Added to Book Quotes and Passages

If I let Chance get over on me then that’s who I would be in the streets: the nigga you can get over on. I had to rearrange the discussion to where I was in a position of power, and I had to do it fast.

50 Cent

From Pieces to Weight

That’s when I realized that as long as you don’t broadcast your beefs, you can get away cold with murder. It’s even better if you don’t allow the beef to take place. If someone disrespects you, you can know in your heard that you’re going to get him, but you don’t have to show him there’s a beef. You can just look at it like, Okay, this nigga must not know. And then you fall back and you put it down.

50 Cent

From Pieces to Weight

I didn’t hit shit but air because them niggas got to running as soon as they saw me jump out of the car. Still, they got it in their heads that that motherfucker don’t have no restrictions–he’ll air anything out, anytime.

50 Cent

From Pieces to Weight

What do you mean, I need a rest? No. I don’t need a rest. I’ll rest in between shows, tour dates, and video shoots. Because you know what? On the corner I didn’t need a rest. I didn’t even stop sometimes to change my clothes because I was grinding. There were times I slept outside when I was hustling. I was just out there on the bench like everybody else. It’s summertime, it’s hot, I ain’t gone home last night. I didn’t quit in my old business and I’m not going to quit in my new business either.

50 Cent

From Pieces to Weight

I didn’t survive being shot nine times for nothing. I didn’t claw my way out of the hood just because it was something to do. I know I’ve got a purpose–a reason for being on this planet. I don’t think I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do yet. But I do know this: I ain’t going nowhere ’till I’ve done it all.

50 Cent

From Pieces to Weight

When this goes down as the age that redefines all other ages, the era where titans exchanged ideas openly and you could rub shoulders and strategize with the next generation of leaders and geniuses posted and mused for free, I want to say: I was there. I contributed. I breathed it. I lived it. And if it costs me some money. So? It could just as easily make me a millionaire many times over. A new renaissance. Utterly paradigm shifting stuff happens everyday. And I get to sit there on the phone and translate it. And adapt. And poise to capitalize. You can’t learn this stuff in a classroom except for after it happens.

For the first time in history the cost of information is approaching zero. Almost every American industry is built on the understanding that information must be limited, controlled and restricted. Because when you make knowledge scarce, you can sell bits and pieces of it for enormous amounts of money. You create industries filled with “experts” and “consultants” and “specialists” who know only a tiny bit more than your average person. And most importantly, you can get away with not being all that good. What the internet has done is not free up a bit of information here or there, but ALL information. And thus we see the simultaneous teetering of dozens of major power players. It’s a lot harder to sell shitty cars or shitty music or charge the shitty 6% in broker’s fees when people can peek behind the curtain. You can do the majority of what they do yourself, and your experiences are no longer isolated to your small clan–you have access to the collective experiences of everyone.

Take the YouTube announcement. No question, it will profoundly changed our world. The Radiohead thing is a stunt. It’s mostly meaningless. The price at which bands sell their music is just a tactic, but how content is consumed, distributed and monetized, that is the grand, grand strategy of it all. In doing what they did–the details will surface but I can’t discuss all of it because it’s for a client–YouTube has altered the basic junction between content and consumer. It will make hundreds of middleman (who had positioned themselves as creators instead of facilitators) obsolete. And they will never come back. Why is that important? Because many of you are training to be those people.

You will be utterly fucked. Outsourcing is not the problem. It is that millions of jobs no longer need to exist. What is more of a threat to bank tellers? Cheap Chinese labor or the ATM? When industries accept mediocrity in service, of course there is going to be a lot of dead-weight and extra positions. So now they’re having to go lean just to staunch the bleeding–and it’s never going to stop. My whole generation is being taught by people who were shown that limited information worked and then are being sent into a world that is drastically different. They aren’t training young people to wade through bullshit, to grasp intuitively what makes sense and what doesn’t, or how to treat people well, or how to create stuff that actually appeals to people instead they’re teaching them the same stuff that got us here. So we’re going to have to learn it on our own, or fail once more.

I get really angry when I get behind a slow driver and people always tell me to calm down. They don’t get where the rage comes from. It comes from not being able to understand how someone can be so devoid of purpose or direction that they not only lack urgency in their own life, but they actively impede others who know where they want to go.

It seems to me that the worst thing you could ever say about someone is “You’re not just mediocre, you’re contagiously mediocre.” We all have problems, areas where we are objectively bad at things, but to drag others down–either via obliviousness or malice–is about the most evil act one can engage in.