🎤 What Hip-Hop Can Teach Us About Becoming Successful

It’s Tuesday, which means, “We gon' rock it 'til the wheels fall off.”

This past Friday, August 11th, Hip-Hop turned 50. 🥳

“It started with a back-to-school party on August 11, 1973, in The Bronx. Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, improvised and played snippets in a loop on two turntables to keep the music and dancing going.”

The Culture is now an industry giant worth nearly $8 Billion. In 2020, hip-hop made up 48.9% of the song consumption market in the U.S.

Now that’s how you take market share. 📈

So, what does all of this have to do with small businesses, technology, and personal growth? In today’s issue, we’ll walk through five ways the history of hip-hop can help you and your business be more successful.

IN LESS THAN 8 MINUTES, I GOT 5 ON IT:

1. Culture is King 👑

2. Stay Fresh 👟

3. Boss Up 👔

4. Keep It 💯

5. Crew Love 🤝

1. Culture is King 👑

If consistency is Queen (Who run the world? Girls). Culture is King.

While an organization can have better people, better products or services, or a better (marketing) strategy, it will eventually fall to one with a stronger foundation. Culture.

People, products, and strategy are ultimately seasonal, while a well-maintained culture has the power to create a competitive advantage of sustained growth for the long haul.

Culture begins with what people do and how they do it, and most importantly, culture is why they do it.

A strong, healthy culture not only provides an unwavering north star for those in the organization, and creates belonging and community around a commonly held set of beliefs, it also allows an organization to thrive on change.

Here’s a world-class example of Culture in action.

2. Stay Fresh 👟

If there’s one thing hip-hop has taught us, change is constant, and maintaining a focus on innovation is key to business success and longevity.

In a world where innovation moves at lightning speed, products and business models are always at risk of being replicated. Many businesses are too slow to adapt to change and improve upon how they’ve done business in the face of ever-evolving market dynamics.

You’re likely familiar with the story of Blockbuster and Netflix.

What’s most interesting though is that while we now associate Netflix with innovation and technology, and Blockbuster with inconvenience and dated business models, Blockbuster’s catalyst for growth was originally their innovative use of technology through their computer database, which housed insights on the tastes and preferences of 40 million customers.

Ultimately, Blockbuster chose stagnation over continuing to be innovative and went the way of the dodo, courtesy of disruptive company cultures that leveraged innovation of customer experience as their competitive advantage.

In business (as in life), you are either growing or you are dying, and staying the same just prolongs your organization’s inevitable extinction.

3. Boss Up 👔

Over the past 50 years, countless examples in hip-hop have reminded us of two core entrepreneurial principles.

1. Believe in yourself. If others don’t believe in your vision, show them.

2. Be an owner. Authorship should mean ownership. Take equity.

By the late 90s, the playbook for rappers seemed to be quite consistent. Sign a deal, release a classic first album, then have a sophomore slump, rebound with a solid third album, then start a label so you can sign the lesser-known artists you came up with, and if you’re really big, start a clothing line. The trouble is, for a lot of people, being the boss isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

This wasn’t the case for Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter.

By 1996, when Jay-Z’s debut album Reasonable Doubt was released, he had been grinding hard for ten years. Jay appeared on other artists’ songs as a feature, released his own singles, and had meeting after meeting with record labels, yet he was rejected over and over again.

Sure, record execs didn’t believe in his product, but his vision and work ethic was unwavering.

Jay pivoted and went the independent route, linking up with Damon Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke, to form their own independent label, Roc-A-Fella Records. Soon after, Def Jam approached Roc-A-Fella with a 50-50 partnership and distribution agreement. As a result, Jay-Z became an official partner of the top hip-hop label globally, rather than merely being signed to a label.

Fast forward, the latest estimate from Forbes values the net worth of the Brooklyn-born artist at $2.5 Billion.

Jay-Z was the first billionaire in the rap industry in 2019, owning stakes in Armand de Brignac champagne and D'Usse cognac worth over $400 million and investing in properties in New York and LA. His wealth has grown significantly in recent years due to numerous investments in companies such as Uber, the expansion of his entertainment company, Roc Nation, and most recently, the sale of the streaming service TIDAL to Square for $297 million.

4. Keep It 💯

To keep it real or “100%” in business, it really comes down to being authentic as well as knowing how to stay in your lane.

Historically speaking, when rappers sign endorsement deals, if it’s not related to clothing, it’s usually alcohol brands that are front and center.

Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson was different. One of the biggest bets he made early in his career was staying true to himself in the deals he did. It paid off. Big.

50 is known for living a clean lifestyle, prioritizing energy from gym sessions over bottles of bub in da club. 🍾

In 2004, at the height of his popularity, 50 became a partner and spokesperson for Glacéau, which produced VitaminWater, and instead of earning a fee upfront, he received minority shares in the company.

A few years later, in 2007, Coca-Cola purchased Glacéau for $4.1 Billion, earning 50 Cent an estimated $100 million for his shares. 🤑

5. Crew Love 🤝

One of my favorite aspects of hip-hop culture is fierce loyalty. Sure, I’m biased. I’m very loyal to those who have made a significant impact on my life.

The catch is loyalty is a double-edged sword.

Staying true to those who have been with you on your come-up and supported you from day one is something you love to see.

On the other hand, relationships are messy, especially when egos get involved and one person is rising to the top faster than the rest of the crew. It’s inevitable though.

To achieve the highest levels of success (whatever that is for you and your business), your personal growth, mindset, and actions have to match that ambition. More often than not, you will out-grow those around you, and things will get… weird. 😅

The best way to have a circle that grows together is to encourage each individual to go all in on their strengths. This may mean they are in a perfectly-suited role on your team, have their own business, or have their dream job, and they’re doing what they love and what they’re exceptional at doing.

They say you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. This can be one of your biggest assets, or liabilities.

You may need to grow apart from those you started with if it’s necessary to accomplish what you set out to do. You can still love, respect, and appreciate them, you just have to limit your time with them.

In other cases, if everyone is on board with constant growth, and has the right seat on the bus, things should work out well for everyone. The number 6 employee at Facebook is a billionaire too.

ONWARD TOGETHER.

In The Weeds 🌾

Additional resources for you to dive deeper.

• Hip Hop: A Culture of Vision and Voice [The Kennedy Center]

• 50 Years Later, Everything Is Hip-Hop [Wall Street Journal]

• Hip-hop turns 50, reinventing itself and swaths of the world along the way [PBS News Hour]

• Nasdaq honors hip-hop’s 50th anniversary with LL COOL J’s Rock The Bells [Yahoo! Finance]

• Timbaland: Hip-hop is "whole" industry right now [Axios]

• Hip-hop’s future will be less American and more global [The Economist]

• What the Hip Hop Industry Can Teach Us About Digital Marketing [Adweek]

• Hip-Hop Education: How 50 Years Of Music & Culture Impact Curricula Worldwide [Grammys]

• Hip Hop Invented Modern Music Economics [The Atlantic]

• Hip-hop turns 50 [Morning Brew]

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