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Identity · Perseverance · Resilience
James BaldwinWriter, essayist, playwright
"You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."
The world builds an idea of you before you ever open your mouth. Based on what you look like. Where you came from. What you have or have not done. That idea becomes the ceiling most people live under for the rest of their lives.
The I Will Be Program starts by asking one question: what titles do you carry? Not the ones you chose. The ones that were handed to you before you had a choice.
Baldwin decided. This program is where you start deciding too.
Start with The Fire Next Time. Born Harlem, 1924.
Tupac ShakurRapper, poet, actor
"I know it seems hard sometimes but remember one thing: through every dark night, there's a bright day after that."
Tupac wrote and recorded over 200 songs, most of them before he was 25. He grew up without stability, without safety, without anyone handing him a map. What he had was language — and he used it to name things most people were afraid to say out loud.
The resilience block of the I Will Be Program asks one question: what have you survived that you do not give yourself enough credit for? Tupac's entire catalog is the answer to that question put to music.
The dark night is real. So is what comes after it.
Listen to Dear Mama. Read his poetry collection The Rose That Grew from Concrete.
Frida KahloPainter
"I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."
Kahlo was in a near-fatal bus accident at 18 that shattered her spine, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, and right leg. She spent months in a body cast. Her mother mounted a mirror above her bed so she could see herself. She started painting.
She did not paint to escape her life. She painted it directly — the pain, the surgery, the grief, the politics, the identity. Every canvas was an act of refusing to disappear.
The I Will Be Program asks participants to look directly at who they are — not the ideal version, the actual version. That kind of honesty takes the same courage Kahlo brought to every painting.
Your reality is worth painting. Start by looking at it clearly.
Look up The Two Fridas and Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace.
Maya AngelouPoet, memoirist, activist
"You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them."
Angelou did not speak for five years as a child — not because she could not, but because she chose not to after experiencing trauma that the adults around her failed to protect her from. She filled those years with reading. Every book in every library she could reach.
She came back to language on her own terms. And when she did she became one of the most powerful voices of the twentieth century.
The I Will Be Program teaches that recovery is not weakness. It is identity in motion. The way you come back from hard things is one of the most honest things about who you are.
You are not what happened to you. You are what you do with it.
Read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Muhammad AliBoxer, activist
"I am the greatest. I said that even before I knew I was."
Ali said this not as arrogance but as instruction. He understood something most people spend their whole lives trying to learn — that identity is not discovered, it is declared. You say who you are before the evidence arrives. Then you build the evidence.
He also gave up his heavyweight title, his passport, and faced prison rather than go to war he did not believe in. That was not arrogance. That was a man who knew exactly who he was and refused to be anyone else.
The I Will Be Program ends with a declaration. Every participant stands up and says out loud who they are and who they are becoming. Ali did that every day of his life.
Watch his 1974 fight in Zaire. The Rumble in the Jungle. Then find out why it mattered beyond boxing.
Nina SimoneMusician, singer, activist
"You have to learn to get up from the table when love is no longer being served."
Simone spent decades giving everything she had to audiences, to the civil rights movement, to music — and spent equal time fighting for her own dignity in an industry that did not always give it. She was classically trained. She applied to the Curtis Institute of Music and was rejected. She believed it was because she was Black.
She built something anyway. Then she used her platform to say things no one else was saying — in concert halls, on stages, directly into microphones.
The I Will Be Program teaches participants to examine what they are holding that no longer serves them — titles they have outgrown, habits that vote against who they want to become, relationships that pull them away from themselves.
Some tables you have to leave. Knowing which ones takes courage.
Listen to Feeling Good and Mississippi Goddam.
Jean-Michel BasquiatPainter
"I don't think about art when I'm working. I think about life."
Basquiat started as a teenager spray-painting poetry and symbols on walls in lower Manhattan under the name SAMO. By 27 he was one of the most celebrated artists in the world. By 27 he was also dead.
He painted crowns. He painted words. He painted Black figures, anatomy, history, jazz musicians, athletes — things the art world had ignored or erased. He put them back. Loudly.
The I Will Be Program talks about legacy — what you leave behind in the ordinary choices you make every day. Basquiat left behind over a thousand works in less than a decade. He was not thinking about art. He was thinking about life. That is the distinction.
What are you thinking about when you work?
Look up his painting Untitled (1982). Then find out who Jean-Michel was before the fame.