The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Keep adapting.
It was in your youth that your generation forged its
particular spirit, a period of emotional intensity that we often
remember fondly. The problem that you face is that as you get older,
you tend to remain locked in the values, ideas, and styles that marked
this period. You become a kind of caricature of the past to those who
are younger. You stop evolving with your thinking. The times leave you
behind, which only makes you hold on more tightly to the past as your
only anchor. And as you age, and more and more young people occupy
the public stage, you narrow your audience.
It is not that you should abandon the spirit that marked you, a
rather impossible task anyway. Trying to ape the styles of the younger
generation will only make you seem ludicrous and inauthentic. What
you want is to modernize your spirit, to possibly adopt some of the
values and ideas of the younger generation that appeal to you, gaining
a new and wider audience by blending your experience and perspective
with the changes going on, making yourself into an unusual and
appealing hybrid.
For the film director Alfred Hitchcock, the decade that shaped him
and his work was the 1920s, when he entered the industry and became
a director. What mattered most in these silent films was perfecting a
visual language for telling a story. Hitchcock mastered the art of using
camera angles and movement to make the audience feel as if it were in
the middle of the story.
He never abandoned this obsession with visual language
throughout the six decades he worked as a director, but he continually
adapted his style—to the color spectacles so much in vogue in the
1950s and to the popular thrillers and horror films of the sixties and
seventies. Unlike other aging film directors, who either fell completely
out of fashion or simply tried to mimic the current style, Hitchcock
created a hybrid of the past and the present. This gave his later films
tremendous depth, as he had incorporated all of the adaptations from
earlier in his career. His films could have mass appeal, but they were
made unique by these layers of innovations embedded in the film.
Such depth will always have an uncanny effect on any audience, as
your work seems beyond time itself.

---