The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Keys to Human Nature
Let us say that you have a project to realize, or an individual or group
of people you wish to persuade to do something. We could describe a
realistic attitude toward reaching such goals in the following way:
Getting what you want is rarely easy. Success will depend on a lot of
effort and some luck. To make your project work, you will probably
have to jettison your previous strategy—circumstances are always
changing and you need to keep an open mind. The people you are
trying to reach never respond exactly as you might have imagined or
hoped. In fact, people will generally surprise and frustrate you in their
reactions. They have their own needs, experiences, and particular
psychology that are different from your own. To impress your targets,

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you will have to focus on them and their spirit. If you fail to accomplish
what you want, you will have to examine carefully what you did wrong
and strive to learn from the experience.
You can think of the project or task ahead of you as a block of
marble you must sculpt into something precise and beautiful. The
block is much larger than you and the material is quite resistant, but
the task is not impossible. With enough effort, focus, and resiliency
you can slowly carve it into what you need. You must begin, however,
with a proper sense of proportion—goals are hard to reach, people are
resistant, and you have limits to what you can do. With such a realistic
attitude, you can summon up the requisite patience and get to work.
Imagine, however, that your brain has succumbed to a
psychological disease that affects your perception of size and
proportion. Instead of seeing the task you are facing as rather large
and the material resistant, under the influence of this disease you
perceive the block of marble as relatively small and malleable. Losing
your sense of proportion, you believe it won’t take long to fashion the
block into the image you have in your mind of the finished product.
You imagine that the people you are trying to reach are not naturally
resistant but quite predictable. You know how they’ll respond to your
great idea—they’ll love it. In fact, they need you and your work more
than you need them. They should seek you out. The emphasis is not on
what you need to do to succeed but on what you feel you deserve. You
can foresee a lot of attention coming your way with this project, but if
you fail, other people must be to blame, because you have gifts, your
cause is the right one, and only those who are malicious or envious
could stand in your way.
We can call this psychological disease grandiosity. As you feel its
effects, the normal realistic proportions are reversed—your self
becomes larger and greater than anything else around it. That is the
lens through which you view the task and the people you need to reach.
This is not merely deep narcissism (see chapter 2), in which everything
must revolve around you. This is seeing yourself as enlarged (the root
of the word grandiosity meaning “big” or “great”), as superior and
worthy of not only attention but of being adored. It is a feeling of being
not merely human but godlike.
You may think of powerful, egotistical leaders in the public eye as
the ones who contract such a disease, but you would be very wrong in

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that assumption. Certainly we find many influential people, such as
Michael Eisner, with high-grade versions of grandiosity, where the
attention and accolades they receive create a more intense
enlargement of the self. But there is a low-grade, everyday version of
the disease that is common to almost all of us because it is a trait
embedded in human nature. It stems from our deep need to feel
important, esteemed by people, and superior to others in something.
You are rarely aware of your own grandiosity because by its nature
it alters your perception of reality and makes it hard to have an
accurate assessment of yourself. And so you are unaware of the
problems it might be causing you at this very moment. Your low-grade
grandiosity will cause you to overestimate your own skills and abilities
and to underestimate the obstacles that you face. And so you will take
on tasks that are beyond your actual capacity. You will feel certain that
people will respond to your idea in a particular way, and when they
don’t, you will become upset and blame others.
You may become restless and suddenly make a career change, not
realizing that grandiosity is at the root—your present work is not
confirming your greatness and superiority, because to be truly great
would require more years of training and the development of new
skills. Better to quit and be lured by the possibilities a new career
offers, allowing you to entertain fantasies of greatness. In this way, you
never quite master anything. You may have dozens of great ideas that
you never attempt to execute, because that would cause you to
confront the reality of your actual skill level. Without being aware of it,
you might become ever so slightly passive—you expect other people to
understand you, give you what you want, treat you well. Instead of
earning their praise, you feel entitled to it.
In all of these cases, your low-grade grandiosity will prevent you
from learning from your mistakes and developing yourself, because
you begin with the assumption that you are already large and great,
and it is too difficult to admit otherwise.
Your task as a student of human nature is threefold: First, you must
understand the phenomenon of grandiosity itself, why it is so
embedded in human nature, and why you will find many more
grandiose people in the world today than ever before. Second, you
need to recognize the signs of grandiosity and know how to manage the
people who display them. And third and most important, you must see

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the signs of the disease in yourself and learn not only how to control
your grandiose tendencies but also how to channel this energy into
something productive (see “Practical Grandiosity,” on
this page
, for
more on this).
According to the renowned psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1913–
1981), grandiosity has its roots in the earliest years of our life. In our
first months, most of us bonded completely with our mother. We had
no sense of a separate identity. She met our every need. We came to
believe that the breast that gave us food was actually a part of
ourselves. We were omnipotent—all we had to do was feel hungry or
feel any need, and the mother was there to meet it, as if we had magical
powers to control her. But then, slowly, we had to go through a second
phase of life in which we were forced to confront the reality—our
mother was a separate being who had other people to attend to. We
were not omnipotent but rather weak, quite small, and dependent.
This realization was painful and the source of much of our acting out—
we had a deep need to assert ourselves, to show we were not so
helpless, and to fantasize about powers we did not possess. (Children
will often imagine the ability to see through walls, to fly, or to read
people’s minds, and that is why they are drawn to stories of
superheroes.)
As we get older, we may not be physically small anymore, but our
sense of insignificance only gets worse. We come to realize we are one
person not just in a larger family, school, or city but in an entire globe
filled with billions of people. Our lives are relatively short. We have
limited skills and brainpower. There is so much we cannot control,