A fridge with a button to get ice and water together. That was the first ‘this is sexy and I want it’ experience of Jay-Z’s life.
He was just a kid named Shawn Carter then, growing up without a father, for the most part, in Brooklyn’s rough Marcy Projects. The fridge was in the house of his sixth-grade teacher, Renee-Rosenblum Lowden, a rare kindly soul in his otherwise challenging childhood. Jay-Z saw the technological marvel when Miss Lowden took her students home after a field trip to the New York Transit Museum.
“She had an ice thing on her refrigerator. You know, you push it and the ice and the water come down. I was really amazed by that. I was like, I want one of those,” Jay-Z told Forbes during a joint interview the publication did with him and Warren Buffett.
Water literally turned to wine when, in 2014, Jay-Z became the owner of the champagne brand Armand de Brignac, informally called Ace of Spades because of its logo. In February 2021, he sold half of it to LVMH. Soon afterwards, he sold a major chunk of his stake in streaming service Tidal. In a matter of days, Jay-Z’s net worth is estimated to have swelled from $1 billion to about $1.4 billion.
A boy who grew up poor, without a father and sold drugs as a teenager could make it. You can too. But what exactly can you learn from the Jay-Z story?
One, it’s important to tell children they are smart. And it’s important for the child, or even a professional, to not ignore genuine well-wishers. Even though Jay-Z was a brooding child with a lot on his plate, he had a passion for words and a felicity with them that was beyond his years. Miss Lowden sensed this and her class was the one he enjoyed the most.
“The thing I remember about Shawn is he took the reading test and he scored 12th grade in the sixth grade,” Rosenblum-Lowden told The Washington Post in an interview. “And I remember telling him — because I really feel it’s important to tell kids they’re smart — I said, ‘You’re smart, you better do well.’ And he listened.”
Jay-Z said, “It's funny how it works, just a little bit of attention.”
Another learning from Jay-Z’s success is to treat your talent or passion with respect, even if it is not mainstream. Words, music and lyrics were the few wholesome outlets in the young Jay-Z’s life. He always carried a pencil and paper, and if a line came to him, he would stop and write it down.
“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,” Jay-Z once said.
When his bleak surroundings influenced him and he was going astray, he had the awareness to see the danger ahead and save himself.
“I got caught into my neighbourhood and my surroundings. But I've always taken it [music] with me, and I've always gone back to it. It just got to a point where it was, like, ‘Make this decision, because this is something you really love. It's time to really focus on and then get serious about it, give it your all’. And once I did that, it was no looking back from there.”
Keeping music and business separate is Jay-Z’s simple formula for artistic and financial success. He is thankful to his genre – rap - for not conforming to the stereotype that true artists should not be money-minded.
“Hip-hop from the beginning has always been aspirational,” Jay-Z told Forbes. “It always broke that notion that an artist can't think about money as well. Just so long as you separate the two and you're not making music with business in mind. At some point it [the music] has to be real when they touch it, when they listen to it. Something has to resonate with them that's real. When you're in the studio you're an artist, you make music, and then after you finish, you market it to the world. I don't think anything is wrong with that. In fact, I know there's nothing wrong with that.”
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