"I Got RICH When I Understood THIS..." (Principles For Success & Money) | Wallstreet Trapper

You gotta start trading time for money. You gotta start learning how to make your money work for you. You gotta learn how to give value to people. I didn't learn that message, the value part, I didn't learn that till I started my business. And I was like, I have never heard nothing. Like, that was like, I think you.

Gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness. Really? Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes.

When did you realize that you were gonna start learning about financial literacy and then what did it look like when you got out?

Oh man, so, you know, born and raised in New Orleans, first and foremost, and New Orleans has always been a city that I feel is full of culture, right? And on the front side, people know it for food and music. Music, you know, the good times. But there's a part of New Orleans that also is on the other side that gets a lot of light, which is it being a murder capital, high crime, right? A lot of poor, a lot of underdeveloped people, financially, just in so many different ways. And so I grew up in that. Saw my moms get shot when I was nine years old.

Saw her get shot.

I saw her get shot when I was like nine.

Wow.

Maybe like 100 yards away from me.

Wow.

So immediately I had a connection and understanding of violence, right? So at nine years old, kind of like when I got older, I now don't think about how that played in my brain over and over and over again.

When a kid sees violence at an early age in the family, what does that do to the kid? Does it normalize it? Does it make them want to be more violent, be less violent, like and run away from it? What happens?

So what it did for me was it did two things. One, it made me realize that violence in my environment was a necessary evil.

To do what? Protect yourself.

Protect whatever, like, And if anything happened, violence was now the first result. No matter what that violence looked like, whether it was fighting, whether it was shooting, it was like, okay, if someone can shoot my mother, then they can shoot me. So now I'm automatically in protect mode. Okay, cool, this is what it is. But also it becomes a tool for regulation. like, you. You understand, like, okay, like, violence is what gives me respect. Violence is what keeps me from being a prey, right? And so you just start to normalize it. It's like, I always. I said this to somebody before, I said, if you come to New Orleans and you're in a park and a gun goes off, if there's a bunch of kids in the park, I can almost guarantee you they won't run. They know the protocol. you know, to get down, look both ways, see where the gunshots coming from, and then go the opposite way. That is normalized. That's trauma. No kid should understand the protocol to what to do with a gunshot.

Yeah.

But it's like understood. Like I even knew it at a young age. I would be inside. Gunshots ring, the first thing we do, we get under the bed. Wow. You know what I'm saying?

Like this is understood. So...

It's like the, you know, in school.

They teach you like, Stop, Drop, Roll.

Yeah, yeah. Where there's a tornado warning, a siren, it's like, here's what to do. Yeah, this is what you do. So it's like a survival handbook, but in real time. And you also see that no age limit is off limits to getting killed.

Wow. Because young kids are getting young kids shot up.

Yeah.

Like, it's happening. So you start to understand, like, okay, this. This is my environment. Me seeing guns, me seeing drugs, prostitution. All right, cool.

This.

Okay, this doesn't scare me no more. I get it. All right, cool. So now I got to, I have to now walk around and understand how that feels. I have to walk around knowing if I don't do the right things, that could be me at a young age.

Right?

So, so you have to educate yourself on violence and protecting yourself and being aware of what to do and how to get out of situations and how to defend yourself.

Conflict resolution. Yeah, like all of those things are apparent at a young age. Even when it comes down to even just like bare fists fights, you understand that if I don't handle this situation right here, right now, then it's certain things in this neighborhood I will not be able to do. You know what I'm saying? I will not be able to go to this store if I let him take him or whoever they are take this dollar from me, 50 cent from me.

Why I want you to go to the store?

Because now every time they see you, they take more. It's gonna take more.

Unless you defend yourself.

Let'S shoot. And it's either gonna be, man, it ain't even worth my time going over there messing with him. Yeah, I don't got time to hear that. He's gonna beat one of a time. Let me go over there.

Yeah.

Right.

So it's like, it's like the bully in school.

It's like the bully keeps beating you up until you stand up to the boy. And then the thing about the bully is the bully never really wants a tough fight. Yeah. Why would I do something tough when I could go away easier?

Right.

So you. You just start to understand those things. You're like, you know what? And then you start hearing things in the street, like, your people tell you stuff like, let's say you go home, you my uncle, you send me to the store, and I come back and be like, oh man, such and such, them took it from me. Well, don't come back in here until you either come back with what I gave you, or you come in here bloody.

Prove me.

Right. Show me that somebody, and now we gonna go out there and take care of that. So now like, those are the realities at a young age, and it doesn't, say, okay, you're too young for this. Nah, it's whenever it happens, you got to be able. And so now you develop that mindset, that mentality from a little bitty to adulthood. And what happens is now you see it so much, it becomes you. Oh, I know how to handle this situation right here. All the gate, boom, boom, booms. And then you now teach that trauma.

Yeah, right. You replay it.

You replay it. So 16, maybe like 14, I was homeless. so my grand. I live with my grandmother. My grandmother passed away, and I was homeless, like, literally homeless, because my. It wasn't that my family didn't want nothing to do with me, but everybody has the issues. Nobody wants to take on another burden, you know what I'm saying? No matter what it is. So I dealt with that for a minute, just being homeless. And then I moved with my aunt who was on drugs, and I. Started hustling out her house, you know, for survival purposes, you know what I'm saying? Just been able to survive, just understand like I learned this from my mom. So this is how I'ma eat, right? So school becomes second nature, survival becomes present, you know, this is what has to happen. So 16, I go to prison for attempted murder. I got robbed out of some drugs and some guns. some money and in the streets, it goes back to that same mentality where if I let you get away with this, then I can't hustle no more.

Then you're gonna do this again to me over and over.

Yeah.

And not only are you gonna do.

It, but- Someone else will do it.

Everybody else, I'm fair game.

They'll hear that you're fair game.

And then in the streets, there's this code of, there's a difference between robbing me and jacking me.

What's the difference?

So if I Jack you, it's, yo, give me this. What you gonna do about it?

Right, right, right.

Whether it's a gun or not, it's mine now.

Yeah.

What you gonna do about it? Robbing you is if I have a mask on. I don't really know who you are.

Right.

So robbing you, you kind of get like, all right, I gotta find out. But jacking me, it's a bold statement. It's like, whatever. And so that has to be met with some type of consequences. You know what I'm saying? And not always saying it's right, but in the jungle- To survive. Exactly.

Otherwise you gotta move.

You gotta move to another state. And this is what we're doing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then nobody, you don't have time to do all that. That's why I'm in a hurry.

Trying to get to the store.

Yeah, so I went to prison for shooting him, and I got 10 years. for attempt murder on robbery. And that's kind of when I'm not gonna say life changed, I'm like, all right, cool, I'm in prison.

'Cause your mom was there for a night.

My mom was in prison, yep.

And you would visit her, so you kind of knew that this is an environment that I could potentially be in one day.

Yeah, that's kind of understood already.

Yeah.

Like you already understand that at some point on your journey, you're going to prison. like, that's it. You're going to prison. You're going to, at some point, use a gun on several different occasions. Wow.

Right?

Like this. Like this understood already. And I know it'd be kind of hard for a lot of people to understand that, because if you, if you, if you've never been introduced to that, you'll never, you know, like, if you've never seen a lion hunt, then when he eat the gazelle, you're like, that's so ferocious. But you don't understand the rules of the jungle. you don't understand the rules of the safari, right? So it may seem grotesque, but in the safari, we know that's the ecosystem, right? So in the streets, that's just like part of the ecosystem.

That's the environment.

Yeah, it has to happen.

What was that like when you knew that you were sentenced to 10 years at 16? Was it devastating? Is it kind of like, this is my badge of honor? Is it kind of like, man, I was only hoping for a year or two, not 10.

So I remember, My great aunt came to court for me because they wanted to give me 35 years. Because the dude, you know, he wasn't, again, it was a temper, so he wasn't dead. And my aunt, she knew the judge. Wow. And she kind of like just told him my story. She's like, look, he just been going through a lot. His mom's in prison. My sister passed away, which was my grandmother's sister. You know, he just been out here. he's a better kid than that. You know, he just, you know. So he actually gave me, he came to me and he said.