The 50th Law - 50 Cent [32]
The man’s arrogance was increasing by the day. Perhaps he would follow this visit up with some violent act to show the Pharaohs he meant what he said, but Curtis had a real bad feeling from that afternoon. Over the next few days, he did whatever he could to avoid running into Jermaine. Sure enough, a week later Jermaine was shot in the head and killed in one of the back alleyways of the hood. Everyone knew who did it and why.
In the months to come, Curtis thought long and hard about what had happened. A part of him had identified with Jermaine. He too had great ambitions and wanted to forge some kind of empire within the hood. With all the competition on the streets, this could never be an easy task. It was natural then for someone like Jermaine to decide that the only way to create this empire was through force and the buildup of a monopoly. But such an effort was futile. Even if he had lasted longer, there were too many people operating on the fringes who resented his takeover and would have done whatever they could to sabotage him. The fiends would have grown tired of his one-size-fits-all approach; they liked variety, even if it was only in the color of the capsules. The police would have taken notice of his large operation and tried to break it up. Jermaine had been living in the past, in ideas cooked up in prison in the 1970s, the grand era of the drug lord. Time had passed him by, and in the ruthless dynamic of the hood, he paid for this with his life.
What was needed was a new skill set, a different mentality for handling the chaos. And Curtis would be the hustler to develop these skills to the maximum. For this purpose, he let go of any desire to dominate an area with one large operation. Instead he started experimenting with four or five hustles at the same time; inevitably one of the angles would work and pay for all the others. He made sure he always had options, room to move in case the police pushed in and cut off one of his access routes. He interacted with the fiends, looking for any changes in their tastes and ways he could appeal to them with some new marketing scheme. He let those who worked for him do things on their own time, as long as they produced results—he wanted as little friction as possible. He never stayed tied to one venture, one partner, or one way of doing things for very long. He kept moving.
The chaos of the streets was part of his flow, something he learned to exploit by working from within it. Operating this way, he slowly accumulated the kind of hustling empire that could surpass what even Jermaine had attempted.
In 2003, Curtis (now known as 50 Cent) found himself thrust into corporate America, working within Interscope Records and dealing with the growing number of businesses that wanted to ally themselves with him. Coming from the streets, with no formal business background, it was natural for him to feel intimidated in this new environment. But within a few months he saw things differently—the new skills he had developed in the hood were more than adequate.
What he noticed about the business executives he dealt with was rather shocking: they operated by these conventions that seemed to have little to do with the incredible changes going on in the business environment. The record industry, for instance, was being destroyed by digital piracy, but the executives could only think of somehow maintaining their monopoly on ownership and distribution; they were incapable of adapting to the changes. They interacted only with themselves—not with their customer base—so their ideas never evolved. They were living in the past, when all of the business models were simple, and control was