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.
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