How To Be Rich, Ninja – The Guessing Game

Most people think that they second-guess themselves and their idea; however, I believe that we first guess ourselves. In other words, before our ideas even become a reality, we kill them because we begin to think too much. We begin a guessing game and we start to guess about the customer and guess about whether [...]

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LOS ANGELES - OCTOBER 31:  (U.S. TABLOIDS OUT)  Models prepare backstage at the Martin Martin fashion show during the Mercedes-Benz Shows LA Spring 2004 Collections at The Avenue in the Standard Hotel October 31, 2003 in Los Angeles, California.  (Photo By Mark Mainz/Getty Images)
Most people think that they second-guess themselves and their idea; however, I believe that we first guess ourselves. In other words, before our ideas even become a reality, we kill them because we begin to think too much. We begin a guessing game and we start to guess about the customer and guess about whether someone wants the product or service. This is why we need to simply put our ideas forward, handle the criticism, and keep steppin.

The people who have become a success did it without guessing if people would like or approve of their ideas and dreams. If I really cared what people thought or began first guessing what I think people will think about this book, I wouldn’t have wrote it at all. You need some creative tactics for first guessing yourself and thinking that no one will want what you have to offer.

Here it is: if you’re going to guess about things guess that people will love your idea. Guess that they will buy 3 Million copies of whatever it is you’re selling. Guess that they’ll love your album,
love your skills, love the way that you do hair and love your services. Guess that eventually the entire planet will begin to love exactly what you do and begin to not be able to live without what
you sell.

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No Nicca Left Behind – Original Poem

most times, these public skool systems don’t give a shyt about yung niccas growin’ up in the hood they’d rather see u in the mud or on deathrow with a lethal injection sending poison to the brain either that or you’d already have been declared insane in this muhphuckin’ game of strife or rather life [...]

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most times, these public skool systems don’t give a shyt about yung niccas growin’ up in the hood they’d rather see u in the mud or on deathrow with a lethal injection sending poison to the brain

either that or you’d already have been declared insane in this muhphuckin’ game of strife or rather life

if u learn slow, they’ll place a lil nicca in special education and hold yo ass back so that you lose a stack of money in this game related U.S. hustle where you need a ton of muscle

and I mean mental and econ muscle and might where the power is to keep up the fight of income edu.K. Shun

better learn how to harness this game of making money and not be caught up in a lame existence of non-power where you can only hope and pray to get a shower one day off the mean streets of Brooklyn

where it’s each man for himself carrying change in a can of tin only other U.S. solution: army or jail

these type of stories only niccas tell

come on nicca, ride with the west coast rydah the underground millionaire is here

From the UMM forthcoming album by Gerard Spinks East of Groove Street copyright 2006, Gerard Spinks Publishing copyright 2006 The Underground Millionaires Militia

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The Most Trusted Name In Urban Content

I thank all of you as we are now over 150,000 readers strong this year….

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We truly value our readers and henceforth, we take serious pride in delivering content to you. We want to inform, entertain, educate, and provide a real value add to your Internet experience. I came up with this tag line to service my readers because I look at this blog as my business not just a way to get quick hits.

I sincerely value your time, your energy, your comments, and even if you’re just passive reading and browsing, I’m okay with that. It’s kind of like a newsstand at the UndagroundMilli. Pick up an article and read and keep moving. I thank all of you as we are now over 150,000 readers strong this year and headed for 1,000,000. I appreciate every single one of you.

Making Money In Sports Part Deuce

Therefore, you will need to either adjust your lifestyle after sports
or you will need to ensure that the big stuff is paid off…

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This is a continuation of my blog post http://www.undagroundmilli.com/2010/07/11/how-to-deal-with-sports-money/.

How To Be Rich, Nigga by Gerard D. Spinks

How To Be Rich, Nigga by Gerard D. Spinks


If you purchase the mansion for $2Million cash money, you actually will only have $5 Million left. $5 Million dollars stretched out over the next 40
years of your life is not a ton of money. It’s certainly better than the average salary from a job but you don’t want to even consider earning a salary from a job after earning so much money from athletics. If you average your $5Mil over your 40 years after sports life, you will actually earn roughly $125,000 annually.

Therefore, you will need to either adjust your lifestyle after sports
or you will need to ensure that the big stuff is paid off during your high-income earning years. Pay off the house and the cars. But keep in mind that property taxes on a million dollar+ mansion can easily exceed $50,000 annually themselves. Don’t forget the property taxes. You can get foreclosed
on these.

Make sure your money earns more money by making wise investment decisions and working with a competent investment adviser.
I personally like seeing our peeps make a ton of money from playing sports. Sports are the fabric of American society and actually bonds people
together. Keep playing and keep saving and plan for your young and fun life after sports.

Making Money In Hip Hop Part Deuce

Artist A&R has been dead for about 10 years now as far as hip hop goes ….

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Continued from my blog post “Can You Make Money In Hip Hop”

…Most of all, you need to not only be diligent and persistent but you must get your music produced and you must learn to market and promote your
music yourself and ultimately get your music into large retail record stores or small community record stores. Record labels need to see that you know how to do this yourself and you will have leverage in negotiating your record deal if you walk in the door and tell them that you’ve already sold 100,000 or whatever number of units yourself.

Any of the artists turned executives mentioned above learned to sell music on their own without help from anybody, quiet as kept. Each person that created wealth did it by selling and moving a massive amount of units. When they went in to negotiate with the label, they simply needed help in distribution but did not need help marketing and promoting their album projects. They learned where their customers were and how to reach those customers and put together a plan to sell to those customers.

When you go into the label with this track record, trust, the whole nature of the conversation changes. You become respected when you tell them that you’ve moved 100,000 CD’s or downloads at a wholesale cost of $5 on your own. You’ve shown them that you know what it takes to move the records on your own and you understand the industry and how the retail end of the industry works. The music label executives want people that know how to sell, bottom-line. They no longer and have not wanted for quite some time
any artists that they have to teach, mold, and manage. Artist A&R has been dead for about 10 years now as far as hip hop goes and no labels including Bad Boy wants to micro-manage any individual.

Come to Diddy, Russell, Jay-Z, or Master P with some track record and cats will listen to you. Come in there talking about you think that you can sell based upon your style and they’ll show you 2,000 other artists that responded in that same way to them that month alone. I encourage artists to keep trying but start to think independently and begin to not only create your CD and body of work but also start finding out how to get it into stores across the U.S. and even in London and Japan.

Can You Make Money In Hip Hop?

Making money and building wealth in the music industry although widely publicized by the likes of P. Diddy and Master P, is not easy.

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How To Be Rich, Nigga by Gerard D. Spinks

How To Be Rich, Nigga by Gerard D. Spinks


From my book “How To Be Rich, Nicca” –
Making money and building wealth in the music industry although widely publicized by the likes of P. Diddy and Master P, is not easy. If you really
observe and study how these individuals made large sums of wealth from hip hop and the music industry, it is due to their diversification of products and the ownership of those products.

Cats didn’t just create a couple of records and get rich real fast.
P. Diddy, Master P, Russell Simmons, Cash Money Millionaires, and the other handful of artists turned record executives took a great deal of time and study to actually get to the point where they were earning a great deal of money from record sales. They did it by first owning their publishing. What this means for the novice and experienced folks is that they created a
company first and foremost, actually wrote the lyrics to most of their songs, copyrighted those lyrics, and owned the publishing rights to those
lyrics.

When I talk to people in the hip hop industry, most think that it is easy to come up in the hip hop game and most do not even understand the
inner workings of the business. The Hip Hop Music Recording Industry is just like any other industry. It is based upon product sales, marketing, and distribution. In order for you artists to come up, the first thing that you must
do is learning how to write and compose your own songs. You must then copyright your music and all of the lyrics before you approach anyone
in the industry.

How To Be Rich, Nicca – The Come Up – Part Deuce

I would meet Master P, JT the Bigga Figga, E-40, Rappin 4-Tay, Coco Quick, and a lot of cats who would go down to Phunky Phat to get their CD cover art work

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I would hire Underwood Works to do all of my graphics and go there almost 2-3 times per week to proof the work that they would do. I would pay for my designs out of my paycheck from my job that I had working in downtown Oakland, CAon 22nd and Webster at Shared Medical Systems. When I would show up at Underwood Works, which would eventually become known as Phunky Phat Graph-X, I would meet niggas that would be trying to do the same thing as me and be independent and push their music out to the world.

I would meet Master P, JT the Bigga Figga, E-40, Rappin 4-Tay, Coco Quick, and a lot of cats who would go down to Phunky Phat to get their CD cover art work, posters, and other graphics work done by Phunky Phat Graph-X. I would go on to see first hand the work that was taken to build and grow No Limit Records that the world now knows today as earning and grossing over $250 Million dollars.

When we were all coming up though, nobody even dreamed of being able to make it up as high as No Limit has. Master P was struggling to get things together just as we all were. He was living up in Richmond, CA which is a crazy environment and even the record store that he had up there was in the cut. He and I also sold music to Ts Waiuzi Record Store in East Oakland near Eastmont Mall. Again, no one knew that people would blow up the way some folks did. The point is that everyone was striving and driving to move ahead regardless of their situation. We didn’t care if we didn’t have the
money or the banks wouldn’t loan us any cash to move our company’s ahead. We didn’t care if we didn’t have enough money to get the thing looking excellent from day one.

P rounded up his brothers and launched The Real Untouchables after a bullshit deal with Jason Blaine over at InaMinute Records up in Emeryville, CA. I knew Jason Blaine from a
function that Lachlan McIntyre, owner of 4080 Magazine threw in Berkeley. Lachlan was also trying to come up and created a hip-hop magazine that focused on hard core West Coast Hip Hop.

How I Survived The Great Recession

The other and last thing is diversification. I do not have only one source of income.

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Many people ask me how did I personally survive this great recession or great depression and how I kept my company afloat during this crazy time. Well, first of all, it wasn’t and isn’t easy. There has been some crazy low times in business over the last 6 years to keep it completely 1 Hunid with you. Secondly, my firm, Spinks Technologies, serves a niche technological market called middleware application development. Some people refer to it as EDI, others as EAI, and still others as Service Oriented Architecture.

But, forget all those big technological words for a minute. I survived by faith, first and foremost in God. No joking. No kidding. No hype. No bullshit. Faith is what pulled me through in some difficult times. Then, I learn constantly and learn new technologies, new software, and new methods. I am a classically trained software engineer but most importantly, I’m a business man. So, to that end, I always look for opportunities and not just to work at a job.

What has saved me is that constant looking for opportunities and the creation of opportunities myself. So, the niche market that I serve helped since not many people know how to do what we do from a technological standpoint. Faith is what kept my mind and spirit right in difficult times. Constant praying, affirming, and reading the Book of Job helped immensely. Having good friends and family around me and not isolating myself also aided in helping me through the recession. No amount of money beats family and friends that surround you in tough times.

The other and last thing is diversification. I do not have only one source of income. I have 4 ways to get paid and four different companies to aid in doing this. I’m not saying that all of them have me wearing the greatest diamond studded chain but they make money so that if one goes away, the other is there to replace it. This is the key to sustainability tomorrow. Even if you’re not in a position to do this today, plan for other sources of income tomorrow when you get on your feet.

How To Be Rich, Nicca – Tales Of The Come Up

What this created was the independent rap music scene in Oakland and artists started putting out music themselves.

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How To Be Rich, Nigga by Gerard D. Spinks

How To Be Rich, Nigga by Gerard D. Spinks


You might say to yourself that you’ve been trying for a long time
and nothing has ever worked and nothing has ever come to you. Here’ s a little story of a come up that I’d like to share. In the mid 1990′s, I decided to start a clothing company called Tribe Zulu Sports. The clothing company featured a line of baseball caps, t-shirts, sweatshirts, and other stuff. I figured that it would be successful because at the time Cross Colors was widely successful and on a very good path to earn up to $50 Million annually.

I launched the company and began contacting a graphics company that could help me develop funky t-shirt designs and not just normal designs. I contacted a company in East Oakland called Underwood Works. The owner was a young brova like myself who was hungry and starting his own company too. Thomas Underwood was his name and he and his brother Tracy started the company and began making Phunky graphic designs for the burgeoning rap music market that was developing in Oakland.

At the time, MC Hammer and Too Short had put Oakland on the map but the rap music industry was going through a lot of change around 1995-1998, similar to today. The music industry felt that rap music was dead and that there was no real money in rap music since there was so much written about East Coast
and West Coast gangsta rap. So, the music industry stopped signing artists and no one could get a music deal from any labels down in Los Angeles, CA.

What this created was the independent rap music scene in Oakland and artists started putting out music themselves. Since I had my clothing company in East Oakland, off of High Street and
Macarthur, I would interact with a lot of these artists who were trying to come up. I decided to give my clothes to the artists during their video shoots and I would get noticed along the way.
We were just all-hungry niggas trying to come up. This story will continue in another post to follow…

The Ballers Guide To Major Figure$ – The Intro

The Baller’s Guide to MAJOR Figure$ is a follow up book to my first release How To Be Rich, Nigga.

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The Ballers Guide To Major Figures

The Ballers Guide to MAJOR Figure$


The Baller’s Guide to MAJOR Figure$ is a follow up book to my first release How To Be Rich, Nigga. The first book spoke generally
about what it takes to become financially wealthy and spoke in general terms about putting a plan in action to do so.
This second body of work dives more into the detail about creating the plan and working a plan to pursue and create wealth for you.

Capturing wealth is not easy, as we all know and is especially difficult for African-Americans since there are many factors in our way economically to even begin to think about the pursuit of wealth. Many of our families have taught us historically that money is the root of all evil. In fact, my mother taught me this and would use church to re-enforce this fact of hers. I don’t fault my moms and don’t fault anyone who thinks like this because to a certain extent money does not create happiness. I have learned this lesson first hand as well.

In some cases, you will need to create a new you, a different you in order to create and build wealth. You will need to come to know and believe that wealth is necessary while we are
living on this planet to sustain ourselves and make a decent life for ourselves here in America.

All posts are original content by Gerard Spinks Publishing, LLC, Atlanta, GA USA 678-993-7743