Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter

by Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson

The goal is not just to be successful. It’s about learning how to sustain that success, too.

One of the cornerstones of my sustained success is that I don’t rush into deals. Even though I’ve become synonymous with “getting paid,” I never chase money. I evaluate every new venture based on its long-term potential, not on what the first check I get is going to look like.

One of the secrets to getting what you want in life is creating the perception that you don’t need a thing. That can be a difficult energy to project—especially when you’re struggling—but committing to that perception will make you more attractive professionally, personally, and even romantically.

I’m not someone who is comfortable resting on their laurels. If I’m around at seventy, I still want to be contributing and participating. It may require less of me, but I’ll still be a part of the culture. Helping push it forward. I might not be jumping around anymore, but I’ll still be there, trying to help.

It was more that I didn’t like having my success ride on someone else’s ability or inability to perform. It’s a feeling I haven’t been able to shake to this day. I always say that if I were ever going to bet on a horse at the track, then let it be me, goddammit. Because I know I’m going to run as hard as I can.

You need to bend fear into moments of action at every opportunity, because the fearless not only recognize but also often reward one of their own.

I’ve accepted that the punches are going to come in life, and some of them are going to land. But I’m always going to survive and keep fighting for the things I want. That has to be your attitude, too.

You were better trained, better prepared. But you didn’t let the world see that because you were scared. That fear is going to stop you from getting full value for your work. Don’t let it happen.

Plenty of people might be willing to outrap, outperform, or even outsmart me, but no one—and I mean no one—is ever going to out-work me.

If you’ve spent your childhood worrying about past-due bills, family members in jail, or gunshots on your corner but are still out here trying to make it happen, you possess real resiliency. Acknowledge that about yourself. And then use that to your advantage.

Here’s the bottom line: whether you’re a rapper, stockbroker, scientist, schoolteacher, or drug dealer, you’re going to experience peaks and valleys. Even when you think you’ve been through it all, you’re going to find out there’s still more shit to go through.

I’ll get involved only if I feel a passion for what I’m doing. I’m not signing up for anything just for a check. That’s the easiest way to dilute your brand and lose your money. Your fans will know that there’s nothing organic about what you’re doing and won’t support it.

When you open yourself up to someone, either financially or emotionally, and they go left on you, it’s a different kind of pain, even more dramatic than a stickup kid physically taking something from you. Like Malcolm X said, “To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal. You see, I could conceive death, but I could not conceive betrayal.”

On the streets, there just isn’t enough space for both success and suckers. The quicker you understand that, the quicker you’ll get the most out of your journey.

Whenever you find success in life, there will be people who believe some of it belongs to them. Bang ’Em was that sort of person. When you remove them from your life, instead of looking in the mirror, they get angry at you.

No matter what position you’re in, when you make rules that benefit the collective good, you need to enforce them. Don’t let someone who’s focused only on themselves ruin it for everyone else. They can be hard rules to live by, but doing so will always pay off in the long run.

In order to get the best out of the people around you, sometimes you have to clearly and forcefully articulate the opportunities you see for them. Just because you see something for them, you can’t assume they see it, too. If someone is not responding to, or taking advantage of, the opportunities you’ve created for them, you’re going to have to take them to that place. That’s literally what “leading” means.

You cannot, under any circumstances, compromise when it’s your vision on the line. You have to be prepared to go against popular opinion and turn down money—even if it jeopardizes your relationships—until you’re confident you’ve found the right opportunity.

When you settle, you’re demonstrating a lack of confidence. If your journey hasn’t been easy, you might start to question the value of what you’re doing. Maybe you’d better grab the next thing that gets offered before you never get offered anything again. When you begin thinking like that, you’ve lost the hustler’s spirit.

Still, no matter what your situation is financially, if you really believe in something, I’d always recommend you go for the piece of equity over an up-front payday.

You should always fight for your worth, but never take offense that you have to fight in the first place. When you do that, you’re moving off of emotion. It might not be fair, but to get what you want, you can only move off of strategy. Anything less will leave you hustling backward.

Securing the best long-term potential is always worth making sacrifices in the moment.

A final word on making sure you always get your fair value. While it’s critical to establish your worth, once you do, the most important thing you can do is get it down on paper. Getting all your agreements, promises, and plans down on paper in the form of a contract is absolutely essential. Never let your value rest on someone’s “word.”

But the bottom line is this: promises aren’t worth shit. You have to get papered up. Whether you’re collaborating on an album, a TV script, a landscaping business, or a brewery, you need to get the terms and expectations on paper before you sink too much of your time and equity into it. Trust me, everyone loves each other at the start. That handshake agreement feels firm when you’re starting out. But jealousy and envy are real. They might be buried so deep in a person’s nature that it could take years for them to come out, but they’ll find a way if there’s money involved. Protect yourself. Put it on paper.

The fatal mistake a lot of rappers make is refusing to accept the pattern. In their minds they’re still damaged, still the same person who broke into the game. But, as I wrote earlier, people tend to stop viewing you as human once you taste success. In the public’s mind, once you make it, you’re fixed. Time to move on to the next one.

Once we get the things we are striving for, we rarely remain satisfied with them. The things are just the bait. Chasing after them forces us to evolve, and it is the evolution and not the rewards themselves that matters to us and to those around us. This means that for most people success is struggling and evolving as effectively as possible.

Why he hadn’t done more to support my last few records—even as he’d sunk lots of money into clearly inferior projects like Puffy’s Last Train to Paris. (Actually, I do know why. I’ll save that for the next book.) I was already focused on the future, a future that would find me becoming heavily involved in film and television.

You need people in your life who are going to invite you to places you might not normally go, or send you interesting articles you might not normally read, or have you try food you might not normally order. You must find people who are going to inject new energy into your life. Because if you keep having the same conversations with the same people year after year, your energy is going to stagnate. Your ideas are going to get stale. Your momentum is going to get stuck.

There are some people who always try to position themselves to be the smartest person in the room. They do that because it soothes their insecurity. They’d rather present the impression of being important than actually put themselves in the position to grow. Never be that person. Always challenge yourself to be around people who might be informed in different ways than you are, who have had different experiences, and, most important, aren’t intimidated to share that information with you. Those are the people who are going to supercharge your evolution into your best self.

When you pattern yourself too closely after another person, you’re putting weak, ineffectual energy out into the world. You’re running away from your most inexhaustible power supply: being yourself.

Influencing how people perceive you doesn’t make you fake. It doesn’t make you phony. It makes you someone who knows how to control energy—to your advantage.

“You couldn’t understand it at the time because you were too young,” he explained. “But I gave her all the money to stop her from looking at things that I couldn’t give her. Instead of having her head filled up with fantasies, I let her work with reality. Having that piece of mind at home was worth more to me than a few extra dollars in my pocket.”

By showing my grandmother exactly what he was bringing home and then giving it all to her, my grandfather had shifted the energy in the house. If she wanted the nicer pair of shoes or the more expensive dress, she was going to have to justify that purchase to herself. Not him.

But do not ever give the impression that you “need” that job or that you are “dying for it”—even if that’s exactly what you’re feeling. You must suppress that instinct because of this fundamental truth: neediness is a turnoff to everyone except the most compassionate people. The vast majority of people are attracted to the things they think they can’t have. No matter what the setting, unattainability is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

“Taking care of a woman is not a bad concept. But taking care of a woman who has to be taken care of is a terrible concept!”

I really believe that the better your opponent is, the better you become.

“20 G bets I’m winning them / threats I’m sending them / Lex with TV sets, the minimum / Ill sex adrenaline.” To the outside world it didn’t sound like anything, but those of us in the culture knew that Jay-Z rode around in a Lexus with a TV set. So that was a subliminal shot at Jay.

I certainly keep a mental book on the individuals I consider my competition. I follow all of the moves they make carefully. If someone does something I consider smart, I make note of it and try to think of ways I could do something similar. If I see my competition do something I consider foolish, I make note of that, too. And then I look for a way to leverage that vulnerability against them down the road. The key is that I remove emotion from the equation when I make my mental notes. I don’t get jealous when I see someone make a smart move, just like I don’t get excited when I see them stumble. I just make note of what happened and file it away for later.

Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.

To me, success can be achieved only through repeated failure and introspection,” Honda said. “In fact, success represents 1 percent of your work, which results only from the 99 percent that is called failure.”

Don’t look at failure as something you need to distance yourself from. Try to embrace it instead. Wrap your hands around it and examine it. Believe that you can use it to rebuild your idea and take it to an even higher level than you’d originally conceived.

You can only feel betrayal when you feel like you’re owed something from someone. You can only feel resentment when you had expectations for assistance. When you accept that it’s all on you, only then can you finally be free to focus 100 percent on being the best version of yourself.

I don’t care how long I’ve known you. I am going to remove you from my life forever if I start to feel like you’re holding me back.

In order to be a true hustler, you have to chase the gratification that can only come from making things happen yourself, when you have a vision that no one else can identify with and pour everything you have into it. You find yourself in valley after valley and can’t ever quite catch a glimpse of the mountaintop. But you keep pushing forward, until that one day when you finally do make it to that peak. Man, that’s going to be the best damn view you ever saw in your life. You’re going to soak up every bit of that mountain air and enjoy every inch of the panorama spread out in front of you.

An immigrant isn’t going to identify with either of those mentalities. From their perspective, there’s no difference between the bricks in a skyscraper and the bricks in a housing project. The entire country looks like the most beautiful place in the world, compared to where many of them are coming from.

There is one question you must ask about every person in your life, no matter how long you’ve known them: Does he or she ever make deposits into my life, or do they only make withdrawals? If the answer is “withdrawals,” then that’s someone you need to distance yourself from immediately. Remember, no one only makes one withdrawal. Would you only go to an ATM that kept spittin’ out free money just the once? Hell no. You would go every single day until the bank figured it out. Well, people are the same way. Until you shut them down, they will keep taking and taking until there’s nothing left.

Professionally, you can always contribute to morale no matter what position you’re in. If you’re part of a team, it doesn’t cost a cent to be the one with a positive attitude. That doesn’t mean you have to kiss your boss’s ass or be fake. You just have to stay upbeat about things. Be the person who doesn’t bitch or moan when you get a tough job or assignment. Be the person who is smiling and open to interacting with co-workers instead of putting on headphones and hiding behind a computer screen. Be diplomatic, and try to identify a resolution when your co-workers aren’t getting along.

It is important to remember that not every deposit someone puts into your life is going to be monetary. A person might never give you a dime, but still bless you in all sorts of other ways. My aunt Geraldine and uncle Mike deposited a lot of affirmative energy into my life without asking for anything in return. A rare trait in my family! The three of us must have been drinking different water than everyone else. We all understand that no matter what happens in your life, there should never be a moment when you feel like it’s okay to stop working and start looking for a handout.

I never realized it before, but now I can see that the givers are going to be the ones with the strongest presence in their absence. When they’re dead and gone, people are still going to speak about them in reverential tones.

I used to think I was from the bottom, but my trip to Africa was a wake-up call. It turns out that I didn’t have any idea what the bottom actually looked like. My African brothers and sisters were struggling in a way I wasn’t even remotely familiar with. People in the hood might not understand this. When I tell them about Africa, they’ll tell me, “Yo Fif, we’re hungry here, man.” No, you think you’re hungry. But across Africa, hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year due to starvation. That’s true hunger.