The Wealth of My Mother's Wisdom: The Lessons That Made My Life Rich

by Terrence J

  When I first arrived at North Carolina A&T in 2000, the Omega Psi Phi fraternity hadn’t existed on campus for several years—there had been issues in the past concerning hazing that led to the organization being suspended from campus. But in 2003, the fraternity was eligible to come back, and that first year of their return there was a lot of buzz around their presence. Omega Psi Phi is a very manly organization, very militant in presence, full of dominant personalities. Where other Greek organizations on campus were smooth and debonair, Omega Psi Phi was about power and edginess—but also intelligence. The guys in Omega, in addition to being big guys and football players, were also future doctors, lawyers, and engineers. That impressed me. Plus, they wear signature gold boots and army fatigues: I remember looking at them and thinking, “Wow, they look cool.” All the girls on campus flocked around them. I had to join.

  But there were other reasons to join, too: the brotherhood aspect, for instance; the fact that both Travis and Fred were pledging; and, finally, the challenge of pledging itself. That appealed to me. It was a killer process, incredibly difficult. I often heard stories of guys who couldn’t make it through—tough, six-foot-four football players who just couldn’t cut it. I love a good challenge, and this sounded like the ultimate.

  I can’t tell you about the process of entering Omega Psi Phi, but I can tell you that it was one of the hardest things I’d done in my life thus far, and one of the most gratifying experiences of my adulthood. I learned about manhood, scholarship, perseverance, and uplift—the four cardinal principals of Omega Psi Phi. I came to understand the meaning of sacrifice and commitment. And I built an incredible lifelong bond with my “line brothers” (pledge class) and my Mu Psi (our college’s chapter of Omega Psi Phi) brothers after going through some very dramatic experiences. We still attend each other’s bachelor parties and weddings; I sleep well knowing that if anything were to happen to me, they’d take care of my family, and vice versa. Our kids all have twelve godfathers.

  My line brothers—Dimitri Yates, Donovan Caves, Richard Patterson, Fred Whittaker, Travis Bond Roseboro, Darnell Reid, Billy McEachern, Jerome Butler, Uche Byrd, Tamario Howze, Charles Biney, and Fred Boone—are my support system. As we say, “Mu Psi until the day I die.”

  Nearly ten years after graduating, Travis and Fred and I still work together every day: Fred is my business manager, and Travis is the head of digital media for our business. The scale of the deals that we do is much larger now, but it’s the exact same formula we perfected when we were twenty years old, throwing parties and hosting events at A&T.

  The more successful I’ve become, the more I’ve come to appreciate my team, which has grown over time. Money changes people. It leads to jealousy, envy, and complications. That’s why loyalty is so imperative. Loyalty means that if everything goes away tomorrow, your crew will still be there. Hollywood is jammed with fairweather friends. When you have a successful album or film, they’ll latch on in order to get a piece of your success. But when things don’t go so well? Those types of folks are nowhere to be found.

  It is vital to surround yourself with the right people. We are all motivated by our collective vision, our collective brotherhood, and our collective loyalty.

  When I think of Omega Psi Phi, and all of my close friendships, I can trace these relationships directly back to my mom. You’re only as good as the team you have behind you. Thanks to my mom’s good advice, I have the best team in the world behind me. People who step up and hold me when I need help, people who make me feel incredibly secure. People who directly helped me achieve all the things—joining the fraternity, winning student body president, and becoming a TV host—that ultimately made me the success that I am today.

  Just like my mom, hiding in the bushes and watching out for me on that day so long ago, they have my back—no matter what. And I can never thank them enough. I’ve got their backs, too.

  In the background, I could hear Tyler waking up. “We’re not there yet, little man. Still an hour to go,” Tiffany murmured. Then, to me—“Hey—I gotta run, Tyler’s waking up and he’s gonna be hungry.”

  “Of course.”

  She hesitated. “You have my back, right?” she asked.

  “Always,” I said.

  “Just checking.”

  * * *

  In Her Own Words: Lisa on Loyalty & Friendship

  You are only as successful as the team that you have. No one makes it alone. You have to have support no matter what.

  Family is the main team, at the core of everything. When I met Jaime, I thought, “Now I can choose this person to form a team with.” Parents are like a tree: If the tree isn’t strong, the limbs—the kids—won’t be strong. It takes that strong base. At the end of the day it’s all about your family: If anything happens, those are the people who have your back.

  And friends, too. Anyone will be in your corner when you ride in the limousine; will those people still be there when you have to ride the bus? Terrence’s industry, the media, can sometimes be a monster, so you have to be careful whom you’re around. When things are going great, people will jump on your coattails, but a lot of people aren’t genuine. When something happens, are those same people still going to be in your corner?

  When it comes to your friends, you have to ask yourself, does this person have my best interest at heart? If a fight breaks out, is that person gonna jump in and help me out, or is he going to say “I ain’t gonna get involved”?

  Every life has its peaks and valleys. There are times when you are up, and everything’s great; and then—like everything else—there’s a dip. You want to have people on your team who are willing to be there for the grind, not just when the magic happens. That’s what loyalty is.

  Sometimes we can get caught up thinking: This is it; this is all I can do. Then you find someone supportive and loyal who believes in you—your family or your friends. When your team believes in you, it helps you be more than you can be. Because of Terrence and Jaime believing in me, I’m smarter, bolder, and wiser now than I was ten years ago. They make me a better person, stretching and growing. They help me to see what’s possible, and encourage me, give me the tools that I need to be successful and believe in myself.

  I’m going to be fifty very soon and I’m always thinking about how I can still make them proud of me.

  * * *

  T.I. Talks About His Mom

  Clifford Harris, better known as T.I., is an author, actor, record executive, and three-time Grammy Award-winning hip hop artist who has had numerous hit singles, including four that have reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Billboard called him the Artist of the 2000s decade. He grew up in Atlanta, and his role in the semibiographical film ATL brought him acclaim as an actor. He shared with me how he and his mom didn’t always see eye to eye, but their mutual respect and great love has carried them through the good times and the tough.

  For the longest my mom and I did a lot of bumping heads, you know. My ambitions were other than the wishes that she had for me—whether it was my previous experiences in—how do I say?—the pharmaceutical trade, or me putting all of my energy and efforts into the music, and allowing myself to be distracted from my schoolwork. My momma, man, she was always huge on education; she would go on about it. I got grounded a lot, and worse than that.

  My momma, she used to fight with my uncles when I was a kid. I would see my momma fighting with grown men: bim bam bow. She was younger then, of course, but she was running around handling things like men do.

  I think all of that contributed to me being the man I am today—the stubbornness, the confidence, and believing in myself, whether people agree with me or not. A lot of that came from my experiences with her. Her being real, on her own and independent, and not really bending or conforming to whatever it was that other women did when they were in relationships with men.

  My mom only had one boyfriend after my dad, and I was always the man in the house. No one ever came in the house and presented h
imself as a second dad. It was always me and her. Anything we needed between the two of us, we got. That bond, it introduced me to my young adulthood with a sense of loyalty and an idea of what it takes to be a provider, to really be a boss and call your own shots. And how to rest on your own abilities.

  My mom is my partner. Come hell or high water, low times or the highest times. She is always going to be in support of me, and we of each other. If we gonna chastise each other, it’ll be in private, never in public.

  We need to appreciate our moms more; without you there could not be us. We may not take enough time—more than the third weekend in May—to stop and say we appreciate you and hold you in high regard and respect you. But whatever we accomplish it’s because of y’all.

  7

  My Mother’s Words of Wisdom About Dreams & Perseverance

  And here things had been going so well. Less than a month after we last spoke, Tiffany’s out of a job. The boutique where she was working had to close up shop—the recession finally got to them—and she was let go along with everyone else. When she called me up recently, she was devastated.

  “I went around and applied at every clothing store and fashion company I could find. I even tried to get a job answering the customer service line at Macy’s. But no one is hiring. There are a million other girls who want the same job I want, and most of them don’t have to worry about flex hours or day care, either.”

  “I thought your grandma offered to watch Tyler.”

  “Yeah, that’s another thing—she says she can’t do it anymore, it’s too hard on her to chase Tyler around now that he’s crawling. Plus, she’s got to go out and look for her own job.”

  “Hey, you okay?” I asked.

  “At least I’m getting to spend more time with Tyler. And Sean’s been showing up with a lot more money than he usually does, so we’re not hurting too bad.”

  “Sean got a job?”

  She mumbled her response. “Not that I know of.”

  Uh-oh. I didn’t want to ask where the money was coming from, and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t want to tell me anyway. I encouraged her to keep looking for work—there had to be a job in the fashion industry for her, somewhere. She just had to keep her eyes on the prize.

  But Tiffany wasn’t hearing me. “Maybe it was all a stupid idea anyway—making clothes. It’s like a fantasy job, not a real job. It’s not practical.”

  “If that’s what you love, it’s not a fantasy.”

  Tiffany snorted. “Practical is a nine-to-five job with health insurance. Practical is not trying to sell silk dresses in the middle of a recession.”

  “You’ll never know if you don’t try.”

  “Maybe I’m not cut out for fashion, anyway.”

  I didn’t know what to tell her. And then I realized that I’d never told her about how I got my job at 106 & Park, the job that truly launched my career. It’s a great story about how perseverance pays off. My mom firmly believed that you should never give up on your dream, and in my case, her advice was spot on.

  ONE OF MY MOM’S favorite sayings is “the harder you work, the luckier you’ll get.” Growing up, she must have said this to me a hundred times, a thousand times. If you wake up every morning, dreaming about the thing that you want, and work every day to make it a reality, doors will open and things will happen.

  When I was ten years old, my mom encouraged me to make a vision board of the things that I wanted most from life. You’ve probably seen these—a vision board is basically a bulletin board with inspiring images pinned on it, clippings and photos and pages from magazines to help you focus on the things that you want to achieve. I still remember the vision board I created that year. On it, I pinned a photograph of a big house on a hill. An ad for a shiny new red Ferrari. And images, torn from magazines, of the three people I admired most at the time: Michael Jordan, Oprah, and Will Smith.

  I never grew tall enough to play basketball—not much I could do about that—but my other two heroes remained a source of inspiration and aspiration all through the years. No matter which direction I strayed in my interests, I always came back to these two. One was a legendary broadcaster, TV host, and entrepreneur. The other is one of our most charismatic actors and producers. The older I grew, the more I came to recognize that these were the areas where my true passions lay.

  It’s not a surprise that I grew up with a love for acting and entertainment. My stepdad is a huge film buff. As I grew up, Jaime would sit me down in front of old Alfred Hitchcock films and pepper me with questions as we watched: What did I like about the film? What was the director doing? What did I think about that actor? We’d spend hours on the couch, watching old Hollywood classics with Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, and James Dean, as well as more recent action films starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino (my mom wasn’t thrilled about the latter—she’d cover my eyes, give me the earmuffs when anyone swore—but Jaime would let me watch anyway). Jaime liked to tell me stories about how he grew up watching Marlon Brando, explain how the images that you consume can end up shaping your life. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was teaching me an appreciation for storytelling.

  Meanwhile, my mom was a big media person. She was always watching the news, staying up to date on current events, music, entertainment, and fashion. She also understood the importance of presentation. She constantly reminded me to stand up straight, look people in the eyes, shake hands, speak to the room, enunciate, be nice to people. From her, I inherited a fascination with popular culture and an appreciation for the power of good communication.

  Without being aware of it, my mom and my stepdad were grooming me for my eventual double career: as an actor and TV host. Before I’d even made it to high school, I was pinning new photos to my inspiration board and spending hours at the library (these were the days before Wikipedia) doing research on icons like Eddie Murphy and Denzel Washington, Dick Clark and Jay Leno.

  The good news was that I didn’t just have an interest being in front of an audience, I had the personality for it, too. In high school, I was a huge class clown, constantly cracking wise for anyone who would listen. One of my teachers eventually pulled me aside and said, “You can make people laugh—you have a big mouth. Just make sure that that big mouth puts you in front of a check, and not behind bars.”

  When I told my mom what my teacher had said, she laughed. But she also agreed, “She’s right.” It was easy to just goof around and be a class clown, but if I really wanted to work in entertainment—if I wanted to put my big mouth to work for me—I had to be prepared to do the hard work that it would take to get there. It wasn’t enough to just have some photographs of actors pinned on a bulletin board.

  My mom had already shown me how this was done. Growing up, I often thought about the day that she packed all of our family’s belongings into a U-Haul and drove us south from New York City to North Carolina. I remember that before we got in the car, I told her that I didn’t want to go. North Carolina was too far from my friends, I grumbled; too far from everything. Why did we have to move?

  My mom crouched down next to me: “When you have a vision, you have to see it through, no matter how far you have to go to get it,” she said.

  Throughout my life, these words would echo back to me. That day, as we began the long drive south to North Carolina, my mom’s vision was to raise me in a place that was safe, in a house that she had paid for herself, with a dog for me to play with. Every decision she made with her life in the years to come was about working toward her personal dream board, no matter how distant or challenging it seemed. And by the time I got to high school, she’d achieved all of those dreams.

  As for me and my dream of being an actor and entertainment news host? It never would have happened if my mom hadn’t pushed me in the right direction, at just the right moment.

  FLASH FORWARD TO THE summer of 2005. Less than a year out of college, I was an account executive at NASCAR, working in their diversity department and living in Daytona Bea
ch, Florida. It was a great job; a job with a lot of potential upside; a job with stability, benefits, and great coworkers. I loved it there.

  But it wasn’t my passion.

  The truth was, at just twenty-three years old, I had already given up on my dream of acting and working as a host. At the very last minute, after pursuing my vision all through college—taking acting classes, hosting my radio show, running events for my college and fraternity—I had chickened out. I had listened to teachers who told me that you couldn’t be a host and an actor at the same time: “It just doesn’t make sense,” they’d said. I had listened to the people who told me that I shouldn’t try to pursue my dreams right after I graduated from college: “You can’t be an actor: You live in North Carolina, not Hollywood.” “You’re not Will Smith.” “You need a real nine-to-five job that will make payments to your 401k.” You’re not smart enough, fast enough, handsome enough to do the things you want to do, they’d said; and I had listened.

  Worst of all, I had listened to my own fears.

  The summer after I graduated from college, I had flown out to Los Angeles to give acting a real Hollywood try. I spent three weeks there going to auditions nonstop. X-Men, Superman, Dreamgirls, Pirates of the Caribbean, Fast & Furious, the Pursuit of Happyness, Mission: Impossible—if it was a movie with an open casting call, I was the first one in line, script in hand. I was convinced that this was the first step toward turning my vision into a reality. I thought I was en route to being a star.

  Instead, I got slammed. Among the things I heard about myself: “You’re too skinny and too young.” “We’re looking for a guy who is more built than you.” “We don’t think we’re going African American for this role.” “You’re too urban.” And my favorite: “You suck.”

  “Don’t quit your day job, kid,” a casting director told me.