The 50th Law - 50 Cent [83]
There is another, fearless way of approaching your life. It begins by untying yourself from the opinions of others. This is not as easy as it sounds. You are breaking a lifelong habit of continually referring to other people when measuring your value. You must experiment and feel the sensation of not concerning yourself with what others think or expect of you. You do not advance or retreat with their opinions in mind. You drown out their voices that often translate into doubts inside you. Instead of focusing on the limits you have internalized, you think of the potential you have for new and different behavior. Your personality can be altered and shaped by your conscious decision to do so.
We barely understand the role that willpower plays in our actions. When you raise your opinion of yourself and what you are capable of it has a decided influence on what you do. For instance, you feel more comfortable taking some risk, knowing that you are always able to get back up on your feet if it fails. Taking this risk will then make your energy levels rise—you have to meet the challenge or go under, and you will find untapped reservoirs of creativity within you. People are drawn to those who act boldly, and their attention and faith in you will have the effect of heightening your confidence. Feeling less confined by doubts, you give freer rein to your individuality, which makes everything you do more effective. This movement towards confidence has a self-fulfilling quality that is impossible to deny.
Moving towards such self-belief does not mean you cut yourself off from others and their opinions of your actions. You must take constant measure of how people receive your work, and use to maximum effect their feedback (see chapter 7). But this process must begin from a position of inner strength. If you are dependent on their judgments for your sense of worth, then your ego will always be weak and fragile. You will have no center or sense of balance. You will wilt under criticisms and soar too high with any praise. Their opinions are merely helping you shape your work, not your self-image. If you make mistakes, if the public judges you negatively, you have an unshakable inner core that can accept such judgments, but you remain convinced of your own worth.
In impoverished environments like the hood, people’s sense of who they are and what they deserve is continually under attack. People from the outside tend to judge them for where they come from—as violent, dangerous, or untrustworthy—as if the accident of where they were born determines who they are. They tend to internalize many of these judgments and perhaps deep inside feel that they don’t deserve much of what is considered good in this world. Those from the hood who want to overcome this pronouncement of the outside world have to fight with double the energy and desperation. They have to convince themselves first that they are worth much more and can rise as far as they want, through willpower. The intensity of their ambition becomes the deciding factor. It has to be supremely high. That is why the most ambitious and confident figures in history often emerge from the most impoverished and arduous of circumstances.
For those of us who live outside such an environment, “ambition” has almost become a dirty word. It is associated with such historical types as Richard III or Richard Nixon. It reeks of insecurity and evil deeds to reach the top. People who want power so badly must have psychological problems, or so we think. Much of this social prudery around the idea of power and ambition comes from an unconscious guilt and desire to keep other people down. To those occupying a position of privilege, the ambitiousness of those from below seems like something scary and threatening.
If you come from relative prosperity, you are more than likely tainted with some of this prejudice and you must