The 50th Law - 50 Cent [84]
One of the most fearless men in history has to be the great nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He was born into the cruelest system known to man—slavery. It was designed in every detail to destroy a person’s spirit. It did so by separating people from their families, so they could develop no real emotional attachments in their lives. It used constant threats and fear to break any sense of free will, and it made sure that slaves were kept illiterate and ignorant. They were to form only the lowest opinions of themselves. Douglass himself suffered all of these fates as a child, but somehow from his earliest years he believed that he was worth much more, that something powerful had been crushed but that it could spring back to life. As a child he saw himself escaping the clutches of slavery some day, and he nourished himself on that dream.
Then in 1828, at the age of ten, Douglass was sent by his master to work in the home of a son-in-law in Baltimore, Maryland. Douglass read this as some kind of providence working in his favor. It meant he would escape the hard labor on the plantation and have more time to think. In Baltimore, the mistress of the house was constantly reading the Bible, and one day he asked her if she would teach him to read. She happily obliged and he quickly learned. The master of the house heard of this and severely upbraided his wife—a slave must never be allowed to read and write. He forbade her to continue with the teachings. Douglass, however, could now manage on his own, getting books and dictionaries for himself on the sly. He memorized famous speeches, which he could go over in his mind at any time of day. He saw himself becoming a great orator, railing against the evils of slavery.
With growing knowledge of the outside world, he came to resent even more bitterly the life he was forced to lead. This infected his attitude, and his owners sensed it. At the age of fifteen he was sent to a farm run by a Mr. Covey, whose sole task in life was to break the spirit of a rebellious slave.
Covey, however, was not successful. Douglass had already created in his mind an identity for himself that would not match what Covey wanted to impose on him. This image of his own high value, believed in with all his energy, would become reality. He maintained his inner freedom and his sanity. He converted all of the whippings and mistreatment into a spur for him to escape to the North; it gave him more material to some day share with the world on the evils of slavery. Several years later, Douglass managed to escape to the north. There he became a leading abolitionist, eventually founding his own newspaper and always pushing against the limits people tried to impose on him.
Understand: people will constantly attack you in life. One of their main weapons will be to instill in you doubts about yourself—your worth, your abilities, your potential. They will often disguise this as their objective opinion, but invariably it has a political purpose—they want to keep you down. You are continually prone to believe these opinions, particularly if your self-image is fragile. In every moment of life you can defy and deny people this power. You do so by maintaining a sense of purpose, a high destiny you are fulfilling. From such a position, people’s attacks do not harm you; they only make you angry and more determined. The higher you raise this self-image, the fewer judgments and manipulations you will tolerate. This will translate into fewer obstacles in your path. If someone like Douglass could forge this attitude amid the most unfree of circumstances, then we