What is the 72-hour rule Drake lives by?
Drake is an artist who finds himself in the spotlight more than most, whether that’s being on the receiving end of Kendrick Lamar’s diss tracks or Pusha T outing him for having a secret child. Managing his emotions in the public eye is a real focus for him in order to not retaliate in a way that he’ll regret. That’s where the 72-hours rule comes in.
With the help of his mother, Sandra Graham, the Toronto rapper learnt an important lesson during the early stages of his career. She gave Drizzy the advice after he came across a “crazy” edited photo of him and his cousin, and was worried that people might think it was real.
“My mum has this thing called the 72-hour rule,” he told Zane Lowe during an interview on OVO Sound Radio. “It happened years and years and years ago, the first time I ever had, it was just when the culture of the Internet, like the blog gossip culture, was happening, and they edited some picture of me and my cousin. I was like, ‘Oh, this is it! Everyone is going to believe this, look at the edit.’ It was crazy, something crazy.”
The practice involves not making a rash decision and holding back on responding to a situation. Drake’s mum said that after sleeping on the incident for a few nights, he’d be less bothered about the issue, and that the public would have moved on due to another celebrity being the next centre of attention.
“My mum said to me, ‘You know what, you’ll go to sleep tonight, you’ll wake up, and it’ll still bother you. Then you’ll go to sleep again, and you’ll wake up, and it’ll bother you a little less. And then on the third day you’ll wake up and someone else will have done something stupid enough that everyone will forget,” he recalled.
For that reason, Drake said that he doesn’t rush to Instagram as fast as he once would. “That’s the 72-hour rule,” he said with the supreme confidence an artist gathers with hit after hit. “I’ve learned to control my emotions for those first two or three days. That’s why I don’t run to social media and start yapping about my anger or my frustration, I let it sit, and it always goes away.”
Drake has often spoken about his mother in lyrics throughout his career. One of those moments was the chorus of ‘Look What You’ve Done’ from his 2011 album Take Care, where he rapped, “You knew that I was gon’ be somethin’/ When you’re stressed out and you need somethin’, I got you/ Look what you’ve done, look what you’ve done.”
His mother’s name also appeared in the title of his 2018 song ‘Sandra’s Rose’, which was featured on his Scorpion album.