What I learned from reading Decoded by Jay Z.

Unpredictability was 1 of the things that we counted on.

Like the day when I wandered up to something I'd never seen before.

I shouldered my way through the crowd towards the middle.

It felt like gravity pulling me into that swirl of kids.

Like a planet being pulled into orbit by a star.

His name was Slate and he was a kid I used to see around the neighborhood.

An older kid who had barely made an impression on me.

In that circle, though, he was transformed, like the church ladies touched by the Spirit, and everyone was mesmerized.

He was rhyming, throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a trance, for a crazy long time, 30 minutes straight off the top of his head.

Or he'd go in on the kids who were standing around listening to him.

And then he'd go in on how clean he was, how nice he was with the ball, how all the girls loved him.

Then he'd start rhyming about the rhymes themselves, how good they were, how much better they were than yours, and how he was the best that ever did it.

All he had were his eyes, taking in everything and the words inside him.

That's some cool shit, was the first thing I thought.

That night, I started writing rhymes in my notebook.

Then I'd bang out a beat on the table, my bedroom window, whatever had a flat surface, and practice from the time I woke in the morning until I went to sleep.

A way to recreate myself and reimagine my world.

After I recorded a rhyme, it gave me an unbelievable rush to play it back, to hear that voice.

If I was crossing a street with my friends and a rhyme came to me, I'd break out my binder, spread it on a mailbox or lamppost, and write the rhyme before I crossed the street.

Even back then, I thought I was the best.

I'd spend my free time reading the dictionary, building my vocabulary.

I could be ruthless, calm as fuck on the outside, but flooded with adrenaline.

an excerpt from the book that we talked about today, which is Jay-Z's memoir, and it's called Decoded.

Before I jump back into the book, just real quick, I get messages every week for people asking how they can buy gift subscriptions to founders for other people.

There's always a link in the show notes on the Misfit feed, you'll see buy a gift subscription, and if you don't see it there, you can always go to founderspodcast.com, and you'll see it in the header.

And you can buy a gift description for like a few months, a year.

And now there's a lifetime gift description option as well.

So this podcast is going to be similar to when I read all the way back on founders number 2 19.

I read the, the biography of Anthony Bourdain.

And the reason this is similar is because before I read the biography of Anthony Bourdain, I had read his books, I watched almost every single episode of his shows.

I've been listening to his music repeatedly for over 2 decades.

I have a folder on Instagram that is labeled motivation.

And so when I come across something that just hypes me up, or just a good idea, I put it in there.

And then I just go to that folder whenever I have a few minutes and just watch videos.

And a lot of them also have, it's also Jay-Z just dropping pieces of advice or lessons that he learned through his life.

And I cannot believe it's taken me this long.

I cannot believe it's taken me this long to read this book.

I remember going to a friend's house back in like 2010-2011 and it was on his coffee table.

And I remember picking it up and leafing through it like, wow, this is amazing.

And so it's taken me more than a decade to circle back around, but I'm very, very glad.

Once I read it, I could not believe how good it was.

So I want to go back to the part of the introduction.

the very first chapter and I just want to

pull out a couple thoughts I had as I went through some of these highlights I just read to you.

When he's seeing this kid in a cypher, which is just in the early days of hip-hop, it's just 1 person sitting in the middle rapping.

Sometimes it's 1 person, sometimes it's a few and they're battling, whatever the case is, and just people surrounded by them.

This is the first time Jay-Z is seeing that happen.

for a while but it was interesting what came to his mind.

He's like that's really cool and I could do that and that's an illustration of a major point that pops up over and over again in these biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs is that belief comes before ability.

He had never wrapped a day in his life, but he already said, okay, no, no, I believe I can do this.

If that person figured out how to do it, I can too.

I've learned about the history of entrepreneurship from reading almost 250 biographies to as little words as possible, I would say that the entrepreneurs, the great founders of history, they would combine Kanye West levels of self-belief with the work ethic of Kobe Bryant.

And so that leads into it leads me to the second thing that he says on this page that is really really interesting and it's about the importance of practice and when I read that 600 page biography of Michael Jordan all the way back on founders number 212 it blew my mind how much Michael in that book talked over and over and over again about his belief in practice, his dedication to practice, that he'd rather miss a game than miss practice.

He says, I would practice from the time I woke up in the morning until I went to sleep.

This is 12 years before he makes, he creates his first album.

He's 26 years old when he releases his first album, Reasonable Doubt.

This is another example of that maxim that I've said on a few podcasts, that the public praises people for what they practice in private.

The public praises people for what they practice in private.

We didn't see, we saw this first time when he dropped it when he was 26 years old, we didn't see the 12 years before that of him practicing his craft before it was in public view.

It's a fantastic documentary on Kanye West, it's called Genius.

It's a three-part series, you can skip the third part, but the first 2 is all about the struggle, the founder mentality that Kanye had to possess to break into the music industry and to actually achieve his lifelong dream.

And so just like we didn't see Jay-Z practicing for

years before he's actually in the music industry, Kanye says the same thing in that documentary.

When Kanye leaves Chicago to chase his dream in New York, it's year 2001, Kanye is 24 years old and he's selling beats, although people at

the time don't realize that he's only making and selling beats so he can rap on them, right?

But that was his in, he found his in to the industry.

But he had been producing beats since the seventh grade.

He was 12 years old when he starts making beats.

He doesn't start becoming famous or well-known for another 12 years.

It's an incredible, incredible documentary.

I'll probably watch it 50, 100 times in my life.

Second episode is really good as well and I've watched it multiple times.

But Kanye on his debut album talks about what he had to do out of, again, out of view of the public, right?

And so on Kanye's album, I'm just going to read you some, some, his lyrics real quick from his album Spaceship.

And he says, y'all don't know my struggle.

Lock yourself in a room doing 5 beats a day for 3 summers.

Like 3 summers, I deserve to do these numbers.

And the reason this is important, the reason I'm bringing this to your attention is because this is all over the history of entrepreneurship.

All the experiences, the practice you put in, the things that you're learning, you don't even have an idea how you're gonna be able to utilize them in the future.

And we just saw this recently when I reread Sam Walton's fantastic autobiography, Made in America, on Founders Number 234.

I'm gonna read, this is so fantastic, because he

puts words to this idea that I'm trying to explain to you and

he says somehow over the years folks have gotten the impression that Walmart was something I dreamed up out of the blue as a middle-aged man and that it was just as great idea that turned into an overnight success.

It's true that was 44 when we opened our first Walmart but the store was totally an outgrowth of everything that we've been doing since Newport.

So he's talking about the 12 or 14 years of his retail career.

had opened before he had learned that there was a massive opportunity that he winds up calling Walmart.

So it says it's true that it was 44 when we opened

our first Walmart but the store was totally an outgrowth of everything that we've been doing since Newport.

I'm gonna pause there go back to what Jay-Z says.

Yeah I would practice from the time I woke up in the morning until I went to sleep.

If I was crossing the street with my friends and a rhyme came to me I'd break out my binder and I'd spread it on a mailbox or a lamppost and I'd write the rhyme before I crossed the street.

It is the exact same idea applied to 2 different domains.

Sam Walton applied this domain this idea to retail Jay-z applied it to hit to being a rapper to being an artist.

A musician going back to Sam but that store was totally an outgrowth of everything we

Another case of me being unable to leave well enough alone.

Another experiment and like most overnight and what and like most other overnight successes it was 20 years in the making and so let's go back to Jay-Z's motivations that what I just read to you I saw it as an opening

a way to recreate myself and reimagine my world.

The feeling he's having is a 13 or 14 year old saying, hey, maybe hip hop was a way.

I live in, you know, I'm not very happy with my surroundings, I live in the projects.

My dad left, I'm being raised by a single mother.

Steve, a few weeks ago or a few months ago, I read Steven Spielberg's fantastic biography.

This is back on Founders 209, in case you haven't listened to that podcast.

Filmmakers, I'm working on another podcast for you on a biography of a filmmaker.

Filmmakers are some of my favorite people to read about because I think the way they approach their craft, there's just so many parallels and ideas that we can steal as founders for our own work.

But there's a line, talks about why Steven Spielberg was, he was obsessed.

time he was like 12 years old, he was like, yep, I'm going to be the director.

Steven Spielberg at 12 years old started practicing.

He said he would envision himself going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar and thanking the Academy.

was just talking about, Kanye says something.

He says, before I had a car, I would be walking to the train practicing my Grammy speech.

He was completely broke, couldn't even afford a car.

I'm walking to the subway to go from my apartment in New Jersey to Manhattan to try to sell some beats and I'm already practicing my Grammy speech.

to compare for you, what Jay-Z just said, he's like, I thought it was a way for an opening for me to recreate myself and reimagine my world.

It's very similar to what Steven Spielberg said in his biography, they said about him in his biography when he's a young person, he was disappointed in the world so he built his own.

Jay-Z used hip-hop and rapping to build his own world, Steven Spielberg used making movies, directing movies to make his own world.

And then just 1 other thing before I move forward in the book, again the importance of practice.

That is the main lesson from...and Jordan and Michael Jordan's, you know, it says in the book that maybe no 1 has ever been as good as their job as Michael Jordan was at his, like later in his career.

So there's a lot, like obviously we're all trying to get to the top of our professions, we're trying to be the best we possibly can be.

That's why we're listening to this, that's why we're reading these books, that's why we're doing all the stuff we're doing.

And so Jordan just has a lot of things to teach us, but the importance of practice.

And so ever since I read, I'll tell you how I interpret that for my own work.

Ever since I read that, or Jordan taught me that, I spend hours, hours, every day, when I'm not reading books or when I'm not making podcasts, I'm rereading the highlights.

I told you I have over 20, 000 highlights in this app called Readwise.

So every single highlight I make goes into this app called Readwise.

It becomes this gigantic search database of all my notes and highlights from the history of entrepreneurship.

And I just read them over and over again.

He's a young kid and he's like, all I have are my eyes and my words, right?

So he says, I'd spend my free time reading the dictionary, building my vocabulary.

Remember that too because there's a fantastic story where Jay-Z gets to have dinner with Michael Jordan later in the book so I'll bring that up to you because it's just fantastic.

2 of my favorite people having dinner together.

So then he's talking about this time, this is the late 70s, early 80s and if you ever studied Mark Andreesen, so back on Founders Number 50 I read Mark Andreesen's, I think it's like 200 page archive of his blog that used to be on, you can go back there in Founders Number 50, you'll see the link to download the PDF for his blog.

But Mark's advice for young people, he's like, listen, you should only be working in the industries where the founders of the industry are still in charge of their companies.

I thought that was a really interesting idea.

And so what Jay-Z's picking up here, he's like, well, I'm in a brand new industry.

They don't even really know, they don't even know, some people are making a tiny bit of money, or other cases, and he's like, but I have a gigantic opportunity.

So not only can I practice my craft and get better over time, but I'm in this, I'm in an expanding market and so it will lift me along with that?

And he says, I'm not going to say that I thought I could get rich from rap, but I could clearly see that it was going to get bigger before it went away.

And then we're going to get into something that also blew my mind and it's silly that it should blow my mind at

Given everything you and I have talked about.

But how much of this book is Jay-Z talking about studying the great people that came before him, breaking down their approach to their craft.

So the book has chapters, but in between each chapter is Jay-Z's, he's like handpicked some songs, and so he'll go through line by line, and he'll give you his interpretations.

Like, people listen to my songs, they don't even understand what they're about.

And so the way he did that for his own music, he's been doing that forever for the music of other people.

It's very similar to how you and I are approaching these books where like it's not just a line.

We look at it, we underline it, we try to tie it to other things, we really think deeply about what the hell it means.

And so in this case, this is the first example he's talking about, hey I really looked up to people like Run DMC, The Sugar Hill Game, Cool Moe D, and so he's going to talk about what he liked about Run DMC's songs.

And he says their rhymes were crisp and aggressive.

And he's talking about Run DMC, he says Run rapped about having a big long caddy, not like a Seville." And so he's quoting him.

He says, that line seems like a throwaway, but to me it felt meaningful.

note I left myself on that page is like, I feel the same way.

Like I'll be reading an entire paragraph of page and there's just something that jumps out at you.

And you can't even really describe why it's so important.

If you sit down and pause, and don't just skip to the next paragraph and think about what's happening, it's like a prompt for your thinking.

And then here, Jay-Z describes his early life when he's starting to do this, and the crazy thing is, So he says, I was just a kid from public housing whose whole hood would rubberneck when an expensive car drove down the block.

And what I wrote, and I wrote this several times throughout the book, when he says stuff like this, it's like a lot can happen in 1 lifetime.

He goes from a kid living in public housing who is lusting after an expensive car to living in a hundred million dollar house in Bel Air.

And the great thing about reading autobiographies is the fact that this stuff is not sugar-coated.

They talk in a way that they may not talk in public interviews or if they're marketing a new project or whatever the case is.

So in this case he's describing the environment that he grew up in and this is the environment he had to survive.

He talks about the fact that he was a kid when the crack epidemic in the 1980s just exploded and he says but when crack landed in your hood it was a total takeover over sudden and complete most of these crack fiends were my parents age are a little younger they were skeletal and ashy and they were jittery as a rookie beat as rookie beat cops and their eyes were always spinning with schemes to get money for their next hit.

Kids my age were serving them, meaning the kids were actually the ones selling the drugs to the older crackheads.

Guys my age, and why were they doing that?

Because guys my age, fed up with watching their moms struggle on a single income, were paying utility bills with money from hustling." So that hustling is obviously talking about selling drugs.

He says, the courtyards of my projects of Marcy projects and projects across the country contain teenagers who wore automatic weapons like they were sneakers.

We had grandmothers who were afraid to leave their house.

And this is was the person he used to buy what happened to the person he was buying drugs from.

So like his supplier, like his wholesalers, you can think of like that.

When Dede was murdered, it was something out of a mob movie.

They cut off his balls and stuffed them in his mouth and shot him in the back of the head, execution style.

And so that is the crazy, crazy environment that he's got to develop the skills to not only survive But escape and then thrive throughout life So the main theme of the book at the because he spends a lot of time talking about let's say his teenage years He's like early 20s.

He doesn't want to sell drugs, but he's not sure.

He's like, if rap was actually a career, and he talks about the fact that people that were from similar projects like him, Biggie Smalls and Torres Badgie grew up in a project in Brooklyn, Nas grew up in a project in Queens.

And he says once he saw them blow up with their initial with their their album so Nas did Elmatic when he was like 17 years old which is crazy like just insane how somebody that young could build something could make a classic album at such a young age and then Biggie's Ready to Die both came out before Jay-Z and that really helped him realize, hey, this is actually possible.

And so that that struggle of like straddling 2 worlds like, you know, there's stories in the book where he's been selling drugs in Virginia for 3 days and he's got to go and meet a record executive to try to get a label so he's got to drive back from Virginia overnight shows up all dirty you know smelling terribly trying to convince this guy to sign him and I guess I kind of just turned the page and kind of just ran over my own point that I was trying to make it.

It was all moving so fast it was hard to make sense of it or see the big picture.

Kids like me, and you don't feel that way.

You damn sure don't feel like a kid, but you definitely are you just don't know it kids Like me we're going through something strange and twisted and we had a crazy story to tell

So through a friend of a friend he winds up meeting 1 of his idols which is this rapper called Big Daddy Kane.

At this point remember when I'm about to read you Jay-Z has no intention he's like I'm not he's I guess I'll just be a hustler you know that's what I'm gonna do for my life.

winds up meeting Kane he's still rhyming so Kane puts him

on an album on 1 of his songs And that song is actually played on the radio.

And he says, people were talking about the second kid on the tape, that's him, the MC before Cain.

I couldn't believe people even noticed my verse.

And He says he couldn't believe they could notice his verse because Big Daddy Kane had an audience, he had people that liked him, and people thought he was really, really good.

Jay-Z gets on the track, he's like, wait a minute, I can hold my own with 1 of the best.

Then he goes back, and again, this just blows my mind.

Jay-Z is studying the greats that came before him, which is exactly what you and I do every week on this podcast.

His flow was complex and his voice was ill.

He was approaching rap like literature, like art, which is exactly what Jay-Z considers it.

He's like, I write, but I don't write things down.

So I don't know if you know this, but Jay-Z is famous because he starts writing things in his notebook when he's younger.

But as he gets older, and you can actually see this in there's a documentary, it's called Fade to Black, came out like 15 years ago.

I re-watched it for prep for this podcast, and it's when Jay-z thought he was

gonna retire and it shows him building the album And so he goes to California and he's working with this with this famous producer named Rick Rubin Who's 1 of the like the co-founders of Def Jam and he's produced albums for everybody not just hip-hop artists but country people, rock, everybody goes all over they think Rick is just an amazing person.

Actually I have a note for you real quick I wasn't planning on talking about it right now but while I'm in case I forget to talk about Rick Rubin later on he's a Rick Rubin like hangs out with people like Jack Dorsey like seeks his counsel and stuff like that but in the documentary it's funny he says uh this is what Jay-Z likes about Rick Rubin he goes listen Rick

a fuck he is strange by strange standards and he goes when's the last time you seen a bison in some dude's studio?

And he's making music with in a room with Rick Rubin and Rick Rubin's got this huge stuff bison and so this is what Jay-Z loves about him.

He goes, listen, Rick is over 20 years into his career and now almost 40 years over 20 and he's still doing it.

Over 20 years into, this is Jay-Z talking, over 20 years into his career and the dude ain't changed.

And so our interpretation of that is he didn't build, his product in some degree is himself, and he knows what Peter Thiel taught us.

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#238 Jay Z: Decoded