by 50 Cent
On one particular occasion, the fiends were suddenly avoiding him and he could not figure out why. All he knew was that he could not sell a batch of drugs that he had on consignment. Under such an arrangement, a higher-up source, or connect, had given him the drugs for free; once he sold the entire lot, he would return a specified amount of the earnings to the connect and keep the rest as profit. But in this instance it looked like he would not make nearly enough to pay back the connect. That could prove damaging to his reputation and lead to all kinds of trouble; he might have to steal to get the money.
Feeling somewhat desperate, he went into full hustling mode, working night and day, offering all kinds of discounts, whatever it took to unload the drugs. He managed to make back just enough, but it was a close call. Perhaps the quality of the batch he was selling was inferior, but how could he tell beforehand and how could he prevent this from happening again and again?
One day he sought the advice of a man named Dre, an older hustler who had lasted an unusually long time dealing drugs on the streets. He was considered a sharp businessman (in prison, he had studied economics on his own), and he seemed to have an especially good rapport with the fiends. Dre explained to Curtis that in his experience there are two kinds of hustlers in this world—those who stay on the outside, and those who move to the inside. The outside types never bother to learn anything about their customers. It’s just about money and numbers. They have no concept of psychology or the nuances of people’s needs and demands. They’re afraid of getting too close to the customer—that might force them to reassess their ideas and methods. The superior hustler moves to the inside. He’s not afraid of the fiends; he wants to find out what’s going on in their heads. Drug users are no different from anyone else. They have phobias and bouts of boredom and a whole inner life. Because you remain on the outside, he told Curtis, you don’t see any of this and your hustling is purely mechanical and dead.
To raise your game, he explained, you have to first put into practice one of the oldest hustling tricks in the book—the “tester.” What this means is the following: whenever you get a batch of drugs, you separate a portion of it to give out for free to certain fiends. They tell you right there on the spot whether the stuff is good or bad. If their feedback is positive, they will spread the word through their own networks, and such reports are so much more credible, coming from a fellow user, than reports from a hustler hyping his own stuff. If the feedback is negative, you will have to adjust and find some way to cut it, to offer “illusions” (apparent two for one deals, with the capsules simply loaded with dust), whatever it takes to unload it. But you must always operate with feedback on the quality of your product. Otherwise you will not survive on these streets.
Once you have this system in place, you use it to cultivate relationships with your most reliable fiends. They supply you with valuable information about any kind of change in tastes that are happening. Talking to them you get all kinds of ideas for marketing schemes and new angles for hustling. You gain a feel for how they think. From this inside position, the whole game explodes into something creative and alive with possibility.
Curtis quickly incorporated this system and soon discovered that the drug fiends were not at all as he had imagined. They became erratic only when you were not consistent in your dealings with them. They valued convenience and fast transactions, wanted something new every now and then, and loved the thought of any kind of deal. With this growing body of knowledge he could play to their needs and manipulate their demand. He discovered something else—spending much of their time on the streets, they were a great source of information about what was going on with the police, or the weaknesses of rival hustlers. Knowing so much about the neighborhood gave him a feeling of great power. Later he would translate this same strategy to music and his mix-tape campaign on the streets of New York. Maintaining a close connection to the tastes of his fans, he would alter his music to their responses and create the kind of sound that had a visceral appeal, something they had never heard before.
After the remarkable success of his first two commercial albums, Curtis (now known as 50 Cent) stood on top of the music world, but his sense of connection, so vital on the streets, was fading in this new environment he now inhabited. He was surrounded by flatterers who wanted to be in his entourage, and managers and industry people who saw in him only dollar signs. His main interactions were with people in the corporate world or other stars. He could no longer hang out on the streets or get firsthand looks at the trends that were just starting up. All of this meant that he was flying blind with his music, not really sure if it would connect anymore with his audience. They were the source of his energy and spirit, but the distance separating them was growing. Other stars seemed to not mind this; in fact, they enjoyed living in this kind of celebrity bubble. They were afraid of coming back down to earth. Fifty felt the opposite, but there seemed to be no way out.
Then in early 2007, he decided to start up his own website. He thought of it as a way to market his music and merchandise directly to the public, without the screen of his record label, which was proving quite inept in adapting to the Internet age. Soon this website transformed itself into a social networking site, like Facebook for his fans, and the more he delved into it, the more he began to sense that this represented much more than a marketing gimmick—it was perhaps the ultimate tool for reconnecting with his audience.
First, he decided to experiment. As he prepared to launch a G-Unit record in the summer of 2008, he leaked one of the songs onto the website on a Friday night, then the next day he refreshed the Comments page every few minutes and tracked the members’ responses to it. After several hundred comments it was clear that the verdict was negative. The song was too soft, they judged; they wanted and expected something harder from a G-Unit record. Taking their criticisms to heart, he shelved the song and soon released another, creating the hard sound they had demanded. This time the response was overwhelmingly positive.
This called for more experiments. He put up the latest single from his archenemy, The Game, hoping to read negative comments from his fans. To his surprise, many of them liked the song. He engaged in an online debate with them and had his eyes opened about changes in people’s tastes and why they might have grown distant from his music. It forced him to rethink his own direction.
To draw more people to his site, he decided to break down the distance in both directions. He posted blogs on personal subjects, and then responded to his fans’ comments. They could feel they had complete access to him. Using the latest advances in phone technology, he took this further, having his team film him on their cell phones wherever he went; these images were then streamed live on the website. This generated intense traffic and online chatter—fans would never know when such moments could happen, so they were forced to check in at regular intervals to try to catch these spontaneous moments, sometimes riveting in their banality, other times made dramatic by Fifty’s flair for confrontation. Membership grew by leaps and bounds.
As it evolved, the website came to strangely resemble the world of hustling that he had created for himself on the streets of Southside Queens. He could produce testers (trial songs) for his fans, who were like drug fiends, constantly hungry for new product from Fifty, and he could get instant feedback on their quality. He could develop a feel for what they were looking for and how he could manipulate their demand. He had moved from the outside to the inside, and the hustling game came alive once more, this time on a global scale.
The Fearless Approach
THE PUBLIC IS NEVER WRONG. WHEN PEOPLE DON’T RESPOND TO WHAT YOU DO, THEY’RE TELLING YOU SOMETHING LOUD AND CLEAR. YOU’RE JUST NOT LISTENING.
—50 Cent
All living creatures depend for their survival on their relationship to their environment. If they are particularly sensitive to any kind of change—a danger or an opportunity—they have greater power to dominate their surroundings. It is not simply that the hawk can see farther than
any other creature, but that it can see great detail, picking out the slightest alteration in the landscape. Its eyes give it tremendous sensitivity and supreme hunting prowess.
We live in an environment that is mostly human. It consists of the people that we interact with day in and day out. These humans come from many varied backgrounds and cultures. They are individuals with their own unique experiences. To know people well—their differences, their nuances, their emotional life—would give us a great sense of connection and power. We would know how to reach them, communicate more effectively, and influence their actions. But so often we remain on the outside and lack this power. To connect to the environment in this way would mean having to move outside ourselves, train our eyes on people, but so often we prefer to live in our heads, amid our own thoughts and dreams. We strive to make everything in the world familiar and simple. We grow insensitive to people’s differences, to the details that make them individuals.
At the root of this turning inward and disconnect is a great fear—one of the most primal known to man, and perhaps the least understood. In the beginning, our primitive ancestors formed groups for protection. To create a sense of cohesion, they established all kinds of codes of behavior, taboos, and shared rituals. They also created myths in which their tribe was considered to be the favorite of the gods, chosen for some great purpose. To be a member of the tribe was to be cleansed by rituals and to be favored by the gods. Those who belonged to other groups had unfamiliar rituals and belief systems—their own gods and origin myths. They were not clean. They represented the Other—something dark, threatening, and a challenge to the tribe’s sense of superiority.
This was part of our psychological makeup for thousands upon thousands of years. It transformed itself into a great fear of other cultures and ways of thinking—for Christians, this meant all heathens. And despite millennia of civilization, it lives on within us to this day, in the form of a mental process in which we divide the world into what is familiar and unfamiliar, clean and unclean. We develop certain ideas and values; we socialize with those who share those values, who form part of our inner circle, our clique. We form factions of rigid beliefs—on the right, on the left, for this or for that. We live in our heads, with the same thoughts and ideas over and over, cocooned from the outside world.
When we are confronted with people or individuals who have different values and belief systems, we feel threatened. Our first move is not to understand them but to demonize them—that shadowy Other. Alternatively, we may choose to look at them through the prism of our own values and assume they share them. We mentally convert the Other into something familiar—“they may come from a completely different culture, but after all, they must want the same things we do.” This is a failure of our minds to move outward and understand, to be sensitive to nuance. Everything must be white or black, clean or unclean.
Understand: the opposite approach is the way to power in this world. It begins with a fundamental fearlessness—you do not feel afraid or affronted by people who have different ways of thinking or acting. You do not feel superior to those on the outside. In fact, you are excited by such diversity. Your first move is to open up your spirit to these differences, to understand what makes the Other tick, to gain a feel for people’s inner lives, how they see the world. In this way, you continually expose yourself to wider and wider circles of people, building connections to these various networks. The source of your power is your sensitivity and closeness to this social environment. You can detect trends and changes in people’s tastes well before anyone else.
In the hood, conditions are more crowded than elsewhere; people with all kinds of different psychologies are constantly in your face. Any power you have depends on your ability to know everything that is going on around you, to be sensitive to changes, aware of the power structures that are imposed from without and within. There is no time or room to escape to some inner dreamland. You have a sense of urgency to stay connected to the environment and the people around you—your life depends on it.
We now live in similar conditions—all kinds of people of divergent cultures and psychologies are thrown together. But because we live in a society of more apparent abundance and ease, we lack that sense of urgency to connect to other people. This is dangerous. In such a melting pot as the modern world, with people’s tastes changing at a faster pace than ever before, our success depends on our ability to move outside ourselves and connect to other social networks. At all costs, you need to continually force yourself outward. You must reach a point where any sense of losing this connection to your environment translates into a feeling of vulnerability and peril.
In the end this primal fear of ours translates into a mental infirmity—the closing of the mind to any ideas that are new and unfamiliar. The fearless types in history learn to develop the opposite: an open spirit, a mind that is constantly learning from experience. Look at the example of the great British primatologist Jane Goodall, whose field research revolutionized our ideas on chimpanzees and primates.
Prior to Goodall’s work, scientists had established certain accepted ideas on how to do research on animals such as chimpanzees. They were mostly to be studied in cages under very controlled circumstances. On occasion, primatologists would research them in the wild; they would come up with various tricks to lure the chimpanzees closer to them, while remaining hidden behind some kind of protective screen. They would conduct experiments by manipulating the animals and noting their responses. The goal was to come up with general truths about chimpanzee behavior. Only by keeping their distance from the animals could the scientists study them.
Goodall did not have any formal training in the sciences when she arrived in 1960 in what is now known as Tanzania to study chimpanzees in the wild. Operating totally on her own, she devised a radically different means of research. The chimps lived in the remotest parts of the country and were notoriously shy. She tracked them from a distance, patiently working to gain their trust. She dressed inconspicuously and was careful to not look them in the eye. When she noticed they were uncomfortable with her being in the area, she moved away, or acted like a baboon that was merely there digging for insects.
Slowly, over the course of several months, she was able to move closer and closer. Now she could begin to identify individual chimps that she kept seeing; she gave them names, something scientists had never done before—they had always been designated by numbers. With these names, she could begin to detect subtle nuances in their individual behavior; they had different personalities, like humans. After nearly a year of this patient seduction, the chimps began to relax in her presence and allow her to interact with them, something no one had ever achieved before in the history of studying primates in the wild.
This took a tremendous degree of courage, as chimpanzees were considered the most volatile of the primates, more dangerous and violent than gorillas. As she interacted with them more and more, she noticed a change in herself as well. “I think my mind works like a chimp’s, subconsciously,” she wrote a friend. She felt this because she had developed an uncanny ability to find them in the forest.
Now, gaining access to them, she took note of several phenomena that belied the accepted data on chimpanzee behavior. Scientists had catalogued the animals as vegetarians; she observed them hunting and eating monkeys. Only humans were considered capable of making and using tools; she saw them crafting elaborate instruments to catch insects for food. She saw them engage in bizarre dance rituals during a rainstorm. She later observed a horrific war that went on for four years between rival packs. She catalogued some rather strange Machiavellian behavior among the males who fought for supremacy. All in all, she revealed a degree of variety in their emotional and intellectual lives that altered the concept not only of chimpanzees but also of all primates and mammals.
This has great application beyond the realms of science. Normally when you study something, you begin with certain preconceived notions about the subject. (Because scientist
s had come to believe that chimpanzees had a limited range of behavior, that is all that they saw, missing the much more complex reality.) Your mind begins the process in a closed state—not really sensitive to difference and nuance. You are afraid of having your assumptions challenged. Instead, like Goodall, you must let go of this need to control and narrow your field of vision. When you study an individual or a group, your goal is to get inside their minds, their experiences, their way of looking at things. To do this, you must interact with them on a more equal plane. With this open and fearless spirit, you will discover things no one had suspected before. You will have a much deeper appreciation for the targets of your actions or the public you are trying to reach. And with such understanding will come the power to move them.
Keys to Fearlessness
FEW PEOPLE HAVE THE WISDOM TO PREFER THE CRITICISM THAT WOULD DO THEM GOOD, TO THE PRAISE THAT DECEIVES THEM.
—François de La Rochefoucauld
In the work that we produce for business or for culture, there is always a telling moment—when it leaves our hands and reaches the public for which it was intended. In that instant it ceases to be something that was in our heads; it becomes an object that is judged by others. Sometimes this object connects with people in a profound way. It strikes an emotional chord, resonates, and has warmth. It meets a need. Other times it leaves people surprisingly cold—in our minds we had imagined it having a much different effect.
