Book Nook: Creative Hustle - Blaze Your Own Path and Make Work That Matters

Olatunde Sobomehin is the CEO and co-founder of StreetCode Academy, a Silicon Valley-based non-profit that offers free tech classes to communities of color. It is one of the fastest-growing organizations in the region, growing from 20 students in its inaugural class in 2014 to now serving over 2,000 students annually with over 40,000 hours of free instruction. Back from a long overdue and life-changing sabbatical, Sobomehin is celebrating a new book he co-authored, Creative Hustle: Blaze Your Own Path and Make Work That Matters

Sobomehin says, "Parents are the ultimate creative hustlers! It is innate." He and his wife, Tamara, reside in East Palo Alto, CA, with their four children: Olatayo, Temilola, Tatiola, and Olataiye. All of his kids are outright (and heralded) entrepreneurs in their own right. Tunde can talk about how he raised his kids to know their gifts and move forward with an innate sense of agency.

You can learn more in this interview.

We see the word "hustle" a lot these days. How do you and your co-author define it?

In the book, sam and I acknowledge that hustle has a lot of different meanings and interpretations, some good and some bad. We see hustle as representing a strong work ethic and an indefatigable energy. We see hustle as the positive act of taking any idea and applying tenacity to make it happen.

For me personally, the fact that my wife, Tamara, and I are raising a family of six in Silicon Valley on non-profit salaries is a hustle. At one point, for a very small period, our financial reality literally meant we only had canned food to eat. But we drove past that reality and promised our kids we would “eat like kings.” We called our cousin to let us into the Stanford cafeteria, where we filled up tupperware with chicken strips, bbq sauce, and other things. We ate like kings that night. Since then we’ve continued hustling to where we now (thank God) don’t have those problems. 

In fact, now as a family, we’re defining the next level of hustle as finding the right balance between work and rest. 

Why is creativity important, and where does it intersect with the "hustle?"

In our book, we bring the words creative and hustle together and define it as the alchemy of imagination and ambition that will enable you to apply your gifts to reach your goals. Every human is built with unique gifts and goals. There is no one path that will get us there, so we’ll need creative hustle to find the path that is unique to us. 

Beyond the professional or academic, this creative hustle walk is a spiritual one. We need creativity to think outside of the standards and norms of our world, to really see who we are. And we need hustle to go out everyday and find it.

What experiences have inspired your unique Creative Hustle? Why is it important to bring this idea and process to others?

When I was in high school, a mentor of mine, Kevin Fuller, introduced me to the book, Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys, where the central concept was that black boys were implicitly told they couldn’t be both “popular and smart.” At that time, I noticed this around me – that it was assumed you couldn’t be both a high performing athlete and a high performing scholar. 

I took this as a challenge for me to live outside of these expectations. I earned all As from then on and competed in soccer, basketball, and track at the state level. I brought that same concept and drive to Stanford University, where I walked on to a Top-25 basketball team and was voted Most Inspirational from my teammates. Then I sold T-shirts with a mission to “make popular culture positive so that positive culture can be popular.” 

It’s important to keep reminding myself and others that the best story can be the story of us – through creative hustle, we can blaze new paths, and live a life of meaning that works for us.

Can you tell us about StreetCode Academy? What is its mission and why is it important to you?

StreetCode Academy is about unlocking the brilliance and innovation in communities of color by using technology. It’s really about redemptive entrepreneurship, a concept I learned from Praxis, which says there are three ways we can innovate: exploitative, where we try and take all we can get; ethical, where we try to do no wrong; or redemptive, where we can bless others, renew culture, and give creative restoration to communities and the world.  

StreetCode’s mission is to inspire innovation within our communities by providing free, high-quality tech education classes in coding, entrepreneurship, and design. We want to build our own tech ecosystem and “Motown the Industry,” where the underdogs in our community shape technology to influence the world. 

Do you have to be creative to get something out of this book? In what areas of work or life will this book be helpful?

Filmmaker and futurist Erwin McManus reflected in his book, The Artisan Soul, that after thirty years studying creativity, he sees that “the great divide is not between those who are artists and those who are not, but between those who understand that they are creative and those who have become convinced that they are not.”  

I was this person. I felt I wasn’t creative because I couldn’t draw or create films. However, this book project allowed us to broaden the definition of creativity, entrepreneurship, hustle – and allowed us to find the ways we are all creative hustlers. The book is both aspirational and practical. It asks readers to define their goals, and also helps them think through the path to get there.

No matter your role or job, I think the book can help shape your practices, how you see other people, and how you define and shape your own principles. 

It’s a book for everyone.

You write at the start of the book that "one of our goals in writing this book was to actively contribute to bringing about a more just and more beautiful planet–a world that will be healthier and happier for our relations and future generations." How can focusing on our individual goals contribute to a greater good?

All of us wake up in our own bodies every morning. We brush our own teeth, look at ourselves in the mirror, and decide how we want to live our lives. To that extent, our own goals occupy our most immediate attention. However, we want to show in the book how much other people – our communities – are a part of that journey, and how essential we are to other people around us.

We are all connected. 

That awareness of our interconnectivity and interdependence should position us in family, in household, in community – and by way of that, it creates our world and our legacy. In the book, Tesa Aragones talks about meditating and then immediately talking to her mother every morning; it’s a practice that shapes her successful goal of being the best designer in the world. Bryant talks about assembling his friends as his personal board of directors to help him become his best self. 

These examples help me to imagine a world where we all activate the people around us with the goal of unlocking our best creative hustling selves. 

The book aims to teach readers how to identify and unlock the potential of their unique gifts as a way to achieve their goals. Can you describe the guidance that you offer in the book?

Our approach in the book is pretty simple. The first piece of guidance we offer is to take the time away to think about these things. Whether you’re a seasoned tech professional, a working-class parent, or a wide-eyed student, we rarely carve out time carved to think about and write down our goals. Just taking the time to do this is a serious step in this process. 

The second piece of guidance is to find inspiration in the people around us. We consciously chose people that were inspirational in their careers, and yet approachable enough that we could see ourselves in them. We found practical and tangible takeaways on how they unlocked creativity for them that could be great starting points for us to do the same. 

And the last piece of guidance we offer is to keep it going. Never stop doing it. This is not a one-time event; this is a lifestyle. We take the design approach of integrating, prototyping, and then repeating as a way to think about connecting our gifts to our goals. 

Olatunde Sobomehin is the CEO and co-founder of StreetCode Academy, a Silicon Valley-based non-profit that offers free tech classes to communities of color. It is one of the fastest-growing organizations in the region, growing from 20 students in its inaugural class in 2014, to now serving over 2,000 students annually with over 40,000 hours of free instruction.  As a student at Stanford, Olatunde also led a public speaking class in the Engineering department and played on the top 25 Men's Basketball Team, where he was also voted Most Inspirational Player (2003). His body of work has earned him recognition as a 2018 Aspen Institute Scholar, a 2019 Praxis Fellow, and a 2020 Social Entrepreneurship Fellow at Stanford University. He has also taught classes at the Stanford Haas Center and Stanford d.school.  Olatunde graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Urban Studies. He and his wife, Tamara, reside in East Palo Alto, CA with their four children: Olatayo, Temilola, Tatiola, and Olataiye.

Your website URL: www.streetcode.us