What “Survive & Thrive” Really Means to Me

There are moments in life that completely redefine success.

Not business success.
Life success.

For me, being featured in the How to Survive & Thrive – Special Edition alongside Reebok founder Joe Foster is incredibly meaningful—not because of the recognition, but because of the story behind it.

A story built through survival.

Like many entrepreneurs, my journey started with pressure long before success. I grew up learning quickly that hard work doesn’t guarantee outcomes. After my parents divorced, I learned independence early. By college, I had sold my car just to pay tuition and walked miles each day to work while trying to build a future I couldn’t fully see yet.

At the time, I thought survival meant pushing harder.

I’ve since learned survival is much deeper than that.

It’s continuing forward when life rewrites you.

Building businesses taught me strategy. Losing my son Cody taught me perspective.

There is no business framework for grief. No leadership manual for surviving the loss of a child. That experience permanently changed the way I view success, family, time, and purpose.

For a long time, I believed thriving meant scaling faster, achieving more, and winning bigger.

Today, I see it differently.

Thriving means:

• building a life that matters,
• creating businesses that outlive dependency,
• being present with family,
• helping others through pain,
• and turning hardship into purpose.

That’s why this book matters to me.

Not because my name is in it. But because someone out there may read a piece of my story and realize they are not alone in theirs.

Throughout every season of life, my wife Holli has been my foundation. Through the growth, the uncertainty, the success, and the hardest loss imaginable, she has remained the steady force beside me. When people ask how I survived and kept building, the answer starts there.

This chapter also gave me the opportunity to speak openly about mental health and suicide prevention—something deeply personal to our family and a mission we now support through the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

The stigma surrounding mental health often keeps people silent when they most need connection.

That has to change.

If there’s one lesson I hope people take from my story, it’s this:

Life will hit you harder than business ever will. Build something that still matters when it does.

That’s legacy. That’s purpose. That’s what survive and thrive truly means to me.

— Joe Carter

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