The 50th Law - 50 Cent [86]
Moving to this more active form of freedom does not mean that you are giving yourself over to wild and ill-considered action. Your decision to alter a career path, for instance, is based on careful consideration of your strengths and deepest desires and the future you want. It comes from thinking for yourself and not accepting what others think about you. The risks you take are not emotional and for the sake of a thrill; they are calculated. The need to conform and please others will always play a role in our actions, consciously or unconsciously. To be completely free is impossible and undesirable. You are merely exploring a freer range of action in your life and the power it could bring you.
What block us from moving in this direction are the pressures we feel to conform; our rigid, habitual patterns of thinking; and our self-doubts and fears. The following are five strategies to help you push past these limits.
DEFY ALL CATEGORIES
As a young girl growing up in Kansas at the turn of the twentieth century, Amelia Earhart felt oddly out of place. She liked to do things her own way—playing rough games with the boys, spending hours by herself reading books, or disappearing on long hikes. She was prone to behavior that others considered strange and unorthodox—at boarding school she was kicked out for walking on the roof in her nightgown. As she got older she felt intense pressure to settle down and be more like other girls. Earhart had an abhorrence, however, of marriage and the constrictions it represented for women, so she looked for a career, trying her hand at all kinds of jobs. But she craved adventure and challenges, and the jobs available to her were menial and mindless.
Then one day in 1920 she went for a short ride in an airplane, and suddenly she knew she had found her calling. She took lessons and became a pilot. In the air she felt the freedom she had always been looking for. Piloting a plane was a constant challenge—physical and mental. She could express the daring side of her character, her love of adventure, as well as her interest in the mechanics of flying.
Female pilots at the time were not taken seriously. The men were the ones who set records and blazed new paths. To combat this, Earhart had to push the limits as far as she could, doing feats of flying that would make headlines and contribute something to the profession. In 1932 she became the first woman to pilot a plane solo across the Atlantic, in what would turn out to be her most death-defying and physically arduous flight. In 1935 she contemplated doing a crossing of the Gulf of Mexico. One of the most famous male pilots of the time told her it was too dangerous and not worth the risk. Feeling there was a challenge in this, she decided to attempt the flight anyway and managed it with relative ease, showing others how it could be done.
If at any moment in her life she had succumbed to the pressure to be more like others, she would have lost that magic that now seemed to follow her when she went her own direction. She decided to continue being herself, whatever the consequences might be. She dressed in her unconventional manner and spoke her mind on political matters, even though that was considered unbecoming. When the famous publicist and promoter George Putnam asked for her hand in marriage, Earhart accepted under the condition that he sign a contract guaranteeing he would respect her desires for maximum freedom within the relationship.
People who met her invariably commented that she was not really masculine or feminine or even androgynous, but completely herself, a unique mix of qualities. It was this part of her that fascinated people and