Can you imagine Latifah and her “trainer” pushing strollers around Hollyweird in a couple of years? According to a new interview, that’s exactly the move she’s trying to make. Latifah, who splits her time between New Jersey, Miami, and Los Angeles, says that in 10 years, she hopes to be “on cruise control, with a couple of kids under my belt.” Is she making a move in that direction? “It’s in the Lord’s hands.” Meanwhile, her overarching goal right now “is just to enjoy life more. I work a lot. I want to make sure I’m living life to the fullest and checking in with me.” We can’t help but try to imagine her pregnant now. Or do you think she’d find a surrogate or adopt? Here are some other interesting tidbits running through her mind and governing her life. FAMILY VALUES HUSTLE = SUCCESS Latifah took her early cues as a businesswoman from her family. “My grandfather owned a hardware store in Newark,” she says. “Just seeing him become successful and how it became a family business was always interesting to me. And if my brother and I wanted money in our pockets, we had to get jobs–my first was at 15, at Burger King. We had to come up with ways to create an income.” She avoided the routes that some neighborhood kids took. “Unfortunately, some of the brightest minds use that hustler spirit and apply it to becoming drug dealers. I didn’t want to be that person. It wasn’t a positive way to make money, and we all knew that it led to death or jail.” PAY ATTENTION AND ASK QUESTIONS “When it came time to be a professional rapper, I wouldn’t sign anything without reading it. There was no way I was going to have people make decisions for me or wake up one day and find that I was broke because I never bothered to read a contract. I wasn’t a lawyer, but I had a pretty good idea of what words meant, and things I didn’t understand I would ask about. Shakim [Compere, Latifah’s longtime business partner in Flavor Unit Entertainment] and I were like sponges. We listened and we observed people who were more successful than us.” ADMIT WHEN YOU’RE IN OVER YOUR HEAD “Our record label didn’t fly. I think we were loyal to a fault–we signed all these really talented artists who hadn’t made records yet, we were paying salaries for people working in our office, we were paying all the bills. We sank millions into our company, and we shouldn’t have done that.” Complicating matters, she was personally hit with a huge, unexpected bill from the I.R.S. “We had to say, ‘Enough is enough. This isn’t working right now.’” OPENING UP HELPS OTHERS COPE In her recent quasi-motivational book Put on Your Crown, Latifah wrote about adversities in her life–including being sexually abused as a child by a babysitter and losing her beloved older brother in a 1992 motorcycle accident–to share with others how she got through the dark times. “I think people can feel when you’re saying something from the heart, something truthful,” she says. “I don’t know how to do it any differently. Sometimes it’s just knowing what someone else has been through that strikes a chord, that helps other people get through their lives in a more full way.” Hmmm. Who knew she was such a fan of telling the truth and opening up. Source
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When Pigs Fly: 40-Year-Old King Latifah Wants To Be A Mommy In Ten Years