The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

part of this, be open to exploring the insights that come from your own
unconscious, as revealed in your dreams, in moments of tiredness, and
in the repressed desires that leak out in certain moments. You have
nothing to be afraid of or to repress there. The unconscious is merely
one more realm for you to freely explore.
How to view adversity: Our life inevitably involves obstacles,
frustrations, pain, and separations. How we come to handle such
moments in our early years plays a large role in the development of our
overall attitude toward life. For many people, such difficult moments
inspire them to restrict what they see and experience. They go through
life trying to avoid any kind of adversity, even if this means never really
challenging themselves or getting much success in their careers.
Instead of learning from negative experiences, they want to repress
them. Your goal is to move in the opposite direction, to embrace all
obstacles as learning experiences, as means to getting stronger. In this
way you embrace life itself.
By 1928 the actress Joan Crawford had a reasonably successful
career in Hollywood, but she was feeling increasingly frustrated by the
limited roles she was receiving. She saw other less talented actresses
vault ahead of her. Perhaps the problem was that she was not assertive
enough. She decided she needed to voice her opinion to one of the

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most powerful production chiefs on the MGM lot, Irving Thalberg.
Little did she realize that Thalberg viewed this as impudence and that
he was vindictive by nature. He therefore cast her in a Western,
knowing that was the last thing she wanted and that such a fate was a
dead end for many an actress.
Joan had learned her lesson and decided to embrace her fate. She
made herself love the genre. She became an expert rider. She read up
on the Old West and became fascinated by its folklore. If that’s what it
took to get ahead, she decided to become the leading actress of
Westerns. At the very least this would expand her acting skills. This
became her lifelong attitude toward work and the supreme challenges
an actress faced in Hollywood, where careers were generally very short.
Every setback was a chance to grow and develop.
In 1946 twenty-year-old Malcolm Little (later known as Malcolm X)
began serving an eight-to-ten-year prison sentence for burglary. Prison
generally has the effect of hardening the criminal and narrowing his
already narrow view of the world. Instead, Malcolm decided to reassess
his life. He began to spend time in the prison library and fell in love
with books and learning. As he saw it now, prison afforded him the
best possible means of changing himself and his attitude toward life.
With so much time on his hands, he could study and earn himself a
degree. He could develop the discipline he had always been missing.
He could train himself to become an expert speaker. He embraced the
experience without any bitterness and emerged stronger than ever.
Once he left prison, he saw any difficulty, large or small, as a means to
test and toughen himself.
Although adversity and pain are generally beyond your control, you
have the power to determine your response and the fate that comes
from that.