Comedian Kevin Hart is known for jokes and comic relief, but in a recent radio interview, the funny man got serious as he discussed his past financial struggles that led him to consider heading down the wrong path in life.
As he explained to the Breakfast Club Power team at 105.1 FM, he was a broke college student about ready to turn to stripping to make a quick buck, until some friends and loved ones intervened and offered life-changing perspective. He is now speaking openly about how far he has come in an effort to inspire others to embrace working hard and avoid the pitfalls of the so-called “easy route” to money or fame.
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“I was going to be a a stripper,” Hart declared, before adding that he was a community college student watching his bank account run “dry” when a woman he was hanging out with suggested he “start dancing.”
While he joked that he never got far enough along in the process to pick his stripper name, he did get “far enough” to think about a routine and pick out some clothes.
“As funny as me putting myself in a situation to possibly almost strip is, there’s a lesson in that,” Hart said. “Like, as crazy as it was, desperation was in, and I was about to go to the ultimate route of desperation.”
In that moment of desperation, Hart found support in the people who knew him best.
“It took someone going … ’Stupid! What are you doing? No, you ain’t about to do that. Go out there and just take your lumps. You’ll figure it out. You ain’t about to do this,’” he recalled.
Hart said he had always been led to believe that struggle was a sign of weakness or failure, and with very little money and no obvious job prospects, he found himself at what he believed to be rock bottom. In reality, it was just the beginning.
“It took somebody checking me to make me go, ‘Alright, it ain’t that bad to struggle.’ I thought if you were struggling, that’s bad because what else you do,” he said. “Man, go struggle. Go get your dumb a** out there.”
He went on to explain that his experience should serve as a warning to anyone who is looking to take the easy way out.
“It’s a lesson within the attempt to find an easy route. I wanted a quick fix. How do I get some quick money in my pocket? The life lesson within that moment was there is no win in the quick route,” he said. “Everybody wants that quick route … There’s nothing wrong with taking a longer route. There’s nothing wrong with grinding. There’s nothing wrong with actually working and getting a little dirty and getting some lessons from the dirt that you now got on your hands.”
Likening life to authoring a book, Hart reminded those listening that each and every person has the power to choose how their life will go. There is a beginning, middle, and end to every story, to every life, and it is up to the individual to write the chapters.
“Your life is book. You got different chapters in your life. Ultimately, you’re going to get to the end of your book. However you want that book to end is up to you,” Hart said. “Are you learning from the chapters? Are you taking the positives out of the negatives to make the next chapters better? Or are you the type of person that can finish each chapter on the negative and shoulder shrug it?”
“You gotta start taking responsibility,” he concluded. “When I started doing that, that’s when I started to grow, that’s when I started to get better.”
(H/T: Goalcast)