From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

Wyclef Jean on making an idea happen

(singing) - And then, so now, by the time I'm like, 17, right? I'm in the Booger Basement in the hood, inside of a basement similar to Steve Jobs, and I'm like yo, I'm going to create this idea I have, and so it started off with basically the fact that I understood what an audio engineer was, but I learned it backwards first. So if you listen to an album called The Score, for example, you all have heard The Score? So The Score, "one time, two time," in The Score, you hear a Fender Rose. I couldn't afford a Fender Rose, but I understood that if I could take a sine wave and basically create a frequency and tune it at 443, right, 440 is standard, I can trick the human psyche into vibration because that's what we are and that produced the album which was called The Score. So by the time I was like, 19, 20, and I did The Score, I delivered it to Sony. It was like, well, which big studio did you record this at and who recorded it with you and which soundboard did you use? Um, dude didn't believe me. Donny Ienner came to the basement, after that, they called me Frankenstein because literally you're going down this basement and you're seeing all these antennas, you're like, what the heck is going on? So that's what I inspire every kid and that's how I inspire my daughter. Whatever is in your head, you can just bring it out. Don't let nobody dictate because the only way you're going to invent is, you know, you understand the math, you understand the science, but you have to push it like I'm depending on you to take me past the moon.

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