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

by Terrence J

  I ended up applying to a bunch of colleges—Howard, the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill, a few colleges in New York City—but from the get-go, I knew that where I really wanted to go was North Carolina A&T State University. I’d already visited the campus a few times with my friend Eric, whose sister Michelle went there; I’d even attended an A&T homecoming. It was a beautiful campus, it was affordable due to in-state tuition, and it was close enough to my parents that I could drive home for the weekend and steal food.

  Most important, they accepted me.

  Not long after I got my acceptance letter, my mom and I drove three hours east, to Greensboro, North Carolina, to visit the campus. My first stop—before I even met any of the professors—was the radio station. We’d arranged to meet the program director, a woman named Cherié Lofton, and when I walked in I went straight up to her and introduced myself. “Hi, my name is Terrence. I know how to use Cool Edit Pro”—a top software audio program—“and I really want to work here. Are there any opportunities?” Then I handed her my air check—a recording of my best breaks, like an audio résumé.

  I was definitely a young lion. Cherié and I can laugh at it now, but I was very confident and sure of myself. I knew exactly what I wanted to do; and sure enough, before I’d even started my freshman year, Cherié had me on the air. In fact, my very first day of college, I hosted the big freshman step show; and for the next four years, I hardly stopped to put down the microphone. Working at Soul 92 Jams would have been great, but I would have missed out on maximizing my full potential and seeing what else the world had to offer. My mom was right—I was getting the best of both worlds: career opportunities and an education at one of the most respected institutions in the South.

  People think of education as book learning; that college is all about going to class and getting good grades. But for me, an education is so much more than that: It’s about taking advantage of the opportunities that are available to you.

  From my first day at school, I took full advantage of all the on-campus resources. I looked at college as a safety net: I was in a confined atmosphere with ten thousand other students, and it wasn’t the whole world yet. Why not try and experiment? Since I knew I wanted to do radio and TV, I found every outlet available to me. I worked at the campus radio station with Cherié Lofton and the program director, Tony Welborne, doing graveyard shifts, even counting down the New Year from the booth, eventually getting my own show on Monday afternoons. I hung out at the on-campus TV station, under the guidance of two Communication Department professors—Gail Wiggins and Nagatha Tonkins—who let me borrow equipment and film segments around school. I built a radio reel. And anytime I could have a microphone in my hand, I held it.

  I utilized anything they had at school that might help me gain experience. And to promote myself, I printed up signs in the school’s computer lab that read WHO IS TERRENCE J? I taped them up on every door on campus, to the point that when people met me they’d say: “Are you that motherfucker Terrence J? I hate you! The flyer you taped to my door ruined the paint!” Soon, everyone knew my name, even if they had no idea who I was.

  Promotion was a lot different back in 2000. Social media was in its infancy; Myspace and Facebook didn’t even exist yet. All of the current tools for promoting events and getting your word out hadn’t been invented. Instead, it was very simple: If you wanted to promote a party on a college campus, you had to find someone to design flyers and then go pass them out. Promotion was hand to hand, approaching people, and getting in their faces. It’s a skill set that’s given me an edge to this day. Maybe kids who went to college ten years later than I did are a lot faster on a computer, but in the room, against that same person, I’m an animal. I’m not afraid to put myself on the line and risk failure or embarrassment by approaching someone.

  These days, you can go on a social media outlet and follow someone, direct-message them, or “like” them, rather than going up to them in person or giving them a call. It takes some of the courage out of communication; there are fewer stakes involved; and as a result, less sincerity and personal contact. And I often run into young people who tell me they don’t know how to talk to their managers, or write a letter in full sentences instead of slang and emoticons. Technology should never overshadow the importance of learning how to communicate directly.

  That’s why, even though I’m active on social media, I try my best to have real-life interactions as much as I can. I’ll pick up the phone or set up a face-to-face meeting. I try not to let technology consume my life. Instead, I try to respect the one-on-one conversation and the genuine connection.

  I can definitely trace building my skills in this regard back to North Carolina A&T. Will Smith says there’s a difference between skill and talent—talent is something you’re born with, but to have skill is to tirelessly work to the best of your ability to hone that talent. Not convinced? In another one of my favorite books, Outliers, the author Malcolm Gladwell writes that in order to be great at anything, you need to practice for ten thousand hours. Why was Michael Jordan such a great ballplayer at age seventeen? Because he picked up his first basketball at age six and never put it down. Why was Michael Jackson so incredible? Because he started singing at age five. To be truly great takes years of experience; it has to be an everyday thing in your life, the thing that you eat, breathe, and sleep. This relentless practice is what separates the greats from those who are just good, the Chris Pauls, the Dwyane Wades, and the Carmelo Anthonys from the guy playing ball at your local park.

  In college, entertainment and promotion was my breath. Every day of every week, and all weekend, all I was thinking about was How am I going to get better? I worked so many free talent shows, spent so many hours in the radio booth, and hosted a million banquets, happy just to hold a microphone night after night. And every single time I did it, I learned something. I learned how to understand crowd energy, stole techniques from other people I watched, and created my on-air persona.

  People think of school the wrong way. It’s not all about the classroom. School is where you sharpen your blade. It’s about the opportunities you get while you’re there: doing things by trial and error, playing around, learning your passions in an environment of no risk. I messed up tons of those shows at school, but it was okay. It was school, and everyone else was learning just like me.

  I was having a blast at college, but my mom tried to keep me grounded. “It’s great that you have a voice,” she’d say when I called home to brag about the latest gig I’d hosted. “But at some point you’re going to want to use that voice for more than just promoting parties and talking about events and chasing after girls. You’re going to want to use it for good.”

  My junior year of college, I found out what she was talking about. A student named Christopher who lived next door to me in my freshman dorm was shot and killed at a local nightclub. It was a horrible, random act of violence. Gun violence was on the rise in our community, creeping into A&T, and the campus was starting to feel divided. A&T had a long relationship with the civil rights movement. Four A&T students had been the Greensboro Four, the activists responsible for staging one of the first and most influential sit-ins at the start of the civil rights movement. Jesse Jackson had attended college here, too. In that spirit, my friends Travis, Fred, and LaShawn “Quiet” Ray and I decided to organize a Unity March. Our student adviser, Mr. Maltese, helped us organize an event that became a huge success—more than a thousand students marched from the nightclub where Christopher was shot, back to the campus for a rally and candlelight vigil. I gave a speech about the importance of sticking together as a community. I was inspired by what had happened to speak out for an end to violence. For the first time, I understood the power of my voice.

  Motivated by this experience, I decided to run for class president, and I was lucky enough to win. My senior year was insane: Now, not only was I doing my radio show and hosting, but I was running a $500,000 operating budget, organizing campus concerts and s
tep shows, learning money management and public speaking, and trying to please my constituency. It was my first experience living in the public life. Oh yeah, and I still had to pass my classes.

  On top of everything else, I had joined Omega Psi Phi, one of the most prestigious black fraternities in the country. So, for the last six months of college, I was operating on two or three hours of sleep at most. During the day, I would be in a suit giving speeches in between classes; at night, I would be running through the woods with my fraternity brothers, doing the full military-style training that was part of our pledge process.

  There wasn’t a single opportunity in college that I missed. I may have been exhausted, but it was one of the most fulfilling times of my life. Every skill that I have today, I honed at A&T. My college years from 2000—2004 really shaped my life.

  Tiffany was quiet and still. When I glanced down, I saw that Tyler had fallen asleep in her arms, a bottle still in his mouth. She and I watched him for a while, as peaceful as can be. Finally, Tiffany whispered, “You said your mom never stopped trying to go back and finish her education. Did she ever get her degree?”

  She didn’t manage to go back to college for a bachelor’s degree, but she never stopped trying to find opportunities to expand her education. And watching her helped remind me that I needed to keep learning, too.

  A few years after I graduated from college, I was working in New York City, hosting 106 & Park on BET. I was working hard, but wasn’t necessarily taking my job as seriously as I could: I was having a blast, going to parties and premieres, meeting hip-hop artists whose work I loved, and having a lot of fun. Then my mom called to tell me that she’d gone back to school: She’d started taking that contractors’ course, and was going to get her certificate. A few months later, I drove down to North Carolina to cheer her on as she graduated. It was a real eye-opener. She was forty years old and still trying to further her education. What was I doing to further mine? At the moment, not very much. Once again Mom showed me a better way through her actions.

  When I got back to New York, I took a look at the bigger picture of my life. I wasn’t going to be twenty-three years old and hosting 106 & Park forever. What did I want to be doing when I was forty? I decided that, like my mom, I needed to go back to school.

  I’D LET MY PURSUIT of acting fall by the wayside over the years. So I signed up for acting workshops at the famous Lee Strasberg Institute—where the greatest actors, like Al Pacino and James Dean, studied their craft. Maybe I wasn’t going out on auditions at the moment, but I needed to use my free time to hone my skills so that when things did happen, I’d be ready. I attended class four hours a day, three days a week—after working my full-time job—for more than two years, eventually earning my full acting certificate.

  And I’m still not done. I’ll never be. Someday, when I accomplish what I want to do in TV, I’d love to get a master’s in communication. The marketplace is always changing, and I’d love to learn more about the digital direction our industry is taking. I’d love to speak Spanish fluently, too. There’s always more to learn.

  Tyler began to stir. Tiffany stood, carefully trying not to jostle him awake, and smiled wryly. “Too bad they don’t offer degrees in diapering and formula,” she said. “I’d have a Ph.D. by now.”

  I laughed. “True, true. But seriously . . . you know what I mean. Don’t give up on bettering yourself. You’ve got way too much future ahead of you to do that.”

  * * *

  In Her Own Words: Lisa on the Importance of Learning

  I have an innate need to learn new words. I keep a busted, beat-up dictionary by the chair where I sit every evening. And if I’m watching TV or listening to the radio and hear a word that I don’t know, I look it up. It’s just my thing—something I love to do.

  I’m constantly reading, looking at things, learning. I like to think of reading as “Sailing Toward Knowledge”—that’s the meaning of the crest with the picture of the boat that I put in Terrence’s books. Knowledge is power. Information helps you harness the world.

  Raising Terrence, college was paramount for me. I didn’t want any doors to be closed to my kid, that’s why by hook or crook Terrence had to finish school. But information and learning isn’t just something you get from school; it can come from books you read, people you meet, wherever you can find it. Take the best information you can get from any and all of the smartest minds you know.

  Jaime and I call it the Art of Living. It’s something you never finish working on—there’s always new technology becoming available. New books with new ideas. New complications to life, new circumstances, new things to experience. If you stop learning, you stop growing. As long as we’re here and breathing, every day is an opportunity to learn more.

  You can learn something from anything and anyone. From a clerk at the grocery store, the busboy at the restaurant, even animals. But we have to be open to it. I’m inquisitive, I ask questions. I listen to the answers. I pay attention to what is around me and what other people are doing, showing, saying. Just observe. Because if you’re talking, you can’t listen.

  * * *

  Romany Malco Talks About His Mom

  Romany Malco is an actor, Renaissance man, and one of the most interesting people I know. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, his breakthrough roles came on the Showtime series Weeds and his hilarious turns in the now classic The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Baby Mama. I met Romany on the set of Think Like a Man, and we have become friends. I talked to him about his mother on the set of Think Like a Man Too, and he told me about how her fun-loving personality sparked something in him.

  My mom had me at twenty-three, and she was very young and spirited. When I was growing up, she worked at Columbia University as an accountant. Columbia at the time was one of the top ten schools in the country, and also one of the most progressive. So her friends were an incredible mix of people.

  I remember when I was six or seven, she used to have all her friends over, to get ready to go to a party. My mom would be in the mirror teaching everyone to do the latest dances. I loved her nerve at that time in her life. She was the ringleader but also the person who brought all walks of people together, a really culturally diverse group. You name it, we had it: any nationality, whatever your sexual preference was, it didn’t matter. They were all here with us.

  Looking back, this is what people try to portray in movies now, but it was my real life because of my mom. I loved how spirited and inclusive she was. I think it had a lot to do with her West Indian roots.

  This transferred into my life, and now I’m the same way. The reality is, the majority of this country is very segregated. And if you’re not exposed to things, you sometimes think of them as intimidating; the fact that people are different makes you uncomfortable. I never had that discomfort. I was allowed to experience different things, and that translated into a perspective that seems to be very unlike the perspective of someone who had a standard upbringing in one isolated environment. It made me extremely adventurous. I’ve been all over the world, and a big part of it was about how adventurous my mom was in her youth.

  She was also really encouraging of my interest in entertainment. I grew up with a lot of kids who aspired to be athletes or singers, influential people, attorneys. Most of their moms were saying, “Be realistic and get yourself a job.” My mom, for as long as I could remember, was saying, “Hell yes! Here’s a talent show, want to get in it?”

  That type of encouragement really instills the type of discipline you need to make it life.

  6

  My Mother’s Words of Wisdom About Loyalty

  Not long after our conversation, Tiffany sent me an email letting me know that she’d bailed on going to Howard. “I couldn’t figure out how to do it and get a job and take care of Tyler, especially with Sean refusing to leave New York,” she wrote. I felt for her—it was the same dilemma my mom had faced, decades earlier. Things haven’t changed that much, it seems—there just aren’t that many re
sources for young, single moms.

  Despite her hard call, Tiffany was feeling good. She had found a job working at a small boutique in Brooklyn, owned by an independent fashion designer who had been impressed by the home-sewn dresses that Tiffany was now selling in her Etsy shop. Tiffany’s hustle had paid off. The boutique owner took Tiffany under her wing and was mentoring her, teaching her everything she knew about manufacturing clothes. Maybe Tiffany wasn’t in college, but she was getting a kind of education just the same. Her grandmother was even pitching in, after initially refusing—she’d lost her job as a cafeteria worker in a local high school, and while she was unemployed she was watching Tyler for free.

  Meanwhile, I was in the process of moving to Los Angeles. I’d taken a new job as the coanchor for E! News, alongside Giuliana Rancic. This was a very exciting career move. Even though I was moving to the other side of the country, I’d promised Tiffany that we’d keep in touch. Sometimes she would call when she needed to get something off her chest. Recently, she’d been venting to me about her old high school friends, who had disappeared off to college and looked to be living the carefree life that Tiffany once thought she’d be living, too. They say the fastest way to make God laugh is to tell him how your life will turn out. It is amazing how much can change in a year.

  “Sometimes I read their status updates or see their pictures online and it bums me out,” she told me. “They’re all about parties and road trips and staying up all night having fun. I can’t even remember the last time I went to a party. Of course I love Tyler to death, but sometimes I feel like I’m missing all the fun parts of life. It’s like I’m eighteen going on eighty.”

  “People only post the good stuff online,” I told her. “I bet if you went to go visit them you’d see that their lives aren’t a highlight reel all the time. They struggle, too. But you’d never know it from their photos.”