The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Create a ladder of descending goals.
Operating with long-term goals will
bring you tremendous clarity and resolve. These goals—a project or
business to create, for instance—can be relatively ambitious, enough to
bring out the best in you. The problem, however, is that they will also
tend to generate anxiety as you look at all you have to do to reach them
from the present vantage point. To manage such anxiety, you must
create a ladder of smaller goals along the way, reaching down to the
present. Such objectives are simpler the further down the ladder you
go, and you can realize them in relatively short time frames, giving you
moments of satisfaction and a sense of progress. Always break tasks
into smaller bites. Each day or week you must have microgoals. This
will help you focus and avoid entanglements or detours that will waste
your energy.
At the same time, you want to continually remind yourself of the
larger goal, to avoid losing track of it or getting too mired in details.
Periodically return to your original vision and imagine the immense
satisfaction you will have when it comes to fruition. This will give you
clarity and inspire you forward. You will also want a degree of
flexibility built into the process. At certain moments you reassess your
progress and adjust the various goals as necessary, constantly learning
from experience and adapting and improving your original objective.
Remember that what you are after is a series of practical results and
accomplishments, not a list of unrealized dreams and aborted projects.
Working with smaller, embedded goals will keep you moving in such a
direction.
Lose yourself in the work.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty you will face
in maintaining a high and consistent sense of purpose is the level of
commitment that is required over time and the sacrifices that go with
this. You have to handle many moments of frustration, boredom, and
failure, and the endless temptations in our culture for more immediate

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pleasures. The benefits listed above in the Keys are often not
immediately apparent. And as the years pile up, you can face burnout.
To offset this tedium, you need to have moments of flow in which
your mind becomes so deeply immersed in the work that you are
transported beyond your ego. You experience feelings of profound
calmness and joy. The psychologist Abraham Maslow called these
“peak experiences”—once you have them, you are forever changed. You
will feel the compulsion to repeat them. The more immediate pleasures
the world offers will pale in comparison. And when you feel rewarded
for your dedication and sacrifices, your sense of purpose will be
intensified.
These experiences cannot be manufactured, but you can set the
stage for them and vastly increase your odds. First, it is essential to
wait until you are further along in the process—at least more than
halfway through a project, or after several years of study in your field.
At such moments, your mind will be naturally filled with all kinds of
information and practice, ripe for a peak experience.
Second, you must plan on giving yourself uninterrupted time with
the work—as many hours in the day as possible, and as many days in
the week. For this purpose, you have to rigorously eliminate the usual
level of distractions, even plan on disappearing for a period of time.
Think of it as a type of religious retreat. Steve Jobs would close the
door to his office, spend the entire day holed up in the room, and wait
until he fell into a state of deep focus. Once you become adept at this,
you can do it almost anywhere. Einstein would notoriously go into
such a deep state of absorption that he would lose himself in the city
streets or while sailing on a lake.
Third, the emphasis must be on the work, never on yourself or the
desire for recognition. You are fusing your mind with the work itself,
and any intrusive thoughts from your ego or doubts about yourself or
personal obsessions will interrupt the flow. Not only will you find this
flow immensely therapeutic, but it will also yield uncannily creative
results.
For the time period that the actress Ingrid Bergman was engaged in
a particular film project, she poured every ounce of her energy into it,
forgetting everything else about her life. Unlike other actors, who gave
greater importance to the money they earned or the attention they
received, Bergman saw only the opportunity to completely embody the

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role she was to play and bring it to life. For this purpose, she would
engage with the writers and the director involved, actively altering the
role itself and some of the dialogue, making it more real; they would
trust her in this, because her ideas were almost always excellent and
were based on deep thinking about the character.
Once she had gone far enough in the writing and thinking process,
she would go through days or weeks feeling herself fuse with the role,
and not interacting with others. In doing so, she could forget about all
the pain in her life—the loss of her parents when she was young, her
abusive husband. These were the moments of genuine joy in her life,
and she translated such peak experiences to the screen. Audiences
could sense something profoundly realistic in her performances, and
they identified unusually intensely with the characters she played.
Knowing she would periodically have such experiences, and the results
that went with them, kept her moving past the pain and sacrifices that
she demanded of herself.
Look at this as a form of religious devotion to your life’s work. Such
devotion will eventually yield moments of union with the work itself,
and a type of ecstasy that is impossible to verbalize until you have
experienced it.