Snoop Dogg says ‘adversity is like the gym for your soul’ and offers 3 pieces of advice for USC business school grads

• The hip-hop legend, entrepreneur and investor spoke at the commencement ceremony for the USC Marshall School of Business on Monday. Snoop Dogg gave the graduates three pieces of advice and hailed the virtues of overcoming obstacles. “See, adversity is like the gym for your soul. It hurts. It’s heavy, but it builds you up.”

Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr.—better known as Snoop Dogg—spoke at the commencement ceremony for the USC Marshall School of Business on Monday and passed on some advice for graduates.

The hip-hop legend, entrepreneur and investor also hailed the virtues of overcoming obstacles, saying he has been an underdog his whole life.

“But guess what, I didn’t let none of that stop me,” he said. “I stayed true to myself. I stayed focused on the vision, and I turned them no’s into yes’s. See, adversity is like the gym for your soul. It hurts. It’s heavy, but it builds you up.”

Speaking at the LA Memorial Coliseum—not that far from where he grew up in Long Beach—Snoop Dogg also said graduation is more than just getting a diploma: “It’s about the grind, the sleepless nights, the sacrifices, the prayers you whisper when nobody was watching.”

The underdog has “the realest story,” he added, because when you come from nothing, “you appreciate everything, you hustle different, you love different, and you lead different.”

That set up his advice for the graduates, telling them to do three things.

“Stay humble: never forget where you came from. Stay hungry: keep that fire in your soul. And stay true: always be real with yourself and the world, because the world don’t need no more copies. It need originals. And trust me, ain’t nobody else can do what you do like you do,” he said. 

Snoop told graduates to keep believing in themself and keep pushing, reminding them that, “It’s always the underdogs who end up running the game. Trust me, that’s why I’m running the game.”

After becoming a hip-hip superstar in the 1990s, Snoop Dogg has become an entertainment icon, famously teaming up with Maratha Stewart, appearing on TV shows like NBC’s The Voice, and stealing the show at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.

He has also been building a lucrative empire of his own. In addition to his numerous endorsements, he has launched a line of ice cream, a coffee brand, and a breakfast cereal, to name just a few ventures.

Snoop also cofounded Casa Verde Capital, an investment firm focused on the cannabis industry, while also investing in companies like Klarna, Reddit and Robinhood.

“I’m trying to be one of those examples of someone who creates his own everything, owns his own everything, and has a brand strong enough to compete with Levi’s and Miller and Kraft and all of these other brands that have been around for hundreds of years,” he said in a 2021 interview with the New York Times.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com