The 50th Law - 50 Cent [25]
Now the songs started to pour out of him. He fed off all the anger he felt and the doubts people had had about him. He was also consumed with a sense of urgency—this was his last chance to make it and so he worked night and day. Fifty’s mix-tapes began to hit the street at a furious pace.
Soon he realized the greatest advantage he possessed in this campaign—the feeling that he had already hit bottom and had nothing to lose. He could attack the record industry and poke fun at its timidity. He could pirate the most popular songs on the radio and put his own lyrics over them to create wicked parodies. He didn’t care about the consequences. And the further he took this the more his audiences responded. They loved the transgressive edge to it. It was like a crusade against all the fake crap on the radio, and to listen to Fifty was to participate in the cause.
On and on he went, transforming every conceivable negative into a positive. To compensate for the lack of money to distribute his mix-tapes far and wide, he decided to encourage bootleggers to pirate his tracks and spread his music around like a virus. With the price still on his head, he could not give concerts or do any kind of public promotion; but somehow he turned even this into a marketing device. Hearing his music everywhere but not being able to see him only added to the mystique and the attention people paid to him. Rumors and word of mouth helped form a kind of Fifty mythology. He made himself even scarcer to feed this process.
The momentum now was devastating—you could not go far in New York without hearing his music blasted from some corner. Soon one of his mix-tapes reached the ears of Eminem, who decided this was the future of hip-hop and quickly signed Fifty in early 2003 to his and Dr. Dre’s label, Shady Aftermath, completing one of the most rapid and remarkable turnarounds in fortune in modern times.
The Fearless Approach
EVERY NEGATIVE IS A POSITIVE. THE BAD THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO ME, I SOMEHOW MAKE THEM GOOD. THAT MEANS YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING TO HURT ME.
—50 Cent
Events in life are not negative or positive. They are completely neutral. The universe does not care about your fate; it is indifferent to the violence that may hit you or to death itself. Things merely happen to you. It is your mind that chooses to interpret them as negative or positive. And because you have layers of fear that dwell deep within you, your natural tendency is to interpret temporary obstacles in your path as something larger—setbacks and crises.
In such a frame of mind, you exaggerate the dangers. If someone attacks and harms you in some way, you focus on the money or position you have lost in the battle, the negative publicity, or the harsh emotions that have been churned up. This causes you to grow cautious, to retreat, hoping to spare yourself more of these negative things. It is a time, you tell yourself, to lay low and wait for things to get better; you need calmness and security.
What you do not realize is that you are inadvertently making the situation worse. Your rival only gets stronger as you sit back; the negative publicity becomes firmly associated with you. Being conservative turns into a habit that carries over into less difficult moments. It becomes harder and harder to move to the offensive. In essence you have chosen to cast life’s inevitable twists of fortune as hardships, giving them a weight and endurance they do not deserve.
What you need to do, as Fifty discovered, is take the opposite approach. Instead of becoming discouraged and depressed