The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

The Flexible Mind—Self-strategies
You find it frustrating when people resist your good ideas out of sheer
stubbornness, but you are largely unaware of how the same problem—
your own stubbornness—afflicts you and limits your creative powers.
As children our minds were remarkably flexible. We could learn at a
rate that far surpasses our adult capacities. We can attribute much of
the source of this power to our feelings of weakness and vulnerability.
Sensing our inferiority in relation to those older than us, we felt highly
motivated to learn. We were also genuinely curious and hungry for
new information. We were open to the influence of parents, peers, and
teachers.
In adolescence many of us had the experience of falling under the
sway of a great book or writer. We became entranced by the novel
ideas in the book, and because we were so open to influence, these
early encounters with exciting ideas sank deeply into our minds and
became part of our own thought processes, affecting us decades after
we absorbed them. Such influences enriched our mental landscape,
and in fact our intelligence depends on the ability to absorb the lessons
and ideas of those who are older and wiser.
Just as the body tightens with age, however, so does the mind. And
just as our sense of weakness and vulnerability motivated the desire to
learn, so does our creeping sense of superiority slowly close us off to

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new ideas and influences. Some may advocate that we all become more
skeptical in the modern world, but in fact a far greater danger comes
from the increasing closing of the mind that afflicts us as individuals as
we get older, and seems to be afflicting our culture in general.
Let us define the ideal state of the mind as one that retains the
flexibility of youth along with the reasoning powers of the adult. Such a
mind is open to the influence of others. And just as you use strategies
to melt people’s resistance, you must do the same on yourself, working
to soften up your rigid mental patterns.
To reach such an ideal, we must first adopt the key tenet of the
Socratic philosophy. One of Socrates’s earliest admirers was a young
man named Chaerephon. Frustrated that more Athenians did not
revere Socrates as he himself did, Chaerephon visited the Oracle of
Delphi and posed a question: “Is there a wiser man than Socrates in all
of Athens?” The oracle answered no.
Chaerephon felt vindicated in his admiration of Socrates and
rushed to tell his mentor the good news. Socrates, however, being a
humble man, was not at all pleased to hear this and was determined to
prove the oracle wrong. He visited many people, each eminent in their
own field—politics, the arts, business—and asked them many
questions. When they kept to knowledge of their field, they seemed
quite intelligent. But then they would expatiate on all kinds of subjects
about which they clearly knew nothing. On such subjects they merely
spouted the conventional wisdom. They did not think through any of
these ideas.
Finally Socrates had to admit that the oracle was indeed accurate—
he was wiser than all the others because he was aware of his own
ignorance. Over and over again he examined and reexamined his own
ideas, seeing inadequacies and infantile emotions lodged within them.
His motto in life had become “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
The charm of Socrates, what made him so devilishly fascinating to the
youth of Athens, was the supreme openness of his mind. In essence,
Socrates assumed the weaker, vulnerable position of the ignorant
child, always asking questions.
Think of it this way: We like to scoff at the superstitious and
irrational ideas that most people held in the seventeenth century.
Imagine how those of the twenty-fifth century will scoff at ours. Our
knowledge of the world is limited, despite the advances of science. Our

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ideas are conditioned by the prejudices instilled in us by our parents,
by our culture, and by the historical period we live in. They are further
limited by the increasing rigidity of the mind. A bit more humility
about what we know would make us all more curious and interested in
a wider range of ideas.
When it comes to the ideas and opinions you hold, see them as toys
or building blocks that you are playing with. Some you will keep,
others you will knock down, but your spirit remains flexible and
playful.
To take this further, you can adopt a strategy promulgated by
Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who really wants to get to know something
new (be it a person, an event, a book) does well to entertain it with all
possible love and to avert his eyes quickly from everything in it he finds
inimical, repellent, false, indeed to banish it from mind: so that, for
example, he allows the author of a book the longest start and then, like
one watching a race, desires with beating heart that he may reach his
goal. For with this procedure one penetrates to the heart of the new
thing, to the point that actually moves it: and precisely this is what is
meant by getting to know it. If one has gone this far, reason can
afterwards make its reservations; that over-estimation, that temporary
suspension of the critical pendulum, was only an artifice for luring
forth the soul of the thing.”
Even in writing that is inimical to your own ideas there is often
something that rings true, which represents the “soul of the thing.”
Opening yourself up to its influence in this way should become part of
your mental habits, allowing you to better understand things, even to
criticize them properly. Sometimes, however, that “soul” will move you
as well and gain some influence, enriching your mind in the process.
Upon occasion it is good to let go of your deepest set of rules and
restrictions. The great fourteenth-century Zen master Bassui posted at
the door of his temple a list of thirty-three rules his monks were to
abide by or be thrown out. Many of the rules dealt with alcohol, which
was strictly forbidden. One night, to totally disconcert his literal-
minded monks, he showed up to a talk completely drunk. He never
apologized or repeated it, but the lesson was simple: such rules are
merely guidelines, and to demonstrate our freedom we must violate
them from time to time.

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Finally, when it comes to your own self-opinion, try to have some
ironic distance from it. Make yourself aware of its existence and how it
operates within you. Come to terms with the fact that you are not as
free and autonomous as you like to believe. You do conform to the
opinions of the groups you belong to; you do buy products because of
subliminal influence; you can be manipulated. Realize as well that you
are not as good as the idealized image of your self-opinion. Like
everyone else, you can be quite self-absorbed and obsessed with your
own agenda. With this awareness, you will not feel the need to be
validated by others. Instead you will work at making yourself truly
independent and concerned with the welfare of others, as opposed to
staying attached to the illusion of your self-opinion.
There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No
other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and
let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed
back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s
temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange
perfume: there was a real joy in that—perhaps the most satisfying joy left to
us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its
pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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