DON’T COVER YOUR CUP

Think & Grow Rich was the first book that changed my life. Kendrick mentioned it, and it caught my attention because man, I was broke, and one thing I knew for certain. Absolutely NO ONE was coming to change that for me. Everything around me was broke. Struggling was the norm and work was life. I got my first job at 13 and never thought that was odd until I got older and heard people talk about their childhoods, what they did for fun. Fun was a limited thing where I’m from. That’s no knock on the people who raised me. I was raised by an entire community, and that community survived circumstances crazier than most people can imagine.

The residue of Alabama is thick. If you aren’t careful it traps you in ways you don’t even realize. It runs on fear, and it even speaks. You grew up hearing it. “A storm is coming.” That teaches fear. “Don’t get the big head.” That teaches you to shrink. “Who he think he is.” That teaches envy. A system of lack, and what lack does to your brain, your mind, and your nervous system is something you can’t understand until you live it, and even then you won’t understand until you acknowledge it. Scarcity has one message: nothing is freely yours. Everything must be earned. You get things by proving you deserve them. It says that about money first, then it says the same thing about love, about rest, about you. It even teaches you to hate being helped. I could never ask. It’s almost as if I’d feel a physical pain if I had to ask someone for help, because you learn early that sooner or later, they’re coming to collect. So with that in mind, I’ve always aimed to do it myself. These independent things come together and, without you even realizing it, they teach you to cover your cup before you even know you’re holding one.

Acknowledging all of this takes a shock. Some event, usually a tough one, and after it, a choice. We all get these moments in life. Sometimes we don’t recognize them until after. Sometimes we never acknowledge them at all. But these are what crack the shell and let you out. It’s a very interesting thing. If you listen to interviews of successful people or read into any of their lives, almost everyone has these examples. What makes the difference is how they reacted to it compared to the standard reaction, the “norm.”

Coming up where everything is limited obscures your view of the world, but it’s not for nothing. The mutation is key to your survival. When people will do anything to get ahead, you learn to be wary, because you could be an example of the anything that they’d do. You notice everything, thanks to your world class threat detection skills. You see things shaping up while other people miss them, even when it’s right in front of them. You can see individual pieces coming together into something complete and beautiful, because one of the first things you ever saw was people who could make something out of nothing. But the mutation carries a cost. It never learned rest, because the conditions that made it never allowed any.

The way I came up wasn’t random. It was a recipe, and everybody I knew cooked from it, because it works for the environment. Work hard, keep your head down, don’t get the big head, and once you find something stable, you never let that go. When you see someone off, you tell them “be safe,” not “have fun,” and it’s such a slight difference, but once you notice it you can’t unsee it, because it’s conditioning, and conditioning is a result of the environment. Those are all changeable things.

Think about the fact that you’re sometimes nervous if things get too good. You’ll even start to brace, because “a storm is most definitely coming.” That recipe was right once. Where I’m from, a Black man doing too well could get killed for it, and that’s not a figure of speech (Elmore Bolling). So the people who taught me weren’t paranoid or over the top. They were teaching me how to make it by the rules of that world. But that kind of danger teaches you something else underneath the lesson, that there’s one way through and you’d better not miss it. I think that’s true but I also know that environment has its own specific rule book. What you really can’t miss is that every environment has its own specific rule book. If you want change, it comes with change.

Back to the book. The name made me think it was simple. Think about these things and manifest. What I found went much deeper than anything I could have imagined, and it fundamentally challenged my views of life as a man while helping me become a better one. There was no one stop pass. The lesson was to think, and then you can grow rich, and that’s been the process over the last decade. The process is terrible while you’re in it. It tests you, changes on you, hits you from every angle. For a long time I thought the difficulty was rent I’d be paying forever. It was the entry fee.

I can name my fees. I was well on my way to an egregious amount of money in my mid 20s, a few times over, and luckily life spared me with circumstances I didn’t really like or understand but needed. Losing crypto in 2019. An injury so severe I was told I wouldn’t play basketball again (I’ve played twice in the last week). Legal threats from the NBA over the popularity of my unlicensed products. The possibility of life forever altered by a federal investigation. Filing bankruptcy at 26 as a long term gamble for a better future.

Most of those were self-induced, others not so much, but as chaotic as it looks from the outside, it’s never as random as it seems. For example, let’s talk bankruptcy. I realized a long time ago that when you’re given a bad hand, you have to play it to the best of your ability. I studied a few people who used bankruptcy for the tool that it was and realized I could do the same. The big drawback is you give up your money and possessions, but lucky for me, being from poverty played to my advantage. No nest egg, no big accounts, so what can you actually take? Nothing. What I got in return was a freeze on my student loan payments for five years, and what I did instead was put that money into my 401k, get the employer match, and save while I worked on myself. Plan, scheme, and eventually burst out of the cocoon. Did it go as smoothly as planned? Absolutely not. Did I miscalculate a few things? For sure. Was there a period where I felt pretty miserable and had to consistently remind myself that the payoff would eventually come? You bet. But ironically enough, that plan at 25 is the only reason I had twenty thousand liquid for the greatest lawyer in Alabama when I faced another challenge that I was told was basically impossible to come out of favorably. Crazy how that all lined up, right? Time’s an interesting thing.

But here’s an even more brutally honest part. Even with all that, I still stayed asleep. An impressive sleep, honestly. More of a hibernation, or slumber. I caught myself once, three weeks in a row, running the exact same loop. Gym, Fresh Market, food, home. Same order, same days. I think about this period of time often, and I think that after all of this, I was just so happy to not have my life completely nuked that I became the opposite of who I really am for roughly 12 to 15 months. I took zero risks. I didn’t create. I genuinely just existed. Fear came back, and it truly had me for a while. One day the question broke through: “what am I doing?”

A shock only offers the choice. It can’t make it for you. What finally landed was this: it’s easy to act fearless or call yourself fearless, but how do you react when you’ve truly had to sit with it and potentially lose it all? It’s so easy to talk in theory and hypotheticals, but when it actually happens, which person will you be? Those interviews and stories I mentioned earlier, how will yours be written? That thought became louder and louder until I knew that I had to snap out of it. In this life, you rarely get something for nothing. Life is balanced and the scale keeps score. Make the effort and the result is assured. Cheat the process and the shaky foundation eventually crumbles. Losing those fast roads felt like bad luck at the time, but the scale was sparing me. Money is just an accelerant. It amplifies what’s there, and if you’re already sleepwalking and moving carelessly, it speeds up the inevitable. Everyone I’ve ever studied went through the fire. The difference was how they reacted to it. The slow road gave me time to learn my reaction, learn the why, and completely revamp the how when it comes to what I do.

I’ve always been creative, and I never realized how much the people around me forced me to use that muscle. My family had me making church programs. My classmates had me doing our class jackets. My frat brother had me making chapter merch. Same muscle every time, getting reps, growing. And still the conditioning held. Then two of my frat brothers offered to help, and I let them. That’s the whole turn. With their support, instead of listening to the voice, we took an idea making roughly twenty thousand a year and built it into something making over twenty-five thousand a month, with customers all over the world. I could never have done that alone, and it matters to understand the limits of self. Nothing outside of me changed on the way to those two numbers. It was always me blocking me. That support was literally always there.

Now the part I really came to say, because elements of this story are probably yours too, and it’s important to take this away. There’s a cup in your hands. Life is pouring into it at all times. Opportunity, love, help, ideas, it’s flowing whether you believe it or not. And there’s a voice in your head that’s not actually you. It learned its lines from the same place you did. It causes anxiety, doubt, fear, and it does it under the guise of safety. “Trust me, I’m here to help.” “This will hurt you.” “What if you lose?” “What if you fail?” That voice is your hand, and the hand becomes a lid.

But what if you DON’T? If you’re already down, if you come from a place with no opportunity and life has handed you very little, what do you actually have to lose by trying? The cup was always pouring. My own hand was the lid. Don’t cover your cup.

I understand this isn’t easy. A scarcity mindset comes from your environment. You don’t choose it. It’s inherited. You carry what the ones before you were handed. But remember this. You’re here. That means the ones before you did their part, through everything they faced. Depending on where you’re from and who you are, that has real weight. That’s major, and it’s not coincidence. Life has plenty of randomness in it and I won’t discount that. But these words finding you at this moment? That’s synchronicity. They did their part.

You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, and a long line of people survived to make sure that happened. Regardless of the circumstances, the odds, the history, the failures: if you’re reading these words, it means you’re still here. You’re reading this, which means the body is resonating, even if the mind hasn’t caught up enough to process it yet. At the very minimum, drops are coming through. Your cup isn’t completely empty yet. Truly think on that, and once you do, you’ll realize how special it is for you to be here right NOW.

The next part is up to you.

Will you receive or retreat?