thank you thank you guys my name is jonathan williams i'm one of the co founders of feel your lap and we're really grateful for lakeshore advantage for bringing this here and i want to give a quick shout out to our title sponsor consumers energy thank you so much for supporting us and i want to give a personal shout out to start garden an organization that has been with us since the inception and helped us and guide us and support us that's paul the whole point of tonight is to push back on the fear and the isolation and the stigma around failure and what's unique about our format is we have six successful individuals who have all faced struggle adversity and failure and each one has gotten back up to rise to new successes but what's unique about tonight is they're not here to talk about their lessons or their morals or what they learned they're simply going to tell you the tough story and after each talk you're going to be invited into it so there's going to be a giant clock that's going to well the giant let's say medium sized clock that during that time pull out your phone and you can tweet or use whatever the latest social media is that you're using and use hashtag lab and you can share your thoughts your lessons or you know what you're thinking based on their story and also in between each story teller we are going to have a local perform we've got some stories hopefully you had a drink we've got some music and it should make for an awesome night thank you all so much for coming in please give everyone a huge round of applause again get to feel first so my name's dave thibeault and i'm the superintendent of hamilton community school always good to get a little show for him and i have the best job in the world every day i work with kids i work with teachers i work with people that change lives but i work in an industry where failure is a bad word and it's time that we change that for our kids and this next generation and for ourselves as well so i get to tell you a story about failing and when i was first asked they said we want to come and talk about a failure i said that is sure it's easy but get you out of here before eleven because i got a list  have a dad as a superintendent and that can't be an easy thing i know that the snow day crawls in the pressure for their dad to make that snow day call really is not fun for them and not fun for me either  and we just go to the core stuff now and so hold back and independent living in interior design and all those things that she taught have gone by the wayside so i have a lot of stress to do well  as a kid when your dad is the principal in elementary school it's not so fun but then when you transition into middle school in you're that awkward teens pre teen kid who discovered girls and acne and his body smells funky and all those weird things and your dad then becomes the principal of the middle school that really sucks that's a whole lot of pressure that i wouldn't want to put on anyone and then i get into high school and my dad becomes a superintendent and thankfully it was a superintendent of another district but in hindsight i least my kids have the dad the superintendent and i'm removed somewhat from their day to day  i got to see my dad every day and sometimes good and sometimes bad and there's a whole nother story about my grades and and the teachers kind of making some adjustments for my at that time on diagnosed the oh it's ok he's just comfortable oh it's ok he's the the principal's kid oh we don't really want to discipline him because then we gotta go talk to the principal too so i got away with some of that stuff then i always knew i wanted to work with kids but i didn't know how or what that looked like i was always a hard worker started when i was twelve years old now and neighbors lawns and fourteen of my work permit and i michigan speedway was right down the road went there and started serving pot roger penske son's hockey team and did well there and then i got invited to serve food in the penske suite and then move myself into the n b a suites and so i was doing this catering and concession stuff as i was a kid and i thought now maybe maybe i won't go into education like my mom and my dad and then i graduated i went off to college and i can't continue to work catering concessional i'm in college and i don't know what i want to do because i wasn't very successful in school i didn't get good grades there was a fear a feeling of failure in that and it's alright because when your dad is the principal in your mom's a teacher the expectation is that their children do well academically my sister got all a's my younger brother got all a's and for me i went because it  means to play basketball as a means to go to track practice and play golf so i didn't it didn't work all that well so in college i didn't know what i wanted to do and then i defaulted into said now i'm running catering and concessions for offsite stuff and so in the summer i'm hiring my friends to work with me so i can see i'm and things are going well and i finished my coursework to and undergrad to be a teacher and i have to make a decision next to student teaching at the same time i've got my employer saying come work for us full time we can give you a job you make good money and so i did and i decided i didn't i wasn't going to teach about a year into office being done with school and a little break i decided that working eighty hours a and being on call to catch trucks that showed up at the speedway with frozen boudinot somebody had to come unlock and put in the freezer another load of the driver to get out and never being at home for more than two weeks and never having a chance to date anyone because nobody wanted to date the guy who was never here and two weeks in detroit in two weeks here and all around i decided ok this isn't the type of job that i want and i missed working with kids so i went back to spring arbor minds the school i went to college with and i said i got a student teach so i did everything that i needed to do to become my student teacher and i got a phenomenal placement a wilson elementary is in jackson public schools it's the inner city elementary and as a kid growing up that reflected person in me always said i want to help the kids that didn't have what i had i had everything i needed especially educationally whatever i needed it was right there and so i felt like i needed to give back and i needed to do something for kids who didn't have all of what i had so wilson was a great elementary school for me so i started and i worked with two two ladies and i was in a first grade classroom because i figured not very many males are in elementary education i want to be that male role model that that figure for them that these kids could connect with so i start my student teaching experience and i think things are going well i have a i had a student who came in and i tell him i love him and it's ok that he was late and this can help him and after school gets out the teachers pulled me aside and said hey you know you really can't buy stuff for the kids like that i said that this didn't feel right to me so we continue to move on in a couple weeks later a young girl came in and she was really tired she said in the front of class which keeps putting her head down and i walk over and i talk i start to talk to her and i ask her what's wrong she said well you know my mom my mom works at night and my younger brother's in kindergarten and he's sick and so he was up all night so i was up with him taking care of him tito i'm just really tired but you had down it's ok you know just rest two seconds later she's out like a light she's warm she's safe she's care for she just needed to sleep i thought i did the right thing school gets out teachers call me and we notice that you just let her sleep all morning yeah she was tired she was up all night with her brother things we want to do so ice i'm getting a feeling that this is not i'm screwing something up when you're in soon teaching your cooperated teacher from the university comes out and they watch you teach and so i had the day that my cooperate teacher was going to come out and he came and he watched me teachin we go through the day and at the end we debrief so t teachers come and sit down and this is going to cooperate teacher and i sit down and the teacher said well you know mr t was doing some good things but you know he bought a student alarm clock in the le student sleep in we have a lot of our major concern and he's not copying any of our stuff he's not making copies of the work sheets to take with him and he's not sticking around afterwards and reproducing things that are ours that we want to have and i don't believe in worksheets and i don't believe in reproducing what somebody else is doing because i thought i was learning to teach on my own so i'm a little worried that things didn't go very well but i'm going to keep doing what i'm doing because i love kids and i'm excited and i very day i got and i excited when i'm working with kids parent teacher conferences come and i'm sitting on the side and the teachers are talking to a mom who comes in with her daughter and my mom is in a shirt that is staying in pajama pants and slippers and the daughter is there and they're talking about their son or son and the teachers spent fifteen minutes just talking at this mom and i'm watching this m just become overwhelmed with all of what she's done wrong and how she's not helping her son and the conference gets over when the mom walks out and i could tell she was upset and so i was with her and i asked what i can do is there something that we can do how can we help what what is it that we can do in my pretties to tell me that she brought her daughter who's in high school because she's going to go back to jail she smokes crack she admits it she she violated probation she goes back to next week so she wanted her daughter to hear what was going on and that if we needed to talk about her younger brother that it's going to be her sister his sister that takes care of or so but for what a couple of weeks and might cooperate in teacher shows back up and he wasn't scheduled to be there and so school gets out and we need to talk to you mr t bo craps the economy was being things were getting worse the first location which was a lot carol it was based on catering from automotive production plants was barely getting focusing on the ship i was working full time we had two young children and things were falling apart the economy was a crane the restaurant the first ship location was not meanwhile and my husband was working over one hundred hours a week i barely saw him i remember on the weekends i would go into that restaurant with our two young babies and just sit there and stare at h catherine she was a little maybe a hundred pounds twenty one full of life and energy she was a newlywed she actually was married to one of our hearts time and i remember being around catherine with the light and the beauty that she had and thinking there she is she's our angel she is the one who's going to live the burden on our family my husband back i was beyond excited as you started to train her over an eight week period of time and i remember one night and i told her two thousand and eight when my husband came home early he was for the clothes then i was about we later found out what happened that night that nineteen year old brandon was just a witness he agreed to testify in court against the other two he was there to witness the crime as part of a gang initiation this gang required all of their members to induct a violent crime but random explained it was just supposed to be a robbery it was never supposed to be more than that the shooter was fearful at the time just fired into the window and with one shot catherine was killed the twenty one year olds yonder he was the driver he had an array of different violent crimes he also agreed to testify but there was already a warrant out for as a rast and he was very quickly try and satin had no family in his life sometimes he lived with his aunt and sometimes he lived with his grandma i surmised the fact that the gang that he was going to be initiated into was very not his family restaurant the media was having a field day there was a memorial in the parking lot people were coming to the right side just to take us out of the scene of the murder versus that actually coming in to eat and to try to tire you  going to take to rome back with him out of state to stars like over and there wasn't much hope to be had that was my glimmer of hope i thought about and now he was facing numerous charges numerous possible crimes there was no redemption there was no one saying in the choir our son's legacy was gone our business is gone and my last glimmer of hope faded into the darkness to hear my story with you so in two thousand and ten we have began the journey to start a high profile very successful mobile advertising company and before i universities or all the mercies are sponsored by the government so what that means is whenever the professors decide to go on strike it creates a backlog of students it's about time i finished high school there was a backlog of three academic years before i went to university and so my parents were very supportive of education a big big believe in education so they sponsored my exams taking the i c t and i applied to a few schools in the u s and calvin college was the only and being a good catholic boy and listen to my mom and i came to michigan into calvin college so tell me how you started out a little rocky what i mean by that is as part of my application process i was supposed to come work at the computer lab accounting but when i got there there were no spots left for me so i began working services and spent a lot of my time working as a janitor and then i kind of lucky break i got a call from the computer lab in a spot it opened up and i could work there so this was around one thousand nine hundred eighty around when the dot com bubble was frightening and h t m l websites designed were really taking off and apparently i had a knack for it so i started designing websites for professors and for departments at calvin i was getting paid for it and i thought hate this is really cool i could carve a leech here and so i kept doing that when i was a calvin so fast forward in two thousand and nine i just got to marry i had spent the last eight years working at jo controls and johnson controls had given me a green card and i'd given them eight years of my life but i was getting ready to start an m b a program at northwestern and in chicago and part of my application process was this very see that my father had implanted  me in my application as i said i was coming to learn about businesses and to start a high growth business and positively impact my community so i decided to start taking classes that piqued my interest and one of those classes was focused on we my class i happened to be partnered with a group of four guys who i didn't know and it turned out that something that we shared in common was that living social in groupon really fleecing small businesses and we were going to stop it so we went out into open stand and started talking to city city officials we started our own business owners students shoppers to try to find out what they liked and didn't like about the whole groupon and discounting experience through that we found our ideal customer it was in the shoppers it was in the business owners but there was a role in the community and in many communities in illinois that existed before these digital companies came out and what their role was was to advertise and market businesses within the specific downtown community so that was awesome for us because we had found our customer and so with the class we worked with this customer and develop an app for the city of evanston for the businesses in evanston and by the end of the first quarter we had one hundred businesses listed in the air and we demo it to city officials to businesses to much praise and  success our customer talked to all their peers in illinois and they were all gung ho about what we had built by the end of the second quarter we had over three businesses in the app and things were looking really really really positive needless to say we got an a in the class and it was around graduation time and i thought to myself hey this is why i came to business school and i really really want to continue this so i gathered my team of three other people so we're four in total and i said hey guys i think there is a future here and i want to do this full time would you come join me and to my astonishment they all said yes and all of them declined their full time offers to go work for bigger companies to come on this journey with me now on the home front we had to keep the lights on and the job that my wife kim was employed could barely help us sustain that and so kim and i had a discussion i said hey you know when i was a g c i i tried to save as much as i could and i have seventy thousand dollars in my phone here account and i really believe in this company so i think we should use that to support us now the rational brain in my head said austin that is really stupid because you're losing out on compounding interest then the rational intrapreneur in my brain kicked said well your company is going to follow the typical hockey stick growth that silicon valley companies take and if ideas you'd have sold the business you'd have made eight hundred grand so this is a no brainer and so i convinced can and you're probably know the answer to this by now we dip into their retirement savings account in order to grow the business we needed to raise a seed round so what that means is we need to go find some enjoy investors to help because of the company and that was my job so we went out raised about one hundred ten thousand dollars and we had a team together and we built an app we built it we actually finished all the features and we're having a lot of success we had about a thousand businesses in the app at that point following this we decided to apply to and were accepted into the premiere tech incubator in chicago eight hundred seventy one and this was a really really solid validation for our team because we're surrounded by a lot of successful intrapreneur is a lot people and they were really really great in terms of inspiring us to move forward so that we realize that in order for users to take advantage of the apps that we're building we needed an app that was specific for phone and an app that was specific for android so what that meant was based on the amount of money that was coming in from our current customers we needed to go out and raise a venture capital around about a million dollars so we could hire a full time i phone developer and a full time android developer because those apps work differently so that began my other journey of fund raising probably talked to over fifteen venture capitalists i was pitching constantly between that i was going back and forth to northwest university to share the story about how we would build a start up to teach classes on that so that was a very very busy time in my life now talking of v c s and fundraising it's one of the hardest things i've ever done in my life and if you work with me you know i can take a lie but this was really really tough and i heard answers ranging from why didn't you come back to us in a few months when you gain some more traction to you guys are really trying to solve a market problem for a two sided market that's very difficult to scale so ty we can do that other comment i heard this was just one of them was you're black you think you're going to succeed at this another comment was you're not good looking enough to be a c e o you name it i heard it forward six months later we still had to raise the venture round and our funds were rapidly dwindling that point in time we had about thirty thousand dollars in the bank and two of my full time employees needed to support their families so they decided to take full time offers but i don't again and i really escalated my commitment to the idea of becoming a successful entrepreneur and bringing that into the community in which i live and i was always thinking about my own country so what i did was i said ok we have thirty thousand dollars i'm going to hire a developer we're going to change our strategy we're going to build one app that can serve both platforms and then when we come up with a new feature or fix a bug we only have to do it once and it works for all the apps and the whole idea behind that was that i will be working just well enough to buy has enough time to fundraise boy was i unique but take for example in notification feature when you get into a feature a text message you get a banner that comes down from the top of your phone and you get a little icon on the app icon that counts up that says how many messages that how many messages you've had this decision to go with one platform completely changed all that so it's an example when they are apps into a notification you never saw a banner come from the top you never saw a number increase on the icon you had to open up the app go into unification and then you see the messages in there i'm a software developer and i know that is a terrible user experience and our end customers months from that we had two employees left i was myself and a partner of mine we have five thousand dollars left in the bank and we had three suitors who literally wanted to pay us pennies on the  wrote a letter to our into investor is saying we're closing down the business and i remember thinking to myself maybe they were right all along maybe i am worthless thank you good evening my name is holder those of you that know me are probably now expecting a powerpoint presentation but i was just reminded last night again there is no slides tonight so this is going to be interesting so i was reflecting on my past failures in the past few weeks that was a very interesting journey i realized as well as thinking of these failure is and there has been plenty my biggest fears had less to do with something i did or didn't do something that went wrong or some mistake i made they had more to do with my explorations in life and how these aligned with the people around me and how i dealt with the conflicts resulting from that so sometimes it's less about what you do or don't do not that she wanted another son i already had two older brothers but she was convinced that my life would have been so much easier if i was just a boy for the long as i didn't see that i thought my challenge was only being the youngest but i also thought if i just try hard enough i'm going to be able to keep up with the older boys and maybe i'm even going to be able to be the best of them so clearly growing up there's been a few bumps in the rote as i was wearing the clothes from my brother so i had scratches and bruises and i did fairly regularly to keep up with the older boys but again i thought i just have to try hard enough and then i'm going to be one of them the first came around the birthday of my best friend back then you will guess it was a boy and his mother thought this is no place for a little girl now i was angry i was furious i had no interest in playing tea party or playing with dolls or some like that i wanted to be with the boys and go on their adventures and there was always some sort of trouble that they would get in and that was so exciting and i wanted to be part of that and i was allowed to come i was really angry so fast forward to twenty some years i'm now working at a technology company typically the only woman and typically the youngest but again that didn't bother me i was convinced i only have to work hard enough and then i'm going to be accepted as one of the boys and me i can even become one of the best of them right so there was this project that already started out really challenging here we go again unfortunately the project went on and the attitude of the colleagues and changed no matter how hard i tried to prove to them that i was one of them i would never become one of their buddies but again that didn't discourage me i thought i just have to work hard enough and then i'm alternately going to prove to them that i'm worthy and i'm going to be one of them so i work day and night through all the barriers and challenges and  achieve some really good results at the end of the project the next thing that happens is that my boss claimed all of my complements for him self that really irritated me and in the same time frame there was this male peer in the team that everyone admired he was so confident and he had so much drive he would regularly stand up for himself and for his belief and everyone just thought he was the next leader so i watched him and thought i'm going to do it like him i'm going to stay in my man and i'm going to fight for my reputation now that didn't go so well i was patted on the back index i'd never heard of that before was that i mean why was i being compared to women and as far as i was concerned there was no other woman in the department so who was i being compared to and then and then hold on what was that word pushy why was the same behavior that this man called it demonstrated and mire it as being driven and and confident and self assured and i was doing the exact same thing and it was criticised as being pushy or aggressive or impatient that was really frustrating i was working really hard i was  great results and i was trying to do the same behavior as my male colleagues and then criticize ford we're replaying by the same rules the heart is failure though in this time frame came from my personal life my husband and i decided on early on in our in our marriage that we would spot roles he's a loving mother and i tried to be a decent father and it works great if you're convinced sometimes dads are just the better moms and i thought you know what only friends and family they're going to be so happy for me that i get to live my purpose in my passion and my talent but that was in the case in fact especially in the early years of our marriage there was a lot of criticism love doubt a lot of questions concerns one of the typical question was about well being of my children hunty suffering from your career or the wall being of my husband and in fact i do believe that there is some bets out there going when he would finally leave me he didn't but this was tough it was it's one thing to not fit in perfectly at work it's a whole different story if you feel that you're not living up to the expectations of the people that you love i want to live my purpose and passion i was really precious with my career i had a husband that supported me in a fabulous way but all this was happening without the blessing of people that we greatly respected and loved how could i live my life without upsetting them or could i live my life with not upsetting them but upsetting myself the hardest punch though in this timeframe came from my roommate and best friend from back then you have to know she was also a working mother don't feel like eating when you can unlock the door to your fourth story walkup new york city apartment in brooklyn that you run into on line and whose owner isn't picking up his phone and it's midnight and you have your younger brother and is nothing because you have a pit in your stomach the size of eight burgers and even though you're wearing a tank top and a skirt you were hotter than that one time you were at the beach laying out and even squeezing your eyeshot could not keep the sun out enough and you felt your body baking like physically baking you cups and i know you're thinking too i did not leave the key inside i didn't do anything bad even though i could care less about seeing that fountain in central park where they where they filmed their opener to friends and oh my gosh why this store just unlock i've heard the stories you know about you being a mover of the mountains i mean my logical mind always thinks metaphorically but you know what i bet you literally could too i mean have you ever thought that he could literally move a mountain multiple if you want to he came back to work and through those stories with us i remember who you are now so i talk to you with my siblings trying to lock over and over i talk quietly and with with my head bowed thanking you for moving mt everest because with that in holland would just be a traffic nightmare and then i ask you to open the door so in my eyes that i say to my siblings nothing i take the key out i put the key and i turn it i push on the door nothing again i take the key out i put the key and i turn the key i turn the key the other way push the door nothing i turn the key the other way can push the door nothing i wait the sweats out of my eyes the way my hands on my skirt sonny deep breath take the key out put the key in turn it one way push the door nothing to the other way city in jesus get my sibling safely inside get myself safely through and then lock the door behind me two hours and ninety five dollars later a locksmith comes he walks up to the door and i can't really speak so i smile laugh this relief type laugh so my siblings tell me to go inside they'll pay the man and walk him down and i take those first steps into the open door and bree falling to mine as my face presses to the wood floors i have been dreaming about for hours here now i find him not in  but in the fact that i was never going to be able to open it on my own so now instead of falling falling to my knees at your feet i surrender thank you about in the year two thousand my wife and i started a design studio about how your studio i was just myself i didn't have a big huge significant reputation on what the studio should look like in the future what it was going to be what it was going to do and we got together and said and i don't not sure how many of you know what   that was that was a big hairy audacious goal and if you know anything about industry in this particular case there were at least fifteen or twenty other studios in front of us and  so early on we we set out to do what we're going to do but just like give you an idea of what going through a start of biz is like in this one particular day i was still  the only designer and we were trying to recruit another designer first designer and that particular day again getting out of bed is very hard for a designer you've got to go sell something so you know time is wearing down and brain in your mental mental state about every day ahead of yourself something i would rather just drop things but this particular day i get a phone call calls me and says i had the kids and we own a building back then and said the furnace blew up and the whole building shook and oh yeah ok it out and two thousand and seven in the spring we had just liners illustrators interaction designers graphic designers my own makers and we were just starting a rock a little bit right just start to get traction and then chrysler and all that what they knew that something big and bad was coming so what they did is they they they cut off all their suppliers to  including us we're not doing business with us anymore we're you know discount we we've got we have we're going down for the count for a while and sure enough  that was our first hurdle in our first downturn right so i got home my goodness a what are you going to do with ten levon twelve people when ninety percent of your business is  e all right said to myself we've got them right where you want to get and i have to say that because it's not come from the military and there's no such thing as as giving up there's no such thing as failure that was not an option so we hung on tight we prayed we we did everything we could i didn't and eight and just what happened in two thousand  there was twenty five percent filled are hardly anybody around you can get in that a discount it was just like it was eerie but it was just hanging on your life mean just looking at each other you kind of in shock right here in shock because everybody is losing their jobs and you're hanging on and just kind of scratching your head and that big hairy audacious goal of trying to be their number one studio we're getting closer and closer in two thousand and one reason why there are only two or three studios left in the company we're targeting now forgive me there there were none there were any studios in front of us they had a e gone out of business automotive clients and we were just rocking i mean everybody a lot of people who remain or stayed in business they came back strong right because we survived the the  everything's perfect one thing one thing was kind of happening and i was personally losing energy i'm a very lively person my attitude is i was losing energy die in january i got to meet you but don't tell anybody is that i doctor ordered a blood test months before and i failed to go to the you know a year yes think about it first thing you think about is your family and you think about your relationship with god things like that  lord well if you take me now and i'm going to be able to you see here to see that accomplishment if it is soul then it is so ok i believe well i didn't believe the first whisper i said in my listening to things so later on that afternoon i hear that we're spirit when nobody around you can be ok guys out back i'll pick you up back that we nobody sees me and so i picked up the two guys that were going to make a presentation with halfway to the crime which is an hour and a half where i got my i pad started hurting and i go we we became their number one house or studio where designers illustrator models interaction designers  you know you felt the competition you felt confident you felt bless you know a little my kid from texas be able to do something like this  o it was supposed to be happy ray so what else could go wrong what can go wrong now we met our goal everything's fine everybody's happy i was looking forward to that ok we can do that however one more phase to this story is that in the spring  and twelve you get a phone call from the client say oh we're we're going through some changes here in our company and just hang on hang on tight we'll let you know and we'll let you know what we're going to do now what's going on so we had other clients to but we were all extremely invested in this particular company and they were bested in us as well their business very diverse thing their whole division whatever you want to call it ten thousand people whatever that is and they were there were going to need our studio anymore they were going to need their studio either so everybody was just going to be spread out all the systems of partnerships with the everything that we have been developing for the last ten years was about to go up in smoke right is just so you know i feel i had this at this point in this yeah thank you russia's back because this is very traumatic and a lot of work that i do i have to understand that the truth as never in your face i was about three years old and my mom was getting beat by my father she got beat constantly by my father and i witnessed it a lot of times room and slid under the bed why i completely bitter it for another hour i didn't see my mouth for two weeks two weeks after that she was in the hospital years later she decided that she was going to leave and then asked me what i want to go what am i but that's not no way so now we have to move out of the house that he was trying to burn down after we left we moved across the way and to another neighborhood and now we've got to walk into a bad neighborhood just to get to school the second day of school we got caught in that alley and some do is try to wait my two sisters older sisters luckily we had some friends in the neighborhood and a parent came out and stopped it but i swore and that i was going to protect my and so i joined the same game not swore that i wouldn't be in because of my father they gave me a gun there's two ways to get initiated in the black gates of the cycles one you had to commit a violent crime two you have to get beat by twelve other guys they gave me a gun and friend of mine who went to go shoot someone because i had to kill someone they got to pick out who i was i walked up to this guy that they pointed out had a gun to his face i had five of the guys behind me telling me to shoot  but i had to be what they wanted me to do just so i could survive and every time i wouldn't kill no one i got beat by the same people who told me who told me it was my family do you deal with that was to ride on ailes so that's what we did we were on nails and we went too far one time we wanted to another gangs neighborhood and they thought we was there to do it here and so as we i knew then that i was the next guy's i don't know what happened they let me go there's no way they should let me go i just witnessed them kill one of my partners but again law i got to come and retaliate with other people lord knows i only know how i may get home walking thirteen blocks dressed in all blue and i'll read neighborhood i couldn't say anything because if i did i would be killed by my own game start for me nobody knows me i can be a kid again i'm thirteen years in years oh now when i got there i didn't know what to expect i walked into a school that was done and what a race war the blacks was against the whites and i wasn't liked by white hears and i also won't lie  black kids you know why because my mom's new boyfriend is a deputy sheriff so now i'm not accepted by anyone and now me and my two older sisters are getting jumped every day the only thing that saved me for a little bit was break dancing in a couple commercials young girl sent bad he was playing basketball he said boy you good need to come to start church with me practice so hard i broke my arm and missed the trials he won star search bar same me a sport that i can play with all this anger and hurt people and i get in trouble so i started playing football but at the same time i was selling the smok i was living two separate lives the sports guy and this drug guy and the streets had a hold on me the streets made me feel safe i lost all my scholarships and my two sisters came over and said hey we don't come to get you this we can why don't you come let us take you and let us help you you can go  college you can be somebody you can be the first person in our family to go to college and be something so i said ok it's a friday night i'm sitting at the table and i'm waiting for my sisters in the night is that the door ever to trust anyone she said i'm don when she said i was done that last time i knew i had lost the only person i gave a damn about me so i got in my car