Curating Your Community to Overcome Adversity: Lessons from the Wu-Tang Clan

The Wu-Tang Clan descended on the rap scene like a swarm of killer bees. Urging you to “Protect Ya Neck,” the clan were armed with malicious metaphors that masterfully painted the plight of growing up in the slums of Shaolin (Staten Island).

Like most powerful truths, the genius of the Wu can easily be lost. To understand their brilliance, we must examine their formula like a mathematician. The riches are in the steps.

Step 1: There’s Power in Numbers

The beauty of hip hop music is found in its simplicity. A microphone, a drum loop, a sample, and words are all that is needed. Pre-Wu, hip-hop groups consisted of four members max (three lyricists and a DJ).

The Wu were nine people deep. Nine unique styles, flows, and personas knocked listeners unconscious with punchline after punchline. RZA, the group’s founder, knew that alone their voices could easily be overlooked, but by uniting their expression they couldn’t be ignored.

On “C.R.E.A.M.,” Raekwon states, “My life got no better same damn ‘Lo sweater times is rough and tough like leather. Figured out I went the wrong route, so I got with a sick tight clique and went all out.” 

Lesson: When people come together for a common purpose, they don’t just rise, they soar.

History is littered with examples of groups of people overcoming adversity to achieve amazing results. Like the Wu, use the themes of the past to formulate your future.

Action Step: Take time to assess your past, envision your future, and connect and curate your clan. 

Step 2: Adversity builds character; privilege stifles strength.

The brilliant and unrivaled Ghostface Killah knows a thing or two about adversity. Ghost grew up in an environment overwhelmed with a poverty of spirit, love, and money.

In 1996, Ghost bottled up his experiences and relaxed his flow on the iconic slow jam, “All That I got is You,” as he smoothly rapped, “Seven o’clock plucking roaches out the cereal box, sharing the same spoons watching Saturday cartoons. Sugar water was our thing every meal was no frill and in the summer, free lunch held us down like steel.” 

Never having sugar water, free lunch, or roaches to pluck from my breakfast, you’d think that my naivety would’ve blocked his hardship from penetrating my core. But it didn’t. In fact, after watching the video on MTV Jams, I became even more responsive to his representations of hardship. Letting myself imagine life in his reality, I struggled with the concept of my own frailty and began to envy his fortitude. As I coveted his strength, a powerful theme emerged... shared struggle builds mutual fortitude.

With the help of his extended network, Ghostface overcame his plight. Simply put, the Wu-Tang Clan was an intentional grouping of members who brought their collective adversity to develop communal strength.

Lesson: Our experiences can either break us down or build us up. To overcome adversity, we need to enlist the power of people to gain commonality, perspective, and positivity amidst the struggle.

Action Step: Go out and grow your network. Train yourself to find joy and strength in the midst of your hardships and seek compassion to enter into the pain of others.

Step 3: Knowledge is power; ignorance is whack.

“Knowledge, know the ledge to where your heart is or fall off into the internal hell that’s uncharted.” – RZA

The true power of knowledge is that it provides options. It is liberating to be able to hatch scores of plans for where you’d like to work, live, study, and fellowship.

In essence: knowledge provides the ability not only to dream but to put forth action for achievement.

When the Wu entered the hip-hop arena, they did so with an intellect as sharp as their ambition to make it out of Staten Island. Like a quick right hook to a glass jaw, their intellectual flow connected with the masses. They introduced representations of their past with imagery that painted vivid depictions of the world as it was, and how it could be.

The Wu used their knowledge to out-strategize their competition. Thus, it’s not surprising that members of the Wu-Tang Clan launched their own clothing line (Wu-Wear), starred, directed, and wrote Hollywood movies, and even earned the highest title that a chess player can obtain (Grandmaster).

Lesson: Knowledge is like the air we breathe, it is necessary for our survival and paramount to unleash our full potential.

Action Step: Stop pursuing knowledge as an afterthought; it is your birthright. Seek knowledge in every interaction, situation, and struggle to continuously improve.

Regardless of status, class, gender, and nationality, trials and tribulations impact us all. When trials present themselves, you’ll be able to navigate through the darkness if, like the Wu-Tang Clan, you:

1.    Connect and curate your clan

2.    Enlist the power of people to gain commonality, perspective, and positivity amidst the struggle

3.    Recognize knowledge as elemental to your being