What Kanye West Taught Me About Assets, Boundaries, and Narratives
“Gotta testify, come up in the spot looking extra fly, ’for the day I die, I’ma touch the sky” — Touch the Sky
One of the most polarizing figures of today, Kanye West is the epitome of reinvention.
Listen to his albums starting with College Dropout, one by one, and you can hear stark differences. You can hear his growth.
His growth is made possible because he has an ability to acknowledge his assets, boundaries, and narrative (ABN). Not only does he acknowledge them, he leverages them, and even flips them at times.
Here’s a shallow dive into these three elements:
Assets
The tools you own or possess.
From a personal perspective, these can include your skills, your possessions, and your network. From a business perspective these can be broken down into tangible (property, inventory, securities, etc.) and intangible (Intellectual property, joint ventures, etc). Assets are things you can build up, learn, or own.
Acknowledge them, and you can see paths where you leverage them to open up new opportunities. What do you have that isn’t being used to its full potential? What do you have that would be valuable to others?
Boundaries
What are you not willing to do? What can’t you do?
Some boundaries are external. They are imposed on you by other people. Interestingly, you can do things to flip these boundaries and remove them. Even more powerful is accepting some of these boundaries and embracing them as ones that help you do even better work.
Which of the external boundaries that you have are actually helpful?
Others are self-imposed. Fear, indecision, past decisions (sunk costs), spending, location, social network, etc. If you pick these boundaries intentionally, you have more power.
Which of your self-imposed boundaries are ones that you picked?
Narratives
The story that you tell yourself. The running script that your mind plays given a set of situations.
We all have them. We have them about money, love, our skills, friends, work, family, the list is endless. Take the previous list. What narratives do you have about these?
Your narratives impact how you make decisions. They impact how you treat other people and situations. Your narratives create a lens through which you see the world. So now the question becomes how is your narrative helping you?
You can control your narrative. It takes practice. Choose your narrative carefully. It will impact your world more than you realize.
Kanye’s evolution viewed through ABN
Let’s start with young Kanye. The one that was trying to shop beats. Here was a kid with significant boundaries:
His teachers didn’t believe he’d amount to anything
He couldn’t play an instrument or sing
He lived in Chicago (not a music hub)
Getting into the music industry would seem hard for this type of person. But Kanye had an asset: A good ear for music. And he had a narrative: “I’m a rebel. I’m a genius and I can do anything. I’m persistent and determined and I obsess over my art.”
That narrative fed into his assets. He flipped the narrative of his teachers into his motivation and began to sell beats, eventually producing 5 songs for Jay-Z’s critically acclaimed The Blueprint.
Kanye the Rapper
Most people would go on to build a successful career producing music. But he didn’t stop there.
Kanye wanted to be a rapper. So he tried to get people to sign him.
They laughed.
So here we have the same Kanye, with new boundaries: no way in, labels that don’t want his raps, an image that didn’t fit the norm. And then he smashed his car, and his face.
Talk about an extreme boundary. People thought his rap career (which hadn’t even started yet) was already over because of this accident.
What does Kanye do? He flips the boundary into one of the most creative songs of all time, his first hit-single, Thru the Wire.
This is fully embracing a boundary (constraint). 2 weeks after the accident he records the song about having his jaw wired shut, WHILE HE STILL HAS HIS JAW WIRED SHUT.
“I drink a Boost for breakfast, an Ensure for dessert, somebody ordered pancakes, I just sip the sizzurp” — Thru the Wire
And just like that, Kanye’s career took off. College Dropout, Late Registration, Graduation. There is a progression in his music.
You can hear the shift and how it all builds, one upon the next. Chipmunk soul production, orchestral soul production, brass and synth production. Not only did his production evolve, his lyrics evolved as well. He kept pushing boundaries.
“Everything I’m not made me everything I am” — Everything I am
Heartbreak and Transformation
And then Kanye went through a rough patch. His fiancé ended their engagement, his mom passed away. He spiraled. Rap become the boundary because it severely limited his ability to express his pain. He needed an outlet.
All of the sudden, Kanye realized he didn’t just have to be a rapper. If he used autotune, he could let his emotions out through R&B.
The result of breaking that boundary was 808’s & Heartbreak. It was a complete departure from everything he had done up to that point.
“Look back on my life and my life gone, where did I go wrong? And my head keeps spinning, can’t stop having these visions, I gotta get wit’ it” — Welcome to Heartbreak
The 2009 VMAs
Then the Taylor Swift incident happened. And the whole world hated Kanye. New boundaries. And possibly his narrative had shifted. He was more lost than ever.
He took a break. He went to Japan, then Rome, and the Hawaii.
Now Kanye had a choice: go back to old Kanye or accept the change in mindset, boundaries, and assets.
He chose to accept them and create a whole new masterpiece: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It may have been his best album. It may be one of the best albums of all time.
“I’m lost in the world, been down my whole life, I’m new in the city, and I’m down for tonight.” — Lost in the World
Each of Kanye’s albums speaks for itself. Each shows how he has used his narrative and his assets to create something remarkable. Each takes a set of boundaries and pushes them. It’s what makes Kanye, Kanye.
ABN for your or your business
So what does Kanye teach us?
He teaches us the importance of doing things on purpose. He teaches us that we should use our narrative to our advantage, and then when it no longer serves us, we should change it. He teaches us that how we approach our boundaries and assets determines our success.
It takes a great deal of introspection to do these things. He teaches us that we must constantly evaluate the assets, boundaries, and narratives. That we must ask ourselves the hard questions:
How are these serving me right now?
Are they producing the results we seek?
What can we change to move us to something better?
A huge thank you to Tim, Sumit, and Vik who inspired this post and who expanded my thoughts on this topic and asked me lots of hard questions. And a thank you to Mark, Nicole, Maria, Ali, and Cindy for your feedback and questions on this post.