What this quote means

Nine words, three imperatives, no filler. “Own your power, live your purpose, be of service” is the sentence Kwanza Jones says she lives by — the personal motto printed on her own site as the answer to how she does what she does. It reads like a checklist, and in a sense it is one: a sequence of moves designed to be repeated for an entire lifetime, each clause pointing to the next.

The first clause is about agency. To “own” your power is to stop waiting for permission — for a stage, a title, a seat at the table — and to recognize that the power is already yours to claim. Jones built a whole philosophy on this: her SUPERCHARGED brand, her song “Queen Moves Only,” her repeated insistence that “true power isn’t given, it’s claimed.” It is a deeply self-authored idea of success, and she has lived it literally — she won Amateur Night at the Apollo on her own merits, funded her own record label, and became an MLB owner not by inheritance but by a lifetime of accumulated achievement.

The second clause aims that agency somewhere. Power without purpose is just energy looking for a vessel, so Jones pairs the claim with direction: a life bent toward a mission rather than a collection of wins. For her that mission is explicit — “to boost humans and humanity” — but the line works for anyone, because it refuses to separate what you are good at from what you care about. The third clause completes the turn outward. Power owned and purpose lived could curdle into self-advancement; service is what keeps them honest. It is the same instinct that gave Princeton its Kwanza Jones Hall, that gave Bennett College its million-dollar rescue during its accreditation crisis, that has poured hundreds of millions into education, entrepreneurship, equity and empowerment through the Jones•Feliciano Initiative. Her famous one-liner about teamwork — “no one succeeds alone… sometimes you need a boost” — is just the casual cousin of this same idea.

What makes the motto powerful is that it is not aspirational abstraction; it is a description of a life already lived. The woman saying “own your power” won a legendary talent competition as a college student and later the right to buy a baseball team for $3.9 billion. The woman saying “be of service” was the first Black woman on the national board of Susan G. Komen and donated $20 million so two dormitories could carry her name. When a motto and a biography confirm each other, the words stop being slogans and start being evidence — which is exactly why this one travels so well. It is an invitation to do what she did: claim the power, aim it at meaning, and spend it on others.

About Kwanza Jones

Kwanza Jones was born in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving Day and raised in Washington, D.C., where she played flute, violin and piano, sang in school and church choirs, and ran track for Coolidge Senior High School. Music ran in the family — her paternal great-grandmother had played piano for the great blues singer Bessie Smith. At Princeton University she studied Public and International Affairs, sang in the gospel choir and an a cappella group, played in an electronica band, ran track for the Tigers, and won the storied Amateur Night at the Apollo in New York — a chance meeting with music legend Quincy Jones helped nudge her toward music as a profession. She later earned a Juris Doctor from Cardozo School of Law and a Master of Dispute Resolution from Pepperdine, taught negotiation at NYU, and served as a court-appointed mediator for New York City’s Civil Court.

Her music career was built on her own independent label, Innovation Entertainment. Her debut album Naked came out of her Princeton years; Think Again became her first Billboard-charting single; and by the mid-2010s “Turn It Up” and “Supercharged” had carried her into the Billboard top 10 and the dance charts, eventually nine chart hits in all. In the studio one day, a dying phone battery sparked the idea for SUPERCHARGED: if people diligently charge their devices, she reasoned, what could happen if they charged themselves? That media-and-community company — along with the Kwanza Jones & José E. Feliciano Initiative she co-founded with her husband — became the engine of her philanthropy: $20 million to Princeton for two new dormitories, $1 million to help keep Bennett College accredited, a million-dollar pledge for Puerto Rico relief after Hurricane Maria, a seat on the board of The Apollo, and more than $200 million committed to expanding access and opportunity.

In August 2026, Jones stepped into the biggest arena of her life. After reports in April and a formal agreement in May, she and Feliciano closed on the purchase of the San Diego Padres at a $3.9 billion valuation — the most expensive sale in Major League Baseball history — with the couple holding roughly 40% of the team. “This is about more than baseball,” they said in their joint statement. “It’s about boosting the pride, energy, and connection that define the Padres… investing in community, deepening belonging and ensuring this team remains accessible and endures for generations.” Days later, the Buss family’s new sports capital firm joined the ownership group. When her Wikipedia page — which had been drawing only a few hundred views a day — suddenly surged past 139,000 on August 25 as readers looked her up, it was the same pattern her whole life had followed: quiet, relentless building, and then, all at once, the world paying attention. Her motto never changed along the way. It was just being lived.

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