Confessions of a Degenerate Entrepreneur

I was raised in a single-parent household in South Jamaica, Queens with my autistic brother. Growing up I didn’t have many friends, so I found pleasure in reading books, writing stories, and watching musicals on VHS tapes with my grandmother. Although my brother’s autistic, it never stopped me from including him in singalongs on my karaoke machine. Maybe I didn’t like being bored, but I was always putting on one-woman shows in the living room or just creating my own little thing.

One of my favorite places to go to as a kid was Black Spectrum Theatre, located at the epicenter of Roy Wilkins Park. The park itself had a jungle gym, a few tennis, basketball, and handball courts, and a couple of dugouts. Seasonally, the surrounding space would be rented out for tiny concerts or carnivals. Regardless of all the festivities that took place at Roy Wilkins, Black Spectrum Theatre is the foundation of my entrepreneurial spirit, and where I was able to get as creative as I could be.

During my time at Black Spectrum, I took acting classes — some of which were instructed by my mom — assisted in the creation of sets for the on-stage productions. As I got older, my grandma, who managed the box-office, would let me help with online ticket sales and ushering people to their seats that came to see a show. I developed a deep appreciation for the arts, which has led me to the artist, and entrepreneur, I am today.

I finally admitted to being an entrepreneur around this time last year. It was an interesting self-discovery because I had just figured out how to spell the word not too long before. Being an artist and an individual who knows how to move within the corporate space, can be bittersweet. Not only are you creative and can think outside of the box, but you also think strategically and try to understand the core value of what it is you’re trying to sell. Personally, this has become one of my biggest flaws and gives me reasons to believe that I am a degenerate.

I’m sure there are others like me out there who have a passion and are so deeply planted into their industry. For example, as a media planner in the advertising space, after a year of attending various conferences I’ve started to think that I’m being consumed by the information, rather than me consuming it. Most of the feelings I’ve been getting have made me conflicted.

I believed that being an artist isn’t an entrepreneur, and while that may be true, successful artists act like entrepreneurs — hustlers, a word I am very used to hearing and being described as. Perhaps my time at Black Spectrum taught me a lot about how to curate my craft soundly and how to improve on it, but I didn’t understand the part of me that was voluntarily helping around was the hustler in me.

With a deeper understanding of entrepreneurship and what it means to be an artist, it’s come so naturally to just do it, but now I want to share this same wealth of knowledge with others. Others meaning, young entrepreneurs like myself, it has become extremely dire and if there’s no one else who can speak on it, I will voluntarily do so myself.