Yusuf Dahl
He knew he was loved by his mother, and because she loved him, Yusuf Dahl knew he was worth something. Growing up in a food insecure and financially unstable household in Milwaukee taught Yusuf what not to do in order to be a successful adult. Those lessons made him a profitable drug dealer. After landing in prison, however, Yusuf began applying himself in a new way. The investment in himself set him up for a future he never could have imagined, including a degree at Princeton, a real estate career, and a mission to make housing more affordable and available for everyone.
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In this episode:
The right to affordable housing.
The influence our parents and guardians have on us.
How we view our community matters.
The role demographics plays in the trajectory of your life.
Learning to respond to challenges and adversity with optimism.
Stay connected to YUSUF:
Websites:
Twitter: @YusufDahl
Instagram: @yusufdahl
Charity Donation: The Petey Greene Program
Wise Words:
Every person in this country, quite frankly, deserves access to safe, quality, and affordable housing.
I often say I am who I am because of my mother, but not always in the positive sense. Right? How I learned to manage money was watching her every month waste the resources that our family would receive from the government. She was a profligate spender when she had it. I remember, honestly, at a very young age, just watching her manage her money, and I’d be like, “That is not how you do it.” So, a lot of what I learned came from her, just to do the opposite.
Because she loved me, I knew I was worth something, and because I knew I was worth something, I had to invest in myself.
An entrepreneur always starts with three things. I don’t care what business it is. An entrepreneur starts with who they are, what they know, and who they know.
If I don’t do something to make a difference, who the hell is going to? If I don’t care, and I’m from these communities, if I don’t care, and I victimized these communities when I was a young person, who really is going to care?
My childhood was very transient. When you have a transient relationship with your community if you just view where you live as a discrete place that you stay in for a discrete period of time, that influences how you view that community. If there is a piece of trash floating around, why are you going to stop? Hell, I’m going to add trash to it. What do I care? But when you view where you live as your community, you start to take ownership, and that is so important.
How can you live your life in a way that you change the trajectory for your children and everyone and everything that comes after you? That to me is the challenge that I issue to myself.
Place matters. A lot of this stuff we know empirically. There has just been so much research over the last 10 years. Where you are born, the zip code that you are born in is a predictor of where you’re going to end up. First of all, that should just outrage all of us because that goes against the very ethos of this country. Right?
You are going to experience challenges. It’s not a question of if you’re going to experience them, the question is how are you going to respond to them. I believe if you respond to challenges and adversity with optimism and with a commitment to try to make the most of it, you’re going to be able to do great things for yourself and, hopefully, others.