The Disconnect of 13.4%: Life Lessons, Influence and Forbidden Choices

By Lanny Morse

"The Disconnect of 13.4%," Tells a story through experiences that allow a young male to develop and plan of action through others' decisions. Specific choices can help align personal goals and avoid failure. This read can help a person to push forward and reach their highest potential. This Self-help book is one's perception that gives insight to choosing a life partner, choosing people as mentors, and surrounding yourself to drive success and positivity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667810683

Book preview

Chapter

2

Working with my hands, Problem-

Solving, and Good Judgment

Like many black children, I didn’t have a father in my life. My father I found out about in my 30’s, and by that time, he was deceased. So, a lot of my knowledge I received from my grandfather and uncles. My uncles and grandfather were true entrepreneurs. Throughout my life, they sold illegal cable, did concrete, construction, photography, gas line maintenance, and many other businesses. The good thing is that I learned to negotiate and make an honest dollar. My first experience making some cash was using my mother’s lawnmower from her first new home. I would charge 10 to 20 bucks until I was able to get a job at my uncle’s record store. My uncle and my aunt are not together anymore, but the day I turned 16, I had a job making $5.85 per hour. I don’t know if I was truly fit for the job or if it was cheap labor. Throughout the summer, before me working part-time, my mom would take me to his shop and make me sweep and clean the shop before I was of age. I didn’t see the blitz coming in months to come. This was my mom’s way of trying to make me an honest man and keep me off the streets. I hope to God my aunt does not read this book but, if she does, I truly mean no harm or disrespect; this is just my thought process of what I remember from these situations.

So, after dating, my auntie and uncle got married. My new uncle had great friends, and they helped each other invest and have stores. This was big because I didn’t know a lot of black store owners, especially in Indiana. Indiana is not built for minorities having brick and mortar owned and operated locations. So, after meeting and getting married to my auntie, she motivated him to cut ties with his friends and go into business for himself. This decision and opportunity were possibly groundbreaking but politically could have been done differently. When you come from the streets, this is not a good look for a man. Men would call you pussy whipped or disloyal to the hands that feed you. The new store chain was a record shop, event ticket sales center, and tobacco accessory sales center. For the first few days, I worked there. I expected to be around all upper-class people. I didn’t truly understand how regular surviving people lived on a day-to-day basis. The things I learned from this store were crazy. Each day I had drug addicts coming in, ticket scalpers, music artists doing fan signings, and people that were outside the household income didn’t expose me to. I learned so many valuable lessons on what life had to offer. One of the most important things I learned was that there were more white people on drugs and living as functioning drug addicts than I had ever seen before. I even saw a local news anchor come in to buy a cocaine device.

Because of the low pay and hours, my ever-evolving coworkers were 18-24, and they would tell me about how they grew up and why they liked music, and I just soaked in all in. I learned that despite being different races, we all had a lot in common. It is too bad we don’t fight for each other without a draft in effect. As technology changed, so did the need for music on a physical platform. In the early 2000’s the age of MP3 CDs and digital music players destroyed the small mom-and-pop stores. We fought hard to keep the store alive by selling mixtapes, scalping tickets, and burning singles. Soon the music police came in for copyright, and once white people found out that a black male ran the store, any infraction policy caused problems. People were taking photos and claiming we were rigging the events sales line. I cannot confirm or deny that we weren’t, but after cd’s stopped selling, we were trying to do anything to survive. My uncle’s store eventually failed, and even after moving to another store with some creative ideas of making custom t-shirts, it just didn’t have the same customer market as we did before. So, my uncle had to get a regular job. I felt terrible for him. Not only was I out of a job, but I learned a valuable lesson from his situation. My uncle was used as a pawn. He not only cut ties with people he was successful with but also lost everything because of trying to live up to a standard of a person who had nothing to offer him. My uncle, for the first time in years, hit rock bottom.

I, being so young, saw my uncle working at UPS a few years later. Not as a manager but as a loader. I was just getting out of college, going to school for a useless degree, but my uncle’s life was at a low, and to support his children who needed food and insurance, he decided to work until things changed. During my first week at UPS, I saw him in the trenches with me. I was being escorted around by my manager, and there he was, my uncle, missing all his teeth. He