Facing Your Fears: Nate Schott’s Journey from Darkness to Light

When Success Becomes a Prison

Nate Schott was 24 years old when he opened his dental practice. By 40, he was running multiple locations, sitting on community boards, and anonymously buying groceries for families in need. He’d sing at nursing homes and let people stay rent-free in properties he owned. Then federal investigators came knocking.

“I had a couple of guys. Hey, hey, we’ve heard about some of this stuff with you with insurance and go, I’m like, well, I’ll check on it,” Nate told me about the first warning signs. What started as casual mentions from friends in his recovery group turned into something much bigger.

Nate’s story begins in Florida with what he calls a “complicated upbringing.” He was the hero child in a family impacted by addiction and alcoholism. Four kids born close together, with Nate and twins arriving just 11 months apart, then another sister three years later. His dad sold real estate and developed mobile home parks but was always on the road.

“I think the thing that impacted our family the most was addiction and, you know, alcoholism came through that,” Nate explained. But he learned crucial lessons too. His father taught him to work with his hands, to sell, to knock on doors without fear.

The Fear-Driven Pursuit

Nate earned scholarships for both tennis and music, even getting interest from Juilliard for trumpet. But fear drove his choices. “In those days, I wasn’t running and going for something. It’s what I didn’t want to be,” he said about his motivation.

The fear of financial instability, of the feast-or-famine cycle he’d watched his parents navigate, pushed him toward dentistry. “You want to live by this. You want to live by the surgeon’s lifestyle without having the hours of the surgeon and make the same money,” he explained about why many choose dentistry.

He calls it “the disease of more.” Not greed exactly, but an insatiable drive to achieve, to prove himself worthy. “I knew if I could work hard enough and do those things, you know, what could you become? You and I were taught, well, you can become anything you want to,” Nate reflected.

But that mindset created its own trap. Even with all his community involvement and genuine care for others, something was missing.

The Addiction That Changed Everything

At 42, after eye surgery, Nate became addicted to prescription narcotics. For a dentist who could write his own prescriptions, this was dangerous territory. He went to treatment, worked with a therapist who became a close friend, but something remained unresolved.

“He said, and another guy says, you know, we treated you after, but we always thought there was one little thing we could never get to,” Nate recalled. “I said, I know what you didn’t get to. I didn’t fully surrender. I thought, I still knew better.”

Even when people warned him about potential business issues, he looked but didn’t dig deep. He wasn’t holding himself fully accountable. By 2013, he’d stepped back from day-to-day practice but kept his license active for occasional work.

When the Government Comes Calling

The investigation began quietly. Employees started getting phone calls from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The Office of Inspector General got involved. Nate’s business lawyer gave him crucial advice: don’t talk to anyone without representation.

“If the government is coming to you with investigation, it is not, they’re not your friend. Your state government isn’t your local government isn’t your federal government isn’t. They’re there to enforce,” Nate learned the hard way.

The pressure was immense. “When you see United States of America versus your name, the full weight, authority and power of the United States government is coming at you. Takes your breath away,” he described.

The case involved healthcare fraud allegations. Nate doesn’t run from the fact that he broke the law, but he struggles with how the narrative was constructed. “There were ongoing because if you do it one time, they get it and they stay on it in days count and weeks,” he explained about how individual incidents became a pattern in the government’s telling.

The Weight of Letting People Down

What haunts Nate most isn’t the prison time he served. “I let a lot of people down. That’s something I regret. I regret most I let my family down,” he said. The man who had anonymously helped so many people in his community now saw his name in headlines.

The stress was overwhelming. He couldn’t sleep or eat. He backed away from relationships and even from a potential Senate run he’d been considering. “You’re not thinking correctly. You can’t. And anybody that says they are, they’re not,” he said about that period.

His advice to others facing similar situations is stark but practical: find great legal representation, ask questions, but understand that this is your life on the line, not theirs.

Finding Freedom in Surrender

Today, Nate talks about a different kind of freedom. Prison taught him what his treatment hadn’t: complete surrender. He’s involved in helping others navigate the legal system and runs businesses with his wife, including a vocational school.

“Haven’t had a cancer diagnosis yet or anything like that. And I say, yet, because who knows what tomorrow holds? But everybody’s like, what’s the worst thing they can do to put you back in prison? Well, we’ve already did that,” he said with a kind of dark humor.

Nate’s story isn’t about falling and rising again. It’s about a successful man who discovered that external achievement couldn’t fill an internal void. Sometimes the very drive that creates success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The disease of more, left unchecked, consumed everything he’d built.

But in losing it all, he found something he’d been missing: the ability to surrender completely and find peace with who he is, not just what he’s accomplished.