From Foster Care To Harvard With Rodney Walker

 

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Entrepreneurial Mindset Project. Today I’m speaking with Rodney Walker.

This is truly an amazing story you won’t want to miss.

Raised on the south side of Chicago, Rodney was born to parents who both struggled with addiction. At the age of five, he was cast into the foster care system, where he was separated from his parents and siblings. As he put it, he felt like life was happening to him, that he had no control over his circumstances.

While the foster care system kept him in school, he struggled to keep pace, often finding himself in after school detention. Little did he know that exposure to entrepreneurship combined with a dedicated mentor would alter the course of his life.

Today, Rodney not only holds degrees from Morrehouse College, Harvard and Yale, he is also the author of several books and is now a sought-after speaker and entrepreneur.

So without any further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rodney Walker.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

From Foster Care To Harvard With Rodney Walker

Rodney, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Gary. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you, and I look forward to our conversation.

We’ve known each other for many years. I am so excited to be doing this with you. There’s no way we’re going to get this done in an hour and a half, but let’s give it a try. Rodney, we met when you were a rising junior at Morehouse. Is that right?

That’s right, between the summer and fall of 2010.

That’s correct. I don’t want to start there. I feel that’s too far into the story already. I want to help our audience understand who you are, where you came from and how almost a random encounter with entrepreneurship altered the course of your life. Let’s start with that. Can you give us the backstory?

My encounter with entrepreneurship was very circumstantial. Divine intervention, I believe, now at this point. I was born and raised in Chicago to parents who had me under precarious circumstances. My mom and dad are both from Chicago’s public housing and they struggled with adverse experiences before they had their children. My dad was in Vietnam and came back with post-traumatic stress disorder and had a very adverse disposition to drug abuse as a coping mechanism for his trauma.

My mom had a very negligent childhood from her parents not being around and not being involved in her life. She was raised in the very toxic environment that she grew up in, where she learned adverse things. By the time she started having kids, she didn’t even understand what having kids was about. All that gravity and adverse conditioning is what I call it is what made her into the absent parent that she was for me and my siblings.

When I was five years old, my dad was incarcerated. My mom had lost the privilege of having kids under her custody after she was found to have been struggling with drug addiction. I came to foster care around five, along with several of my siblings. From 5 to 17, I was in about a dozen foster homes across the city of Chicago. I stayed in many different places. I stayed in the group home and struggled with knowing where my parents were, what my family was, how my circumstances came to be, and what they were.

I didn’t find that out until I aged out around seventeen years old, to find my parents still living on the South side of Chicago, struggling with drug addiction, struggling with homelessness from time to time and transitioning and having siblings all over the city where I didn’t know where they were. It tormented me in a big way.

This on top of the fact that when I came into the education system that I was in with the IEP and struggling with what they call autism, not learning at the level that I should have, having failed the fourth grade because of my challenges and been the victim of bullying and social failure on many different levels. After a certain point, I felt that life was happening to me and I wasn’t happening to life at all. I had no pathology about the prospects of my life going forward like what I could be, what I could do, what I could achieve and how I can grow. I didn’t get that sentiment or that appetite for learning, growing, or being anything until two critical things happened. I talk about it all the time. I was exposed to entrepreneurship and nothing of my own making brought that to me. It was very circumstantial.

The other thing that happened was a very radical trauma-informed mentorship program that my mentor, who was the dean of students in my high school for one year and only one year, ran in my school. The explosive combination of the entrepreneurial mindset program through the network for teacher entrepreneurship and this trauma-informed mentorship program together helped me to both deconstruct my trauma and create something new for my future.

Those two things together helped me cultivate a mindset of I’m not going to aim to fix what’s broken. I’m going to create something new so that what’s broken can never be allowed to happen ever again. It has been the pathology that has driven my life since being introduced to these two powerful programs in my senior high school.

Rodney, there’s so much to unpack there. You said something about, “Life was happening to me.” I totally could see that. You feel you’re a ping pong ball. You have no control over your nightlife. No sense of agency. The question I wanted to ask you was, when you were getting bounced around from one foster home to another, did you have any contact with your parents in there? Did you know where they were? Did you get to go see them on weekends?

In the beginning, my parents were in court doing the work to try to get us back and they had to do substance abuse counseling, parenting classes and anger management classes. When my mom did, it fell through. They weren’t able to grapple with the fact that they were made to see us in the social worker’s office or at some location and they had to leave us. I think that was hard for my parents, definitely my mom.

Early on, in foster care, I saw my parents. Wherever we went, which was relatives, my first foster homes were family members. It was my grandmother, my aunt or my cousin. My parents knew where we were. They tried to stay connected. After they failed in these court proceedings to get us back to do what they need to do, ultimately, I moved to not relative foster homes. That’s when I totally lost contact with them until around the last years of my time in foster care.

You were struggling in school as well. You were going to school, but you’re struggling for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that you don’t have a stable home life.

Actually, in contrast to that, one of the advantages of being in foster care for me, and I’m sure of many others, is that I had the structure in place to be made to go to school. When I came to foster care early at five years old, obviously, I was made to go to school. Part of the preconditions for social workers and the system to hold parents accountable was to make sure that we actually had report cards from our teachers and that we were made to adequate reports of us going to schools, coming back home, and having the things we needed in the homes. That was actually a benefit, even though it didn’t feel a benefit in real time.

I think you said you were in ninth grade. I always get this wrong. Ninth or tenth grade. You took an entrepreneurship course and said it was combined with a radical mentoring experience as somebody who understood trauma. Can you tell us about each of those?

I was exposed to entrepreneurship program in my junior year of high school in the 11th grade. I didn’t take the class until my senior year of high school. I was exposed to this entrepreneurship program when a student, one of my peers, came back from an event where she had won the competition and had this big $2,500 check in her hand or something. It was a big old poster board with her name and the check. I was like, “What does she do? What is that about?” She was a part of a business class that had started my school my junior year and I said, “Next year, I’m going to take that class because I want that.” I did it strictly for that, that sense of achievement and money, obviously.

My senior year was the year that I got involved in that, not knowing what entrepreneurship was or the mindset aspect of it. I learned that when I got involved. The trauma mentorship program happened the exact same way. I came in to my senior high school with the former dean of my students moving on to another job somewhere else, a new dean coming in. I’m thinking about how I was in school suspension detention all the time, not for behavioral reasons, but for truancy and for time reasons, not showing up to class, not doing homework, little small things that.

I was exposed to him circumstantially because when I went to detention versus sitting there and being made to study or being made to write something or to waste my time, I had a dean who thought to do something very radical, which is to take us out into the community with poster boards to say we love our community and we need fathers here and all sorts of things.

We were in a vulnerable situation in our community where there were violence and conflicts all the time. We were made to walk blocks to let the community know we love them. I was made to come on the weekends. Instead of going to detention, I was made to come on Saturday and Sunday as a makeup for my detention to feed people in the community. I was made to stand an assembly line and put mashed potatoes, macaroni, cheese, chicken, and stuff and feed homeless folks who were coming into the gym on weekends. That was my exposure to dismantling and learning about the things that I was going through on a much broader scale before my mentor took it deeper and helped me unravel stuff that was going on with me personally in my life.

Did he start getting you involved in the community?

That’s right.

Are you talking about Michael?

That’s right.

I remember I had the privilege of meeting him once. He’s this awesome human being. Tell me what that was like, Rodney. You are seventeen years old, plus or minus. None of your needs are being met. School isn’t resonating with you. You’re not showing up. You’re not bringing yourself. You’re showing up, but you’re not showing up. This is what I’m hearing you say.

That’s right. I was a complete autopilot.

Yeah, you’re a zombie. You don’t even know what’s happening. I didn’t suffer anywhere near the experiences you did, but I experienced high school similarly. I showed up, but I was a zombie. Anyway, I wanted to ask you how that landed in your mind when you’re this kid? None of this is making sense to you. You don’t know where your siblings are, you’re in foster care and now you handed out food to other people. How did you internalize that? What did you think about that? Is this something else like, “adults are making me do that I don’t want to do?”

Yeah, it was different, though. I always say you can’t fake investment in kids. You can’t fake the investment and you can’t fake passion. You can’t do that. I was made to do many things in my childhood experiences growing up, but this was so radically different. To have a person who was responsible for suspending students, sending them home for ten days, recommending them for expulsion to one day in detention room, “Get your stuff, get your bags. Let’s go. We are getting out of here and I want you to hold this. You take this, you take that and get in the line, a straight line.” We walked out of the door to the front of the school, turned left and walked about a half a mile East on 55th Street across gang lines and war-torn buildings that’s been shot up by gunfire. Very impoverished conditions and us shouting with him.

 

He had a bullhorn and he said, “We love our community. We are part of the community. Whatever you need.” We were doing that. We saw people looking out the windows and saying, “Right on,” stuff like that. It was weird. It was trivial to me at the time. In the beginning, I was like, “Why are we doing this?” It didn’t mean anything to me in the beginning. It just came to me something because I realized off of the energy that Michael brought, that he cared so much. He wasn’t from where we were from, so he was willing to go out in the street and risk his life every day across gang lines and other volatile conditions. Police were out there as well to do that with us. He risked his job to do that.

To me, that meant something for my peers and me to see somebody care that much about doing that. I think it’s something that you can’t conflate with also teachers having those other type of interventions. Not to trivialize those interventions, but that’s much different from a parent-teacher conference. Very different from being in the principal’s office and talking about how you need to get yourself together, how you need to work harder. That was a different level of investment that I think at least piqued my curiosity enough to ask myself questions and unpack the layers that I’ve been suppressing and harnessing within me for a lot of years.

Michael was the first guy that came along that could have used his authority to punish. I think what you’re saying is you knew that was his role as a vice principal. That’s a big part of this role in any case.

He was the dean of students at the time. The dean of students’ only job was to keep the school building safe, make sure process and protocol was followed by the students and his immediate administration security and then to recommend for detention, school suspension and expulsion. That was the pedigree of the work.

Were other kids responding positively also to Michael?

Yeah. It was a wave. These are the same students who were in detention and in school suspension years prior. We had three years’ worth of deans who, again, they care, but the job description is what it is. I knew everybody who I came into that experience with in my senior year of high school. I knew everyone because we were the first graduating class in my high school. We were all confused about like, “What is this guy doing?”

Thinking about your history to make sense of it. Michael was probably experimenting on his own. He didn’t have it all figured out, I imagine.

He would readily admit that. He didn’t know. He cared enough to know that the court issue wasn’t the decisions we were making. It was the manifestation of those decisions inherent in our trauma. Asking questions like, “When did your life change? What’s it to be you? If you can go back to the age when you felt your life changed, what age would that be? Just say a number. When?” He would go around the room. “I was 5,” “I was 15,” “I was 13.” People would say things and then we would be able to linger on it and unpack it in very deep ways that we had never been able to do in a school setting. Why is that because the majority of our day was curriculum and instruction when it was us being without peers, not even thinking about conscious lived experiences?

Did he do that in in in a discussion group, to have kids sit around in a room and talking about their trauma and stuff?

Yeah, exactly. We were all in a circle and we were all made to sit around and he would lead off the conversation by talking about something he had went through, something that we can relate to because he had lived experiences that was comparable to ours. By virtue of him talking about his relative experiences made someone in the room vulnerable enough to share their story. That story in the room basically fed everybody else’s story. It was very organic.

Entrepreneurship Changed The Tune

To me, that is a profession in and of itself if you know how to do it well. He did it to perfection. Being able to pick and extract post-traumatic stress disorder, adverse childhood experiences across the room, that engaged us in a healing process to let us know that finally is someone sees past the dysfunction of my ways and my poor decisions. They can see the root and the gravity of the things that I’ve been through and the ways that I’ve been conditioned over the years.

That to me is something that did not exist in my school all the while I was there. It was very helpful. This is the last thing I’ll say, though. I want to say his trauma-informed approach was the first part of the equation because the second part of the equation was entrepreneurship, which changed the tune in a very important way. It is something I have a unique experience to have that a lot of my peers did not. With trauma-informed education, with what he did, he allowed us to say, “What am I going through? What is my adversity? What are my challenges? How do I overcome that?” Entrepreneurship did not do that. What they did and helped me create a business, they didn’t do any of that.

What they did was incite my imagination. They made me step outside of the things that I was going through, my adversity. They helped me say, “What does the magic of life look like manifesting in the business? What can you do all day that you don’t have to get paid for, but can create a business out of? To make something that exists in your own way, in your own world. Something that represents the truest version of your vision. That is the second part of the equation that I think a lot of my peers unfortunately did not.

That is why I think I could turn the things I was going through into something better than getting out of Chicago. I had a dream when I went to Morehouse to be an entrepreneur, actualize my business, and make something of myself beyond the South side of Chicago. I think that’s, that was radically important for what I’ve been through with entrepreneurship after the trauma-informed program.

I can see that. What you’re saying about the entrepreneur experience and from a young kid who feels like the world’s happening to you seems very clear to me. You don’t have any control over it. I think it’s not talked about enough that entrepreneurship gives us a sense of agency. We can make our way in the world instead of being a hapless receptacle of social stimuli. We can actually steer in spite of the crashing season, in spite of the hurricanes and the wind and so forth.

Entrepreneurship was that in spite of. I think dealing with trauma and dealing with adversity and all those things, dealing with pain from the past is that one element that it requires attention, but it can’t be the focal point. I think that if I had had that alone, I would’ve stayed there. I would’ve stayed in that space.

That’s a super important point you’re making there because I think people get hung up in the trauma. The focus becomes the trauma. I think your story says you have to deal with the trauma, but you can’t linger there.

If I could use an analogy, it’s as if weeds is growing in your garden, so the trauma is like the weeds. If it’s growing in your garden, one thing you can do is spray the weed repellent. That’s what trauma-informed education is to me. You’re spraying the weeds to manage the disorientation of your environment, but you need to plant new seeds and grow new flowers so the weeds can be starved out and replace what was growing in that garden. That’s what entrepreneurship business is like. What do we want here? Not what are we trying to contain? What do we want here? What do we want to create?

I think you’re also hitting on something else that’s important, Rodney, that I don’t think a lot of people think about this in this way, but as entrepreneurs, using your imagination to imagine a future that looks different from the past. That’s a subtle cognitive shift that the person themselves doesn’t even know is happening. There’s this whole literature around this. It’s called Prospection Theory. When we’re focused on something compelling out into the future, we have access to problem-solving abilities in our mindset that we don’t have access to otherwise.

The way our mindsets work is most of us draw from the past to navigate the future. We get stuck there. I think that’s what you’re saying, if I understand you properly, that your experience with Nifty and entrepreneurship in high school flipped that switch for you, and you started to imagine a future that looked different from the past.

Absolutely. Nifty gave me different references for how to navigate a coming future for myself versus what I was doing all the way up until that point, which is referencing a very broken past, which then cultivated more brokenness. It was so organic for me. To tell you how deep-rooted my adverse experiences were, even when Nifty exposed me to these different facets and perspectives of life through businesses and through going to New York for the entrepreneurship competition and then other places that Nifty helped me to get into these other spaces, I was so deep-rooted in where I had come from and the people that I cared about in those spaces that my mind was split between both worlds. I still feel that way now, but it was definitely Nifty struggling to get me to make one more dominant than the other because that’s true.

I tell you, as broken as my past was, I love my parents, I love my siblings, and I loved where I came from. As broken as it was, I loved where I came from. It was an energy that I was very attracted to. It was a home feeling. I don’t care how broken it was. We’re talking about gang violence, gun violence, homelessness, hopelessness, poverty and addiction. All that aside, I had an affinity for where I was from, and I can tell that I met opportunities with that challenge very early and very often. It took me a while for them to make that a dominant theme in my social psychological set and my space to be able to compete with that.

It is interesting, Rodney. I read a book called The Dawn of Everything. Anthropologists and archeologists looking at 10,000 years of humanity or longer. One of the things they said that was so striking to me is we don’t adopt new ideas based on their usefulness. We adopt new ideas based on our cultural identity. The example they gave were like, the Inuit knew about snowshoes for hundreds of years before they started using snowshoes. It’s like, “We’re not snowshoe people.”

I wonder about that and I think that’s why so many entrepreneurs come from adverse conditions, because you’re more willing to grab onto something different. Still, that’s a powerful thing you’re saying. I wanted to ask you a little bit about that. I don’t want to get too far ahead too fast, but you went from having poor grades to graduating high school. I think in ninth grade, you were almost ready to flunk out of high school. By 12th grade, you had a 4.0.

That’s correct. I always had the ability to get a 4.0. Maybe that’s a distinction I don’t often make because I think that when there are cognitive learning challenges in play, there is things that you need to do to work with that. My grades in my senior year reflected the first time I wrestled to succeed versus before that, I didn’t wrestle to succeed. I didn’t wrestle or fight with that. I didn’t fight with success. It’s just life truly happened to me. I had no agency. I had no real self-determination, no motivation, and no sense of what I could or could not be, what I could do, what I could achieve. That trauma-informed program that I was a part of helped me to be thankful for the things that I had been through for the first time.

I put myself in a space to say, “If you could have gone through all that and still be here, why can’t you also do the same thing and be where you want to go?” That was very important for me to understand and get. For the first time, I did. I don’t think I do a good job of communicating this. When I got all A’s in my senior high school, it wasn’t that for the first time I went to my math class, my science class, English class or history class and said, “I understand this content, so now I’m going to go and pass the class.” It was me staying until 8:00 or 9:00 at night doing what I didn’t know how to do because I didn’t take the time to learn it or develop it on my own and wrestle with it.

That’s what led to that. When my school got out at 2:30, 3:00 in the afternoon, while everyone else was going home or going to practice at some sport or whatever, I was staying in the same classroom I was in the detention. That same classroom became a vehicle for success. I was there for the next six hours doing my homework with my peers and my classmates, talking about those sessions around social, emotional stuff.

After that, doing homework, learning how to read, learning how to write, learning how to do math with teachers who stayed behind as well. I had a lot of investment once they saw I was invested. That’s, I think, where that change came from. It wasn’t a result of a gift that I had. It was a result of a true fight to be the best, a real competitive energy that I had gotten from learning. I’m not going to die here. I can’t stay here. I got to do something. I can do something different. I know that and I’m going to do something different. That light switch made me stay beyond my own will, my own best interest. I stayed until I get it right and it worked.

What you’re saying is that it didn’t come easily to you. It wasn’t that some genius switch turned on in your head and straight A’s started flowing out. You had to work for every inch of it. That’s the much more powerful story.

The Power Of Mentorship

To that point, I have to talk about mentorship because I don’t want to make it seem when I stayed from 3:00 to 8:00 or 9:00 at night, I was doing it because I was so hard willed to make something of myself until I succeed and to get out of Chicago and to make something of my life. I was that. It was a combination of me being motivated and me being made to stay. I think one of the most diluted perceptions about mentors is that they are people who coach you into success. If you have the right type of mentorship disposition, your mentor will make you do things you otherwise wouldn’t do. I’m not a morning person. I’m a night person. I wouldn’t wake up willfully in the morning unless I had to get up in the morning.

 

I’m talking about 5:00 in the morning. If you have a coach who’s splashing water in the bed and says, “Get up,” if you have the type of relationship and they’re getting you up at 5:00 AM every single morning getting in the gym or getting in the lab or getting in the office, something’s going to come from all that. I had to have the privilege of having the mentor who said, “I can go back home to my wife and my children. You know what we’re going to do. We’re going to stay here until 9:00. We’re going to stay here until 10:00 PM. If you need a ride home, I’ll ride you home.”

He did that every day, even on the weekends, in ways that I felt were unreasonable. Talk about affinity and attraction. I knew I wanted to go somewhere. I had a mentor who was bold enough, radical enough to say, “If you say you want it, you’re not going to leave or quit when I start putting pressure on you to do the things that needs to be done to succeed.” By the time I went to Morehouse, I was on a different autopilot. I was waking up doing work, invested in hard work ethic because I had been conditioned so fast in my senior year that I didn’t need him to do that now because I had it. It’s almost going to drill in the military boot camp. I had that.

There are people who quit from that and there’s people who stay. What determines if you quit or stay is your level of motivation and determination. The first part of the program was about that. Are you willing to endure, not give up the race when the race gets hard? After that, it’s like, “Okay, let’s go.” I had a mentor who did that. That is the magic bullet of all success after a certain point when things get tough.

That’s such a potent combination there, Rodney. I remember you telling me this back in 2010 when I first met you. You said the entrepreneurial experience that you had in school taught you could apply that same mindset to school. I think you said something to me to the effect of, “Somebody else figured it out. I am not leaving until I understand it.” That was the way you articulated the determination. “Somebody else has figured this out. I am not leaving until I understand it. I’m going to dig in and make that happen.”

That’s such a cool story. Michael is an amazing guy that we need to figure out how to clone that guy and replicate that because you’re right, the potency of not only the mentorship but the entrepreneurship, a sense of agency, I can envision a future, it looks different from the past. I can create my own future, the future I want. Rodney, one of the things you told me that was powerful that Michael had you do was write a letter to God. Can you talk about that a little bit?

I call it the purge moment or the moment of impact. What I think sometimes they call the critical window in psychology. It’s basically a moment in time that you can identify as the most transformational or life changing moment, both in one direction or another. We talk about I came into foster care or I lost my home, when I was homeless or my parents were divorced or I lost my dad or somebody was incarcerated or I saw somebody shot on the street or I had my first child. All these critical window moments, one of them was the one that snapped. In that session, which I call the purge, my mentor set us all around the border of the room. It was dark. He asked us to had a sheet of paper and a pen.

He said to write down the one moment you believe changed your life and may be something you’ve never shared with anybody. That was very important for him to say, something that that no one else knows about what you’ve been through because only you know what you’ve been through and it’s something that you’ll never share with anybody. He asked us to write that and write it as a way of talking to yourself and forgiving yourself for what happened and write it all. Don’t leave out any details. Tell the whole thing. Know you are in a safe space where you can do that and don’t stop until you’re done. Everything was quiet. We had a sheet of paper, it was blank. He asked us to write and whatever happened, happened. Basically, that was his approach.

That moment, I think, for the first time, helped me purge those very suppressed feelings and emotions that I had for a long time because I don’t think up until that point I ever cried. It was only until that point that I could let go of a lot of the things that I was harboring for a very long time. After we did that, we went outside into the parking lot of that annex where we did it and we ripped up our papers, put it in a tin bucket and all sat in a circle holding hands and we burned it. We burned what we wrote and his message, “We’re going to let this go. We’re not going to let this have control of our life.” Yeah, it was a very powerful.

That’s so radical. It’s so powerful. There are a lot of people walking around who could benefit from that.

I believe so, but you have to prime it. You have to prime the environment and experiences for that to work. I always use the analogy of lighting the fire but light it the natural way. It’s like when you put two logs together. You can either rub two sticks together, you can light a small fire under it. The real key to the fire is starting and burst into a wildfire is the two logs have to be close enough that it creates a window where the smoke can become fire. It’s got to be close enough. That analogy to me is that wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t spent the prior three months priming us for that moment.

 

Get you out in the streets doing these things, getting you working on your homework deal. He had already invested. He earned the right to do that. He didn’t start with that. Rodney, you took an entrepreneur class in high school and you thought like, “This is for me, I can create a future that I want to create for myself.” I think you told me you got into Morehouse on a provisional scholarship.

No, provisional probation.

You got into Morehouse. Was that a shocking thing? You were going to high school on the South side of Chicago at the time, right?

That’s right. Yeah, it was charter school and first in my class. I was already happy to graduate from high school to be the first in my school to graduate. That was already exciting. I applied to thirteen different colleges, but I haven’t heard back from any of them.

Were you thinking like, “That’s a pipe dream?” You were getting your hopes up. That had to be scary.

It was very scary, but I was determined to go to college. If I didn’t go to Morehouse, if I didn’t go to any school that I applied to, I would’ve gone to community college. I do think that. I didn’t want to stay in the city because I thought that that would’ve been a very vulnerable thing for me to do because I was so vulnerable to all the elements that I came from. I wanted to be as far away from Chicago as possible. Morehouse, what did they do in giving me a probation acceptance, saying that I’ll only be accepted and that I have one semester? I had to make over a certain GPA and have certain credits and take certain classes in order to maintain status as a student. That lit a fire under me that was riveting and exciting at the same time.

What was it like when you landed at Morehouse? Was it a culture shock?

If anybody who’s read this show, they know Georgia. They know Atlanta. My first semester, I actually stayed in an area called Riverdale. This was 2008, 2009. Riverdale, the area that I stayed in, it was very challenging. I stayed in a pretty aggressive pocket when it came to that street stuff. I couldn’t stay on campus in my first semester. I stayed with my sister during my first semester at college because, again, I didn’t have any probationary acceptance. I stayed off campus, made my way to campus. Every night, I went back to Riverdale near College Park where there was a lot of shootings at night. It was pretty interesting and I did my work from there.

In the school environment, were you exposed to kids that were like you or did the kids came from upper middle-class families? What was that like?

My experience at Morehouse College, it wasn’t what I expected. I thought that I would be in an environment of the best African American, young African American men, which is largely true, but to Morehouse’s credit, they accept several hundred students on provisions or what we call probation. I was one of those students. I felt like a second chance student. I didn’t do enough in high school to make my way to Morehouse the normal way, but they put me in the position to say I got to work. When I went to Morehouse, the first thing that happened was the ceremony. It’s the new student orientation ceremony and it’s very culturally symbolic.

It’s a lot of celebration. The parents are there seeing their kids off. They have the drums and the African beats. The parents are crying as they’re seeing their kids off because they leaving, but my parents didn’t show up, so I didn’t have that. I saw the people who had that. Honestly, that was hard for me because I didn’t even know what I was walking into. I tell you how deprived I was. I didn’t know that I was supposed to bring my parents to that because my parents would’ve very much appreciated that.

When I got to the Morehouse campus, I saw the whole spectrum of my peers, those who were gifted at learning, highly exceptional, very scholastic valedictorians at high school. I had the classes that I was in, which was the classes where I had to learn how to do algebra, learn how to read, the college readiness classes with students who came from the same neighborhoods I came from. They had the same challenges reading at a 10th-grade or 11th-grade level at whatever. I didn’t know how to learn. Yeah, it was the whole gamut. To me, that created a sense of balance when I was at Morehouse.

How long did it take you to figure out like, “I could do this?” Was there a moment where you were thinking, “I don’t know if I could do this?”

During those first several weeks, I was struggling, and again, talking about mentorship, Michael called me every single weekend. “How’s it going? Are you going to class?” He was making sure I went to class. “I don’t have to come down there. I got to make sure I don’t have to set you straight.” He was my surrogate dad, the way that my own dad couldn’t be for me. That I know I’m going to win mindset, I had it when I got to Morehouse, so I never had a doubt about whether or not I could succeed at Morehouse. I knew it was a matter of time because of his combination with what I had learned from Nifty and their radical entrepreneurship approach.

What happened? You graduated from Morehouse. You did well at Morehouse, didn’t you?

Top 10% of my class. I applied to Divinity school. My major was Philosophy and Religion at Morehouse. I went on to graduate, go to Divinity school at Yale and get a Master’s in Religion. I continued my social justice work after that point. Learning at Morehouse and even at Yale to a degree was never challenging for me. I had that work ethic that it was conditioned and cultivated over a long period of time that I was there.

It’s like you know what it’s to go to the gym every day. It’s the same thing once you got that figured out. You met your wife at Yale, didn’t you?

No, I met my wife at Spelman, actually. Spelman is right across the street from Morehouse. It’s a historically Black college. It was all women. Morehouse, a historically Black college, all men. I met her as a friend in my sophomore year. We kept in touch, but she went to New England when I went to Yale. That’s when we started dating. We got married when I got into Harvard later on. She got into Yale later on, actually. That’s when we married, but I met her at Spelman very early.

I had the privilege of being at your wedding, so that was a privilege and an honor. I still got some of the videos to prove it on by phone.

Making Something New

Interestingly, a handful of people from my family in my community came about my wedding. My wife’s family came, but only a handful of people came to my wedding. It was in Connecticut and my family doesn’t travel that much, but half of the people at the wedding was from my circle of folks. I believe the people who came to my wedding for me were from my circle and were the truest reflection of the diverse people who helped me get where I was.

To be able to be there and see the crowd of people who were there that wasn’t my birth or biological family told me the truest version of the antidote or kids in my community who are going through these struggles. It takes a whole community of people with varying degrees of experiences to all pitch in and help. It’s something that I can’t state enough. Steve Mariotti came and that surprised me. I don’t think I gave him an invitation. He just showed up. I was like, “That’s amazing.”

I remember that’s where I met Michael. I met him at your wedding.

He was the best man at my wedding.

I also met your mom and dad, which I also thought was a privilege. I got a chance to talk and meet both of them. It was good. One of the things that struck me, I saw this at your wedding. I felt like I saw it and maybe I misinterpreted, but you came from the South side of Chicago and now you’re marrying a girl going to Yale and marrying into a different family. You said earlier and it’s interesting, you love where you came from. You love home. Is there some tension that you’re trying to break out of? In aeronautical engineering, they call it escape velocity, to get out of the pole of the Earth’s gravity. Did you experience that or have you? Is that a problem or a challenge?

Yeah, it’s a challenge because I talk about this in different ways, but I mean it all in the same fashion, which is that I’ll say life is not about fixing what’s broken. It’s about creating something new so that what’s broken can never be allowed to happen ever again. The problem that I always had with the neighborhoods that I grew up in Chicago, namely Inglewood and Roseland, West Lawn, North Lawndale and those areas where I spent time in foster care and where I live now and the places where I went to school and the places where I got to travel to experience the world. It’s living the magic of life is what I call it. One of them is visionary and one of them is circumstantial and no one is realistically going to be there if they had an option to be there.

 

No one was willfully living in poverty and social failure. The answer to that is not about investing in communities. It’s about everybody having the same identity in terms of values and education, disposition and orientation. That does not exist, especially where I’m from. I realized very early that the only way this will be fixed is if I become the leader of my community and start my own family first. To establish what I felt my community and my family and my world should be like.

Those who agree with that and are willing to adopt that, they’re going to come and they’re going to be a part of it and we’re going to cultivate that together. What I can’t do is take something that’s been developed over decades before I was even born and try to change that because there’s so many layers involved to the point where I would be wasting my time and then be sacrificing my own future, the own vision, my own vision that I have.

It’s having that sense of empathy, compassion and respect for what is, while also having the sense of discernment saying, “Maybe I need to have another offering. I need to offer something else, a different pathway, a different vision.” Time will tell me if the people who I love and care about and the community that I come from is going to be able to meet me there and adopt and adapt or not.

What you found out, at least it’s what I found out over the years is that my community and communities like mine is so consumed with things that has happened, not just from their perspective, but to them that man, to change all those dynamics, it is incredibly hard. That’s an understatement. It’s hard to dismantle, deconstruct, and then rebuild all those things from the inside out, which is why people do it from the outside in.

That’s what we call gentrification. That’s why they do it from the outside in. What we want to do it from the inside out is to get moms to be able to have the help that they need to get off of drug addiction. The dads who were incarcerated to re-enter into society and to civic engagement and to be the fathers they were always meant to be. To have my peers to go to school one day and to say, “Today, I’m going to honest effort to be the very best version of myself and to work towards that so that getting A’s and B’s on my report card is not an anomaly, it’s the rule itself. It’s not an exception.

That’s what we’re trying to cultivate. When you think about the gravity of things that has perpetuated what is right now, in my lifetime, to dismantle that is impossible. In my mind, I’ve always felt I had to make a critical choice between continuing to fix what’s broken or to create something new and allowing people into that space along with myself.

If I could repeat what you’re saying and maybe using different language, what you’re saying is something about agency and structure. There’s structure that holds people back. What you’re saying is if I focus on that, I’m not going to make a dent in that universe in my lifetime. I’m going to show people a different path and work on the agency of the individual as Michael did for you.

It structures on every single level because the one level we always talk about structural on is the economic structure. We talk about the educational infrastructure of neighborhoods and communities and definitely economics. What we don’t talk enough about is the spiritual infrastructure. Even if in the psychological infrastructure that you also have to attempt and dismantle, which is hard because when a person has their mind made up about certain things, it’s very difficult to deconstruct and dismantle that and then re-engineer it.

I know from my lived experiences how difficult that is, but it takes a lifetime, and you have to ask yourself if that’s something you want to be a part of or if that’s going to be your legacy. I didn’t want that to be my approach to check things. I sound like a politician right now, but honestly, that’s not what I wanted my approach to be.

I have these conversations a lot, Rodney. I think it’s important. It dawned on me, I’ve probably interviewed more than 600 entrepreneurs all over the world. We got back from doing some stuff in South Africa. We’re training thousands of teachers in South Africa right now and we can focus on the structure. There are certainly structural things that are barriers.

The thing that it suddenly occurred to me by listening to your story and other stories is the entrepreneurs that I interviewed that have come from poverty and overcome significant structural socioeconomic barriers, it struck me that what are not talking about is perhaps more important than what they are talking about. They’re not focusing on the bigger societal structural barriers. They’re not denying that it’s there, it’s just not where the focus is. The focus is like, “What can I do to move forward and how can I change? What part of the equation do I have control over?” I think that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?

It is what I’m saying. Both ends of the spectrum is adverse is what I’m saying. I’m saying you can do what we call mixed-income, mixed-affordable housing. I don’t mean to get too superstructural, political or anything like that because I’m not that, but I do from a very big picture standpoint. You can give everyone who’s been deprived all their life all they want and they’ll give it away. That’s my point. You can put a kid who from birth to 18 years old has been entrenched in poverty, social failure, parental neglect, have been in communities where he’s experienced incarceration, violence and drug abuse down the line. These are all people he cares about and love. At eighteen years old, take him to NFL, NBA, MLB or whatever, give him $100 million, and he’ll throw it all away.

It’s not his fault and it’s not the community’s fault. It’s a microcosm of both these things explosively being what they are that makes him say versus take this $100 million and prosper. There are exceptions to the rule of course. The rule is that his disposition is like, it was never the conditions. It was his mindset. It was his spirit set. It was his psychosocial network that exists in his world that allowed him to take $100 million and, within years, go broke. That’s one spectrum, but the other end of the spectrum again is you can give everybody the enrichment, the education, the sense of I can do, I can be, I can have, I can want, I deserve and put them in a war-torn environment where the government or the system at large is trying to destroy them.

They are trying to suppress them or starve them of opportunity or resources. No matter how hard his motivation is and there are a lot of people in there who are the exception to that rule also. No matter how hard that is, the rule is going to be that you won’t get out of there. You won’t get out. It’s that simple. I think about a lot of people who I know personally who have family, who are byproducts of nothing more than where they were from and who they are in real time and space. They don’t struggle with motivational charisma. They struggle with the window out because they don’t have the systems at large giving them the pathways to get there.

That’s why it’s so important that people hear your story and stories like yours, because it allows people to see a future different from the past. Rodney, I am becoming increasingly convinced the most important thing distinguishing the entrepreneurial mindset from a non-entrepreneurial mindset is a compelling vision. The way I think about mindset is from an evolutionary perspective, we learn something and it comes into our brain.

Once our brains accept this as the correct way to think, perceive and feel, our brains then relegate that schema to habitual control because our brains are always trying to reduce the cognitive load. It’s seeking to automate everything it can. You can’t wake up in the morning and go, “What the heck is this?” You look at it, you go, “It’s a pair of pants.” You’re not even thinking about it.

What happens is once a particular schema has been relegated to habitual control, it falls off our conscious awareness. It drops beneath our conscious awareness, and now it drives our behavior unconsciously. It’s influencing our decisions, our motivation, choices, everything. If you back up and think about this from an evolutionary perspective, your mindset is a feature.

It works for you when you want the future to look like the past because you get better and better at functioning in these certain conditions. It becomes a bug when the future doesn’t look the past or when you don’t want the future to look the past because it’s difficult to correlate our deeply held values and taken-for-granted assumptions with the outcomes they’re creating. Do you see what I’m saying?

What happens is when things go properly in our lives, we take credit for, but when things aren’t going well, we tend to blame. I think the most important message that comes from your story and others like it is to look within first when stuff’s going wrong in your life. It’s not that there aren’t outside factors that are working against you, but the first place you should look is within. Are you with me on that?

Absolutely. It’s taking ownership. Think about the two ends of the spectrum I was talking about. Both of those elements is the fact that if you come from a neighborhood where I’ve come from and you have the motivation and the will to succeed and you don’t know how to do it, but you have the will and you are willing to figure it out, you need the entrepreneurial mindset if you’re not gifted and talented.

What I mean by that is you need the entrepreneurship. I was going to say you need the entrepreneurial mindset to figure out the complexity of life and how that’s going to optimize your human experience. If you’re not a basketball player, if you’re not six foot seven, if you don’t have the incredible leaping ability, if you don’t have an incredible intellectual gift where you can solve a math problem that most people take years in a second, then you need to figure out in an entrepreneurial fashion how to be able to procure the vision that you have. You got to have the vision first, then you have to find a way to do it.

 

You got to have the vision first. That’s not to be overlooked. Go ahead.

Simultaneously, if you are the person who come from a neighborhood where I’ve come from who has been blessed with the gift of privilege, I call it it. Not just if you are 6’7” or have a crazy arm where you can throw 100-mile hour baseball or whatever it is or you have some type of great intellectual gift. If you are born of a certain race, but you’re born in poverty, you have an avenue of opportunity that wouldn’t be afforded under those same conditions if you were in another race, you still have to have an entrepreneurial mindset and this gift of ownership.

You still have to figure out how to navigate the complexity of being or and needing resources to get where you’re trying to go. You have to now cultivate it a situation where you can do that. In my opinion, both ends of the spectrum have to work in that way. You can’t do it by blaming other folks that are looking for others to give you those answers entirely.

I think it’s easy for folks to get stuck there. It’s easy for people to blame. Before we started, I was telling you a little about my new book, but one of the things I said in the final summary of the book is that I figured it took me a long time to figure this out. Your ability to make yourself useful to other humans is a source of power and empowerment, whatever word you want to use. It’s a source of power that’s available to anyone. It doesn’t require you to have money. It doesn’t require any academic credentials. It doesn’t require you to be charismatic or an inventor or have any particular dispositional traits.

It’s available to anybody. That’s the power of the entrepreneurial mindset. Once someone realizes that, and this goes back to something you said a minute ago, Rodney. If you’re not gifted, so maybe you’re not on the medical track, you’re not going to become a doctor or a lawyer, an engineer, those are the three, “I’m a gifted kid, I’m going to go smash it in engineering school or medical school,” or whatever.

I still believe in entrepreneurial mindset’s essential for everyone. In the entrepreneurial mindset, I think similarly to you in that we all come into this world with gifts, with interests and abilities that are unique to us. We don’t even get to pick them. You might think you picked them but you didn’t. You might like basketball because you were born in Chicago, but if you were born in Afghanistan, you’d be into soccer.

It’s situational. We all have interest and abilities that are unique to us. I think that when we are able to pursue the things that are innately interesting to us and cultivate our capabilities in ways that contribute to the greater good in some way, we become optimally engaged. We tap into the most potent form of motivation, which is known as intrinsic motivation. When that happens, work isn’t work. You’re not thinking, “It’s Monday, I have to go back.” You’re thinking, “Thank God it’s Monday. Let’s go.” I can’t wait to get to work.

One of the most powerful aspects of your story that I wish for every young person is that if you can experience learning and work as a source of joy and meaning, self-governance, and self-reliance somewhere early in your life, you’re golden. Once that happens, you can never go back to making learning and work in the drudgery, which is the way so many young people experience.

That’s why entrepreneurship is a very complex, robust, neurological and systematic enterprise. I don’t want to conflate this concept because entrepreneurship is the mindset and then entrepreneurship is the infrastructure. I think both of those have strengths and limitations because I always say you may be able to find your way to the thing you can do all day for free, but then get paid. You have to still figure out how to get paid. You have to figure out what you can do and what you can’t do.

Entrepreneurship is this entire experience of exploration to perfection and actualization and optimization. If your passion is running, I would never ask you to run a 1040 in X amount of yards because I know your limitations, physiological limitations probably wouldn’t allow you to do that. I tell you that entrepreneurship will suggest if you have children, you can work with them from now until the next 1ten0 years. When they run it, they’ll run it like that.

 

It’s the same thing; it’s just a different entrepreneurial disposition because you’ve learned so much about entrepreneurship that it has taught you how to make that same million dollars in a million different ways. There are so many ways to do it with the same passion, but you have to be very aware of how entrepreneurship works in that fashion. That, to me, is like the beauty of the space of entrepreneurship. I don’t want to work a 9:00 to 5:00 job, even though I love to do what I love to do. You can do it as an entrepreneur and you don’t have to work from 9:00 to 5:00.

You can work from 5:00 to 9:00. You don’t have to do bookkeeping. Do you have a wife or a girlfriend or an aunt or a mom or dad who does do bookkeeping? You don’t have to do scheduling. Do you have somebody who can do it because you are not good at it? You’re not good at feedback, you’re not good at integrating research into your work or presentations, or you know what you do. Do you have someone you care about or somebody you can invest in or make an investment in, and where you can have that outsourced to whatever?

Entrepreneurship says all of those things. What is the hard thing that has happened with 9:00 to 5:00 work, I can defend 9:00 to 5:00 work in many different ways. One of the things that has happened is that we’ve suspended ourselves from thinking we can create all these things ourselves. We can do it all. We get a W-2 and we pay our taxes the same way all for the next 30 years until retirement. No one ever thinks about the fact that these people are figuring it out the same way we figured it out. These bosses are still figuring stuff out in the boardroom with the stakeholders the same way we are doing the same thing on the ground level. It looks more economically correct.

Let me riff on that with you for a second, Rodney. My understanding of where the entrepreneurial mindset comes from and what causes people to think and act that way. I took a great step forward when I read a book written by Nisbett and Ross called The Person and The Situation. So much of our behavior is influenced not by our personality traits, but by cognitive, motivational and situational factors of which we are largely unaware. Awareness of those factors also gives you power.

Values Over Vision

It’s a great book.

It’s a fantastic book. What I’m saying is this, Rodney. You have a vision for a future you’re trying to create. If there’s like a Rodney clone who goes to work at his corporate job, and this is broad brush, but a lot of people go to their job. They do the best they can, but they’re being told what to do constantly. They’re constrained in that way. We know that undermines intrinsic motivation. They go and do their best, but they come home at 5:00 and stop thinking about it. They stop thinking about it at 4:00. They start looking at the clock and they can’t wait. It’s like, “I can’t wait until the day’s over.” They come home, reorient their mental energy towards other things, and start thinking about their work the next morning once they get there. Of course, I’m broad-brushing this.

Whereas you are thinking about how to move the ball down the field every minute. You might be at a Sunday barbecue with family and you’re off in a corner talking to this dude trying to learn something from him so you can get the ball going a little further down the field. Your brain is always thinking about how to grow and keep going. Whereas someone of equal or greater talent than you who’s in a more corporate setting, they’ll evolve differently. I don’t want put any good or bad judgment on it. Their brains are going to evolve in a different way.

Let me take this a little bit deeper. Is your vision led by your values or is your values led by your vision? By the way, it sounds like your values are informed by your vision. Is your vision informed by your values? I can get to where I want to go. Am I going to be satisfied when I get there? If not, then that means that my values drive my vision versus if I know that I value certain things and I predicate what I do based off of what I value, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get to where you want to go. It doesn’t mean that where you’re going to go is going to look where you want to be. That to me is a definition of your vision being influenced by your values.

I give you a perfect example of this. It’s I’m a very value-based person. Even though I have a strong vision, but my strong vision is influenced by my values. I value the same thing everybody else values spending time with my family. I value time in general. I love spending time doing the things that I love to do. I love passion-driven projects and passion-driven experiences. I love spending time with my wife. I love raising my kids. I love to live in the magic of life and earn it. I love earning it. I believe in work ethic. I believe in all these different things, but that doesn’t look a particular entrepreneurial pathway. It’s just I’ve cultivated an entrepreneurial pathway from that. I’m glad that I wasn’t the other way around, which is like, “I want to get the money. I want to get rich.”

I don’t care what I got to do.

“I want to get out of Chicago.” If I had been like, “I want to get out of Chicago,” I would be right back in Chicago because I’m out of Chicago now. It’s like, “I’m out. Now what?” If I value what I value and my value happens to be Chicago and it happens to be where I am from, I could get out of Chicago and I go right back. It literally would’ve happened like that. I know how it sounds. I grew up the way I grew up, I was around who I was around, I knew what I knew and someone exposed me to this idea of creating a vision through an entrepreneurial mindset work and programming. I can do things with my vision. I have a vision. I’m going to create this whole vision board. I’m going to have this whole blueprint, this whole business plan, I’m going to achieve it.

Now that I’ve achieved it, like what I was saying, “I got $1 million or I’ve become a bestseller of this, I’ve been able to travel here, what now?” The what now is the value and the what now is going to say, “I want to go back home. I want to go back to what I’m used to. I want to go back to what I was doing because that’s what I value.”

Deconstructing everything that you worked hard for because it was all a means to an end, not the end itself. I think that that’s very important to make that distinction between value and vision. My mentor tries to change values in many very radical ways so that we can create a vision that can work with that. If your values don’t change, yeah, you, you’re going to be stuck in the same place. Maybe not now. Definitely towards the end.

 

Just to build on that, Rodney, what you’re saying is that intrinsic motivation is when the task itself is the reward. That’s intrinsic motivation. That is the most potent form of human motivation when we do things for their own sake as opposed to extrinsic motivation where we do something for some separable reward. Let’s call it money, let’s call it letter grades, let’s call it approval from others, fame, or whatever. Those things don’t get it for us. Desi and Ryan are different psychologists who brought us out of the dark ages of motivation. It used to be believed that motivation came from outside the individual in the form of punishment or rewards. That was BF Skinner’s conditioning thinking. That was a dominant thinking in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. That’s what school was built on.

Grades and attention.

What’s crazy is that the desire to learn is innate. It’s in every living thing. That’s how we orient ourselves with our environment. Letter grades and gold stars and punishment actually undermine our desire to learn. When coming back to the values thing, the values issue, Desi and Ryan have this thing called self-determination theory. We are all acorns with the innate desire and the capacity to become all that we can become. However, like an oak tree, we need the right combination of soil, sunlight and water to self-actualize.

What Desi and Ryan are saying is that sunlight and water are a part of something for humans, and autonomy, competency, and relatedness are part of it. When those three, what they call nutrients, are attainable, we experience lifelong growth, social integration and psychological wellbeing. Take away any one of those three, and the wheels will start to fall off the wagon. I think this is what you’re speaking to. We tend to turn towards what they call need substitutes. We buy the BMW we can’t afford as a proxy for relatedness to be recognized in the community or whatever. Now we’re tethered to a job we don’t like. We have an $800 a month car payment or whatever it is. The pursuit of those needs substitutes speaks to your idea about value versus vision.

When you do things like that, you either have to maintain it or deconstruct it. That’s when life stuff gets compounded. Going back to that $800 car payment on that BMW that you did to substitute. If you ever get to a point where you realize this isn’t the way, now you have to figure out what do you got to do.

That’s a scary moment for people. I heard Tim Ferris talking about this on one of his podcasts. It’s like he is talking to other entrepreneurs. He sold their business for $20 million and 6 or 9 months later, whatever it is, there’s this yucky feeling. I thought this was going to do it, but it’s not doing it. What a scary feeling that is. There’s no purpose associated with my work. The message from your story is if there’s no purpose in your work, you’re missing it. That’s part of the entrepreneurial journey. I think there’s got to be purpose. There’s got to be some prosperity. You have to benefit from it, but it also has a purpose component.

I don’t have a lot of meaningful relationships with my neighborhood and the community that I’ve come from. Even though I go back now and again, I don’t have meaningful relationships because my life has driven me to the vision and the values-oriented over the years with myself. I think about how even if you get to some radical place that looks what you want it to look and exists the way you want it to, you still have memory and still have things that are inherent to your identity, the things that you come from. I don’t feel any type of pride or pleasure in saying like I graduated from Harvard, I graduated from Yale and have been able to have a successful entrepreneurial career and all that.

My parents still struggle with drug addiction and my high school is still dropping kids out and some of my peers are still incarcerated, in and out of jail. My community is still impoverished or struggling with this onset of gentrification or whatever and people are being in this place. As I look at those things and where I am, I’m proud and happy about where I am, but I always have to reference it to what’s still happening. I always wrestle with this exception to the rule concept, which is that they’re going to be more Rodney Walker stories or any other person who’s from the rags to whatever story. I think most of us want the rule to be changed in a very big way.

I think entrepreneurship is one of the key ingredients that can help us do that in a meaningful way. Entrepreneurship has to be integral. It has to be integral to the early childhood development aspect. The entrepreneurial mindset is what I’m talking about. The programming, disposition, and value set have to be integral to early childhood development because that’s when students will look at their environment and say, “We can fix this. We can all be participants in fixing this.”

It’s a matter of what we do to do it. That’s not doing it the conventional way sometimes. Sometimes it’s doing it in different ways. You have to be able to think and be aware of how those different channels can evolve. You can’t do that without an entrepreneurial mindset. It literally impacts every level of the neural network. Entrepreneurship impacts every level of the neural network. I believe the truest definition of neuroplasticity is being able to go through different channels within the brain to figure something out.

Also, reinvent yourself constantly.

If you’re in a room where everybody’s saying 1 plus 1 equal 2, you’re the only one saying 3 minus 1. You’re the only one saying different ways.

I said as much in my new book, Rodney. I want to be respectful of your time and wrap this up. What would happen if we started treating entrepreneurship with the same fervor and reverence that we do sports? What if, starting in 5th or 6th grade, every kid had an entrepreneurial project of their own every year that they worked all through school? What if parents showed up in stadiums cheering on their kids’ projects? What if there were entrepreneurial directors who were athletic directors where every kid has made sure every kid had basic entrepreneurial competencies?

What if high schools had talent scouts, venture capitalists showing up and seeing them who got the best ideas that can change the world? I love what you said. Create Rodney Walker’s on purpose rather than by accident because Rodney happened, if I understand you, by accident. It wasn’t part of the school design. It was a random entrepreneurship program. Michael was a radical outlier in his thinking. It happened by accident. How many Rodney Walkers are still languishing in our classrooms and communities all over the country, and is that world not getting their gifts? I think that’s the work you and I have yet to do. There’s a formula here.

Have you seen this movie called I Am Legend?

I did.

At the end of the movie before he sends the woman and the child into the tunnel because the building’s being attacked by the zombies who were humans turned over. He found out the end that the antidote was in his blood. My story of success through adversity is people figuring out that and my story there is the antidote, but it’s circumstantial that you came to that answer. It wasn’t science or pathology. In the movie, he doesn’t find out scientifically that his blood is the antidote. He found out by happenstance that it was the antidote.

That’s exactly what I feel like as a person who’s done all these things from where I’ve come from. There was no systematic approach to my story, but there is an antidote that could create and cultivate an environment where a lot of student’s experience. They’re growing up the way I grew up of no fault of their own and graduating from college and being world class entrepreneurs or professionals raising families apart from the way they were raised, being the moms or the dads or the spouses or the whatever, the ages of change. There’s an antidote for that. Hearing that is the details of our stories, my story and your lived experiences, the Gary’s of the world and the Rodneys of the world. There are ways that we could as educators can take those things and create a very powerful antidote. It’s just a matter of you doing it.

That’s my whole book right there in a nutshell. What can we learn from these underdog entrepreneurs? They’re not just random gifted people with some weird, scientifically unfathomable traits. There are common and controllable factors in their story that we can and ultimately, we’re missing out on this whole aspect of human potential we can’t get to. That’s ultimately what it’s about. Rodney, I’m being respectful of your time. I’m grateful for your time. Talk to me about what are you doing now and where can people get ahold of you? I know that public speaking is a big part of what you’re doing. You’ve written a few books. Tell us a little bit about that.

I still speak. I love to do it. I love to speak with young people and professionals, and obviously, educators about the work of helping kids deconstruct adverse childhood experiences and post-traumatic stress disorder and childhood trauma and learn how to take that pain and use it as a vehicle to do something great my mentor did for me. My platform is ANewDayOne.org where if anyone wants to get in touch with me, they can definitely find me there.

I also teach Leadership and Social Justice at my alma mater, Morehouse College, here in Atlanta, Georgia. For the most part, I teach all freshman students how to cultivate leadership through resilience in their own respective academic careers and things like that. I also teach at the United States Federal Penitentiary here in Atlanta. I teach at Metro Reentry here in Atlanta, teaching returning citizens and adults in custody about the entrepreneurial mindset.

I teach entrepreneurship education and social justice education in those prisons to inmates who are going to be getting out very shortly. I want to help them reintegrate into society, be more civically engaged, and find a pathway back to normal citizenship. That is a part of my legacy work that I’m happy about doing. I do have two books. The first book is A New Day One. It’s a memoir about my journey from foster care to Harvard. I have a book called Wounds You Cannot See, which is a professional development book for educators to talk about how they can cultivate resilience and leadership among at-risk youth.

Can we get those on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever?

You can get them on our website or you can get them on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Give me a website address. Where can people find you?

It’s www.ANewDayOne.org.

Rodney, this is such a great story. I want to shout it from the rooftops. It seems you are a living, breathing example of what I said. Taking your experience, your gifts in using them in a way, using the entrepreneurial mindset to make the world a better place. I love what you’ve said multiple times throughout this episode that you are using your adverse experiences now as an advantage. You’re making them work for you, not against you.

That’s right. As a vehicle to do something great.

Rodney, thank you so much for doing this.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Absolutely. We should do this again, by the way.

We got to do it again. We should be doing this show together, but that’s great. I’m so happy to hear you’re teaching at Morehouse. You’re doing reentry stuff. I’m about to go to Little Rock, Arkansas, to train people to hold ten people who are going to take Ice House into the reentry space.

If you ever find yourself in Georgia, by the way, let me know. We should definitely connect.

We’ll do that. Thanks, Rodney.

I appreciate it.

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Just a few quick things before you go. Are you an unlikely entrepreneur with a story to tell? Do you know someone who is? If so, we’d love to hear about it. Please drop us a note at ELIMindset.com/shareyourstory. Do you want to learn how to think an entrepreneur? Do you want to encourage others to do the same? The Ice House Entrepreneurial Mindset Program now enables you to learn directly from the firsthand wisdom and insights gathered from hundreds of everyday unlikely entrepreneurs who started with little or nothing yet somehow managed to succeed. The result is a revolutionary new learning experience that is redefining entrepreneurship in classrooms and communities worldwide. We’ve created a limited time offer for audience to get full access to the Ice House Entrepreneurial Mindset program for just $79. To enroll, visit .

 

Important Links

• Rodney Walker
• The Dawn of Everything
• The Person and The Situation
• A New Day One
• Wounds You Cannot See
• ELIMindset.com/shareyourstory