Early Morning Soundtracks & Story Roots Early Saturday mornings, music would blare out from the living room. That was the first alert—a full day of bleach, baskets, and the laundromat was ahead. Smokey Robinson serenaded my mom while she glided across the kitchen floor, pouring bleach into tubs and sinks like she was baptizing the house. Our LA apartment—romantically named the hood—wasn't much, but the music turned it into something sacred. That was our first cinema. That was storytelling, long before we had cameras or computers. See, for people like us, storytelling didn’t come from school or studios. It came...

I’ve been creating variations of this company for years. I often have doubts if I have what it takes to create a business. I don't like asking for money. I don't like trying to get attention even if it's for a business project that I have created. In my thinking, once the project is created and submitted to the market, if it's a good project, it should take off. However, that’s not exactly how business works. You need to keep your products in front of people to get them to buy what you're selling. You also need to place the...