Lessons from Nipsey: You need to face adversity to create breakthroughs

If you want anything life, you have to hustle for it. Straight up! Now before you get super-glued to the grind, first you must identify your “why.”

Why are you willing to dedicate your blood, sweat, and tears to whatever you are about to pursue? Is it beneficial to your future? Is it going to help you grow as a person? Is it going to feed you and your family?

However, you might feel like you don’t need a reason. Growing up, you might have felt like an outcast, the love was absent, the peers you grew up with never understood your energy, resulting in 100 reasons to not have a reason to your ways.

Your mission might be to flex on everyone who doubted you. The hate you received by those around you is what is motivating you; motivating you to pull up in a foreign whip, to have diamonds and gold dripping from your neck and wrists, and to have strangers seeking your validation.

Whether you have a reason to dedicate yourself to the grind or not, your hustle dictates your future — making you the master of your fate.

That is the beauty of Nipsey Hussle’s “Young N***a” track. Nip documents his come up as an underprivileged inner-city youth who wasn’t accepted by society, to becoming a mogul. Hussle jumped off the porch at 14-years-old. After dipping from his mother’s crib and into his grandmother’s house, he joined the Rollin’ 60s Crips.

Even though Neighborhood Nip was putting in work in the streets, his passion for music never died.

Nevertheless, the decision to divert from the street-life and go the legal route has its challenges. Especially when the initial money that you had to start your own business is damn near destroyed.

During an interview with NPR Music, Nip said,

“My brother had buried a quarter of a million dollars in my momma’s backyard on 60th Street that he had just got off the street. He left it there for a year and when he went to go dig it up a little bit more than half of it had molded. He had the fire-proof, earth-proof safe, wrapped it in plastic, dropped it in the safe and then buried it. But when he dug it up, half of that money was molded. I remember him just losing his s***, and I’m like, “Oh man, this is devastating.”

When you’ve been moving uncomfortably your entire life, losing a couple of hundred thousand isn’t the end of the world.

It might be a setback, but it definitely isn’t the end. It makes the taste of success sweeter. A loss of that magnitude will reveal how resilient you are as a person. The decision not to give up will create huge breakthroughs, allowing you to shine in all your glory.

Adversity is something we face and can learn from daily. As we continue to defeat adversity, we reveal to ourselves how great we are. Once that’s realized, it’s imperative to show your greatness to the world through your work.

Don’t let anyone stop your shine. If you have a dream and you’re passionate about it, pursue it all the way through. That should make you want to go and get it.