The 50th Law (20 page)

With this system in place, she began to see a pattern from the bottom up—a growing disenchantment with the New Deal. Every day, she left a memo in her husband’s basket, reminding him of these criticisms and the need to be more responsive. And slowly she began to have an influence on his policy, pushing him leftward—for instance, getting him to create programs such as the NYA, the National Youth Administration, which would involve young people actively in the New Deal. Over time she became the unofficial channel of communication for women’s groups and African Americans, shoring up FDR’s support in these two key constituencies. All of this work took tremendous courage, for she was continually ridiculed for her activist approach, long before any first lady had ever thought of taking such a role. And her work played a major part in FDR’s ability to maintain his image as a man of the people.

As Eleanor understood, any kind of group tends to close itself off from the outside world. It is easier to operate this way. From within this bubble, people will delude themselves into thinking they have insight into how their audience or public feels—they read the papers, various reports, the poll numbers, etc. But all of this information tends to be flat and highly filtered. It is much different when you interact directly with the public and hear in the flesh their criticisms and feedback. You discover what lies at the root of their discontent, the various nuances of how your work affects them. Their problems come to life, and any solutions you come up with have more relevance. You create a back-and-forth dynamic in which their ideas, involvement, and energy can be harnessed for your purposes. If some distance between you and the public must be maintained, by the nature of your group or enterprise, then the ideal is to open up as many informal channels as possible, getting your feedback straight from the source.

RECONNECT WITH YOUR BASE

We see the following occur over and over: a person has success when they are younger because they have deep ties with a social group. What they produce and say comes from a real place and connects with an audience. Then slowly they lose this connection. Success creates distance. They come to spend most of their time with other successful people. Consciously or unconsciously, they come to feel separated and above their audience. The intensity in their work is gone and with it any kind of real effect on the public.

In his own way the famous black activist Malcolm X struggled with this problem. He had spent his youth as a savvy street hustler, ending up in prison on drug charges. There, he discovered the religion of Islam, as practiced by the Nation of Islam, and immediately converted. Out of prison he became a highly visible spokesperson for the group. Eventually he broke off from the Nation of Islam and transformed himself into a leading figure in the growing black power movement of the 1960s.

In these various phases of his life, Malcolm felt intense anger and frustration at the levels of injustice for African Americans, much of which he had experienced firsthand. He channeled these emotions into powerful speeches, seeming to give voice to the anger that many felt who lived deep within the ghettos of America. But as he became more and more famous, he felt some anxiety. Other leaders in the black community that he had known had begun to live fairly well; they could not help but feel some distance and superiority to those they were supposed to represent—like a father caring for a child.

Malcolm hated that feeling of creeping paternalism. In his mind, people can only help themselves—his role was to inspire them to action, not act in their name. To inoculate himself against this psychic distance, he increased his interactions with street hustlers and agitators, the kind of people from the lower depths that most leaders would scrupulously avoid. Those from the heart of the ghetto were his power base and he had to reconnect with them. He made himself spend more time with those who had suffered recent injustices, soaking up their experiences and sense of outrage. Most people mellow with age—he would retain his anger, the intensity of emotions that had impelled him in the first place and given him his charisma.

The goal in connecting to the public is not to please everyone or to spread yourself out to the widest possible audience. Communication is a power of intensity, not extensity and numbers. In trying to widen your appeal, you will substitute quantity for quality and you will pay a price. You have a base of power—a group of people, small or large, which identifies with you. This base is also mental—ideas you had when you were younger, which were tied to powerful emotions and inspired you to take a particular path. Time and success tend to diffuse the sense of connection you have to this physical and mental base. You will drift and your powers of communication will diminish. Know your base and work to reconnect with it. Keep your associations with it alive, intense, and present. Return to your origins—the source of all inspiration and power.

CREATE THE SOCIAL MIRROR

Alone, in our minds, we can imagine we have all kinds of powers and abilities. Our egos can inflate to any size. But when we produce something that fails to have the expected impact, we are suddenly faced with a limit—we are not as brilliant or skilled as we had imagined. In such a case, our tendency is to blame others for not understanding it or getting in our way. Our egos are bruised and delicate—criticism from the outside seems like a personal attack, which we cannot endure. We tend to close ourselves off and this makes it doubly difficult to succeed with our next venture.

Instead of turning inward, consider people’s coolness to your idea and their criticisms as a kind of mirror they are holding up to you. A physical mirror turns you into an object; you can see yourself as others see you. Your ego cannot protect you—the mirror does not lie. You use it to correct your appearance and avoid ridicule. The opinions of other people serve a similar function. You view your work from inside your mind, encrusted with all kinds of desires and fears. They see it as an object; they see it as it is. Through their criticisms you can get closer to this objective version and gradually improve what you do. (One caveat: beware of feedback from friends whose judgments could be tainted by feelings of envy or the need to flatter.)

When your work does not communicate with others, consider it your own fault—you did not make your ideas clear enough and you failed to connect with your audience emotionally. This will spare you any bitterness or anger that might come from people’s critiques. You are simply perfecting your work through the social mirror.

Reversal of Perspective

Science and the scientific method are very powerful and practical pursuits of knowledge that have come to dominate much of our thinking for the past few centuries. But they have also spawned a peculiar preconception—that to understand anything we must study it from a distance and with a detached perspective. For example, we tend to judge a book that is full of statistics and quotes from various studies as carrying more weight because it seems to have that requisite scientific objectivity and distance. Science, however, often deals with matter that is inorganic or has a marginal emotional life. Studying such things from a detached perspective makes sense and yields profound results. But this does not translate so well when dealing with people and creatures who respond from an emotional core. The knowledge of what makes them tick on the inside is missing. To study them from the outside is merely a prejudice, often one stemming from fear—dealing with people’s experiences and subjectivity is messy and chaotic. Distance is cleaner and easier.

It is time to reevaluate this preconception and see things from the opposite perspective. Knowledge of human nature and social factors, the kind that is often most valuable to us, depends on knowing people and networks from the inside, on getting a feel for what they are experiencing. This can best be gained by an intense involvement and participation, as opposed to the pseudoscientific pose of the intellectual addicted to studies, citations, and numbers, all designed to back up their preconceptions. This other form of knowledge, from the inside, must be the one that you come to esteem above all others in social matters. It is what will give you power to affect people. To the extent that you feel yourself to be distant and on the outside, you must tell yourself you do not understand what you are studying or trying to reach—you are missing the mark and there is work to be done.

A REALLY INTELLIGENT MAN FEELS WHAT OTHER MEN ONLY KNOW.

—Baron de Montesquieu

Respect the Process—Mastery

THE FOOLS IN LIFE WANT THINGS FAST AND EASY-MONEY, SUCCESS, ATTENTION. BOREDOM IS THEIR GREAT ENEMY AND FEAR. WHATEVER THEY MANAGE TO GET SLIPS THROUGH THEIR HANDS AS FAST AS IT COMES IN. YOU, ON THE OTHER HAND, WANT TO OUTLAST YOUR RIVALS. YOU ARE BUILDING THE FOUNDATION FOR SOMETHING THAT CAN CONTINUE TO EXPAND. TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN, YOU WILL HAVE TO SERVE AN APPRENTICESHIP. YOU MUST LEARN EARLY ON TO ENDURE THE HOURS OF PRACTICE AND DRUDGERY, KNOWING THAT IN THE END ALL OF THAT TIME WILL TRANSLATE INTO A HIGHER PLEASURE—MASTERY OF A CRAFT AND OF YOURSELF. YOUR GOAL IS TO REACH THE ULTIMATE SKILL LEVEL—AN INTUITIVE FEEL FOR WHAT MUST COME NEXT.

Slow Money

MASTER THE INSTRUMENT, MASTER THE MUSIC, THEN FORGET ALL THAT SHIT AND PLAY.

—Charlie Parker

Growing up in Southside Queens, the only people Curtis Jackson could see who had any money and power were the street hustlers. So at the age of eleven and with big dreams for the future, he chose just such a path for himself. Almost immediately, however, he saw that the life of a hustler was not glamorous at all. It consisted mostly of standing on a street corner day after day, selling the same stuff to the same fiends. It meant enduring hours with nothing to do, waiting for customers to come by, often in the bitter cold or the blistering heat. And in those long, tedious hours on the streets, Curtis’s mind naturally would wander; he would find himself wishing for money that would come faster and easier, with more excitement. There were opportunities for this in the hood—they mostly involved crime or some dubious scheme. Sometimes he would feel tempted to try them, but in such moments he would remind himself of the endless stories of the hustlers he had known who had fallen for the illusion of fast, easy money—all suckers who inevitably ended up dead or broke.

There was his friend TC who got tired of hustling and fell in with a crew that would spend the summer robbing convenience stores and occasionally a bank. He made quite a haul of money over those three months and then blew it all over the fall and winter. The following summer he was back at it again. It wasn’t just the money; it was the thrill that came in flirting with so much danger. But that second summer his luck ran out and he was killed in a gunfight with the police.

There was Curtis’s colleague Spite, a few years older, who had managed to save some money from his hustling but had dreams of something much bigger. He convinced himself he could make a fortune fast by buying a piece of a franchise business that was new to the hood but that he felt was certain to be hot. He poured all of his money into the venture, but he was too impatient. He had not taken the time to accustom the public to his new life. Everyone believed the business was just a front for some drug operation. They avoided it and it soon became a hangout for hustlers and fiends. It failed within a few months and he never recovered from the experience.

This was the gist of the problem: to be a successful hustler you had to accustom yourself to the slow, grinding pace of the job. But in the hood, the future rarely seemed promising. It was hard for hustlers to imagine saving their money for some rainy day in the future when that day would probably never come. Inevitably the desire for something faster would creep into their blood, and if they gave in, they created a cycle they could never escape. If they were able to get some fast money, it would act like a drug—they would get excited and spend it all on items to impress people. With no money left, they would return to dealing drugs, but now it seemed too slow and boring. They would try again for something fast. They became trapped by their own greed, and as the years went by, they would fail to develop any kind of patience or discipline. They could not manage this up-and-down pace for too long. By the age of twenty-five or thirty they would burn themselves out and have no skills or money to show for their years of work. Their fate after that was generally unpleasant.

To resist this temptation, Curtis decided he would force himself in the opposite direction. He treated hustling as a job. He showed up on the street corner at the same hour every day, working from dawn to dusk. Gradually he accustomed himself to this slow pace. During the long hours with nothing to do, he would contemplate the future and come up with detailed plans of what he would accomplish year by year—ending with his eventual escape from street hustling. He would move into music, and then into business. To take the first step, he would have to save his money. The thought of this goal helped him endure the daily tedium of the job. In these slow hours, he also devised new hustling schemes, with the idea of continually improving himself at this job.

He took up boxing to discipline his mind and body. He was terrible at first, but he was tenacious, training day in and day out, eventually becoming a skilled fighter. This taught him invaluable lessons—he could get whatever he wanted through sheer persistence rather than by violence or force; progressing step-by-step was the only way to succeed in anything. By the age of twenty, he made his break into music—all according to his original plan.