The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Strategies for Developing a High Sense of Purpose
Once you commit yourself to developing or strengthening your sense of
purpose, then the hard work begins. You will face many enemies and
obstacles impeding your progress—the distracting voices of others who
instill doubts about your calling and your uniqueness; your own
boredom and frustrations with the work itself and your slow progress;
the lack of trustworthy criticism from people to help you; the levels of
anxiety you must manage; and finally, the burnout that often
accompanies focused labor over long periods. The following five
strategies are designed to help you move past these obstacles. They are
in a loose order, the first being the essential starting point. You will
want to put them all into practice to ensure continual movement
forward.
Discover your calling in life.
You begin this strategy by looking for signs
of primal inclinations in your earliest years, when they were often the
clearest. Some people can easily remember such early indications, but
for many of us it requires some introspection and some digging. What
you are looking for is moments in which you were unusually fascinated
by a particular subject, or certain objects, or specific activities and
forms of play.
The great nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientist Marie
Curie could distinctly recall the moment when she was four years old
and entered her father’s office, suddenly mesmerized by the sight of all
sorts of tubes and measuring devices for various chemistry
experiments placed behind a polished glass case. Her whole life she
would feel a similar visceral thrill whenever she entered a laboratory.
For Anton Chekhov, it was attending his first play in a theater as a boy
in his small town. The whole atmosphere of make-believe thrilled him.
For Steve Jobs, it was passing an electronics store as a child and seeing
the wondrous gadgets in the window, marveling at their design and
complexity. For Tiger Woods, it was, at the age of two, watching his

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father hit golf balls into a net in the garage and being unable to contain
his excitement and desire to imitate him. For the writer Jean-Paul
Sartre, it was a childhood fascination with printed words on a page,
and the possible magical meanings each word possessed.
These moments of visceral attraction occurred suddenly and
without any prodding from parents or friends. It would be hard to put
into words why they occurred; they are signs of something beyond our
personal control. The actress Ingrid Bergman expressed it best, when
talking of the fascination she had with performing in front of her
father’s movie camera at a very early age: “I didn’t choose acting. It
chose me.”
Sometimes these moments can come when we are older, as when
Martin Luther King Jr. realized his mission in life as he got pulled into
the Montgomery bus boycott. And sometimes they can occur while
observing other people who are masters in their field.
As a young man, the future Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa
felt particularly aimless. He tried painting, then apprenticed as an
assistant director on films, a job he hated. He was ready to quit when
he got assigned to work for the director Kajiro Yamamoto in 1936.
Watching this great master at work, suddenly his eyes were opened to
the magical possibilities of film, and he realized his calling. As he later
described this, “It was like the wind in a mountain pass blowing across
my face. By this I mean that wonderfully refreshing wind you feel after
a painfully hard climb. The breath of that wind tells you you are
reaching the pass. Then you stand in the pass and look down over the
panorama as it opens up. When I stood behind Yama-san in his
director’s chair next to the camera, I felt my heart swell with that same
feeling—‘I’ve made it at last.’”
As another sign, examine moments in your life when certain tasks
or activities felt natural and easy to you, similar to swimming with a
current. In performing such activities, you have a greater tolerance for
the tedium of practicing. People’s criticisms don’t discourage you so
easily; you want to learn. You can contrast this with other subjects or
tasks that you find deeply boring and unfulfilling, which frustrate you.
Related to this, you will want to figure out the particular form of
intelligence that your brain is wired for. In his book Frames of Mind,
the psychologist Howard Gardner lists certain forms of intelligence for
which people usually have one particular gift or affinity. This could be

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mathematics and logic, physical activity, words, images, or music. We
could also add to this social intelligence, a superior sensitivity to
people. When you are engaged in the activity that feels right, it will
correspond to that form of intelligence for which your brain is most
suited.
From these various factors you should be able to spot the outline of
your calling. In essence, in going through this process you are
discovering yourself, what makes you different, what predates the
opinions of others. You are reacquainting yourself with your natural
likes and dislikes. Later in life we often lose contact with our own
preferences for things, deeply influenced by what others are doing and
by the culture. You are subtracting such external influences. The
deeper you make this connection to your calling, the more you will be
able to resist the bad ideas of others. You will engage that internal
guidance system. Put some time into the process, working with a
journal if necessary. You are developing the habit of assessing and
listening to yourself, so that you can continually monitor your progress
and adjust this calling to the various stages in your life.
If you are young and just starting out in your career, you will want
to explore a relatively wide field related to your inclinations—for
instance, if your affinity is words and writing, try all the different types
of writing until you hit upon the right fit. If you are older and have
more experience, you will want to take the skills you have already
developed and find a way to adapt them more in the direction of your
true calling. Remember that the calling could be combining several
fields that fascinate you. For Jobs, it was the intersection of technology
and design. Keep the process open-ended; your experience will instruct
you as to the way.
Do not try to bypass the work of discovering your calling or imagine
that it will simply come to you naturally. Although it may come to a few
people early in life or in a lightning-bolt moment, for most of us it
requires continual introspection and effort. Experimenting with the
skills and options related to your personality and inclinations is not
only the single most essential step in developing a high sense of
purpose, it is perhaps the most important step in life in general.
Knowing in a deep way who you are, your uniqueness, will make it that
much easier to avoid all of the other pitfalls of human nature.

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