The 50th Law - 50 Cent [39]
Understand: you exist in a particular cultural moment, with its own flow and style. When you are young you are more sensitive to these fluctuations in taste and so you generally keep up with the present. But as you get older the tendency is for you to become locked in a style that is dead, one that you associate with your youth and its excitement. If enough time passes, your style-lock can become quite ludicrous; you look like a museum piece. Your momentum will grind to a halt as people come to categorize you in a narrow period of time.
Instead you must find a way to periodically reinvent yourself. You are not trying to mimic the latest trend—that will make you look equally ludicrous. You are simply rediscovering that youthful attentiveness to what is happening around you and incorporating what you like into a newer spirit. You are taking pleasure in shaping your personality, wearing a new mask. The only thing you really have to fear is becoming a social and cultural relic.
Reversal of Perspective
In Western culture, we tend to associate strength of character with consistency. People who shift around too much with their ideas and image can be judged as untrustworthy and even demonic. We honor those who are true to the past and certain timeless values. On the other hand, people who challenge and change the prevailing conventions are often viewed as destructive figures, at least while they are alive.
The great Florentine writer Niccolò Machiavelli saw these values of consistency and order as products of a fearful culture and something that should be reversed. In his view, it is precisely our fixed nature, our tendency to hold to one line of action or thought, that is the source of human misery and incompetence. A leader can come to power through acts of boldness, but when the times shift and require something more cautious, he generally will continue with his bold approach. He is not strong enough to adapt; he is a prisoner of his fixed nature. What raised him above others then becomes the source of his downfall.
True figures of power, as Machiavelli saw it, would be people who could shape their own character, call up the qualities that were necessary for the moment, and know how to bend to circumstance. Those who remain true to some idea or value without self-examination often prove to be the worst tyrants in life. They make others conform to dead concepts. They are negative forces, holding back the change that is necessary for any culture to evolve and prosper.
This is how you must operate: you actively work to overcome this fixed nature, deliberately trying a different approach and style than your usual one, to get a sense of a different possibility. You come to view periods of stability and order with mistrust. Something isn’t moving in your life and in your mind. On the other hand, moments of change and apparent chaos are what you thrive on—they make your mind and spirit jump to life. If you reach such a point, you have tremendous power. You have nothing to fear from moments of transition. You welcome, even create them. Whenever you feel rooted and established in place, that is when you should be truly afraid.
PEOPLE WISH TO BE SETTLED; ONLY AS FAR AS THEY ARE UNSETTLED IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR THEM.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
CHAPTER 5
Know When to Be Bad—Aggression
YOU WILL ALWAYS FIND YOURSELF AMONG THE AGGRESSIVE AND THE PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE WHO SEEK TO HARM YOU IN SOME WAY. YOU MUST GET OVER ANY GENERAL FEARS YOU HAVE OF CONFRONTING PEOPLE OR YOU WILL FIND IT EXTREMELY DIFFICULT TO ASSERT YOURSELF IN THE FACE OF THOSE WHO ARE MORE CUNNING AND RUTHLESS. BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE YOU MUST MASTER THE ART OF KNOWING WHEN AND HOW TO BE BAD—USING DECEPTION, MANIPULATION, AND OUTRIGHT FORCE AT THE APPROPRIATE MOMENTS. EVERYONE