If you're wondering how to achieve professional and personal success in your life, Stedman Graham says it can all depend on who you think you are. Here's an excerpt.

I Am Stedman Graham, and This Is Why I Care

When I was growing up as one of six black children, two of whom were disabled, in Whitesboro, NJ, a small black community surrounded by a predominately white one, the catch-phrase was, Nothing good ever comes out of Whitesboro.

With a race-based consciousness, every day I woke up thinking I couldn't make it because of the color of my skin. This was tied directly to my self esteem, it was tied to my belief systems, it was tied to what I thought my talent was, what skills I could develop, it was tied to my habits, to my vision, and to my hopes and dreams. I had a totally self-limiting consciousness.

Picture this; I was a young six-foot-six black man in a white community. What does everyone say? Basketball player. Label. So I was that. I lived the label. I was exposed to many good people, but I was also buying into what others said and how others acted, all instead of being in better tune with my own soul. My self-esteem was too low for me to appreciate life. I was an angry person. I was angry at the system and I felt a victim in my own right. It was almost as if I had a hole in my heart.

Then one day it hit me over my head. It was not about race. It was about me not knowing a process for becoming successful. I didnt know how successful people think and act. I'd been told it was about race. I suddenly realized that somebody had fed me a bill of goods, and I had bought into it. And if I bought into the notion that its about race, there was no way out, because I would be trying to solve what the problem wasn't.

If you feel you have no control over your life, you need to come to the same epiphany I did, that, 'Oh, I'm not alone. Millions of women buy into the fact that they can't make it because they're a woman. Im not alone. Where I came from, blacks and Native Americans buy into the fact that they can't make it because of the color of their skin. Thats their label. I'm not alone.

Folks who are entitled, who think that they are so because they're a certain race, that because they're white they're better than somebody else, they're labeled. They buy into that. Or you might be a person who bought into the fact that you can't make it because your mother or father said you're nothing, that youre never going to be anything, and you got labeled by that.

So, youve got all these labels. I realized that everybody's labeled, not just me. I'm not the only person around here with a label. And I realized that the secret to un-labeling yourself is not to let other people define you, it's to let you define yourself, if you know how.

One of the key things Im going to stress is your understanding of the difference between the internal world and the external one. This is all about you.

The rest is here:
'Your Passport to Success': Take back who you are