As 50 Cent, Curtis Jackson has always been comfortable with publicly sharing his successes, but privately he is well aware that in spite of his achievements, his life still isn’t quite "right". He knows he has failed as many times as he has succeeded. The goal here is not just to be successful, but to learn how to sustain that success without crumbling under the huge pressure that comes with it.
Jackson has been asked to write a self-help book many times over the years, but only accepted once he felt he was truly ready, and able to share valuable strategies that can help all kinds of people.
This is not an instruction manual on how to become 50 Cent: this persona is only one facet of Curtis Jackson in ‘real’ life, and if this were all there was to him, he almost certainly would never have been able to maintain the success he has achieved.
The streets and the business world are not so different for someone who, like Jackson, having grown up in the ‘projects’, has then gone on to make it big, and across various industries: neither the streets nor the business world play fair, and both are ultra-competitive. We need to be fearless, because refusing to become comfortable with fear gives us an advantage in almost any situation. We need to cultivate the heart of a hustler, remembering that we don't necessarily need a certain goal in life, and that hustling is a motor that keeps running, fuelled by passion, that will take us anywhere we want to go. We need to be able to count on a tight-knit crew, and know that we are only as strong as the weakest person on our team. We need to know our value, because it allows us to bet on ourselves, and win. We need to remember the importance of evolving and changing as individuals. We need to be able to shape the perception people have of us, in order to achieve the success we want, while never being afraid to compete with our rivals, and learning from our mistakes. There is no point complaining about our losses, the main thing is to learn from them. It is also imperative that we avoid the entitlement trap: nobody owes us anything, just as we don't owe anything to anyone else, and once we accept this, we lay the ground for opportunities to start opening up for us.
