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Source: Alan Upshur / Alan Upshur
Raven Paris: What does adversity mean to you?
Alan Upshur: Adversity, to me means obstacles, opposition, and things that are challenges, whether those challenges are mentally, physically, or spiritually.
Raven Paris: What has been one of the biggest obstacles you’ve had to overcome that has made you who you are right now?
Alan Upshur: I’d like to say, one of the biggest obstacles that I had to overcome was facing prison. Prison for me at first, started off as being a physical location I was trying to get out of to obtain freedom. As time went on, I realized that prison was more mental. I wasn’t right with self. I was, you know, searching for what I thought made me feel good. I was lost. I had to really focus on myself, meditate and realized, this is not who I am. My biggest lesson was finding myself and it took many years being in a cage and getting incarcerated multiple times to find that.
Raven Paris: I love that, so now let’s go into the topic of prison. I feel like a prison is beyond just a facility, It’s also a mindset, right? So what have you done or what has been some steps you’ve had to take to free yourself from your own personal prison?
Alan Upshur: That’s a great question. Self-talk and Self-affirmations are so important. Self-Talk used to be, you know, man, I’m having a bad day, I want to get drunk. It was a lot of negative self talks that I hated and I would wonder why these negative things happens to me and it was because the universe was giving me what I asked for. When I began reading books, that helped me get out of that mindset. Also when I started searching for positive energy, positive people came, even in a place like prison. When you start thinking in a positive light of yourself, you’ll gravitate to the people who are also trying to do things the right way. Everybody in there didn’t have a negative mindset. I started gravitating to the ones who went to the library and who also thought positive. My mindset shifted when I realized that I wanted better for myself.
Source: Alan Upshur / Alan Upshur
Raven Paris: What are your top three favorite books? The most impactful books that you would suggest to anyone who wants to free themselves from the prisons that they’re mentally in, what would you tell them to read?
Alan Upshur: So my first one, I might have to go with, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire by Deepak Chopra. That was a book that really talked about the power of coincidences. I remember when I was in the library and a book had fell down, it was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Fiber Kiasaki. I read it, and it made me think about how I can make money the right ways as opposed to the wrong ways. It wasn’t no coincidence that book dropped, so I stopped looking at life with the coincidence mindset and started looking at life thinking more positive. The universe will give you signs. The second book I would like to say is, As A Man Thinketh by James Allen. Anything that you think about, it becomes your reality, whether that’s good or bad. So you really have to be cautious on what it is that you think about. The third book I would suggest to read is, The Alchemist. The Alchemist, talked about the importance of peace and the importance of self meditation. You’ll learn how to calm yourself down, how to take yourself away from that external noises and how to just focus on yourself. These three books I’ve read multiple times. They helped shift my mindset, which also shifted my actions, which in reality shaped my whole life.
Raven Paris: Now you’re also an author of Prison to Paradise and Stay out of the BS Let’s talk about those.
Source: Alan Upshur / Alan Upshur
Alan Upshur: Prison to Paradise took me over five years to complete; I started it when I got my first prison sentence. One day, my dad told me, you’re going to be in there for some time so what you should do is write every day of your life while you are in there. So I actually wrote every day of my life, when I was incarcerated. It started off with a lot of negative self thoughts that I had in there. As I grew throughout my prison sentence and started understanding myself better, I realized that we all have obstacles. We all have prisons. I just used mine so that people can now use their own prisons as a conversion or a fuel to overcome and obtain their best. My second book, it was all poetry. I got my first poem published at the age of 14, when I was in private school. I’ve always loved to write. The second book really just talks about overcoming adversity, but I use it in vivid ways.
Raven Paris: What legacy do you want to leave behind?
Alan Upshur: I see myself as motivation, because I’ve learned to overcome adversity. I feel like I’ve been put on this planet to give people that extra push, after they’d been through something negative. That’s, my purpose. When you overcome adversity, that’s where wealth is created and wealth can be created through the communities by overcoming adverse. That’s the legacy I want to leave on.
Raven Paris: What do you do now, business wise and how can we support you?
Alan Upshur: I have a real estate team in Baltimore. The thing that I love about it, is not only people making money by selling real estate, but they are also learning new practices. I’m teaching them about mortgages, how to submit offers and also how to work with clients. Lately I’ve been going back and forth from Baltimore to Florida to build that team out there. Real estate is equivalent to generational wealth. It’s a lot of people who want to buy houses, but they just don’t know the exact way to do it, or the right loan program for this scenario, whether it’s residential or commercial. I help people understand money and improve their lives through financial literacy as well as entrepreneurship. You can find me on Facebook and on Instagram giving daily motivation through real estate tips or ways to overcome adversity with the main objective of obtaining wealth and giving people a blueprint to be able to obtain it.
