Charlie Rocket Is on a Mission to Change Your Life
If Charlie Jabaley, 30, comes off strong, it’s because the self-made hip-hop mogul only knows unequivocal commitment to every challenge. When he fails, he fails hard.
But his dauntless, wide-smiling spirit rebounds a step ahead. When a band you’ve never heard of fired him, his next beat was to manage an eventual Grammy winner. And when a brain tumor put a floodlight on his failing health, he shed 130 (at last count) pounds and completed an Ironman. His next goal: change a million lives.
And he’s really going to do it.
1988: I started off life normal-sized.
I grew up in Atlanta in the ’90s, and education about food just wasn’t there. I gulped orange juice, ate lots of sandwiches. We’d go out for Mexican, and I’d down the chips and salsas. I loved food. Every day was built around it-it’s a celebration, it’s family time, it’s a go-to when you’re feeling down. I was 6 the first time I realized I didn’t look like everyone else.
1993: As a kid, I only had one dream: to become an athlete.
I was overweight, but sports were everything. You can’t help what you love. Basketball was life. Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Shawn Kemp, the Harlem Globetrotters, I loved them all. I knew stat sheets forward and backward. Every Friday night, I would rent the same Harlem Globetrotters documentary on VHS. Every Saturday morning, I’d practice my moves in our driveway.
1996: Being an athlete was my dream, but I was the chubby kid.
At 8 years old, it wasn’t so bad being big. You know you’re not as good at sports as everybody else, but you’re really young, you don’t mind. When I started getting a little older, the separation of talent really grew, and because I was short and chubby, it was like a double negative. I just couldn’t run fast like everybody else.
1999: I became CEO Charlie.
I wanted to become an entrepreneur because of my parents. My dad worked on houses, and my mom sold vacuum cleaners-she had to get out there and hustle. They never made more than $35,000 a year combined, but they invested their money, they knew about stocks. That fascinated me. As I got older, I started asking myself, “What am I gonna be good at?” And I was like, “I'm gonna be CEO Charlie.” I realized, even though I loved sports, they weren’t going be the big thing for me. I wore suits all the time, even to school, and carried a briefcase instead of a backpack.
2004: In high school, I was the supplier of cool.
I always had a business. I would have the cool jerseys, the cool shoes. For the girls, I’d have the Abercrombie & Fitch. I sold stuff out of the trunk of my car in the school parking lot. Then everybody would come to my house and play basketball. I started a music studio in my bedroom, and 30 kids would be in there writing lyrics. We’d put 20 people on one song, and songs would be like 12 minutes long. The days were built around sports or entrepreneurship.
I wanted to be part of the basketball team, so I was a manager. I took pride in sweeping the floor. I don’t talk about this much, but I am really good at shooting. When you’re overweight, you can’t do the cool moves, so I just shot a lot. I spent more time in the gym than anybody else, and the coach would have me teach the other players how to shoot. To this day, I’ll strike bets with NBA players, challenge them to a shooting contest. I don’t want to reveal who, but I’ve taken down some pretty big names.
2007: I dropped out of college to go on tour with Soulja Boy as his cameraman.
I got into producing hip-hop, started making videos for my friends who were artists. I created a media outlet for independent rappers called Spityourgame.com, and it started picking up traction. My friends and I, we were in the center of this whole dance movement happening in Atlanta. In my first year at community college, the website picked up steam. This kid who lived in Mississippi, he was a fan of what we were doing. His name was Soulja Boy.
The day I registered for my sophomore year of classes, I got a call from Interscope Records: “Soulja Boy wants you to be his cameraman and go on tour with him across the country.” I went back up to the school that day and said, “Give me my money back. I’m done.”
2007 continued...I got fired.
I wasn’t a normal cameraman. I was a media outlet-I had a voice, an audience. Soulja Boy, he’s got the No. 1 song in the world, but when he messed up, I’d tell him. Over time, he didn’t want his $200-a-week cameraman telling him what he should do.
Getting fired was the best thing that could have happened, because I knew I had a bigger purpose. I went to my mom: “Ma, I’m gonna be a manager. That whole camera stuff was cool, but I got to see how the game works, and managers are the ones who make the real money.” She said, “What do you know about managing artists?” And I said, “Nothing, but I'm gonna figure it out.”
2008: My first signed group was called Vistoso Bosses.
I found this girl group that was really, really cool. They kind of sang and rapped. I got ’em signed to Interscope Records, the same label as Soulja Boy. Interscope believed in what I could do to blow an artist up.
2008 continued...I got fired…again.
The girl group said, “We can’t really have an 18-year-old manager.” They left me, and I had to take it on the chin. Their careers ended at about that same point.
2009: I didn’t give up. I signed a group named Travis Porter, and we went top 10 in the U.S.
I told ’em, “If you stay loyal to me, I’m gonna make you a star.” I was living in my mom’s basement at the time. We ended up with three top-10 songs on the U.S. radio charts without a record deal. I literally passed out 150,000 CDs outside of clubs, posted thousands of comments on Myspace to build our fan base, and would drive to radio stations from Jackson, Mississippi, up to Washington, D.C., and work the records.
2010: I cofounded Street Execs Management, and things got good when we discovered 2 Chainz. We were running a multimillion-dollar management company.
It’s really rewarding when nobody does it for you. It wasn’t like somebody came and blessed us with an opportunity. I was grateful, but more so just proud of what I built. I did it myself.
2011: The bigger my business got, though, the bigger I got-I hit 300-plus pounds.
Business was two things: celebrations that revolved around food, and stress that revolved around food. I was gaining weight, but I was also always on a diet. I’d wake up and say, “Today’s the day, I’m gonna do this.” Then, by the end of the day, I’d mess up, eat a ton of fast food, and it was, “Tomorrow’s the day.” It was like I would trip down one stair then just push myself down the rest because, hey, I’m going to start tomorrow, so why not really mess up today. I got so big I didn’t want to leave the house. I became severely depressed, insecure, and mentally was in a really, really bad place.
2012: I lost 100 pounds by starving myself…
I was only eating like 500 calories a day. I couldn’t exercise, because I didn’t have the energy to move.
2013: Then I started binge eating, and all the weight came back.
To me, eating is a lot like breathing. If I told you to take far fewer breaths, eventually you’d be short of breath, and then you’d start gasping to catch up–ahuh, ahuh, ahuh. That’s what binge eating was for me.
2015: My best friend, Scott Cameron, challenged me to run a marathon to lose my weight once and for all.
Scott said, “No more diets. We need to exercise your mind.” I wasn’t a runner. It was one of my dreams just to be able to run around Atlanta’s Chastain Park, and that was only about two miles. When you’re 300 pounds, you can hardly walk a mile.
We ended up running three marathons.
We trained hard, and I found I could run really far. But I also kept eating-way too much. When I ran my first marathon in Santa Rosa, California, in August, I was 10 pounds heavier than when I started training. We did another in October, the Silver Comet Marathon outside Atlanta, and I gained 10 more pounds. Almost four months later, I did the L.A. Marathon and gained another 10.
Exercise saves me from my psychology, my depression, and it’s so rewarding-I was proud of those races. But I wasn’t fixing the root of my problem. I thought that running would make me lose weight, but my root was my relationship with food and stress. There would be nights where I’d eat 15,000 calories, insane binge eating. You just can’t outrun that.
2016: I couldn’t stop eating. I had hit rock bottom - or so I thought.
A brain tumor I had since childhood started growing. It wrapped around my carotid artery and my left optic nerve. Doctors told me it could corrode the top of my spinal cord.
I was at 2 Chainz’s house in late 2016. When I woke up one morning, I reached for a pair of socks, and fell down and passed out. I knew something was really wrong. This brain tumor had always been there, but it was growing larger, and really started to affect me. I thought about why this was happening, and I figured tumors came from an imbalance in the body. The doctors just told me to take a higher dosage of my medication, but the side effects at those levels were bad for my heart.
That’s when I decided to go vegan. My gut was telling me that the imbalance was the way I was eating all these years, all the processed foods, the meat from the ketogenic diets I’d put myself on. I would go years and barely eat fruits or vegetables.
Believe it or not, when I went vegan, I gained 20 more pounds. Just because you’re vegan doesn’t mean you’re healthy. I didn’t know how to do it right. I was eating French fries, packaged goods-vegan junk food.
January 2017: I made a contract to myself on January 1st.
I picked the most difficult thing in the world I could imagine to accomplish, something so big and so bold that when I told people I was gonna do it, I was forced to follow through: an Ironman triathlon, a race less than 1 percent of people in the world finish. Setting a goal like “I'm going to run every day” wouldn’t work for me. There’s no accountability to that. There’s no finish line.
2017: I became Charlie Rocket.
I retired from my business, left my hometown of Atlanta, and moved to what I thought was the healthiest place in the world-Santa Monica, California! I wanted to reinvent my life, eat better, become an athlete, and learn how to help people.
I embraced the concept of “living food.” I had never really heard anybody put it that way and ask, “Is that food dead or alive?” But it made perfect sense to me. I started eating only what grew, was once alive, and was real. I don’t want to diet. I want to live it. I ate heaps of vegetables-living. I got rid of a lot of oil, which is to me dead, and salt, dead. I ate lots of fruit, and I stopped binge eating sugary cookies, pastries, doughnuts.
I went online and purchased a training program for my Ironman. It was the stupidest thing I ever saw. It was like, run this fast for this BPM, do this interval then that interval, swim this lap at this time and then bike this interval. I mean…what!? I boiled it down to one simple thing: How many hours a week does an Ironman train? It came down to about eight to 12 hours a week. So just a couple of hours a day. That’s easy for me to understand.
When I was a kid, riding my bike or running around a playground for two hours wasn’t hard. So I said, “I’m going to train like an 8-year-old.” And I woke up every day with the outlook that “I’m going to have fun and play.” I trained that way for 10 months, gradually going farther, playing more. And yes, there were times it was intense. But I just told myself beforehand it was going to be easy, because, just like anything you first try in life, eventually it always gets easy.
I never binged while training. I didn’t feel the need to because I was eating a ton of living food that included sugars, and I was never hungry. Eating and exercising this way, I lost 130 pounds. It’s still off.
February 2018: I made my own commercial and put it out there, telling Nike I wanted to be one of their athletes.
As a kid, I bought my very first stocks in Nike. I just always loved Nike. They felt like an inspiration company, motivating athletes, motivating people to become athletes.
I asked myself, “What do Nike athletes have?” Well, commercials. So I made one, just me and a cameraman. We came up with the concept, wrote the script, and put it on YouTube, Insta-gram, and Facebook. The next day, a Nike employee called me and said, “Your video has our campus in a frenzy.” They flew me to Beaverton, Oregon, and said they wanted me to be a part of the family. Nike wants to empower me to keep inspiring people.
March 2018: I completed my Ironman in Taupo, New Zealand, in 16:41:01.
Crossing that finish line felt GOOD. I was glad I was able to do it. People were so proud of me. It was literally a dream come true. But I have this problem…I don’t know how to celebrate. After the race I was like, “Okay! What’s next?’ That’s when I started thinking about helping people’s dreams come true.
April 2018: My life has been transformed. The next challenge: help others do the same.
I used to romanticize the term “millionaire.” I realized it meant nothing when I was sick and felt my life was over. When I was in my darkest place, I felt like I had nobody I could look up to. It seemed like everybody was selling a program or a protein shake. Now, I want to help that person who’s also in a dark place and give them hope. My new way of thinking of a million is to inspire and transform 1,000,000 people’s lives.
In April, I began my cross-country Dream Machine Tour to start helping people. So far, the tour has paid off the mortgage and cancer-treatment bills for a preschool aide in Arizona. And we bought a car for a homeless high school honors student in Houston.
Summer 2018: This is my message: Running can SAVE you!
I’m still on my journey, still about 30 pounds overweight. But now I know running can be my medication. It’s my prescription for my social anxiety, my depression, which I still fight. I can wake up at five o’clock on a Saturday morning, and all my insecurities go away when I know I’m going to go run. I can push the limits, I can go farther than I did last time. That brings me so much confidence, so much good energy, so much joy. And I believe it's helped my tumor, which is shrinking.
I feel strong. Running keeps me in a regenerative state of mind, away from degenerative activities. It’s just as exciting to me as going to the club, drinking a whole bunch of alcohol, and waking up the next day feeling bad. It gives me a way to feel good about myself, even though the social pressures are out there. Running saved my life.
I relate to the rocket. It’s only 62 miles to outer space, but when rockets first take off, they start slow. In that first mile, they use up more fuel than the entire rest of the journey of the atmosphere. Once they're up there, though, there’s no more pressure, they can go faster than ever with less energy. Think about the rocket when you're in mile one of anything, when it's hard and it doesn’t feel like you're going anywhere. Know that if you just push, push, push, push, eventually, it’s gonna get easy.
I’m still in my slow phase. But I know I’m going to end up cruising if I just don’t stop.
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