“Laying Out Our Dreams” (A Forum With Hill Harper)
People would always ask him, “Why did you spend time getting all this education when you work in a field where you don’t even need a high school diploma?” Harper would respond with something simply as, “ I wanted to get my education.” His speech was very motivational to me. As a current college student at an art school, it’s very rare that you get to talk to not only a successful college graduate who got their degree and has become very successful in their field, but also an African-American male at that.
Harper was very inspiring to me. When I asked him his advice as to how I could possibly successfully run my record label as well as have a successful music production career, he responded with,” You can be a master of many things, but you have to be strategic in where you use your time.” I seriously began to think about this long and deep. Though it’s been less than 24hours since his visit at my school that I began to write this, certain important things had already began to sink into my head. I realized that I was brought here to make a significant difference in people’s lives. The average person wouldn’t understand, cause visually they couldn’t even imagine someone who seems to be “just like them” achieving such a huge success in many things. I also realized that the average person, was average, simply because they wanted to be average.
I had just gotten out of class, so I got to the forum about 20minutes, but I walked in as Harper was comparing our lives to that of a design made by an architect. He broke it down into four steps. 1) Blueprint, 2) Foundation, 3) Frame, & 4) Door were the four steps he listed. I think almost everybody has taken out the time to develop a blueprint in life, but most are full of unorganized ideas. It’s usually somewhere between the Foundation and the Frame where we all get lost. We seem to let our blueprint become so liquid of a substance that even the coldest day in Chicago’s winter couldn’t help to freeze it over into a solid Foundation. He went on to elaborate about the Framework of our architectural design. He described how he had ahouse made of wood in L.A. and a house made of brick in New York.. He then went on to describe how each was appropriate for where they were. How a brick house, was solid and great for cold NY weather, and how a wood frame was great for L.A. because it adapts to the stress that heat causes onto a building. He also went on to say, that we are often brought up to believe that we should have a solid brick frame in life. But the truth is, that everybody would be able to stand up so much stronger and taller with that wood frame, because we’d be able to adapt to the stresses and life that come and be physically prepared for it. However, while all of this is said, forget about even trying to put up a frame without a foundation. We’d be lucky if whatever we tried to frame up, without a foundation, lasted a solid few months. While this is all my interpretation of his architect concept, I believe this could apply to a lot of people in life.
By this time, I had become fully motivated, but he went on to leave even more motivational words. I guess for lack of better words, we began to talk about not always believing the hype, or as he called it, “False evidence appearing real.” He used Kanye West’s first album “College Dropout” as an example. He told us he was good friends with Kanye and had told this story before, and then went on to say that his album title should have been called, “College Dropout, but unless you live with a college professor, you should take your butt to college.”
I guess to sum up everything, we all can pretty much do whatever we want in life. We all seem to want to give up when times get a little rough or uncertain. I'd like to end this blog with a post from a famous poem called "Don't Quit." "So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit; it's when things seem worst that you mustn't quit."
-ORIE
