Like I have said a million times I get to interact with the coolest people doing this. I follow The Hip Hippy on Instagram. I’m definitely going to do a podcast with her sometime but for now our interactions have been limited to Insta interactions.
Follow her @thehiphippy and check out her Tarot reading skills. (If you are into that sort of thing, and I am!)
She has Tarot Tuesday where she sets 3 cards out and you pick a card by commenting left, middle or right and then check back that night for the reading.
I usually think about a question I have about something that is currently happening in my life and sometimes it’s a biggie and sometimes it isn’t. This time it was a biggie and the answer that I got was so encouraging I wanted to share it here.
The card was the six of wands and she said, this card indicates that you have harnessed your strengths and talents in order to bring about a successful outcome in your endeavors. You have managed to get through the confusion of the 5 wands, minimizing your distractions and focusing on the task at hand. You have overcome the challenges along the way, and now you are focusing your energies on the one goal that will lead you to your success. This is your time to shine and come out on top. This card is such a positive encouragement to believe in who you are and your accomplishments so far.
Wow! Right? Amazing. Super excited for what the future holds and I look forward to sharing that here with you. All in good time.
I also wanted to tell you, if you don’t already know about this amazing 4 part series on HBO that I recently watched called, The Defiant Ones. I didn’t even know what it was about; they just had me at defiant ones.
Turns out it’s about Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre and how as HBO puts it, through decades of defiance and determination two street kids, (with no formal education), created empires.
Ultimately with each other as partners but it follows their individual lives until they teamed up and produced Eminem’s first album Slim Shady. (Which by the way they have footage of Dre playing the opening beats and Eminem automatically start saying my name is, my name is. And at that moment, they both knew it was going to be something big and that was within 10 minutes of meeting each other.
This series is not just for rap fans however. It is an epic story of over coming insurmountable odds by working your ass off and never ever giving up. Obstacles come at you but you have to learn to dodge and weave and sometimes start all over again.
Great moment when Dre was standing on his Malibu back deck and he sees Jimmy walking up and he comes up and Dre tells him I just got an offer to do a sneaker line but I don’t think that’s for me, it doesn’t feel right. I don’t know anything about sneakers or fashion. I only know speakers and headphones. And Jimmy was like, ok then that’s what we will do. And by the next day they were testing every headphone made and deciding which one would become Beats by Dr.Dre. They got every friend who was in music or an athlete to wear them. Jimmy was a marketing genius and pretty soon all athletes wanted beats to the point that when the Olympics came around they manufactured them to come in every color of every flag participating so every athlete competing were wearing beats. And since The Olympics is such a corrupt moneymaker them selves that they finally banned Beats because if they weren’t an official sponsor, i.e., if the Olympics weren’t making money off of it, then no go. Which of course made Beats even more news and noteworthy. And then Apple bought them for 3 billion dollars. And they all lived happily ever after.
But forget the wealth because both of these men came from Compton and Brooklyn respectively. They came from nothing and lived amongst chaos and grew up and gave back so much to their own communities and the world at large. After Jimmy’s father died unexpectedly he ended up producing A Very Special Christmas Album that raised millions of dollars in his father’s name to the Special Olympics.
Dre has given back to Compton High School trying to make it an inviting place to make kids want to go to school. He says at one point, what kid wants to go to school? I hated school; everybody did where I come from.
When you grow up in chaos, you are in survival mode and when you have to worry about really big things it’s almost impossible to have to wrap your head around normal things like homework and getting to class on time.
School is for some people and not for everyone. Both of these super successful people both maintain that school was not for them. If you know what you want and what you love then no matter what anyone else says, go for it.
It isn’t going to be easy and you are going to have to work your ass off. But if you are relentless and unapologetically determined. Stay true to your self, don’t conform. Don’t worry about pleasing everyone and stick with it, eventually your path will flow right where it’s supposed to be.
At one point Jimmy says, “Listen, they put blinders on a racehorse because when you are a champion you’re running after something with everything you’ve got, you don’t need to look right or left at what everyone else is doing. You have laser focus on that prize at the end and you go for it and you never, ever give up. Stay in the saddle.
