Street Smart: The Primer for Success in the New World

By John Positano and Rock Positano

The essence of being street smart is the ability to take advantage of lucky breaks. And everyone—at least once in their lifetime—gets a lucky break. What they do with that lucky break varies tremendously from individual to individual. Street smart people don't just sit around waiting for something to happen and fall into their laps—they create their lucky breaks. It's certainly not taught in school and formal education!

Why is it so important to take advantage of these lucky breaks? Because...
•Working hard isn't enough.
•Networking isn't enough.
•Diligence isn't enough.
•Brilliant strategizing isn't enough.
•Old school ties aren't enough.
•Internal politicking isn't enough.
•Working around the clock isn't enough.
•Professional competence isn't enough.

You need something more. You need to be street smart. And successful people will tell you how—right here in this book—and will explain some of the techniques they employed that brought them to the head of the class.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Post Hill Press
• Release date: Oct 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637583654

John Positano

John A. Positano, Esq., is associate producer of The Joe Piscopo Show, which airs daily on AM970, and the weekly Live From Downtown New York City. He graduated from New York Law School. In addition to arguing federal cases, he has written articles on the military, law, and surfing for the LI Pulse, Huffington Post, and Daily News (New York). He lives near Stony Brook, New York.

Book preview

WELCOME TO THE ASPHALT JUNGLE

This book is not the usual Horatio Alger happy horseshit notion of the self-help, self-image, self-reliant school of getting ahead. In some ways, this book is a little tart and blunt, so it is not eternally happy, and definitely not horseshit. Its contents are based on countless hours of successes, failures, conversations, and confrontations. They’re not derived from reading a how to book.

It won’t tell you that everything will be alright if you just work even harder, network like a fiend, lean on business contacts, tie on the old-school tie, smile harder, and think optimistically. You can buy the other self-improvement books for that reason. Other advisors, gurus, books, influencers, DVDs, and internet sites were obsolete before the various and sundry waves of COVID hit you in your home and business, and now, these other advisors have become dangerous. Whether or not the world tomorrow gets a magic bullet killing COVID, this is the present reality.

Instead, what our Street Scholars are telling you, directly and without a filter, is that using your Street Smart to spot, seize, exploit, and create a lucky break is mandatory not just for success, but for survival. To our knowledge, no other personal advice book has ever connected success to survival; but in today’s world, it seems more relevant and crucial than ever.

Before we introduce ourselves and these Scholars, let’s get to definitions….

We define success as such: being exemplary in your field, accomplishing goals amidst any obstacles and trepidation, and taking advantage of these achievements to improve humanity and the world they inhabit. Wealth and access to people in high places are only a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. There are other definitions, but this is not a book on philosophy. For that, feel free to read Plato or Socrates, who both practiced their own version of Street Smart back in their day.

These Street Scholars, who will tell you how they directly achieved success, come from every walk of life that you can imagine: several races, ethnicities, and income levels.

So, what exactly are our Street Scholars directly recounting to you in these pages?

They’re telling you, after a brief introduction from us about our own street education, that they not only believe in the concept of being Street Smart, but that they also use it every day of their successful lives. They further tell you exact examples of how being Street Smart has been useful to them, without mincing words. For the purpose of emphasis, the rules of present-day political correctness and cancel/woke culture are suspended here. So, for those who might be offended, we apologize in advance. These chapters are their Street Smart Memoirs. They use, for the most part, their own words—raw but powerful. Amazingly, their stories overlap in many ways but also are distinctly different.

These Street Smart Memoirs are powerful and perhaps even relatable, because you may very well have been aware of being Street Smart in your life.

You have always said that you spotted a brilliant idea like Stephen A. Schwarzman, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or those young tech billionaires, and you didn’t take advantage of such an opportunity. Especially in the era of COVID, or post-COVID, you may have heard other people tell themselves, regarding a person, industry, or firm that did not survive the years of COVID, Unlucky bastards, better them than me!

The traditional personal advice books and speakers don’t seem to work post-COVID. The old ways of attaining success were: attend personal advisor workshops; view movies and videos in conference centers dispensing personal advice; glad-hand possible influential people during luncheons and fundraisers; read facial gestures and body language for clues; smile and think positive thoughts; work the magical overtime and over-weekend hours for guaranteed success; struggle with that school tie; grin inanely like the village idiot; and network, network, network!

During COVID, it was almost impossible to go to personal advisors, except on the internet; it was also legally and physically risky to network personally; attend big meetings of any type; observe facial and body language through triple-masked faces; gauge the strength and sincerity of handshakes through gloves or telephones; read body language through a MOPP suit, or hold brainstorm sessions in person. Optimistic thinking, which was wishful thinking on an international basis, was worse than merely ineffective…it may have killed millions.

Now the obsolete becomes dangerous in a real way. You can be true to the old ways, but as Benjamin Franklin said in Poor Richard’s Almanack, Who has deceived thee as oft as thyself?

With that out of the way, let’s continue reading the treatise that you really did help to write. The topic at hand: how famous, accomplished, and successful people in various fields spotted, seized, exploited, and created their lucky breaks.

So, what got people through difficult and troubling times? Being Street Smart, able to spot an opportunity and navigate accordingly in wholly unlucky times. Stephen A. Schwarzman, philanthropist and co-founder of Blackstone, perhaps says it best in his own book, What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence: For me, the greatest rewards in life have come from creating something new, unexpected, and impactful. I am constantly in pursuit of excellence. When people ask me how I succeed, my basic answer is always the same: I see a unique opportunity, and I go for it with everything I have. And I never give up.¹

When first conceived, being Street Smart was applicable merely to business success. But as you’ll soon read, being Street Smart applies to success in all other walks of life. You’ll discover that it’s not the number of degrees and diplomas you have hanging on your wall, but the number of times you’ve been knocked on your ass and found the will to get up again, strategize, and put yourself back in the game.

The concept of a primer actually comes from the early American history of Ben Franklin, hailed as an intellectual and practical war leader. He also suffered from the dreadful gout, which some say may have affected his writings (and perhaps even United States history).

A primer is a short book that contains everyday wisdom on how to adapt to the world. In Franklin’s time, both New York and Philadelphia were frontline battlegrounds, and the actual frontier—meaning wild animals and hostile enemies—was a stone’s throw away. Franklin and a small staff toiled away at creating a primer, which were originally just corny religious sayings, into a practical, lifesaving guide to survival. These writings were immediate bestsellers, rolling off printing presses in the little towns and villages.

That’s why we call this book a primer. COVID, certain violent world events, and high crime make survival critical. Boiling down the blubber from the usual self-help or self-improvement book just yields useless fatty oils today. Success means survival, and many have not survived in this era. The difference between survival and failure is the use of Street Smart. The three dozen or so Street Scholars you meet here are directly, and without a soft buffer, passing on the primer. Like Ben Franklin, they do not mince words. Because while the advice of merely one successful person is worthy of respect, the synchronized advice of several dozen successful people is much more compelling, impactful, and far-reaching.

STREET SMART MEMOIR OF JOHNNY AND ROCKY

Johnny and Rocky

_______________

¹   Stephen A. Schwarzman, What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2019), 8.

THE BEGINNINGS OF BEING STREET SMART

The Benefits of an Ivy-League Education on the Rough-Ass Streets of Olde Brooklyn: Street Smart Elementary School

We grew up as working-class kids during the ’70s and early ’80s in Brooklyn, an outer borough of New York City. It was the neighborhood known as Bensonhurst, roughly divided between Jewish communities, Italian Americans, a few Irish Americans, and a handful of WASPs. Everyone was poor or working class. Stores were entirely mom and pops with a sprinkling of small groceries. It was lucky to own a single car, let alone the fleets of cars families expect now. Our father worked as a window trimmer (a field now buried by malls) at stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue, B. Altman and Company, and Macy’s, famous for his design of the Christmas windows, among many others. Dad was also an accomplished musician who played piano with the Big Bands in the ’40s. He was a high-school dropout, yet he was the only father in our neighborhood who read the New York Times. He taught us the value of understanding a more sophisticated vocabulary than the one that we were exposed to in the neighborhood.

Our mother, a Depression-era baby, was a stay-at-home mom, but she worked at a fledgling computer-data-entry company called Interstate Computer in another rough neighborhood to make ends meet. We were both prehistoric latchkey kids, when most moms stayed home and made chocolate pudding. We were out in the schoolyard, playing hoops and avoiding all the bad influences imaginable during the turbulent late ’60s and ’70s. These influences included: drugs, drinking, petty larceny, discrimination, unsafe sex, among others. You name it. We saw it and passed. No place for this crap in our lives. These vices were for the spoiled brats in the neighborhood.

There’s no doubt in our minds that being cheek to cheek with other ethnicities and races, being exposed to other cultures, and being accustomed to the New York minute made us sharper when compared to people from slower-paced neighborhoods. New York is the Petri dish of ideas in politics, music, the arts, medicine, and even crime. That follows from the premise here that New York outer borough life brings an innate need for being Street Smart. It’s the hidden and unwritten curriculum that nobody talks about but is unquestionably present in the mosaic of the university without walls. Surviving into adulthood equates graduating from this particular school. Not everyone makes it, but those who do are well-equipped for what lies ahead.

Brooklyn, being a vibrant part of New York City, at least in our day, now looms as a major reason for developing one’s Street Smart. It is no accident that many of the Street Scholars lived as neighbors.

Which brings us forward to the dilemma: an entire generation of Americans has been raised without development and appreciation of their own Street Smarts. And they desperately need it. Luckily, an older generation has developed what is needed: direct advice from their collective experiences and mentoring that helped propel them to success amidst setbacks, obstacles, and barriers that seemed unbreakable and insurmountable. This advice is not available in school, not codified in any books, and not given to the newer generations anywhere else. Much of the younger generation has been deprived of exposure to this invaluable skill. It’s not their fault. We can blame ourselves as doting parents and teachers, protecting our kids from all the adverse and bad things out there in the real world that we had to endure and overcome. For example, you wouldn’t leave a puppy alone in the middle of the woods, would you?

People always lived by their wits, using their own Street Smarts to live better and now to live safer. Back in Olde Brooklyn, meaning Brooklyn in the ’60s/’70s, when no one cared to acknowledge our existence, we each followed our own Street Smarts religiously.

Literally.

Take the example of a poor Jewish shul, meaning a very small, ill-attended synagogue that was located in our old neighborhood of Bensonhurst. The shul had seen better days, frequented by a rapidly dwindling and aging population of older Jewish people, including many survivors of the Holocaust from Southern Europe. It occupied a ground-floor open door premises with the rabbi living on the second floor. Our third base on the punchball court was located directly outside the entrance, and many a Spalding or Pennsy Pinky ball would end up inside the synagogue.

This was not one of the marble super temples of the Upper East and West Side, attended by suited-up celebrities and industry masters of the universe. No, there were never more than a few dozen poorly dressed old people crammed into a worshiping area all of eighty feet deep and twenty feet wide. Bensonhurst—indeed, most of Brooklyn—was a genuine melting pot of Jewish, Italian, and Irish cultures, where people accepted and even enjoyed differences where politically correct heightened sensibilities were plainly not observed, relevant, or important.

Us streetwise kids saw that the shul needed protection from neighborhood hooligans. It was common for the shul to receive firework and smoke-bomb barrages in the summer, snowball attacks in the winter, and catcalls throughout the long rolling year. This was completely unacceptable and intolerable behavior for the both of us. The neighboring streets were busy Sixty-Fifth Street and Twenty-Fourth Avenue, only twenty feet away through open doors. The congregants competed with eternal truck traffic and honking horns from the streetcars and motorcycle gangs, and the street always won. So, it was easy to disrupt the nighttime services.

One winter day, the rabbi in charge of the shul was walking up Sixty-Fifth Street to shop at the kosher fish market near Bay Parkway and attracted the dubious attention of one local rascal. The rabbi had on a very tall and very wooly fur hat that made him a conspicuous target, even above mountains of newly plowed snow from a recent New York blizzard.

The neighborhood ruffian, a kid about ten, sized up wind direction and distance, blocked street traffic, and hurled a snowball about a hundred feet to its destination. We saw the snowball make contact with its intended target, and the oversized hat ended up in a mound of snow. We gotta admit, we admired the accuracy of the throw but not the dirtbag who threw it…the kid was a punchball expert who threw a snowball from the east side of Sixty-Fifth Street to the west side, taking enough lead to hit a moving target about a hundred feet away. Naturally, even in Brooklyn, clergy were exempt from attack (yes, how naïve this is today), so we cuffed the kid, picked up the rabbi’s hat, got a thank you from the holy man, and went home.

Now this was all minor hooliganism, but it goes to prove the somewhat inevitable reality that force is also an effective language when all else fails. You can turn the proverbial other cheek and end up with two shattered cheekbones and a short vacation in the local hospital.

The delinquent in this case was attending a parochial school, so he should have known better. He never showed up again, though. We waited at the unspoken behest of the rabbi, who was certainly of the turn the other cheek theology. You can look to Darwinism with the extinction of the dodo bird, whose only response to aggression by humans was being even friendlier, thereby becoming extinct. Reasonable is sometimes a cover-up for being dangerous. Certainly, in the streets, the dodo-bird reflex is dangerous enough.

This expanded to protection from snowballs and fireworks tossed into the shul itself. Now, we were good bullies as kids, meaning we extended protection from attacks to people that needed it: senior citizens, younger kids, and those with special needs. The start of every school year had the first street fight between the two biggest boys in the grade: Fran Apicella and Paul Fontana, the two best athletes in the class of ’72 at St. Athanasius.

We happened to pick up the moniker good but rough kids, and we made good money from it, too. Hey, who does something for nothing in a working-class neighborhood? But, it was better than stealing.

So, we were now Shabbos goyim, meaning young non-Jewish kids, who on the Sabbath would perform very ordinary household chores on Fridays and Saturdays so the Jewish people could observe appropriately. For a price of course, always for a price! The Jewish families could not attend to very ordinary chores because the Old Testament said it was illegal to do so on the Sabbath.

We were the only Catholic school kids who loved Chanukah more than Christmas. To us, Chanukah meant Chanukah gelt, which tasted far better than the Italian cookies and other delicacies of the season. We knew every major and minor Jewish holiday of the Old Testament as well as the Christian holidays we celebrated. It was good for both business and neighborhood harmony. It was extremely important to know the ways of your neighbors as well as your enemies.

Protection is important. As Catholic school kids, we embraced that the foundation of our religion was based on a Jewish man, Jesus Christ. We always asked our parents, Why do we go to Catholic school if we were being taught to follow the life and examples of a Jewish man?

There was never a response, just a nod of the head. and a shrug of the shoulders

Our mother swore that we were running numbers or betting in the streets, as the Sanka coffee jar on our kitchen windowsill was always filled with dollar bills and coins. Our Jewish neighbors taught us the value of entrepreneurship: identifying a need and filling it.

We’d get a quarter for things like turning off light switches, opening mail, lighting a gas burner, or throwing out garbage. Good work if you could get it, and we got it, for the unspoken reward for being decent, caring, and protective, even though we were rough-edged kids. There was no room for religious discrimination on our block. And it was bad for business!

So we spotted and created the lucky break, seized and exploited it, and gained the rewards of being Street Smart, courtesy of our revered Jewish neighbors.

Now no one ever spoke of this, but the link was clear enough for us kids. We were being Street Smart. Brooklyn (and New York) kids grew up being more resilient and resourceful because we lived by our wits. More people meant more interplay. That meant more interaction, schemes, dishonesty, and more reason to employ what we had learned from our experiences. To this day, we regard this as urban evolutionary, Darwinian Survival of the Fittest at its best, and it is.

Faster-paced and more cosmopolitan surroundings equate to Street Smarts being exercised on a daily basis. And we lived it in a real-time fashion.

Practically every one of our Street Scholars stresses that using their own version of being Street Smart helped them overcome their social and economic disadvantages, becoming successful enough for us to want to include them in this book.

The Science Behind Street Smart

Street Smart is always born and honed in urban or crowded environments, where intense and constant interaction with diverse populations is the norm. It is never forgotten in childhood. It is never hard to define being Street Smart as it is always present. This specific skillset almost always separates the successful from the ordinary.

Extrasensory perception (ESP) is a staple of American folklore. ESP is roughly defined as perception of facts and thoughts not actually derived from the usual senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch.

Street Smart is itself derived, we believe, from ESP. In other words, people believed that a capacity for Street Smarts existed, and they knew of it. And, of course, they said so. The polls are older but certainly informative and overwhelmingly favorable to the belief that being Street Smart is relevant. As we have stated, the capacity to read a situation or a person beyond mere physical features is a critical component of being Street Smart.

A 2005 Gallup Poll related that 73 percent of Americans believed in some kind of paranormal phenomena, with 41 percent of those polled saying they believe in ESP or used it themselves in their lives. A 2002 Gallup showed a 57 percent belief, as reported in CBS News. More polls as in the Baylor Survey (2007) indicated a 63 percent belief in Street Smart as expressed in ESP. The decade before, belief always hovered favorably in the 60–67th and even 70th percentiles.

The New York Times, in an issue dated January 10, 1984, traced military applications of ESP from an order from President Jimmy Carter in 1977 to the Central Intelligence Agency to close a perceived ESP gap between the United States and the then-Soviet Union. The CIA supposedly responded with several projects accordingly to close the gap.

Similarly, CBS News televised in 2018 the news that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) initiated Project Star Gate with a dozen or so ESP-talented individuals in intelligence gathering.

From several media accounts, Star Gate existed. In fact, the CIA declassified over twelve million pages of Project Star Gate (now defunct under its former name but continued under top secret designation elsewhere), including a program tracking Islamic terrorists. Twelve million pages is a lot of information based on a frivolous topic, by anyone’s measure.

One of the authors participated in an early-1970s version of Star Gate, as reported in the New York Times from November 25, 1973. The concept explored and proved statistically is called remote viewing: reading a person’s mind from another, sealed, isolated room in the building.

In this article, Federal Grant Supports ESP Dream Research at Maimonides, Times reporter Gordon T. Thompson recounted the basic outline of the experiments that had been conducted in 1974–75.

With a major grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Maimonides Medical Center of Parapsychology and Psychophysics conducted both experiments. Maimonides is a major hospital in, of course, Brooklyn. The NIMH is another major player, not given to frivolous causes. It was, and is, notoriously tightfisted in giving away money. Its spokesman told the Times:

The evidence of ESP, not only from our work but from a dozen other experiments, establishes beyond any reasonable scientific doubt that it occurs. It is important that research on ESP now shifts from attempts to demonstrate that something unusual is happening—which has been the argument over the last 90 years—to what kind of situations and individuals are necessary for it to be obtained.

Many scientists have argued that parapsychology—the term commonly applied to ESP research—is not a true science and point to its long years as the exclusive province of carnival mind readers and charlatans. But the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the country’s largest scientific association, has recognized it as a discipline and admitted it as an affiliate, in effect recognizing ESP research as a legitimate scientific enterprise.

This was the program one of the authors participated in as part of a joint Long Island University (Brooklyn Center, of course!) cooperation between Maimonides Medical Center and LIU’s Honor Programs, with unofficial assistance from the United States Army.

Effectively, one sender tries to mentally project a glimpse of a registered image to another person (a receiver) in a neighboring room, with a crew tape recording both persons as they recount what is going through their mind. They are sensory deprived otherwise (wearing eye coverings and earmuffs) and kept in relative darkness for concentration. People are statistically psychic when their hit scores, meaning when they exactly match the image projected to what they were sent, in such accuracy that it can’t be explained away by mere chance. (Seeing the Mona Lisa or Malibu at the same exact time without clues is psychic.) And the same ability termed Street Smart, registered similarly, is the capability to see an opportunity or avoid a trap.

Last, but hardly least, the US Marine Corps (USMC) participated in an Office of Naval Research (ONI) program exploring the Spidey sense (ESP of Marvel superhero Spiderman) of Marines and sailors that lasted four years and cost several million dollars. Spidey sense or not, this was Street Smarts for Marines.

In popular culture, ESP was fictionalized in the 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring Jeff Bridges and George Clooney. The movie accurately, if in a tongue-in-cheek way, depicts a remote reading program undertaken by the United States military in the aftermath of 9/11. The military used Street Smarts to track down terror cells. This involved actual combat in Street Smart tactics during the invasion and pacification of Iraq. The official word is that such programs have wound down to basically caretaker administration. The unofficial word is that the programs still exist, though not advertised in military literature.

Similarly, both the Russian government and the Chinese government have unpublicized Street Smart programs. The New York Times picked up the lead way back in the ’70s in an article titled, Émigré Tells of Research in Soviet in Parapsychology for Military Use, by veteran reporter Flora Lewis. In that Times article, the old Soviet KGB (national Russian secret police) drafted sixty experts in many scientific fields. Physics was the primary emphasis. It was eventually termed Special Department Number Eight.

Further research is found in Unconventional Research in the USSR and Russia, by Serge Kernbach, archived at ARXIV.org, with over three hundred scholarly citations (Dec. 5, 2013). Curiously, a specific Soviet Army unit based at Novosibirsk (Russia) and tagged unit 715 A2 was employed for Street Smart purposes. Soviet, then Russian, research focused on Street Smart mental emissions.

In short, the CIA, DIA, USMC, ONI, our Street Scholars (including Bo Dietl, Detective, NYPD), various other national governments, and most Americans believe or at least publicly believed in a version of being Street Smart. But, being Street Smart isn’t taught or scripted, and it can certainly be fleeting.

Street Smart Classics: Guys Who Weren’t Lucky Enough to Be Born in Brooklyn, or Who Are Dead Right Now

There’s Street Smart wisdom from ancient China and Middle Ages Europe, well quoted over the centuries, but which has been adapted in various self-help and business strategies. Sun