Growing up in the culture, especially when influenced by hip-hop, can profoundly shape our values and priorities. For those of us who didn’t grow up with much, these influences can often steer us in the wrong direction. It’s not just harmful to us as individuals; it’s detrimental to us as business people. This is where the concept of the “bad teacher” comes in—how we’ve been shown the wrong path and how we continue to perpetuate it without realizing the damage we’re doing.

I remember, like it was yesterday, being at the park in Savannah. Someone would always be out there, sitting in their jeep with 15-inch woofers blaring the latest mixtape fresh from New York. That scene shaped me, just like it shaped so many of our children. The culture had a grip on us, making us fall in love with the wrong things. Your favorite rapper tells you about the cars, the jewelry, and the trips, and you start to idolize that lifestyle. There’s nothing inherently wrong with those things, but what’s missing is the other side of the conversation.

We don’t talk about financial literacy. We don’t discuss investments. We don’t learn how to start and run businesses or create generational wealth. It’s not just about blaming rappers; maybe they don’t know any better themselves. But that’s the problem. They’ve become bad teachers, and in turn, we’ve become bad stewards.

It’s time to change that narrative. We have social media at our disposal, a powerful tool that can help us reshape the culture and infuse it with financial literacy. Imagine the day when rappers start talking about how to set up a trust or how to leverage a business to buy a car and write it off as a tax deduction. That shift in focus could impact an entire generation.

Everyone might not take the information and run with it, and that’s fine. But it’s our responsibility to put the information out there as we learn it. My hope is that you’ll not only learn these principles but also apply them to stabilize your financial life. And once you’ve done that, teach them to others so that we can stop being bad teachers and bad stewards.

God Bless The Entrepreneur.