The 50th Law (11 page)

With so many physical limitations, hustlers have learned to develop mental freedom. They cannot let their minds be bothered by all these hindrances. Their thoughts have to keep moving—creating new ventures, new hustles, new directions in music and clothes. That is why trends change so quickly in the hood, which often serves as the engine for new styles in the culture at large. With people, hustlers have to adapt to all of their differences, wearing the mask that is appropriate for each situation, deflecting people’s suspicions. (Hustlers are consummate chameleons.) If they can maintain this mental and social fluidity, they can feel a degree of freedom beyond all the physical confinements of the hood.

You too face a world full of obstacles and limitations—a new environment where the competition is more global, complicated, and intense than ever before. Like the hustler, you must find your freedom through the fluidity of your thoughts and your constant inventiveness. This means having a greater willingness to experiment, trying several ventures without fear of failing here or there. It also means constantly looking to develop new styles, new directions you can take, freeing yourself up from any inertia that comes with age. In a world full of people who are too conventional in their thinking, who respect the past far too much, such flow will inevitably translate into power and more room to move.

The fearless types in history all reveal a greater capacity to handle chaos and to use it for their purposes. No greater example of this can be found than Mao Zedong. China in the 1920s was a country on the verge of radical change. The old imperial order that had suffocated China for centuries had finally fallen apart. But fearing the disorder that could be unleashed in such a vast country, the two parties vying for control—the Nationalists and the Communists—opted to try to contain the situation as best they could.

The Nationalists offered the old-style imperial order with a new face. The Communists decided to impose on China the Lenin model—waging a proletariat revolution, centered in urban areas, controlling key cities in the country and enforcing strict adherence to party dogma among its followers. This had worked well in the Soviet Union, creating order in a short period of time, but it had no relevance to China; by the end of the decade this strategy was failing miserably. On the verge of annihilation, the Communists turned to Mao, who had a totally different concept of what to do.

Mao had been raised in a small village, among the country’s vast peasant population. As part of his upbringing, he was immersed in the ancient belief systems of Taoism, which saw change as the essence of nature, and conforming to these changes as the source of all power. In the end, according to Taoism, you are stronger by having a softness that allows you to bend and adapt. Mao was not afraid of the vast size and population of China. The chaos this could represent would simply become part of his strategy. His idea was to enlist the help of the peasantry, so that Communist soldiers could blend in to the countryside like fish in water.

He would not attack city centers or try to occupy any single position in the country. Instead he would move the army around, like a vaporous force that would attack and then disappear, the enemy never knowing where it was coming from or what it was up to. This guerrilla force would stay in constant motion, allowing the enemy no breathing space and giving
them
a sense of chaos.

The Nationalists epitomized the opposite school of fighting, conventional to the core. When Mao finally unleashed on them his new brand of warfare, they could not adapt. They held on to key positions, while the Communists encircled them in the vast spaces of China. The Nationalists’ control narrowed to the point of a few cities, and soon they crumbled completely in one of the most remarkably swift turnarounds in military history.

Understand: it is not only what you do that must have flow, but also how you do things. It is your strategies, your methods of attacking problems, that must constantly be adapted to circumstances. Strategy is the essence of human action—the bridge between an idea and its realization in the world. Too often these strategies become frozen into conventions, as people mindlessly imitate what worked before. By keeping your strategies attuned to the moment, you can be an agent of change, the one who breaks up these dead ways of acting, gaining tremendous power in the process. Most people in life are rigid and predictable; that makes them easy targets. Your fluid, unpredictable strategies will drive them insane. They cannot foresee your next move or figure you out. That is often enough to make them give way or fall apart.

Keys to Fearlessness

THUS ONE’S VICTORIES IN BATTLE CANNOT BE REPEATED—THEY TAKE THEIR FORM IN RESPONSE TO INEXHAUSTIBLY CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES…. IT CAN BE LIKENED TO WATER, AS WATER VARIES ITS FLOW ACCORDING TO THE FALL OF THE LAND.

—Sun Tzu

All of us have experienced at some point in our lives a feeling of momentum. Perhaps we do something that strikes a chord and we get recognized for it. This positive attention fills us with unusual confidence, which in turn attracts people to us. Now brimming with self-belief, we are able to pull off another good action. Even if it is not so perfect, people will now tend to overlook the rough patches. We have the aura of success about us. So many times in life, one good thing seems to follow another.

This will go on until inevitably we disrupt the flow. Perhaps we overreach with an action that breaks the spell, or we keep repeating the same things and people grow tired of us and move on to someone else. Just as quickly the opposite momentum can afflict us. Our own insecurities start to get in the way; the little imperfections that people overlooked before now seem glaring. We enter a run of bad fortune and feelings of depression render us more and more immobile.

On either end of the spectrum we recognize the phenomenon but we treat it as if it were something mystical, beyond conscious control and explanation. But it is not as mysterious as we might think. In the midst of any run of momentum, we generally feel more open; we allow ourselves to be carried along. The confidence we have when things are going well makes people get out of our way or join our side, giving our actions added force. Sometimes a feeling of urgency—we have to get something done—pushes us to act in a particularly energetic manner, and this starts a good run. This is often accompanied with a feeling that we have little to lose by trying something bold. Perhaps feeling somewhat desperate, we loosen up and experiment.

What ties this all together is that something inside of us opens up and we allow a greater range of motion. Our style becomes freer and bolder, and we move with the current. On the other hand, when a run of momentum ends, it is usually from something we do, a kind of unconscious self-sabotage. We react against this loosening up, out of some fear of where it could lead us. We become conservative and the flow of energy stops, slowly reversing itself into stasis and depression. In many ways, we are the ones in control of this phenomenon, but it does not operate on a conscious enough level.

Understand: momentum in life comes from increased fluidity, a willingness to try more, to move in a less constricted fashion. On many levels it remains something hard to put into words, but by understanding the process, becoming more conscious of the elements involved, you can place your mind in a readied position, better able to exploit any positive movement in your life. Call this calculated momentum. For this purpose you must practice and master the following four types of flow.

MENTAL FLOW

In the time of Leonardo da Vinci’s youth (mid-fifteenth century), knowledge had hardened into rigid compartments. In one slot, there was philosophy and scholasticism; in another, the arts, which were considered more like simple crafts; in yet another, science, which was not yet very empirical. On the margins stood all forms of dark knowledge—the arts of the occult.

Da Vinci was the illegitimate son of a notary, and because of this murky social position, he was denied the usual formal education, all of which became a great blessing in disguise. His mind was freed from all the prejudices and rigid categories of thinking that prevailed at the time. He went to serve an apprenticeship in the studio of the great artist Verrocchio. And once he began to learn there the craft of drawing and painting, a process was set in motion that led to the forming of one of the most original minds in the history of mankind.

Knowledge in one field simply opened up in da Vinci an insatiable hunger to learn something else in a related field. The study of painting led to that of design in general, which led to an interest in architecture—from there he flowed to studying engineering; making war machines and strategy; observing animals and the mechanics of motion that could be applied to technology; studying birds and aerodynamics, the anatomy of animals and humans, the relationship between emotions and physiology; and on and on. This incredible stream of ideas even overflowed into areas of the occult. His mind would recognize no boundaries; he sought the connections between all natural phenomena. In this sense, he was ahead of his time and the first real Renaissance man. His discoveries in various fields had a momentum—the intensity of one leading to another. Many could not understand him and thought he was eccentric, even erratic. But great patrons such as King François I of France, and even Cesare Borgia, recognized his genius and sought to exploit it.

Today we have regressed to a point that resembles the pre-Renaissance. Knowledge has once again hardened into rigid categories, with intellectuals shut off in various ghettos. Intelligent people are considered serious by virtue of how deeply they immerse themselves in one field of study, their viewpoint becoming more and more myopic. Someone who crosses these rigid demarcations is inevitably considered a dilettante. After college we are all encouraged to specialize, to learn one thing well and stick to it. We end up strangling ourselves in the narrowness of our interests. With all of these restrictions, knowledge has no flow to it. Life does not have these categories; they are mere conventions that we mindlessly abide by.

Da Vinci remains the icon and the inspiration for a new form of knowledge. In this form, what matters are the connections between things, not what separates them. The mind has a particular momentum itself; when it heats up and discovers something new, it tends to find other items to study and illuminate. All of the greatest innovations in history come from an openness to discovery, one idea leading to another, sometimes coming from unrelated fields. You must develop this spirit and the same insatiable hunger for knowledge. This comes from widening your fields of study and observation, letting yourself be carried along by what you discover. You will find that you will come up with unexpected ideas, the kind that will lead to new practices or novel opportunities. If things run dry in your particular line of work, you have developed your mind along other lines that you can now exploit. Having such mental flow will allow you to constantly think around any obstacle and maintain your career momentum.

EMOTIONAL FLOW

By nature we are emotional creatures. It is how we primarily react to events; only afterwards are we able to see that such emotional responses can be destructive and need to be reined in. You cannot repress this part of human nature, nor should you ever try. It is like a flood that will overwhelm you all the more for your attempts to dam it up. What you want is for these endless emotions that assail you during the day to wash over you, to never hold on to one single emotion for very long. You are able to let go of any kind of obsessive feeling. If someone says something that bothers you, you find a way to move quickly past the feeling—either to excuse what they said, to make it less important, or to forget.

Forgetting is a skill that you must develop in order to have emotional flow. If you cannot help but feel anger or disgust in the moment, make it a point to not let it remain the following day. When you hold on to emotions like that, it is as if you put blinders on your eyes. For that amount of time, you see and feel only what this emotion dictates, falling behind events. Your mind stops on feelings of failure, disappointment, and mistrust, giving you that awkwardness of someone out of tune with the moment. Without realizing it, all of your strategies become infected by these feelings, pushing you off course.

To combat this, you must learn the art of counterbalance. When you are fearful, force yourself to act in a bolder fashion than usual. When you feel inordinate hate, find some object of love or admiration that you can focus on with intensity. One strong emotion tends to cancel out the other and help you move past it.

It might seem that intense feelings of love, hate, or anger can be used to impel you forward on some project, but that is an illusion. Such emotions give you a burst of energy that falls quickly and leaves you as low as you were high. Rather, you want a more balanced emotional life, with fewer highs and lows. This not only helps you keep moving and overcoming petty obstacles, but it also affects people’s perceptions of you. They come to see you as someone who has grace under pressure, a steady hand, and they will turn to you as a leader. Maintaining such steadiness will keep that positive flow in motion.

SOCIAL FLOW

Working with people on any level can be a disorderly affair. They bring their differences and own energy to the project, as well as their own agendas. The natural tendency for a leader is to try to tamp down these differences and get everyone on the same page. This seems like the strong thing to do, but in fact it stems from that infantile fear of the unpredictable. And in the end it becomes counterproductive, as those who work for you bring less and less energy to the task. After an initial burst of enthusiasm in your venture, the discontent of those working for you can quickly stifle any momentum you had developed.