The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Seek out calibrated challenges.
The problem with fantastical grandiosity
is that you imagine some great new goal you will achieve—that brilliant
novel you will write, that lucrative start-up you will create. The
challenge is so great that you may start, but you will soon peter out as
you realize you are not up to it. Or if you are the ambitious, assertive
type, you might try to go all the way, but you will end up in the Euro
Disney syndrome, overwhelmed, failing in a large fashion, blaming
others for the fiasco, and never learning from the experience.
Your goal with practical grandiosity is to continually look for
challenges just above your skill level. If the projects you attempt are
below or at your skill level, you will become easily bored and less
focused. If they are too ambitious, you will feel crushed by your failure.

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However, if they are calibrated to be more challenging than the last
project, but to a moderate degree, you will find yourself excited and
energized. You must be up to this challenge so your focus levels will
rise as well. This is the optimum path toward learning. If you fail, you
will not feel overwhelmed and you will learn even more. If you succeed,
your confidence increases, but it is tied to your work and to having met
the challenge. Your sense of accomplishment will satisfy your need for
greatness.
Let loose your grandiose energy.
Once you have tamed this energy,
made it serve your ambitions and goals, you should feel safe to let it
loose upon occasion. Think of it as a wild animal that needs to roam
free now and then or it will go mad from restlessness. What this means
is that you occasionally allow yourself to entertain ideas or projects
that represent greater challenges than you have considered in the past.
You feel increasingly confident and you want to test yourself. Consider
developing a new skill in an unrelated field, or writing that novel you
once considered a distraction from the real work. Or simply give freer
rein to your imagination when in the planning process.
If you are in the public eye and must perform before others, let go of
the restraint you have developed and let your grandiose energy fill you
with high levels of self-belief. This will animate your gestures and give
you greater charisma. If you are a leader and your group is facing
difficulties or a crisis, let yourself feel unusually grandiose and
confident in the success of your mission, to lift up and inspire the
troops. That was the kind of grandiosity that made Winston Churchill
such an effective leader during World War II.
In any event, you can allow yourself to feel ever so godlike because
you have come so far with your improved skills and actual
achievements. If you have taken the time to properly work through the
other principles, you will naturally return back down to earth after a
few days or hours of grandiose exuberance.
—
Finally, at the source of our infantile grandiosity was a feeling of
intense connection to the mother. This was so complete and satisfying
that we spend much of our time trying to recapture that feeling in
some way. It is the source of our desire to transcend our banal

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existence, to want something so large we cannot express what it is. We
have glimmers of that original connection in intimate relationships
and in moments of unconditional love, but these are rare and fleeting.
Entering a state of flow with our work or cultivating deeper levels of
empathy with people (see chapter 2) will give us more such moments
and satisfy the urge. We feel oneness with the work or with other
people. We can take this even further by experiencing a deeper
connection to life itself, what Sigmund Freud called “the oceanic
feeling.”
Consider this in the following way: The formation of life itself on the
planet Earth so many billions of years ago required a concatenation of
events that were highly improbable. The beginning of life was a
tenuous experiment that could have expired at any moment early on.
The evolution since then of so many forms of life is astounding, and at
the end point of that evolution is the only animal we know to be
conscious of this entire process, the human.
Your being alive is an equally unlikely and uncanny event. It
required a very particular chain of events leading to the meeting of
your parents and your birth, all of which could have gone very
differently. At this moment, as you read this, you are conscious of life
along with billions of others, and only for a brief time, until you die.
Fully taking in this reality is what we shall call the Sublime. (For more
on this, see chapter 18.) It cannot be put into words. It is too awesome.
Feeling a part of that tenuous experiment of life is a kind of reverse
grandiosity—you are not disturbed by your relative smallness but
rather ecstatic at the sense of being a drop in this ocean.
Then, overwhelmed by the afflictions I suffered in connection with my sons,
I sent again and inquired of the god what I should do to pass the rest of my
life most happily; and he answered me: “Knowing thyself, O Croesus—thus
shall you live and be happy.” . . . [But] spoiled by the wealth I had and by
those who were begging me to become their leader, by the gifts they gave
me and by the people who flattered me, saying that if I would consent to
take command they would all obey me and I should be the greatest of men
—puffed up by such words, when all the princes round about chose me to be
their leader in the war, I accepted the command, deeming myself fit to be
the greatest; but, as it seems, I did not know myself. For I thought I was
capable of carrying on war against you; but I was no match for you. . . .
Therefore, as I was thus without knowledge, I have my just deserts.
—Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus

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