Authors: 50 Cent
By 2007, after the tremendous success of his first two records, Fifty began to sense a problem looming on the horizon. He had created an image for the public, a Fifty myth that centered on his tough and menacing presence and his indestructibility. This was projected in his videos and interviews, and the photos of him with his glare and tattoos. Most of it was real, but it was all heightened for dramatic effect. This image had brought him a great deal of attention, but it was turning into an elaborate trap. To prove to his fans that he was still the same Fifty, he would have to keep upping the ante, engaging in more and more outrageous antics. He could not afford to seem like he was going soft. But it was not real
to him
anymore. He had moved on to a different life, and to stay rooted in this past image would prove to be the ultimate limit to his freedom. He would be trapped in the past and the prisoner of the very image he had created. It would all grow stale and his popularity would wane.
In each phase of his life he had found himself challenged by some seemingly insurmountable obstacle—surviving on the streets without parents to guide him, keeping away from the violence and time in prison, eluding the assassins on his heels, etc. If at any moment he had doubted himself or accepted the normal limits to his mobility, he would be dead or powerless, which was as good as dead in his mind. What had saved him in each case was the intensity of his ambition and self-belief.
Now was not the time to get complacent or have doubts about the future. He would have to transform himself again. He would have his signature tattoos removed; perhaps he would also change his name again. He would create a new image and myth to fit this period of his life—part business mogul, part power broker, slowly withdrawing from the public eye and flexing his muscles behind the scenes. This would surprise the public, keep him a step ahead of their expectations, and remove yet another barrier to his freedom. Reinventing himself in this way would be the ultimate reversal of the fate that seemed to await him after the death of his mother.
The Fearless Approach
YOUR OPINION OF YOURSELF BECOMES YOUR REALITY. IF YOU HAVE ALL THESE DOUBTS, THEN NO ONE WILL BELIEVE IN YOU AND EVERYTHING WILL GO WRONG. IF YOU THINK THE OPPOSITE, THE OPPOSITE WILL HAPPEN. IT’S THAT SIMPLE.
—50 Cent
When you were born, you entered this world with no identity or ego. You were simply a bundle of chaotic impulses and desires. But slowly you acquired a personality that you have more or less built upon over the years. You are outgoing or shy, bold or skittish—a mix of various traits that defines you. You tend to accept this personality as something very real and established. But much of this identity is shaped and constructed by outside forces—the opinions and judgments of hundreds of other people who have crossed your path over the years.
This process began with your parents. As a child you paid extra close attention to what they said about you, modeling your behavior to win their approval and love. You closely monitored their body language to see what they liked and didn’t like. Much of this had a tremendous impact on your evolution. If, for example, they commented about your shyness, it could easily strengthen any tendencies you had in that direction. You suddenly became aware of your own awkwardness and it stuck inside you. If they had said something different, trying to encourage you in your social skills and draw you out, it might have had a much different impact. Either way, shyness is a fluid quality—it fluctuates according to the situation and the people you are around. It should never be felt as a set personality trait. And yet these judgments from parents, friends, and teachers are given inordinate weight and become internalized.
Many of these criticisms and opinions are not objective at all. People want to see certain qualities in you. They project onto you their own fears and fantasies. They want you to fit a conventional pattern; it is frustrating and often frightening for people to think they cannot figure someone out. Behavior that is considered abnormal or different, which may very well be coming from somewhere deep within you, is actively discouraged. Envy plays a role as well—if you are too good at something, you might be made to feel strange or undesirable. Even the praise of others is often designed to hem you in to certain ideals they want to see in you. All of this shapes your personality, limits your range of behavior, and becomes like a mask that hardens on your face.
Understand: you are in fact a mystery to yourself. You began life as someone completely unique—a mix of qualities that will never be repeated in the history of the universe. In your earliest years, you were a mass of conflicting emotions and desires. Then something foreign to you is placed over this reality. Who you are is much more chaotic and fluid than this surface character; you are full of untapped potential and possibility.
As a child you had no real power to resist this process, but as an adult you could easily rebel and rediscover your individuality. You could stop deriving your sense of identity and self-worth from others. You could experiment and push past the limits people have set for you. You could take action that is different from what they expect. But that is to incur a risk. You are being unconventional, perhaps a bit strange in the eyes of those who know you. You could fail in this action and be ridiculed. Conforming to people’s expectations is safer and more comfortable, even if doing so makes you feel miserable and confined. In essence, you are afraid of yourself and what you could become.
There is another, fearless way of approaching your life. It begins by untying yourself from the opinions of others. This is not as easy as it sounds. You are breaking a lifelong habit of continually referring to other people when measuring your value. You must experiment and feel the sensation of not concerning yourself with what others think or expect of you. You do not advance or retreat with their opinions in mind. You drown out their voices that often translate into doubts inside you. Instead of focusing on the limits you have internalized, you think of the potential you have for new and different behavior. Your personality can be altered and shaped by your conscious decision to do so.
We barely understand the role that willpower plays in our actions. When you raise your opinion of yourself and what you are capable of it has a decided influence on what you do. For instance, you feel more comfortable taking some risk, knowing that you are always able to get back up on your feet if it fails. Taking this risk will then make your energy levels rise—you have to meet the challenge or go under, and you will find untapped reservoirs of creativity within you. People are drawn to those who act boldly, and their attention and faith in you will have the effect of heightening your confidence. Feeling less confined by doubts, you give freer rein to your individuality, which makes everything you do more effective. This movement towards confidence has a self-fulfilling quality that is impossible to deny.
Moving towards such self-belief does not mean you cut yourself off from others and their opinions of your actions. You must take constant measure of how people receive your work, and use to maximum effect their feedback (see chapter 7). But this process must begin from a position of inner strength. If you are dependent on their judgments for your sense of worth, then your ego will always be weak and fragile. You will have no center or sense of balance. You will wilt under criticisms and soar too high with any praise. Their opinions are merely helping you shape your work, not your self-image. If you make mistakes, if the public judges you negatively, you have an unshakable inner core that can accept such judgments, but you remain convinced of your own worth.
In impoverished environments like the hood, people’s sense of who they are and what they deserve is continually under attack. People from the outside tend to judge them for where they come from—as violent, dangerous, or untrustworthy—as if the accident of where they were born determines who they are. They tend to internalize many of these judgments and perhaps deep inside feel that they don’t deserve much of what is considered good in this world. Those from the hood who want to overcome this pronouncement of the outside world have to fight with double the energy and desperation. They have to convince themselves first that they are worth much more and can rise as far as they want, through willpower. The intensity of their ambition becomes the deciding factor. It has to be supremely high. That is why the most ambitious and confident figures in history often emerge from the most impoverished and arduous of circumstances.
For those of us who live outside such an environment, “ambition” has almost become a dirty word. It is associated with such historical types as Richard III or Richard Nixon. It reeks of insecurity and evil deeds to reach the top. People who want power so badly must have psychological problems, or so we think. Much of this social prudery around the idea of power and ambition comes from an unconscious guilt and desire to keep other people down. To those occupying a position of privilege, the ambitiousness of those from below seems like something scary and threatening.
If you come from relative prosperity, you are more than likely tainted with some of this prejudice and you must extirpate it as much as possible. If you believe ambition is ugly and needs to be disguised or repressed, you will have to tiptoe around others, making a show of false humility, in two minds every time you contemplate some necessary power move. If you see it as beautiful, as the driving force behind all great human accomplishments, then you will feel no guilt in raising your level of ambition as high as you want and pushing aside those who block your path.
One of the most fearless men in history has to be the great nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He was born into the cruelest system known to man—slavery. It was designed in every detail to destroy a person’s spirit. It did so by separating people from their families, so they could develop no real emotional attachments in their lives. It used constant threats and fear to break any sense of free will, and it made sure that slaves were kept illiterate and ignorant. They were to form only the lowest opinions of themselves. Douglass himself suffered all of these fates as a child, but somehow from his earliest years he believed that he was worth much more, that something powerful had been crushed but that it could spring back to life. As a child he saw himself escaping the clutches of slavery some day, and he nourished himself on that dream.
Then in 1828, at the age of ten, Douglass was sent by his master to work in the home of a son-in-law in Baltimore, Maryland. Douglass read this as some kind of providence working in his favor. It meant he would escape the hard labor on the plantation and have more time to think. In Baltimore, the mistress of the house was constantly reading the Bible, and one day he asked her if she would teach him to read. She happily obliged and he quickly learned. The master of the house heard of this and severely upbraided his wife—a slave must never be allowed to read and write. He forbade her to continue with the teachings. Douglass, however, could now manage on his own, getting books and dictionaries for himself on the sly. He memorized famous speeches, which he could go over in his mind at any time of day. He saw himself becoming a great orator, railing against the evils of slavery.
With growing knowledge of the outside world, he came to resent even more bitterly the life he was forced to lead. This infected his attitude, and his owners sensed it. At the age of fifteen he was sent to a farm run by a Mr. Covey, whose sole task in life was to break the spirit of a rebellious slave.
Covey, however, was not successful. Douglass had already created in his mind an identity for himself that would not match what Covey wanted to impose on him. This image of his own high value, believed in with all his energy, would become reality. He maintained his inner freedom and his sanity. He converted all of the whippings and mistreatment into a spur for him to escape to the North; it gave him more material to some day share with the world on the evils of slavery. Several years later, Douglass managed to escape to the north. There he became a leading abolitionist, eventually founding his own newspaper and always pushing against the limits people tried to impose on him.
Understand: people will constantly attack you in life. One of their main weapons will be to instill in you doubts about yourself—your worth, your abilities, your potential. They will often disguise this as their objective opinion, but invariably it has a political purpose—they want to keep you down. You are continually prone to believe these opinions, particularly if your self-image is fragile. In every moment of life you can defy and deny people this power. You do so by maintaining a sense of purpose, a high destiny you are fulfilling. From such a position, people’s attacks do not harm you; they only make you angry and more determined. The higher you raise this self-image, the fewer judgments and manipulations you will tolerate. This will translate into fewer obstacles in your path. If someone like Douglass could forge this attitude amid the most unfree of circumstances, then we should surely be able to find our own way to such inner strength.
Keys to Fearlessness
ONE’S OWN FREE, UNTRAMMELED DESIRES, ONE’S OWN WHIM…ALL OF THIS IS PRECISELY THAT WHICH FITS NO CLASSIFICATION, AND WHICH IS CONSTANTLY KNOCKING ALL SYSTEMS AND THEORIES TO HELL. AND WHERE DID OUR SAGES GET THE IDEA THAT MAN MUST HAVE NORMAL, VIRTUOUS DESIRES? WHAT MAN NEEDS IS ONLY HIS OWN INDEPENDENT WISHING, WHATEVER THAT INDEPENDENCE MAY COST AND WHEREVER IT MAY LEAD.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In today’s world our idea of freedom largely revolves around the ability to satisfy certain needs and desires. We feel free if we can gain the kind of employment we desire, buy the things we want, and engage in a wide range of behavior, as long as it does not harm others. According to this concept, freedom is something essentially passive—it is given and guaranteed to us by our government (often by not meddling in our affairs) and various social groups.