How does one acquire a street mentality? Does it come from refusing to get a job? Does it seep into your brain furtively while you play cops and robbers as a child? Or is it something that is genetically passed down through your lineage? Or how about is it something that is taken upon by people who rebuff financial freedom and a business acumen? The “streets” looked at from a “hood” perspective are the ghettos, hoods, flavellas, wards, and slums of the poverty stricken and forlorn communities. The streets are tough, rugged, and unloving. It cares for no one and only looks out for itself. The people that run the streets are the bums, pushers, thieves, prostitutes, murderers, and crime infested bedlamites who refuse to enroll into college or pick up a history book and learn all of the sacrifices their forefathers went through so they could have an opportunity to flourish in a cynical society. The people that regulate the streets are the police, who all the aforementioned flee from so they can keep their freedom; freedom that can never be taken away unless YOU commit a crime which seals your own fate. Many rappers say they are not scared of anyone and will take a man’s life if they are tested. Yet these same rappers along with other titular thugs run from the police, which overtly displays their FEAR of another man. Being in the streets is a job to some and a lifestyle for others. The streets makes a person watchful, dubious, and malicious. Notorious B.I.G. ran the streets of New York. Tupac Shakur ran the streets of California. And it is those same streets that took their lives; the same streets that have taken COUNTLESS AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES for the reasons of gang violence, jealousy, territory, and stupidity. Making it out the ghetto means you have made it out the streets, which to many has been a task that is Mission: Impossible. Or is it?
So to make it out the streets it would take a street mentality correct? No, it would take a business mentality, the same mentality that is needed to make it out of any situation. Good grades equals you are accepted to a respectable college equals you receive a top education equals you acquire a great position at a venerable company. The elevation gained throughout your career moves you out of the streets and into the palisades of west Los Angeles. This is not acquired by standing under a street light watching for police, refusing to get a job because you feel you’re too good to work, or putting aside college because you feel it is a waste of time.
Having a street mentality means that you are uncivilized, conniving, dangerous, and uneducated. You are not equipped with the brain of a genius or magnate but trapped in a void of irrelevance, meaning everything that you do is irrelevant to what is actually significant in life. Graduating from high school and going off to college; that is relevant to success. Dropping out and working a dead in job is not. Investing and starting your own business is relevant to success. Squandering your money in the club and not saving money for your kid’s college fund is not. A person who possesses a street mentality believes they are outsmarting the law, when really the UNIVERSITY EDUCATED GOVERNMENT knows every move they make and have set up the Chess match so that the drug dealer pawns can be moved at their will. A street mentality leaves one to believe that putting money back into the hood is helping the youth when really the youth needs education, guidance, and role models more than anything. With this trinity they can create wealth in the community once they graduate from college. A street mentality promotes hatred against their brother, jealousy for material objects they cannot afford, and brings death to their community through violence. You can never have a street and business mentality in the same brain. One wants to do business and grow, the other wants to be a hoodlum. Hoodlums cause destruction, the antipodal of cultivation.
Bill Gates has been for the past two decades one of the richest men in the world. Did he achieve this through a street mentality? No, he achieved it through a business mentality. Getting an education, starting a business, expanding his business, and investing in business. None of these accomplishments involved committing crimes, squandering his capital, refusing to get a job, or dropping out of school. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and other magnates from around the world succeeded because they acknowledged that financial freedom came with education and not the streets.
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