This is America, land of the free. This is America, a land of opportunity. Some people in other countries would cut off their left arm to be here because they can make money and provide for their families. You live here and maybe you haven’t done anything, maybe you’re just sitting back and doing nothing. But this is America. You can finish high school, go to college, get a job. All you have to do is show up to make something happen. There is no excuse for anyone to not try and move their life forward. There is so much you can do, why don’t you see it?
One night I was watching the news and back to back there were all these negative stories about random crimes, murders, break-ins, and carjackings. It made me think that some people take all the opportunities and access we have in America for granted. Some people are just sitting at home, not even trying to find a job or do anything to change their circumstances or situation; they just freeload and collect unemployment, social security, and other kinds of free money. For some reason on this particular night I had a random, extreme idea to create an exchange program where I would take a hundred dysfunctional American people overseas to a country in the middle of nowhere, where everything is isolated and regular people barely make money, and live in poverty, struggle for food, and don’t have the access, power, or control—a place where people are bound to their lifestyle so even if they try to do something different they are just stuck. I would then bring a hundred people from the same poor country to America for a year and see how they would take pure advantage of all the amazing things that we have access to in this country. I can almost guarantee that these people would have multiple flourishing careers compared to the hundred Americans that would be sent overseas. Once the Americans came home, after living in huts, making seven to twelve cents a day, and having no access, money, or power—maybe even having to hunt for their food—they’d appreciate America so much more.
People who have been in America for two or three years have said to me, “Americans are lazy. They have no idea how blessed they are to be in this country. I am in America to take advantage of all the gold that’s under everyone’s noses that no one is making use of.” There should be no such thing as poverty in America when you have this much access. It’s the only place where you can go from being homeless to being a millionaire within the same year if you just make the right choices. Unless someone is mentally challenged or has a debilitating handicap there is no reason to be unemployed or not trying to do something creative to get something off the ground. This is America, the land of opportunity. Many people don’t know how good we really have it. I know there’s a recession and the unemployment rate in this country is at an all-time high, but I’m also aware that there are people out there who were capable of working before the recession hit, who purposely decided to be lazy bums and sit around the house collecting unemployment and taking advantage of the system.
You have to believe in yourself. Don’t allow your friends and family to discourage you from what you’re thinking. It all goes back to self-love. You are not a Siamese twin. Your heart and mind are not connected to anyone else’s because God blessed us with individual minds. You are so much more than you can ever imagine. If God was done with you, you wouldn’t be here anymore. What is the mission you are supposed to be living out? Everyone has a purpose. God has a purpose for our being here. It’s not too late to figure out what you want for yourself.
The beauty of thinking and coming up with your ideas for yourself along the way is that your story and your thoughts are always evolving. You change, you transition, you’re on your way to another level. You’re on the ladder and you’re heading up to that place where your better you is. Every little bit of knowledge and self-love you gain is another rung of the ladder that brings you closer to that better place. I hope that by giving people some knowledge and information about what’s around the corner I will somehow make getting up the ladder a bit easier.
Chapter 8
Are You Ready for the Next Level?
When you come up with an idea—a purpose—you have to set a plan in motion for how you’re going to execute your idea.
When it comes to execution, the thing that I specialize in is a Things to Do List. My Things to Do List is for both my personal and business lives. I write down everything. My lists are thorough, detailed—they could go up to a hundred pages. I will walk through my house with a pen and a pad and will write down everything that needs to get done, or I will sit down in front of a laptop and go through everything I can think of. I type the whole thing out and then I’ll cut and paste it into a regular e-mail and send it to people who work with me. After that I’ll follow up with everyone some time later.
One time I was on a flight, thirteen hours overseas, and I went through my phone and wrote a list of reminders of things I was supposed to follow up on or execute for every name in my phone. I could more than likely figure out something pertaining to each person in my phone right now because they wouldn’t be in my contacts if they weren’t important or relevant in my life.
It’s all part of the hustle: I wouldn’t be in this position if I were not supposed to maximize the stage that I’ve been blessed to stand on. Your career and your life is that stage. You wouldn’t be blessed to know or have access to the people you have access to if you weren’t supposed to figure out a way to make use of those relationships. There is a reason every single person has been brought into your life and your journey.
So get organized and execute your dream!
Do You Own the Blessing?
Before you even start executing your plan, you have to feel like you own the blessing. When you own the blessing, you work really hard to maintain it. But if you feel like you don’t own it—if it’s something you feel you don’t deserve or even asked for—most likely you won’t work hard to keep it. The reason a lot of people suffer from self-sabotage and self-defeat and don’t work hard to maintain the blessing is because they don’t feel like it’s really theirs.
When I first started singing, my only motivation to get out of the hood was survival—I didn’t want to be hungry anymore. Once I wasn’t hungry and was making money, something in me was making me underperform. I wasn’t working nearly as hard as I had in the beginning of my career. I got complacent and lazy and was sabotaging a lot of the good things going on in my life. The world didn’t see it that way, but as new opportunities came my way I would figure out a way to bring some dysfunction into a situation that wasn’t dysfunctional at all.
It was like I was enjoying this successful life on borrowed time, and at some point the clock would strike midnight and the coach would turn back into a pumpkin, like in Cinderella. It felt like everything was so unreal because it happened so fast: I went from extreme nothingness and dysfunction and craziness to the extreme opposite of that very quickly—success, bling, good food.
I was sabotaging my blessings because I didn’t feel I owned them. I was afraid I would lose everything. I knew I was going to be a singer but the modeling and acting were unexpected blessings I didn’t ask for. I took them for granted and I didn’t protect them. Even though I worked my ass off to get where I was, once it started happening I felt like somebody was going to pinch me or wake me up and tell me my run was over. I felt like the blessings were rented, like my career was a rental car. Think about how you treat a rental car compared to how you treat your own car—you’re burning rubber, sometimes you lock the door and sometimes you don’t. But if the car is yours, you treat it with respect and decency; you wouldn’t put cheap gas in a car that belongs to you. If you treat your life, the people around you, or your house, like a rental car, then the blessing is going to go away.
Since I felt like it was going to end anyway, I figured I would end it myself. That way I could control the way it would end. I would have done it to myself instead of someone completely taking it away from me. I actually found myself being negative about so many things that were so positive and so wonderful—I didn’t want to accept all the great things in my life if
they were going to disappear. That was a very negative mind-set to have.
I had to recognize the blessing and I had to take ownership of it. This blessing was mine, and I had to take care of it and take responsibility for it and continue to hustle. I had to become the master of my environment and believe it.
We often want more than we have, but we should own the blessing, own what we have now, and maintain it. We have to work harder at maintaining the blessing. Uphold it like it’s your last, and act like it’s not going to be there tomorrow.
Do you own the blessing? The more you appreciate the unexpected blessings, everything you are asking for and trying to accomplish will reveal itself eventually. The more you love yourself and know that you do deserve your blessings, the more you will be ready for the next level.
Figure out if you’re committed and willing to do the work. Commit to your goal. Commitment is knowing how far you are willing to go to get to where you’re destined to be. So many people believe they know where they should be in their minds, but they are not as willing to put in the work to get there. Are you willing to make the commitment just to get to the highest level you can? You’ve got to protect your blessings and do the work. My mentor John Bryant told me that Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. You have to be enthusiastic to stay on your path—and you need self-love and respect to execute the idea and maintain the blessing.
You also have to understand your motives. Are they financial? Are you just hoping to buy stuff you don’t have? When I talk about ideas I don’t just mean ideas for making money, but ideas for getting to your better place, whatever that may be. Money will not make you happy. Everyone who is broke and wishes they had more money is assuming life will be better with money. Some people say mo’ money mo’ problems, but I think having more money with the wrong people in your life is what brings more problems. When you have more money and you have great people in your life, then you’re able to enjoy all the fruits of life that come from having money. Material things will not make you happy, especially if you have a lot of dysfunction in your life. You have to clear away the dysfunction and make more room for self-love. Dysfunction makes being broke even worse and it doesn’t let you enjoy the success, either. Sure it’s a pleasure to have certain things, but it’s not the be-all and end-all to your happiness.
A few years ago I was in my Bentley—I’m not being flashy, I work hard. I was at the light at Crenshaw and Slauson, and I was miserable. It had been a crazy couple of months for me, and I was sad and broken down. I was at the light and I saw this dude at the bus stop with some headphones on, dancing and having the time of his life. I was thinking, Look at this guy with the headphones on, in the hood, happy as a mofo, and I’m sitting in a Bentley all miserable. I actually said to myself, I wish I was that dude at the bus stop. I had dropped all this cash for the sound system and the car and that dude just had headphones and bus fare, and he was happier than me.
There are still times when I have to remind myself that I’m the master of my environment, despite my success. It’s one thing to say you’re the master of your environment, and it’s another thing for you to actually believe it and act upon it. I could say to people hundreds of times that I’m the master of my environment, but if I don’t believe it, then it’s not really the case.
Every Level’s Another Devil
Every level’s another Devil means that as you reach and try to grow, the Devil will get busy and try to distract you from bettering yourself. A friend of mine told this to me when he was going through some heavy stuff and I never forgot it. I identified with it because even after achieving success I still had to deal with a lot of dysfunction. The Devil creates obstacles to get you off focus from your goals. The Devil will try and get you to go back to your old ways. The more you try to love yourself is when the Devil is going to come at you, so you’ve got to try your best to ignore those negative thoughts—stay strong and stay focused.
When you get to the big opportunity, the Devil comes back at you stronger because you have more responsibility, people want more from you, and you have more to lose. You’re out and about trying to figure things out and one thing is happening after another and as soon as that big thing happens, that’s when everybody rushes toward you, everybody’s aggressively trying to get your attention. With every new step comes another obstacle you’ve got to overcome. Don’t let yourself get discouraged. If you’ve come this far you’ve got to remind yourself that you can go farther.
I can still get discouraged—as a father, an ex-husband, boyfriend, friend, son, actor, or singer. I think everyone gets discouraged when they don’t get something they want really bad, especially if they want something and don’t know why they didn’t get it. I get discouraged working out because I don’t love to do it. I remind myself of my blessings and get back to self-love to stay fired up.
We associate God with good, and the Devil with bad, but one time my security guard’s mother told me something interesting. She said we have a bad habit of giving the Devil credit. If something goes bad, we say the Devil did it. When we do that, we’re technically praising the Devil for his work and giving him credit. This wonderful woman said we should never even recognize or give the Devil opportunity for praise. We shouldn’t even make reference to the Devil and act like the Devil doesn’t exist. But sometimes we have to be aware that he’s out there to stay on our game. Don’t allow the Devil to lure you away from focusing on your goals.
People say idle time is the Devil’s playground. They end up doing stupid things when they’re bored that they wouldn’t do if they were busy—things they will regret later—I know I definitely have. If you’re not advancing your life in a personal or professional way, you’re opening yourself up to doing things you won’t be proud of.
I’ve said this before, but it’s arrogant to believe the next second belongs to you. Now, when I said that earlier, it was about abusive relationships and how your life could change or end in one second. But it’s also about your life and what you want from your life. Because I’ve seen it—growing up in the hood, with people dying all around me—your life can change in one second. So take that second to make the decision about how you’re going to get to that better place.
Setbacks
There will be times when you’ll be forced to take a step backward. The key to getting out of these situations is remembering what your bottom line is while you are moving backward. In other words, always keep sight of your goal. As long as your step backward is connected to trying to achieve your goal, you don’t have anything to worry about. Think about it as a challenge that God wants you to face an opportunity head-on and to prove to yourself and Him that you are strong enough to overcome it.
The problems arise when your setback is caused by allowing your bottom line to shift—like if you allow a person to suck you back into dysfunction.
It’s hard if you’re in the spirit of being discouraged and wanting to give up. Bishop Ulmer once told me that when we go through setbacks, God is setting us back to set us up. He’s got something special planned out for us. Bishop Ulmer explained it like this: God is a quarterback. In football, a quarterback takes the ball and draws back a few steps, and then throws the ball for a touchdown. Life is like that sometimes. You’ve got to draw back in order to throw as far as you can to get the touchdown. Even when you go backward, you’ve got to keep your bottom line in mind, and not go back to that man or woman or friend who brought you misery. Stay off the pity potty, get back to self-love.
I look at my life for the blessing it is, and you’ve got to fight for your blessings. You can’t give up because it’s not happening as fast as you want. Don’t give up on college or high school because it’s tough and your teacher or coach is giving you a hard time. You have to fight. If you want to respark your careers, do what you have to do to educate yourself, surround yourself with better people who will support you, and don’t let the ideas die because of the circumstances you fell into
. There are still things I want to accomplish. I want to go back to school and get my degree in filmmaking, to become a director and a better writer and an expert on the whole film process. I’m still in the process of executing that goal.
I keep my spirit open to allow people to come in my life and elevate me, because I’m constantly on a mission to be the best version of me. When I’m given options for how to do something I always take time to assess which way would be best. If there’s anything I don’t understand, I reach out to the people I have in my life. If I can’t come up with an answer or make a decision on anything I’m going through, I’ll at least put it out there and see if someone says something that makes sense for me so I can make the best decision. A lot of times we are in our own way because we’re not able to come up with the best scenario or the best answer for ourselves. Sometimes our own ideas are not the best ways to deal with a problem or a situation, or sometimes we’re so in our own minds and need that other point of view to shake up our approach to fixing our problem and help us get to a better place in our lives.
I want you to initiate your career and get to your better place. Stay in that space of self-love and be a person of integrity. Do not put your beliefs on the line to get your career off the ground because God is watching. It’s not only about what you’re capable of, it’s about whom you know. Relationships are everything. Get off your ass and hustle.
How to Get Out of Your Own Way Page 20