Are You Following Someone Else's Rules?

My dad defused bombs in World War II.

At social gatherings or during those awkward team-building exercises when you're asked to share "an interesting fact about yourself," that's my ace in the hole. People glance at me sideways, doing the silent math. The timeline doesn't compute. How could someone my age have a father who was defusing bombs when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president?

(He was drafted at 18 and had me when he was 51, if you're still working it out.)

The next question always comes: "Why bombs? Why not literally anything else?"

He wasn’t a thrill-seeker, and he didn’t have a death wish. My father was eminently practical. His calculus was brutally simple: if something went wrong with a bomb, you weren’t coming home missing limbs. You simply weren’t coming home. And if you did it right, you came back whole. Whole or not at all — that was Dad's equation.

This binary approach followed him home from the war and into our living room. As a teacher in the alternative program for last-chance kids at the local high school and as a father, Dad was consistent. You could fail, stumble, or get lost along the way. But you had to own it. You had to genuinely want to make it right. Show him that, and he would move mountains for you. Fall short of that honesty, and the emotional walls went up. You were on the outside.

It took several years before I realized that a lot of Dad’s stark framework had become my own. I had internalized this all-or-nothing approach without ever consciously choosing it. Sometimes it served me quite well. Other times, not so much.

Thing is, we all carry these mental templates, old patterns that dictate our choices without really announcing themselves. They are the assumptions we make about how the world works, how relationships function, what success looks like, and what we deserve. And they have a way of shaping everything.

So this week, let's talk about the invisible scripts that silently direct our lives, how to recognize when they're no longer serving us, and what it takes to rewrite the rules we live by instead of calling it fate.

The Hidden Code We Inherit

Entrepreneur Ramit Sethi coined the term invisible scripts for those silent assumptions that can govern our lives without permission. They are not universal truths. They are more like programming we have taken in through osmosis, often without realizing it.

You have heard them. Maybe you have said them:

• "Renting is just throwing money away."

• "Go to college first, then you can see the world."

• "Never quit a job until you have another one lined up."

• "Success means climbing the corporate ladder."

• "Good parents always put their children first."

Some scripts carry real wisdom. Others may actually work against us. Either way, they rarely tell the whole story (and that is where it gets tricky). In the end, they’re just hand-me-down beliefs, quietly steering our decisions without us even realizing it.

And folks, the most powerful patterns come from childhood, from watching our parents navigate the world, or from early experiences that branded themselves into our DNA. My father's all-or-nothing approach was not just a personality quirk. It was a survival mechanism born in wartime that became his default setting for everything that followed.

What makes these beliefs so sticky is that they do not announce themselves as optional. They feel like just how things are.

We do not question why we apologize when we have done nothing wrong.
We do not question why we feel anxious about taking time off from work.
We do not question why old wounds keep pulling us toward the same kind of hurt.

The scripts tell us this is normal, expected, undeniable.

Try this: Think about a decision you made recently that felt somehow predetermined. Something where you didn’t even consider alternatives. Maybe it is how you approached a conflict, a purchase, or a career move that felt somehow non-negotiable.

Now ask yourself: Who taught me this was the only way?

The answer might surprise you. And it might reveal a script that has been running your life on autopilot.

When Scripts No Longer Serve Us

As Carl Jung said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." Read that again: it will direct your life and you will call it fate. This insight stops me in my tracks every time.

Our invisible scripts exist for a reason. They teach us how to survive, belong, achieve. At one point, they made perfect sense for the circumstances we faced or the people who taught them to us. But something that once made sense in one context can become limiting in another.

An invisible script I picked up from my dad was simple: stay in control.

Dad didn’t drink. No drugs. No tattoos. Bills paid early. And his word was law. If you made a promise, you kept it.

I learned early: if you didn’t stay on top of things, you’d pay the price. That wiring made me careful and reliable, but it also made it hard to trust, hard to delegate, and hard to let go. It also left me with a pretty short fuse (another thing I got from dad).

At the time, it just felt like being responsible. Only later did I realize it was an old rule I had inherited, one that helped for a time but held me back once I outgrew it.

The trouble is, our scripts don't announce when they stop working. They don't trigger a notification. They just keep running in the background, steering us without asking.

So how do you know when an old script is running the show, and when it’s time to write a new one? Here are a few signs that a script might no longer be serving you:

• You keep hitting the same walls, no matter how hard you try.

• You feel stuck between two options, afraid to commit to either one.

• You say you want change, but keep slipping into old patterns.

• Life feels like it’s happening to you instead of being shaped by you.

These are not character flaws. They are invitations. Invitations to pause, to notice, and to ask: "Is this still helping me? Or is it time to write a new one?"

Rewriting Your Own Story

If old scripts can quietly run our lives, the good news is this: we can write new ones.

It starts with awareness. Recognizing that what feels like "just how things are" might actually be a script we've internalized. Like my dad's fairly extreme approach, these rules can shape our choices in ways we don't fully recognize until we step back and examine them.

Once we see them for what they are, we realize they are learned behaviors rather than immutable truths. We can keep what serves us and change what doesn't.

This isn't about rejecting everything we've learned. A lot of our scripts contain genuine wisdom. It's about consciously choosing which ones to follow rather than operating on autopilot.

This week, try a simple three-step process to start updating your internal wiring:

• Listen for what you don't say. Pay attention to the quiet assumptions behind your decisions. What are you treating as non-negotiable without even realizing it?

• Question one script. Find one invisible rule that no longer serves you. Ask yourself: "Who taught me this? Does it still hold true for my life today?"

• Test a small action. Take one step that directly challenges the old script. It doesn't have to be dramatic, even a tiny shift is proof that you're writing a new story.

Small actions, repeated over time, become new beliefs. And new beliefs change everything. The most powerful moment in rewriting your scripts isn't when you have it all figured out, it's that first moment when you realize you're holding the pen.

Your Story, Your Choice

My father went to war with a stark kind of clarity: you came home whole, or you didn't come home at all. There was no room for maybes. No space for wishful thinking.

The scripts that brought us here often served a real purpose. My dad's extreme mindset helped him navigate war and later, it made him the kind of teacher his students needed.

But what once protected us can eventually confine us. The rules written for survival are not always built for growth. And when we surrender authorship of our own lives to approval, fear, or inertia, we live someone else's story, not our own.

We don't have to live by the patterns we inherited. We do have a choice.

We can pause, question, and begin to write a new story. A story that's more true to who we are becoming, not just who we were expected to be. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to happen all at once. But every choice we make is a new sentence written.

Because life isn't something you follow, it's something you create. The most powerful story isn't the one that’s been passed down to you; it's the one you choose to tell.

After all, no one knows your story better than you.

Until next week,
Derek
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