The 50th Law (21 page)

In 1999, after a few years of apprenticing with Jam Master Jay, Curtis (now known as 50 Cent) signed a deal with Columbia Records. It seemed like a dream come true, but as he looked around at the other rappers who had been at the label a little longer, he saw the dangers around him had only increased. The tendency, as he saw it, was to immediately let up in your energy and focus. Rappers would feel that they had arrived, and unconsciously they wouldn’t work as hard and would spend less time learning their craft. That sudden influx of money would go to their heads; they would imagine they had the golden touch and could keep it coming. One hit song or record would make this even worse. Not building something slowly—a career, a future—it would all fall apart within a few years, as younger and more eager rappers would take their place. Their life would be all the more miserable for having once tasted some glory.

To Curtis, the solution was simple: this was a new world he had entered. He had to take his time and learn it well. In the fast environment of hip-hop, he would slow everything down. He avoided the partying and kept mostly to himself. He decided to treat Columbia Records as a university, his one chance to educate himself in the business. He would record his music at night and spend the entire day at the Columbia offices, talking shop to people in every division. Gradually he taught himself more and more about marketing and distribution, and the nuts and bolts of the business. He studied all aspects of production, what went into making a hit song. He practiced his music over and over. When the label sent him and dozens of other rappers to a retreat in upstate New York to write songs, he returned with thirty-six tracks, while most of the others could barely muster five or six.

In the wake of the assassination attempt on Fifty in 2000, Columbia Records dropped him from the label, but by then he had outgrown his need for their expertise. He had accumulated so much knowledge and skill that he was able to apply it all to his mix-tape campaign, creating songs at an insane pace and marketing his music as smartly as any professional. Step by step he advanced, the campaign gaining the attention of Eminem, who signed him to his label at Interscope in 2003.

Years later he found himself in the corporate world, and he quickly discovered it was not much different from the streets. So many of the business people and executives he met had that same level of impatience. They could only think in terms of months or weeks. Their relationship to money was emotional—a way to impose their importance and feed their ego. They would come to him with schemes that seemed intriguing in the present but that led nowhere down the road. They were not attuned to the immense changes going on in the world and planning to exploit them in the future—that would take too much effort and time.

These business types came at him from all directions with endorsement deals that would make him some fast millions. They assumed he was like all the other rappers who grabbed at such opportunities. But endorsement deals would not help him build anything solid or real. It was illusion money. He would turn them down, opting to start his own businesses on his own terms—each business building on the other like links on a chain. The goal this time was simple—to forge an empire that would last. And as before, he would get there through his own grinding persistence.

The Fearless Approach

MOST PEOPLE CAN’T HANDLE BOREDOM. THAT MEANS THEY CAN’T STAY ON ONE THING UNTIL THEY GET GOOD AT IT. AND THEY WONDER WHY THEY’RE UNHAPPY.

—50 Cent

For our most primitive ancestors, life was a constant struggle, entailing endless labor to secure food and shelter. If there was any free time, it generally was reserved for rituals that would give meaning to such a hard life. Then, over thousands of years of civilization, life gradually became easier for many, and with that came more and more free time. In such moments, there was no need to work the fields or worry about enemies or the elements—just an expanse of hours to somehow fill. And suddenly a new emotion was born into this world—boredom.

At work or in rituals, the mind would be filled with various tasks to accomplish; but alone in one’s house, this free time would allow the mind to roam wherever it wanted. Confronted with such freedom, the mind has a tendency to gravitate towards anxieties about the future—possible problems and dangers. Such empty time faintly echoes the eternal emptiness of death itself. And so with this new emotion that assailed our ancestors came a desire that haunts us to this day—to escape boredom at all cost, to distract ourselves from these anxieties.

The principal means of distraction are all forms of public entertainment, drugs and alcohol, and social activities. But such distractions have a drug-like effect—they wear off. We crave new ones, faster ones, to lift us out of ourselves and divert us from the harsh realities of life and creeping boredom. An entire civilization—ancient Rome—practically collapsed under the weight of this new need and emotion. Their economy became tied to the creation of novel luxuries and entertainments that sapped its citizens’ spirit; few were willing anymore to sacrifice their pleasures for hard work or the public good.

This is the pattern that boredom has created for the human animal ever since: we look outside ourselves for diversions and grow dependent on them. These entertainments have a faster pace than the time we spend at work. Work then is experienced as something boring—slow and repetitive. Anything challenging, requiring effort, is viewed the same way—it’s not fun; it’s not fast. If we go far enough in this direction, we find it increasingly difficult to muster the patience to endure the hard work that is required for mastering any kind of craft. It becomes harder to spend time alone. Life becomes divided between what is necessary (time at work) and what is pleasurable (distractions and entertainment). In the past, these extremes of boredom assailed mostly those in the upper classes. Now it is something that plagues almost all of us.

There is, however, another possible relationship to boredom and empty time, a fearless one that yields much different results than frustration and escapism. It goes as follows: you have some large goal that you wish to achieve in your life, something you feel that you are destined to create. If you reach that goal, it will bring you far greater satisfaction than the evanescent thrills that come from outside diversions. To get there you will have to learn a craft—educate yourself and develop the proper skills. All human activities involve a process of mastery. You must learn the various steps and procedures involved, proceeding to higher and higher levels of proficiency. This requires discipline and tenacity—the ability to withstand repetitive activity, slowness, and the anxiety that comes with such a challenge.

Once you start down this path, two things will happen: First, having the larger goal will lift your mind out of the moment and help you endure the hard work and drudgery. Second, as you become better at this task or craft, it becomes increasingly pleasurable. You see your improvement; you see connections and possibilities you hadn’t noticed before. Your mind becomes absorbed in mastering it further, and in this absorption you forget all your problems—fears for the future or people’s nasty games. But unlike the diversion that comes from outside sources, this one comes from within. You are developing a lifelong skill, the kind of mental discipline that will serve as the foundation of your power.

To make this work you must choose a career or a craft that excites you in some deep way. You are creating no dividing line between work and pleasure. Your pleasure comes in mastering the process itself, and in the mental immersion it requires.

In the hood, most of the jobs that are available offer low money and the kind of menial work that leads to no real skills. Even hustling is tedious and not really a path with a future. In the face of this reality, people can go in one of two directions—they can seek to escape this reality through drugs, alcohol, gang activity, or whatever immediate pleasures can be had; or they can get out of the cycle by developing an intense work ethic and discipline. The types who go in the latter direction have a deep hunger for power and a sense of urgency. Nipping at their heels at all times is the possibility of a life of crap jobs or dangerous distractions. They teach themselves to be patient and to practice something. They have learned from early on, through their jobs or through hustling, to endure the long, boring stretches of time that are necessary to master a process. They do not whine or seek to escape this reality, but instead see it as a means to freedom.

For those of us who do not grow up in such an environment, we do not feel this urgent connection between discipline and power. Our jobs are not so dull. Some day they may lead to something really good, or so we think. We have developed some discipline at school or on the job, and it’s enough. But we are in fact deluding ourselves. More often than not our jobs are something that we endure; we live for our time off and dream of the future. We are not engaged in the daily activity of the job with our full mental powers because it is not as exciting as life outside work. We develop less and less tolerance for dull moments and repetitive activity. If we happen to lose our job or want something else, we suddenly have to confront the fact that we do not have the requisite patience to make the proper change. Before it is too late we must wake up and realize that real power and success can come only through mastering a process, which in turn depends on a foundation of discipline that we are constantly keeping sharp.

The fearless types in history inevitably display in their lives a higher tolerance than most of us for repetitive, boring tasks. This allows them to excel in their field and master their craft. Part of this comes from seeing early on in life the tangible results that come from such rigorousness and patience. In this vein, the story of Isaac Newton is particularly illuminating. In early 1665 he was a twenty-three-year-old student at Cambridge University, on the verge of taking his exams to be a scholar in mathematics, when suddenly the plague broke out in London. The deaths were horrific and multiplied by the day; many Londoners fled to the countryside where they spread the plague far and wide. By that summer, Cambridge was forced to close, and its students dispersed in all directions for their safety.

For these students, nothing could have been worse. They were forced to live in scattered villages and experienced intense fear and isolation for the next twenty months, as the plague raged throughout England. Their active minds had nothing to seize upon and many went mad with boredom. For Newton, however, the plague months represented something entirely different. He returned to his mother’s home in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. At Cambridge he had been bothered by a series of mathematical problems that tortured not only him but his professors as well. He decided he would spend the time in Woolsthorpe working over such problems. He had carried with him a large number of books on mathematics that he had accumulated, and he proceeded to study them in intense detail. He went over the same problems, day after day, filling notebooks with endless calculations.

When the sky was clear he would wander outside and continue these musings, seated in the apple orchards surrounding the house. He would look up at an apple dangling on a branch, the same size to his eye as the moon above, and he would ponder the relationship between the two—what held the one on the tree and the other within the earth’s orbit—leading him to ideas about gravity. Staring at the sun and its optical effect on everything around him, he began to conduct his own experiments on the movement and properties of light itself. His mind flowed naturally from problems of geometry to how it all related to motion and mechanics.

The deeper he went into these studies, the more he would see connections and have sudden insights. He solved problem after problem, his enthusiasm and momentum quickening as he realized the powers he was unleashing in himself. While the others were paralyzed with fear and boredom, he passed the entire twenty months without a thought of the plague or any worries for the future. And in that time, he essentially created modern mathematics, mechanics, and optics. It is generally considered the most prolific, concentrated period of scientific thinking in the history of mankind. Of course, Isaac Newton possessed a rare mind, but at Cambridge nobody had suspected him of such mental powers. It took this period of forced isolation and repetitive labor to transform him into a genius.

When we look at those who stand out in history, we tend to focus on their achievements. From such an angle, it is easy for us to be dazzled and see their success as stemming from genetics and perhaps some social factors. They are gifted. We could never reach their level, or so we think. But we are choosing to ignore that telling period in their lives, when each and every one of them underwent a rather tedious apprenticeship in their field. What kept them going was the power they quickly discovered through mastery of certain steps. Sudden insights came to them that seem like genius to us, but are actually part of any intense learning process.

If only we were to study that part of their lives as opposed to the legends they later became, we would understand that we too could have some or all of that power by a patient immersion in any field of study. Many people cannot handle the boredom this might entail; they fear starting out on such an arduous process. They prefer their distractions, dreams, and illusions, never aware of the higher pleasures that are there for those who choose to master themselves and a craft.

Keys to Fearlessness

ALL OF MAN’S TROUBLES COME FROM NOT KNOWING HOW TO SIT STILL, ALONE IN A ROOM
.

—Blaise Pascal

As children learning language, we all undergo the same process. At first we experience a level of frustration—we have desires and needs we wish to express, but we lack the words. Slowly we pick up phrases and absorb patterns of speech. We accumulate vocabulary, word by word. Some of this is tedious but we are impelled by our intense curiosity and hunger for knowledge. At a certain point we attain a level of fluency in which we can communicate as fast as we think. Soon we don’t have to think at all—words come naturally, and at times when we are inspired, they flow out of us in ways we cannot even explain. Learning a language—our own or a foreign one—involves a process that cannot be avoided. There are no shortcuts.