by 50 Cent
This process can seem rather mysterious. Some people seem to have a knack for creating things that resonate with an audience. They are great artists, politicians with the popular touch, or business people who are endlessly inventive. Sometimes we ourselves produce something that works, but we fail to understand why, and lacking this knowledge, we cannot reproduce our success.
There is an aspect to this phenomenon, however, that is explicable. Anything we create or produce is for a public—large or small, depending on what we do. If we are the type that lives mostly in our heads, imagining what the intended public will like, or not even caring, this spirit is reproduced in the work itself. It is disconnected from the social environment; it is a product of a person who is wrapped up in him- or herself. If, on the other hand, we are deeply connected to the public, if we have a profound sense of their needs and wants, then what we make tends to resonate. We have internalized the way of thinking and feeling of our audience and it shows in the work.
The great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky had almost two separate parts to his career: in the first, he was a socialist who interacted mostly with other intellectuals. His novels and stories were relatively successful. But then in 1849 he was sentenced to several years of prison and hard labor in Siberia for ostensibly conspiring against the government. There, he suddenly discovered that he hadn’t known the Russian people at all. In prison he was thrown in among the dregs of society. In the small village where he did his hard labor, he finally mingled with the Russian peasantry that dominated the country. Once he was freed, all of these experiences became deeply embedded in his work, and suddenly his novels resonated far beyond intellectual circles. He understood his public, the mass of Russian people, from the inside, and his work became immensely popular.
Understand: you cannot disguise your attitude towards the public. If you feel superior at all, part of some chosen elite, then this seeps out in the work. It is conveyed in the tone and mood. It feels patronizing. If you have little access to the public you are trying to reach but you feel that the ideas in your head cannot fail to be interesting, then it almost inevitably comes across as something too personal, the product of someone who is alienated. In either case, what is really dominating the spirit of your work is fear. To interact closely with the public and get its feedback might mean having to adjust your “brilliant” ideas, your preconceived notions. This might challenge your tidy vision of the world. You might disguise this with a snobbish veneer, but it is the age-old fear of the Other.
We are social creatures who make things in order to communicate and connect with those around us. Your goal must be to break down the distance between you and your audience, the base of your support in life. Some of this distance is mental—it comes from your ego and the need to feel superior. Some of it is physical—the nature of your business tends to shut you off from the public with layers of bureaucracy. In any event, what you are seeking is maximum interaction, allowing you to get a feel for people from the inside. You come to thrive off their feedback and criticism. Operating this way, what you produce will not fail to resonate because it will come from the inside. This deep level of interaction is the source of the most powerful and popular works in culture and business, and a political style that truly connects.
The following are four strategies you can use to bring yourself closer to this ideal.
CRUSH ALL DISTANCE
The French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec came from one of the oldest aristocratic bloodlines in France, but from early on he felt estranged from his family. Part of this came from his physical handicap—his legs had stopped growing at the age of fourteen, giving him a dwarfish appearance. Part of it came from his sensitive nature. He turned to painting as his only interest in life, and in 1882, at the age of eighteen, he moved to Paris to study with a famous artist whose studio was in Montmartre—the bohemian and somewhat seedy part of the city. There Toulouse-Lautrec discovered a whole new world—the cafés and dance halls frequented by prostitutes, con artists, dancers, street performers, and all the shady characters who found themselves drawn to this quartier. Perhaps because of his own alienation from his family, he identified with these outcasts. And slowly he began to immerse himself deeper and deeper in the social life of Montmartre.
He befriended the prostitutes and hired them as models, seeking to capture the essence of their lives on canvas. He returned to the dance halls often and sketched while he watched. He drank with the criminal types and the anarchist agitators who passed through the neighborhood. He absorbed every aspect of this world, including the habits of the rich people who came to the area for entertainment and to slum it. Other painters like Degas and Renoir, who both lived in Montmartre, painted many scenes of life there, but it was always with a sense of distance, as if they were outsiders peeking in. Toulouse-Lautrec was more of an active participant. And as his drawings and paintings began to reflect this immersion, his work drew more attention from the public.
All of this culminated in the posters that he did for the dance hall the Moulin Rouge, which opened in 1889. The first and most famous one of all was a scandalous image of a dancer kicking so high you can see her underwear. The colors are intense and garish. But strangest of all is the kind of flat space he created, which gives viewers the sensation that they are there onstage with the performers, in the middle of all the activity and bright lights. No one had created anything quite like it before. When the poster was placed all over the city, people were mesmerized by the image. It seemed to vibrate with a life of its own. More and more posters followed of all the figures in the Moulin Rouge whom he came to know on intimate terms, and an entire new aesthetic was forged around his complete, democratic mingling with his subjects. His work became immensely popular.
Understand: in this day and age, to reach people you must have access to their inner lives—their frustrations, aspirations, resentments. To do so, you must crush as much distance as possible between you and your audience. You enter their spirit and absorb it from within. Their way of looking at things becomes yours, and when you re-create it in some form of work, it has life. What shocks and excites you will then have the same effect on them. This requires a degree of fearlessness and an open spirit. You are not afraid to have your whole personality shaped by these intense interactions. You assume a radical equality with the public, giving voice to people’s ideas and desires. What you produce will naturally connect, in a deep way.
OPEN INFORMAL CHANNELS OF CRITICISM AND FEEDBACK
When Eleanor Roosevelt entered the White House as the First Lady in 1933, it was with much trepidation. She had a disdain for conventional politics and for the kind of cliquish attitude it fostered. In her mind, her husband’s power would depend on his connection to the people who had elected him. To get out of the Depression, the public had to feel engaged in the struggle, not merely be seduced by speeches and programs. When people feel involved they bring their own ideas and energy to the cause. Her fear was that the bureaucratic nature of government would swallow up her husband. He would come to listen to his cabinet members and experts; his contact with the public would be relegated to formal channels such as reports, polls, and studies. This isolation would spell his doom, cutting him off from his base of support. Denied an official position within the administration, she decided to work to create informal channels to the public on her own.
She traveled all over the country—to inner cities and remote rural towns—listening to people’s complaints and needs. She brought many of these people back to meet the president to give him firsthand impressions of the effects of the New Deal. She started a column in The Woman’s Home Companion, in which she had posted above the headline, “I want you to write me.” She would use her column as a kind of discussion forum with the American public, encouraging people to share their criticisms. Within six months she had received over 300,000 letters, and with her staff she worked to answer every last one of them. She opened other channels of communication, for instance, planti
ng her aides in various New Deal programs who would then poll on her behalf the public affected by these programs.
With this system in place, she began to see a pattern from the bottom up—a growing disenchantment with the New Deal. Every day, she left a memo in her husband’s basket, reminding him of these criticisms and the need to be more responsive. And slowly she began to have an influence on his policy, pushing him leftward—for instance, getting him to create programs such as the NYA, the National Youth Administration, which would involve young people actively in the New Deal. Over time she became the unofficial channel of communication for women’s groups and African Americans, shoring up FDR’s support in these two key constituencies. All of this work took tremendous courage, for she was continually ridiculed for her activist approach, long before any first lady had ever thought of taking such a role. And her work played a major part in FDR’s ability to maintain his image as a man of the people.
As Eleanor understood, any kind of group tends to close itself off from the outside world. It is easier to operate this way. From within this bubble, people will delude themselves into thinking they have insight into how their audience or public feels—they read the papers, various reports, the poll numbers, etc. But all of this information tends to be flat and highly filtered. It is much different when you interact directly with the public and hear in the flesh their criticisms and feedback. You discover what lies at the root of their discontent, the various nuances of how your work affects them. Their problems come to life, and any solutions you come up with have more relevance. You create a back-and-forth dynamic in which their ideas, involvement, and energy can be harnessed for your purposes. If some distance between you and the public must be maintained, by the nature of your group or enterprise, then the ideal is to open up as many informal channels as possible, getting your feedback straight from the source.
RECONNECT WITH YOUR BASE
We see the following occur over and over: a person has success when they are younger because they have deep ties with a social group. What they produce and say comes from a real place and connects with an audience. Then slowly they lose this connection. Success creates distance. They come to spend most of their time with other successful people. Consciously or unconsciously, they come to feel separated and above their audience. The intensity in their work is gone and with it any kind of real effect on the public.
In his own way the famous black activist Malcolm X struggled with this problem. He had spent his youth as a savvy street hustler, ending up in prison on drug charges. There, he discovered the religion of Islam, as practiced by the Nation of Islam, and immediately converted. Out of prison he became a highly visible spokesperson for the group. Eventually he broke off from the Nation of Islam and transformed himself into a leading figure in the growing black power movement of the 1960s.
In these various phases of his life, Malcolm felt intense anger and frustration at the levels of injustice for African Americans, much of which he had experienced firsthand. He channeled these emotions into powerful speeches, seeming to give voice to the anger that many felt who lived deep within the ghettos of America. But as he became more and more famous, he felt some anxiety. Other leaders in the black community that he had known had begun to live fairly well; they could not help but feel some distance and superiority to those they were supposed to represent—like a father caring for a child.
Malcolm hated that feeling of creeping paternalism. In his mind, people can only help themselves—his role was to inspire them to action, not act in their name. To inoculate himself against this psychic distance, he increased his interactions with street hustlers and agitators, the kind of people from the lower depths that most leaders would scrupulously avoid. Those from the heart of the ghetto were his power base and he had to reconnect with them. He made himself spend more time with those who had suffered recent injustices, soaking up their experiences and sense of outrage. Most people mellow with age—he would retain his anger, the intensity of emotions that had impelled him in the first place and given him his charisma.
The goal in connecting to the public is not to please everyone or to spread yourself out to the widest possible audience. Communication is a power of intensity, not extensity and numbers. In trying to widen your appeal, you will substitute quantity for quality and you will pay a price. You have a base of power—a group of people, small or large, which identifies with you. This base is also mental—ideas you had when you were younger, which were tied to powerful emotions and inspired you to take a particular path. Time and success tend to diffuse the sense of connection you have to this physical and mental base. You will drift and your powers of communication will diminish. Know your base and work to reconnect with it. Keep your associations with it alive, intense, and present. Return to your origins—the source of all inspiration and power.
CREATE THE SOCIAL MIRROR
Alone, in our minds, we can imagine we have all kinds of powers and abilities. Our egos can inflate to any size. But when we produce something that fails to have the expected impact, we are suddenly faced with a limit—we are not as brilliant or skilled as we had imagined. In such a case, our tendency is to blame others for not understanding it or getting in our way. Our egos are bruised and delicate—criticism from the outside seems like a personal attack, which we cannot endure. We tend to close ourselves off and this makes it doubly difficult to succeed with our next venture.
Instead of turning inward, consider people’s coolness to your idea and their criticisms as a kind of mirror they are holding up to you. A physical mirror turns you into an object; you can see yourself as others see you. Your ego cannot protect you—the mirror does not lie. You use it to correct your appearance and avoid ridicule. The opinions of other people serve a similar function. You view your work from inside your mind, encrusted with all kinds of desires and fears. They see it as an object; they see it as it is. Through their criticisms you can get closer to this objective version and gradually improve what you do. (One caveat: beware of feedback from friends whose judgments could be tainted by feelings of envy or the need to flatter.)
When your work does not communicate with others, consider it your own fault—you did not make your ideas clear enough and you failed to connect with your audience emotionally. This will spare you any bitterness or anger that might come from people’s critiques. You are simply perfecting your work through the social mirror.
Reversal of Perspective
Science and the scientific method are very powerful and practical pursuits of knowledge that have come to dominate much of our thinking for the past few centuries. But they have also spawned a peculiar preconception—that to understand anything we must study it from a distance and with a detached perspective. For example, we tend to judge a book that is full of statistics and quotes from various studies as carrying more weight because it seems to have that requisite scientific objectivity and distance. Science, however, often deals with matter that is inorganic or has a marginal emotional life. Studying such things from a detached perspective makes sense and yields profound results. But this does not translate so well when dealing with people and creatures who respond from an emotional core. The knowledge of what makes them tick on the inside is missing. To study them from the outside is merely a prejudice, often one stemming from fear—dealing with people’s experiences and subjectivity is messy and chaotic. Distance is cleaner and easier.
It is time to reevaluate this preconception and see things from the opposite perspective. Knowledge of human nature and social factors, the kind that is often most valuable to us, depends on knowing people and networks from the inside, on getting a feel for what they are experiencing. This can best be gained by an intense involvement and participation, as opposed to the pseudoscientific pose of the intellectual addicted to studies, citations, and numbers, all designed to back up their preconceptions. This other form of knowledge, from the inside, must be the one that you come to esteem above all others in social matters. It is what will g
ive you power to affect people. To the extent that you feel yourself to be distant and on the outside, you must tell yourself you do not understand what you are studying or trying to reach—you are missing the mark and there is work to be done.
A REALLY INTELLIGENT MAN FEELS WHAT OTHER MEN ONLY KNOW.
—Baron de Montesquieu
CHAPTER 8
Respect the Process—Mastery
THE FOOLS IN LIFE WANT THINGS FAST AND EASY-MONEY, SUCCESS, ATTENTION. BOREDOM IS THEIR GREAT ENEMY AND FEAR. WHATEVER THEY MANAGE TO GET SLIPS THROUGH THEIR HANDS AS FAST AS IT COMES IN. YOU, ON THE OTHER HAND, WANT TO OUTLAST YOUR RIVALS. YOU ARE BUILDING THE FOUNDATION FOR SOMETHING THAT CAN CONTINUE TO EXPAND. TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN, YOU WILL HAVE TO SERVE AN APPRENTICESHIP. YOU MUST LEARN EARLY ON TO ENDURE THE HOURS OF PRACTICE AND DRUDGERY, KNOWING THAT IN THE END ALL OF THAT TIME WILL TRANSLATE INTO A HIGHER PLEASURE—MASTERY OF A CRAFT AND OF YOURSELF. YOUR GOAL IS TO REACH THE ULTIMATE SKILL LEVEL—AN INTUITIVE FEEL FOR WHAT MUST COME NEXT.
Slow Money
MASTER THE INSTRUMENT, MASTER THE MUSIC, THEN FORGET ALL THAT SHIT AND PLAY.
—Charlie Parker
Growing up in Southside Queens, the only people Curtis Jackson could see who had any money and power were the street hustlers. So at the age of eleven and with big dreams for the future, he chose just such a path for himself. Almost immediately, however, he saw that the life of a hustler was not glamorous at all. It consisted mostly of standing on a street corner day after day, selling the same stuff to the same fiends. It meant enduring hours with nothing to do, waiting for customers to come by, often in the bitter cold or the blistering heat. And in those long, tedious hours on the streets, Curtis’s mind naturally would wander; he would find himself wishing for money that would come faster and easier, with more excitement. There were opportunities for this in the hood—they mostly involved crime or some dubious scheme. Sometimes he would feel tempted to try them, but in such moments he would remind himself of the endless stories of the hustlers he had known who had fallen for the illusion of fast, easy money—all suckers who inevitably ended up dead or broke.