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By Any Means Necessary

Finding your will gives you the strength to endure whatever it takes to make it happen, even if it means sleeping on the floor of a friend's cockroach-infested apartment in the Bronx.

Walter Randolph, a lanky twenty-three-year-old kid from Chicago, wants my spot. He's followed my career path from intern to president in the music trade press. He knows that anything is possible because he's read up on it. But you won't believe what he's been willing to go through to realize his dream.

Growing up, Def Jam's music was the sound track to young Walter's life. Every job he ever worked through high school and college was in record stores, sampling and selling rap music. To him, Def Jam was the Mecca of the music business in the Holy Land of Hip Hop.

He was like thousands of other kids who travel across the country to try to get their foot in the door. He didn't aspire to be a rap artist himself. Instead, he wanted to be part of an environment that nurtures artists and creates great music that can change a culture.

At college in Tallahassee, Florida, an acquaintance of Walter's was a college rep for Sony. She'd been up to our offices in New York City to get some CDs and heard that Def Jam was hiring summer interns. She mentioned it to Walter, and his eyes lit up. He told his friend, "I'll sweep the floors, take out the garbage, anything, just get me in there!"

Immediately, he e-mailed the person in charge of recruiting interns, sending in his resume and letters of recommendation from former employers. He got a polite call back explaining the summer intern slots had already been filled, but to please try next year.

Instead, Walter kept in touch on a weekly basis, regularly following up with calls, e-mails and letters. Months later someone took a look at his resume and realized he had some valuable experience in music sales. In the middle of his junior year exams he got a call and was told to be there the next day.

What we didn't realize at the time was that Walter didn't live in New York. Truth be told we probably wouldn't have cared. So he did what he had to do, raiding his bank account for all his cash to buy a $600 last-minute plane ticket to fly up from Florida that same day. With no money left over for a hotel room, he spent the night in LaGuardia Airport's arrivals terminal and came into the city for his interview the next morning.

Walter's sacrifice paid off. He got the position, headed back home, packed all of his worldly possessions into his beat-up Chevy and drove back to his father's place in Chicago. He took a train to New York and started work with nothing but the clothes on his back.

When he started work at Def Jam Walter didn't even have a crib. We don't pay interns at Def Jam. Like me when I interned for Def Jam's regional office in Baltimore, armies of kids are willing to prove their stuff for free.

But Walter had it especially rough. After hours, he'd put his head down on a bench by the piers at Forty-seventh Street, where the cruise ships come in. He'd sleep all night on the subway. He didn't have enough money to buy food. Not eating properly gave him an ulcer.

Back then people used to say, "Walt, you work such long hours!" But he didn't want to leave the office because he had nowhere to go!

His first home, a piece of floor in a crack house in Far Rockaway, Queens, was raided one day while Walter was at work. Then Walter found a distant cousin with a free sofa in the Bronx, but he outstayed his welcome after a few weeks. Last I heard he was sharing a place with a friend in New Jersey.

He survived on the occasional hustle, and charm. Walter's polite demeanor and willingness to do anything to help made him a favorite of the girls in the office. They'd get him Phat Farm clothing samples so he could look cool. They'd order food in so he could get his three squares.

For a while there it looked to Walter like he'd never get paid. The music industry had had a lot of layoffs over the past couple of years. For the longest time I couldn't offer any of the interns full-time paid positions. They just didn't exist.

But even back in the heady days when everything we touched went platinum, most interns moved on before a full-time position opened up. They got tired of doing the stuff that nobody else wanted to do and eventually realized that making it in the music industry was just too much of a challenge for them.

Walter was an exception. No matter how tough it got, he never complained. He just kept coming to the office and working longer hours than Def Jam employees on the payroll. He made himself indispensable to me, and he knew it.

I gave him the demos that aspiring rap groups hand me outside the office so that he could tell me what, if anything, was good. I relied on him to be my eyes and ears.

Every day he'd put together a book of record spins and other daily numbers that I need to scan each morning. Known in the industry as the BDS -- or Broadcast Data System -- report, I call it my bible. Walter was one of the few people in the office who knew how to put it together just the way I like it.

Every day, he'd sit at the workstation outside my office taking in everything around him. When I dropped knowledge, he was there to catch it. He'd listen in on meetings and study the major players as they walked and talked through the halls. He was one of Def Jam University's best students.

He never asked me for a thing. He endured the hard times and positioned himself just right. So when I left Def Jam last year for Warner Music Group, I took him with me. Now he's getting paid.

I've got big plans for Walter. Excerpted from 'Make it Happen: The Hip Hop Guide to Success' by Kevin Liles. Copyright© 2005 by KWL Enterprises, LLC. Permission granted by Simon & Schuster.