The 50th Law (18 page)

—Carl bon Clausewitz

Know Your Environment from the Inside Out—Connection

MOST PEOPLE THINK FIRST OF WHAT THEY WANT TO EXPRESS OR MAKE, THEN FIND THE AUDIENCE FOR THEIR IDEA. YOU MUST WORK THE OPPOSITE ANGLE, THINKING FIRST OF THE PUBLIC. YOU NEED TO KEEP YOUR FOCUS ON THEIR CHANGING NEEDS, THE TRENDS THAT ARE WASHING THROUGH THEM. BEGINNING WITH THEIR DEMAND, YOU CREATE THE APPROPRIATE SUPPLY. DO NOT BE AFRAID OF PEOPLE’S CRITICISMS—WITHOUT SUCH FEEDBACK YOUR WORK WILL BE TOO PERSONAL AND DELUSIONAL. YOU MUST MAINTAIN AS CLOSE A RELATIONSHIP TO YOUR ENVIRONMENT AS POSSIBLE, GETTING AN INSIDE “FEEL” FOR WHAT IS HAPPENING AROUND YOU. NEVER LOSE TOUCH WITH YOUR BASE.

Hood Economics

I KNEW THAT THE GHETTO PEOPLE KNEW THAT I NEVER LEFT THE GHETTO IN SPIRIT, AND I NEVER LEFT IT PHYSICALLY ANY MORE THAN I HAD TO. I HAD A GHETTO INSTINCT; FOR INSTANCE, I COULD FEEL IF TENSION WAS BEYOND NORMAL IN A GHETTO AUDIENCE. AND I COULD SPEAK AND UNDERSTAND THE GHETTO’S LANGUAGE
.

—Malcolm X

Starting out as a drug dealer at the age of twelve, Curtis Jackson faced an unfamiliar world that contained all kinds of dangers. The business side of hustling was relatively easy to figure out. It was the people, the various actors in the game—the rival hustlers, the big-time dealers, the police—who could be tricky. But strangest and most impenetrable of all was the world of the drug users themselves, the clientele upon which his business depended. Their behavior could be erratic and even downright frightening.

With rival hustlers and the police, Curtis could get inside their way of thinking because they all operated with a degree of rationality. But the drug fiends seemed to be dominated by their needs, and they could turn unfriendly or violent at any moment. Many dealers developed a kind of phobia of the fiends. They saw in them the weaknesses and dependence that could befall anyone who succumbed to addiction. The hustler relies on his razor-sharp mind; to even flirt with drug use could destroy such power and lead him down the slippery slope towards dependence. If he was around the fiends too much he could become a user himself. Curtis understood this and kept his distance from them, but this aspect of hustling bothered him.

On one particular occasion, the fiends were suddenly avoiding him and he could not figure out why. All he knew was that he could not sell a batch of drugs that he had on consignment. Under such an arrangement, a higher-up source, or connect, had given him the drugs for free; once he sold the entire lot, he would return a specified amount of the earnings to the connect and keep the rest as profit. But in this instance it looked like he would not make nearly enough to pay back the connect. That could prove damaging to his reputation and lead to all kinds of trouble; he might have to steal to get the money.

Feeling somewhat desperate, he went into full hustling mode, working night and day, offering all kinds of discounts, whatever it took to unload the drugs. He managed to make back just enough, but it was a close call. Perhaps the quality of the batch he was selling was inferior, but how could he tell beforehand and how could he prevent this from happening again and again?

One day he sought the advice of a man named Dre, an older hustler who had lasted an unusually long time dealing drugs on the streets. He was considered a sharp businessman (in prison, he had studied economics on his own), and he seemed to have an especially good rapport with the fiends. Dre explained to Curtis that in his experience there are two kinds of hustlers in this world—those who stay on the outside, and those who move to the inside. The outside types never bother to learn anything about their customers. It’s just about money and numbers. They have no concept of psychology or the nuances of people’s needs and demands. They’re afraid of getting too close to the customer—that might force them to reassess their ideas and methods. The superior hustler moves to the inside. He’s not afraid of the fiends; he wants to find out what’s going on in their heads. Drug users are no different from anyone else. They have phobias and bouts of boredom and a whole inner life. Because you remain on the outside, he told Curtis, you don’t see any of this and your hustling is purely mechanical and dead.

To raise your game, he explained, you have to first put into practice one of the oldest hustling tricks in the book—the “tester.” What this means is the following: whenever you get a batch of drugs, you separate a portion of it to give out for free to certain fiends. They tell you right there on the spot whether the stuff is good or bad. If their feedback is positive, they will spread the word through their own networks, and such reports are so much more credible, coming from a fellow user, than reports from a hustler hyping his own stuff. If the feedback is negative, you will have to adjust and find some way to cut it, to offer “illusions” (apparent two for one deals, with the capsules simply loaded with dust), whatever it takes to unload it. But you must always operate with feedback on the quality of your product. Otherwise you will not survive on these streets.

Once you have this system in place, you use it to cultivate relationships with your most reliable fiends. They supply you with valuable information about any kind of change in tastes that are happening. Talking to them you get all kinds of ideas for marketing schemes and new angles for hustling. You gain a feel for how they think. From this inside position, the whole game explodes into something creative and alive with possibility.

Curtis quickly incorporated this system and soon discovered that the drug fiends were not at all as he had imagined. They became erratic only when you were not consistent in your dealings with them. They valued convenience and fast transactions, wanted something new every now and then, and loved the thought of any kind of deal. With this growing body of knowledge he could play to their needs and manipulate their demand. He discovered something else—spending much of their time on the streets, they were a great source of information about what was going on with the police, or the weaknesses of rival hustlers. Knowing so much about the neighborhood gave him a feeling of great power. Later he would translate this same strategy to music and his mix-tape campaign on the streets of New York. Maintaining a close connection to the tastes of his fans, he would alter his music to their responses and create the kind of sound that had a visceral appeal, something they had never heard before.

After the remarkable success of his first two commercial albums, Curtis (now known as 50 Cent) stood on top of the music world, but his sense of connection, so vital on the streets, was fading in this new environment he now inhabited. He was surrounded by flatterers who wanted to be in his entourage, and managers and industry people who saw in him only dollar signs. His main interactions were with people in the corporate world or other stars. He could no longer hang out on the streets or get firsthand looks at the trends that were just starting up. All of this meant that he was flying blind with his music, not really sure if it would connect anymore with his audience. They were the source of his energy and spirit, but the distance separating them was growing. Other stars seemed to not mind this; in fact, they enjoyed living in this kind of celebrity bubble. They were afraid of coming back down to earth. Fifty felt the opposite, but there seemed to be no way out.

Then in early 2007, he decided to start up his own website. He thought of it as a way to market his music and merchandise directly to the public, without the screen of his record label, which was proving quite inept in adapting to the Internet age. Soon this website transformed itself into a social networking site, like Facebook for his fans, and the more he delved into it, the more he began to sense that this represented much more than a marketing gimmick—it was perhaps the ultimate tool for reconnecting with his audience.

First, he decided to experiment. As he prepared to launch a G-Unit record in the summer of 2008, he leaked one of the songs onto the website on a Friday night, then the next day he refreshed the Comments page every few minutes and tracked the members’ responses to it. After several hundred comments it was clear that the verdict was negative. The song was too soft, they judged; they wanted and expected something harder from a G-Unit record. Taking their criticisms to heart, he shelved the song and soon released another, creating the hard sound they had demanded. This time the response was overwhelmingly positive.

This called for more experiments. He put up the latest single from his archenemy, The Game, hoping to read negative comments from his fans. To his surprise, many of them liked the song. He engaged in an online debate with them and had his eyes opened about changes in people’s tastes and why they might have grown distant from his music. It forced him to rethink his own direction.

To draw more people to his site, he decided to break down the distance in both directions. He posted blogs on personal subjects, and then responded to his fans’ comments. They could feel they had complete access to him. Using the latest advances in phone technology, he took this further, having his team film him on their cell phones wherever he went; these images were then streamed live on the website. This generated intense traffic and online chatter—fans would never know when such moments could happen, so they were forced to check in at regular intervals to try to catch these spontaneous moments, sometimes riveting in their banality, other times made dramatic by Fifty’s flair for confrontation. Membership grew by leaps and bounds.

As it evolved, the website came to strangely resemble the world of hustling that he had created for himself on the streets of Southside Queens. He could produce testers (trial songs) for his fans, who were like drug fiends, constantly hungry for new product from Fifty, and he could get instant feedback on their quality. He could develop a feel for what they were looking for and how he could manipulate their demand. He had moved from the outside to the inside, and the hustling game came alive once more, this time on a global scale.

The Fearless Approach

THE PUBLIC IS NEVER WRONG. WHEN PEOPLE DON’T RESPOND TO WHAT YOU DO, THEY’RE TELLING YOU SOMETHING LOUD AND CLEAR. YOU’RE JUST NOT LISTENING.

—50 Cent

All living creatures depend for their survival on their relationship to their environment. If they are particularly sensitive to any kind of change—a danger or an opportunity—they have greater power to dominate their surroundings. It is not simply that the hawk can see farther than any other creature, but that it can see great detail, picking out the slightest alteration in the landscape. Its eyes give it tremendous sensitivity and supreme hunting prowess.

We live in an environment that is mostly human. It consists of the people that we interact with day in and day out. These humans come from many varied backgrounds and cultures. They are individuals with their own unique experiences. To know people well—their differences, their nuances, their emotional life—would give us a great sense of connection and power. We would know how to reach them, communicate more effectively, and influence their actions. But so often we remain on the outside and lack this power. To connect to the environment in this way would mean having to move outside ourselves, train our eyes on people, but so often we prefer to live in our heads, amid our own thoughts and dreams. We strive to make everything in the world familiar and simple. We grow insensitive to people’s differences, to the details that make them individuals.

At the root of this turning inward and disconnect is a great fear—one of the most primal known to man, and perhaps the least understood. In the beginning, our primitive ancestors formed groups for protection. To create a sense of cohesion, they established all kinds of codes of behavior, taboos, and shared rituals. They also created myths in which their tribe was considered to be the favorite of the gods, chosen for some great purpose. To be a member of the tribe was to be cleansed by rituals and to be favored by the gods. Those who belonged to other groups had unfamiliar rituals and belief systems—their own gods and origin myths. They were not clean. They represented the Other—something dark, threatening, and a challenge to the tribe’s sense of superiority.

This was part of our psychological makeup for thousands upon thousands of years. It transformed itself into a great fear of other cultures and ways of thinking—for Christians, this meant all heathens. And despite millennia of civilization, it lives on within us to this day, in the form of a mental process in which we divide the world into what is familiar and unfamiliar, clean and unclean. We develop certain ideas and values; we socialize with those who share those values, who form part of our inner circle, our clique. We form factions of rigid beliefs—on the right, on the left, for this or for that. We live in our heads, with the same thoughts and ideas over and over, cocooned from the outside world.

When we are confronted with people or individuals who have different values and belief systems, we feel threatened. Our first move is not to understand them but to demonize them—that shadowy Other. Alternatively, we may choose to look at them through the prism of our own values and assume they share them. We mentally convert the Other into something familiar—“they may come from a completely different culture, but after all, they must want the same things we do.” This is a failure of our minds to move outward and understand, to be sensitive to nuance. Everything must be white or black, clean or unclean.

Understand: the opposite approach is the way to power in this world. It begins with a fundamental fearlessness—you do not feel afraid or affronted by people who have different ways of thinking or acting. You do not feel superior to those on the outside. In fact, you are excited by such diversity. Your first move is to open up your spirit to these differences, to understand what makes the Other tick, to gain a feel for people’s inner lives, how they see the world. In this way, you continually expose yourself to wider and wider circles of people, building connections to these various networks. The source of your power is your sensitivity and closeness to this social environment. You can detect trends and changes in people’s tastes well before anyone else.