"You're too little to go to Colorado by yourself."

This was probably the 3rd summer in a row I've heard these words.

At this point, I'm 15, and my brother has been going to Colorado to work for our uncle for the last several summers

And I'm supremely jealous. (imagine being jealous someone was going to work for their entire summer lol)

"You guys always say that but Matt was younger than me when he started going out there!"

"Well, you're not going."

I'm used to this. I'd been told my entire childhood by what seems like everyone that I'm too little.

By my parents, teachers, coaches, even other kids. You name it.

I remember it taking tons of convincing for my football coaches to even think about letting me run the ball.

All because of how "little" I was.

And as an adult, I get it (and am grateful for it, more on this in a minute)

They were only trying to protect me.

Especially my parents. I was the baby after all, and they love me. And to be fair, I was in fact, little.

But to my young mind, it felt like a limitation.

And something in me viscerally rejected that idea. That I was limited.

I think that feeling of being "too little" has been triggered at other points in my life when other people told me I couldn't do something.

Like when I was 16 and a promoter told me my band would never get signed because we sucked (we did), or when I worked at guitar center and people told me that my band would never tour or have songs on the radio (we did both)

Or like when I told my old boss at AT&T that I wanted to move away to pursue the film industry and they reminded me I had a "good job"

And most of all, I took personally the "you can't do that" that wasn't even directed at me but was the collective identity of people from my home town around chasing your dreams who probably still haven't left there.

But anytime someone told me I wasn't capable of something, it fueled me. It made me want to prove them wrong because somewhere deep in my core I felt that they were wrong.

The truth is, I always felt special in some way. That I was highly individual. That I was in fact capable of more than I was being told I could handle.

I think we all feel this way, until life convinces us otherwise. That maybe we aren't special after all.

What's interesting to me about all this, is that until very recently, I thought that I was immune to these rejections.

Because something else my parents told me 10 times more than "too little" was that I was capable of anything. That if someone else had achieved something, I could too.

Two messages, planted at different times: you're too little, and you can do anything.

They should have canceled out. But they fused into something else. When someone told me "you can't," I felt it viscerally. And the only response that ever felt like it made sense was "watch me."

(And to my parents, who I know are reading this, you were the best. The "too little" thing never hurt me. It did the opposite. You protected me and you told me I could do anything in the same breath, and somewhere in that combination you accidentally built my superpower. So thank you <3)

So looking back, trying the hard things always felt like second nature.

That was, until recently when I realized that this pattern of limitation has been playing out for me all this time, but in a different form.

Procrastination.

It took me 3 years after I decided that I needed to move away from home to pursue entertainment to actually do it.

3 years of dragging my feet because I was afraid.

It took me 2 years once I finally got to LA to really start pursuing stunt jobs because I was afraid of making the wrong moves, or offending the wrong people.

It still takes me massive amounts of effort to raise my hand when an opportunity arises like when I was asked to fight coordinate for the first time on Ballerina, and again on Thunderbolts.

And I've been actively struggling for the last few years of diving head first into youtube because of "how hard and unlikely it is."

I guess sometimes I do still feel "too little" after all.

But how can that be? How can I have come so far and still feel such insurmountable self-doubt?

Programming.

But my own.

How do you get over programming you wrote yourself?

By looking at someone who's already done the thing that you're afraid to do, and realizing that it's a person with the same number of cells in their body as you, with their own fears and doubts, and their own version of "too little."

But they did it anyway.

And once you see that clearly, the question then has to change.

It can no longer be "is this possible?" Because you've seen that it is.

It has to become, "why have I decided that this isn't possible for me specifically?"

Because that's the lie we tell ourselves.

It's shifted from "you can't" to "I can't" even though others clearly have.

And the cruelest part of all is who's been saying it.

Me.

The cookie cutter advice is don't let others define you.

But that was never my problem. I stopped listening to them a long time ago.

The real challenge is, don't let yourself define you.

If this hit home:

I'm helping my VIP clients undo their own self-limiting programming inside my 1:1 program. 5 spots open in a couple weeks. You can get on the priority list here​

Caleb