The 50th Law - 50 Cent [87]
Understand: the day you were born you became engaged in a struggle that continues to this day and will determine your success or failure in life. You are an individual, with ideas and skills that make you unique. But people are constantly trying to fit you into narrow categories that make you more predictable and easier to manage. They want to see you as shy or outgoing, sensitive or tough. If you succumb to this pressure, then you may gain some social acceptance, but you will lose the unconventional parts of your character that are the source of your uniqueness and power. You must resist this process at all costs, seeing people’s neat and tidy judgments as a form of confinement. Your task is to retain or rediscover those aspects of your character that defy categorization, and to give them even greater play. Remaining unique, you will create something unique and inspire the kind of respect you would never receive from tepid conformity.
CONSTANTLY REINVENT YOURSELF
As a child, the future president John F. Kennedy was extremely frail and prone to illness. He spent much time in various hospitals, and grew up to be rather frail and weak looking. From these experiences he developed a horror of anything that made him feel that he had no control over his life. And one form of powerlessness particularly irked him—the judgments people made of him based on his appearance. They would see him as weak and fragile, underestimating his underlying strength of character. So he initiated a lifelong process of wresting this control from others, constantly re-creating himself and casting the image that he wanted people to see of him.
As a youth, he was perceived as the pleasure-loving son of a powerful father, so at the outbreak of World War II, despite his physical limitations, he enlisted in the navy, determined to show another side of himself. As a lieutenant on a patrol torpedo in the Pacific, his boat was rammed and cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. He proceeded to lead his men to safety in a way that earned him numerous medals for bravery. During this incident he displayed an almost callous disregard for his own life, perhaps in an attempt once and for all to prove his masculinity. In 1946, he decided to run for Congress, and he used his war record to craft the image of a young man who would be an equally fearless fighter for his constituency.
A few years later, as a senator, he realized that many in the public perceived him as a bit of a lightweight—young and unproven. And so yet again, he chose to reinvent himself, this time by writing a book (authored with his speechwriter Theodore Sorenson) called Profiles in Courage, cataloguing stories of famous senators who defied convention and achieved great things. The book won a Pulitzer Prize, and more important, it completely altered the image the public had of Kennedy. He was now seen as thoughtful and independent, somehow following the path of the senators he had written about—clearly an intended effect.
In 1960, when Kennedy was running for president, people once again underestimated him. They saw him as the young Catholic liberal senator who could not possibly appeal to the majority of Americans. This time he decided to recast himself as the inspiring prophet who would lead the country out of the doldrums of the Eisenhower era, returning America to its frontier roots and creating a sense of unified purpose. It was an image of vigor and youth (contrary to his still physical weakness) and it proved compelling enough to captivate the public and win the election.
Understand: people judge you by appearances, the image you project through your actions, words, and style. If you do not take control of this process, then people will see and define