Read here the full transcript of Jay Bailey’s talk titled “How Entrepreneurs Can Unlock Their Full Potential” at TED Talks 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
A New Definition of Hell
I’ve got this new definition of hell that I’m still testing out. My theory is this: when we leave this earth, the vast majority of us are actually going to take the elevator up, but when we get there, whatever God we believe in is literally going to show us every single thing that was possible in our lives while on earth had we only believed.
See, our biggest regrets are never rooted in our actions or the things that we did do. It’s in our inactions, the things that we did not do or even try, and it’s usually because we didn’t believe we could. “I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, I’m not rich enough, I didn’t have time.” Beliefs are generally formed by two things: either our experiences, our environment, our inferences, or our own deductions, or by accepting what other people tell us to be true. And most of our core beliefs are formed when we’re children.
Childhood Entrepreneurship
Now, I was a horrible student. I was branded gifted in kindergarten, I was a really smart kid, but I hated school. But I was always enterprising. I was the kid, y’all, that used to make popsicles in the ice tray and sell them for a dime on my driveway. I was so cold with it, y’all, that I used to charge people 50 cents to fight in my backyard so they wouldn’t get in trouble getting fighting in the front yard, and that is a true story.
I love the transaction. And I was riding my bike to the barbershop one day, and I’ll never forget this day, I was 11 years old, riding my bike to the barbershop, and you got to understand, when I grew up in the ’80s, you could have put a Bentley next to a Ferrari, and I would have taken a Ford Mustang GT 5.0 every day of the week.
A Life-Changing Encounter
So as I pull up to the barbershop on my bike, I’m frozen in my tracks, I’m talking deer in headlights. Why? Because oh my God, there it was, a black-on-black-on-black convertible Mustang GT 5.0 parked illegally in front of the barbershop, and I lost my mind. I ran into the barbershop and screamed, “I’m 11, whose car is that?” And so I see my barber in the corner of my eye just chilling in the cut just, then he gave me the nod.
That’s the Universal Soul Brothers symbol for “that’s me.” And so because of my environment, my examples, my inferences, my deductions, there was only one thing that he could have possibly done to afford that car. And because it was so normalized in my community, I didn’t think anything of it. So when I got in his chair, as matter-of-factly as I’m asking about the weather, I asked him, “John, I didn’t know you were a dope boy.”
Clicked, turned off the clippers, screamed at him, “Shut the F up,” and turn around and count how many chairs you see in this shop. I said, “I don’t know, 10?” He said, “Well, each one of these barbers pays me $50 a week to cut hair at my shop. Jay, you’re smart, do the math.”
So little Jay Bailey started tabulating. And he stopped me. He said, “You got to realize, I got two more shops just like this, finish the math.” So now things got interesting. Remember, this is the early ’80s, and I’m an 11-year-old kid, and I had never seen zeros like this. Zero, zero, zero, comma, zero. And then he said it. He said, “I am an entrepreneur.”
“I own this business, and I own those other two shops. And what you need to do is go find you something you love and go make money doing it.” Two very powerful things happened in that one moment. For the first time in my life, I had ever heard the word entrepreneur. And it’s what I had always been, but I didn’t have a name for it. And so literally, once I started to understand what entrepreneur really meant, my life started to make sense, and I had direction. And the second thing was that nobody had ever explained to me the whole concept of ownership. And those two things fundamentally changed my trajectory.
The Power of Exposure and Opportunity
I can’t understate or overstate the power of that chance encounter that lit a fire in the belly of an 11-year-old kid that became a 12-year-old business owner who now stands before you leading the largest center in the world dedicated to growing, scaling, and developing black businesses. Touching thousands of entrepreneurs, wow.
And so for what we did there, and for now touching thousands of entrepreneurs, I knew that we lose GDP every year because the brilliant ideas that reside on the south side of the tracks of every city in America never reach the marketplace because they don’t believe they belong. And I’m also a firm believer that the only difference between that north side of the tracks and that south side of the tracks is access, opportunity, and exposure. And that’s it.
Innovation in Adversity
You want to talk about innovation? Show me somebody on the planet more innovative than a single mother with two kids making $17,000 a year. The way she thinks, the way she problem solves, her grit, her determination, her resilience. How is she able to smile and still spread joy to her kids at Christmas when there are no gifts under the tree and there is literally no food in the pantry? But somehow she still makes it work. How does she do it? In this example, she feels like a warrior, but what does she believe when she stares in the mirror?
Drug dealers.