The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

particular the way we use relationships to handle or modulate our
stress. For instance, children of the dismissing parent will tend to
avoid any kind of negative emotional situation and to wall themselves
off from feelings of dependency. They might find it harder to commit
to a relationship or will unconsciously push people away. The children
of the enmeshed variety will experience a great deal of anxiety in
relationships and will feel many conflicting emotions. They will always
be ambivalent toward people, and this will set noticeable patterns in
their life in which they pursue people and then unconsciously retreat.
In general, from these earliest years people will display a particular
tone to their character—hostile and aggressive, secure and confident,
anxious and avoidant, needy and enmeshing. These two layers are so
deep that we have no real conscious awareness of them and the
behavior they compel, unless we expend great effort in examining
ourselves.

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Above this a third layer will form from our habits and experiences
as we get older. Based on the first two layers, we will tend to rely on
certain strategies for dealing with stress, looking for pleasure, or
handling people. These strategies now become habits that are set in
our youth. There will be modifications to the particular nature of our
character depending on the people we deal with—friends, teachers,
romantic partners—and how they respond to us. But in general these
three layers will establish certain noticeable patterns. We will make a
particular decision. This is engraved in our brains neurologically. We
are compelled to repeat this because the path is already laid. It
becomes a habit, and our character is formed out of these thousands of
habits, the earliest ones set well before we could be conscious of them.
There is a fourth layer as well. It often is developed in late
childhood and adolescence as people become aware of their character
flaws. They do what they can to cover them up. If they sense that deep
inside they are an anxious, timid type of person, they come to realize
that this is not a socially acceptable trait. They learn to disguise it with
a front. They compensate by trying to appear outgoing or carefree or
even domineering. This makes it all the more difficult for us to
determine the nature of their character.
Some character traits can be positive and reflect inner strength. For
instance, some people have a propensity toward being generous and
open, empathetic, and resilient under pressure. But these stronger,
more flexible qualities often require awareness and practice to truly
become habits that can be relied upon. As we get older, life tends to
weaken us. Our empathy is harder to hold on to (see chapter 2). If we
are reflexively generous and open to everyone we meet, we can end up
in a lot of trouble. Confidence without self-awareness and control can
become grandiosity. Without conscious effort, these strengths will tend
to wear down or turn into weaknesses. What this means is that the
weakest parts of our character are the ones that create habits and
compulsive behavior, because they do not require effort or practice to
maintain.
Finally, we can develop conflicting character traits, perhaps
stemming from a difference between our genetic predispositions and
our earliest influences, or from parents who stamp in us different
values. We might feel both idealistic and materialistic, the two parts
fighting within us. The law remains the same. The conflicted character,
which is developed in the earliest years, will merely reveal a different

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kind of pattern, with decisions that tend to reflect a person’s
ambivalence, or that swing back and forth.
As a student of human nature your task is twofold: First you must
come to understand your own character, examining as best you can the
elements in your past that have gone into forming it, and the patterns,
mostly negative, that you can see recurring in your life. It is impossible
to get rid of this stamp that constitutes your character. It is too deep.
But through awareness, you can learn to mitigate or stop certain
negative patterns. You can work to transform the negative and weak
aspects of your character into actual strengths. You can try to create
new habits and patterns that go with them through practice, actively
shaping your character and the destiny that goes with it. (For more on
this, see the last section of this chapter.)
Second, you must develop your skill in reading the character of the
people you deal with. To do so, you must consider character as a
primary value when it comes to choosing a person to work for or with
or an intimate partner. This means giving it more value than their
charm, intelligence, or reputation. The ability to observe people’s
character—as seen in their actions and patterns—is an absolutely
critical social skill. It can help you avoid precisely those kinds of
decisions that can spell years of misery—choosing an incompetent
leader, a shady partner, a scheming assistant, or the kind of
incompatible spouse who can poison your life. But it is a skill you must
consciously develop, because we humans are generally inept when it
comes to such assessments.
The general source of our ineptness is that we tend to base our
judgments of people on what is most apparent. But as stated earlier,
people often try to cover up their weaknesses by presenting them as
something positive. We see them brimming with self-confidence, only
to later discover that they are actually arrogant and incapable of
listening. They seem frank and sincere, but over time we realize that
they are actually boorish and unable to consider the feelings of others.
Or they seem prudent and thoughtful, but eventually we see that they
are in fact timid at their core and afraid of the slightest criticism.
People can be quite adept at creating these optical illusions, and we fall
for them. Similarly, people will charm and flatter us and, blinded by
our desire to like them, we fail to look deeper and see the character
flaws.

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Related to this, when we look at people we often are really seeing
only their reputation, the myth that surrounds them, the position they
occupy, and not the individual. We come to believe that a person who
has success must by nature be generous, intelligent, and good, and that
they deserve everything they have gotten. But successful people come
in all shapes. Some are good at using others to get where they have
gotten, masking their own incompetence. Some are completely
manipulative. Successful people have just as many character flaws as
anyone else. Also, we tend to believe that someone who adheres to a