The 50th Law - 50 Cent [44]
The fearless types in history have often had to face a lot of hostility in their lives, and in doing so they invariably discover the critical role that one’s attitude plays in thwarting people’s aggression. Look at Richard Wright, the first bestselling African American writer in U.S. history. His father abandoned his mother shortly after Wright’s birth in 1908, and Wright knew only poverty and starvation as a child. His uncle, with whom they lived, was lynched by a white mob, and his family (Wright and his mother and brother) was forced to flee from Arkansas and wander across the South. When his mother fell ill and became an invalid, he was shunted from family to family, even spending time in an orphanage. The family members who took him in, themselves poor and frustrated, beat him incessantly. His classmates at school, sensing he was different (he liked to read books and was shy), taunted and ostracized him. At work, his white employers subjected him to endless indignities, such as beatings and dismissals from the job for no apparent reason.
These experiences created in him intricate layers of fear. But as he read more books about the wider world and thought more deeply, a different spirit rose inside of him—a need to rebel and not accept the status quo. When an uncle threatened to beat him over a triviality, he decided he had had enough. Although just a child, he clutched two razor blades in his hands and told the uncle he was prepared to go down fighting. He was never bothered by that uncle again. Seeing the power he had with such an attitude, he now made it something more calculated and under control. When conditions at work became impossible, he would leave the job—a sign of impertinence to the white employers, who spread word of this around town. He didn’t care if people thought he was different—he was proud of it. Feeling like he was going to be trapped in Jackson, Mississippi, for the rest of his life and yearning to escape to the North, he became a criminal for the first and last time in his life, stealing enough to pay his way out of town. He felt more than justified in doing this.
This spirit permeated his life to the very end. As a successful writer now living in Chicago, he felt that his novels were being misread by the white public—they invariably found a way to soften his message about racial prejudices, to see what they wanted to see in his work. He realized he had been holding back, tailoring his words to appeal to them. He had to rise again above this fear of pleasing others and write a book that could not be misread, that would be as bleak as the life he had known. This became Native Son, his most famous and successful novel.
What Wright had discovered was simple: when you submit in spirit to aggressors or to an unjust and impossible situation, you do not buy yourself any real peace. You encourage people to go further, to take more from you, to use you for their own purposes. They sense your lack of self-respect and they feel justified in mistreating you. When you are humble, you reap the wages of humility. You must develop the opposite—a fighting stance that comes from deep within and cannot be shaken. You force some respect.
This is how it is in life for everyone: people will take from you what they can. If they sense that you are the type of person who accepts and submits, they will push and push until they have established an exploitative relationship with you. Some will do this overtly; others are more slippery and passive aggressive. You must demonstrate to them that there are lines that cannot be crossed; they will pay a price for trying to push you around. This comes from your attitude—fearless and always prepared to fight. It radiates outward and can be read in your manner without you having to speak a word. By a paradoxical law of human