The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Accept people as facts. Interactions with people are the major
source of emotional turmoil, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The
problem is that we are continually judging people, wishing they were
something that they are not. We want to change them. We want them
to think and act a certain way, most often the way we think and act.
And because this is not possible, because everyone is different, we are
continually frustrated and upset. Instead, see other people as
phenomena, as neutral as comets or plants. They simply exist. They
come in all varieties, making life rich and interesting. Work with what
they give you, instead of resisting and trying to change them. Make
understanding people a fun game, the solving of puzzles. It is all part of
the human comedy. Yes, people are irrational, but so are you. Make
your acceptance of human nature as radical as possible. This will calm
you down and help you observe people more dispassionately,
understanding them on a deeper level. You will stop projecting your
own emotions on to them. All of this will give you more balance and
calmness, more mental space for thinking.
It is certainly difficult to do this with the nightmare types who cross
our path—the raging narcissists, the passive aggressors, and other
inflamers. They remain a continual test to our rationality. Look at the
Russian writer Anton Chekhov, one of the most fiercely rational people
who ever lived, as the model for this. His family was large and poor,
and his father, an alcoholic, mercilessly beat all of the children,
including young Chekhov. Chekhov became a doctor and took up
writing as a side career. He applied his training as a doctor to the
human animal, his goal to understand what makes us so irrational, so
unhappy, and so dangerous. In his stories and plays, he found it
immensely therapeutic to get inside his characters and make sense of
even the worst types. In this way, he could forgive anybody, even his
father. His approach in these cases was to imagine that each person, no
matter how twisted, has a reason for what they’ve become, a logic that
makes sense to them. In their own way, they are striving for
fulfillment, but irrationally. By stepping back and imagining their story
from the inside, Chekhov demythologized the brutes and aggressors;
he cut them down to human size. They no longer elicited hatred but
rather pity. You must think more like a writer in approaching the
people you deal with, even the worst sorts.

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