Mentorship and relationship building

- [Instructor] This is an audio course. Thank you for listening. - Tricky, thank you for joining us. - Hey, how are you? - I'm great. Great having you on. - Thank you. Thank you for having me, sir. - Thanks for being here. You grew up in Markham, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and you grew up in a family where music was front and center. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What inspired your passion for music and what drove you to pursue a career in the music business? - I think music was just something that was in my family's, literally, in our DNA for as long as I could remember. Friends being intimidated to singing Happy Birthday at the party just because when the family would sing, it turns into basically a church choir almost you know, five or six part harmonies going without any rehearsal. And it's just kind of everybody knows how to fall in line and do what they're supposed to do. And it's kind of been been a big joke in my friends' circle like my whole life. And it's really just one of those things that everywhere that I looked, honestly music was just deeply entrenched all the way through from my grandparents to every uncle, every aunt, my mother my brother's, cousins, everywhere. So, you know, from Jason Weaver, the actor, being my cousin to Kuk Harrell being my cousin. And, you know, he has more Grammys than I have. My brother Laney being like the, the goat one of the greatest producers that I've ever heard of brother Mark being our manager and kind of like our business consultant and builder of our businesses throughout the years. And then his wife, Judy, they actually joined forces back when we were first starting 30 years ago. And she's been rocking with me ever since my career started. So this is literally, like, even if you come into the family, somehow you'll end up doing music too. - Sounds like a birthright. You had so many mentors along the way who were instrumental to your development and your success. You mentioned a few of them. You mentioned your older brother Laney but there were so many others. And I wanted to know if you could talk about some of those relationships, what you learned from them and what tips you have on the topic of mentorship. - I think some of my strongest mentors like you said are Laney Stewart, my big brother and Mark Stewart as well. Also it's LA Reed. It was Jheryl Busby and Louil Silas Jr. are a few of my mentors and people who really touched me at pivotal points in my career. And I think the biggest part of mentoring for me is to take the time. And when you have accomplished something or you're a person that people look to for information to understand that regardless of who the person is or what their talent level is, or if you feel like they can do something for you at the time, or if you see something in them or not, as you being you, have to use your spark to maybe light a fire in someone that you may not even benefit from the conversation. And what I have found that there's been a lot of ember you know, that I've had the fortune of because I took the time and enjoyed a moment with someone. - What advice do you have on how to find a mentor and how to really optimize a relationship with whatever mentor you've been able to find? - So from the standpoint of the mentor or who I think is the greatest mentor to me, my relationship with LA Reed is probably the one that shaped me the most, right? And that relationship is just something that I nurture a lot. I make sure that regardless of what's going on with me I make sure that I always understand going on with him and that he understands exactly what's going on with me as well to just have a communication that the mentorship ultimately turns into friendship when there's, you know, the type of success that we've had but the art of opportunity to give opportunity, where there's not necessarily anything reciprocal in that opportunity but to really just be a vessel or a springboard for people to find their voice to find their passions and find their purpose I think is really, really important. And that's something I learned from him that there can be seasons while those things do connect. But at the same time once you light that fire, that fire lit forever.