Own Your Past Change Your Future

Own Your Past Change Your Future Plot Summary

Introduction

I was crawling in the mud at 3 AM, flashlight clenched between my teeth, examining what I believed were catastrophic cracks in my home's foundation. The rain poured down my back as I meticulously inspected every inch, certain my house was collapsing around me. It wasn't. In that moment of clarity—soaked, covered in mud, and laughing through tears—I realized something profound: the house wasn't falling apart. I was. We all carry stories that shape our lives—narratives about who we are, what we're capable of, and what the world expects from us. Some we're born into, others we're told by parents, teachers, or society. Many are stories we've told ourselves for so long they feel like absolute truth. These stories have incredible power. They can inspire us to greatness or keep us trapped in patterns of fear, doubt, and limitation. The beautiful truth is that while we cannot always control what happens to us, we absolutely can control the stories we tell about those experiences. This journey isn't about denying our past or pretending everything is perfect. It's about examining our narratives with courage, connecting authentically with others, changing our thoughts, and taking decisive action toward a life of freedom and wholeness.

Chapter 1: The Backpack of Bricks: How Stories Weigh Us Down

Several years ago I was an administrator at a university in Texas. I served on the university's Emergency Response Team, a small group that dealt with various student crises. One Friday afternoon we were called together after a mini-bus carrying our students was involved in a horrific accident. The wreck involved a faculty member and students who'd been headed to an orphanage to spend the weekend serving children. The single-vehicle accident happened in the middle of nowhere on backroads of Texas. The wreck scene was a disaster, with students, wallets, backpacks, clothes, and bus parts strewn all over the grassy field by the interstate. Because of the location, multiple police departments, state troopers, EMS, and other emergency responders showed up to help. Anyone who has ever been involved in such a scene knows how confusing and contradictory the flow of information can be. Everyone has a story—or rather, a piece of it. Media, friends, other students, families, emergency responders, local churches, and administrators all grasp for bits of information, desperate for details and explanations. Thousands of people exchange stories via text messages or social media posts, phone calls or hastily assembled news broadcasts. Those bits of information get woven into narratives that take on lives of their own, morphing into half-truths and untruths. Our students ended up in five different hospitals, hundreds of miles from campus. The ERT members huddled around a large whiteboard at the university police station. The Chief of Police divided the board into three vertical columns—alive students, deceased students, and students whose whereabouts were still unknown. I spent the evening and into the night on the phone with parents and siblings looking for their loved ones—family members who thought their kids might be dead. In the days that followed, I met with a family from out of state. When we met, the student's mother told me she had one final question: "The wreck happened in the early afternoon. My child was driven to one hospital and then taken to another. Y'all didn't call us until 11:00 that night. We had no idea our daughter was hurt until she called us herself using a nurse's cell phone. Why did you wait so long?" I took a deep breath and told her the truth: during our emergency debriefing, we were told her child was dead. Her daughter's picture had been taped up in the "deceased" column. The delay was simply us waiting for official confirmation. Late into the night, when we found out her daughter was alive, we immediately called home. After I explained, a stunned silence fell over the room—the silence of a family's gratitude that their child was still alive, mixed with the grief that someone else's child had died. For days, their story was that my team was incompetent or scared to make the hard call. In reality, their story was incomplete. That's how it is with the narratives we carry—some are right, some are wrong, and many are just part of a larger truth we can't yet see.

Chapter 2: Stories We're Born Into: Cultural and Social Narratives

Anna Del Priore was born in 1912—the same year the Titanic sank. She caught the Spanish Flu when she was six and Covid-19 when she was one hundred and seven. Think about what Anna has seen in her lifetime: World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, Desert Storm, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. She watched the evolution from handwritten letters to telegrams to switchboard operators to phone booths to rotary phones to cordless phones to satellite phones to mobile phones to smart watches. Anna was born into a very different story than we live in now. In a little more than a century, her world experienced an explosion of connection, innovation, and gadgets. She saw the world get faster, more responsive, safer, and more interconnected. She also saw it get slower, sicker, far more dangerous, and lonelier. And her world is our world. One of the most pervasive stories of the past three centuries is that you can save yourself, by yourself, and you don't need anyone. What began as a righteous call for freedom, liberty, and personal responsibility has morphed into a lie. The lie is that you are all that matters, that you can have it all and do it all, all by yourself, and that you don't need other people. This distortion, combined with the illusions of technology and debt, has given birth to the most destructive force the world has ever known: loneliness. I grew up on a suburban street in north Houston. Our block was blessed with endless young kids all about the same age. We played made-up sports games together, got in barn-burner fights, broke things, hid things, built things, spent the night at each other's houses, and caused mayhem. These guys were my first friends. My gang. Over time, we all grew apart. We got busy. We stopped hanging out so much and started calling. We stopped calling and started texting. We stopped returning texts immediately. We sent emails. This also happened with my high school friends and my college friends. They were there... and then I blinked. And suddenly an internet algorithm was sending me reminders that it was someone's birthday. Right under my nose, the friends I have quietly became the friends I had. And all of a sudden, no matter how many friends I had in my phone or on social media, I felt alone. I've perfected the art of hiding in a crowded room, of being alone in bed with my wife. I've mastered the art of texting funny memes and not authentically reaching out. Loneliness kills us. According to research, the physiological cost of being lonely is greater than smoking. When your body recognizes it's lonely, the biological response is similar to being physically assaulted. We were made for connection—for real, meaningful, in-person give-and-take with people we trust and love. Our bodies physically regulate themselves in relationships with others, which means our relationships actually help us heal from trauma, physical pain, and loss, just as the absence of relationships causes trauma, physical pain, and loss.

Chapter 3: Stories We're Told: The Voice of Others in Our Minds

In second grade, my teacher, Ms. Mosley, assigned our class a two-page writing assignment on something we loved. I'd just seen the latest Karate Kid movie, so naturally, I wrote my paper on karate. I blew past the first two pages and kept writing. After a few days, Ms. Mosley let me move my chair to the back of the room during writing time just so I could keep going. I was entranced with the idea that I was a writer, a karate expert, and a creator. I ended up with a good grade, but more importantly, while Ms. Mosley was walking up and down the classroom rows, she bent down and said, "Wonderful job, John. You have a great imagination and you're an excellent writer." And then she just kept walking. I showed my mom and dad my assignment. They told me—and showed me—how proud they were. My mom sent copies to extended family, and a few of my uncles mentioned it during the holidays. Even my older sister told me "Good job." Fast-forward more than three decades, and I now write and tell stories for a living. I speak to millions of radio and podcast listeners every month. I use my imagination and experience to connect a diverse array of academic disciplines and personal challenges to give people hope and direction. Ms. Mosely gave me a new story, which became an identity. My family affirmed the story. From passing comments to hugs and high-fives, I was encouraged about my ability to write and communicate. But the stories we're told aren't always positive. I was in accelerated reading and math classes in third grade. I didn't try super hard academically, but I had enough natural talent to do well. Then a new opportunity popped up: I could test for WINGS—the gifted and talented program at my elementary school. My brilliant older sister was in WINGS, and so were some of my friends. Grades and academics were a big deal in my family—and I was confident taking the tests. Except I didn't get in. I took the tests and I didn't qualify. I concluded that I was not a smart kid. Which meant I was a dumb kid. Here were the facts: I was in accelerated classes, I made good grades, I read books, and I was intelligent. My parents loved me, they supported me, and I had excellent teachers guiding my schooling. But facts don't matter under threat. I took this WINGS experience and created new stories to repeat to myself: I'm stupid. I'm not enough. I'm not any smarter or more gifted than anyone in my class and therefore I'm less than. My parents are disappointed in me. Thirty years later, I have a stack of graduate degrees, three from a Research-1 university. I've spent my life running from the story that I'm not smart enough. The story I told myself when I was nine is still hanging around. It shows up during tough academic debates, during research conferences, or when I hang out with my brilliant mechanic friend or my brilliant banking friend. The story that I'm not smart enough or good enough shows up at the most ridiculous times.

Chapter 4: Stories We Tell Ourselves: The Most Powerful Narratives

I quietly slipped out of my bedroom, careful not to wake my wife or young son. I grabbed a cheap plastic flashlight from the kitchen and silently undid the deadbolt on the back door. Wearing only my boxer briefs, I stepped outside into the backyard. It was pitch black as I waved the faint light back and forth in the rain. We were coming out of the hottest Texas summer on record and clawing our way out of a devastating drought. Everywhere I went, all anyone was talking about was the heat and how badly we needed rain. Secretly, I was the only guy in the state praying for it not to rain. I know—selfish. But I couldn't afford to have my house collapse. Shortly after my family and I moved into our new home, I began to notice cracks in the Sheetrock walls, spidering cracks above the doors, and tiny concrete cracks in the foundation. I figured if it started raining, the sudden shift in soil moisture could split the foundation of my home and wreck me financially. That night, my eyes popped open at 3:00 a.m., my heart pounding. The rain had arrived. I stutter-stepped through the darkness, dropped down onto my hands and knees behind the boxwoods, and crawled the rest of the way on all fours through the mud. My head near the ground, I traced the line where the concrete foundation met the flowerbed, looking for any cracks where water could be pouring into the house. I invited several friends over to show them the cracks. They always mumbled something about "settling is normal" or "your house looks really great." I called different contractors out. They'd walk around, measure things, and sigh heavily. But they found nothing. They all gave the house a clean bill of health. Finally, I called Todd, one of my best friends in the world. His dad was an architect, and Todd had grown up on construction sites. After walking around the house with me, he turned, looked at me, and spoke directly: "Delony, your house is good. It's strong. What you're seeing is cosmetic. The cracks are completely normal and there's not even that many. Dude, this conversation is over." I was deflated yet resolute. I trusted my friend but I also knew that even the smartest people could be wrong sometimes. I could see the cracks in my house and no amount of disbelief could convince me that I wasn't seeing what I knew I was seeing. Problem was, I wasn't just seeing cracks at my house. I was starting to see cracks everywhere. Outside of the problems with my house, my life was a chaotic blur. I was a human hurricane, held together by a dress shirt and tie. I worked at a university where I was responsible for thousands of students. When the wheels fell off—students getting wasted, attempted suicides, car wrecks, failing grades—I was often the guy who got called. These challenges don't have office hours, and neither did I. My job never ended. I lived on a merry-go-round. That night in the West Texas mud and rain, I began to acknowledge that I was living a story that wasn't true. My house was never cracking apart. It was just a story I was telling myself. Getting well was still many months away, but the first step was recognizing I'd been following the wrong stories. Lots of them.

Chapter 5: Breaking Free: Changing Thoughts and Actions

Dr. Hendricks sat down in his chair and announced to the class: "Time for a case study... but this time you're the case." I was in a doctoral counseling class, and we were all sitting in a circle, chairs facing inward. Dr. Hendricks was famous for his case studies. "Suppose you've been meeting with a client for six months," he began. "They come every week without fail. They tell the truth, they show up on time, and they do the homework assignments. Then one day the client comes into your office with a lot of anger. When you ask what's wrong, they let you have it: 'You suck at counseling. I've given you something like $2,500 over the past six months, and everything is worse. I tried your little talk-to-your-boss idea, and not only did I not get the raise, but I got demoted. My boyfriend still ended up moving out, and I haven't lost any weight. You shouldn't be a therapist.'" The professor looked around. "How would you respond?" I raised my hand. "That would probably kill me." My professor dug in: "Why would that kill you?" I responded: "My counseling sessions have been intimate. My clients have told me their fears, their loves and sexual habits; they've talked about their hurts and hurdles. I feel close to these people. If one of them came in and dropped that bomb, I think it would crush me." One of my classmates spoke up. She was a brilliant counselor with more than twenty years of experience. "No, John," she said. "They don't get that." "What do you mean?" I chuckled. "Is that some counselor-lingo nonsense?" What she said next changed my life: "Your clients don't get that type of access to you. They don't have permission to hurt you. You decide who gets to hurt your feelings." I laughed and rolled my eyes, but inside I felt flushed. She kept going: "You get to decide who hurts your feelings. You get to decide who pierces your heart, frustrates you, and annoys you. People can take away your livelihood, your possessions, and even your life—but you get to choose who hurts you." "So it's like my heart is a little box," I said, poking at her, "and I get to choose who I allow in it?" "Exactly," she answered. "You choose." "How many people can go in the box?" "I don't know. Maybe four. At most five." As I rode my bike home, I thought about it. Who would I allow to hurt my feelings? I tried to reverse-engineer the question: Who was I allowing to hurt my feelings right now? My blood ran cold. Everyone. I had given everyone access to my heart. Students, teachers, family members, my little kids, plus years of friends, acquaintances, and co-workers. I let people I didn't even know on the internet get me riled up. By the time I cruised into my driveway, I realized I had between two thousand and a million people crammed into that box. I was a punching bag for other people's opinions. I had mistaken wholehearted living for open-access living. I had no boundaries. Right then and there, I started taking people out of the box. I realized that if I get to choose who hurts me, I also could choose what hurts me. Or bothers me. Or makes me angry. I get to choose what's happening in my brain: who and what has access to it, what I spend time thinking about, who I spend time thinking about. I can't always choose my feelings, but I get to choose my thoughts about how I feel.

Chapter 6: Creating Connection: The Path to Healing

There were two couples sitting around my kitchen table: me and Sheila, and Byron and Jamillia. Our kids were playing somewhere down the hall. I waited until the laughter died down and there was a pause in the conversation. "So this is gonna be awkward but I don't know another way do to it. I've got a question to ask you two, and you have to know this is gonna be weird, even for me." When I announced I was about to be awkward and weird, the room got quiet. Very quiet. I love people and am endlessly curious. I have a reputation for asking personal—or as my wife calls them, "super inappropriate"—questions. "Well," Byron said. "Okay." He shifted a little in his chair and chuckled. "This should be good. What's up?" Now it was my turn to fidget. I caught myself looking down at my shoes, so I consciously looked him in the eyes, took a beat, and let my question fly. "Sheila and I would like to know if you and Jamillia—insert long, uncomfortable pause—will y'all...? We'd like to ask you two to officially be our friends." Byron smiled like he was getting ready for a punchline. But that was my question. It's all I had. The air in the room got heavy. Sheila stifled a quiet cough. Byron shook his head and said, "What do you mean 'officially be your friends'? We are your friends." "Right," I said. "But we're letting you know that we will show up at 2:00 a.m. when you call. And if we need something at 3:00 a.m., we'll call you. We want our kids to know your kids and we want to celebrate your family... and we hope you'll celebrate ours. We are asking y'all to be our friends." Let me back up a bit. My wife and I had just moved to Nashville, and we were in the early stages of rebuilding our marriage after a tough season. We'd both spent our entire lives in Texas. Our families were in Texas. Our best friends were in Texas. Our professional connections were in Texas. We had a tight-knit community and relationships we'd enjoyed for years. I loved my wife and she loved me, but our ship had turned sideways in the harbor and we were stuck. I was working my dream job in a wonderful city with wonderful colleagues. And I was so, so lonely. A few months in, it felt like the only people I spoke with outside of work were the other parents on my son's Little League team. Those conversations were hard to dig into. "Hey man, how are you?" "Good, how are you?" "Good, glad to hear it." "All right." I knew the biology and psychology of loneliness. I knew the science said my body is a connection-seeking machine, always scanning the environment for who's in my tribe. I knew the key to all physical, spiritual, relational, and mental health is belonging. I knew being lonely was physically more damaging than smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Sheila and I both understood that we needed people we trusted to walk with us as we figured out who we were going to be in this new chapter of our life. We knew we couldn't heal our marriage and create something new without others walking alongside us. We needed friends to know and love our kids, and we needed other kids to know and love us. So, we started inviting people over to our house. We started saying yes to every invitation. Our goal was to connect, love, and risk. The "this just got really weird" couple are still close friends. The second couple we invited over was Aaron and his wife, Erica. Same deal. Same house. Same chairs. Same awkward question. Only this time, Aaron sat quiet for a moment and then glanced at his wife. Without warning, a tear began rolling down his cheek. "Nobody's ever asked me that before."

Chapter 7: Writing New Stories: Redemption and Legacy

One afternoon during my first few months of co-hosting the radio show, I received a phone call from a woman who lived in Alaska. She told me all she ever wanted in her life was to be a stay-at-home mom. She wanted to build a home for her family, have a loving partnership with her husband, and pour herself into her children. This was her dream. Unfortunately, in the middle of her dream she learned her husband had racked up somewhere close to $750,000 in business debt under his name. This meant that he and his wife had to pay it off as consumer debt. To their credit, this woman and her husband got to work. She took a job, he took several, and they started plowing through the debt. Year after year. Dollar by dollar. When she called my show, she and her husband had almost paid off every single debt. They had less than a hundred thousand dollars left to pay back. But her last child was about to leave for college. Which meant her dream of being a stay-at-home mother was over. She missed it. She'd been working for more than fifteen years, forced into a life she didn't choose or want. Her dream was gone. She said, "All I ever wanted was to be a stay-at-home mom, and my husband screwed up and took that from me. I'm just so angry with him, and I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive him." I could hear her hurt—the anguish in her voice, the loss, the rage. She had stood by her man in spite of his mistakes, and it had cost her everything. I felt angry on her behalf just thinking about it. But here she was. There was no way to recapture the past. She had to own her past and then decide what came next. I said, "Ma'am, with all due respect, you've got to put that down." Silence. I continued, "From this point forward, every minute you choose being resentful, angry, or bitter, is a minute you're choosing to have less joy, less love, and less fun. When you choose anger and resentment, you're choosing to not fully live whatever life you have left. To be whole, you have to set down your anger, forgive your husband, and let those things go." About a month later, I received a handwritten letter from the woman. She had included a series of miniature quilts with crocheted words across them: Anger. Resentment. Bitterness. In the letter, she said she'd spent time making those quilts—cutting, sewing, stitching—and in the process, she literally felt her anger and resentment leave her body. She wrote, "I've got peace. I let them go, and I'm done with them." She set them down. She chose new thoughts, and she chose new actions. And her heart changed. She wanted to change her heart, so she got to work. Now it's your turn. You can't change the old sentences. They have a period at the end. But you can write something new. Something you've never written before. Your bricks can become a new part of the great old brick road. A road that is thousands of years in the making, formed from the challenges, trails, and triumphs of millions of people who have come before you. Those people were brave, strong, worthy, and enough. Just like you.

Summary

The stories we carry have immense power. They shape our identity, drive our decisions, and determine how we see the world. Whether we're born into them, told them by others, or create them ourselves, these narratives operate like bricks in a backpack—weighing us down as we move through life. Some serve us well, providing direction and meaning. Others become burdens, creating patterns of self-sabotage, disconnection, and limitation that can last a lifetime. The path to freedom isn't about erasing our past or denying difficult truths—it's about recognizing that we have the power to examine our stories, challenge their validity, and choose which ones deserve to shape our future. This journey requires courage: the courage to own our stories, acknowledge reality, get connected with others, change our thoughts, and transform our actions. When we take ownership of our narratives, we discover that peace isn't found in perfect circumstances but in our response to life's inevitable challenges. Wellness means that even when the world is on fire, we can remain patient. When we remember those who hurt us, we can choose forgiveness. When faced with limitations, we can choose creativity and resilience. Our stories don't need to end with pain; they can continue with redemption, connection, and a legacy that will inspire generations to come.

About Author

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Dave Ramsey

Dave Ramsey is America’s trusted voice on money and business. He’s a #1 National bestselling author and host of The Ramsey Show, heard by more than 18 million listeners each week. Dave’s eight national bestselling books include The Total Money Makeover, Baby Steps Millionaires, and EntreLeadership. Since 1992, Dave has helped people take control of their money, build wealth, and enhance their lives. He also serves as CEO of Ramsey Solutions.

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