Snippet from "Water From Turnips" by Quanstar out in September 2009

Due to the fact that I was an excellent underachiever I became comfortable with the mundane. Success scared me. I know you may be thinking, “What the fuck are you talking about? How could you be scared of success?”. Some of you say that I was stupid, and I was; however, the same cats that are speaking it out of the
sides of their necks are probably the same ones that are scared of success because they are probably scared to fail.

Failure has always petrified me. For whatever reason, I’ve always looked at things from the “What if it doesn’t work out?” angle. And because of this, everything for the better part of my life has ended in one of two ways:
< I work hard and bust my ass to only get close to the end and give up
< I ignore the whole situation all together, and hope it will go away because I think it would be too much work

I squandered so many years and so many opportunities to improve myself by living this way. This is my struggle. Not the music, booking shows, or my documentary. Everyday I fight to never go back to that person. That person believed that you were given a hand by life, and sometimes you were lucky enough to get good cards.

That person believed that being undervalued is what life was all about. That person was a fucking idiot, and I promise I will never be that person again. I realized that failure was a seed of success. You can’t get ahead without it, and we often fail at something a multitude of times before we succeed. This book alone attests to that.
“Water From Turnips” is currently my eighth attempt at writing a book since 1999. After I found ACN, I read just about everything in existence on anything that had to do with success. So much so that all the information that I was taking in began to blur together. So I decided to develop, with all of my unpracticed knowledge, 20 principles of success. Not only that, through delusion and arrogance, I decided to write a book called nothing other than “20 Principles Of
Success”.

This was an incredibly stupid idea on so many levels, the biggest one being that I had no idea what success was. I mean, I’d read about it, I’d known people that were successful; however, I’d never experienced it in the way I was going to
write about it. Hell, I was only in ACN 4 months when I got this bright idea. I remember I had this huge outline with all of these laws. I’d even gone as far as to come up with the idea for the book cover. There was only one thing missing...
personal examples. So after a long, hard examination I realized that writing a book about principles that I had not practiced enough to know if they worked was pretty unethical. Besides, I couldn’t get passed the ninth page.

My second book was called “God Is...”. It was supposed to be about what my next chapter is. It was going to be in dialogue form. God having a conversation with me. Then I read “Conversations With God”. That ended that.

My third book was called “Marriage...What Am I A Fucking Idiot?” It was a book about my exploits as a bachelor, and the keys to getting sex in three dates or less. I actually wrote 30 pages of this before deciding against it. For one, telling
dudes my secrets to getting sex would actually decrease my chances of it. Two, if women read that book I probably wasn’t going to be getting sex very often.

Next I was going to write a book about the Matrix, and how I apply all of the movie’s symbolisms to the rest of my life. This was actually a great idea, being that I was borderline obsessive compulsive over the movie. When it was out on the big screen, I literally saw it 55 times. I own the trilogy, and I watch it at least once a month. This actually counts as a fourth, fifth, and sixth. For whatever
reason, I couldn’t get past page 40. There was really no reason why either, I just got stuck all three times.

My seventh time was going to be my day to day memoirs. I was going to keep a diary for 2007 that would show how I did business, and lived my life. I was going to start every week and month off with what my goals are. Then at the end
of the day I would write about what happened. The problem with this one was that I had too much shit going on in my life, heart, and head to finish this book.

Plus, telling people my daily innermost thoughts made me feel kind of like a bitch. Especially since I was pretty depressed over what had happened with
Ebony and I.

I even started writing this book with a whole different premise in mind. It was going to be about the woes of the music business, and how it eats people up. That idea only lasted a day. I don’t want to discourage people from being in the
industry. Nor do I want folks to think that I hate the business. I hate the people in the business. It’s a difference.

If this book didn’t work out, I would start another later on. Eventually I would finish. This is what success is about. Who cares if something doesn’t work out the first time, or the second time, or even the two thousandth time? The only thing that matters is that I finish. This is my new life’s philosophy.