“The 50th Law” by 50 Cent and Robert Greene
Robert Greene is my number one favourite author, and to date I’ve read every single book written by him. Except for one, this book. Initially I never had the desire to read a book co-written with Fifty Cent, not that I have anything against him but because as much as I like some of his songs I’m not really a hip hop kind of guy.
But then the Diddy case emerges, with a lot of the biggest names in showbusiness are mentioned. So like a lot of people I did a deep dive into the whole scandal, including watching all 4 episodes of the documentary funded by Fifty. Oh the sheer level of patience and calculated pettiness by him is just chef’s kiss. And I thought, this dude’s different, he’s very strategic in everything he does, very methodical, and I’m intrigued to read more about him. And I know exactly which book to read about all of it.
In making this book, Greene was given access to pretty much all of Fifty’s world throughout 2007. As Greene recalled, he “followed him on numerous high-powered business meetings, sitting quietly in a corner and observing him in action. One day I witnessed a raucous fistfight in his office between two of his employees, with Fifty having to personally break it up. I observed a fake crisis that he manufactured for the press for publicity purposes. I followed him as he mingled with other starts, friends from the hood, European royalty, and political figures. I visited his childhood home in Southside Queens, hung out with his friends from his hustling days, and got a sense of what it could be like to grow up in that world.”
And during this whole shadowing period, Greene noticed something: “the more I witnessed him in action on all these fronts, the more it struck me that Fifty was a walking, living example of the historical figures I had written about in my three books. He is a master player at power, a kind of hip-hop Napoleon Bonaparte.”
This is not a cheap compliment from Greene’s part. Because Greene is the master of writing about various power plays in history, where he developed a theory that the source of greatness or success could almost always be traced to 1 single attribute or skill or unique quality that distinguished them from the rest. For Napoleon, according to Greene, it was his ability to absorb a huge amount of detail and organized them in his mind. And after shadowing Fifty and interviewing him about his past, Greene concluded that the 1 single source of his power is utter fearlessness.
As Greene reasoned, “This quality does not manifest itself in yelling or obvious intimidation tactics. Any time Fifty acts that way in public it is pure theater. Behind the scenes, he is cool and calculating. His lack of fear is displayed in his attitude and his actions. He has seen and lived through too many dangerous encounters on the streets to be remotely fazed by anything in the corporate world. If a deal is not to his liking, he will walk away and not care. If he needs to play a little rough and dirty with an adversary, he goes at it without a second thought. He feels supreme confidence in himself. Living in a world where most people are generally timid and conservative, he always has the advantage of being willing to do more, to take risks, and to be unconventional. Coming from an environment in which he never expected to live past the age of twenty-five, he feels like he has nothing to lose, and this brings him tremendous power.”
And this is what the 50th Law is about: Fearlessness. As Greene sums it up neatly: “In the end, this is a book about a particular philosophy of life that can be summed up as follows—your fears are a kind of prison that confines you within a limited range of action. The less you fear, the more power you will have and the more fully you will live.”
With this in mind, the book tells Fifty’s story from the technical side: Unlike any other biography, it focuses less on the anecdotal details of his life’s story but more on the blueprint of his moves, the method out of the madness, how he carry himself during each one of those events, etc. The book doesn’t tell Fifty’s story in a linear way either, where Greene would go back and forth between Fifty’s hustling days and rapping days in every other chapter, to illustrate his many different power plays.
Fifty, however, is not the only figure covered in this book. In fact he only comprised of what it feels like 40% of the total coverage, with the other examples for the fearlessness trait are taken from the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia, Miles Davis, JFK, Mao Zedong, Leonardo da Vinci, Ingmar Bergman, Charlie Parker, Niccolò Machiavelli, Richard Wright (the first best-selling African American author in US history), Catherine the Great, film director John Ford, Moses, Thomas Alva Edison, Louis XIV of France, Roman general Scipio Africanus, Jane Goodall, Fyodor Dostoevsky, French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Eleanor Roosevel, Malcolm X, Isaac Newton, boxer Jack Johnson, Demosthenes, Thur-good Marshall, Michelangelo, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earheart, Frank Lloyd Wright, Joan of Arc, Seneca, Ernest Hemingway, Oliver Sacks, Jean de Léry, and more.
Suffice to say, I am now a big fan of Fifty, not necessarily for the music but for the character. His life’s story is immensely crazy, from never knowing his father and the fact that his mother was killed when he was 8 only years old, to learning hardship and how to survive in the streets selling drugs from the age of 12 in one of the most dangerous neighbourhood in the country. Along the way he got into numerous troubles, including getting caught and go to prison, having beef with the biggest drug lord in the neighbourhood, and of course the infamous story about him getting shot 9 times and survived. His fearless aproach on life is also what later helped him successfully navigate the nasty world of music business.
To compare his harsh beginning with his life now as a rich and famous person in control over his own business empire, might seem like something close to a miracle. But if you read this book that shows all the power plays behind his rise to success, you will see that luck got nothing to do with it.
THE CHAOS THEORY 