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Try Everything

Don't be discouraged if you haven't found your will yet. Not everyone is like Irv. Not everyone is lucky enough to find their life's passion by the time they hit puberty. Sometimes we get stuck on the wrong path. I took many paths, just so that I could keep my options open.

It's okay to experiment. Take as many risks as you can while you're young. You wouldn't buy a car without test-driving it first, so why not try a few different things before you figure out what's going to be your life's work? Explore!

Lyor Cohen, one of the most powerful executives in the music business, calls it dabbling, and look where it's got him. Today, he's the CEO of Warner Music Group. Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, was a lawyer, a political consultant and a banker before he became one of the few African-Americans to head up a Fortune 500 company. Kenneth Chenault, the CEO of American Express, started out in dental school!

Sean "P. Diddy" Combs expanded his business and widened his appeal to audiences outside of the hip-hop culture by acting in movies and playing Walter Lee in Raisin in the Sun on Broadway. He's got a clothing empire alongside his music empire and the sky is the limit as to what that B-boy will do next.

Trying new things always carries the risk of failure. Puffy could have gotten his ass kicked by critics for his Broadway debut and quit. Not only did he keep it moving, he invested in his own play. He got mixed reviews and a lot of nods for making the effort to stretch himself. He brought young urban audiences into the theater for the first time and exposed them to great American drama. He puts himself out there. As Lyor would say, he leaves a piece of himself on the field every game. That alone deserves respect.

Not everything you do is going to work out, but you'll learn what works, what doesn't, what you're great at, and what you suck at. You may learn that something you love doing will be a hobby, not a career. Doing it may lead to something related that you never even thought about turning into a career.

It took me a while to figure out my true calling. My parents made sacrifices so that I would have the chance to try out all the things that captured my interest. They also pushed me to do things they knew would help me build the skills and character I would need to become a leader. They just had one condition: whatever I tried, I had to put my heart into it and see where it would take me.

I was into everything: Little League baseball, football, basketball, the Boy Scouts, the church choir. And those were just the extracurricular activities my mother knew about.

While I was earning every merit badge in the Scouts I was also hanging out with my homeboys. We'd come together on the corner of Liberty Heights and Gwynn Oaks, a rough patch of West Baltimore where we'd network with the other crews and see how much fun we could have. We were always coming up with creative ways to get the money to finance our latest needs, not all of them strictly legit.

One thing I did know early on was that I loved the power of the Almighty Dollar. I had needs. I wanted the latest sweatsuits or those Air Force Ones I'd seen at the mall. When I was eleven I took on a paper route so that I could buy myself the nice extras my father wasn't willing to pay for. But I soon figured out that there were easier ways to earn a dollar than getting up at four in the morning every Sunday.

I graduated to shoveling snow with one of my buddies. We figured out where the old ladies lived and cleared the paths from their front doors so they wouldn't slip and fall. We clocked when a potential client would open his garage door to drive to work, so we could clear the driveway just in time. We earned hundreds of dollars in extra tips from the appreciative snowbound masses of Baltimore!

Later on, other sources of income came from hustling. By our mid-teens, our crew had all kinds of deals going on, selling any illicit commodity we could steal or turn over for a profit. I wouldn't recommend that way of living to anyone, for reasons I'll discuss in a later chapter. But those experiences were not only lucrative, they gave me a taste for negotiating a deal and thinking fast on my feet.

I was also rapping. I wrote most of the lyrics for Numarx, including a hit song. But I was better at promoting and selling our group. I watched where the money was going. I set up our gigs. I got our music played on the radio. I planned our image and how we would invest in ourselves.

I had so many business ideas that the other guys in Numarx started calling me KG for "Krhyme Genius." One of those ideas was to start our own production company. We used our income from performing and loans from our parents, to invest in equipment for our production company, Marx Bros. Records.

My new hustle led to all kinds of interesting and profitable sidelines: street team marketing, throwing parties and promoting records on local radio. I knew every club owner, music retailer, deejay, cop and drug dealer in the mid-Atlantic who could help me push and sell records.

The sidelines continued on through high school and college. I played football at Woodlawn High for three years. By the age of nineteen I was studying to get my degree in electrical engineering and managing a telemarketing team of four hundred people for a travel marketing company called World Connections Travel.

Something had to give. The first thing to go was football. That killed me. I was one of the top high-school players in the state of Maryland, and I'd been playing football since I joined the Pop Warner league at the age of nine. I hated letting down my team.

Two years later I ditched college. I was so obsessed with music that I couldn't sit down and focus on complicated physics formulas. I'd sit in front of the computer at home and compose rhymes in my head.

Finally, my will to be in the music business was coming into focus. The hardest part was letting down my parents. My mother, Miss Berta, was disappointed. I was always close to my parents and I still am, but my decision to drop out was a turning point in our relationship. Still sore from the time I quit Boy Scouts before graduating to Eagle Scouts, they said, "Kevin, why can't you finish anything? Don't be a quitter!" But when you find your will, nothing, not even the sadness of letting down family, can stop you from going your own way.

I wasn't fully aware of it at the time, but everything I had going on from the very first dollar I earned was in some way preparing me for my career at Def Jam.

Team sports taught me the discipline needed to be a manager and work toward the good of the company. Shoveling snow and delivering newspapers taught me how to think about what the customer wants. Hustling taught me how to handle tense situations and think on my feet. Managing a telemarketing team showed me how to be a leader.

My experience with Numarx made it all clear. I wrote a song that would become one of the biggest singles in 1989, "Girl You Know It's True." National labels were clamoring to sign us to re-record it and fan the flames, but we were tied to a contract with Studio Records, a regional record label in Oxen Hill, Maryland. That didn't stop Chrysalis Records from taking it and recording it anyway as a song by Milli Vanilli.

Watching Milli Vanilli's cheesy video and hearing about those crazy record sales was galling. Our manager found us a lawyer, we sued and we won. We got the BMI award for Song of the Year, and all the royalties. At nineteen I got my first royalty check for $90,000.

At twenty, I was already bringing in $90,000 a year from my marketing job, band royalties and all my other little hustles. That was more than I could expect to make from sticking to college and graduating, so there wasn't much my mom could say.

Through all this I discovered that what I really loved was the business of music. I realized that the industry needed good music executives to take care of their own. I was twenty when I knew, more than anything, that I wanted to be part of an organization that takes care of its artists. I'd finally found my one true vocation. 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.