Lucky Me Review
Over the past week, I read Rich Paul’s latest book, Lucky Me, and by read, I mean I listened to the audiobook at 1.5x speed. Read by Paul himself, it was a rich story that took a commendable angle. The angle was that Rich focused on his upbringing and what built “Lil Rich” rather than the champagne-soaked tales of being a kingmaker in professional sports or gossipy takes on his good friend LeBron that could be skewed and reshaped by the pundits and social media.
No, in Rich’s story, I saw so much of myself. Now, to be clear, I never sold weed. I was never the kid in the dice game (I’d watch and then get bored and go play basketball), but what did resonate was a spirit shared by all the crack-era babies. However, I did utilize everything around me to hustle my way out of abject poverty, and I now run my companies and business endeavors a certain way. And many people will never understand my mindset about my work, but this book captures that spirit. Much of it goes unsaid, but the vibe is thick and cloudy, like the old clubs Billie Holliday used to perform in.
What Rich captured was a demeanor you have as a Black boy learning in a fast-paced environment where real danger, dangers you don’t even fully comprehend as dangers at the moment, are all around. Rich captured the complicated relationship many of us had during that era with addict parents and how we made sense of the world. Rich also captured how our minds were molded then, which still influences us today.
Check out the book if you want a raw character study of one of the best minds in modern sports today. If you want to understand better how a young man who hustled dime bags and throwback jerseys became one of the most potent powerbrokers in all sports, then this is the book for you. As attributed to the book title, this is Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt, not the latest algorithmic 2-minute hit that only deals in surface-level exploits. It’s a man pouring his soul and exercising demons, many of which will never die. I know it all to well. You have been warned.
It’s a hell of a book.
