Even after he began working for himself again after his stint in prison, he says he struggled to acquire customers because every dealer had a street corner they absolutely refused to share.ĥ0 Cent says he decided to meet with a notorious Brooklyn gang he befriended in prison and ask them to do him a favor. Selectively use aggression to assert yourself.Īfter he decided as a teenager that music would be his ticket out of the hood, 50 Cent was still confronted with the challenge of making enough money to produce some records and get a label's attention. Jake Gyllenhaal, Eminem, 50 Cent, and Miguel Gomez at the New York City premiere of "Southpaw," in which 50 Cent plays a boxing manager. He also gave the people he worked with freedom, as long as they delivered. Instead of trying to have control over one large area, 50 Cent "started experimenting with four or five hustles at the same time inevitably one of the angles would work and pay for all the others," Greene writes. Jermaine was murdered.ĥ0 Cent says he identified with Jermaine's drive but knew he had to be more fluid to survive.
The brashness that made his dad a success in the underworld didn't work in the contemporary one. Greene writes that Jermaine inherited his father's cockiness and went into the street with the intention of making deals with local gangs and dealers to only sell his drugs and to give him a cut of the profit. Never stop moving.Īs a kid in the late 1980s, 50 Cent says he observed how an old drug lord used his son Jermaine as his puppet after he was released from prison. The mixtape he made in this time blew up in the underground and attracted the attention of Eminem, who quickly signed him and made him a star. And though labels avoided him because they were afraid of his attempted assassination, he released a song to the streets that embraced it, challenging those who tried to kill him. Greene says 50 Cent at this point used "hood alchemy" to turn "sh- into sugar."Īfter he finally recovered enough to make it out of bed, 50 Cent says he decided to lay low for a few months to produce music that was heavier than any of the rap on the radio. The rapper narrowly survived but Columbia dropped him, afraid of the dangers present in his life. A few weeks before its release date, an assassin shot 50 Cent nine times and left him for dead. Find an advantageous opportunity in a negative situation.ĥ0 Cent landed a deal with Columbia Records and was scheduled to release what was supposed to be his major-label debut, "Power of the Dollar," in 2000. It's why, 50 Cent tells Greene, as soon as he became famous he set to work developing his own record label with the intention of one day making it independent of his record label Interscope. "After that, he swore to himself he'd never work for another person ever again," Greene writes. He was back working for himself within a week. "The 48 Laws of Power" author Robert Greene collaborated with 50 Cent in 2009.Īt the end of the first day, he tells Greene, he was convinced his ego wouldn't fit into the role, and he secretly made a deal with the other baggers: They would each take a very small portion of drugs from each batch and set them aside for 50 Cent, who would split up his bagger's salary among them and rely on the drugs to make his own cash. It's why he entered into deals like the one with Vitamin Water for substantial chunks of money, using his music as a "tool" to further his cultural influence. He realized that especially with the rise of music piracy, his albums weren't going to get him the wealth he desired. Years later, after his 2003 debut album "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" made him a celebrity, he tells Greene, he used Truth's advice to see past the doting of sycophants or manipulative deals from record executives. Truth taught him, Greene writes, to not complain about his difficult circumstances and that, "in fact, the hard life of the streets is a blessing if you know what you're doing." 50 Cent says he learned that the increased risk of danger forces a hustler to focus intently on what's happening around him and when others are lying to him, in addition to being aware of his own limitations.Īfter he was arrested at age 16 and sent to a boot-camp prison for nine months, he says he realized that the life he was living would never satisfy his ambition to make a name for himself, and he decided that he was going to find a mentor and enter the music industry.
One day, he says, he was talking with an older drug dealer who went by the name Truth.
He started selling crack cocaine on street corners when he was 12. 50 Cent grew up in a rough neighborhood in Queens, New York, and became an orphan at age 8 after his mom was murdered.