Where Do We Go From Here? #16 - Kenji Summers

My guest on this episode of Where Do We Go From Here? is Kenji Summers, an incomparable presence in my life. I met Kenji when he was working at Nike, where his job largely entailed searching for musicians, athletes, and all sorts of talent to help build the brand.

Kenji currently operates as a mindfulness instructor and mindbody coach. In his own words, “Today, Kenji works with professional athletes to help them find calm under pressure and is building cultural communities that encourage people to work-in. He recently co-founded the Free Peace Awake NY Meditation Club with Angelo Baque and is leading a mass meditation movement called Meditation for Black Men Who Do Too Much, creating space for healing, reflection, and balance in underserved communities.”

In all our conversations over the years, he cuts the figure of a philosopher, practitioner, and artist. Kenji’s work merges music, mindfulness, and sports culture in ways few people so effortlessly could. He can pack more meaning into a sentence than most can squeeze out of a whole year of talking and he always takes a breath before he says anything, as you’ll discover. There’s a lesson in that for all of us. After his work at Nike, he trained under the same mindfulness teacher who mentored Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, learning the power of meditation to unlock athletic potential as well as creative capacity. Kenji has brought his practice to schools, prisons, publicly traded companies, not to mention beloved artists and athletes.

In his own words, “Today, Kenji works with professional athletes to help them find calm under pressure and is building cultural communities that encourage people to work-in. He recently co-founded the Free Peace Awake NY Meditation Club with Angelo Baque and is leading a mass meditation movement called Meditation for Black Men Who Do Too Much, creating space for healing, reflection, and balance in underserved communities.”

It’s hard to sum up our conversation. We covered so many different topics and ideas, a summary can’t do it justice. Anxiety, breath work, corporate life, New York City, early career hustles, hit records, storytelling, the proletariat, the Mamba Mentality, and “Mo Bamba.” We hit a little bit of everything and left plenty of room for more.

The power of narrative

“I knew that stories that hadn’t been told were really important,” Kenji told me. “I’m telling stories that haven’t been told, and I’m telling it to people who would have not had those stories told to them.” Whether in corporate contexts or his private practice, Kenji has made a constant effort of championing hidden narratives, never relenting in the mission of shedding light on those so often overlooked. I have often said that talent management has much to do with strong storytelling. To sell someone’s art, to defend someone’s work, to be an advocate, you have to be able to able to tell their story. You must translate the abstraction of need into confines of a tale anyone can process. Kenji has honed that power from his time bringing new talent to one of the most iconic sneaker brands in existence to his work with athletes, students, and the incarcerated.

“Working in to get the work out” (or the power of mindfulness in creative practice)

“For the athletes that I work with, because I work with pro athletes, I’m like, we work in so we can work out. But with the artists, the musicians, visual artists and all those people, I say we work in so we can get the work out. So you can release those singles, you can release those EPs, you can release those albums, you can release the creativity.”

Learning to hear and help your anxious self

Early in the episode, Kenji speaks openly about his confrontations with anxiety. While still at Nike, he felt overwhelmed to the point of collapse. ”My anxiety reached a level I had never thought was possible,” he told me. “I went through a depressive episode. I had to take off from work. I didn’t tell people at that time, but now I’m pretty proud to talk about it because I think there’s somebody that’s going through that right now that has an incredible gift and their career will be long. It might be in the same career they’re in now. It might be a totally different career. It might be adjacent like mine is.” Kenji also shares an unlikely story of discovering meditation’s true power while on Travis Scott’s Astroworld tour. As with many aspects of a conversation with Kenji, one block tends to build on another. Here his mindfulness work and passion for hidden stories collide.

The story of “Mo Bamba”

Kenji and I first came to know each other because my oldest clients Take A Daytrip produced “Mo Bamba” for Sheck Wes. Kenji had met Sheck while at Nike and started working with him almost immediately. I won’t spoil our stories, but suffice to say “Mo Bamba” accelerated both of our lives in unexpected ways. “You can’t choose, you’re chosen,” Kenji said in response to me referring to the song as alchemy. “And it’s the producer, it’s the artist, it’s the people that were in a room.”