Rick Culleton is hardly the kind of person you'd expect to fly an airplane. He is fearful of heights and lacks a good sense of orientation. None of this, however, has prevented him from earning a pilot's license. Nor have anxiety and ADHD and people labeling him a lost cause stopped him from becoming highly successful as an entrepreneur.

In his candid, entertaining debut book, Messed Up Like You, the author shares sometimes hair-raising experiences from his personal life, business ventures and mental health journey and weaves them together with anecdotes from flight school. His narrative, which shows how lessons he learned up in the air apply to life in general, will inspire readers who feel written off by society.

Culleton's story is one of repeated triumph over adversity. Growing up in central New York state, he struggled in school because of his learning difficulties and did a brief stint in prison at 17. As a young man in Texas, where he initially hustled cars, he was taken advantage of by customers.

Later, after finding success in the retail and real estate sectors, he was sued by a major corporation and faced a years-long IRS audit where incarceration seemed inevitable. While both these David-against-Goliath fights often felt overwhelming, Culleton weathered them as a pilot would weather turbulences. Rather than feeling sorry for himself or letting his anger about the situation turn destructive, he relied on sports and other coping mechanisms to keep himself sane. And he kept doing his work.