The 50th Law - 50 Cent [76]
Too often our concept of learning is to absorb ideas from books, to do what others tell us to, and perhaps to do some controlled exercises. But this is an incomplete and fearful concept of learning—cut off from practical experience. We are creatures who make things; we don’t simply imagine them. To master any process you must learn through trial and error. You experiment, you take some hard blows, and you see what works and doesn’t work in real time. You expose yourself and your work to public scrutiny. Your failures are embedded in your nervous system; you do not want to repeat them. Your successes are tied to immediate experience and teach you more. You come to respect the process in a deep way because you see and feel the progress you can make through practice and steady labor. Taken far enough, you gain a fingertip feel for what needs to be done because your knowledge is tied to something physical and visceral. And having such intuition is the ultimate point of mastery.
MASTER SOMETHING SIMPLE
Often we have a general feeling of insecurity because we have never really mastered anything in life. Unconsciously we feel weak and never quite up to the task. Before we begin something, we sense we will fail. The best way to overcome this once and for all is to attack this weakness head-on and build for ourselves a pattern of confidence. And this must be done by first tackling something simple and basic, giving us a taste for the power we can have.
Demosthenes—one of the greatest political figures in ancient Athens—followed such a path, determined to overcome his intense fear of public speaking. As a child, he was frail and nervous. He talked with a stammer and always seemed out of breath. He was constantly ridiculed. His father had died when he was young, leaving him a nice sum of money, but his guardians quickly stole all of it. He decided to become a lawyer and eventually take the perpetrators to court on his own. But a lawyer needed to be an eloquent speaker, and he was an abysmal failure at that. He decided he would give up law—it seemed too difficult. With what little money he had, he would retire from the world and attempt somehow to master his speech impediment. At least then he could take on some kind of public career.
He built an underground study where he could practice alone. He shaved half his head so he would be too embarrassed to go out in public. To overcome his stammer, he walked along the beach with his mouth full of pebbles, forcing himself to speak without stopping, louder and more forcefully than the waves. He wrote speeches that he then recited while running up steep slopes, to develop better breathing techniques. He installed a looking glass in his study, allowing him to monitor closely the looks on his face as he declaimed. He would engage in conversations with visitors to his house and gauge how each word or intonation would affect them. Within a year of such dedicated practice, he had completely eliminated his stammer and had transformed himself into a more than adequate orator. He decided to return to law after all. With each new case that he won, his confidence rose to new heights.
Understanding the value of practice, he then worked on improving the delivery of his speeches. Slowly he transformed himself into the supreme orator of ancient Athens. This newfound confidence translated into everything he did. He became a leading political figure, renowned for his fearlessness in the face of any foe.
When you take the time to master a simple process and overcome a basic insecurity, you develop certain skills that can be applied to anything. You see instantly the reward that comes from patience, practice, and discipline. You have the sense that you can tackle almost any problem in the same way. You create for yourself a pattern of confidence that will continue to rise.
INTERNALIZ THE RULES OF THE GAME
As a law student at Howard University in the early 1930s, Thurgood Marshall could contemplate many injustices that blacks experienced in the United States,