A MINDSET SHIFT
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the people who stayed with me through every version of my life.
To my mother, whose strength carried our family even when the world felt uncertain.
To my sister, Shamika who made me fight for everything I wanted in life and never hesitated to hold me accountable when I needed it most.
To the mentors who helped guide me along the way.
Fran Ivory — Rest in Peace.
Thank you for believing in me when I needed it.
Tom Rummels-Rest in Peace.
Your influence and wisdom will never be forgotten.
To Matt McDowell, who is still with us and continues to inspire me with his example and leadership.
And above all…
To God, who never left my life even during the moments when I walked the furthest away from Him.
Your grace carried me through every mistake, every lesson, and every opportunity to become a better man.
This story exists because you never gave up on me.
Separate to Elevate
Sometimes the greatest growth in life comes from the courage to separate…
from the environments that limit you,
from the habits that trap you,
from the expectations that confine you,
and sometimes even from the version of yourself that no longer serves your future.
Because elevation only begins
when you decide you are ready to rise.
— Clifton D. Sims
Introduction
The Moment Everything Changed
There’s a picture of me that most people would never expect.
In it, I’m standing against a plain wall wearing a light blue prison uniform. My hands are folded in front of me. My face is calm, but the truth is, nothing about that moment was calm.
That picture captures a version of me that many people will never understand.
A version of me that had run out of excuses.
A version of me that had nowhere left to hide.
When you’re standing in a place like that, something strange happens to your mind. The noise of the world disappears. The distractions fade away. And suddenly, you’re left alone with the one person you can’t escape.
Yourself.
No crowd.
No applause.
No opinions.
Just truth.
And the truth can be uncomfortable.
In that moment, I had to face a question that most people spend their entire lives avoiding:
How did I get here?
But even more importantly:
Who do I become from here?
Life has a way of forcing clarity on you when everything else has been stripped away. When the distractions are gone, you begin to see things differently.
You start to recognize the weight of the past.
The people who influenced you.
The decisions you made.
The mindset that shaped your path.
But clarity also reveals something powerful.
It reveals the moment where change becomes possible.
Because transformation doesn’t begin with success.
It begins with separation.
Separation from the habits that held you back.
Separation from the voices that told you who you were supposed to be.
Separation from the fears that kept you standing still.
And sometimes, the hardest separation of all…
is separating from the version of yourself that no longer serves your future.
The world often talks about elevation like it’s something glamorous. Like success appears overnight or growth happens automatically.
But real elevation is different.
Real elevation is painful.
It requires distance.
It requires discipline.
And most importantly, it requires the courage to walk away from things that once defined you.
This book isn’t about pretending the past didn’t happen.
It’s about understanding it.
It’s about recognizing the moments that shape us — the decisions, the influences, the environments — and learning how to step beyond them.
Because every person reaches a point in life where they must decide:
Will I remain the person my past created…
or will I become the person my future requires?
For me, that decision began in a place most people would never expect.
Standing in that blue uniform.
Looking at the reality of where my life had taken me.
But that moment wasn’t the end of my story.
It was the beginning of my separation.
And that separation became the first step toward elevation.
This book is about that journey.
The lessons.
The mindset shifts.
The moments of clarity that come when you finally decide to remove the things that are holding you down.
Not just from people.
Not just from noise.
But from the beliefs, fears, and limitations that once defined you.
Because elevation doesn’t begin when life becomes easier.
Elevation begins the moment you decide…
to separate from what no longer serves you.
Chapter 1
The Life That Led Me There
I grew up on the west side of Davenport, Iowa.
Whenever I tell people that today, the first thing they usually ask is:
“Are there Black people in Iowa?”
And I always laugh a little when they ask that question.
My answer usually goes something like this:
“Yeah… not only are there Black folks in Iowa… there’s some real onestoo.”
Because the Iowa most people imagine isn’t the Iowa I grew up in.
People picture cornfields, farms, and quiet country life. And sure, that exists. But that wasn’t the world I lived in.
Davenport sits in what’s called the Quad Cities—a group of cities connected by the Mississippi River. Davenport and Bettendorf on the Iowa side. Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline on the Illinois side.
And if you look at a map, we’re only about two hours from Chicago.
That proximity matters.
Because Chicago influence has always found its way into the Quad Cities—through culture, music, family connections, and sometimes through things a little more dangerous.
So what you ended up with was a strange mix.
On one side, Iowa has always been a conservative state. A place where people didn’t like a lot of change. When I was growing up, Governor Terry Branstad seemed like he had been governor forever. He was around through most of my childhood and even years later when I was already grown.
On the other side, you had the influence of Chicago street culture drifting into the area.
Now combine conservative Midwest culture with Chicago street energy and put it inside a handful of river cities.
That mix created something different.
And I grew up right in the middle of it.
There were neighborhoods where life felt quiet and predictable. And then there were neighborhoods where you saw things that didn’t fit the stereotype people have about Iowa.
The truth is, some of the craziest things I’ve ever seen in my life happened right there growing up.
But this book isn’t about proving how wild Iowa could be.
It’s about explaining how the environment around me shaped the person I would eventually become.
Because the truth is, I grew up in a unique position.
I wasn’t fully raised inside one single culture.
Instead, I observed everything.
I had Black friends.
White friends.
Latino friends.
People from different backgrounds and different ways of life.
I watched how people moved. I watched how they talked. I watched how they survived.
When you grow up without fully understanding where you fit, you start studying the world around you.
You become observant.
You learn people.
And that ability to observe became one of the most powerful skills I ever developed.
Because when you study people long enough, you begin to understand how they think.
You begin to see patterns.
You begin to recognize motivations.
At the time, I didn’t realize what that skill would eventually become.
But looking back now, I see something clearly.
Growing up in that environment didn’t just teach me survival.
It prepared me.
Dangerously prepared me.
Prepared to understand different types of people.
Prepared to navigate different environments.
Prepared to see both sides of life.
The church kid who loved baseball.
And the street influence slowly creeping into the neighborhood.
The quiet Midwestern town people imagined.
And the complicated reality that existed beneath it.
All of those things were shaping me long before I understood what they meant.
Because environment doesn’t just surround you.
It builds you.
It whispers ideas into your mind about who you are supposed to become.
And when you’re young, you absorb those messages without realizing it.
Some of those lessons helped prepare me for the future.
Others slowly led me down a path I didn’t yet understand.
But the truth is, everything I experienced growing up in Davenport—every influence, every lesson, every observation—was laying the foundation for the choices I would eventually make.
Choices that would take me further away from the life I once imagined.
And closer to the moment where everything would finally have to change.
Before the streets ever really got their grip on me, I was already known for something else.
Basketball.
By the time I got to about the ninth grade, I had made a decision in my mind. This was what I wanted to do. I wanted to hoop. I started taking it seriously. Practicing more. Playing with older guys whenever I could. Testing myself against people who were bigger and stronger than me.
And if I’m being honest… I was pretty good.
People around the neighborhood started recognizing me. Around Davenport. Around the Quad Cities. If there was a game somewhere, I wanted to be there. I didn’t care if it was at a park, a school gym, or some outdoor court with a crooked rim.
Basketball was the one thing that made everything else disappear.
When you’re on the court, there’s no poverty. No stress. No labels. Just the game.
For a while, that was my identity.
The kid who could ball.
But even while basketball was growing in my life, another world was growing around me.
And it was a world that was a lot louder.
One of the biggest influences I saw during those years was my cousin G.
G loved me like family should. From the bottom of his heart. And the crazy part is he saw my potential early.
He knew I could do something different with my life.
He told me that many times.
I remember him saying,
“Man, don’t ever get involved in this. Whatever you need, I got you. If you need shoes, if you need anything, I got you, cuz.”
And he meant it.
G was making serious money at the time. The kind of money a poor kid notices immediately.
Gold chains.
Gold watches.
Beautiful women.
Cars.
One time when I was about fourteen years old, he even let me drive his Benz.
No license. Just a kid living a moment he had never imagined.
It was a big-body gold Mercedes with hammer rims on it. I remember driving it in Chicago one time and accidentally going the wrong way down a one-way street. I didn’t even realize it until somebody started yelling and things started getting tense.
I could’ve gotten shot that night.
But in that moment, I didn’t care.
I was fourteen years old driving a Benz.
To a poor kid, that felt like power.
Another moment with G stuck with me forever.
One night he thought the police might raid his place. He grabbed a big stack of cash and handed it to me.
“Take this down the street,” he told me.
When he put that money in my hands, I had never seen anything like it before. To me it looked like a mountain of money.
Later I learned it was around fifteen thousand dollars.
But at that moment, to a teenager, it felt like a million.
I was mesmerized.
The power.
The money.
The respect people gave him.
As a kid watching all of that up close, it was hard not to be fascinated.
And at the same time, the streets were changing.
Crack cocaine had entered the neighborhood, and it changed everything.
Suddenly guys who used to be broke had money.
Cars.
Clothes.
Attention.
And when you’re a young man trying to figure yourself out, those things start to look like success.
At the same time, gangs were beginning to divide the neighborhood.
Friends I grew up with started choosing sides.
Some went with the Gangster Disciples.
Others joined the Vice Lords.
And the craziest part about it was that a lot of those guys had grown up together. We used to be one group of kids hanging around the same streets.
We even had a name for ourselves back then.
The 6th Street Posse.
But once gangs started influencing the drug trade, everything changed. If you wanted to move product in certain areas, you had to be aligned with the right group.
That influence came heavily from Chicago. Guys from Chicago had brought their gang structures with them.
And suddenly the neighborhood wasn’t just a neighborhood anymore.
It was territory.
One of the strange parts of my life was that I was connected to both sides of the river.
My mom had friends in Rock Island on the Illinois side, so I spent time there growing up. Later I discovered my father had children in Illinois too, and I eventually grew closer with them than I ever did with him.
So I moved between worlds.
Iowa side.
Illinois side.
But the tension between the two was real.
Illinois guys and Iowa guys didn’t always get along.
And the deeper the drug game went, the more dangerous things became.
I started seeing things I had never seen before.
Friends getting hurt.
Friends getting killed.
I remember the first friend of mine who died connected to that life. That moment stayed with me.
But even with those warning signs, the money was still pulling people in.
And eventually, it pulled me in too.
I remember the first time I sold someone crack.
I made twenty dollars.
Then another twenty.
And it happened fast.
Too fast.
When you’re young and poor and suddenly you’re making money in seconds, it changes your thinking. I wasn’t thinking about school anymore.
I wasn’t thinking about long-term consequences.
I was thinking about shoes.
About money.
About girls noticing me.
About feeling like I was somebody.
I remember one day on the block during the first of the month. That was when people got their checks and the streets would get busy. Police knew it too, so they always patrolled the area.
One of the officers who pulled up that day was actually a football coach from my school.
He recognized me.
Before they got out of the car, I had already tossed the drugs away.
I had probably the equivalent of two thousand dollars’ worth of crack on me.
If they had caught that, my life might have gone in a completely different direction much sooner.
The officer walked up and looked me in the eye.
“Cliff,” he said, “I don’t know if this is yours or who you’re serving for… but this ain’t your life.”
He knew me as an athlete.
He knew I had something else going for me.
And at that moment, for the first time, I felt something strange.
A sense that maybe I was meant for something different.
But the streets weren’t done with me yet.
Not even close.
Because once money starts flowing…
once gangs start drawing lines…
and once pride and reputation enter the picture…
walking away becomes a lot harder than stepping in.
And I was about to learn that lesson the hard way.
Even with everything happening around me, there was still another side of me that people didn’t always see.
I loved school.
Not just being there — I loved learning.
Science was my thing. I used to call myself a science sleuth. I was always curious about how things worked, why things worked, and what made the world move the way it did. I had a teacher named Miss McShane who really encouraged that curiosity.
I remember a few science projects we worked on that I was really proud of.
One of them she might’ve taken a little too much credit for — but that’s another story.
The point is, school mattered to me.
Even when the streets started pulling at me, part of me still loved learning.
That’s what made the situation complicated.
Because by the time I was fourteen, the streets had already started creeping into my life.
By fifteen, I was off the porch.
Making trips out of town with cousins — Missouri, Quincy, Illinois, and other places — moving crack. At that age, it felt like adventure.
Looking back now, it was just danger disguised as opportunity.
When I got my driver’s license at sixteen, the freedom only made things easier. Now I could move around myself. Drive places. Deliver product.
But even with all that happening, basketball was still in my heart.
There were moments where I thought about leaving the streets alone and focusing completely on the game.
One of the moments that shook me happened during my senior year.
One night I was near my grandmother’s house with one of my best friend’s brothers when we saw my cousin G come out of the house holding a couple guns.
I asked him what was going on.
He said he had business to handle with someone.
Curiosity got the best of me, and we followed from a distance just to see what was happening. We parked across from where everything was about to go down.
Then the shooting started.
Bullets flying everywhere.
One of those bullets came straight through the windshield of the car we were sitting in and lodged in the center console.
If I had moved differently… if I had ducked the wrong way…
That bullet would’ve gone straight into my head.
That moment scared me.
It made me think seriously about walking away from the street life and putting everything into basketball.
For a while, it seemed like that might actually happen.
I ended up going to a junior college with several guys from Davenport who were athletes too.
James Randolph.
Jeremy Smith.
Jake Young.
Sam Edwards.
We were all chasing opportunities through sports.
For a moment, life felt like a normal college experience. Parties. Dorm life. New freedom.
But things were tense around campus.
Some people from the surrounding neighborhoods didn’t like the college athletes being around. A lot of the tension centered around women and pride — the kind of immature stuff that turns dangerous when egos get involved.
Sometimes college guys would get caught in the city and jumped.
Sometimes neighborhood guys would get chased away from campus.
One day things escalated.
A guy rolled past the dorms in a gold drop-top ’64 Impala, the same kind of car Ice Cube had in Boyz n the Hood.
Someone threw a brick at it.
A couple hours later, retaliation came.
We were upstairs in the dorm playing what we called “floor wars.”
It was stupid college fun — if you got caught on the wrong floor, you got roughed up a little. Nothing serious.
Just dorm games.
Then suddenly we heard gunshots.
Guys ran to the windows.
We saw people running across the field.
The dorms had been shot up.
The next day, a lot of the white students packed their bags and went home.
Some of us couldn’t do that.
We couldn’t afford to just leave school and start over somewhere else.
We were already in junior college — one step away from being back in the streets.
And for some of us… that’s exactly what happened.
For me, the moment that changed everything came a little later.
One night after a party on campus, I was walking back to the dorms when I saw something happening outside.
A group of guys were beating up one of the students who lived in our dorm.
I didn’t know all the details.
But what I did know was that it didn’t look right.
And I’ve always been the type of person who stands up when something feels unfair.
It didn’t matter if you were Black, white, or anything else.
Right is right.
Wrong is wrong.
So I stepped in.
I broke it up.
In the middle of the chaos, I ended up breaking one of the guy’s noses.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the guy I hit had a connection to the administration — a relative of someone high up.
The result was simple.
They took my scholarship.
Just like that.
The opportunity I had to pursue basketball — the thing that might have pulled me completely away from the streets — was gone.
And the crazy part is…
I lost it for doing what I believed was the right thing.
That moment changed the trajectory of my life more than I understood at the time.
Because when that door closed…
the streets were still wide open.
And when a young man loses the one thing that might have saved him…
he often falls back into the one thing that never left him.
For me, that meant going back to the life I had been trying to escape.
And what happened next would take me further down that road than I ever imagined.
Chapter 2
When the Streets Became My Classroom
Losing that basketball scholarship changed everything.
It didn’t just close a door.
It pushed me straight back into the only world that was still open to me.
The streets.
Up to that point, I had always been balancing two identities. On one side was the kid who loved sports and school. On the other side was the young man who had already started stepping into the drug game.
When basketball disappeared, the balance disappeared too.
There was nothing left pulling me away from the streets.
So I leaned into it.
Hard.
By then I was already learning the neighborhood politics. I was meeting gang members from all over the Quad Cities. Guys from Davenport. Guys from Rock Island. Guys from Chicago who had influence in both places.
The deeper I went, the more I started to understand how organized everything really was.
One of the older guys in the game started noticing me.
He was a respected OG in the area, a big dealer who used to ride through Sixth Street where we were hustling. He knew my cousin. He knew the reputation the neighborhood was building for making money.
And he knew I was one of the young guys out there every day.
One day he pulled me aside.
He said he had something bigger for me.
He handed me what was basically the equivalent of a quarter kilo of cocaine.
I was sixteen years old.
Sixteen years old holding an amount of drugs worth more money than I had ever seen in my life.
That moment changed my perspective on everything.
Because now I wasn’t just a kid on the corner making small sales.
Now I was responsible for something real.
The plan was simple.
Move the product.
Bring him back the money.
Keep the rest flowing.
I started distributing work to my friends.
But most of them didn’t understand the seriousness of it.
They weren’t paying me back.
They treated it like a game.
Older guys started noticing I had that much product.
Some of them tried to rob me.
I remember one time they chased me through the neighborhood. I was so scared I jumped into a random car with people who were already driving just to get away.
That’s how wild things had gotten.
Because crack and cocaine had people doing anything.
Robbing.
Lying.
Betraying.
And the deeper I got, the more I started noticing something else.
The people who were supposed to know the rules… didn’t follow them.
Some of them were getting high on their own supply.
Some of them were sloppy.
And that’s when I started learning another side of the game.
Organization.
Eventually I connected with some guys from Chicago.
Those guys operated differently.
They moved with structure.
They had hierarchy.
They had discipline.
And they treated me like family in a way that felt powerful at the time.
It was the kind of brotherhood that makes you feel protected.
Like you belong somewhere.
They showed me how the organization worked. How different people had different roles, all moving toward the same goal.
Looking back now, I realize something strange about that period of my life.
I was learning leadership and structure…
just in the wrong place.
Because the more I learned, the deeper I got.
Before long I was around people connected to upper levels of the Gangster Disciples organization.
Things moved fast.
Too fast.
And eventually the law caught up with me for the first time.
Ironically, my first real case wasn’t even about drugs.
It started over something small.
A crack addict owed me money.
One rule of the street is simple:
Never give credit to a crackhead.
They’re never going to pay you back.
I learned that lesson the hard way.
When the person didn’t pay me, I went into their house and took their television.
In my mind, I was just getting my money back.
But it was still burglary.
And the woman pressed charges.
I was charged with Burglary in the Third Degree in the state of Iowa.
That put me on probation.
A couple years later, things got worse.
One day I was test-driving a car for someone who was known in the streets. While driving through Rock Island, police pulled me over.
They claimed they smelled marijuana.
They searched the car.
And they found less than a tenth of a gram of weed hidden in the seat.
That tiny amount didn’t matter.
Because I was already on probation.
My probation officer at the time was a woman named Nancy Boyle.
If you knew her reputation, you knew she didn’t play.
She told me straight up she was going to revoke my probation.
Not just because of the weed.
But because detectives in Rock Island had told her I was heavily involved in drug activity.
She recommended the full sentence.
Five years.
In Iowa, a five-year sentence automatically gets cut in half for eligibility purposes.
But it was still prison.
My first time.
I had to turn myself in on February 12, 1998.
I remember everything about that moment.
I had kids on the way.
Multiple women pregnant.
At that point, that was the only real legacy I had built from the street life.
Kids and trouble.
I was supposed to turn myself in a couple days earlier.
But Valentine’s Day was coming.
And I delayed it.
I told my lawyer I needed a couple more days.
It sounds crazy now, but at that moment I was still trying to hold onto normal life for just a little longer.
Then the day came.
Walking into that processing center was one of the strangest feelings of my life.
Fear.
Anger.
Confusion.
I didn’t know what prison would be like.
I didn’t know what my future would look like.
All I knew was that the choices I had made had finally led me here.
And when those doors closed behind me for the first time…
my life entered a completely different chapter.
Chapter 3
The First Night Inside
The first part nobody really prepares you for is the ride.
That ride from the county jail to prison.
You get on the van or the bus, chained up, sitting next to people who are all headed to the same place but for completely different reasons. Nobody talks much. Everybody’s in their own head.
I remember staring out the window most of the time.
Thinking.
Wondering how my life had gotten to that point.
The first stop was Oakdale Medical and Classification Center. That’s where everyone goes first in Iowa before they send you to your actual prison. It’s where they figure out what kind of inmate you are and where you belong.
Petty offender.
Serious offender.
Maximum security.
They study everything about you.
Even though it’s technically prison processing, Oakdale still felt a little like jail. Some dorm areas, but they also had those small cells where you could end up by yourself.
Six feet by nine feet.
Just you and your thoughts.
Eventually they moved me to my actual prison assignment.
Rockwell City Correctional Facility.
I remember the moment we pulled up.
Seeing the fences.
The barbed wire wrapped across the top.
The towers.
Even though Rockwell was considered a minimum to medium security facility, it still looked like prison to me.
Still miles away from home.
Miles away from everyone I loved.
Miles away from everything I knew.
When they processed us in, we had to go through clothing.
They issued us state blues.
Your prison uniform.
Just like that, everything about your identity changes.
You’re not Clifton anymore.
You’re an inmate.
Once they finished processing us, they assigned me to one of the dorm units.
D North or D South.
When I walked inside, it wasn’t exactly what I expected.
In my mind, prison looked like the movies.
Shawshank Redemption.
Big walls.
Steel bars.
Cells stacked on top of each other.
Rockwell was different.
It was more like an open dorm setup.
You walk into a big common area with a couch, a TV area, maybe a pool table. Then there were rooms that held about six guys each.
Still prison.
But not what I imagined.
And in a strange way, that made it slightly easier to breathe.
But only slightly.
Because prison is still prison.
You’re surrounded by people you don’t know.
People with stories you don’t know.
And when you first walk in, everyone sees you.
They see you carrying your property.
They see the look in your eyes.
They know exactly what you are.
The new fish.
Fortunately, I recognized a couple people from Davenport.
Guys from the city.
Seeing familiar faces helped a little.
But it didn’t take away the reality of where I was.
That first night was the hardest part.
When things quiet down.
When the lights dim.
When you’re laying there staring at the ceiling thinking about everything that led you there.
Your family.
Your kids.
Your mistakes.
Your future.
I remember asking myself one question over and over again.
How did I end up here?
The emotions hit all at once.
Fear.
Anger.
Confusion.
Disbelief.
Because I knew I had potential.
I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there.
But there I was.
One of the things that stuck with me the most during those early days was the phone.
Watching guys line up to use the phone.
And watching what happened after they hung up.
Some guys walked away smiling.
Most didn’t.
Some got bad news.
Some couldn’t get their girlfriend or wife to answer.
Some learned that life was moving on without them.
You could see it on their faces every time they came off that phone.
It changed people.
The yard was another experience.
The first time I went out there, I didn’t know what to expect.
I was nervous.
Watching everybody.
Trying to figure out the politics.
Trying to understand who was who.
At one point I even smoked a cigarette for one of the first times in my life.
It didn’t take long to realize that wasn’t for me.
But that’s the thing about prison.
Everybody’s coping with something.
Some people lift weights.
Some gamble.
Some smoke.
Some isolate.
Some just watch.
And that’s what I did a lot of in the beginning.
Watched.
Observed.
Just like I did growing up.
Because the more time I spent in there, the more I started realizing something.
A lot of the guys in that place came from stories just like mine.
Broken homes.
Poverty.
Drugs in the neighborhood.
Bad decisions made young.
Some guys probably belonged there.
But a lot of guys…
a lot of guys were just products of the same environment.
Different cities.
Different streets.
Same story.
And every night when I laid down in that dorm, one thought kept echoing in my mind.
This can’t be how my story ends.
But at that moment, I had no idea what it would take to change the direction of my life.
All I knew was that prison had given me something I hadn’t had in years.
Time to think.
And sometimes that’s the most dangerous thing a man can have when he’s forced to face himself.
Chapter 4
I Wasn’t Ready to Change
People like to tell prison stories as if the first time you go in, you come out completely different.
That wasn’t my story.
My first prison bid changed my surroundings, but it didn’t change my heart enough.
Not yet.
What prison did give me was structure. For the first time in a long time, life had rails on it. You wake up when they tell you. You move when they tell you. You eat when they tell you. And inside that routine, I found the one thing that had always helped me feel like myself.
Basketball.
One of the first things somebody noticed when I got there was my height. I was about 6’4″, maybe 6’5″, and one of the guys asked me if I played.
I looked at him like, Do I play?
The prison had a basketball team, and I made it.
That ended up saving me from a lot.
We would play outside teams sometimes—small colleges, local teams, different groups that would come in and test themselves against the prison team. It sounds strange saying it now, but some of the best release I felt in that place came with a ball in my hands.
For those few hours, I wasn’t just another inmate in state blues.
I was an athlete again.
A competitor.
A man with rhythm and purpose.
We didn’t even always have the right shoes. Some of us wore these imitation Converse-looking shoes they called Bob Barkers. Some guys had real gym shoes. It didn’t matter. Once the game started, everybody wanted to win.
And the games were serious.
Competitive.
Physical.
Emotional.
That part of prison felt familiar to me because the court had always been the one place where I could forget everything else.
But basketball also brought out something else in me—my temper.
That had always been true, even on the streets.
A lot of my altercations in life started on the basketball court because I talked trash, and I talked trash because I was good.
One day, after I had taken the place of another guy on the team, tensions got high. Some inmates were playing against us on an outside squad arrangement, and in my mind they were carrying themselves like they were against us, not with us.
We lost, and I took it personal.
Words got said.
Too many words.
My temper got the best of me, and I hit one of the guys in the mouth.
It was stupid.
And I regretted it almost immediately—not just because of what I did, but because of what it could have caused.
There were people in that place who actually cared about me. People who knew I was a short-timer and wanted me to get in and get out. They didn’t want me catching extra time, getting into trouble, or forcing everybody around me to stay on alert because I couldn’t control myself.
That moment taught me something important.
Even in prison, I still wasn’t separate from the same impulses that had brought me there.
I could read my Bible.
I could play basketball.
I could talk about changing.
But if anger still controlled me, if ego still controlled me, then I wasn’t free. I was just contained.
That first prison stay did help me reconnect with God. I got deeper into my Bible again. Not because I was trying to become one of those prison ministers or put on some holy act. God had always been in my heart. Even when I was in the streets, even when I was making bad choices, I never felt far from Him in my spirit.
And I know for a fact I wouldn’t have made it through any of that without Him.
But faith and transformation are not always the same thing.
Sometimes faith keeps you alive while you are still too hard-headed to change.
That was me.
I did eight months and got out on early release in November of 1998.
And if I’m honest, I was not rehabilitated.
I had not suffered enough to understand the lesson.
I had not separated enough to really become somebody different.
The streets still made sense to me.
The money still made sense to me.
The identity still made sense to me.
So when I came home, the old life was waiting.
One of the guys basically blessed me when I got out. Told me I had been loyal, had held myself down, had done what I was supposed to do. The gang culture worked like that. They wanted you to feel taken care of, feel seen, feel like your loyalty had value.
And to a man coming out of prison with no job, no money, pressure on his back, and kids to think about—that kind of love feels real.
Even when it’s the exact thing destroying you.
That was the trap.
I needed to separate from that life, but I wasn’t ready.
Not in 1998.
Not yet.
So in 1999, I went right back.
I linked back up with one of the guys I had been locked up with in Rockwell. We came home with the same mindset: make money, stay sharp, don’t get caught again.
We started moving drugs in East Moline.
And the money came fast.
I told myself I was doing it for my daughter, for my family, to change my situation. But really I was still addicted to the feeling. The control. The fast money. The illusion of power.
I didn’t have a real job.
I couldn’t see a clean path.
And the streets always offer a shortcut when you’re desperate enough to take one.
Around that same time, my daughter had moved to Florida, and part of me started thinking maybe basketball still wasn’t done with me. Maybe there was still another path. I started reaching out again, trying to reconnect to the dream I had once carried so seriously.
A coach from Pensacola Junior College got interested.
At the time, they were one of the top junior college programs in the country.
I went down there.
Tried out.
Made the team.
That should have been the miracle.
That should have been the exit ramp.
But then the coach called me.
He said, “I’ve been looking at your background, and it seems like you never finish what you start.”
That line stuck with me.
He said he wouldn’t give me a full scholarship the first semester. He wanted me to earn it. He offered me a half scholarship instead, with the chance to work up to a full ride.
I was devastated.
Not because he was wrong.
But because deep down, I knew he might have been right.
The crazy thing is, I had enough to make it work.
I had around five thousand dollars.
A couple cars.
Enough hustle and enough resources to find a way.
But instead of choosing the future, I chose one more run.
One more trip.
One more score.
One more chance to stack some money before I left.
That decision changed everything.
Me and one of my guys took a trip to Chicago to pick up more crack. Another guy was riding in front of us in a raggedy lemon van that could barely go over fifty-five without smoking. The whole day felt off from the start. We were taking too long. Phones were blowing up. Dealers and fiends were both calling, asking where we were at, when we were coming back.
Everybody needed the product.
Everybody was waiting.
And because we were late, because the whole day was off, because God sometimes lets things fall apart to save your life, we got pulled over on the way back.
The police searched the car.
Illegally.
They found nine ounces of crack cocaine in the glove box.
And just like that, my life stopped again.
They wanted to give me sixty years.
Sixty.
That’s not a sentence. That’s a burial.
I remember sitting in the back of that police car praying harder than I had prayed in a long time.
I told God, “If You get me out of this, I will never, ever, ever touch crack cocaine again in my life.”
And this time, God gave me mercy.
The case got suppressed on illegal search and seizure grounds. They had violated our Fourth Amendment rights. It took months to beat the case, but we beat it.
I should have walked away right then and never looked back.
But mercy doesn’t always change a man if his mind is still the same.
And in another way, that Florida coach had been right all along.
I still hadn’t finished what I started.
I had another chance at basketball.
Another chance at life.
And I traded it for one more trip.
Then life kept coming fast.
Around 1999 going into 2000, I got stabbed on New Year’s Eve by some younger Vice Lords at a bar.
That changed me too.
Because in that moment, it stopped being about me.
I started thinking about my kids.
About some man taking me away from my children.
Or my children growing up without me because I was out here trying to live some life I didn’t even understand anymore.
Those same guys ended up shooting at me a couple months later.
And by then, I was looking around at my life wondering how I had gotten so deep into something I never really meant to become.
In a short span of time, I had gone to prison, come home, gotten back in the streets, gotten stabbed, gotten shot at, caught another major case, beat it, and still wasn’t really changing.
That’s what happens when you keep ignoring the lesson.
Life keeps teaching it harder.
Eventually I ended up in Illinois prison, and that was a whole different reality from Iowa.
Iowa prison had introduced me to incarceration.
Illinois prison introduced me to fear.
When I got to Joliet and those huge gates opened, it felt like something out of a nightmare. Real bars. Real lockdown. Twenty-three and one. COs beating the bars through the night. Men crying because they were headed to max. Men losing their minds because the weight of what they were facing had finally become real.
That was prison.
And I knew immediately I wasn’t supposed to be there.
I ended up doing sixty-one days on what was basically a lie-to-police identity case that should have been handled differently. But I didn’t have the right representation, and by then I had already made myself an easy target. I had beaten a major dope case, and to them I was just another Black kid they wanted to put somewhere.
That season of my life was warning after warning after warning.
And I wish I could say I got it immediately.
I didn’t.
Because the truth is, the hardest thing to separate from is not always the streets.
Sometimes it’s the version of yourself that still believes he needs them.
Chapter 5
Warnings, Mercy, and the Man I Was Becoming
By the time I got caught with the nine ounces, my life had already been moving too fast for too long.
I was tired.
Tired in the kind of way that doesn’t show on your face at first. The kind of tired that settles into your spirit. Tired of looking over my shoulder. Tired of trying to act like I had everything under control when I really didn’t. Tired of pretending the streets were still giving me something they hadn’t already taken.
But even then, I still wasn’t done learning.
When me and Mr. Phillips got locked up on that case, we were housed in the Henry County Jail. From the beginning, something felt off about the whole thing. The officer who pulled us over had a friend working in the jail, and that guy was always around us, always asking questions, always trying to casually find out what we knew or what we were thinking about the case.
At the time, we didn’t know why he was so interested.
Later, it became clear.
That traffic stop was supposed to be a big win for them. A trophy case. A major bust. And we were sitting right in the middle of it.
The problem was, they knew from early on that their case had holes in it.
Big holes.
But instead of doing the right thing, they held us in there for five months trying to make something stick. Trying to get one of us to tell on the other. Trying to pressure us into bad deals. Trying to make us crack before their case did.
That’s when I really started understanding how much of the system is not about justice.
It’s about leverage.
It’s about pressure.
It’s about whether they can make you break before the truth gets a chance to breathe.
The more paperwork we got, the more we realized they had problems.
The main officer claimed he smelled weed and that’s why he got us out of the car. But then he asked for consent to search. If you actually smell weed, you don’t need consent. Another officer said neither one of us smelled like weed at all.
That was true.
And the reason it was true is one of those strange moments in life where you can see God working backward through a bad decision. We had taken so long getting there that we missed the weed man. If we had caught him like we meant to, we probably would’ve been smoking, probably would’ve smelled like it, and their lie might have become their truth.
That day, our slowness became our protection.
God has a way of hiding mercy inside confusion.
When the suppression hearing finally came, the judge could see the problems in the case. He even admitted there were things lacking. But instead of doing the right thing then and there, he denied the motion without really giving a reason.
Basically telling us: Yeah, y’all probably got an issue here, but I’m not gonna be the one to fix it.
That day should have broken me.
But it didn’t.
Because God had already placed another set of eyes in the room.
My brothers had shown up to court that day.
And they saw something we didn’t.
The same bailiff who smiled in our faces every day in jail, the same one always acting friendly, had been stepping in and out of the courtroom during testimony, going outside and telling other officers what had already been said on the stand so they could get their stories lined up.
He was helping them rehearse while the hearing was still happening.
My brothers caught it.
Told my lawyer.
And all of a sudden the whole thing changed.
We went back into court.
Filed again.
And this time the truth had too many witnesses.
The judge finally let us go.
I still remember what he said:
“The same law y’all was breaking is the one that let y’all go home today. Y’all remember that the next time y’all come down Interstate 80 with nine ounces of crack cocaine.”
And I did remember it.
Sitting there in that moment, I knew I had been given mercy I did not deserve.
I had already prayed in the back of that police car. I had already told God that if He got me out of that situation, I would never touch crack cocaine again in my life.
And this time, I meant it.
Because by then life had been warning me from every direction.
I had been to prison.
Gotten out.
Gone right back.
Got stabbed.
Got shot at.
Caught another major case.
Watched chance after chance narrow in front of me.
It felt like my life was running out of road.
When I got free, I knew one thing for sure:
I had to get away.
Not just from the neighborhood.
From the energy.
From the guys.
From the cycle.
So I moved.
I left my neighborhood and went to Cedar Rapids, trying to build something different. Trying to change my surroundings because I knew I couldn’t keep breathing the same air and expect to become a different man.
That was one of the first real acts of separation in my life.
Not perfect.
Not complete.
But real.
I started a new life with a different woman. Tried to calm things down. Tried to become somebody else. And for a little while, things felt better.
But when a man has not fully changed, he will often invite the same trouble back in through a different door.
That’s what I did.
The woman I was with tried to help me, but the kind of help she offered wasn’t the kind I needed. At that point in my life, “help” still looked like fast money. This time it wasn’t crack. It was marijuana. And not even good marijuana.
Mexican brick weed.
The kind nobody really wanted.
I was actually trying to take it back because I couldn’t move it.
That’s how ridiculous the whole thing was.
And while all of that was going on, I was trying to become something else again.
A rapper.
Some people I knew had gotten a major deal with No Limit Records, one of the hottest labels in the game at that time, and I started thinking maybe that could be another lane for me. Maybe music was the answer.
But the truth is, I wasn’t chasing purpose.
I was chasing escape.
And every escape route I chose still had the streets attached to it.
So there I was again.
On the highway.
Drugs in the car.
Police lights behind me.
This time they pulled me over for tinted windows.
Then they searched the vehicle and found the marijuana.
Another case.
Another county jail.
Another stretch of time sitting still with my thoughts, wondering how many chances a man gets before they finally run out.
By then I honestly believed I was probably going back to prison again. My record wasn’t clean anymore. My history was starting to stack up. And when you’ve already been in the system, every new charge feels heavier than the last one.
So I did the only thing I really knew how to do in those moments.
I prayed.
Not a polished prayer.
Not a church prayer.
A desperate one.
The kind a man prays when he knows he has run out of lies to tell himself.
And God gave me another break.
That break changed me more than the others.
Because this time I was finally tired enough to listen.
I remember standing before the judge and telling him that if he gave me another chance, he would never see me again.
That I was going to do something positive with my life.
That I was done.
And this time, something inside me believed it.
Not because I suddenly became perfect.
Not because temptation had disappeared.
But because I had finally started to understand something I had been missing for years:
The streets were not giving me identity.
They were stealing it.
And from that day on, I started moving in a different direction.
Toward kids.
Toward service.
Toward becoming a positive influence instead of another warning story.
I didn’t know it yet, but that promise in the courtroom was opening the door to another part of my life.
A part that would eventually lead me to work with young people.
A part that would change me forever.
A part that would prove God can build purpose out of the same life that once looked headed for destruction.
Because sometimes the first sign that a man is really changing…
is not that he never fell again.
It’s that when he finally stood up, he stopped running back toward the same cliff.
Chapter 6
The Promise I Had to Keep
Getting out and trying to live differently sounds simple when people talk about it.
In reality, it’s one of the hardest things a man can ever do.
Because you’re not just trying to change your environment.
You’re trying to escape the one person who knows all your secrets, all your strengths, and every weakness you’ve ever had.
Yourself.
I learned quickly that you can move to a different city, change the people around you, even change the places you go every day.
But if the change doesn’t come from within…
none of it matters.
When I moved to Cedar Rapids, I was trying to start over. I met Alyssa. I was trying to rebuild my life piece by piece. Trying to find something that felt honest. Something that felt stable.
But the real turning point came after the marijuana case.
Standing in that courtroom, talking to the judge, promising that I would change my life—that moment meant something to me. And shortly after that, I found myself working with the Boys & Girls Club.
And that job changed me in ways I didn’t expect.
There’s no feeling in the world like knowing you’re helping change a child’s life.
Every day those kids came into that program, they brought energy with them. Different personalities, different attitudes, different stories. Some of them were dealing with the same kinds of struggles I had grown up around.
And somehow, being around them made me feel like a different version of myself.
It made me feel like I mattered.
Working with those kids started teaching me things I had never fully understood before.
It taught me about responsibility.
It taught me about leadership.
It taught me how to care about people in a way that wasn’t connected to money, reputation, or survival.
And maybe most importantly, it started teaching me how to become a better father.
For the first time in my life, I was doing something that actually felt meaningful.
I didn’t come into the Boys & Girls Club as a leader.
I started the way most people do.
Learning the program.
Understanding how things worked.
But I was creative, and I cared about those kids more than anything else in that building.
Before long I went from being someone who worked in the program to someone who helped run it.
Then I started helping open new facilities to house the program.
For the first time in my life, I had stability.
I had my own apartment.
My own car.
My own office.
I could look around and see that I was improving people’s lives.
That job gave me something I had never truly had before.
Purpose.
But purpose doesn’t always protect you from people.
The leadership at the time included a woman named Carol.
Carol was the kind of person who thrived on control and competition. She sent emails constantly, questioned everything, and created tension where it didn’t need to exist.
And me?
I was never the kind of man who knew how to kiss anyone’s ass.
That was never going to be me.
So eventually we clashed.
And the crazy part is, the conflict wasn’t even about the kids.
It was about ego.
Around that time, something happened that shook my life deeply.
My niece—the daughter of someone who was like a brother to me—died in Chicago after a dentist gave her too much anesthesia.
It became a major news story.
National news.
But I didn’t know about it right away.
I wasn’t watching the news.
Most of the time all I watched was SportsCenter.
When Carol found out I didn’t know, she questioned me about it.
“How are you a youth leader in the community and don’t know what’s going on in the community?”
I told her the truth.
“It didn’t happen here. It happened in Chicago.”
But the conversation turned into something bigger than it should have been.
By that time I was already dealing with a major challenge at work.
I had warned the leadership that the new facility we were opening would bring in far more kids than they expected.
They didn’t believe me.
They thought I was exaggerating.
But when the program opened, we had over 150 kids show up on the very first day.
Now I had to train staff, organize the program, and manage a situation they had underestimated.
When my niece passed away, I asked for time off.
They told me no.
They said bereavement only applied to certain relatives.
But in my mind, that was my brother’s daughter.
Family.
I asked her a simple question.
“What if that was your sister’s son?”
She didn’t like that question.
From that moment forward, I could feel the shift.
She wanted me gone.
Eventually they found a way to push me out.
But what hurt the most wasn’t losing the job.
It was what they told the kids.
They told them I had left them to go to California and pursue a rap career.
That wasn’t true.
But the damage was done.
Those kids thought I had abandoned them.
And that broke something inside me.
Because that job meant more to me than any job I had ever had.
Before that, I had never really worked.
I hustled.
I played basketball.
I survived.
But the Boys & Girls Club gave me something real.
It gave me identity.
It gave me dignity.
And when it ended like that, it shook me.
But it also taught me something important.
I knew one thing for sure after that.
I would never allow someone else to control my purpose again.
I would never allow someone else to take away the work I cared about because of ego or politics.
From that point forward, I decided something.
I would never work for anyone again.
Not if I could help it.
I didn’t care if it meant starting with something as small as a lemonade stand.
If I was going to build something, it would be mine.
That moment was the birth of my entrepreneurial mindset.
Since 2007, I haven’t worked for anyone else.
But even after leaving that job, the impact those kids had on me never disappeared.
They had started calling me Coach Cliff.
And deep down, that felt like who I was meant to be.
A mentor.
A guide.
Someone who could reach kids before they made the same mistakes I had made.
But at the time, I was still conflicted.
Part of me still chased music.
Still chased identity.
Still chased the next opportunity.
And part of me was still learning lessons about relationships, about fatherhood, about respecting women, about becoming the kind of man my children deserved.
I kept making promises to God during those years.
And even when I didn’t keep them perfectly…
He kept showing up for me anyway.
Because sometimes transformation doesn’t happen all at once.
Sometimes God keeps showing mercy until the moment a man is finally ready to become who he was always meant to be.
Chapter 7
Building Something That Was Mine
Leaving the Boys & Girls Club hurt more than I expected.
It wasn’t just losing a job.
It was losing those kids.
Every day I had been showing up for them, and they had been showing up for me in ways they probably didn’t even realize. Being around them gave me a sense of purpose I had never really experienced before.
So when that door closed, it left a hole.
A big one.
For a while, I felt lost.
But one thing the streets had taught me—whether I liked it or not—was how to run an operation.
People think the street life is just chaos.
It’s not.
The people who survive in that world understand organization, logistics, people management, and pressure. The problem isn’t the skill set.
The problem is where those skills get used.
So I started asking myself a different question.
What if I took everything I learned the hard way… and applied it to something legitimate?
That thought started my journey into entrepreneurship.
I had already decided one thing for sure.
I wasn’t going to work for anybody else again.
So the first business idea I jumped into was a restaurant.
And let’s just say I learned some lessons immediately.
The menu was way too big.
My partner wasn’t invested the same way I was because he had other things going on.
And I was still learning the difference between running a street operation and running a legal business.
Taxes.
Payroll.
Licensing.
Employee management.
All the things nobody teaches you when you come from the background I came from.
It was trial and error.
A lot of error.
But every mistake was a lesson.
And every lesson pushed me closer to understanding something important:
If I was going to build something real, it had to come from something I truly loved.
And one thing I had always loved was music.
Music had been part of my life since I was young. Back in the day me and my friend Mark Eccles used to dance to songs like “I Wanna Sex You Up” by Color Me Badd. Back then we thought we were killing it too.
For a while I even thought about becoming a dancer.
But once I got too tall, that dream started looking a little crazy.
Still, the love for music never went away.
And eventually that love turned into something else.
The birth of Nice Da Doughboy.
A big inspiration for me during that time was my friend Alange Davis, also known as Jilla G, who was signed to No Limit Records. Seeing someone from the circle make moves like that made the dream feel real.
It made me believe that I could step into that world too.
But I didn’t want to just be part of somebody else’s label.
I wanted to own something.
Ownership had become important to me.
Maybe because of everything I had lost before.
Maybe because I had finally realized how dangerous it was to put your future in someone else’s hands.
So instead of chasing deals, I started building something of my own.
That’s when Nice World Entertainment was born.
It didn’t start as some big corporation.
It started the same way most real things start.
An idea.
A belief.
And a willingness to figure things out as I went.
Before Nice World really took shape, I tried a lot of different things.
Restaurants.
Coffee shops.
T-shirt businesses.
Different ventures trying to find the lane that fit me.
Some worked.
Some didn’t.
But every attempt was building the mindset I needed.
And eventually I realized something.
My past—every part of it—had given me something valuable.
The streets taught me how to read people.
Prison taught me patience.
Basketball taught me discipline.
Working with kids taught me purpose.
And all of it together gave me the ability to communicate with almost anyone.
Politicians.
Artists.
Entrepreneurs.
Or the most gangster guys you could ever meet.
I could sit in a room with any of them and understand how they think.
That ability became one of my greatest strengths.
And it started shaping my voice.
Through music.
Through storytelling.
Through comedy.
Through creative projects.
I started realizing that everything I had experienced in life wasn’t just something I survived.
It was something I could share.
Something I could create from.
Something that might actually help other people.
Nice World Entertainment became the platform for that.
A place where my past, my creativity, and my vision could all come together.
Looking back now, I realize something.
The same determination that once pushed me to chase money in the streets…
was the same determination that would eventually push me to build something real.
The difference was simple.
This time, I was building something that didn’t destroy me.
This time, I was building something that could actually outlive me.
Chapter 8
Separate to Elevate
The first time the phrase “Separate to Elevate” came to me wasn’t in prison.
It wasn’t during the street life.
And it wasn’t when I first became an entrepreneur.
It came much later in life.
It came when I moved to Atlanta.
At the time, I believed Atlanta was the place where everything I had been building with Nice World Entertainment was finally going to reach another level.
Atlanta was the center of the music industry.
Opportunity was everywhere.
Artists.
Producers.
Executives.
Studios.
Energy.
It felt like the place where dreams either became real… or disappeared forever.
I moved there with a woman I had just had another child with. My daughter, Carleia Nicole Sims, had just been born, and I believed that this move was going to change everything for my family and my career.
And in many ways…
it did.
Just not the way I expected.
Atlanta opened doors I had never seen before.
Through my work I started connecting with people in the music industry. I had the opportunity to work around Def Jam, meet different artists, and move through rooms I had only imagined before.
I even became a writer for Ozone Magazine, which at the time was one of the most influential hip-hop publications in the South.
For a kid who grew up in Davenport, Iowa, this world was something entirely different.
The city was bigger.
The pace was faster.
The energy was louder.
And the temptations were everywhere.
I had never seen so many beautiful women in one place in my life.
Atlanta will test a man if he isn’t ready.
And the truth is…
I wasn’t ready.
I had moved there with someone.
But deep down, I already knew I probably wasn’t going to marry her.
And instead of separating from that situation honestly, I stayed in it while still living the same lifestyle I had always lived.
Different city.
Different opportunities.
Same habits.
At the time, I thought I was chasing success.
But in reality, I was still running from myself.
Music was moving forward.
Nice Da Doughboy was growing.
Nice World Entertainment was expanding.
But Cliff Sims still had a lot of growing to do.
During those years—from 2011 to 2019—my life became complicated.
That relationship produced three children.
And something happened during that time that changed me in a way I didn’t expect.
For the first time in my life…
I experienced what it was like to raise kids in the same house every day.
I had never had that growing up.
My father wasn’t in the house.
The kids I had before that point didn’t live with me either. I saw them on weekends, birthdays, or during the summer.
That’s a completely different experience than being there every day.
Being in that house showed me something I had never truly understood before.
What it meant to be a father.
But at the same time, I was still battling parts of myself that I didn’t understand yet.
Infidelity.
Ego.
Escaping into the persona of Nice Da Doughboy.
Looking back now, I realize something.
That rap persona became another way of avoiding dealing with the real person behind it.
Because the truth was…
there was nothing wrong with Cliff Sims.
Cliff Sims was enough.
But I didn’t know that yet.
So I kept living the character.
And that character allowed me to make choices that hurt people.
It allowed me to be a father who wasn’t always present the way he should have been.
A partner who wasn’t loyal the way he should have been.
A man who hadn’t fully faced his own truth.
Eventually the relationship collapsed.
The infidelity that I had started eventually came back the other way.
And when that happened…
everything ended.
She took the kids.
And just like that, the life I had been building in Atlanta changed again.
For years I carried the weight of that situation.
But the truth is, during all those years I never once thought about therapy.
Where I came from, therapy wasn’t something men talked about.
We thought therapy meant something was wrong with you.
We thought it meant weakness.
We thought we could handle everything ourselves.
But the truth is…
sometimes the strongest thing a man can do is ask for help.
It wasn’t until 2022 that I finally stepped into therapy.
And that experience changed my life.
Sitting in those sessions forced me to look at things I had spent years avoiding.
The pain I caused people.
The damage I carried from my own past.
The habits I kept repeating.
And the responsibility I had for all of it.
Therapy didn’t just help me understand what I had done.
It helped me understand why.
That’s when the phrase finally came to life in a way I had never understood before.
Separate to Elevate.
Separate from the habits that destroy you.
Separate from the environments that trap you.
Separate from the versions of yourself that keep hurting people.
Separate from the ego.
Separate from the character you created.
And finally…
elevate into the person you were meant to be all along.
That realization didn’t fix everything.
Some relationships can’t be repaired.
Some damage can’t be undone.
And that’s something I have to live with.
But what I can do is make sure that the man I am today is not the same man I was back then.
Because the one thing I know for certain now is this:
I refuse to be responsible for generational damage.
I want to be responsible for generational growth.
And ever since I reached that place—since I truly understood my purpose—life has been different.
Clearer.
More intentional.
More honest.
And for the first time in my life…
I’m finally comfortable being exactly who I was always meant to be.
Cliff Sims.
Chapter 9
Becoming Who I Was Meant to Be
Therapy.
If you would have asked me years ago about therapy, I probably would have laughed.
Where I come from, therapy wasn’t something people talked about. We were taught to keep moving, keep grinding, keep surviving. Feelings were something you buried, not something you explored.
But today I can look at myself in the mirror and say something I never thought I would say.
Through the grace of God… and therapy…
I stand here a better man.
Not a perfect man.
But a better one.
And most importantly, a man who understands that asking for help isn’t weakness. Being honest about your emotions isn’t weakness. Allowing yourself to grow isn’t weakness.
That’s what being okay with Cliff Sims is all about.
For a long time in my life, I was trying to be somebody else.
Nice Da Doughboy.
The hustler.
The rapper.
The guy who always had it figured out.
But the truth is, there was never anything wrong with Cliff Sims.
I just had to rediscover him.
That rediscovery brought me back to where everything started.
Back to Davenport.
Some people asked me why I would come back.
Why return to a place connected to so many memories—good and bad.
But for me, coming back wasn’t about going backward.
It was about healing.
It was about trying to help a city that, in some ways, I had once helped damage.
Because the same streets that raised me… also raised a lot of other young kids who are trying to figure out who they’re going to become.
And if my story can help even one of them choose a better path, then every mistake I made might actually mean something.
Today I try to mentor young people.
I talk to them honestly.
I don’t pretend my past didn’t happen.
I don’t hide the mistakes.
Because the truth is, a lot of these kids see themselves in me.
They come from the same places.
They face the same pressures.
They hear the same voices telling them what success is supposed to look like.
And I tell them something simple.
You can look just like me.
You can come from the same neighborhoods I came from.
You can grow up seeing the same things I saw.
And you can still make it.
It’s not as impossible as people think.
The hardest part isn’t the struggle.
The hardest part is trying.
Trying when you’re scared.
Trying when you don’t believe in yourself yet.
Trying when the world expects you to fail.
Trying when your environment tells you that success isn’t meant for people like you.
That’s where the real battle is.
Because elevation requires separation.
You have to separate from the things that keep you trapped.
The things you see every day.
The voices you hear.
The fear you smell in the environment around you.
Sometimes you even have to separate from the version of yourself you used to be.
Only then can you become the person you were meant to be.
These days, I understand something else too.
I have more years behind me than I do ahead of me.
And sometimes I wish I had figured all of this out earlier.
Because along the way, I hurt people.
People I cared about.
People who cared about me.
Some of those relationships will never fully heal.
And that’s something I have to live with.
But growth doesn’t erase the past.
Growth teaches you how to move forward responsibly.
I’m still learning.
Still growing.
Still fighting to become more disciplined.
Still working to be a better father, a better man, and a better example.
But I can say something today that I couldn’t say years ago.
The world is better because I changed.
And if I can change…
anyone can.
My story isn’t about perfection.
It’s about transformation.
It’s about understanding that no matter where you start in life, you still have the power to become something greater.
That’s what Separate to Elevate means.
And that’s the lesson I hope people carry with them long after they finish this book.
Because elevation isn’t reserved for a chosen few.
It’s available to anyone brave enough to separate from the things holding them back.
Including the person they used to be.
Epilogue
The Choice Is Yours
If you’ve read this far, then you’ve walked a long road with me.
You’ve seen a kid growing up in Davenport, Iowa—dreaming about sports, watching the streets, trying to figure out where he belonged.
You’ve seen the mistakes.
The hustling.
The prisons.
The relationships lost.
The moments when I was certain my life was going to end one way.
And you’ve also seen the moments when everything could have changed earlier—but didn’t.
Because transformation rarely happens all at once.
Most of the time it happens slowly.
Through pain.
Through consequences.
Through realizing that the life you’ve been living isn’t the life you were meant to live.
If there’s one thing I hope you understand from my story, it’s this:
Your circumstances are not your destiny.
I grew up in an environment where survival often came before purpose.
Where the streets taught lessons faster than schools.
Where a lot of young men who looked like me believed their options were already decided for them.
But the truth is something I learned much later in life.
Your life is shaped by the decisions you make when nobody is watching.
The moments when you decide whether you’re going to keep repeating the same patterns… or finally break them.
For years I blamed environments.
I blamed people.
I blamed circumstances.
But eventually I had to face the hardest truth of all.
Some of the biggest obstacles in my life…
were me.
My ego.
My fear.
My refusal to slow down and really understand myself.
When I finally stepped into therapy in 2022, it forced me to look at things I had been running from for decades.
And that’s when the words finally made sense in a way they never had before.
Separate to Elevate.
It’s not just a phrase.
It’s a decision.
It’s the willingness to separate from the habits, the environments, the people, and sometimes even the identities that keep you from becoming who you’re meant to be.
Sometimes separation means leaving the streets.
Sometimes it means leaving toxic relationships.
Sometimes it means leaving your comfort zone.
And sometimes it means separating from the version of yourself that you’ve been hiding behind for years.
Elevation can’t happen without separation.
That’s the truth.
You cannot become the next version of yourself while holding on to everything from the last one.
And that doesn’t mean life becomes perfect.
It doesn’t erase mistakes.
It doesn’t undo pain.
But it does create something powerful.
It creates growth.
Today, I stand in a place where I’m still learning, still growing, and still fighting to be a better man every day.
But I’m also at peace with something that took me decades to understand.
I am enough.
Not because I never made mistakes.
But because I finally learned from them.
And if my story proves anything, it’s that no matter where you start in life…
change is always possible.
You might not be able to rewrite your past.
But you can absolutely rewrite your future.
So wherever you are in your journey right now, I want you to remember something.
The same power that allowed me to change my life…
exists inside you too.
You just have to be willing to separate from the things holding you back.
And elevate into the person you were meant to become.
Clifton D. Sims is an entrepreneur, storyteller, entertainer, and creator whose life journey spans athletics, street survival, incarceration, entrepreneurship, entertainment, and personal transformation.
Raised in Davenport, Iowa, Sims grew up navigating the complex realities of Midwest city life during the 1980s and 1990s. A talented basketball player with dreams of athletic success, his early path was influenced by the pressures and environments surrounding him, leading to experiences that would ultimately shape the powerful story he shares today.
After facing incarceration and the consequences of life in the streets, Sims began a long journey of personal growth and reinvention. His work with youth programs, including the Boys & Girls Club, ignited a passion for mentoring and community impact, helping young people avoid many of the mistakes he once made.
Sims later founded Nice World Entertainment, a creative platform dedicated to storytelling, music, comedy, and film. Under the stage name Nice Da Doughboy, he explored music and entertainment while continuing to expand his vision as a creative entrepreneur.
Today, Sims focuses on storytelling, mentorship, and inspiring others through his experiences. His work blends humor, honesty, and real-life lessons about resilience, accountability, and transformation.
Through Separate to Elevate, Sims shares the deeply personal journey that taught him the most important lesson of his life:
Sometimes the only way to rise…
is to separate from the things holding you down.
And through it all, one principle continues to guide his life and work:
Keep Living in Focus™