Before NBA Agent: There Was the Hustler

Spoiler alert. 

If you purchased Lucky Me: A Memoir of Changing the Odds by Rich Paul to find out more about his relationship with LeBron James, and possibly understand how they made moves, you won’t learn a thing. 

Paul’s memoir comes off as a salute to his father and to fathers like him. 

The ones who never married their girlfriends or short-term love interests, yet their union created a life. 

These are the guys in our generation who have always used terms like ‘My Baby’s Mama.’ 

His mother struggled with drug addiction throughout his entire childhood and even well into his adulthood. She was a shadow presence. 

While his father was married to another woman when they met, and remained married, Paul Sr. dealt with whatever heat he needed to take on the home front to stay engaged in his son’s life regularly and during crucial times. 

His father taught him lessons such as:

• How to survive
• How to take calculated risks
• How to take care of your people
• How to stay focused on what matters most
• How to positively impact your community

All this started at the age of five, when Paul Sr. moved his son, Paul’s mother (Minerva Norine Martin), and his two siblings (Brandie and Meco), not his biological children, into an apartment above his store on Edmonton Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.  

That’s being a man. That’s stepping in when he easily could’ve just handed her cash every month and left it there.

Learning Street Math from a Father Who Knew Survival

Your typical seven-year-old today can expect a smartphone, maybe an iPad, to fall into their hands regularly to keep them pacified and give their parents a few minutes to take a needed break. 

Seven-year-old Rich Paul was learning addition and subtraction by working the cash register inside his father’s corner store, R&J Confectionery, a neighborhood institution. 

One day, while still seven, Paul’s father walked him into his storage room and gave him the tools he would need to survive in both good and bad times. A pair of dice. 

“Sometimes in life you might get laid off from work, or something else might go wrong, and you find yourself without a job,” Paul’s father told him, “If that happens, a man needs another way to support himself and his family.” 

Those dice were the prelude to explaining how to play crabs. Then, a thorough lesson on the art of betting to win. From that day forward, his father provided him with the spending money needed to meet his daily needs and set the stage for him to control his destiny. 

After four years competing against kids on corners and around school every chance he had to take their cash in craps, his mastery of the dice led him into games with adults. 

By the tender age of 11, Paul was rolling with more cash in his pockets than most adults and beating grown men out of serious money.  

It’s fair to say his pockets have stayed swollen ever since.

The Execution Gap: Why 98% Fall Short 

Many business executives have taken time somewhere in their corporate careers to read Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power. It’s been one of the quintessential books to understand the nuances of seizing, maintaining, and expanding power. 

With this memoir, Paul brings '22 Rules for Street Hustlers' on the come-up. 

Most who grew up in the inner city will recognize many of these as common sense — street wisdom for surviving, for keeping your ass alive and outta trouble.

• Rule 7: Study Your Craft.
• Rule 8: Move With Intention; Be Ready to Improvise.
• Rule 9: Understand the Whole Show.
• Rule 10: Focus Is Everything.

Paul breaks down every rule with clear examples of how he applied them in real time in his life, and extends his youthful lessons throughout to illustrate how these rules apply today as he works on behalf of his clients at Klutch Sports Group. 

While the fishbowl he operates in has grown from Cleveland’s streets to the entire world, the sharks in the tank, interested in hunting him down, destroying his rep, and taking everything they can from him, remain the same. 

Knowing the code of the streets isn't where most fall. Its execution. 

Ninety-five percent are tripped up by poor execution — another three percent fall to not knowing when to execute which rule. 

Those left standing after that, such as Paul, thrive on unimaginable levels.

Motivation Fades – Discipline Decides What Happens Next

Go through Paul’s 22 Rules for Street Hustlers and get real with yourself about which one has historically prevented you from reaching the mountaintop. 

Rule 5: Discipline Your Approach has been my Achilles heel. 

Now, this doesn’t mean I don’t have discipline – I do. 

Many people do. Yet, there’s a hidden truth. 

Discipline operates on different levels for different people. More importantly, we’re not always consistent in our discipline. 

I’m not. That’s the truth. When my motivation and energy are high, I can blast through walls and make things happen. 

Then the day comes when my motivation evaporates into the air, like steam from a humidifier. When that happens, I might end up mindlessly watching NFL football from sunrise to sunset, and wonder how what I needed to do never happened. 

“Every day you wake up and bring yourself to the world in an undisciplined and thoughtless way is a day you put yourself closer to failure than success.” Rich Paul

Worth the Read

Paul warns against taking his path.

Easily, his story could have turned out multiple ways that might have landed him behind bars for years, like his older brother, Meco. 

His lottery ticket arrived the day he crossed paths with LeBron James. 

James connected with his authenticity and recognized Paul as a man who wasn’t simply out to get something from him.

He asked him to join his team before he knew exactly what Paul would do.  

Truthfully, this isn’t a read for everyone. His story will speak to those who grew up in drug-infested communities and dreamed of breaking out.

His story will speak to those who grew up in towns that flourished during the height of manufacturing but died slow, painful deaths after those jobs went overseas. 

This one’s for the men and women who grew up on the “other side of the tracks.” ■