The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Explore the Shadow.
Consider the Shadow as having depths that
contain great creative energy. You want to explore these depths, which
include more primitive forms of thinking and the darkest impulses that
come out of our animal nature.
As children, our minds were much more fluid and open. We would
make the most surprising and creative associations between ideas. But
as we get older, we tend to tighten this down. We live in a
sophisticated, high-tech world dominated by statistics and ideas
gleaned from big data. Free associations between ideas, images from
dreams, hunches, and intuitions seem irrational and subjective. But
this leads to the most sterile forms of thinking. The unconscious, the
Shadow side of the mind, has powers we must learn to tap into. And in
fact some of the most creative people in our midst actively engage this
side of thinking.
Albert Einstein based one of his theories of relativity on an image
from a dream. The mathematician Jacques Hadamard made his most
important discoveries while boarding a bus or taking a shower—
hunches that came out of nowhere, or what he claimed to be his
unconscious. Louis Pasteur made his great discovery about
immunization based on a rather free association of ideas after an
accident in his laboratory. Steve Jobs claimed that his most effective
ideas came from intuitions, moments when his mind roamed most
freely.
Understand: The conscious thinking we depend on is quite
limited. We can hold on to only so much information in short- and
long-term memory. But the unconscious contains an almost limitless
amount of material from memories, experiences, and information
absorbed in study. After prolonged research or work on a problem,
when we relax our minds in dreams or while we are performing
unrelated banal activities, the unconscious begins to go to work and
associate all sorts of random ideas, some of the more interesting ones
bubbling to the surface. We all have dreams, intuitions, and free
associations of ideas, but we often refuse to pay attention to them or
take them seriously. Instead you want to develop the habit of using this

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form of thought more often by having unstructured time in which you
can play with ideas, widen the options you consider, and pay serious
attention to what comes to you in less conscious states of mind.
In a similar vein, you want to explore from within your own darkest
impulses, even those that might seem criminal, and find a way to
express them in your work or externalize them in some fashion, in a
journal for instance. We all have aggressive and antisocial desires, even
toward those we love. We also have traumas from our earliest years
that are associated with emotions we prefer to forget. The greatest art
in all media somehow expresses these depths, which causes a powerful
reaction in us all because they are so repressed. Such is the power of
the films of Ingmar Bergman or the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and
you can have the same power by externalizing your dark side.