The 50th Law - 50 Cent [37]
Today we have regressed to a point that resembles the pre-Renaissance. Knowledge has once again hardened into rigid categories, with intellectuals shut off in various ghettos. Intelligent people are considered serious by virtue of how deeply they immerse themselves in one field of study, their viewpoint becoming more and more myopic. Someone who crosses these rigid demarcations is inevitably considered a dilettante. After college we are all encouraged to specialize, to learn one thing well and stick to it. We end up strangling ourselves in the narrowness of our interests. With all of these restrictions, knowledge has no flow to it. Life does not have these categories; they are mere conventions that we mindlessly abide by.
Da Vinci remains the icon and the inspiration for a new form of knowledge. In this form, what matters are the connections between things, not what separates them. The mind has a particular momentum itself; when it heats up and discovers something new, it tends to find other items to study and illuminate. All of the greatest innovations in history come from an openness to discovery, one idea leading to another, sometimes coming from unrelated fields. You must develop this spirit and the same insatiable hunger for knowledge. This comes from widening your fields of study and observation, letting yourself be carried along by what you discover. You will find that you will come up with unexpected ideas, the kind that will lead to new practices or novel opportunities. If things run dry in your particular line of work, you have developed your mind along other lines that you can now exploit. Having such mental flow will allow you to constantly think around any obstacle and maintain your career momentum.
EMOTIONAL FLOW
By nature we are emotional creatures. It is how we primarily react to events; only afterwards are we able to see that such emotional responses can be destructive and need to be reined in. You cannot repress this part of human nature, nor should you ever try. It is like a flood that will overwhelm you all the more for your attempts to dam it up. What you want is for these endless emotions that assail you during the day to wash over you, to never hold on to one single emotion for very long. You are able to let go of any kind of obsessive feeling. If someone says something that bothers you, you find a way to move quickly past the feeling—either to excuse what they said, to make it less important, or to forget.
Forgetting is a skill that you must develop in order to have emotional flow. If you cannot help but feel anger or disgust in the moment, make it a point to not let it remain the following day. When you hold on to emotions like that, it is as if you put blinders on your eyes. For that amount of time, you see and feel only what this emotion dictates, falling behind events. Your mind stops on feelings of failure, disappointment, and mistrust, giving you that awkwardness of someone out of tune with the moment. Without realizing it, all of your strategies become infected by these feelings, pushing you off course.
To combat this, you must learn the art of counterbalance. When you are fearful, force yourself to act in a bolder fashion than usual. When you feel inordinate hate, find some object of love or admiration that you can focus on with intensity. One strong emotion tends to cancel out the other and help you move past it.
It might seem that intense feelings of love, hate, or anger can be used to impel you forward on some project, but that is an illusion. Such emotions give you a burst of energy that falls quickly and leaves you as low as you were high. Rather, you want a more balanced emotional life, with fewer highs and lows. This