Sterling Crockett released his first book, The Choice Is Yours, on August 5.
It was not the original release date. The book was expected to arrive sometime in September. But it was finished, and August 5 was his son’s birthday.
So Sterling made a choice.
That is where the story of the book could begin. But it is not where my story with Sterling begins.
I met him over dinner in Bartow.
I had not read his biography. I had not studied his LinkedIn profile. I did not know about the businesses he had built, the rooms he had entered or the basketball scholarship that took him from a small Appalachian community in southwest Virginia to Iona College in New York.
I knew he was connected to one of The Ballstrikers, and somebody believed we should meet.
Sometimes that is enough.
After dinner, we sat in the study and talked. Not interviewed. Talked.
I shared pieces of my journey. Sterling shared pieces of his. The conversation moved through business, basketball, race, family, technology, writing and the complicated responsibility of building something that matters.
It felt less like meeting someone new and more like catching up with an old friend.
Sterling has that kind of presence. He puts you at ease without working hard to prove that you should be impressed by him. The conversation flows because he is not performing his résumé for you.
The résumé comes later.
You first notice that Sterling is tall. Basketball tall. Then you learn that the game helped carry him from southwest Virginia to Iona College on a full scholarship.
Basketball was not simply something he played well. It was a door.
That opportunity gave him access to an education, new places and rooms he may not otherwise have entered. But the more we talked, the clearer it became that Sterling does not measure an opportunity only by what it gives you.
He measures it by what you do with it.
That distinction stayed with me.
We often talk about leadership as if it begins when someone receives a title, controls a budget or becomes responsible for directing other people. Sterling talked about stewardship.
Leadership asks how you will move people forward.
Stewardship asks what has been placed in your hands and what you are going to do with it.
An education can be placed in your hands. So can access, money, experience, influence, family history, talent and time.
Even success.
Success has not changed Sterling. It has given him freedom.
Not the freedom to stop caring, but the freedom to decide what deserves his care. He has reached a place in his life where every project does not have to be driven by money. Some things can be pursued simply because they need to exist.
There is something powerful about that, especially for Black builders.
Many of us spend years trying to earn the right to enter rooms, then more years proving that we deserve to remain there. Even when we produce good work, recognition does not always arrive in equal measure. You learn to understand what you are building before anyone else fully sees it.
Sterling knows that experience.
He has often been the only Black face in professional rooms. He understands the weight of how you enter those spaces, how you carry yourself and how you remain rooted in who you are when no one else in the room shares your history.
His understanding of agency began long before his professional career.
Sterling grew up as schools were becoming fully integrated. He remembers coming home with real grievances about race and being met by family members who did not deny what had happened. Their response was more direct: What are you going to do about it?
That was not permission for racism. It was preparation for reality.
You may not control the room. You may not control the obstacle. You may not control how someone sees you.
You still have a choice in how you enter, how you respond and what you carry away from the experience.
Sterling calls this philosophy Empowered Agency. It is also the foundation beneath The Choice Is Yours.
The book is a philosophical fable centered on a character named Marcus. It began as a memoir before Sterling decided to tell the story through fiction. Marcus is not Sterling, exactly, but the experiences beneath the story belong to him.
The book arrives after roughly a decade of writing that few people saw.
Sterling wrote to release frustration. Then writing became a form of healing. One essay became another until he had accumulated more than 300 of them.
He did not immediately see himself as someone who needed to publish.
His son did.
After reading some of his father’s work, Sterling’s son encouraged him to share it. He believed the words could help people.
His son later died suddenly at 33, shortly before Christmas.
There is no clean way to write around that kind of loss, and there should not be. Grief does not need decoration to make it more meaningful.
What matters here is that Sterling’s son saw something in his father’s writing that Sterling had not yet fully allowed himself to claim. After losing him, finishing the work became more than publishing a book. It became part of what Sterling had been entrusted to carry forward.
Stewardship again.
That is why August 5 mattered.
The original plan said September. The finished book created another possibility. Sterling chose his son’s birthday.
The Choice Is Yours now exists in the world because a man who had spent years writing privately decided the words were no longer his alone.
Sterling is already working on a sequel. He has not decided whether the story will end with two books, become a trilogy or continue beyond that. For now, he is giving the work room to reveal what it wants to become.
That willingness to remain open surfaced throughout our conversation.
Even when we talked about artificial intelligence, Sterling did not approach it primarily from fear. He sees a tool that still requires human experience and judgment. In his view, older people may be better positioned to use it than they realize because they have decades of knowledge and pattern recognition to bring to the machine.
Use the tool. Do not surrender your judgment to it.
There is agency in that, too.
Sterling’s roots remain close to everything he is building. He spoke about southwest Virginia, mining communities, Black labor and the generations of his family whose lives were separated from slavery by far less time than most Americans want to acknowledge.
His great-grandfather lived long enough to see Sterling leave for college on a basketball scholarship.
Think about the distance contained inside that one family memory.
A generation that understood labor without freedom lived long enough to witness a young Black man receive an opportunity that could redirect the course of his life.
That opportunity became education. Education became access. Access became business. Business became freedom. Freedom became the ability to reach back, write, explore what communities need and choose work for reasons larger than survival.
That is the fuller meaning of stewardship.
When I met Sterling, I knew none of this.
I am glad I did not.
There is a gift in meeting someone before you know what they have accomplished. You are not searching their words for proof of the person you researched. You are simply present, open to whoever is sitting across from you.
The man introduced the résumé.
By the time I understood what Sterling had done, I already understood something more important about why he had done it.
The Choice Is Yours may be the title of his first book, but it is also the thread running through his life.
We do not choose every circumstance. We do not choose every room, every loss or every weight placed in our hands.
But eventually, we have to decide what we are going to do with what remains.
