When I asked professionals that I surveyed why they were not actively partaking in these endeavors — most people responded: not enough time. Over the years, through music, I gained the confidence that I could learn anything I wanted to. It is the mindset that has taken me to release three mixtapes, make countless unearthed beats, […]
Music is a strong educative tool and can be lifelong learning and self-improvement tool. What does the image above sound like? A bunch of 0s and 1s? How does that translate to music? Just read along and you will hear it soon. Let’s just back track on how I got here. How music has become […]
The impact of music can be felt across generations, cultures, and geographic locations, making it especially powerful for an impressionable youth. Nas’ God’s Son album was released amidst some controversy — with some critics saying it was blasphemous to release an album in which he compared his likeness to Christ. From the funky James Brown-inspired storytelling on […]
Music is an emotive language that moves us through time and space, sparking vivid memories of the past, pushing us to action in the present, and igniting thoughts for the future. What is music? Music is something that we are all very familiar with. Most of us have grown up loving a certain genre of […]
Most of the biggest innovators and inventors stumbled upon solutions through following their thread of curiosity. Without having an end goal in mind, that’s how penicillin was discovered from a petri dish of staphylococcus bacteria that had been inadvertently left out on the windowsill. Pure curiosity and insistent prototyping is what led to the invention […]
Empathy is an integral part of the innovation process and a foundation for creative development. Empathy — a prerequisite for solving “wicked problems” — is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. The design thinking approach to innovation, as popularised by Stanford d.schooland the global design firm IDEO, has emphasized the concept of empathy to make it inseparable […]
Embracing self-responsibility is one of your clearest paths to living a life with purpose. Most times we tend to look beyond ourselves to find purpose. We ascribe our morality based on things that we watch, the people we’re surrounded by, our culture, religion, and tradition. Our true moral compass comes from within — And that […]
Humans are social creatures. We are herd animals. We function best in groups and communities. We are raised in and by communities. We embody values based on traditional, cultural, and communal values. We strive to be accepted by social groups — sometimes this is crucial to our survival. Belonging to communities adds to our personal […]
I remember listening to Talib Kweli’s fifth solo album called Prisoner of Conscious in 2013 and how one phrase became a mantra. As the album built up to the 5th track — High Life — and the sonic energy burst out of my speakers with intoxicating rhythms, groovy baselines, and spurts of saxophone and vocal samples, I was immediately […]
The rebellion and civil unrest that we are seeing today is not new. The civil rights and social movements that happened globally in the sixties were spurred by the growing inequalities and injustice in the world. The oppressive consciousness that existed then still remains today. Finding purpose lies at the intersection of what we want […]