As President of PFR and a Personal Finance Professor at JMU, I've spent years observing one persistent barrier to success: fatalism. The belief that our outcomes—financial, professional, or personal—are fixed by forces beyond our control. This idea, rooted in the philosophy of Determinism, finds powerful support in modern science, particularly neuroscience. Scientists like Robert Sapolsky argue that every choice is merely the inevitable output of our determined neurobiology.