50 Cent, Fearlessness, and You | Robert Greene | Big Think

50 Cent, Fearlessness, and You

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Can anyone learn to be fearless? Robert Greene ("The 50th Law") considers a famously unflappable rap star and gives an emphatic answer.

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ROBERT GREENE:

Author and public speaker Robert Greene attended U.C. California at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received a degree in classical studies. He has worked in New York as an editor and writer at several magazines, including Esquire, and in Hollywood as a story developer and writer. In 1995 he was involved in the planning and creation of the art school Fabrica, outside Venice, Italy.

He is the author of numerous volumes on power, strategy, war, and seduction, including the international bestseller "The 48 Laws of Power," "The Art of Seduction," "The 33 Strategies of War," and "The 50th Law," co-written with rapper 50 Cent. Greene currently lives in Los Angeles.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What new insights about power came out of your research for “The 50th Law”?

Robert Greene: Well I wanted to look at something kind of really underneath it all because The 48 Laws of Power I’m looking at these games that people are playing in this kind of court like atmosphere with all these politics going on and strategies being used and all of that. I wanted to like dig underneath it and go into the mind and the guts of what makes a person powerful or successful. Not just with money, but just in the sense of feeling like you’re a powerful person and I had the chance to work with 50 Cent. He was a fan of The 48 Laws. A lot of rappers are. I’ve met quite a few who feel like they’ve used the book to help them. He was one of them. We met. We found we had a really interesting rapport. We felt very comfortable with each other as if we had known each other for many years and so we did this book together, but for me the idea was here is somebody who comes from the absolute bottom of America, Southside Queens in the crack era when an African-American male is not supposed to live past the age of 25, particularly one who is dealing drugs and who is dealing with all the violence. Not only did he manage without a mother or father in his life. He never knew his father. His mother was murdered when he was eight. Not only did he manage to be a hustler, but he managed to get out of the hustling racket. He managed to get into music, but he managed to survive that horrible world of music with the crap political games that go on within. He not only survived, but he was able to become successful, but he kept building on it and building on it. It’s a typical American rags-to-riches story. I wanted to know why. What’s underneath it? What was that quality that maybe we could learn? And in spending time with him I felt like if I could summarize it in one word it’s that this is a man who comes to life without fear. So it’s not just fear of death or bullets. That’s the obviously thing we’re talking about. I’m talking about here is a man who is not afraid of change for instance. If something happens where a situation is new, he has lost a job, he has been cut off of his record contract or something happening he doesn’t get upset or worried. He is calm. He deals with it in a fearless manner. He takes risks, but the risks are controlled, but he is not afraid of failing. He is not afraid of being criticized. He is not afraid of being different from other people. When I thought about that it’s just how powerful you could be in life if are not afraid of the things that happen to you. You’re able to feel balanced and in control and make decisions not based on exaggerating risks etcetera, but on reality. I just thought it was an incredibly powerful way to be in the world. I could feel it myself influenced by him and seeing myself going forward and when I looked at all the people I’ve studied in history, Napoleon Bonaparte, Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt, Catherine the Great, Cesare Borgia, all of the thousands of people I’ve studied, they all shared that quality and it’s like a… It’s a way of being in the world. When you’re afraid and fearful it’s like your mind close… the aperture of your mind closes up to this and you stop looking at the world around you. You want everything...

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