Run Your Own Business: Lessons from Biggie | Marc Eckō | Skillshare

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Run Your Own Business: Lessons from Biggie

teacher avatar Marc Eckō, Founder, Ecko Unltd.

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

6 Lessons (49m)
    • 1. Trailer

    • 2. Introduction

    • 3. Ten Crack Commandments #1–5

    • 4. Ten Crack Commandments #6–10

    • 5. Ten Crack Commandments: Summary

    • 6. Finding and Presenting Your Mnemonic Device

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About This Class

In this class you will learn my tips, tricks and mantras for running a business, inspired by Biggie's Crack Commandments . These include:

  • Management skills
  • Enabling ideas
  • Refining your personal brand 

One of the most important lessons I have learned through two decades of building my own businesses is that wisdom and guidance can be found in the most unlikely of places. As a result, I've structured this Skillshare class on my principles of business around the legendary hip-hop track "Ten Crack Commandments" by Biggie Smalls. On the surface it would appear that Biggie is rapping about illegal drug sales, but the knowledge dropped in this song actually applies to all businesses no matter the industry.

This class is for anyone from a young entrepreneur venturing into your first business endeavor to an experienced CEO running a company with thousands of employees. Trust me, you will all take away some information that will improve your business. 


**A winner has been selected to recieve a $5,000 endowment for submitting the most compelling business commandments. Skillshare is no longer distributing promotional codes in exchange for proof of purchase of "Unlabel".**

Meet Your Teacher

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Marc Eckō

Founder, Ecko Unltd.


Marc Ecko founded Ecko Unltd. in 1993 at the age of 20. Since then, he has built a portfolio of successful worldwide companies, including Complex Media, Zoo York, and Marc Ecko Cut and Sew.

Marc recently published "Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out"

About "Unlabel"

"With Unlabel, you will learn how to discover your own voice by overcoming fear and taking action, what it means to deliver on your promises, why failure is essential, how to understand how your product or service makes people feel, and how to recognize if your nostalgia for the past is hampering your ability to envision your future.

Unlabel is a bold and honest approach to building an authentic personal brand, growing a bootstrap start-up into a sustainable business."

Ecko contin... See full profile

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1. Trailer: The 10 Crack Commandments, business principles with Marc Ecko, as inspired by one of the great mnemonic devices of our time, the 10 Crack Commandments. Mnemonic, here is the word "mnemonic". Learning device just helps you retain the information. The gray hair that's under this hat, the scars that you might see, scars that you don't see. For whatever reason, I'm at a place in my life where I want to share what I know. This book, Unlabel, selling you without selling out, I really wrote this as a textbook that I wish I could've bought in college, like a Business 101 for the creative class, those that glean educational pearls from the most unsuspecting of places, right? That's the beauty of Skillshare. That's why here on this platform, pre-order the book on or Send your proof of purchase to us at ecko, E-C-K-O You will then receive a voucher code that could be redeemed at, so you can get my class for free. Skillshare is the promise of the future of where education is going to go and educational curriculum content. I say it all the time, you don't go to school, school comes to you. 2. Introduction: I was at this presentation and there were a series of lectures that were designed for entrepreneurs. It was composed of a lot of academic elites, authors, folks that kind of really own the notion of the entrepreneurial lecture set. I learned some stuff and it was anecdotal. Definitely, I met nice people. But I remember coming home from that trip and listening to my iPod or my iPad or something, and I just happened upon, because I was in the biggie, the Ten Craft Commandments. It occurred to me how that song in a nutshell and those like the short, however many minutes it is, managed to capture a lot of more pertinent, more meaningful inspiration to glean from that actually applied to the things I had hoped to learn at that event that I was at. I get a really great quality deductive reasoning lesson from that record. It's very like Aristotle 101. You find out what it is by asking what it's not and frankly, Unlabel really inspires a lot of the thought process that is informed, this presentation, this lecture that you're about to see. So, my name is Marc Ecko. My brand is Marc Ecko. There's the brand that you perceive. The brand that is my skin to the world and then there's the brand that's inside brand that guts to the skin brand. Over the last 20 years, really, 41 years of my life, I've been nurturing and building. Without getting too much into the backstory of my business, if you'll indulge me for an instant, just so that you have some contexts of who I am. I was born in 1972. In 1993, I left pharmacy school, Rutgers College of Pharmacy, to pursue what had been my vocation, my passion which was airbrushing and painting T-shirts. I had pretty much done that all throughout my high school and college career and was in '93, started to organize it around the Ecko Unlimited brand. There's a picture of me. I'd been airbrushing at the Jack the Rapper Trade Show in Atlanta, Georgia. Here's the products that I'd been making all throughout pretty much from eighth grade through my high school graduation in 1990. Those first few years at Rutgers, I spent a disproportion amount of my time being really entrepreneurial and just hustling T-shirts, and denim jackets, and denim pants throughout my career. As I said, I went to pharmacy school, that's a painting that was actually, I painted that hung in on the walls of the Pharmacy School, the [inaudible] Rutgers College of Pharmacy. Despite being exceptional or relatively exceptional at painting and illustrating, I was really really below average. Well, below average when it came to pharmacy. This is why I decided to drop out. I dropped out of college in '93 when I started the business, really because I checked in somewhere else. I found that in life that often dropouts or tune-outs are usually because they're dropping in or tuning in somewhere else. For me, I knew that this gateway to art would better serve me because it just made me happier than the notion of counting pills and I'm working at a CVS. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but again, I just felt that I'd be very average at applying myself in that fashion. This is the very first T-shirt that was from one of the first ten pages of that first book that I talked about, my black book. I often remind myself to look back at it because it was a T-shirt of a dude smoking a blunt. As people in my sales team or my marketing folks try to challenge me and always reminding me to mainstream your business, I often have to remind them with the very first T-shirt was. It was this sub-culture, counter-culture contexts that really informed the DNA of my brand, and really informs a lot of my philosophy in business which I'm going to share with you today. Those T-shirts led to me wanting to import and produce more sophisticated cut in stone product. I wasn't just contented doing six, or 10, or 12 colored, printed, screen printed T-shirts so I went on to build the brand. Here's images of some of the ad campaigns that it hit back in the day. My very first product where I personally, the mark Ecko, the guy, the guts-to-the-skin brand stepped out from behind the curtain was when in '95, I marketed a video game called "Getting Up" where I went on to tag President George Bush at the time. His Air Force One airplane was still free and you could look at YouTube video up, it was an early viral video pre of the Google acquisition of YouTube. So, viral videos were much different medium back in that day and you can actually get away with getting people to believe and kind of pull hoaxes. Where today, we're also skeptical when we see those sorts of things. We just presume maybe it was produced. It was also around that same period in actually '93 technically where I launched Complex Media and it started as a magazine. Today, it's a men's media platform, all things relevant to male American popular culture. So, the point is that you could say I'm an entrepreneur, right? The word entrepreneur sucks. I do not think of myself as an entrepreneur. I think if we look at the notion of the word entrepreneur, we break up the etymology, it means one who undertakes or manages and assumes the risk of a business or enterprise. But this idea of undertaking just seems like it's more than what I've done. I've struggled with that. I'd like to fancy myself more of an artist, and really because when you study, again the etymology of the root of the word artist, it comes from the root ar-, which means to fit or join together, and I think that's what I've done more and more of them in my life. I've connected the legos, if you will. For whatever reason, the better and different in our culture, we tend to beat the artist out of our students, out of ourselves. Once we retire the crayons in second or third grade, we never looked back on the idea of being an artist. I think, for me, the problem solving mechanisms that column as being an artist, I think are really useful and you needn't to be good at the plastic arts, you needn't be someone who could push around some pixels and vectors, or produce music to declare yourself an artist. There are best practices and working that right side of your brain when problem solving that artists deploy the idea of being an entrepreneur, which is a French word and frankly sucks, fuck that. I fancy myself an artist. 3. Ten Crack Commandments #1–5: I thought I would take you guys, I'll share with you a lesson that's actually not in my book and is here exclusively on Skillshare. I thought we would study today is philosophy maybe. Well, if we're going to study philosophy, I thought what we could do is, we could break down what Aristotle did the best. I mean, Aristotle taught us of deductive reasoning. This idea of the process for reasoning from one or more general statements or premises to reach a logical conclusion like he would say things like all men are mortal. Aristotle is a man, therefore, Aristotle is mortal. I mean, to me, he is a great poet and philosopher and lyricist but I thought what we could do today and the intent of this class is to try to draw inspiration from a more culturally relevant philosopher and poet. The one that I wanted to draw our reference from is Biggie Smalls aka Christopher Wallace. On March 25th, 1997 he released the Ten Crack Commandments. That record produced by DJ Premier is a great tool to apply deductive reasoning to, and at the same time, will act as a great learning device in extrapolating some of my philosophies in business and this certainly for me has been useful in reminding myself of the important things in business for better or worse. So, we'll get right into it, with number one. Never let no one know how much dough you hold. Well, there's the obvious notion of what downside comes with letting people know how much dough you hold. You end up looking like this idiot here, jealousy, right. I mean, is that what Biggie is talking about? To me, that's the Mickey Mouse idea of what he's implying. Mickey Mouse money, if you will. What he's really talking about here is a tenant for me that's been really important in business. To remind us to stop counting, to quit counting, because culturally, this is something that we have a tendency to do. When we are on that journey to build something entrepreneurial and hopefully successful, we end up counting our money, our grades, if you're in school, you're wins, your losses, your likes, your followers, and your friends. For me, this notion that X plus Y equals Z because supposedly, numbers don't lie but people's emotional state about numbers have them not tell the explicit truth either and I think that's very, very important. So, stop counting. There are no straight lines in nature. I challenge you to go outside into the woods and try to find a series of rocks or trees actually organizing themselves in a straight line. They don't exist. There are no straight lines. So, why don't we manage and design our expectations in this manner? You're getting yourself caught up in the downside of this culture of counting and projecting what you have. Life is just not neatly defined by numbers and it's kind of one of the philosophies really deeply embedded in the book and my disposition is to take the piece out of the numbers. So, stop counting and stop seeking validation that can only be found in finite numbers. You spend so much of your pursuit wanting to organize your success by some definitive watermark. Some definitive finish line. Some definitive metric of what success is. It's a journey. It's much more a differential calculus than it is X plus Y equals Z. Number two. Move in silence or violence. Now, obviously, this is a record about the crack game on the street, okay? I don't endorse the crack game on the street. I'm trying to draw an extrapolate learnings from the song. I think though that there are notions of silence and violence that are really important in business and I'm going to share with you what I think he meant. For instance, never letting someone know your next move. I mean, we know this in any game of strategy like chess, like broadcasting, you know your next move is a bad look. Silence in a day and age where we are all partaking in the vomitorium that is this fragmented state of social media, we often have a tough time discerning what to be quiet about and what to be silent about. I would challenge that a lack of silence creates an environment of predictability and in business, predictability is not good. You should always be reminding yourself if you are falling victim of the predictable. The violence part of what Biggie is talking about, the silence or violence, I envision violence in that kind of Winston Wolf type of way. Winston Wolf from the movie Pulp Fiction played by Harvey Keitel. He was the cleanup guy. What he represented and I think what violence for better or worse represents is the ability to make something final and to execute from the old French word "to carry into effect" the idea of an executer is one that carries into effect. It's important to remember this at this period in our lives and our culture because you're not data despite the fact that we allow ourselves to be harvested. We allow ourselves to be harvested in ways where we're ultimately the value. You have to ask yourself, who is the value being created for? Don't act like data. Don't act in a way where we have to fucking broadcast everything and remember, talking about something and actually doing it, two very different things. I have an app for folks too that, you're all familiar with Facebook. I actually would recommend for users of this class to go into the App Store, there's a new app that's out, it's called discretion. It was invented in the 1300s. Good luck. Get that one now on your iOS deck now. Well, this one's sad, right? Sad. Really, mom? Mom will lay in the bushes to light that ass up. Never trust nobody. Isn't that a sad concept? Well, that's truthful. In business, trust is a very, very valuable commodity and whom you trust, and how you deploy that currency of trust, needs to be a very sensitive concept. I don't mean to sound cynical but the reality is trust in business we know is delicate thing. If you don't have it, it could lead to paranoia and there's obviously trade secrets that you will want to protect, but the operative word here for me when we break down, again, the etymology here from the German word "trost" is this notion of comfort. So never trust nobody is also really begging you to tab an inward look and an external look at your degree of comfort. Get a nice pillow and get a nice bed. That's the only time in business that you're allowed to be comfortable. So if you're seeking a comfort zone in business and you're tolerating, over-tolerating trust or you're over deploying that currency of trust, then you're probably allowing yourself to be comfortable to a degree that it's not allowing you to be really sober, intellectually sober about the state of your decision-making and all of your next moves. The other thing that trust and if you over-build too much of it, you start to kind of believe your own hype in that comfort zone and you unintentionally could build a very guarded ivory tower. Ivory towers institutions needn't be those things that you show up to the university or when you pull up to the lobby at the place of work that you work for that's a quote institution, or whomever that those gate-keepers are. The worst kind of institutions are the ones that you create yourself. Being overly comfortable has can unintentionally have you create your own, however real or imagined, ivory tower that you manage your ideas and your processes in. They become sacred, and it's a place where you want to preserve that comfort so you become nostalgic for it. There's no room for that nostalgia, and be careful in being too comfortable. Never get high on your own supply. Never get high on your own supply, man. Never use your own product and the product in the case of the Ten Crack Commandments is crack. So, obviously, lay off of using your own crack is some dangerous shit, but that's, I think, not that's the surface of it. Going layers deeper here and through a layer of deductive reasoning and finding a broader meaning here, I think that what Biggie's talking about is more than money, and it's more than the product. Do you guys know what killed Jabba the Hutt? Princes Leia. Princes Leia kill Jabba the Hutt. We saw it. Just took the chain, choke the motherfucker out. Princess Leia killed Jabba the Hutt. That's what we've seen. I would challenge actually no. That's not what killed Jabba the Hutt. Hubris killed Jabba the Hutt. Jabba's hubris is inability to listen to any advisor. His capacity to get high on his own supply and actually believe it, believed he was that good, is what killed Jabba the Hutt. Hubris is dangerous culturally. It allows you, when you get high on your own supply, to believe everything even if you know down deep to your core it's a fucking lie. Unfortunately, I can tell you in my own business for better or worse, plenty of times where I have been a victim of getting high on my own supply, or me actually believing that the success in a way where you don't work as hard the next day. You're not being intellectually honest. In culture today, where people confuse fame with success, I could tell you, fame is not success. Fame and the pursuit of notoriety can be very toxic and actually is a great catalyzer for hubris. So, I caution you. Those of you that are building either branded platform or your personal brand on that pursuit, be conscious and conscientious to not get high on your own supply. Where you rest at are the key that's the key notion here for me. That looks good, right? That looks good right there, doesn't it? Is that lamb chops with a blackberry on that motherfucker, right? Then why the hell would you eat it here? Don't eat where you shit. Where you rest at is a sacred notion, and for me, a father of three lovely children, a wife who creates tremendous amount of value, and warmth and helps kind of preserve some level of sanity from my personal guts to the skin brand, where you rest at in work is a sacred idea. All too often, we live in this culture. I told you before on the riff on the pillow, where we live in a culture and a time where you're encouraged not to sleep. Great entrepreneurs don't sleep. Bullshit. Sleep. Like I said before, you are entitled to the degree of comfort, but sleep. So where you rest at, i's important. Hydrate and sleep because when you wake up, it's going to be back to the grime. Don't sleep on this concept. 4. Ten Crack Commandments #6–10: Credit, dead It. You think a crackhead paying you back, shit forget it, right? Credit, dead it. Remember Wimpy? I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, I'll gladly pay you Thursday for really, always barn shit, right? Now, this could be viewed as cynical, what I'm about to say, but careful who you lend to, and I'm not just talking about the currency of cash. I'm talking about your human capital, your time, your ideas, your energy, your goodwill, your ability to give a fuck and care which is probably the most valuable thing that you have, so be careful who you lend to. That lending concept is not trivial, and no one should be able to ride for free. That's not to say don't be philanthropic or don't be generous. Be those things, but no one should be able to ride for free, and you should have zero expectations if you are going to lend to ever get your time, your money back. You have to give in a way that is completely selfless. That is the best way to lend. So, if you're going to lend, think of it like giving. Stay away from lending. Keep your family and business completely separated. This one is not trivial, this concept. The reason I say that is because we're in business, we're rational, we're all working towards a rational goals, right? We're rational, right? Is it fair to say? Bullshit. We're not rational. We have to remember, as much as we want to say, "Don't be emotional", we are fucking emotional bitches. We're a bunch of emotional creatures. Really, we have to recognize that in every scenario, we're dealing with emotional human beings. In every instance, we're just a bunch of emotional little brats, and the orchestration and the ability to get us in unison of 5, 10, 20, 200 of us, to do something in unison, when we know it is our nature to be emotional, is something that is very, very magical. Keeping your family and business completely separated is an important concept because family is the center of the emotional ecosystem, and if you consume and tolerate that level of emotion into your workplace, or I should say be careful in not breeding nepotism. Because it by not keeping your family and business completely separated, you inadvertently will breed nepotism. Look how cute he is. He's so cute, but you see the look of auntie in the background, looks suspicious as fuck because she knows keep family and business completely fucking separated because you could end up like this motherfucker. There should not be nepotism in business and keeping your family and business completely separated is crucial. It doesn't mean don't help. Listen, I built my business with my twin sister, so I know from that the importance of how valuable family could be in business, but as I extended that out to other family members, do you know the old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions? Well, look, I've learned in my life and again this sounds maybe a little bit cynical, but really set the guidelines. If you are going to cross that threshold, the guidelines need to be managed that it will not be a forever thing if you're going to deploy a space for your family and business. Never keep no weight on you. Them cats that squeeze guns can hold 'jumb's', too. Jumb's being short for jumbos, which were the nickname for jumbo crack vials, okay? What he's talking about here is the guys on the field that can do the dirty work can actually also execute on the sale. Really, what he's saying, I believe and what I extrapolate from this song, is do not micromanage, right? Do not micromanage. We live in a culture today for better or worse where we've been lucky to be exposed to the greatest micromanager of all time. The god of micromanager, Steve Jobs. The unintended consequence of that is that people think that micromanagement somehow is good and a good best practice in stewarding a business into the right place, and I would challenge that it's not. Remember the scene from the movie Office Space? Don't be a fake ass Steve Jobs. That's my point. Don't be a fake ass Steve Jobs. Those cats that hold guns can hold jumb's too. Let your guys on the ground do the TPS report. Let them do the sale. Let them close. Let them fall down. Let them fuck up. How is the organization going to learn in advance if you don't tolerate that learning environment? So, do not micromanage Don't be the asshole walking around being a fake ass Steve Jobs, and don't run around like me with Helvetica and Anvil effects and think that you're somehow awesome Steve Jobs shit. The guy was a relentless commercializer and measured his success by his ability to transact and built game-changing platforms. So, it wasn't just because he micromanaged, so don't be a fake Steve Jobs and quit micromanaging. We have to dig deeper here to beyond just the cliche relationship of like the hustler and the policeman. Stay the fuck from police, what does he mean? Well, I think when I break down the notion of the word police, I think he's obviously, my view, what I think he's referring to is the notion of politics. If we could reuse this verse from the Ten Crack Commandments, what I would extrapolate, what I glean from it, is it's a reminder to stand clear of politics in business. You should just not tolerate politics. It never ends up good. If ending up good is having more money in your bank. Right, and that's enough? Then okay, that's one play to run, but if creating wealth that matters is a part of your objectives, this whole heavy handed association to politics just rubs me funny. Bono, who's a badass, I love, you got to admit, this photo, doesn't this photo creep you out? I mean, this guy, he's a game changer, a Nobel Peace Prize, he's done crazy shit, kudos to Bono, but just the politics and business, keep them separate. Maybe to make it more understandable for you, this image here of Dwight and his coworkers at Dunder-Mifflin in The Office, there's that degree of politics too, which we think it's funny, we think it's cute because the show is snarky and it's funny, the soap opera brand of it is glorified as well, but we don't need work to be a place of soap operas or comedies. Politics implies an ulterior motive. I'm taking a poetic license with the spelling, but you want to avoid ulterior motives or these alternative motivations, you don't want to signal. It's like rule number two where it talks about, never let them know your next move. Politics is the business of gatekeepers. It's not the gatekeeper but the goalkeeper that matters, the ultimate vote is happening with the consumer that you're transacting with. Whatever good or service that you're building, ultimately the goalkeeper is who you should give a hell about. We think in our minds and create these cultural constructs that somehow the gatekeepers that's in the way of our goalkeeper. Bullshit, avoid politics. You are a brand if you like it or not, if you know it or not. Those gatekeepers are going to put labels on you: rich, poor, gay, straight, whatever it's going to be. So, in life, when you concede, or the conceit in that relationship with the politics is like you're acknowledging that those constructs, these labels are somehow valid. When you refuse those labels and suddenly you play by your own rules not theirs and instead of complying to fit into their standards, these gatekeepers standards, you're conscientious of your goalkeeper standards and you create your own path, your own set of rules, your own compliance matrix to get there. If you ain't got the clientele say, "Hell no," if you ain't got the clientele say, "Hell no" because they're coming for the money, rain, sleet, hail, snow, this one's important. Remember this old saying, there's some real type A bre shit? John Paul Getty said, "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem, but if you owe the bank 100 million that's the bank's problem." You know what I say to that? That's some type a Donald Trump dick headed bullshit. That's bullshit. It's a problem, all right? It's a problem. Careful who you take your cash from. If you do not have the clientele say, "Hell no", don't just borrow for the sake of borrowing. Don't just raise money and measure that as- you know how many startup champagne parties that I've been to because startup XY and Z closed on three million or five million. Oh, we're done. No, you're not done motherfucker. You're just starting. Where you want to focus on, is you want to focus on partners and not lenders. Now, that's maybe a slightly obtuse or overly broad statement, but there is a distinction in the behavior of a partner versus a lender. When you're vetting those partners who might very well provide you capital, it's important to ask them if they understand that difference. How would they define the difference between them being your partner and them being a lender. What are their expectations? We want to distribute the risk. There's nothing wrong with the idea of partnerships. I mean, I think that's another fallacy. I came up unfortunately on this, "Let's make a deal, partner-partner, 50-50." Everything was 50-50 and the way that I built the eco-brands in those first 15 years is, I didn't really distribute the risk,. I wanted to own it all, I was an equity hoarder, it was me, my twin sister my partner Seth and any notion of selling debt or equity for cash was an abstraction, because I culturally was so prideful and for me I wanted all the upside. Well, there's something to be said about distributing the risk and then distributing the upside. The opposite of how I construct it and build complex, for instance, is a much more distributed narrative where there are far more people doing well inside of the ecosystem as executive level, there are more stakeholders, it's a more virtuous ecosystem of both downside and upside and that's a really healthy thing to do. People, they get so consumed with the cap table and I need to be in control. Look, there's ways to manage all of that stuff, all right? Classes of stock, scenarios in an operating agreement in your business to decipher and contractually be clear-headed about how in the upper rating of your day to day, what are those important things that you need to own the majority of? You needn't to own it all. Distribute the risk, distribute the upside. 5. Ten Crack Commandments: Summary: So, those are my prescriptions as extrapolated from the Ten Crack Commandments. In summary, we will review this mnemonic device that Biggie Smalls gave us. What a blessing. Number 1, never let them know how much dough you hold. Number 2, never let them know your next move. Number 3, never trust nobody. Remember, we're talking about trust the notion of comfort. Comfort, all right, there's a time and a place for that. Get a nice fucking pillow, get a nice bed. Never get high on your own supply. We're not just talking about the money or your product, we're talking about the hubris, drinking your own Kool-Aid, the vanity of your success, scareful of how toxic that can be. Never sell no crack where you rest at. This is the notion of not eating where you shit, and not shitting where you eat and vice versa. Rest is sacred and contrary to popular opinion of watching entrepreneurs jump from airplanes and parachute into media events and do crazy wacky shit. This whole tony stark shit is bullshit. Sleep. That goddamn credit, dead it, number six. Who you lend to is not trivial not just of your time, but your ideas, your energy, and be cautious about it because, this culture of, I don't give a fuck. You know what, giving a fuck as a currency is sometimes all you have to give. Every single time, it's more valuable than money. So, give a fuck, but just give it cautiously. Keep your family and business completely separated. Much like number five; Never sell no crack where you rest at the notion of sleep and rest. This is a reminder in the commandment number seven not to tolerate nepotism. You're not going to be able to control everyone and everything, organizations grow, they swell, people have a spark, they fall in love, they screw. But to the extent that you can culturally make it known that it's preferred not to tolerate, I would prescribe avoiding nepotism in the workplace. Your family is sacred. Never keep no weight on you. This is a reminder, don't micromanage. Just because you got a Steve Jobs autobiography signed by Walter Isaacson and you got like an original Apple poster in your room, don't emulate the imagined version of Steve Jobs, don't be a fake ass Steve Jobs. Let your captains on the ground, your soldiers, the frontlines do what the fuck it is that they need to do and tolerate and have the capacity to tolerate a little bit of failure. That's how they're going to learn. If you're not getting bags, stay the fuck from police. Number nine; Stay the fuck from police. Again, this isn't me saying, fuck the police, I have quite the opposite view I think, police are amazing people. But deducing from the lyric and from Biggie's lyrics here, well, I extrapolated the notion of politics and the potential unintended consequence of exhibiting ulterior motives. You don't want to broadcast that you're in it for something else, be in it for what you're in it. Make that clear. Make that clear, just be straight up about it, you won't have to be fucking with the gatekeepers, you don't need them. Number 10; If you ain't got the clientèle say, "Hell no." This is the opposite of that goddamn credit, dead it. Number six, number 10 is about who you borrow from. Number six was lending, number 10, borrowing. Partners over lender's. It is not trivial to be out there over leveraged, distribute the upside, distribute the risk. That knife cuts both ways and I prescribe that's the best way to do it when you could all become successful together, there's more room enough for everyone. It's more meaningful in ways that money alone can't provide meaning to. 6. Finding and Presenting Your Mnemonic Device: So, you just watched the 10 Crack Commandments, my version of a mnemonic device that is designed to be really a learning tool for myself, my peers, co-workers that I'm able to share my business philosophy. What I was connected to was this hustlers anthem and this entrepreneurial anthem that existed there. I wanted to organize it on paper and like my Latin teacher used to say like if you ink it, you think it. Write it down so that I had it in a place that could better serve me and I could use it in almost a encyclopedic fashion or manner and call on it in times of need or when there's an obstacle or you want to anecdotally share something with a friend, a coworker, a buyer, whomever that you're transacting with. But the challenge for you in building a mnemonic devices to in fact, organize those things that you for whatever reason have allowed to live in this disorganized fashion. There are a series of tweets or memes that you've put together, a t-shirt that you love to wear, a scene from a movie that you often reference, that amazing immaculate reception, that play in a sporting event that inspires something for you. So, the goal here for you, we intended to do with this lecture and in this course, is to challenge you and intentionally make you a little flat-footed. There's not going to be a prescriptive course here for you that says, "Okay a mnemonic device is fill in the blank." We're not going to say all right, grab a headline, take a video, use Keynote or use PowerPoint or use graphic design. Those things aren't the measure of what makes a really great mnemonic device. I would challenge that if I were to have presented that lecture that I just presented to you in a black and white wire-frame, with the audio, it would have compelled in a sufficiently strong manner. It would have served its intent as a mnemonic device, even if it was designed much simpler minus all of the animation. I challenge you to go create that. I challenge you to go ahead, you've got the tools, you've got the devices on your computer, there's plenty of places to figure it out. There's a sufficient amount of places to figure out that. This is not a challenge for like graphic design or animation or film. There's great courses by the way here on Skillshare for those things. I'd advise you to sharpen that tool to the extent that you're going to use that to deploy your mnemonic device. Otherwise, just figure the shit out and present something to us that in the same way that I and by design of this this class intends to make you flat-footed and push you back on your shoulders and make you find your balance, present us that mnemonic device that inspires us that we could share it with others. We are adding this interesting carrot to this challenge where the mnemonic device that inspires us and makes us flat-footed and meets that ambition that user, that author will be rewarded a $5,000 endowment to use those proceeds however they wish to. What we care about is you being inspired by this class, the book on label and this lecture; the 10 Crack Commandments to be compelled to go give yourself the belief and the audacity to think that you could actually pull something off that inspires us. That's what we're looking for. That's what this whole ecosystem of Skillshare is about. It isn't just about my dogma and my ability because I'm emphatic and I use my hands and it looks really fucking certain and like I'm in a room that's made out of stone. Like I know somehow better than you do, bullshit. Like the challenge here is for you to teach us, to teach me. It's amazing how this happens. Like in life, that you don't really go to school, school comes to you. All right. Like I said in the promotional trailer for this piece and that's really true. The greatest teachers are in some ways the best entertainers. That's really all I'm asking you guys to do, entertain us, delight us. Create something, well, I don't care what it is. I'm not going to judge you on your video editing skills. I'm not going to judge you on your motion graphics. Hey, if you've got those chops and that's a secret weapon, good on you. Good on you that you could tie that skill set to a part of philosophy and package this amazing piece of learning content. Good on you. But that's not alone what we're going to be looking for. The aesthetic, the veneer, the tits and ass, that alone won't get us there. The there has to be there. So hopefully, you'll pursue that when you build your mnemonic device.