About Sterling Crockett
I
did not arrive at what I believe through books or formal study. I arrived through men—the ones who raised me, worked beside me, and carried themselves in ways I did not fully understand until years after they were gone.
I grew up in the mountains of southwest Virginia, in a small Appalachian community where life rarely unfolded according to anyone’s plan. The men in my family had lived that way for
generations. They did not believe they controlled the forces that shaped their lives. But neither did they surrender the part that belonged to them. That distinction—between what is given and
what remains yours—became the foundation of everything I have come to understand about how a life is built.
I carry five generations of men behind me. Each faced circumstances that did not bend to their
preferences. Each found a way to meet those circumstances without losing what was essential. I
did not recognize what they were teaching until I was old enough to look back at the pattern their
lives made. By then, I understood that what they passed down was not advice. It was example.
And example, held long enough, becomes belief.
For the men in my lineage whose perseverance carried life forward:
Charles Gloster Crockett
James Alexander Crockett
David McTeer Crockett
Lester Crockett
Coulson Sterling Crockett
The choices they made endure in mine.
I
have spent my adult life building—businesses, partnerships, and ideas across multiple
industries. Building taught me what lineage suggested: that circumstances are real, that they
shape the terrain, and that they are not the final word. Every venture I have undertaken has
required me to act inside conditions I did not choose. The ones that moved forward did so
because of what I brought to those conditions, not because the conditions were favorable.
That understanding did not come from a single moment of clarity. It accumulated slowly, the way
most durable understanding does—through repetition, through difficulty, and through watching how differently people respond to situations that look nearly identical from the outside.
At some point the pattern became impossible to ignore. What I had observed across a lifetime in the men who raised me, in the work of building, in the choices that separate people who move through difficulty from those who are stopped by it—pointed toward a single idea.
Circumstances shape the terrain. Response determines the direction.
I have come to call this Empowered Agency. It is not a formula and it is not optimism. It is a way of understanding what belongs to circumstance and what belongs to the individual moving through it—and refusing to surrender the latter to the former.
The Book
The Choice Is Yours is the story of how that understanding took shape. It follows a fictional
character named Marcus across a life shaped by Appalachian landscape, inherited example, and the slow recognition that the most important authority he carries is how he chooses to respond to what stands before him. The book is a fable, not a memoir. But the conviction at its center is mine.
The appendix—The Architecture of Empowered Agency—presents the framework directly, for
those who want to examine the structure beneath the story.
Between what happens to us and what we become, there is
a space.
It is in that space that response
takes form.
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Sterling Crockett is a writer, entrepreneur, and builder. The Choice Is Yours is his first book. He grew up in the mountains of southwest Virginia and now lives in Delray Beach, Florida.
