The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

How to view your energy and health: Although we are all
mortal and subject to illnesses beyond our control, we must recognize

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the role that willpower plays in our health. We have all felt this to some
degree or another. When we fall in love or feel excited by our work,
suddenly we have more energy and recover quickly from any illnesses.
When we are depressed or unusually stressed, we become prey to all
kinds of ailments. Our attitude plays an enormous role in our health,
one that science has begun to explore and will examine in more depth
in the coming decades. In general, you can safely push yourself beyond
what you think are your physical limits by feeling excited and
challenged by a project or endeavor. People get old and prematurely
age by accepting physical limits to what they can do, making it a self-
fulfilling cycle. Those who age well continue to engage in physical
activity, only moderately adjusted. You have wellsprings of energy and
health you have yet to tap into.
How to view other people: First you must try to get rid of the
natural tendency to take what people do and say as something
personally directed at you, particularly if what they say or do is
unpleasant. Even when they criticize you or act against your interests,
more often than not it stems from some deep earlier pain they are
reliving; you become the convenient target of frustrations and
resentments that have been accumulating over the years. They are
projecting their own negative feelings. If you can view people this way,
you will find it easier to not react and get upset or become embroiled in
some petty battle. If the person is truly malicious, by not becoming
emotional yourself you will be in a better place to plot the proper
countermove. You will save yourself from accumulating hurts and
bitter feelings.
See people as facts of nature. They come in all varieties, like flowers
or rocks. There are fools and saints and sociopaths and egomaniacs
and noble warriors; there are the sensitive and the insensitive. They all
play a role in our social ecology. This does not mean we cannot
struggle to change the harmful behavior of the people who are close to
us or in our sphere of influence; but we cannot reengineer human
nature, and even if we somehow succeeded, the result could be a lot
worse than what we have. You must accept diversity and the fact that
people are what they are. That they are different from you should not
be felt as a challenge to your ego or self-esteem but as something to
welcome and embrace.
From this more neutral stance, you can then try to understand the
people you deal with on a deeper level, as Chekhov did with his father.

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The more you do this, the more tolerant you will tend to become
toward people and toward human nature in general. Your open,
generous spirit will make your social interactions much smoother, and
people will be drawn to you.
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Finally, think of the modern concept of attitude in terms of the ancient
concept of the soul. The concept of the soul is found in almost all
indigenous cultures and in premodern civilizations. It originally
referred to external spiritual forces permeating the universe and
contained in the individual human in the form of the soul. The soul is
not the mind or the body but rather the overall spirit we embody, our
way of experiencing the world. It is what makes a person an individual,
and the concept of the soul was related to the earliest ideas of
personality. Under this concept, a person’s soul could have depths.
Some people possessed a greater degree of this spiritual force, had
more of a soul. Others had a personality lacking in this force and were
somewhat soulless.
This has great relevance to our idea of the attitude. In our modern
conception of the soul, we replace this external spiritual force with life
itself, or what can be described as the life force. Life is inherently
complex and unpredictable, its powers far beyond anything we can
ever completely comprehend or control. This life force is reflected in
nature and human society by the remarkable diversity we find in both
realms.
On the one side we find people whose goal in life is to inhibit and
control this life force. This leads them to self-destructive strategies.
They have to limit their thoughts and remain true to ideas that have
lost their relevance. They have to limit what they experience.
Everything is about them and their petty needs and personal problems.
They often become obsessed with a particular goal that dominates all
of their thoughts—such as making money or getting attention. All of
this renders them dead inside as they close themselves off to the
richness of life and the variety of human experience. In this way they
veer toward the soulless, an internal lack of depth and flexibility.
Your goal must be to always move in the opposite direction. You
rediscover the curiosity you once had as a child. Everything and

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everyone is a source of fascination to you. You keep learning,
continually expanding what you know and what you experience. With
people you feel generous and tolerant, even with your enemies and
with those trapped in the soulless condition. You do not enslave
yourself to bitterness or rancor. Instead of blaming others or
circumstances, you see the role that your own attitude and actions
played in any failure. You adapt to circumstances instead of
complaining about them. You accept and embrace uncertainty and the
unexpected as valuable qualities of life. In this way, your soul expands
to the contours of life itself and fills itself with this life force.
Learn to measure the people you deal with by the depth of their
soul, and if possible associate as much as you can with those of the
expansive variety.
This is why the same external events or circumstances affect no two people
alike; even with perfectly similar surroundings every one lives in a world of
his own. . . . The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way
in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it
is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of
meaning. On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the
course of a man’s experience, many people will wish that similar things had
happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be
envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the
significance they possess when he describes them.
—Arthur Schopenhauer

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