How Jay Z Overcame Failure and Achieved Success

How Jay Z Overcame Failure and Achieved SuccessWhen we think about people who have clawed their way up to the greatest heights of success and fame from the very lowest places, we should probably put Jay Z on that list. Born Shawn Carter, in 1969, in the projects of Brooklyn, the man we now know as Jay Z welches raised by a single mother with his three older siblings after being abandoned by their father. His neighborhood welchesnt the best. Crime was rampant. Jay Z himself dropped out of high school, despite showing a great deal of potential, to sell crack to make money. He even shot his brother in the shoulder once during an argument. googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display(div-gpt-ad-1467144145037-0) ) Luckily, Jay Z was able to turn some of this depravity into art. An incredibly talented lyricist, he would compete and win freestyle competitions, making a reputation for himself. Hed even read the dictionary cover to cover on multiple occasions, scouring for better rhymes. He was able to abflug telling his story through his music.After being shot at on a few occasions, and tiring of the drug life, Jay Z partnered with a fellow rapper on a single called The Originators, which earned him a feature on MTV. He kept working with DJs to try and get more tracks recorded, but had little to no success securing a record deal. Every major label in the country turned him down. It became clear that he would never make a living as a hip-hop performer.Rather than let that news get him down, and turn him back to his old life and all the crime, Jay Z tried it from another angle. He became a producer himself and started his own labelaspirationally titled Roc-A-Fellawith two friends. It was a rocky road. Almost all of their artists left the label before making an album. By 1997, only Jay Z had managed to release one. But they persisted. They worked with Notorious B.I.G., and when he died, Jay Z was asked to collaborate on the posthumous album Life After Death, allowing Roc-A-Fella to get a little press.The following year, in 1998, Jay Z released Vol. 2 and the song Hard Knock Life and, well, the rest is history. Roc-A-Fella shot up and became quite successful, and was later sold to Def Jam Records for 1000000s of dollars. As for Jay Z, he became the President and CEO and took the whole merged label by storm. He is now worth roughly $520 million, and was ranked the 6th most powerful celebrity of 2014 by Forbes. He has sold over 75 million records, won 19 Grammies, owns a record company, designs clothes, owns or part-owns real estate, hotels, businesses, even an NBA team, among other claims to fame.In his book Decoded, he says this about his song This Cant Be Life and about failureIt was a verse about fear of failure, which is something that everyone goes through, but no one, particularly where Im from, wants to really talk about. But its a song that a lot of people connect to The thought that this cant be life is one that all of us have felt at som e point or another, when bad decisions and bad luck and bad situations feel like too much to bear, those times when we think that this, this, cant be my story. But facing up that kind of feeling can be a powerful motivation to change. It was for me.So the next time you start to feel down on yourself, thinking of all the ways in which the deck was stacked against you bad parents, bad poverty, bad everything, just remember a man named Shawn Carter turned everything around for himself and became a household name. He even got to marry Beyonc. Hows that for failure being a productive force for success?

This Motherhood Clarity Coach Helps Millennials Decide Whether to Have Kids

This Motzu sichhood Clarity Coach Helps Millennials Decide Whether to Have Kids This is what people will tell you aboutdeciding to have kidsIts the best thing youll ever do.Just dont do it.Theres no good time so you have to jump.If yure not sure, its not for you.And, to those who know they dont want kids Youll change your mind.But even with the endless stream of advice so often hurled at the lebensgefhrteed and childless, I was still skeptical when I found out there is such a thing as a motherhoodclarity coach.Ann Davidman started working with women those who werent sure whether they wanted kids 25 years ago. Today, she runs an online course, both private and one-on-one, for those making that same decision.When I started researching her, Ill admit I even said out loud Well, if you have to pay someone $300+ to figure it out, maybe youdont want kids.Unlike the women in Davidmans course, however, I have always known I wanted kids. Yes, Im currently child-free and unmarried, but when m y boyfriend and I started dating, I definitely began our lets be exclusive chat by telling him I want kids and I want to get married. That didnt mean it had to be withhim, but I knew that was the end goal for me. So I also knew that if he wasnt on board, we had to go our separate ways.I never related to people when they described a lightning-bolt moment of suddenly knowing their sexuality. As a kid, I assumed I wassupposed to be attracted to boys because the women I knew had grown up and marriedboys (er, men). The fact that I developed real, burning crushes on boys in adolescence feels as much a coincidence as anything else. I didntknow I was straight as a kid. But Iknew I wanted to be a mom.Which is to say, I got on the phone with Davidman thinking of her career as some kind of vanity service for millennials who need a coach for everything maybe the kinds of people who have, say,paid for a wedding hashtag or later for ababy-naming service. A group class with Davidman, after all, i s as much as $357, and her rates for private coaching arenteven listed on her website.Of course, Davidman knows that there are plenty of already-decided women like me out there and, she says, they wont find her. That includes plenty of my counterparts, too women who have always known, in the same fundamental way, that they never want to have children. None of either group of us will be attempting to Google ourselves to a decision-making point, reading through so many world wide web versions of the same kinds of advice Just do it, or just dont do it.But, as Davidman tells me, her course is not about seeking external advice. Its about looking inward.Most people get stuck in a gridlock because they try to figure out what they wantandwhat theyre going to do at the same time, she tells me. Her coaching is more focused on self-exploration, and delving into what she terms unconscious recordings, the kinds of things we build our lives around and arent aware of. By examining and unpacking t hem, and looking at things like the impact of families of origin, religion, and society, the course aims to leave women with a much deeper understanding of themselves and their own desires. Davidman also says she goes in with no agenda and is often surprised where people wind up after the four months are over.The coaching is so focused on inward desire, not external factors, that Davidman also instructs women not totalk to their partners, if they have them, about their motherhood clarity journey. She also does not take into considerationfactors such as money and health. I balked at this when I read it on her website arent those some pretty important things to consider? But Davidmans explanation makes sense. The course isnt as much about what youwill do as what you want to do. The coaching isnt about weighing pros and cons (fulfillment vs freedom to travel) as much as it is looking inward at yourself.While I have felt perhaps a bit smug about my razor-sharp clarity around motherhood , all the reasons Davidman gives me for being unclear make sense families of origin that caused trauma, families of origin who expect babies, a society that assumes you will breed, a sense of doom about the future generally, a partner who challenges your decision. Davidman ticks off these examples and more with a kind of effortless ease they feel at once specific and generalized. While Davidman does not, of course, discuss specific clients, the quickness with which she responds to the hypotheticals I throw at her lets me know shes seen it all.But it wasnt until I asked one hypothetical that I think I really got it.Do people go through the course, realize they want children, and then decide they wont have them?Yes, Davidman tells me. Maybe they realize, in their 50s, they actually did want to be moms at this point, but its too late for them. (Davidman also tells me that she has no agenda here and doesnt think there is anything wrong with deciding to be a mom in your 50s). Maybe they realize they do want children, but not with the partner they have. Clients have ended relationships with the clarity they have gained over the course of the program. Maybe they will decide that theywould want kids, but if their partner doesnt, they would still choose to stay with their partner and remain childless. Or maybe they will realize they do want kids with a partner, but not with their current partner and they may break up with their partner even though there are no guarantees of meeting someone new.No matter what choice anyone makes, there is loss, Davidman tells me. Theres always something to face.Too often, the question of whether someone decides to become a mother is discussed as if it zurechtges purely on their desire not whether it actually makes sense for them. Maybe this is because the default for married women is the assumption that they will have children. Maybe it is because, despite how much the U.S.still lags behind the rest of the developed world in maternal health, we can still, generally speaking, expect healthy pregnancies and babies and children at rates that would have astounded our ancestors just a century or so ago. Maybe its life in late capitalism, and we are all docile consumers who believe we can find a way to access whatever it is we want.At the same time, outside the motherhood-clarity-coaching realm, women do typically benefit from weighing practical concerns suchchildcare costs and housing when deciding whether to have kids. But, so often, rather than helping reach a more concrete decision, these factors simply muddy the waters. Those considerations are important, but at the end of the day, a decision like this cant hinge on external factors. After all, there are plenty of wealthy, healthy people who opt not to have children there are also people whom much of society thinks shouldnt have kids (disabled folks, for example, or queer parents, according to conservatives), who are actually wonderful parents.The reverse exists , too People who tick all the boxes and look parent-perfect on paper, but who ultimately find themselves dissatisfied with parenthood or unfit for that role. And, of course, there are so many other kinds of parents and non-parents in between.For so long, my desire to have children has made it feel like an eventuality. And I do believe that my conviction would lead me to pursue having children in ways that more ambivalent women may not. Before I met my boyfriend, I thought that the gelegenheit of my having a long-term partner was lower than my chances of having a child finding a person to marry is a crapshoot, but I knew that if I were to find myself single in my mid- to late 30s, I would seek motherhood on my own.Even knowing that, though, life is still uncertain. No one is promised a child. Even though Davidmans course is not for women like me, it did help me imagine a future in which I could know I had always wanted to become a mom, but didnt become a mom, and ended up totally fin e.Knowing I want to be a mom, that just means being aware of my desire which is strong, but ultimately not the same as a decision. It is simply a kind of clarity that every woman, whatever choices she winds up making around child-rearing, deserves to have. Marshall Bright--This story originally appearedon SheKnows.