The Wealth of My Mother's Wisdom: The Lessons That Made My Life Rich

by Terrence J

  I was no exception to the rule. My freshman year of high school marked the beginning of my—mercifully brief—rebellious phase. We had only recently moved to the area, so I still didn’t have many friends. I wanted to look cool, to fit in, but when I hit high school I couldn’t figure out the best way to do that. I wore the fake gold chains and the baggy clothes, and tried my best to be cool. I spent hours coming up with rhymes; I drank and I smoked; I tried marijuana. I pretended I was tougher than I was in order to hang out with the wrong crowd. I thought I was a real cool kid.

  My mother, not surprisingly, was not amused. She wasn’t amused when I broke my curfew; she wasn’t amused when I wore my jeans hanging halfway to my knees, and she certainly wasn’t amused when I told her my new ambition in life. “I’m going to be a rapper,” I announced to her.

  For the first time in her life, my mother wasn’t particularly encouraging. She hated the profanity of rapping. Worse, I rapped about the things that I’d witnessed growing up in New York City. That was not the life she wanted for me (the life she’d moved to North Carolina in order to escape), and she didn’t like hearing me glorify it. “This isn’t the move for you,” was her reply. “You really want to do this? We’ll support you. But this isn’t it for you.”

  I was still convinced that it was. And I just knew that my big break was going to be at the Sanderson High talent show. Apparently, there was a “talent scout” coming down from New York for the event in order to look for the next great rap star, or at least that’s what the flyers said. I spent weeks working on my rhymes and getting ready for the show. I thought I had nailed it: I had visions of being whisked off to a recording studio straight from the high school auditorium.

  But when I actually stepped onto the stage that day, I was completely unprepared for how hard it would be to perform. The music was louder than I expected. The lights and the crowd and the sound of my tape blaring over the speakers disoriented me. You can probably guess what happened: I bombed. I was so bad that my classmates actually booed me off the stage.

  Despite her quiet objections to my hip-hop aspirations, my mom was in the audience that day, along with Jaime. And even as everyone else around her was jeering, she was applauding as loudly as she could. It was one thing I could always count on: No matter what I chose to pursue, she was guaranteed to be cheering me on, always my number one fan, even if it was embarrassing for both of us.

  After all, this wasn’t the first time she’d sat in an audience and watched me perform. From the moment that I was capable of expressing my own interests, my mom was encouraging me to pursue them. She gave me the space and time to explore whatever caught my attention, always urging me to be creative. She was constantly telling me that I was special, gifted, chosen, that I could do anything I wanted to do. She’d always simply say, “Go get ’em.”

  And so, with her encouragement ringing in my ears, I would go for it, whatever struck my interest at the time. When I was six years old, it was acting. I played P. T. Barnum in a stage rendition of The Greatest Show on Earth in a school production. My mother’s first words when she came backstage? “You’re a star.”

  At seven years old, it was singing. I somehow found myself belting out the national anthem when David Dinkins became the mayor of New York City. (The fact that I knew all the words to the national anthem by heart? That was also my mom’s doing.) “You’re amazing,” she told me.

  After we moved to North Carolina, it was sports. The whole family would get up at the break of dawn so that I could go play Mighty Mite football with the Green Road Eagles. I was skinny and small, and would get hit so hard that I’d almost black out. But still, my mom would be applauding from the sidelines.

  And then it was basketball.

  And then it was rapping.

  Along the way, my parents always supported my ambitions, no matter how often they changed or how unlikely they were. They never missed a performance, a game, a tournament. They were completely behind me—even if they didn’t particularly care for what I was doing.

  The Sanderson High Talent Show was the first and last time I would ever publicly perform as a rapper. Not long afterward, my mother sat me down to have a heart-to-heart about my ambitions. Her advice was circumspect, but cut straight to the point: “Whatever you want to do when you grow up, just make sure you’re the best at it,” she told me.

  In the years since, I’ve thought a lot about those words. The truth is, you’ll probably have a lot of different ambitions over the course of your life. It’s up to you to take an honest look in the mirror and assess your strengths and weaknesses. If you’re not really outstanding at basketball, at some point you’ve got to say to yourself, “It might be time to give up my dream of being in the NBA.” But just because you haven’t been given the ability to play basketball doesn’t mean you can’t be a coach, be an assistant, or get a team ring. There are so many people, beyond just players, involved in any championship. As I’d later learn working at NASCAR, only one person can drive the race car, but the people on the pit crew, the marketing director, the medical assistant—everyone on that team—gets to hold the trophy. Just because you may not have the talent to be the artist to pay the bills doesn’t mean you can’t live in the world of what you love. So you love basketball? Maybe it’s time to shift your goals to being a sports announcer or the person who designs the jerseys, even a team owner. Use your passion within the skill set that you actually possess.

  Not long after that disastrous talent show, I gave myself a good hard look in the mirror and admitted that I wasn’t very good at rapping. I wasn’t ever going to be the guy making the music. But I also realized that I still loved music, and wanted to be part of that world. How could I be involved in the industry without being an actual artist? Where did my talents truly lie?

  Fourteen may be an early age to be thinking about your career trajectory, but my parents had set the bar high. From the time I was little, my mother had instilled in me the importance of a strong work ethic, and the importance of ambition.

  Just because my mom only finished two years of Hunter College didn’t mean she didn’t have drive and professional aspirations. When we arrived in North Carolina, despite a lack of job prospects, my mom immediately found temp work at the pharmaceutical company Glaxo, and within three months she’d talked them into hiring her full time. For the next twelve years, she worked there as an administrator.

  Soon after they arrived in North Carolina, my parents also identified an opportunity in the local contracting industry: There was only one concrete-cutting company in the region, and it would only take big jobs. So Jaime started up a company that he called Coremaster, specializing in concrete cutting, hole drilling, and controlled demolition, and began methodically pursuing the smaller jobs that were still available. He worked days at Coremaster, building up his fledgling business, and then did temp work at night to help pay the bills.

  I watched my parents hustle all throughout my junior and high school years. They often worked two or three jobs at a time—besides her job at Glaxo, my mother also did invoicing work for Coremaster on the weekends. My mother traveled an hour and a half each way to her day job, and never complained. They were driven: to build their own business, to make enough money to provide me with everything I needed, to find the money to build that house my mom had always dreamed of.

  By 2003, my mom felt that she’d hit a plateau at Glaxo—she wasn’t learning anything new, and nothing frustrates my mom more than feeling like she isn’t growing. So when the company went through a corporate merger and offered buyout packages to longtime employees, she saw an opportunity. She would go work alongside my dad, to help grow Coremaster. She accepted a package and began a new career as one of the few female minority contractors in North Carolina, and the only one doing concrete cutting.

  Going to work for yourself is incredibly risky. It’s one of the most challenging things you can do. When you work for yourself there’s no set paycheck. In thirty days if you don’t
have a job lined up and money coming in, the lights go out, the phone gets shut off, the bills go unpaid. It’s a lot of pressure, and certainly one of the scariest things you can do in life. But you already know how my mom feels about fear: She was absolutely fearless. As she puts it, “Self-employment shows you what you’re made of.”

  Her drive has always inspired me. “I am very ambitious,” she has told me. “You give me an opportunity and I’m going to take it and run with it.” No matter where she was working, she was always seeking to grow her career. At Glaxo, she was constantly taking every class that the company regularly offered; sitting in on skill-learning seminars even when there was no room left in the class. And once she made the move to Coremaster, she decided to go back to school to learn more about contracting. She attended a six-month contractor’s construction course—a kind of mini-degree offered by the University of North Carolina. It was a grueling course and a long drive from home, but she stuck to it. My mom learned how to read blueprints, write contracts, and bid projects. She was never afraid to roll up her sleeves and get dirty; she even went out to construction sites to get experience in the field. In the middle of a burning-hot summer, my tiny mother was mounting these giant machines to walls and cutting bricks, hauling concrete to Dumpsters—all in addition to hitting the books. When it was done she got a certificate, and we couldn’t have been more proud.

  My mom also knew how to be responsible and conservative with her money. “Invest in yourself, and invest in land,” she would tell me. “You can trust yourself more with money than in a company you know nothing about; and invest in land because it’s the only thing they aren’t making more of.” And sure enough, by the time I was a sophomore in high school, they had saved enough money to build the house in Rocky Mount, and we finally moved there from Raleigh.

  As I grew older, my mom’s drive became my drive. Her hustle became my hustle. If she was going to work multiple jobs in order to get ahead in life, so was I. To this day, I still can’t sleep—I have a real fear that if I’m sleeping, my competition is working. I know Diddy is somewhere in the world putting together a business deal, and I don’t want to get caught kicking my feet up. I work multiple jobs simultaneously: In an average day I’ll do a TV show, a voice track for a radio show, memorize lines for an upcoming film, and piece together a marketing plan for a Crown Royal event. I do all this while trying to balance a social life, hit the gym, and find time to watch an episode of Homeland before getting in a few hours of sleep and doing it all over again. And I’ve been doing this since I turned fifteen. This type of hectic schedule keeps me sane. It’s the only thing I know.

  “I’m not sleeping, either, but that’s not because I’m working three jobs,” Tiffany said.

  “Having a newborn baby is kind of like having three jobs,” I replied.

  That summer, the summer I was fifteen, we had finally landed in Rocky Mount. By that point my family had moved twice in Raleigh, following the growth of my parents’ business, going wherever their work took us. But now we were finally in the home they had hustled so hard to build. It took almost my whole life for them to build it, and now I had only three years left to live there. It was a one-level ranch-style home with four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The house wasn’t huge, but it had an enormous backyard. My mom painted the facade a soft yellow called “Casablanca” and I helped my dad lay the stone path that led to the front door.

  By the time we moved to Rocky Mount, I was already in tenth grade. When I arrived at Northern Nash High School, most of the kids already had their crews. I was never good in large groups anyway, and now I found it nearly impossible to make friends. I’d played basketball in middle school, and still held out hopes of being a basketball star, but the fact that I was skinny and short was finally catching up with me. When I tried out for the high school basketball team, I didn’t make the cut. Rejected and lonely, I felt like an outcast.

  When I first arrived in Rocky Mount, I hadn’t learned to appreciate it yet. My goal was to leave. How was I going to get out?

  The answer: work. By the summer of my sophomore year, I had three jobs lined up.

  I’d be lying if I said that my early ambition was at the scale of what it is today. I was fifteen. Mostly I wanted money to put in the old red 1989 Dodge Shadow that my mom let me drive with my new learner’s permit. I wanted to be cool with girls. I wanted to be able to visit my old friends and family in New York City, and buy hip-hop mix tapes at swap meets. And I wanted to fill the hours that other people filled with friends and sports, because I didn’t have much of either in my life.

  The first job I got was at Foot Locker. By that point, I already had a thing for sneakers—and, well, we all know how pricey sneakers can be. An employee discount seemed like an opportunity I shouldn’t pass up. So I headed down to the local mall, walked into Foot Locker, and talked the manager into giving me a job.

  Next, I walked down the mall to another store, called Kaemin’s, which carried all the cool clothes in town. Soon, I was working there, too. That summer, I often worked a double shift: I’d punch in at the clothing store at eight A.M., and then start my shift at Foot Locker at five P.M.

  My goal at the time may have just been to make money and get girls, but I was starting a habit that I still have to this day: balancing multiple jobs. Growing up, I’d heard my mom talk about why she worked multiple jobs: It wasn’t just about the money and her drive to get ahead, but about job security. “Always make sure you have more than one revenue stream,” she’d tell me. “Don’t put yourself in a position where one person’s attitude can dictate your career, success, and financial stability.” That summer I started following her example. And it worked in my favor: If one job cut my hours because they had a slow week, I had another job to fall back on.

  I didn’t always handle my new responsibilities well. That summer was the first—and last—time that I stole something. I nicked a pair of white Air Jordans that I thought were really fresh. It was a bad call: I couldn’t even wear them. I spent most of my day at the mall, and was paranoid that people there would know that I couldn’t afford Air Jordans. Instead, I hid those shoes under the bed. When I finally pulled them out, to wear to a school dance, I had a date with good ol’ karma. A fight took place at the dance that night; the police arrived and sprayed mace. We all ran out of the gym, and my first step was into a big pile of mud that was waiting outside for me. My shoes that started out white and fresh were soiled and muddy by the end of the night. I learned a valuable lesson: Nothing in life is free. Even if you don’t get caught, it will come back to haunt you. As my mom likes to put it, “Things always find a way to come full circle,” and this episode really brought that lesson home.

  In any case, the third job I got that summer—the job that would shape my career—was the most important job of all.

  Soul 92 Jams—WRSV at 92.1 on the dial—is Rocky Mount’s top R&B, hip-hop, and soul station. It was the sound track to my life back then. So when station owner Chuck Johnson and afternoon DJ Derrick “D-Train” Alston walked into Foot Locker one afternoon, I knew exactly who they were. They’d come to the mall to do a radio remote, and when they came into the store where I was working, one of the other salespeople gave me a nudge.

  “Rap for them and maybe they’ll put you on the radio,” he whispered.

  Yes, my coworkers had heard about my rap dreams, and at that point, I still harbored delusions about a hip-hop career. So I started rapping for Chuck and D-Train, right in the middle of Foot Locker.

  Chuck laughed. “Honestly? You’re not the best rapper,” he said. “But you got a great voice. Why don’t you come down to the radio station some time?”

  So I did. By the end of that month, I was spending my weekends interning for D-Train and Chuck, learning everything that happens behind the scenes at a radio station. D-Train had a gig I really admired. Working only four hours a day and DJ-ing the afternoon show, he made good money, had a nice car, and tons of respect. I thought it was the coo
lest thing in the world that people asked him to host parties. You could get paid to drink free drinks and hang out with girls? Suddenly, I had a new goal: I have to work on the radio and be the afternoon drive-time DJ.

  Within three months I had wiggled my way into hosting my own show on Sunday afternoons.

  Radio was different back then: I had a lot of creative freedom, and I took full advantage of my love of music. For six hours every Sunday afternoon, I hosted a show called Sizzling Sundays, playing Aaliyah, Jah Rule, LL Cool J, and anything else that was hot at the time. For those six hours, I wasn’t high school junior Terrence Jenkins; I was Youngest in Charge, Terrence J—first name and initial only, just like all the other DJs.

  My mom’s words—“Whatever you want to do when you grow up, just make sure you’re the best at it”—finally hit home. Not long after I sat in the DJ booth for the first time, any desire to be a rapper disappeared. I had a real knack for being on the radio, just being an announcer and talking, and it was clear that I was a mediocre musician at best. My passions simply shifted; I wanted to focus all my energy on becoming an on-air personality now.

  My mom was supportive. She began filling her personal Terrence J museum with tape recordings of every on-air show I hosted. To her credit, she gave me an enormous amount of leeway and flexibility to pursue my new interest. Suddenly, at age seventeen, I was out late doing radio remotes at nightclubs. Not every mom would give that the okay. But my mom offered me the freedom that I needed to grow in my ambitions—while at the same time giving me boundaries within which I needed to operate. She always made sure I got home on time.