Lil Yachty always knew he would be able to get rich with rap.
The artist took a blast to the past on Shannon Sharpe’s “Club Shay Shay” podcast. Before betting fully on his music dreams and dropping out of college in the process, he worked several job. His mother, a businesswoman, instilled in him the importance of education and working.
“My mother’s from a different time period than me as to where, like you know, her parents worked in steel mills, you know, and they instilled college in her. She’s from Gary, IN, so all she knew was a degree career,” he said on the podcast. “So, I’m like ‘I’m going to be rich off rap,’ and I’m from a little suburban area outside Atlanta (GA), where no one was famous, right. It was low to middle income. It was just regular, right. So, she’s like, ‘You got like a one-in-a-million chance.'”
At 15, Lil Yachty worked at McDonald’s as a cook, and a year later he spent a month working at Six Flags amusement park during its Fright Fest. He also altered people’s clothes to make money, charging between $10 to $20. At the same time, his mother lost her job while he was in high school.
Lil Yachty decided to give the school route another go. While enrolled at Alabama State University for a short period in fall 2015, he released the single “1 Night” on Aug. 23, 2015, which became a hit.
By November, he dropped out of school for good and the single peaked at No. 49 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart the following year, notes HotNewHipHop.
