Ebony S. Muhammad (EM): After reading your book, “Everything I’m Not Made Me Everything I Am”, if I had to summarize it in just a few words it would be “The Art of True Success” or “The True Meaning of Success”. You state that money or having a 4.0 in college doesn’t necessarily mean you are successful or happy in life. You’ve seen both who are lost, unfilled and dissatisfied because they have yet to reach fulfillment in other areas in their life.
What would you say to the young people, in particular, who are in middle school, high school, and college who may have come from a single parent household with very few positive influences, who may be raised around a lot of violence and due to the inadequate educational system may not be at the top of their class? How would you introduce the concept of being a success that excludes entertainment and pro-ball?
Jeff Johnson (JJ): I think young people have to see it. I think the challenge is that some of the young people aren’t being presented with models of what success is, whether it’s success in marriage, success in spiritual life or whether it’s success in being a parent. I think that a lot of our young people are stuck in these bubbles of dysfunction, and because of these bubbles of dysfunction sometimes they see models of success, but they don’t know what it is they’re looking at because the Television didn’t tell them so.
Number one, we’ve got to do a better job in exposing our young people to models of success. Number two, I think we need to talk more about what that actually means. In an environment where you’re facing an extreme economic deficit, how do you convince somebody that making money isn’t success? If I’m a kid who’s struggling to have basic needs and I’m stressed out all of the time because of what we don’t have, it’s difficult to tell that kid that getting money won’t change that, because for them in many cases that’s the X-factor between what can potentially make life better. Yet a better life isn’t necessarily a successful life. So I think those are a couple of things we have to do.
EM: Yes sir, thank you.
In that same light, what would you tell the brothers and sisters who are being released or are newly released from prison since there are very few facilities that offer true rehabilitation to prevent re-incarceration as they assimilate back into society? Opportunities for employment are very, very scarce and the odds seem to be against them because they served time. What words would you offer them?
JJ: I think first we’ve got to remind brothers and sisters who are coming out that they are not their time served. Despite that you may have made some bad decisions, you’ve made some mistakes and you may have gotten caught up in the wrong stuff, you as an individual are not defined by your time served. If we can first start by helping people see beyond that then it begins to serve as the emotional and psychological foundation to say that I can do more than I ever did before. If we can’t get brothers and sisters coming out of jail to see beyond the crime they committed and the time they served, then why do we ask them to do anything different then what they did before they went in? I think that’s number one.
Number two, I would say just never stop, because it’s not easy. It’s not like we’re living in a society that’s bending over backwards, let alone that’s bending over forward, to provide opportunities to those who have served time. In fact it seems as though we live in a society that says you have to serve two sentences, one in prison and one afterwards. You’ve really got to remain diligent. Thick skin is an understatement, because it’s not going to come easily. Trying to convince someone that it is, will be setting them up for failure.
Number three, I think more than what we say to them is what we say to ourselves. We’ve got to be willing to give people an opportunity. That may be the small entrepreneur saying, “I won’t close myself off to hiring somebody who may have committed a felony”. It doesn’t mean that you just hire anybody, but it does mean that there are some good men and women out there that have paid their debt to society and they may potentially be the type of person you need working for you if only you gave them an opportunity. So I think there needs to be a message to those brothers and sisters coming out but there has to be a larger message to a community that’s embracing them when they come out.
Do you want the hundreds of thousands of people who are coming out of prison to come back to a community that says “you’re not welcome”, or do we want a community that says “you’re welcome with conditions”? Those conditions are you recognize your own worth. Those conditions are that we will support you as long as you’re willing to support your destiny and the call on your life. The message is that we are willing to do what we can even if it’s not all you need. Help from one person can be all the fuel you need to be able to get over the hump. I think it’s got to be a double-edged conversation otherwise it doesn’t work.
EM: Excellent!
Throughout your book you give a message regarding personal success. As you’ve stated it begins with that person first, but you also emphasize quite a bit on bringing the right people together to push you in that direction.
The current (July) edition of Hurt2Healing Magazine talks about how to let go of toxic relationships, so here I would like for you to give the characteristics that are important to consider when looking for that team of people that will contribute towards your growth. How should a person go about choosing someone for their team?
JJ: I really think it’s like choosing a sports team. What the Lakers need to win a championship may not be what the Celtics need to win a championship. I think we have to realize what is it going to take for me to win? Winning is this comprehensive fulfillment of all of these areas of my life. As I’m looking to build a team, what my team looked like in 2007 isn’t what my team looked like in 2006. Where I was weak was not the same.
The things I needed to accomplish were not the same. Number one; what people need to do is determine what it will take in order to win. Number two; determine what do you already have and what are you lacking? Number three; what are the areas of your greatest strengths and where are you weak? Number four; begin to do some scouting to identify who would be the best person(s) to fill those areas the best.
For some of us it may be that you need somebody on your team that is hardcore, a ridiculous gangster who will never listen to any excuse because most of the people you have around you are “yes” people. Some of us may have no “yes” people around us and we’re getting so beat up by people trying to help us, because they never give an encouraging word that we need a “cheerleader”. While somebody else may have people around them that are so gung-ho and they jump into every situation without thinking, they need a “strategist” around them to say, “Hey, here are five steps you should consider and here are the counter moves for each of those steps”. Someone else may need a person with straight up “wisdom”.
Therefore, people need to figure out what it will take for them to win. What don’t I have, what do I already have? Where are my weaknesses, where are my strengths? Then do the scouting to be able to figure out how to fill those spaces.
Also recognize that teammates don’t necessarily mean “friends”. There are some people who are my greatest friends who aren’t necessarily on my team, and I’ve got to be able to know the difference. It’s the same thing with family. There are many cases when nobody in our family can be on our team, because we’re going places where our family has never gone and doing things nobody in our family are prepared to do, because it’s not their call. It doesn’t mean that it makes them inherently bad or less than us. It just means that we are going places that they’ve never been, and that is never a bad thing-it’s always a blessing. At the end of the day, when I get there my family is blessed as a result of where I’ve been able to go that they couldn’t help me go.
EM: Beautifully stated!
Okay, so now that we’ve made that decision to pursue our personal and professional best and we’ve pulled together that team of people, now it’s time to put it all in motion. However, there’s always that knot, that lump in our throat that comes up when it’s time to perform. That thing called fear. I think that a lot of people have a fear of success more so than a fear of failure. If you could, tell me about a situation that stands out the most to you where you were challenged by a fear and you pushed through. What was the situation, the thoughts and feelings you experienced and how did it feel once you were on the other side of it?
JJ: Fear, fear, fear… If I’m going to be totally honest here I would probably have to say that the area that I’ve harbored the most fear in is personal relationships. I’m not afraid of anything in most cases with business. I don’t make a fool of myself and I don’t like making mistakes, but I don’t think I’m afraid of those things. At the end of the day, it’s not personal. Its business and I understand that it is what it is and that it doesn’t totally define the sum total of who I am, my character and what my legacy will be. I think the area of greatest fear for me has been vulnerability in personal relationships, because those personal relationships are the people you allow closest to you, who you share your inner-most secrets with and who, in many cases, can hurt you the most.
I’m recently engaged, and I know that in my personal relationship that it took time for me to get to a place where as a man I was capable of not getting angry over things that were connected to my own insecurities. I had to go through a process of saying, “Wait a minute; I know that this person is in my life to support me, not to hurt me. I know that this person is in my life because they believe in me and want to see the best in me. If that’s the case, why am I allowing small insecurities…”
There’s only two emotions. There’s love and there’s fear. We either operate out of love or we operate out of fear. If I say that I love somebody in my life, then operating in fear wars against the love that I say I have for them. If I’m not able to control that, these that be my insecurities, being pissed off about something instead of saying, “Hey, that hurt my feelings. Let’s figure out how we can do this different”.
However, for most men, we just don’t roll like that. Its like, “I’m not going to let you know that I’m insecure about some things. I’m not going to let you know that something hurt me. I’m not going to let you know that, because at the end of the day it makes me feel like less than a man”.
The reality is that in most of our relationships, if we don’t have the ability to be vulnerable, the relationship never becomes what it’s supposed to become. So in my own personal relationships I’ve been able to get to a place of vulnerability, and as a result of being in that place my relationship has been better.
EM: Yes sir, thank you.
There’s another self-imposed barrier aside from fear that I think tends to hinder us from being successful and that’s allowing our mistakes in life to hold us back. Believing that we don’t deserve such success because of the mistakes we’ve made. Some people, because of all of the wrong that they’ve done they believe that they deserve to live a mediocre life…
JJ: Yeah, which is non-sense.
EM: Yes sir, absolutely.
JJ: At the end of the day, unless you believe that you decided to wake up, that’s not for you to say. It’s not for me to say, “I don’t deserve great things”. It’s for me to expect that I do, because some other power felt it necessary for me to get up. If a greater power said, in the midst of all this shit that I’m in that I’m supposed to be able to get up, I should be able to expect greatness from myself. What else would allow me to even survive all the dumb stuff that I’ve done if something great wasn’t meant for me? If I’ve survived all that stuff I don’t want mediocre! If I’ve been through great trials then I should anticipate great victories.
You see, the people who should worry more are people who haven’t been through anything! If you haven’t been through anything; if you have never made a mistake then you’ve never done anything worthy of being great!
EM: I would like for you to also address a very sensitive dynamic regarding those who have been gangbangers, hustlers, prostitutes, pimps, dead-beat mothers and fathers, drug addicts, those who have attempted suicide and those who may have taken lives. With what you just said, I believe they could take on a more healthy perspective about themselves. They are those who say that they don’t believe they deserve better or the best out of life because of what they’ve done to others and themselves. Would you address those individuals the same way?
JJ: No. I think that there’s probably no truer saying than we reap what we’ve sown. Yet, what I don’t think people who have made mistakes and who have been in crazy situations realize is this; what you have done is you have in many cases, and I want to be very clear here that I am speaking to people who have made conscious decisions to be where they are. I’m not talking about people who have been abused; I’m not talking about people who have had things done to them by somebody else. I’m talking about people who have made conscious decisions to be where they are.
Those who chose to bang, who chose to shoot those people, who chose to pimp those women, who chose to leave their child, who chose to do these things. Those are the people I’m talking about. I want to be very clear and not to confuse this part. At the end of the day, we have gone so hard doing raggedy stuff that we have reaped great tragedy.
So when people say they don’t deserve greatness, you’ve got greatness but you’ve got great tragedy. You’ve got great tragedy, because you sowed great seeds of negativity. The funny thing about it is the people who think they don’t deserve better forget that they have greatness; you just have great tragedy.
Now what happens if you start sowing, equally, the seeds of positivity into your own life with the same gangster force you did the negative stuff with? Great tragedy will turn into great triumph. Yet, you already have greatness. You have it already! The question is what are you sowing? What are you sowing into, what are you investing in?
There are very few instances where people have a life that they didn’t invest in. If you didn’t invest in school you didn’t graduate. You invested in not going to school, therefore, the opposite of the diploma was flunking out. You invested in it. If you’re marriage is bad, normally if you’re marriage is bad, you didn’t invest in it or it wasn’t invested in.
Normally when you’re children don’t want to be around you, don’t want to know you, don’t want to see you it’s because you never invested in the relationship with your child. What do you invest in? If we look at what we invest in, more than likely that’s what we have the most of.
So the question is how do we get people to start flipping the script and begin investing in their greater future instead of investing in the things that bring them the greatest tragedy.
EM: Beautifully said brother!
Above all in wrapping up everything we’ve discussed, I would like to end with spirituality. You touched on it a little bit just a few moments ago. I don’t want to confuse spirituality with religion, because there is a difference. There’s nothing wrong with religion, but what I mean is a person’s connection and ability to tune into themselves, everything around them and a higher Power, by whatever name you choose to call Him.
How much of a role has spirituality played in your very own success in striving to be your personal best in all that you’ve done in life?
JJ: Everything! The things that I have done well have only happened because I’ve been in tune with the Universe. I want to be very clear. I am in tune with the Power that I believe to be the Creator. In my life, that is what I believe to have created me and the entire Universe. Thus, I have to be in tune with the Universe and that which created it. I don’t mean that from a Christian perspective. I mean that from my relationship with God. It is that relationship which has clearly defined when in those times of my greatest success are the points in my life where I have been the most in tune. The points in my life where I have made the greatest mistakes are the points in my life where I have been the most disconnected. It’s that simple.
If I wake up in the morning and I’m clear about asking the right questions and giving the right responses; because my spirituality, my relationship with God, and my relationship with the Universe, for that matter, is not a one-sided thing. Therefore, I can’t wake up in the morning, if I’m a praying person, and pray to receive all this stuff and then just sit there and wait anymore than I can believe I was given life not to serve. There is nothing in the Universe anywhere, there’s no organism anywhere, and even for your readers’ sake, there’s not organism on Earth that doesn’t give and take except humans. We are the only living organism on Earth that, through a dysfunctional thought process disconnected from spiritual intuitiveness, believe we can consume without giving, which is why we don’t produce. You can’t just take and produce. It just doesn’t work that way.
I think that I’ve recognized, very clearly, that every single solitary gift and ability that I have; every promotion that I’ve received, every blessing that I’ve received, every opportunity that I’ve had, it’s not solely for me to be able to pay the bills, to be able to take care of family but it’s been for me to be able to bless somebody else. I am so cognizant of that that sometimes the blessing has come to me as a surprise. I’ve been so in tune in the service point of it that the blessing that comes goes above and beyond what I would have ever anticipated.
Therefore, the goal for me on a daily basis is to remain spiritually in tune. That means for me to operate in a couple of places. Operating in a place of prayer, operating in a place of meditation, operating in a place of praise and operating in a place of worship. For me those four things are very, very different, and there’s a fifth that I’ll talk about afterwards.
Prayer is how do I begin to speak to the Creator of the Universe? Meditation is how/what do I hear the Universe through the Creator is saying to me? It doesn’t make any sense to me that some people believe that they can’t hear from the Creator. Are you insane? Why would you believe that there would be an entity that would be willing to hear what you have to say, but so selfless that that Being would not want you to hear what He’s saying?
For me meditation is more important than prayer, because on most days I’m not confused that God knows what I need. I don’t have to say it. God, in many cases, wants me to have the gumption to speak into existence that which I need. Yet, God already knows what I need. God is saying, “Do you know”? (laughing) Do you have the gumption to speak it, because if you’re willing to speak it then you actually believe it already exists. I’m not talking about cars and money and all that kind of crazy stuff. I’m talking about the things that I need to be able to do what He put me on this Earth to do.
Yet, meditation is the key, because through meditation comes the inspiration and the direction to be able to act. That’s the one part I left out. It’s prayer, meditation, it’s the action, and then it’s the praise and the worship. Prayer is me lifting up that which I need to be able to do what God put me here to do.
The meditation gives me the direction to actually do it. The action is me walking in it. The praise is me saying, “Yay! Thank you for giving me the ability to do this and winning as a result of walking in the call”! The worship is the appreciation.
A lot of times, especially within a Christian context, people always want to shout, jump around and all this stuff, and they leave out the meditation and the worship. It’s just prayer and praise. The reason why, within a Christian context, so often we’re spiritually and physically unproductive is because in praise all you’re doing is talking. All you’re doing is talking and telling. You’re never receiving and appreciating.
I hope I answered your question, that was way longer…(laughing)
EM: Oh yes sir you did, completely and thoroughly! Thank you!
Is there anything else you would like to add?
JJ: No, that was great!
EM: Oh, one more thing. Are there any future events and/or appearances that you would like for the readers to be aware of?
JJ: Yes, we’re doing an education special live from Detroit on August14th that airs live on MSNBC called “Making the Grade”. It’ll air Sunday, August 14th, I believe at noon. That would be the one thing I would ask everyone to support, as well as every Tuesday on the Tom Joyner Morning Show (102.1 FM –Houston/Galveston or http://www.tjms.com/stream/).
EM: Thank you very much for your time and everything you’ve shared!
JJ: My pleasure.
Jeff Johnson is a Washington, DC based award-winning journalist, social activist and political commentator. Currently, Jeff is a commentator on the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner Morning Show tackling issues on politics, entertainment and social policy issues, sharing the microphone with Harvard Law lecturer, Stephanie Robinson. Recently, he won a 2008 NABJ Salute to Excellence Award for BET’s “Life & Death in Darfur, Jeff Johnson Reports” series. A source of information quoted in Newsweek, Upscale, LA Times, National Journal and Boston Globe. He regularly contributes commentary and analysis about issues related to race, politics, popular culture and socio-economics for news broadcasts and publications such as MSNBC’s Dayside and Hardball with Chris Matthews, CNN Headline News, CNN International, Larry King Live, Fox News Channel, Huffington Post, CNN.com, The Root.com, EbonyJet.com, Upscale, J’Adore, N’Digo, Monarch magazine and more.
To learn more about Jeff Johnson, visit him online at www.jeffsnation.com
