorb it from our parents, teachers, bosses, colleagues, social media, and society without ever stopping to ask whether it actually fits the life we want to build.

Somewhere along the way we start believing that busy means important. That exhaustion means commitment. That promotions equal fulfillment. That everyone celebrates with alcohol. That success is measured by what other people can see instead of how we actually feel when no one else is around.

That's a dangerous way to live because eventually you can arrive exactly where you thought you wanted to be and still feel like something is missing.

For me, that realization didn't happen all at once. It happened through a series of decisions that, at the time, didn't seem connected. Some were professional. Others were deeply personal. None of them felt rebellious in the moment. Looking back, however, I realize every one of them required me to question an expectation I had accepted without examining it.

That's where the title Rebellious Success came from.

People often assume the word rebellious means pushing against authority or breaking rules. That's never been my definition. The rebellion I'm talking about is much quieter and, in many ways, much harder. It's choosing to question the rules you've been following your entire life. It's asking whether the life you've built is actually yours or whether you've simply become really good at meeting everyone else's expectations.

Sometimes that rebellion looks dramatic. It might mean changing careers, starting a business, ending a relationship, or moving across the country.

More often, though, it's surprisingly ordinary.

It looks like deciding you don't have to answer emails at 10:00 p.m. It looks like saying no to an opportunity that doesn't align with your values. It looks like taking care of your body instead of punishing it. It looks like protecting your time instead of filling every available hour. It looks like choosing presence over productivity.

For me, one of those rebellious decisions was becoming alcohol free.

That choice had very little to do with alcohol itself and everything to do with asking better questions. I wasn't trying to escape a crisis. I wasn't trying to become someone different. I simply recognized that alcohol had quietly become too important in my life. It had become part of how I celebrated, how I relaxed, how I managed stress, and how I connected with people. It was woven into so many moments that I couldn't honestly answer whether I was choosing it or simply following a script I'd been handed years earlier.

When I removed alcohol, I expected to miss drinking.

What I didn't expect was to discover so much more about myself.